“This closet makes dioramas real,” Eleanor says, “but Astrid’s closet doesn’t work.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “This is the magic closet. The others aren’t, okay?” She’s speaking French basically. Or Japanese. Or pig Latin, which I know is supposedly really easy to understand, but I never am fast enough to keep up with.
“Enough with the talking! Look what I made for you!” Astrid says. She picks up a handful of grass and throws it at me. I’m surprised it smells real.
I finally take a step. The grass pokes the bottoms of my feet, and silky roses swipe my ankles. Immediately, I want it all. Not only the park and the smell of the outdoors and the way sunlight glints off the shiny pond. I want more. It’s a funny impulse, given how much I now have at my fingertips. Like getting everything I want for Christmas but already making my Christmas list for next year.
I try to list every diorama Astrid’s ever made in my head, or at least the ones I saw strewn all over their floor and furniture yesterday, but there are simply too many. Furry ones and sparkling ones and scary ones and perfect ones. She makes them, tweaks them, dismantles them for parts constantly, so it’s an ever-changing collection of universes. Astrid’s imagination is vast and strange and unexpected. And apparently, we now have a way to live inside it.
I’m goosebumping and blinking.
It smells like a park but also like a home. Birds, bright-blue ones, swoop in the sky and land on Eleanor’s shoulders. They flap their wings against her face, and it seems to relax her.
“We let the closet take care of us,” Astrid says. “And it always does.”
We hold eye contact. In a lot of ways, Astrid’s eyes are more surprising, more magical than anything in the closet. An almost neon blue, much brighter than even the birds, and never blinking.
I pick a rose. “You know these don’t grow from the ground, right? Roses grow in bushes,” I say. I don’t know why this is the thing astounding me the most, but it is. Astrid shrugs. She’s never been concerned with things like reality or facts or the world we live in.
The rose blossom moves in my hand. The petals open farther and farther, then it grows new petals to open even more.
“You’re growing it,” Astrid says.
“That. Is. Beautiful,” Eleanor says.
“This isn’t what usually happens?” I say. The rose grows. It’s the size of my fist, then my head. It smells sweeter and silkier every moment.
“I knew it. We were meant to be in here all together,” Astrid says. She has this serene look on her face, like everything’s clicked, and Eleanor mirrors her soon enough. If one of the twins has a mood change, the other often follows. Twin domino effect.
Marla and I are in different universes, but the twins are living in the same square inch of land. I try to make eye contact with Marla, but she’s staring at the center of the rose, and I’m left searching for something else to look at. This would never happen with the twins.
Eleanor leans over and touches the petals of the rose growing in my hand, and it expands even more.
With that, even Marla looks impressed. She sticks her nose into the center, soaking in the scent with a loud inhale. She’s a different person in here. She can’t stop laughing at the way the petals flop over, hitting her face as they grow.
Eleanor cracks up too and reaches into the pond for a lily pad. “Let’s do this one!” she says, and we all touch it. In a moment, it grows to blanket size, big enough to wrap all four of us into a kind of sister-burrito.
Astrid’s crying from laughing, and Eleanor keeps hugging me. It’s so much better than anything I thought they might be doing up here.
We make all kinds of things grow and become more beautiful. We stick our feet in the pool of water and it sparkles. We hug a tree and it sways.
We do all of it together, since Astrid is sure that’s the key to really accessing the full extent of the closet’s magic. Togetherness. Sisterly-ness.
When we can’t think of anything else to touch as a group, we do the most obvious thing. We play in the park. Like little girls and like sisters and like LilyLee’s family, who always go on group adventures and spend afternoons together.
Marla settles on her back in the grass, which we made longer and greener, and Astrid spins around in circles until she gets so dizzy she falls over, then does it again. Eleanor sits by the pond and splashes the water, kicking her legs up and down so fast they’re a blur, calling for us to join her.
I join Eleanor by the pond and dangle my toes in as well. Fish swim around my feet, tickling my ankles, and we are far, far away from our parents and the New Hampshire house.
“You’ve been keeping this from me,” I say. If we were outside the closet, I think I’d say it meanly. I think I’d pout or something. But inside the closet, the sun on my shoulders and my ankles soaking in a pond filled with bathwater and gentle goldfish, I don’t mind at all, I’m only curious what she’ll say.
“We don’t know if it’s safe,” Eleanor says. “We don’t know anything.”
“So?”