“Jeanie, stop screwing around! We need to go!” He pulled her forward again, but she was rooted in place. She was made of stone, and he had suddenly lost all his strength. “I’m serious, Virginia.”
Jeanie shook her head at him. There was something wrong with his kid. He watched her narrow her eyes and slowly cant her head to the side. She didn’t have to say the words for him to read her questioning expression.
Virginia . . . ? Who’s Virginia?
“This is crazy . . .” he said. “Don’t be weak.” He didn’t reach out again. But he couldn’t just leave her there, no matter how inexplicably angry he suddenly felt. The girl who was standing in front of him looked like his child, but it wasn’t Jeanie—not anymore. And he wasn’t sure he even cared. Fuck it, he thought. Let her mother deal with her. But he couldn’t just leave her.
“Jeanie,” he said, trying to reel in his agitation. “I don’t care what you promised to whom, you understand? Let’s go.”
She didn’t move.
Goddammit!
He reached toward her again, but he didn’t make contact. Just before his fingers grabbed hold of her arm, a rush of air hit him square in the chest. It was like a bottled hurricane, uncorked, pointed directly at him. He was nearly knocked off his feet as he stumbled backward, away from the closet and out of Jeanie’s room. The small of his back cracked hard against the upstairs railing. It was the only thing that kept him from flying head over feet to the red bricks of the ground floor. The wooden banister shuddered against the sudden impact. His legs folded beneath him like broken twigs.
The anger was gone, leaving nothing but panic.
But despite his rapid-fire pulse, his attention never wavered from his daughter. He was zeroed in on her as he sank to the floor. Her expression was a tense mélange of anger and despair. She opened her mouth to say something, but only the first few words managed to escape her throat.
“You’re a liar. You don’t love—”
Before she could finish, the bedroom door swung inward, slamming hard enough to rattle its frame.
Lucas leaped up. He threw himself at the door, fully expecting it to stay shut, fused to the jamb like his study door had been. But it fell open and he fell with it, back into Jeanie’s room.
Except it was no longer Jeanie’s room, but a place Lucas had never seen before. Ugly. Plain. A bouquet of pine branches sat atop a bedside table. A simple bed was covered in a brown blanket.
“Jeanie?!” He spun around where he stood, searching, as though she could hide from him in a room so small. But she was gone.
Her stuff. Her room. His daughter.
Vanished.
A scream clambered up his throat.
Echo. Where was she? Where the fuck was she?
He staggered down the hall to where Echo should have been, shoved open the door in search of his temporary babysitter, but all he found was a vacant air mattress among stacks of boxes he had yet to unpack. He stepped inside, Caroline’s careful handwriting printed across brown cardboard: LOU’S BOOKS. Suddenly, he ached for her. All he wanted was to hear his wife’s voice, to cement himself in some sort of reality, any sort of reality that reminded him of how the world worked. His yearning was felt in little more than a blink of a second, nothing but a quick flash of nostalgia devoid of the facts. The fights. The affair. The imminent divorce. Too short to give him any shred of relief from the disappearance of his only child.
Lucas turned, ready to throw himself back into the hall, to check Jeanie’s room again, to scream for Echo’s help despite suspecting the worst of her. I can’t do this alone. But the guest bedroom door swung shut just as it had in Jeanie’s room, barricading him in the same way he’d been locked in his study not a few minutes before.
He grabbed the doorknob. Déjà vu. It didn’t turn, not even a wiggle. He gritted his teeth, tried to shake it free, but instead of the door opening, the walls began to vibrate again. Lucas let go of the knob and took a few backward steps, staring at the walls that now looked as wavy as a midsummer highway throwing off heat. He swallowed as the door and wall before him warped yet stayed the same.
“What the fuck,” he exhaled, barely audible even to himself. The air went thick with electricity, heavy and cumbersome. He stood motionless, afraid to set off a static spark, imagining the entire house going up in flames if he made a wrong move.
But he couldn’t just stand there. He had to find his girl. Reaching out, he dared to brush his fingers across the plane of the wall that flexed like thin plastic, undulating like bad reception on an old TV. It licked at his fingertips with a soft hiss. He pulled his hand back, unsure whether the sensation was cold or hot. When the room seemed to settle into a state of stability, Lucas sucked in air, knowing exactly what he was going to see.
His stuff would be gone. The house would be different yet, somehow, mind-bendingly the same. Perhaps, this time, it would stay different, permanently. Maybe this time he’d be stuck on the other side.
He pulled open the door with a mix of determined reluctance—hesitant, scared. Just as expected, the house had transformed. But now it wasn’t just the superficial things within it being replaced by those that had existed long ago. Along with the wallpaper and carpet and furniture and framed pictures, the night beyond the windows was replaced by the bright glare of day. Up until now, certain rooms had been reimagined and misplaced, but he always found himself on the side of familiarity. That was all gone now. He could sense it the way a parent anticipated catastrophe. The air smelled different, felt thicker.
Oh God, this isn’t the present, he thought with certainty. This is 1983.