Undone: An Unraveling Novella Part 4

Neither of them responded, and I knew what that meant, or I should have. I looked at Eli anyway.

He shook his head.

"Very dead," Reid said. "Same as the other."

"And that truck," Eli added. "Nothing I've ever seen before. Definitely not from home."

Even though I already knew that deep down, hearing it confirmed was worse than getting punched with a lead fist. I wobbled slightly on the bike, head still swimmy and weak from the exertion.

When we reached the top of the hill, the road turned inland, and I turned left down the first side street I could. I didn't care if Eli and Reid followed me or not, even though I knew they probably would. I rode straight toward the cliffs overlooking the beach, skidded to a stop, and got off the bike.

I didn't know what to do. I wasn't sure how everything had managed to go so wrong. We still didn't have the right answers. We hadn't been able to keep anything from coming through. Now we had a dead driver who was most certainly not dead when he'd been driving wherever he came from, and we'd killed Janelle. That I brought her back was a miracle, but it didn't change that fact that everything we'd done today had been wrong. I kicked the bike and sent it skidding a few feet to the left.

"It's okay," Eli said. "We can try one more time, we cana""

"No," I said, cutting him off.

The guy was a mess. He drank too much, got into too many fights, and didn't care about anything other than getting home. He was also my best friend, and he knew me better than anyone. He heard the finality in my voice, and he nodded. A sign he knew I'd do anything for him. Anything but this.

He didn't say another word. No outburst, no swearing, nothing. The disappointment hung heavy in the air between us, and he looked out over the ocean.

"We'll go back to the research," I said. "We can build a machine, something we can control. I'm not saying we won't get home. I'm just saying this isn't the way. There are too many variables, too many consequences."

"Wait a minute," Reid said, walking to Eli's side. "We're so close. We can't go back to the machine. We have no chance of making that work!"

I didn't say anything. I knew what he was getting at. We had been stuck when it came to the machine. We didn't understand some of his father's notes, we couldn't find some of the same materials he'd used, and if we fixed those problems, we still didn't know how to give the machine enough power to open a wormhole. We also didn't know how to give it "direction." The same problem we were having now.

Eli looked at me, and I saw him take a deep breath. He might want to get home more than any of us; he might even want to say Screw it, we didn't know these people, and this was the price we had to pay.

"f.u.c.k," he said.

"Eli, come on," Reid said. "We have to get home."

He shook his head and looked at Reid. "We've also gotta live with ourselves when we get there."

Reid turned away from us both, lacing his fingers on top of his head. I knew what he was feeling without seeing his face. I'd already faced that realization: After being an immeasurable distance from home for over six years, we'd come within inches of making it back, only to have it yanked away again.

"I'm sorry," I said. Not just because of the way this had turned out, but because it was my fault we were here.

Eli punched me in the shoulder. Hard. I deserved it and worse. "We'll get home," he said. "Just another way."

I nodded, but I didn't believe it anymore.

I knew I would keep trying. I would devote my life to it if I had to, not necessarily for me, but for them.

I just wouldn't tell them I'd lost hope.

Janelle knew I had to leave.

Even though I didn't want to leave her.

A lot had happened since I'd saved her life.

Too much, it seemed, for just twenty-four days. It felt like we'd lived a lifetime together somewhere in between then and now.

After her accident, she sought me out. I told her the truth. All of it. We found the answers to my questions about the portals. We saved the world, and we lost people close to us along the way.

I fell for her even more. More than I'd thought possible. She fell in love with me, too.

So she understood.

For seven years I had thought about what it must have been like for my parents when I disappeared, when I went into the bas.e.m.e.nt and just never came back. Did they know what happened to me? Did they call the cops? Did they search for me? Had they spent seven years counting the days and waiting for me to walk back through the front door?

For my own sanity, I held on to the hope that I would see them again. My mother's hazel eyes and my father's lopsided smile. My too-smart-for-his-own-good big brother and our goofy dog. I needed to see them again, to explain what happened, to tell them what they meant to me.

To apologize for being so careless.

Every day that pa.s.sed I thought about them and what it would be like to get back home.

But when I finally got there, everything was all wrong.

Home wasn't anything like I'd imagined.

We came home at night.

For a split second my lungs burned, my skin felt like ice, and then my knees. .h.i.t concrete, hard. Around me everything was dark, but it didn't matter, because all I could see was Janelle. The wind moved through her hair, her eyes wet with tears, her hands dark with blood. Her voice echoed in my head: the quiet desperation in the way she said my name before I left her there. I held on to that moment, willed my mind to burn it into my memory. I didn't want to forget what we'd just been through. I didn't want to forget even a second that I'd spent with her.

It all had just ended in the canyon behind Park Village. Reid was dead. Janelle's friend Alex was dead. And Eli and I had just left Janelle and portaled home. In the end, what we'd tried so hard to do for seven years happened in an instant.

My throat was tight. My whole body ached. I didn't want to leave her. I shouldn't have left her, but I had to.

I pushed to my feet and looked around. We were in the middle of a neighborhood street, surrounded by dark, sleepy houses.

"Where are we?" Eli said as the wind picked up.

I waited. At first I wasn't sure. Square patches of lawn and small single-family homes were everywhere.

Then I heard the wooden wind chimes.

My chest tightened. That sound. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed hearing it. I turned around, recognizing the oak tree on my parents' front lawn. It seemed somehow both bigger and smaller than I had remembered it: a tower outside my bedroom window.

"This is my house," I said. As my eyes adjusted, I picked out the red bricks around the garage, the white front door, the blue aluminum siding, the black shutters on the windows.

"Holy s.h.i.+t," Eli said. Then he laughed, reached over, and pulled me into a headlock. "This is your house!" he screamed.

A wave of excitement moved through me. This was my house. Those bricks were the ones I cracked my head against when I was seven. I had stolen Derek's remote control car, and he wrestled me to get it back. He pushed me and I fell. That front door, we had repainted it white with my dad. The oak tree was the same one I looked out at every night when I went to sleep, the same one I tried to climb. I had hung those wooden wind chimes after making them in school.

Nothing had changed.

I wasn't sure how Taylor Barclay knew to send us here. Sure he was some high-up Interverse agent who was policing the universes, but I hadn't expected him to deliver us right to my doorstep. The how and the why didn't matter, though. I didn't care.

My parents were inside, sleeping in that house right now.

I pulled away from Eli and jogged up the driveway. As I reached the front door, I paused.

"What are you waiting for?" Eli said when he caught up. He reached out to knock.

I grabbed his hand. "We need to remember this moment," I said. We'd waited for this moment forever, and now we were finally here. But not all of us. Reid wasn't here, and no matter what he had done or how it had ended, he had been part of this. Janelle and Alex had been a part of it too. We wouldn't have gotten here without them.

Even though it might have seemed ridiculous, we needed to pause and memorize these details. I wanted to be able to tell Janelle about all of it. She loved me enough to know I needed this moment, and I wasn't going to lose that. Our good-bye wasn't forever. We would find a way back to one another. I knew that as much as I knew anything. We were both still alive. Just in different places.

I thought about Alex and Reid.

"Reid's parents," I said. I wanted to be able to tell them what this moment was like too.

Eli knew what I was thinking. "We can't tell them what he did."

I shook my head. We couldn't. They deserved to remember him better than that. We could tell them this, though. We could tell them that the night was silent, the darkness almost heavy, as if the whole world was asleep. The only sounds were our own excited breaths.

I knocked on the door.

It wasn't like in a movie. A light never flicked on. I didn't know when she was coming. I had to keep knocking, and I had to knock hard, until my knuckles felt numb because of it.

Finally, after what seemed like minutes, I heard the locks click on the other side of the door.

A woman in a gray long-sleeved s.h.i.+rt and checkered blue-and-white pajama pants stood behind it. She was tall, her hair cut short around her head.

My mother.

Over seven years. Twenty-six hundred and thirty-seven days. That's how long it had been. All of that time had added up to just one single wish: that I would get back to her, that I would see her again. I'd envisioned what she would say to me, what I would say to her.

In the end I didn't need to say anything. She glanced at Eli and then back to me. Her mouth parted, her eyes widened, and she gasped.

I opened my mouth to explain, but she reached through the door and touched my face, as if she wasn't quite sure I was real. Then she started to cry.

I moved in, circling my arms around her, pulling her to my chest. She was smaller and thinner than I remembered. Her skin was soft and papery, and my chest contracted. Those seven years had been long for her.

When she pulled back to look at my face again, she shook her head.

I smiled. "I'm home."

I held her until she'd calmed down, then the three of us went inside.

My mother held my arm, leading me, and she turned on the lights as we moved through the house. "The portal," she said. "We figured out that you went through. We looked for you. We did everything we could to try to get you back. . . ."

"I know," I said, squeezing her hand.

She gasped when she looked down and saw mine were stained with blood.

"It's okay," I said quickly. "I tried to save someone who was hurt." The blood as it washed over Janelle's and my hands, warm and thick. The image made me s.h.i.+ver.

Eli and I took turns was.h.i.+ng our hands.

"Are you hungry?" she asked as she stood in the kitchen by the sink. Under the lights I could see the lines around her eyes. She looked older than I thought she would.

I shook my head.

"How . . . ," she started. "How did you . . ."

"Where's Dad?" I asked. I wanted to tell them everything. We could sit in the den and drink hot chocolate. I would tell the story. It would be like every Friday night when I was a kid and we talked about the best and worst things that had happened in our week.

She didn't answer me, though. Not right away. She moved into the den, turned on a floor lamp to its lowest setting, and then turned around. Her face was even, too even, like she was trying to keep her emotions safely guarded. "He's not here."

I heard her, but she sounded strange. There was an emptiness to her voice, like it was something she had said a lot. She wasn't just saying he was out or that he was away on a trip. She was saying he didn't live here. She sat down in an armchair.

I held my breath and waited for her to say something. For the first time it occurred to me to think about them in a different context. What if they hadn't been sitting around waiting for me to come back? What if something else had happened? What if my father had died?

I looked around the room. It was the same beige carpet, the same comfortable brown suede couches, the same cream-colored walls. They were decorated with a few paintings that I didn't remember, but that wasn't the only thing that made the house seem different. It took me a second to put my finger on it. Things looked the same, but . . . shabbier. The carpet was worn, fraying at the edges, like it wasn't nailed down properly. The couches were sunken in and droopy, the walls were scuffed, and some of the edges looked like they were yellowing. No one had taken care of this house. Not with the same love and pride we had taken care of it when I was a kid.

Something was wrong. Very wrong. I sat down on the couch, just a foot from the chair. Eli stood next to me.

"Is he . . ."

I couldn't bear to finish.

"We'll call him," my mother said. Her voice was even, but she was wringing her hands. "I'll have to make a few calls, though. His number isn't listed."

I looked at my mother and couldn't find the words.

"We haven't spoken in a while." She frowned and looked away from me. I could tell she was understating, that "a while" meant "years."

"What happened?" Eli asked, and for once I felt grateful that he wasn't the type of person to just dance around the issue. It didn't matter if my mom looked small and fragile. He could still ask the hard questions.

"Your father and I got an annulment," my mother said.

At first I couldn't speak. I didn't think of my mom and dad separately. I thought of them as a unit, as my parents. How could they be apart?

"When?" I asked, because the real issue was how this happened and whether I could fix it.

She dropped her eyes, and pain ripped through my chest. They weren't together anymore because of me.

"Derek?" I asked, even though I wasn't quite sure what I was asking.

My mother looked up and smiled. "He has an apartment closer to the city." She glanced at her watch. "He'll be asleep but we can call him."

Eli s.h.i.+fted his weight.

I turned to my mom. "Is the phone still in the kitchen? Eli needs to call his dad."