Beyond the Doors Page 14

  “Alexa!” cried a suddenly worried Janice, rushing forward. “Are you all right?”

  Alexa took a moment to answer that question. She had every right to be howling in pain and/or shock after her dramatic tumble—and she considered doing just that—but in the end, her mission was more important than a well-deserved tantrum. She staggered to her feet and was about to tell Janice that she was fine when she remembered she wasn’t talking to her sister. So instead, she shrugged, dusted herself off, and walked around the brass frame to start hauling the broken door out of the way.

  “Wait! What’s going on? What are you doing?”

  Alexa ignored her sister and dragged the heavy door as best she could. Which was not very well.

  “That’s way too heavy for you,” said Janice. “Just stop, okay? Tell me what you’re doing.”

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” answered Alexa, in as sassy a tone as she could muster for a seven-year-old. If she was going to talk to her sister, she’d at least be nasty about it.

  “Why are you dragging, or trying to drag, that away?”

  Alexa stayed silent, huffing and puffing against the weight of the door.

  “Alexa? Why won’t you talk to me?”

  “Because you don’t believe me!” snapped Alexa, finally giving up both on moving the door and not talking to her sister. She gained a moment’s satisfaction at the startled look of guilt on Janice’s face, then decided this was all way too much emotion for her to handle at once, so she went ahead, fell to the floor, and burst into tears.

  Surrendering to her big-sister instinct, Janice rushed forward. “Oh, Alexa! I’m so sorry!” She dropped to a knee at Alexa’s side and cradled the crying girl’s head in her arms.

  “Yoo-ooo di-id-n’t be-le-ee-ee-eve me-ee-ee,” hiccuped Alexa through her tears. “Yoo-oo thi-ink I—I—I’m a bi-ig, du-umb li-i-i-ar!”

  “No!” protested Janice. “Never! You’re not a liar, Alexa. I never thought that.”

  “Yoo-oo be-ee-lee-eve-d Di-mi-i-i-tri-i,” continued Alexa, who felt she might as well get it all out. “You-oo ye-elled at me-ee.”

  “I did,” admitted the eldest Rothbaum. “I know I did. I shouldn’t have done that. Please forgive me?”

  Alexa paused in her whimpering and peered up at her sister. “You’re not mad at me?” she asked without a trace of misery in her voice. “You don’t blame me?”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Really really?”

  “Really really.”

  “Really really really?”

  Janice raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Weren’t you crying a moment ago?”

  “That was then.” She pushed herself out of Janice’s lap and leaned back down to grab the broken door. “Help me move this?”

  “Why did you disconnect the door? What are you doing down here?”

  “Oh.” Alexa bit her lip. “Right. I didn’t tell you. Because I wasn’t talking to you. Because you yelled at me. So it’s your fault.” She planted her hands on her hips like she’d seen Sydney do when placing blame, but it didn’t feel right, so she let her hands drop.

  “Didn’t tell me what?” asked Janice.

  And Alexa told her. She told her about remembering how Zack and Sydney came into her room when she was reading to Chippy, about how they were trapped in the memory, about how they could travel between memories, and about how they needed someone to open another door and bring them a knob so they could get home. When she was done, Janice just stared at her in utter amazement, her mouth hanging open like it was trying to air out a particularly bad smell.

  Alexa waited for her sister to say something. Janice, for her part, gave no indication that she was planning on doing anything but gawk endlessly at her little sister until the sun went supernova in a few billion years.

  “Did you get all that?” asked Alexa finally. “Or do you need me to say it again?”

  Janice shook herself out of her daze. “No. I got it. I’m good.”

  Alexa didn’t think her sister sounded good, but she chose to ignore the matter and get back to work. “So will you help me?” she asked, indicating the broken door at their feet.

  To Alexa’s great relief, Janice spun into action, grabbing the door and quickly shoving it out of the way. “You’re sure about this?” she asked.

  “I’m not a big, dumb liar.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “You thought it.”

  “I never thought it.”

  “You yelled at me!”

  “Didn’t we already do this?”

  Alexa giggled.

  “Did they say anything about what kind of door they need?” asked Janice, looking around at the countless piles of doors ready and waiting to be hooked up and explored.

  “Nope.”

  “Right. Okay. So we just…pick one?”

  Alexa marched up to the nearest pile of doors and patted the topmost door with the palm of her hand. “This one.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Janice. “It looks a little flimsy.”

  “A door’s a door,” answered an increasingly impatient Alexa. “Let’s go!”

  With Alexa functioning as project manager and offering moral support, Janice lugged the chosen door over to the machine. Under her little sister’s direction, she stood the door on its end and latched it into the brass frame. Then the two girls retreated to the bank of computers, and Janice fumbled with the controls.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” asked Alexa.

  “I watched Dimitri pretty carefully, then asked some questions after Zack and Sydney went in. I’m pretty sure—”

  She interrupted herself by twisting a dial that looked like any other dial on the board. The machine instantly jolted to life with a mechanical cough, followed by an electric sizzle, followed by an unidentifiable sound from somewhere below. The now-familiar bright blue sparks of energy wrapped themselves around the door once again, and the entire frame buzzed excitedly for a moment before quieting into the soft, ever-present drone that meant everything was working.

  “Is good! We go now!” shouted Janice, mimicking Dimitri.

  “Don’t mimic that big, dumb liar,” said Alexa.

  “Sorry.”

  The two sisters turned their attention to the flimsy-looking door cracking with blue energy in the middle of the room.

  “Now what?” asked Janice.

  “I think we go in,” answered Alexa. She waddled over to the drawer and pulled out a doorknob. “You ready?”

  “You realize we have no idea what’s on the other side of that door, right?”

  “Zack and Sydney.”

  Alexa grabbed a pair of rubber gloves and handed them to her big sister. Then she took Janice’s hand and led her, somewhat reluctantly, up onto the platform. At her prodding, Janice pulled on the gloves and reached out to gingerly touch the plain doorknob currently sparking with unidentifiable blue energy. When touching the knob failed to kill her, she went ahead and gave it a good grasp. A serious twist followed the grasp, a forceful yank followed the twist, and the two girls walked blindly into the light.

  “What’s wrong with you?” hissed Charlotte Rothbaum to her children. “You can’t just throw yourselves into your sister’s memories! Do you have any idea the damage you could do? You could…You might…!” Her exclamations faded into growls as she fought for the right words.

  Zack, who hadn’t seen his mother in over six years, stammered a nonreply. She seemed hard and severe—the opposite of her father and Aunt Gladys. Most of all, however, she looked kind of crazy, with her hair all disheveled and her eyes bulging just the slightest bit from her head.

  Truth be told, she looked like she’d just stuck her finger into a light socket.

  “Are you really…our mother?” asked Sydney, sounding so meek Zack did a double take to make sure it was still his sister next to him and not some impostor.

  “You can’t
be here!” continued Charlotte, waving her arms. Zack noticed one of her hands was covered by what looked like a thick rubber gardening glove. “I don’t know how you found this memory, but you need to leave! Now! Before you…It’s not…!”

  “We can’t leave,” said Zack, finding his voice. “They closed our door.”

  “They what? Of all the stupid, brainless…My sister is such a…!” She quickly reached into her pocket with her gloved hand and pulled out a plain brass doorknob. “Someday I’m going to knock some sense into that woman!”

  With a violence Zack didn’t really think was necessary, his mother slammed the brass knob onto the back of Alexa’s door. The knob instantly melded itself onto the door, spitting out a number of bright blue sparks of energy in the process. She turned the knob and pulled the door open, releasing a world of intense white light.

  “Well?” she prompted. “Go on!”

  Zack tried to process the ridiculous amount of impossible that had been dumped into his lap in the last five minutes. Finally, his brain chose to toss it all out his ear and focus on the most important question.

  “Where have you been for the last six years?” he asked.

  “Get moving!” ordered Charlotte.

  Zack and Sydney quickly leaped into the merciless blaze of illumination.

  They emerged in a way-too-cluttered one-room apartment.

  Boxes of wires and gears and widgets and switches littered the floor, the lone couch, both tables, and two of the three chairs. Piles of paper lay scattered everywhere, mixed in with old pizza boxes and takeout containers. Zack was pretty sure if his room had ever looked like this, he’d’ve been grounded for a week.

  There was a soft pop followed by a loud slam, and Charlotte pushed her way past her children. “Sorry about the mess,” she muttered as she flung her glove off her hand and leaned over a collection of old laptops to pound some buttons. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “Where are we?” asked Sydney.

  Charlotte’s fingers flew over multiple keyboards. Zack tried to follow the readouts on the various screens, but none of them made any sense. Finally, his mother stabbed the Enter key on one of the laptops, and the soft, magical drone he hadn’t even realized he’d been hearing suddenly fizzled out with an erratic burst of static.

  Zack turned around to see a plain wooden door—which he recognized as belonging to his sister, which was weird because he’d thought it had burned down with the house—give off a wisp of smoke.

  “My apartment,” said Charlotte with a weary sigh. “I never was much of a housekeeper, as I’m sure your father has probably mentioned.”

  She sat in the only available chair and peered at them, as if studying an unusual species of mollusk.

  “Actually, Dad never said much about you at all,” said Zack.

  “No?” She seemed disappointed for a moment. “I suppose I deserve that. Actually, I deserve worse. Far, far worse.” She said this last part more to herself than to them, causing Zack and Sydney to exchange inquisitive looks.

  “Why?” asked Zack.

  “Why?” She jumped up and paced through the mess of her apartment, wringing her hands together as if washing them under an invisible sink. “Have you seen him lying there? He’s just…And you ask…”

  “Lying there? You mean in the hospital?” asked Sydney. “You visited Dad?”

  “Of course I visited your father! It’s the least…After what I…” She stopped and bit her lip.

  The color drained from Zack’s face. “Mom?” he began, afraid to even ask. “Did you have…Did you…the fire…?”

  “He wasn’t supposed to be home!” snapped Charlotte, throwing her hands in the air and marching away from her children. “He had a very important meeting! And you four…in school…” The invisible hand washing became incredibly frantic as she stumbled to get her words out. “Nobody was supposed to be there!”

  “You started the fire?” asked a shocked Sydney.

  “No one was supposed to get hurt! I even saved Alexa’s hamster!” She gestured wildly to the kitchen counter, where there was a wire cage containing a rather disheveled-looking creature currently buried in shredded newspaper.

  Zack was so devastated over his mother’s revelation that he didn’t bother telling her the “hamster” in the cage was actually Ratty the rat—though he was mildly relieved for Alexa’s sake to learn the disgusting thing had survived.

  “When I saw his car pull into the driveway, I was furious!” continued Charlotte. “What was he thinking? Didn’t he know I was burning the house down? Once he came home, I assumed he’d see the fire and put it out, and I’d have to try again another time, but did he? Of course not! He just rambled in, oblivious to the flames already flickering out the kitchen window! Of all the stupid…Can’t even…!” She tore at her hair in frustration.

  At a loss for words, Zack could only shake his head.

  “He’s punishing me. He’s still angry I left. That’s why he made me go in there and drag his sorry butt out of the house! That’s why he’s in that coma! He’s punishing me!”

  She sank into her chair with a moan and tossed her head back, staring up at the ceiling. Nobody spoke, each lost in their own tumultuous thoughts. All the revelations had pulled the rug out from under Zack’s entire world. He didn’t know what to think.

  “Why…,” whispered Sydney. “Why did you burn our house down?”

  “Why?” Charlotte parroted, only slightly crazy-like. “I needed your doors, of course!”

  “Our doors?” Overwhelmed, Zack plopped down on the edge of the couch.

  “I couldn’t ask your father for them,” she explained, as if this should have been obvious. “And if they disappeared, he’d wonder where they went. He’s nosy like that. But if the house burned down, he wouldn’t know they were missing. Nobody would know!”

  Seeing a slightly obsessive glint in his mother’s eye, Zack scooted back against the cushions. “Why did you need our doors?” he asked carefully.

  “Because your grandfather’s an idiot!” she spat. “He just left her there!”

  “Left? Who?” Utterly confused, Zack looked to Sydney for help, but she just shrugged.

  “My mother! She’s trapped inside! But my father gave up! He closed the door and locked it away! Well, I never gave up. It took years to duplicate his work. But…look!” She spread her arms, indicating all the machinery and gadgets and papers crammed into the tiny room. “I finally got in! I accessed the MemoryVerse!”

  “MemorySphere,” mumbled Sydney automatically. “Pop-Pop calls it the MemorySphere.”

  “He does?” She frowned. “What is that supposed to mean? MemoryVerse is much better. Memory universe. MemoryVerse. Dad was always rotten with names. Thank goodness my mother named us, or we’d’ve been called Pigwort and Boomshakalaka.”

  “I thought Grandma died,” said Sydney. “You say she’s trapped in there?”

  Charlotte popped out of her chair and lunged toward her daughter. “She’s in agony! Every time I visited she was worse. She needs to be saved!”

  Seeing a look of true fear creep into his sister’s eyes, Zack gently tugged his mother away from Sydney and sat her back down in her chair. “You went into her memories?” he asked.

  “She’s trapped, Zack. She’s been trapped for so long….” She trailed off, her head drooping in exhaustion.

  “But what does that have to do with our doors?” asked Sydney. Zack could see her struggling with the intensity of her emotions. This was not the mother any of them had remembered or imagined.

  Charlotte lifted her head. “I knew you’d end up with my sister,” she said conspiratorially. “I was going to travel into your father’s memories through his bedroom door—our bedroom door—and plant the idea. With the house a pile of ashes, where else would you go?”

  “You wanted us to go to Aunt Gladys’s?” asked Sydney.

  Their mother nodded. “But then your father was caught in the blaze, so I had to improv
ise.” She jerked a thumb behind her to indicate a plain office door against the wall with the name Fletcher Groskowsky, Esquire, stenciled on a small pane of glass near the top. “And it worked! You’re in! I can’t get in. Gladys locks up tight and yells at me from a window if I get within fifty feet. She’s still angry about some of the things I said when I left. But you’re in! And when you get back, you’ll find my mother’s door for me. I’m thirsty.”

  She popped up and maneuvered her way through the clutter and debris to the kitchen. Zack found himself sifting through what she’d just said, trying to make sense of it, but Sydney beat him to the punch.

  “You’re sending us back?” she asked. “We just found you! We don’t need to live with Aunt Gladys. We can live with you!”

  “Here?” Charlotte guffawed awkwardly and grabbed a glass pitcher from the fridge. “Out of the question.” She poured herself some unidentifiable brown liquid from the pitcher and gulped it down.

  “But you’re our mother!” cried Sydney.

  “And she’s mine!” roared her mother right back, slamming the empty glass on the counter. Zack and Sydney flinched, and Charlotte closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Sydney. Maybe when this is over…after I save her…”

  Zack came forward to put his arm around his sister’s shoulder. She absently shoved it off, but he didn’t mind. “So you planned on, what?” asked Sydney. “Traveling into our memories to trick us into finding Grandma’s door for you?”

  “Not all of you,” she answered, eyes cast down in shame.

  “Alexa,” said Zack. His mother nodded without looking up. “Why take the rest of our doors?”

  She lifted her head, and Zack was surprised to find tears in her eyes. “I missed you.”

  Nobody spoke, and this simple confession hung in the air for a moment. Finally, Charlotte cleared her throat. “Either of you thirsty?” she asked, holding up the pitcher.