Down World, Rebecca Phelps [book recommendations based on other books .TXT] 📗

I felt a great exhale expel itself from my lungs, as though under the strain of this information, they could no longer perform their function. “That’s why you were in town that day. At the diner.”

“Yes. We . . . we had been trying to find the answer for three years. I wanted to tell her to her face. It’s not the kind of thing you say over the phone—”

“But you barely said anything at the diner. Just something about the old grounds.”

“That was a code. To meet me at the grounds that night.”

I nodded, replaying the conversation in my head. That explained why my mother had been acting so strange that day, why she had left that evening. She must have been going to meet Sage before going to the tracks. “What did you say to her that night?”

Sage started stuffing the letter into a drawer, suddenly quite distracted. “You’ll really need to ask your mother about that, dear. I can’t—I really shouldn’t . . .”

“I can’t ask my mother about it.”

“Why are you two here?” she asked. She was rummaging in her desk. “You shouldn’t be here. Did your mother send you?”

“My mother can’t do anything,” I told her. Her face froze and a panic set into her eyes. I swear I could see her lips curling as she stood before me. “She’s gone. The day she saw you. She had some sort of mental break. Someone spotted her on the tracks, but then she disappeared.”

“No.”

“They said she was trying to kill herself. But she wasn’t, was she? She was trying to follow Robbie. It didn’t work, though, because then she went into the high school. And now . . . now she’s missing.”

“No, that’s not—that’s not right. That’s not what she was supposed to do.”

I turned to Brady, as if to confirm that he had heard her. He stepped before me. “What was she supposed to do?” he asked.

Sage sat down behind her desk, as if she were suddenly too weak to stand. “Nothing,” she said. “There was nothing to do. The answer to her question—about whether there’s a way to get Robbie out—the answer is no.”

I don’t know how long I sat behind the hotel, shifting uncomfortably in one of those lawn chairs with only half a seat. It could have been ten minutes or an hour; my mind was at once racing with information and yet muddled with all the parts I still didn’t understand. I had been convinced that Sage would know where my mother had gone. But now I could see that she didn’t.

All that I knew was my mother had been lying to me, and to my dad, for the past three years. She’d known Robbie was in Down World. She’d known that in some universe, in some way, he was still alive. I suppose a more gracious way to think about it is that she was burdened with a secret she couldn’t share. “My son’s not dead—he got sucked into a train portal and he’s trapped in another dimension” isn’t exactly the kind of thing you can just drop at the next PTA meeting.

And maybe she was holding out hope the whole time that her old friend Sage would discover the secret way of rescuing Robbie. And when that last shred of hope fell through, she did something desperate—whatever that was. I could hardly blame her. The absence of Robbie in our house had been making us all feel desperate for years. Our family without Robbie was like an old blanket that had been sewn together using one thread, and it was being slowly unraveled as that thread was pulled out until nothing would be left.

“Okay,” Brady said, entering the courtyard and pulling up a chair, only to fall right through the bottom as he attempted to sit on it.

I couldn’t help but laugh, and I was surprised that anything could make me do that. Brady buried his head in a silent chuckle, trying to extricate himself from the remains of the chair.

“You like that?” he asked. “Thank you, folks. I’ll be here all day.”

He looked around and grabbed a planter, caked in dry mud and full of the dying remains of what used to be some sort of plant. He picked the whole thing up, shook it until all the debris fell out, and placed it gently upside down by my side so he could sit on it.

“Let’s see if my ass falls through this one too.”

I laughed again. I couldn’t tell if he was doing this for my benefit, or if Brady just had a way of finding the lighter side of things.

“Okay, so here’s what I was going to say. You ready?”

“Yes.”

“This woman’s a nut job. This hotel is creepy and the pizza here sucks. I say we get back on the train and head home, go into DW, and find them ourselves.”

“How? The brick walls,” I reminded him.

“There must be a way to open them. We’ll get some TNT and blow them if we have to.”

I thought about that for a moment. What were the portals beneath the school anyway? They were doorways, like passwords to open a computer program. The doorway itself didn’t matter, only the program that you were accessing.

“No, it wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?” he asked, clearly growing frustrated.

“Blowing the door won’t make the world behind it suddenly appear,” I said. “We need to find out why the brick walls appeared, and somehow undo it.”

“That one’s on you, kiddo,” he said. “I’m getting lost here.”

I laughed again. Nobody called me kiddo except my dad.

“I want to talk to John,” I realized. “I want to ask him. Sage doesn’t know everything.”

“What makes you think John will?”

“Just the way she described him in her journal. That she was afraid he might disappear someday. He was obsessed with it. And he’s older now. So maybe after all this time, he’s figured out some things.”

Brady nodded.

“Are you with me?” I asked. “Because if you want