White Space (21 page)

“With white paint.” Like the door down cellar. She put a trembling hand to her lips. “White slit, white door, white
space
.”
That means something, too
. What had Jasper said?
Every
time you pull them onto White Space, you risk breaking that
Now.

“Okay, House, time-out,” she said. “I get it, I do. I’m supposed to walk through this door and into that room. I’ll bet that even if I leave—go outside and wait by the snowmobile—eventually, I’ll end up here again after another
blink
, because this is what you want.”
This is a … test? Part of a process? What I’ve been brought here to learn and do?
That all felt right. So, really, the only choice was whether she turned the knob this time around, or on the hundredth repetition.

Just do it already, you coward
.

The brass knob was icy. Heart thumping, she tried giving it a twist, but it wouldn’t turn and nothing happened when she pulled.

Push, the way Lizzie’s dad did with the Mirror
.

That did something. She felt the shift under her hand, almost a … a mechanical click?
Same thing when I touched that … that membrane down cellar, when I was twelve. As if I’ve activated something
. She instinctively backed up a step as the slit-door glimmered, not opening so much as dissolving.
Melting, like a phase shift, the way ice changes to water
. And then she thought,
What the hell?

The slit-door vanished. A faint coppery aroma, like the rust-scent of that snow, seeped on a breath of frigid air. Inside, there was no light at all. From deep within, however, she could hear the buzz and sputter of that radio. Otherwise, it was pitch-black.

No, that’s not quite right
. She realized the reason the door opened out.
My God
—she stared at the smooth, glassy, jet-black barrier
—it’s solid
.

It was, she thought, like the mirror in her
blinks. And
what I found in Jasper’s cellar
. A week after she had, the
blinks
had begun.
And I’ve got the feeling there’s something else I’m not remembering; was
made
to forget
. But what?
And why would anyone
make
me forget anything? Who could even do something like that? How?

At her touch, the black shuddered. Her hand instantly iced, then fired to a shriek, but she could stand this; and although her heart was still hammering, she wasn’t as frightened.
It’s like what happened upstairs, in the bathroom
. As if that had been a demonstration designed to show her what to do.

Beneath her fingers, the darkness
gave
and
rippled
, that weird sense of something transitioning from one state of matter to another, and then she was moving, pushing, feeling the suck of that oily black, stepping through

INTO SUMMER
.

She is on East Washington in Madison. She knows this because the capitol’s white dome is just up the hill. To her left is the bus stop on Blair that will take her back to Holten Prep. The air is warm, a little humid from Lake Mendota, where sailboats scud like clouds over lapis-blue water. Her left hand is cold. She looks, expecting to see that her hand isn’t there but still wrist-deep in blackness. Instead, she holds a mocha Frappuccino topped with a pillow of whipped cream, fresh from the Starbucks down the block. In her right hand is a book.

This is a memory
. She cranes a look over her shoulder. There is no room, no slit-door. The street presses at her back.
A steady stream of cars hums past. Distant tunes and radio voices tangle and swell, then fade, trailing after the vehicles like pennants. Light splashes her shoulders because it’s summer. A light-aqua sundress that brings out the indigo of her eyes floats around her thighs.
This is from six months ago
. “That’s really cool.”

“What?” Disoriented, she turns back to discover that she stands before a table heavy with boxes of half-priced books. Her eyes crawl to the storefront window. There is a sign advertising the sale, and the bookstore’s name emblazoned in black-edged gold:
BETWEEN THE LINES
.

I remember this. I was here in June, after exams, a week before my birthday
.

“I said your necklace is so
cool
.” The voice belongs to a guy about her age. In one hand, he cups a perfect glass sphere on a dark ribbon the color of a blood clot that she’s wearing around her neck. The pendant is elegantly crafted: a miniature universe, sugared with stars, that swims with a tangle of twisting bodies and strange creatures. She knows this necklace, too. It’s her galaxy pendant, the one she hasn’t flameworked yet and which exists only as an idea.

“Did you make it?” the boy asks.

“Uh …” Well, the answer is she didn’t, and hasn’t the skill. She might still try—assuming, of course, that she doesn’t crash, get her friend killed, and wind up going slowly insane. “Yeah.”

“I really like how it changes depending on how you look at it,” the boy says. “It could be this dark planet with a ton of lights, like Earth from outer space. Or it could be an explosion, like the black’s about to break apart and what you’re
seeing is white light through the cracks, and
that
lights up all the things that live in outer space that we wouldn’t normally see, you know? Like dark matter? Or what space would look like if you could somehow get outside our universe and then look back.”

It’s as if he’s read her mind. All of that’s
exactly
what she’s after but doesn’t quite know how to do just yet.

“Well, I—” Then she gets a really good look at this boy, and whatever she was about to say fizzles on her tongue.

Because the boy is Eric.

ERIC IS ALMOST
exactly as he will be, right down to those smoldering, impossibly blue eyes fringed with long black lashes. His face is strong and lean, and his lips are full, his mouth perfectly shaped. The only difference is that he’s not as muscular, and his dark hair curls over the tips of his ears. He wears denim shorts and a black tee. His hands are slender, the fingers long. He is insanely handsome, something manufactured by a dream, and that queer sighing flutter in her chest that she feels
now
she will recognize as longing
then
.

“You’re—” she begins and stops. She has almost said,
You’re not real. You don’t belong here. You
weren’t
here
. “You’re not the regular girl. Who works here, I mean.”

“Oh. Well, no. Just subbing for the extra cash.” His eyebrows knit in concern. Releasing the galaxy pendant, he straightens. “Are you okay? Do you want to sit down or something?”

“No, I’m good.” Her throat is so dry she hears the click as she swallows. “You’re Eric,” she says, then remembers to make it a question. “Right?”

“Yeah.” His frown deepens. “Have we met?”

Not yet
. “No. I, uh, I guess I must’ve seen you around.”

“I don’t think so,” he says, and then his expression changes: as if
she’s
glass and his gaze pierces to her hidden heart. “I would’ve remembered meeting you.”

Her pulse throbs in her neck. It’s as if he’s pulled her into a private, breathless space, somewhere warm and safe to which he has the only key. If he wants to hold her there forever …

“Emma!” The voice comes from behind. “Where’ve you been?”

No
. Her stomach drops, and she turns to watch the girl striding toward her.
No, no, you’re—

“I should’ve known. As if we don’t have enough reading to do. Only
you
would buy more books. I mean, making us read
The Bell Jar? Seriously?
That thing is
so
depressing.” Lily executes an exaggerated eye-roll, then plucks the book from Emma’s nerveless fingers. “So what else did you find?”

“Wh-what are you doing here?” Emma croaks.

“Hello, done with finals, not ready to face Sylvia Plath? Into some serious retail therapy?” Lily’s sculpted eyebrows crinkle in a frown. “Emma, are you okay? You don’t look so hot.”

Oh no, I lose my mind on a regular basis
. “I’m fine,” Emma says, but she is definitely
not
. This is all wrong. She had not come with Lily; she didn’t
know
Lily back then, did she? Where had they met? On this street? In a class? She can’t remember, but she does recall that she went shopping with her roommate, Mariane, and they had lost one another when Emma wandered off toward the bookstore down East Washington, thinking now would be a great time to get a jump on all that summer reading.

Wait a second. What if
this
time is the
first
time?
A strange relief floods her veins. Maybe that’s it.
This
is reality. All the rest—the snow, the crash, Lily’s death—is the dream, or
blink
, or hallucination. The street is what’s real. The taste of too-sweet coffee and chocolate still sits on her tongue. Chilly beads of condensation wet her fingers. In a few days, she will be seventeen. Lily is alive and Eric is
here
; he’s real.

But he shouldn’t be. He’s like the pendant I haven’t made yet: something I’ve only—

“Ugh, how can you read this stuff?” With an exaggerated shudder, Lily hands back the book Emma’s chosen. “You and your horror novels … I’d have nightmares for a year.”

Me and my …
She doesn’t like horror; with her past, her life has been gruesome enough, thanks. “Well, I—” Emma begins, and then her eyes click to the book’s cover and Emma feels the blood drain from her face as her ears begin to buzz.

The jacket is smoky. In the center, there is a long dark slit edged in a fiery corona of red and yellow and orange. The slit could be a cat’s eye, or a lizard’s, or a split in the earth—or the mouth she sees whenever she gets a migraine, because there are shadowy figures and a writhing tangle of weird monsters struggling to climb out. Look at it a certain way, and you could almost believe they were about to leap off the cover and out of the book.

And the cover reads:

IN THIS JUNE
of memory, Emma’s blood turns to slush.

Another book by McDermott, in a series she’s never heard of. One that she’s pretty sure doesn’t really exist.
Was this in the bibliography Kramer gave us?
She doesn’t think so. But McDermott
knew
the Dickens Mirror; he
wrote
about it.

Wait a second. Just because he knew doesn’t mean it’s a real thing. Writers make stuff up all the time. The Mirror could be imaginary and something that only exists in a book
.

But if that was true, and even if it wasn’t, then what—
who
—was the
first
book about?

Oh, holy shit
. An icy flood sweeps through her chest.
I am so stupid
. The jigsaw bits and pieces of her Lizzie
-blinks
suddenly begin snapping into place. There are still a lot of gaps; these are
blinks
after all, and her memory of them, the fine print and little details, isn’t perfect, but she recalls enough: that barn, an explosion, a car crash, a dad who’s a writer, and Lizzie’s mom makes glass.
Emma, you nut, Kramer said that—or he will say … Oh, what the hell difference does it make?
She
is shaking so badly, it’s as if she’s back in the snow, in that awful valley. What she remembered was what Kramer said about Meredith McDermott: a physicist turned glass artist, who blew her husband to smithereens.

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, all this—the crash, the valley, House—all this is about Frank McDermott? First I write a story that’s straight out of notes for a book he never finished, and now I’m channeling his kid?
This is like the moment to come, one she hasn’t lived yet, when Kramer accuses her of plagiarism, and all she can and will think is,
Don’t be crazy. The guy’s dead
.

But no, it’s even worse than that; she’s dropping into the last reel because she knows what comes next. Lizzie’s already in the car; that kid’s about five seconds away from
dying
.

“Emma?” Lily touches her arm, but the feel is muted, as if reaching her through a layer of cotton. “Are you all right?”

“I’m … I’m fine.” She flips the book over to study the jacket photo. The image is black and white, and the caption reads in tiny white block letters:
THE WRITER AND HIS FAMILY AT THEIR HOME IN RURAL WISCONSIN
.

They’re all there, ranged on the porch steps: McDermott, his head cocked as if something’s caught his eye, stands on the right. His wife
—so you’re Mom; you’re Meredith
, Emma thinks—is on the left.

Her eyes zero in on a little girl with blonde pigtails and an armful of cat, between Frank and Meredith.
Bet that’s an orange tabby, too
. The cat’s gaze is focused on something that must be in a tree off-camera.

Lizzie and Marmalade and … oh my God
. Despite the day’s
warmth, her skin prickles with gooseflesh as she picks out the porch railing, a bay window on the left, a door with a wrought-iron knocker and pebbled sidelights, the glider on chains, hanging flower baskets spilling over with geraniums that she’d lay money on are red.
That’s House
.

That is also when she realizes: McDermott is not looking
around
. The photographer captured McDermott as he was looking
up
. From the angle, she understands that McDermott is about to spot—or
knows
exactly—what the cat already sees. Her eyes inch up the picture, and then her breath hitches in a small gasp.

“Emma?” Eric says. “Are you okay? What is it?”

“I … It’s …” But her mouth won’t work, and she can’t get the words off her tongue.

In that photograph, draped over the sill of a second-story window, is a hand.