But instead of turning toward the fence, Catalina turned away from it. On the other side of it, there was a hillside, and Catalina was examining it. Satisfied with her findings, she reached into her pocket and withdrew the same handle he’d seen before. It was silver, finely etched and sturdy.
She turned to Gran. “What I’m about to do is secret, okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
“If you tell anyone about this, I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Okay.”
“Worse, if you blab, you could be endangering a lot of people.”
“Okay.”
She took a deep breath. “I can’t believe I’m showing you this. The Regional Manager would be so mad if he knew.”
“Who’s the Regional Manager?” Gran asked.
“Never mind. I shouldn’t have mentioned him.”
Then she lowered her hand toward the slope of the hill, stuck the handle into the earth itself, and when she pulled up, the hill became a door. Just as she had before, she’d created a door where there was nothing like a door. She’d revealed a hollow Earth through an impossible opening. Golden light shone from a rough-hewn tunnel.
“Hurry,” she said.
Gran stepped inside.
On the one hand, it was the most astounding place he’d ever been. On the other hand, it was just a tunnel, and looked a lot like the mining tunnels he’d seen pictures of in books. It was a tunnel right under the hillside, a tunnel seemingly dug by giant gophers, and was musty, dank, dark.
But it was lit by Christmas tree lights. The effect was crude and yet warm and welcoming, and everywhere along the corridor were vertical supports that seemed to be holding up the tunnel ceiling. But the supports weren’t uniform, or even logical. They were an impossibly rickety network of broomsticks, hockey sticks and plastic pipes. It didn’t seem feasible that these rods and poles were holding up the ceiling of the tunnel. But it couldn’t be any other way.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Catalina said. “So I’d rather not spend a lot of time explaining everything, okay?”
“Okay.”
She turned her back to him, then turned around again.
“Where’s the chair?” she asked.
Gran hadn’t brought the chair into the tunnel. Catalina hadn’t told him to. “I didn’t bring it. It’s out there,” he said.
Catalina sighed loudly, pushed Gran aside, and with her handle held tightly, she reached up, attached it to the tunnel wall, and pushed outward. The darkness of the night outside was a door-shaped interruption of the warm glow of the tunnel.
“Can you get it?” she asked impatiently.
Gran retrieved the wheelchair and lowered it into the tunnel.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Follow me,” she said. “With the chair.”
He followed her.
“I need the chair more than I need you,” she said.
Gran wasn’t sure how he felt about that statement, but he said, “Right. Of course.” He followed her, pushing the chair along the rough floor, dodging the dozens of poles holding up the ceiling.
“We have to be quick,” she said, and picked up her pace.
It was a crooked and meandering tunnel, and the random assemblage of objects made to act as supports—a child’s plastic basketball hoop, a car bumper, two baseball bats standing, one atop the other—became stranger and stranger.
“Hurry, over here,” Catalina said, and he rushed to catch up. She had stopped at a slightly wider part of the tunnel. “We’re going outside again. Ready?”
Gran said he was ready, and like before, Catalina took her handle from her pocket, attached it to what seemed like a nondescript part of the tunnel wall, and pushed. The wall became a door, and the starry night was visible again.
“Let’s go,” she said.
They were inside the junkyard. Gran didn’t know how he felt about sneaking in through the tunnel—it was better, it seemed, than cutting through the fence, but still it was trespassing.
“Okay,” Catalina said. “Get anything you see that’s about five feet tall that we can use as a support. Understand?”
“Like the columns inside the tunnel?”
She looked at Gran as if he were dense. “We need about fifty of them. When you get one, dump it into the tunnel. Then we’ll use the wheelchair to get them to the area around the house.”
“What house?”
“The one that collapsed. We have to prevent the damage from spreading. Are you paying attention?”
Gran was not sure what all this meant—collapsing, spreading, preventing—but he didn’t want to tell Catalina this. He wanted her to think that he knew exactly what he was doing.
So with only the moon for illumination, Gran and Catalina rushed around the scrapyard, looking for anything tall and strong. Gran found part of a fence and threw it down through the doorway.
Catalina saw him, squinted, and Gran was sure she would disapprove. But she shrugged, as if to say Good enough, and he continued.
Catalina found another car bumper, and a tall post with a birdhouse still attached to the top. She found a hockey stick, and what looked like a javelin. Everything went through the open doorway and into the tunnel.
Gran worked without pause, finding twenty or so of his own makeshift columns, from an extra-long mop to what looked like a rusted metal chimney, and after an hour Catalina seemed satisfied.
“Okay. Let’s go,” she said, and jumped down into the tunnel. Gran followed, and she closed the door behind them.
Catalina showed Gran what she wanted done and how she wanted it done. What she wanted done was the stacking of as many of their columns as possible on the wheelchair. And she wanted it done carefully and quickly.
She was good at this, and Gran was not so good. As they worked, she made a series of dissatisfied sounds, like tsk and hm and Oh lord no. But soon enough they had arranged their findings on the wheelchair, and the wheelchair was ready to be pushed down the tunnel.
“Where are we going again?” Gran asked.
Catalina looked dissatisfied again, and refused to answer the question.
The silence was broken by the ringing of a phone. Gran knew it couldn’t be his own, because he had no phone; his parents wouldn’t let him have one. The ringing continued, a very loud and antiquated ringing sound that seemed to be coming from far down the corridor.
Catalina strode down the tunnel and reached for something high on a wall. It was an old-style wall phone, shiny and black. She picked it up. The receiver wrapped around her cheek like a parenthesis.
“Yes?” she said in a professional tone.
She nodded a few times and said, “When again?” and then, “That’s in less than a week. How do you expect—” She nodded a few more times and hung up.
She turned back to Gran. “We need to close off and clean up the old-lady sinkhole.”
“Who was that?” Gran asked. “The Regional Manager?”
“Yes. No,” Catalina said. “There’s no such thing as the Regional Manager. Or a phone in that tunnel. You didn’t see anything. Okay?”
Gran had no choice but to say “Okay.”
“Help me push,” she said.
Gran helped her push the wheelchair, which was carrying about a hundred pounds of makeshift poles and columns, and objects that resembled poles and columns.
They pushed the chair through the tunnel as it turned left and turned right and inclined upward and downward and occasionally split. Catalina always knew where to go. Occasionally the ceiling was taller, occasionally it was shorter. But everywhere it seemed like a tunnel carved by a giant earthworm, or a wind blowing steadily for a thousand years.
And everywhere they went, they pushed together, side by side, Gran feeling very good to be so close to Catalina. He felt so good next to her that he forgot about all the questions piling up in his head. Why there was a phone in a tunnel. And who had made this tunnel. And why the tunnel existed in the first place. And why the
y were in it. And why they were pushing column-like objects on a wheelchair through the tunnel.
And exactly where they were going.
“Where are we going?” he asked. They’d been walking through the tunnel for what seemed like a mile.
“It doesn’t matter,” Catalina said. “We’re here.” She stopped pushing so suddenly that Gran bumped into the chair and into the assemblage of poles sticking out behind it.
“Ow,” he said.
Catalina looked at Gran as if his pain were absurd, as if he himself were absurd. “Anyway,” she said. “As you’ve probably figured out, our job is to place these columns strategically so the tunnels don’t collapse anywhere else. Watch.”
Catalina took a two-by-four from the pile and pushed, pulled, and arranged it until it was standing straight up and down like a column, supporting the ceiling above.
“That really works?” Gran asked. The two-by-four didn’t seem strong enough to support what must have been ten thousand pounds of pressure from above.
“Why would we be doing it if it didn’t work?” Catalina asked, and took another long pipe from the pile and walked down the tunnel. “Are you gonna watch me the whole time or are you gonna help?”
Gran took a long piece of white plastic pipe and hoisted it onto his shoulder. He found an area of the tunnel where the roof sagged and tried to do what he’d watched Catalina do. When he had put the pipe into position, making it snug at the top and bottom, he stepped back to assess his work. It didn’t seem possible that the pipe was holding up the ceiling. Then again, it looked sturdier than it had before he’d done it, and maybe that was enough.
In this way they worked through the night.
Finally, when it seemed like it must be morning, and when his shoulders ached and his legs were leaden, he asked Catalina if she knew what time it was.
“Probably five or six a.m.,” she said.
Gran panicked. His mother usually woke at six. He knew he had to get the chair back into the house and by her bedside before she woke up.
“I have to go,” he said.
“That’s fine,” she said.
“Where do your parents think you are?” he asked.
“Parent. My mom works the overnight shift at the grocery store. She gets home at seven. She’ll never know I’m gone.”
“And how do I get out?” he asked.
With a heavy sigh, Catalina led him through the tunnel, took a left, then a right, then they ran for a few hundred yards straight, then another left and right and stopped.
“We’re in your backyard, next to your garage,” she said. “Do you have a dog?”
“No.”
“Good. Ready?”
Gran nodded, and Catalina took her handle from her pocket, attached it to the tunnel wall, then pushed. The light outside was dawn’s pale gray, and Gran saw the sorry blue wall of his garage, and the familiar trees and shrubs of his backyard. He couldn’t fathom how Catalina knew the route to his house. He didn’t know how the tunnels worked, how the handles worked. But he knew, from Catalina’s impatient look, that now was not the time to ask.
“See ya,” she said, and pushed him through the doorway, sending the wheelchair after him.
Gran was in his backyard, behind his garage. The door in the earth was closed, and as always there was no sign whatsoever that a door had ever been there.
He peeked around the garage and looked up to his mother’s window. A yellow light. She was awake. By now she would have noticed that her chair was not by her bed. How would he explain that?
At the back deck, he grabbed the hose and quickly washed off the chair, and with a rag he dried it. When he was finished, it didn’t look very good. In fact, it looked like it had been through some hard labor. Still, he had no choice but to rush it into his mother’s room.
He made it as far as the kitchen, thinking desperately of a way to explain it all without lying—he was pretty sure he’d never lied to his mother and didn’t want to begin this morning—but there was no way to explain the disappearance of the chair without revealing too much. She would never believe what he’d been doing all night.
“Gran? Come in here please,” she called.
Hearing his mother’s stern voice, Gran felt a strange sense of relief, knowing that he’d been caught and would have no choice but to tell the truth.
“Coming!” he said, leaving the chair in the kitchen.
When he turned the corner, and could see her open door at the end of the hall, he also saw Maisie, standing next to his mother’s bed, giving him an enigmatic look.
Gran entered his mother’s room. She was sitting up in bed, wearing her usual sky-blue nightgown.
“Hi,” he said, standing in the doorframe. “You up already?”
“I am,” she said. “Maisie here says you took my chair?”
Gran felt his legs buckle. He knew his mother’s next sentence would include devastated, and he didn’t know whether he could bear it. But instead she said: “She says you were up late last night cleaning it?”
Again Maisie gave Gran that enigmatic smile, a smile that gave no clue whether or not she had believed her older brother. Maybe she did believe him.
“I did clean it,” Gran said, realizing this wasn’t quite a lie. He had just wiped it off seconds ago, on the deck.
“Can I see it?” his mother asked.
“ ’Course,” Gran said. “But I’m not done. Can I bring it around in a few minutes?”
“I do need to start my morning,” she said, “but I’ll give you some time. I can’t wait to see what you’ve done.”
Gran, energized with the strange new idea that he wouldn’t actually be in trouble—that with his sister’s help he might actually be in the opposite of trouble—stopped in the kitchen, got a spray cleaner from under the sink, and a roll of paper towels, and went at the chair with a vengeance.
He cleaned the seat, the wheels, the spokes and footholds. When it was done, it looked at least as good as it had when he’d borrowed it.
His mother wasn’t so sure. When he brought it to her, she tilted her head and squinted her eyes. “I appreciate your effort so much, Gran,” she said. “It’s so kind and thoughtful of you to think of surprising me like this, especially with things so hard around here lately…” She paused and her eyes welled. She sighed and gathered herself.
“But next time you should think of a less abrasive cleaner. Look at these marks,” she said, and pointed to hundreds of scratches on the seat and armrests.
Seeing them, Gran knew they were caused by the poles and columns and two-by-fours he and Catalina had loaded. He swallowed a lump of guilt.
“Okay,” he said. “I will.”
His mother’s shoulders shook, and he feared she was crying. Sometimes, over the years but especially in the last few days, he found her crying. Crying while opening the mail, crying while talking to her sister, Gran’s aunt, on the phone. But she wasn’t crying now. She was shaking, and the headboard behind her was shaking, too.
“Get down!” she yelled. Gran and Maisie dropped to the floor, kneeling, and the ground under Gran’s hands shook.
“Mama, is this an earthquake?” Maisie asked.
“It must be,” she said. “But I don’t see how that’s possible.”
Then it was over. It had lasted no more than a few seconds, but the effect was profound. It altered Gran’s belief in the stability of things. During the shaking, the walls were no longer vertical—they moved and blurred. The floor vibrated and seemed to move side to side.
“This isn’t earthquake country,” his mother said, and Gran’s thoughts were confirmed. He’d never heard of any seismic activity here, or anywhere near here.
His mother led them to the kitchen, which she deemed the safest part of the house, and she called her phone tree friends, and turned on the television, looking for any news of what had just happened. There was nothing on TV, which seemed odd to her and to Gran.
But after a few more phone cal
ls, the answer seemed definitive. It hadn’t been a quake. It had been another sinkhole, this one far bigger than the last.
“Where?” Gran asked.
“Your school,” his mother said.
He ran to it. His mother didn’t try to stop him. It was as if the two of them knew the conversation that would have happened—It’ll be dangerous; I’ll be careful; Stay where the firemen want you; Of course—and simply decided that saying the words was unnecessary.
So he ran, across the valley and up the slope, wondering how much of the school was gone, whether his locker was gone, whether he’d lose anything important, whether anyone was in the building when it had happened, whether anyone had been hurt, whether Catalina would be at the school when he arrived, and whether or not she’d know anything about how this had happened. He knew she would.
The Duke! He thought about the Duke. What if he’d been inside the building when…Gran ran.
As he scampered up the hill, he could hear the bips of police cars, the distant sirens of arriving trucks and ambulances, bursts of urgent words from loudspeakers.
When he arrived at level ground and could see the facade of the building, at first he was relieved. There seemed to be no damage. It looked exactly as it always looked—the narrow white columns, the red brick, the tall narrow windows covered with encouraging words and celebrated assignments. He scanned left and right and saw nothing at all unusual.
“No one inside when it happened,” he heard a fireman say. “That was pretty lucky.”
Gran was relieved. He assumed the Duke was safe.
But where was Catalina? He figured she would appear.
But even if she was there, it would take time to find her. There were people everywhere. Police officers, firemen, paramedics. They were running left and right, holding axes, shovels, walkie-talkies. Gran stayed across the street amid a growing crowd of people. He recognized students he’d seen in school, their parents, some in pajamas and robes. All were craning their heads to see the damage, but there from the street, no damage could be seen. He heard the confusion from the throng: