Beyond the Doors Page 2

  A pathetic heaving of choked breath was uttered behind her. The overwhelming emotion in that breath threatened to send Janice over the edge, so she quickly focused on her father’s bedding, searching for imperfections she could fix in the way the blanket had been gently tucked into the sides. Spotting a slightly mussed fold in the corner of the blanket by her father’s left foot, she reached out to pull it taut.

  “Give it a break, Janice, will ya?” mumbled her sister Sydney.

  Janice stopped midreach. “It’s messy,” she said.

  “It’s fine,” Sydney replied with just a hint of sisterly fury.

  “The doctors say he could wake up anytime, anytime,” said the smelly, pudgy lawyer guy whose name Janice had not bothered to remember. “All we can do is wait.”

  Another half gasp/half sob from behind caused Janice to wheel around and face the weeping individual. “Why are you weeping?” she asked.

  Miss Guacaladilla, the chinless social worker who had been with them every moment since she’d ruined all their lives by coming to school bearing news of the fire, wiped her left eye clear of tears with the back of her hand, further streaking mascara across her already-mascara-covered cheek. “He’s in a coma! He’s lying right there! In a coma!”

  “We know!” snapped Sydney. “You don’t have to rub it in!” Zack moved quickly to her side, placing a calming hand on her shoulder.

  “At least he’s alive,” said Janice. Her siblings all silently agreed. By some miracle—no one knew how—their father had managed to pull himself out of their burning home before succumbing to his injuries. Had he not, the children would be standing at his grave instead of his bedside.

  “It’s just so tragic,” wept Miss Guacaladilla.

  Miss Guacaladilla seemed to find everything in life absolutely miserable, and her constant sobbing was not helping Janice or her siblings deal with the situation in a healthy, orderly manner. Janice felt a rising urge to intensely dislike the woman.

  That’s not fair, thought Janice, reprimanding herself. She’s just the messenger.

  Still, without having anyone else to blame, dumping everything on Miss Guacaladilla (she had asked the children to call her Lubella; the children had refused) made Janice feel better.

  “Can he hear us?” asked little Alexa.

  “Probably,” stated Nurse Hallabug, who had been lurking quietly in the back. She had said she wanted to give the family some privacy, but Janice suspected she really just enjoyed watching people suffer. “We are almost pretty sure that there is a decent chance that it is possible that your father can hear you from time to time. If you don’t mumble. We think.” She smiled at them—one of those “I’m smiling to show how sad I am for you” smiles—and nodded.

  Alexa looked up at Janice, who nodded back down to her. “Go ahead,” said Janice.

  The littlest Rothbaum inched closer to the hospital bed, standing up on her tippy-toes to get a better look. “Please wake up, Daddy,” she said.

  Miss Guacaladilla broke into new sobs.

  Zack stepped next to Alexa and lifted her into his arms. Janice joined them and took her sister’s hand, then was slightly surprised to feel Sydney take her other hand. The four children stood united next to their father, awkwardly waiting for one of the conscious and healthy adults in the room to do or say something.

  A throat cleared. A nose sniffed. Someone loudly scratched an itch.

  “Mr. Rothbaum should probably be allowed his rest,” said Nurse Hallabug. “There’s every reason to believe that it might be good if maybe he was left alone. Perhaps.”

  “Yes, well. I must be off, be off,” said the smelly, pudgy lawyer guy with a commendable sigh. “Things to do, papers to file, and whatnot, whatnot.”

  Miss Guacaladilla gave a loud, teary sniff as she approached the four siblings. “I do hope you poor, sad dears are ready to depart,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand yet again. “We must administer to your future.”

  “Our future?” asked Janice. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you sweet, innocent, miserable children,” announced Miss Guacaladilla in a warbling voice. “With your father in a coma, there is no one to look after you. Also, there’s the upsetting matter of your house burning down. I’m so sorry to tell you, but you have nowhere to go. No one to help you.”

  The children looked at one another. It was obvious none of them had considered this at all. “What are we supposed to do?” asked Zack, speaking for the group.

  “Oh! Yours is such an unfortunate fate!” bawled Miss Guacaladilla, her tears leaping from her face and sprinkling everyone with a fine mist. “I’m afraid you must come with me. It’s time to put you…in the system!”

  Sydney glared at the paintings on the walls of Miss Guacaladilla’s office. They were all wrong. Rather than paintings of people or trees or a bowl of fruit, they were just colors. Lots of dark, morose, gloomy colors. They made the paintings seem sinister and depressing, and made the room feel distinctly miserable.

  This was not a happy office.

  For one thing, Miss Guacaladilla never stopped crying. She’d cried when picking them up from school, she’d cried at the hospital, she’d cried when checking them into a motel for the night, she’d cried herself to sleep watching over them in the motel room, she’d cried the next morning when buying them a change of clothes since they’d lost everything in the fire, and she was crying now just sitting in her chair.

  There was nothing happy about her.

  “Such a tragedy, my poor, sad, miserable little dears,” Miss Guacaladilla was saying. “It is almost too much to bear. To lose your home to the ravages of fire as your father lapses into a coma from which he may never recover. What a horrible way to start your young lives.”

  Way to cheer us up, thought Sydney, fidgeting in her chair and swinging her legs back and forth against the back of the social worker’s desk. Zack absently reached over to still her knee, but she slapped his hand away.

  “Are we going to stay with you, then?” asked Zack.

  “What?” shrieked Sydney. “Miss Boo-Hoo? No way!” She gave the desk another solid kick in defiance and popped out of the chair to pace back and forth along the far wall of the office. Unfortunately, because of the minuscule size of the room, she ended up more or less just turning in circles.

  “I’m afraid not, Zachary,” answered Miss Guacaladilla through a flood of tears. “As much as I adore you all, and as much as I enjoyed our evening together, I am not legally allowed to foster children.” She sighed, as if this were the one great disappointment of her life. “However, I swear on the life of my poodle, Bilbo, that I will not rest until I have secured a loving, legal foster parent for each and every one of you.”

  “Foster parent?” spat Sydney. “We don’t need a foster parent. We have a real parent.”

  “A real parent who is—oh, how it pains me to say this—currently unable to care for you due to his being in a coma. Has the universe no mercy?”

  Sydney smoldered with untapped fury as she watched the obnoxious woman once again descend into a bawling wreck. She didn’t want a foster parent. She wanted Dad.

  “Won’t it be difficult to find someone to take all four of us in?” asked Janice.

  Miss Guacaladilla sucked in her breath as if she’d just seen an alien spaceship land outside her window. A very sad alien spaceship. “Oh, my poor, miserable, sad, forlorn, despondent, forsaken children!” she wailed. “No one will take you all. I’m afraid you will all be sent to different homes to live solitary lives, quite possibly in different cities or even different countries. It pains me to no end to admit that you may never see one another again! Why is life so cruel?” Miss Guacaladilla dropped her head to her desk and blubbered spasmodically.

  Though her siblings froze in astonishment at this news, Sydney, who had never been frozen in her life, grabbed a thick, dusty book off the shelf and hurled it at the social worker. “No!” she roared. “That’s wrong! That’s all wrong!”r />
  Zack managed to deflect the book before it did any actual harm, but Miss Guacaladilla raised her head nonetheless. “I’m so, so sorry, Sydney,” she said. “I wish there were something I could do.”

  “Dad shouldn’t be in a coma!” yelled Sydney, giving voice to the thoughts that had been filling her mind ever since this blubbering faucet had come into their lives. “He shouldn’t even have been home! He should have been at work! It’s all wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong!”

  “Sydney,” began Zack. “You heard what the police said. He forgot his presentation. He went back to get it. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but—”

  “But it’s wrong! And splitting us up? No! No, no, no!”

  Sydney went into full-on RAGE mode, pulling books from shelves and kicking walls, chairs, and an innocent-if-disturbing toad-shaped doorstop. She hoped in some way to articulate exactly how wrong the entire situation was through this childish display, but resigned herself to the knowledge that her particular mode of self-expression would be misinterpreted as a tantrum. True to form, Janice rose from her chair and yelled at Sydney for throwing a fit while Zack ran over and wrapped his arms around her, trying to physically smother the RAGE out of her.

  Alexa appeared about to cry but held off. Sydney figured her sister didn’t want to compete with the social worker, who was crying a flood of her own.

  “Sydney!” yelled Janice. “Calm down!”

  Her words had little effect on Sydney, but then words rarely did. More physical than the other Rothbaum children, Sydney tended to respond to harsh language by destroying something. Since there was little in the office worth destroying, she chose to lash out instead. Luckily, Zack’s more direct approach of wrapping her up in his arms as if he were a human straitjacket did the trick. After a few more moments of her screaming and kicking and biting (she’d have to apologize to Zack for that later), the RAGE subsided and Sydney slumped into a ball on the floor. Zack knelt at her side and stroked her hair as Miss Guacaladilla rose in a sad attempt to regain control of the room.

  “You’re absolutely right, Sydney!” she said. “You’re a family, and you shouldn’t be separated! But you’re also minors, and the law says you must live with an adult. Since you have no living relatives—”

  “Mom’s alive,” squeaked Alexa.

  Everyone was silent, even Sydney. Miss Guacaladilla’s lips trembled, foretelling another coming burst of sobbing. However, she inhaled deeply multiple times and just did manage to maintain control of her tear ducts.

  “Oh, you sweet, innocent, darling little girl,” she whimpered. “Your mother is nowhere to be found. We have looked everywhere since the accident, searched online in some truly unpleasant places, but have been unable to find even the barest hint of her. I’m so, so, so sorry.”

  Had she not just erupted in full force and utterly drained her battery, Sydney would probably have bolted into another RAGE at Miss Guacaladilla’s words. Even though it was old news, the fact that their mother had simply walked out of their lives six years previously was a gaping wound in all their hearts.

  Defeated, the four children sulked in their chairs and on the floor, waiting for Miss Guacaladilla to deliver the final judgment. The social worker took a moment to grab a tissue and blow her nose with a fierce honk before continuing. “As I was unfortunately saying,” she wheezed, “without a living relative available, there is simply no possible way for me to place all of you with a single family. Now then, why don’t you come around here where you can see the computer screen, and I’ll scroll through possibilities in the database. Some of these families are actually quite nice, and not at all creepy. I even think there’s one in Uzbekistan with a pool!”

  Sydney prepared to tell Miss Guacaladilla exactly what she could do with her Uzbekistanian family and their pool when the door burst open, and in rushed the sweaty little man from the hospital.

  “Stop!” he called out. “I found her, found her!”

  Five jaws dropped—four because they thought the man had somehow found their mother, and one because a smelly, pudgy man had just burst into her office. Mr. Fletcher Groskowsky, Esquire, clomped up to the desk and plopped his plump posterior into the nearest chair, ignoring the chair’s groan of protest. He then proceeded to wave a folded piece of paper in front of his face as if he were a dainty Victorian debutante wilting on a hot summer’s day.

  “You had to be on the third floor, didn’t you, didn’t you?” he asked, panting.

  “Second floor,” corrected Miss Guacaladilla. “And there’s an elevator.”

  “No, no. This was far too important to risk an elevator.” Mr. Groskowsky leaned forward. The four children and one social worker leaned forward. Miss Guacaladilla then leaned back because of how bad Mr. Groskowsky smelled. The children braved the stench in hopes of receiving joyful news.

  “Did you…did you find our mother?” asked Janice.

  “What?” snorted Mr. Groskowsky. “No! Of course not! Of course not! Don’t be ridiculous! I found Gladys Tulving!”

  The children were speechless. The social worker was speechless and teary. Finally, Sydney couldn’t stand it any longer, so she punched Mr. Groskowsky in the arm.

  Nobody seemed to mind. Not even Mr. Groskowsky.

  “Who is Gladys Tulving?” asked Zack finally.

  “Who is Gladys Tulving?” snorted Mr. Groskowsky again. “Are you serious? You can’t be serious!”

  Sydney considered punching him again but was stunned into pacifism by his next words.

  “She’s your auntie!”

  Alexa leaned her itchy nose against the car window and quietly rubbed it against the glass while gazing out at the rolling hills of wispy brown grass in the late-afternoon sun. She tried not to look too excited.

  Zack and Sydney were crowded next to her in the back of Miss Guacaladilla’s car—Zack looking all serious and Sydney looking all grumpy. Janice sat in the front, so Alexa couldn’t see her face, but she assumed her big sister was looking all worried—as usual. Alexa knew her siblings were sad over the house burning down and Dad in a coma and everything. She was also sad, of course, but she didn’t like being sad, so she’d chosen instead to concentrate on the sliver of happiness presented to the Rothbaum children.

  They were going to meet Aunt Gladys.

  She’d been told her aunt lived out in the country, and that made Alexa wonder what sort of cute, fluffy animals she would find out there. Her most recent pet—a rat she’d found behind the school dumpster and named Ratty—had very likely perished in the fire. Which was very sad. Except he was a rat, so it was not quite as sad as it would have been had he been something cuter, say a bunny or a chinchilla.

  To be fair, however, it was not meeting her aunt that had Alexa excited, nor was it the possibility of finding something new to smother with love, such as a bear or a raccoon. No, what excited her was what the sweaty, smelly man had said after he told them all they had an Aunt Gladys.

  “They can’t possibly have an aunt,” Miss Guacaladilla had said after picking her jaw up off the floor. “Their father was an only child.”

  “Father?” Mr. Groskowsky had spat, flecks of disgusting goop flying out of his mouth. One of them landed rather near Alexa’s elbow, and she gave a quick shudder and pulled her arms to her chest. “Don’t be silly! Don’t be silly!”

  “Then I’m so very sadly afraid that I don’t—”

  “Their mother! Charlotte Tulving!”

  All eight of the siblings’ eyes bulged in shock.

  “Mommy?” Alexa managed to ask, confused because she was pretty sure her mother’s last name had been Rothbaum.

  “That’s what I said, what I said!” Mr. Groskowsky slammed his folded piece of paper down on Miss Guacaladilla’s desk. “Gladys Tulving is your mother’s younger sister! That’s who your parents wanted you to live with should anything unfortunate happen to them.”

  “Which it did!” wailed Miss Guacaladilla.

  “Yes,” agreed Mr. Groskowsky, loo
king slightly uncomfortable. “Yes. Quite unfortunate.”

  “I don’t remember this aunt being named in the will,” Miss Guacaladilla mused between loud sniffs.

  “No. No. It was…Let me think. It was after we’d finished the will. Later that day. The mother came in and wrote the aunt’s name down for me.”

  “But you didn’t revise the will,” Janice said, acting all suspicious, as usual.

  “No. It seems I didn’t, I didn’t,” the lawyer admitted. Then he tapped his forehead a few times, like he was trying to jog loose a particularly pesky memory. “Strange. That’s not like me.” His eyes had glazed over as he tried to remember. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders. “Forgive me if I seem somewhat scattered. My office was broken into this morning. Nothing important was taken. Well, my door. Which is odd. Perhaps that’s a thing? No matter. I distinctly remember your mother’s note and the name she wrote down. Gladys Tulving.”

  Now they were in a car heading for Aunt Gladys’s house. Alexa could hardly contain her excitement because she had put one and one together and realized that since Aunt Gladys was Mommy’s sister, she would know where Mommy was. In fact, Mommy was probably waiting for them at Aunt Gladys’s house right now!

  Alexa was about to finally meet Mommy!

  As far back as she could remember (granted, not long, as she was only seven), Alexa had dreamed about her mother. She had seen pictures, of course, and Janice and Zack had told her what little they remembered (Sydney didn’t remember anything, since she’d only been three when their mother had left), but other than that, Mommy had always been a blank book. Daddy never mentioned her, and there wasn’t anybody else around who’d known her.

  But while she didn’t know much about her mother in real life, she knew all about her in her dreams. At night, asleep, Alexa and Mommy would spend hours playing games, having adventures, and just being together. Sometimes they’d go on a big trip into the African jungle; other times they’d ride beautiful horses across the open plains. Or they’d go swimming in a magical lagoon. It was always just the two of them, and it was always wonderful. And it pretty much always included ice cream. In her dreams, Mommy was loving, kind, smart, beautiful, and always at Alexa’s side, no matter what happened.