Off the Page

  As he counts down, I pull Delilah close. On three, I start to kiss her. Deeply. Passionately. Wishing every second that she were Jules—who swings at the ball and sends it flying over the fence into traffic.

  Delilah stumbles backward. “What the hell—” She breaks off, realizing that Jules and Chris are staring at us. “—did you stop for?” she finishes feebly.

  Chris grins at Jules. “Maybe for your next turn you don’t have to go full Hulk,” he says.

  After Delilah smashes the ball—almost as angrily as Jules did—we move on to the next hole.

  “You know what I never asked?” Chris muses. “How did you two meet?”

  Delilah and I look at each other, briefly panicked. She opens her mouth to explain, but I cut her off. “Babe, let me.” I meet Jules’s gaze. “She was helping me find something I’d lost,” I begin. “We were searching everywhere. Through a field, in the ocean, on a boat. Finally we gave up and just lay on the beach, stargazing.”

  Jules’s cheeks turn pink.

  “So did you find it?” Chris asks.

  “Find what?”

  “The thing you lost?”

  “Oh, yeah. My, um, car keys. They were in my pocket the whole time.”

  “Sounds like fate kicking in,” Chris says.

  “Doesn’t it?” I ask pointedly.

  For a long moment, Jules glares at me. Then she announces, “I’m going to go to the bathroom,” and stalks off.

  “And I’ll help you find it,” I say, hot on her heels.

  I follow Jules into the ladies’ room and lock the door behind me.

  “What are you doing?” she cries. “You’re screwing everything up.”

  “I’m screwing everything up? ‘How many push-ups can you do, Chris? Your biceps are so big I can barely wrap my hands around them!’ ”

  “I’m surprised you noticed, since you were so busy making out with my best friend!” Jules yells. “You can’t just walk into my life and assume I’m going to drop everything that came before you.”

  “You think it’s easy watching the girl I’m crazy about flirting with another guy?”

  Jules shoves me. “You’re the one who agreed to this date.”

  I shove her back, pinning her against the wall. “Yeah—so I could spend time with you.”

  “Then you’re a moron!” Jules shouts.

  “So are you!” I shout back.

  There is one breathless, furious beat of silence between us, and then suddenly her hands are all over me and mine are tangled in her hair, and I’m kissing her in a frenzy of lips and teeth and heat, like I could devour her.

  When we come up for air, my arms are still on either side of Jules, as if I’ve caged her. She smooths her hair into place and straightens her shirt. “We’d better be getting back,” she says, and she pushes me aside, opening the bathroom door.

  Maybe this day isn’t a total wash.

  I give her a few moments before I walk out of the bathroom too. I’ve only just turned the corner when I see Chris at the counter, picking up a replacement ball for the one Jules sent into the stratosphere. “Hey,” he says, smiling. “This date is totally working.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” I reply.

  Delilah drives me home after minigolf. For five whole minutes she doesn’t speak. Then, at a red light, she turns to me. “Do not ever, ever do that again.”

  “You’re giving me really mixed signals here,” I point out. “Am I or am I not supposed to act like your boyfriend?”

  “Oh please. You and I both know that act wasn’t for me.”

  My face falls. “It’s really hard to finally find someone who totally gets me and then have her ripped away from me.”

  Delilah sighs. “You’re preaching to the choir, Edgar.”

  “If sending them back into the book was the right thing, how come we’re all so miserable?”

  “I guess doing the right thing sometimes means not getting what you want,” Delilah says. “At least you’re in the same world. You get to see her, face to face. You and Jules, you’re still possible.”

  I think about this for a moment. “Have you talked to him?”

  She takes a deep breath and nods, looking pained. “I can’t not talk to him. But when I do, it feels like I’m tearing out my heart.”

  I glance at Delilah. I haven’t really considered how much worse this must be for her.

  She pulls up to the curb near my driveway.

  “Sorry I kissed you,” I say.

  “Sorry I’m not Jules.”

  I open the passenger door and step outside but then lean back down. “Hey, Delilah?” I say. “I know you’re not really my girlfriend. But I’m awfully glad you’re my friend.”

  She smiles a little. “See you tomorrow, Edgar.”

  My mother’s car is in the driveway, but the house is empty. She’s not in the kitchen getting dinner ready. She’s not in the living room watching the five o’clock news. “Mom?” I call, heading upstairs to her bedroom, and I knock on the door, but there’s no answer. Gently I turn the knob to find her bed impeccably made.

  She’s not in the bathroom or in my room either. Walking down the hall, I peek inside her office.

  Papers are strewn across my mother’s desk, some highlighted, some with red circles, and some with sticky notes along their sides. Since she’s not there, I’m about to close the door behind me, when I notice the spines on a stack of books:

  Brain Tumors in Adults

  The Last Walk: A Practical Approach to Preparing for the End of Life

  Hope Is Where the Heart Is: A Guide to Beating Cancer

  Tucked into the top one, like a bookmark, is a brochure: ST. BRIGID MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, NEW ENGLAND’S LEADER IN CANCER RESEARCH & NEUROLOGY.

  I break into a sweat, and my knees start to shake. My mom said she’s editing a time-travel novel; why would she need any of these?

  I walk toward the desk as if a live grenade might be inside it. Scattered across the top are printouts of the kind of articles only doctors can read, filled with jargon. I pick up the one on top.

  CAPGRAS SYNDROME WITH RIGHT FRONTAL MENINGIOMA, I read.

  Abstract: A forty-seven-year-old woman with a right frontal parasagittal meningioma who developed the delusion that her husband had been replaced by a look-alike pretending to be her spouse. This type of delusion involves a compromise of the fusiform gyrus, the mechanism in the brain that allows facial recognition. Although historically patients with such delusions have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, we suggest that the cause may be biological and part of the tumor’s pathology, as evidenced by the fact that postsurgery, the patient experienced a termination of the delusion.

  I squint, as if that might make me understand the jumble of words better. Imagine what would happen if you woke up one morning and the son you knew better than anyone else looked exactly the same—but acted like a British prince. You’d look for an explanation, and the thought that your son switched places with a character in a fairy tale would clearly not be the first one to pop into your head. So maybe you’d start blaming yourself, thinking you were crazy. Or sick.

  Maybe you’d even pack up your house and move to the town that had the best cancer treatment hospital in New England.

  I’ll tell her. I’ll describe everything that’s happened. If she stops thinking she’s crazy and thinks I am instead, at least that’s a start.

  But here’s the important thing: She’s not dying. She doesn’t have cancer.

  She can’t, because she’s my mom, and she’s all I have left.

  Distantly I hear the door opening downstairs, and my mother’s voice calling my name. I try to walk out of her office, but I find myself rooted to the spot.

  She appears in the doorway, her cheeks flushed. She’s wearing the black leggings and oversized sweatshirt she always wears when she goes for a long walk.

  People who are really, really sick can’t go for walks, I tell myself.

  “Edgar,” she whisp
ers, looking from me to the desk with all of those horrible, awful papers. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” I mutter through clenched teeth. I have to hear the words out loud. I have to hear her say it.

  She opens her mouth. But before she can speak, her eyes roll up so that the whites are showing. Her whole body begins to convulse.

  I catch her just before she hits the floor.

  OLIVER

  In here, everything is too bright. The trees seem neon; the moors glow. And there’s a flatness to the landscape that is disorienting, something I never noticed before. I keep bumping into corners and edges, misjudging the space around me.

  The worst, though, is the claustrophobia. I feel like I’m boarded up, boxed in. Like the walls are closing in on me. Or, at the very least, the pages.

  This morning I walked the entire length of the book—twice—and I still feel restless. Socks trots behind me, the bells on his saddle giving me a massive headache.

  “Must you make all that racket?” I snap, looking over my shoulder.

  “Someone got up on the wrong side of the stable,” Socks murmurs.

  “Someone’s going to wind up in the glue factory,” I counter.

  “C’mon, Ollie. Look on the bright side.”

  “Oh, do tell me the bright side….”

  Socks thinks for a moment. “Orville made me a hair mask.”

  “What the devil is a hair mask?”

  “I don’t know,” he confides, “but it’s supposed to help with my split ends.” Socks hesitates. “I’m sure he’d make you one too if you asked nicely.”

  “I don’t need a hair mask.” I need Delilah.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Socks says. “You haven’t seen me in a while. Do I look…different?” He blinks at me when I don’t respond. “Bigger? Smaller…?” His voice trails off. “I hear that sometimes, when you’re not with someone every day, you notice the changes more…and I’ve been eating only baby carrots for the past month.”

  “You look great, Socks,” I say, without even bothering to glance in his direction.

  He prances around me in a circle. “I knew it. I absolutely knew this would work better than the cleanse. You know, I actually feel like I have more energy.”

  Instinctively I leap over the edge of a page, onto the next.

  “Are we going somewhere in particular?” Socks asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “Okay, then.” He moves amiably beside me, swatting at butterflies with his tail. And then, a moment later: “Do you want to play a game? I Spy, maybe?”

  “Socks, I don’t mind you accompanying me. But right now, I don’t feel like talking.”

  He stops and looks at me. “I know. It feels wrong, doesn’t it? To be just the two of us?”

  Thinking of Frump hurts just as much now as it did two days ago. “Yes,” I say, my voice breaking. “I suppose this will never feel right again.”

  Will anything?

  Socks shakes his head, so that his mane streams like silk. “What you need, Ollie, is a distraction. Something to lift your spirits. Like your surprise party!” His eyes bug out, and he grimaces. “Can you pretend you didn’t hear that?”

  I smile a little. “You were the first choice to distract me?”

  “Everyone else had something important to do,” Socks says miserably. “I tried to hang the banners, but I managed to get tangled in them instead, and Captain Crabbe had to cut me free with his sword.”

  “I promise to act surprised,” I say.

  “That would be really great. Especially when they show you your present, the—”

  “Stop,” I interrupt. “Just…stop.”

  Socks snorts. “Whew. That was a close one.”

  “So where is this shindig?”

  “At the castle,” he says. “In an hour.”

  We are at the far edge of the book; it will take nearly that long to reach the castle. “I suppose we’d best get on our way.” I start off on foot, but Socks nudges me with his nose.

  “Ollie?” he says. “For old time’s sake?”

  I want to walk, really. The only way I have been able to even exist here these past couple of days is by wearing myself down to such a level of exhaustion that I’ve simply passed out at night, instead of pining away for what I’ve lost. But he looks so hopeful that I put my foot into a stirrup and swing into the saddle. Socks breaks into a gallop, and the world begins to fly by. The wind catches my hair, and it almost feels like the first time I rode in a car in Delilah’s world, with the windows rolled down. If I close my eyes, if I don’t pay attention to the letters hanging overhead, it’s almost as if I’m still there.

  We reach the castle, and the drawbridge lowers so Socks can canter into the courtyard. He draws to a halt, his nostrils flaring.

  Strung across the entryway are nearly two dozen of Rapscullio’s canvases, each painted with an individual letter, spelling out WELCOME HOME OLIVER. The stone arches are decorated with bright banners in all the colors of the rainbow—except orange. Socks follows my gaze. “That was the one I got tangled in,” he confesses.

  A cake taller than I am has been wheeled into the center of the courtyard. It’s decorated with violets—Delilah’s favorite. And packed into every available corner is a character from the story. Everyone is here—even the mermaids, who are floating in Socks’s water trough.

  “Surprise!” they all shout.

  I glance surreptitiously at Socks, then put my palm on my chest. “Oh my goodness!” I cry. “I never in a million years expected this! How on earth did you manage to keep it a secret!”

  It is possibly the worst acting job I’ve ever done, and since acting is my life’s work, this is saying quite a lot.

  Queen Maureen embraces me. “Are you pleased? Is it too much?”

  “It’s perfect.” I kiss her cheek. “You needn’t have made such a fuss.”

  “Why, Oliver, it’s not a fuss,” she says, truly taken aback. “You’re the closest thing I have to a son.”

  I realize in that instant how much I missed her. Missed all of them, really.

  “Speech!” calls one of the trolls, and his brothers take up the call, smashing their clubs against the iron hitching posts.

  I step onto a mounting block, not because I’m eager to deliver a monologue, but because I’d rather they not damage castle property, and I clear my throat. “Friends, I want to thank you all so much. These past few days have been hard, I know, for all of us, and it may feel as though we have little to celebrate. But instead of focusing on what we’ve lost…I suggest we focus on what we have.” I glance around the crowd. “Each other,” I say.

  A cheer swells from the throng, and Scuttle and Walleye begin a chant to cut the cake. The fairies hover near my shoulders, plucking at the velvet of my tunic to draw me forward, toward the delicacy. Captain Crabbe unsheathes his sword. “Would ye care to do the honors, Oliver?”

  I lift the blade and slice the cake. Chivalrously I carry the first three plates to the mermaids, who cannot serve themselves.

  The mood is buzzy. People enjoy each other’s company, laughing and waltzing to the music of Trogg’s flute. Rapscullio and Queen Maureen take a turn on the dance floor. Seraphima has a third piece of cake.

  I find Captain Crabbe beside the punch bowl, trying to hold a crystal cup in his meaty fist. He takes a swig of the juice. “How is it?” I ask.

  “Could use a bit o’ rum.”

  I grin, pouring myself a glass, and I’m about to take a sip when he reaches out and pulls my lower lip down. “Have ye been neglecting your gums?” he asks. “Oliver, we’ve been through this before. Gums are to teeth as soil is to a plant. If ye don’t take care of the soil, nothin’s gonna thrive, aye?”

  Gently I place my crystal cup upon the table. “How do you do it? How do you just snuff out your dreams?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You clearly want to be a dentist. And instead you’re stuck here, the captain of
a pirate ship.” I meet his gaze, intense. “How do you get up in the morning, knowing you’ll never have what you want?”

  Captain Crabbe seems taken aback by this turn of the conversation. “Och, boy, I canna understand why you think I’ve given up my dreams. I simply make do with what I have.” He glances around, waving one hand to encompass this castle, this party, these people. “What could you possibly want out there that you can’t find here?”

  True love, I think, and I move among the crowd, feeling completely alone.

  There’s a story Queen Maureen once shared with me, about a blind man who was given a wish by a witch. When he wished for sight, she cast a spell, and miraculously he could see. The world became a circus of color, a whirlwind of movement, a bottomless well of discovery.

  But one day the witch returned. “You’ve misunderstood,” she said. “I never promised forever.” Without warning, without time for preparation, the man found himself in the dark once again.

  After living in Delilah’s world, free and able to make my own choices, returning here feels like being in prison. Not only is there a finite number of people to see and conversations to have, but my confidant—Frump—isn’t even here anymore to share my restlessness.

  I am sitting in the great hall of the castle, my back against the stone, pitching a ball to strike the far wall and bounce back to me. I do this over and over, and the ball makes a satisfying thwack each time it hits.

  Queen Maureen comes into the hallway wearing an apron, her hands dusted with flour. “Good Lord, Oliver, I thought we were under attack. Is that really necessary?”

  “Sorry,” I mumble. “I’m having a bit of trouble occupying myself.”

  “Well, I could use an extra set of hands. Come into the kitchen.”

  I let the ball drop, and out of nowhere, Humphrey comes flying to catch it in his jaws.

  Maureen is in the middle of making a cake. “Why don’t you frost this for me,” she suggests, “while I start rolling out croissants?”

  I look at the three rounds of cake and the bowl of pink frosting. I dip my finger into it and take a taste. As usual, it is delicious. Maureen is a master baker. “May I ask you a question?” I say. “Who exactly eats all the stuff you bake?”