But what?
he thought, as Polland quietly slid the book back onto the shelf.
Chapter 26
The Good-Bye
Bran was still quiet when he got back to Bolton Road. As he came inside, Rosie rushed past.
"Quick, it’s Formal Dinner Night!" she said in a hurry.
"Should we all hide?" he asked.
"No, silly!" Mabel huffed from across the room. "Clean! Disinfect! This house is a dustbin!"
Baldretta was calmly gluttonizing herself with a sack of goodies on the couch. Balder was nowhere to be found, which meant he was most likely in the same place he was ninety-eight percent of the daylight hours. Mabel flew up the stairs as if she was never to be seen again. Luckily, that left Bran and Rosie alone to pick up the house.
Evening came, and the sun began to set, and the street was covered in yellow light when Sewey got home. Rosie was in a rush to get the food made on time, and the platters started to pile up on the table in the kitchen. She finished the main course and got to work with the recipe for Rosie’s Famous Whipped Cream Pie. It was a favorite, and Sewey always got double by taking Mabel’s uneaten share. Bran washed the pots as Rosie finished with them, and Balder was at the kitchen table, gazing with delight at the dishes.
"Look at all that food!" he said, licking his lips.
"Don’t touch any of it!" Mabel squealed. "They’re all special!"
She grabbed a scroll off the counter and, drawing the ribbon, let it spill to the floor. She started to check the things off.
"What’s that?" Sewey asked, coming in.
"The food to prepare," Mabel hissed. "It’s a photocopy of the menu from the Demark’s Formal Dinner Night. Everything’s completely organic, and not a bite was tested on ferrets."
"Hmmm…" Sewey said. "This Formal Dinner Night may not be so bad after all."
He elbowed Balder. "Who needs Pig-Out Week when you can have Formal Dinner Night?"
They cackled. Sewey went upstairs to change. Rosie curled Baldretta’s hair and doused her with hair spray, snapping two earrings onto the bottom of her ears. Mabel dragged Balder upstairs, kicking and screaming, and got him all dressed up also, and ordered that Bran find a suit. He stood in front of the mirror with Sewey and Balder, adjusting their ties in the reflection.
Once the Wilomases were seated and munching away, he and Rosie escaped downstairs to the kitchen to eat, and Rosie surprised him with an entire pan of her Famous Whipped Cream Pie.
"I made an extra one," she said, smiling at him. "We can have it all to ourselves!"
Bran looked at her. Something was very different about the way she was acting. She seemed to glide toward the counter when she got their food, and she set it out on the table, making sure everything was just right. He tried to take his eyes off her, but his gaze wouldn’t break free.
She handed him his plate, and then made her own and sat down to eat across from him. She reached for her cup of water and almost spilled it, and Bran noticed that her hands were shaking slightly, and she tried to laugh it off, but he knew something was on her mind.
"Do you like the chicken?" she asked him. "I hope I made it right."
It was delicious, and Rosie had also given him some warm, creamy mashed potatoes and a bit of corn and some steaming gravy to go over the top. The room was quiet, so peaceful that it felt odd, as if Baslyn had been stifled out of the room, and all of the pain and worries that were on Bran’s shoulders seemed to fall away. He thought about Adi and wondered if she had gotten home yet, and he wondered about himself, and what was going to happen to him. Very quickly he began to worry about Rosie, and Bartley, and what would happen when she got married and left the house. The idea seemed so foreign that it almost felt like he had made it all up. Would he ever get to eat downstairs in the quiet with her again?
"It’s good, isn’t it?" Rosie said, and he nodded. He caught her gaze, but she looked away quickly. He saw that there was something in her smile, something behind it she wasn’t telling.
"Bran…" she began, but she cut herself off. She looked down at the floor for a moment and stopped eating, and Bran looked at her. But her words just wouldn’t come out, and there was a pain that appeared behind her eyes, mixed in with whatever joy and gladness was there.
"What is it?" he asked, putting his fork down.
"Oh, nothing…" She went back to her food, but he could tell her mind wasn’t on it, because all she did was cut her meat up until it was nothing but tiny shreds.
"Bran…" she started again, and her shoulders fell, and she put her fork and knife aside, and looked straight at him.
"Bartley and I are leaving tomorrow, before everyone gets up," she said bluntly. Bran was startled by her words. It felt as if Rosie had just driven a train straight into him.
"Tomorrow?" he whispered. Rosie nodded.
"I’ve got to get out of here without the Wilomases knowing, or else they’ll do something awful to Bartley," she said. "And I can’t let them know I’m leaving, because they’ll do something awful to me. And I can’t let them know we’re getting married, because then they’ll throw a fit and cause an outcry through the whole town and find some way to ruin it!"
All of a sudden, Rosie started to cry. He had never seen her cry before, not a single time in his life: not through all the rejections at the newspapers, not through all the troubles the Wilomases had made her go through, not through anything. She had always stood strong, but there in front of him, she was crying, and she leaned forward and put her head into her hands, and he could hear her sobbing softly. It pained him to watch her.
"I don’t know what to do!" she said. "I think…I’m going to call it off and not get married!"
Bran looked down, feeling as if everything around him had disappeared, and all the problems he had and all the things that were happening to him were absolutely nothing. Slowly, he got to his feet and walked around the table, and he put his arm over her shoulder and held her. She leaned against him, and slowly she stopped crying, until only a few tears
came from her eyes. Bran could see she was being torn in two pieces: the Rosie who wanted to stay, and the Rosie who wanted to go.
"How about we go outside," he said softly. "Maybe the sunset will make you feel better."
Rosie nodded, and they left the house. There was just a sliver of the sun down the road, mostly blocked by the house that was on the end. The sun was very wide, however, and threw beams all over the thin clouds, making a spectacular horizon of pinks and blues. Rosie wrung her hands, and Bran looked for a place to sit, but he couldn’t find any.
"Over here’s fine," Rosie said, going to the edge of the sidewalk where the curb met the road, and she sat down on the edge, and Bran moved next to her. His suit was stiff, but he didn’t care, and Rosie stared off to the south, away from the house, not even looking at the sunset, completely immersed in her own thoughts. There was a distant sound, far away, of someone turning on a water hose, and a car horn going off; the sounds almost seemed to soothe the air.
"It
is
strange, Bran," she said, in a soft voice. "How could I want something so much, but want something else just as much also, so that I don’t know which way to go?"
Bran picked some grass off the ground. He twirled it in his hands, letting it fall into the wind.
"I guess in times like that," he told her, "the only thing to do is pick one and not look back."
Rosie didn’t say anything to him, but just went on staring in the distance, her mind wandering. A cool wind blew on them, but the road was still.
"But I
can’t
just choose one," Rosie said with distress. "I can’t just go on and change my life, and never look back on the way it was before. I can’t just…just move on, when everything has been so much the same for all these years." She fidgeted with her hands. "It’s almost as if it
can’t
change, it
won’t
change; it feels like it should just go on all the way into the future, and never be different, just because…" She sighed softly. "Just because that’s the way it’s
always
been, and I’ve been happy."
Bran nodded at her. "But things do change, every day."
Rosie’s expression turned grim as she thought.
"I suppose some times are like that," she said. "Whether we like it or not, life just seems to slip through our fingers, and before we know it, the people we knew are different, they’ve grown up and changed…"
She looked toward the pink clouds on the horizon. Bran’s eyes wandered to Rosie’s face, and then away again. Her words seemed to go straight to his heart. His eyes began to trace the tiny rocks in the gravel.
"But I hate to watch things change," she said softly. "Sometimes it hits me, and I look around and I wonder… where am I? How did I get here?" She looked up. "It seems like only a day ago I was…I was your age, Bran, and I didn’t have to worry about working, or driving, or getting married. Then I stop and I look around and all of a sudden I’m here, thirty-nine years old, and everyone and everything’s different."
"But you have to remember," Bran said thoughtfully, "that’s not the only thing that changes. I guess we do too, and just don’t notice."
Rosie nodded slowly. "But how am I supposed to get married? It’ll change everything—every part of who I am, who I’ve always been!"
Bran looked up at the sky and was quiet for a while. The wind rustled a plastic bag down the street, a quiet scraping in his ears, letting her words settle between them.
"Seems to me," he finally said. "I remember a certain wise person telling me about heroes."
She closed her eyes softly, and a thin smile crossed her face.
"She told me a hero is a person who can be in the depths of despair, with nowhere left to turn," Bran went on. "And they still don’t give up."
He turned. "You’re not going to give up, are you Rosie?"
She didn’t reply, swimming instead in her thoughts and his words. He swallowed hard and gazed in the same direction as she was, and they sat there unmoving, until Rosie suddenly reached out and put her arm around Bran, and hugged him tightly.
"This sunset is so beautiful, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, Bran," she said, and she turned and looked at him straight, and he looked at her, and she hugged him again.
"And don’t worry, I won’t ever forget you either," she said. "Even if that Bartley takes me all the way to the end of the world, Bolton Road will always be my home."
She held him tightly, and even though she was smiling and laughed a bit, he could feel tears going down her cheek.
When the sun had finally set and the street was covered in darkness, Sewey called Rosie inside from the window.
"Want to come in?" Rosie asked Bran as she stood. He shook his head.
"I just want to stay here a little longer," he said. She looked a bit saddened, but finally she drew toward the house and left him alone. He sat there, staring into the darkness, until the street-lamp far down the street finally flickered on, casting a dim light that didn’t reach him. The moon was high above in the sky, and lights from a few of the houses illuminated the street.
"It is a cold night to be outside," a voice said next to Bran. He did not jerk to turn around, as if a strange familiarity had come over him.
"What do you want, Baslyn," Bran said, looking over his shoulder from where the voice had come. He saw the figure, bent over in the shadow next to the tall tree in the yard, not a few feet away from where Bran was sitting. His face was barely perceivable, though his eyes seemed to reflect the light as his gaze held with Bran.
"You know what it is that I seek," Baslyn said, his voice cool, as if waiting for Bran to surrender to his demands.
"I don’t even know what you want," Bran hissed, looking away with contempt. "I don’t even know if you’re real."
"Am I not real before you?" Baslyn asked.
"I don’t know what
is
real anymore," Bran said. He tried to ignore Baslyn standing there, like a shadowy presence that was neither physical nor a simple wandering of his mind. Baslyn’s chill seemed to radiate toward Bran, the coldness of death that nipped at his skin. Bran wished that Baslyn would simply fade away like an old nightmare, but Baslyn stood there, waiting.
"Why haunt me?" Bran finally said. "I have done nothing to you. I have nothing that you own, nothing as your host." He shook his head. "I will never help you with the Curse, to bring it back or whatever it is that you want. So you can leave me, and tell your men and Shambles to leave too. I don’t want any part in your plotting and magic. I just want to be left alone."
Baslyn did not respond, but Bran was too far in his bitterness to even feel afraid of anything then. It was as if Rosie’s words had cast a numbness over him, so that Baslyn did not frighten him, even as he stood so close.
"Then it is an apology I owe to you," Baslyn finally said, though his voice held no remorse. "For I cannot grant what it is you wish. I am bound to you just as you are to me."
"I am not bound to you," Bran hissed, turning to him. "Whatever you want with the Farfield Curse is over."
"Not yet," Baslyn said, his voice still holding the edge of calm control. "When you return me to life, you will have the powers I need to finish the Curse, just as your mother left it."
"And how will you make me?" Bran hissed, his voice staying low. "I think you will find a new person to haunt when you realize I’m not listening to you anymore."
Bran arose angrily, passing Baslyn without so much as an inch between them as he went toward the house. Baslyn did not turn, though Bran heard him give a small, regretful laugh.
"So blind, as always," Baslyn said. "Yet again, I have laid the truth before you, and still you cannot see things as they are."
"I see enough," Bran said over his shoulder.
"And I see enough as well," Baslyn replied. "How is it then that I see all you see, and hear all you hear, and always seem to be around the next corner?"