My Diary from the Edge of the World (21 page)

Prospero picked each one up and studied it closely, looking intrigued and pleased. He smiled as he placed each item down on the table, then shook his head and chuckled.

“I remember these. They're great. The kind of thing people pay a lot of money for back north. Very nostalgic.”

A tension settled around the table. Prospero seemed blissfully unaware of it. We all looked to my mom, who'd gone pale, her dark hair hanging around her face like it had gone limp, though I'm sure I'm just remembering it that way now.

“What do you mean . . . nostalgic?” she slowly asked, laying her hands down on either side of her soup bowl, rubbing her fingers against the surface of the table.

“Well, they're souvenirs,” Prospero said, looking surprised. He stared around at us, more and more bewildered. “From that theme park that used to be in Florida. The World of the Extraordinary World. Didn't you ever go?”

Mom pressed her lips tightly together. “Theme park?” she asked.

“Sure. It was right near Disney. Closed down, of course. Doofy and I talked about it once—we think our parents might have taken us there the same week, when we were little. Right around our birthdays. He loved that place. Theodore's a fanciful guy, as I'm sure you know. I always liked that about him. Not so buttoned up, like so many of us hard scientists.”

Finally, our distress must have sunken in, because Prospero frowned, his eyes widening in surprise. “He didn't tell you they were real, did he?” But he could already tell the answer to his question, and his frown deepened. He took the artifacts in hand, and pointed at the encyclopedia page apologetically.

“You just have to look closely. Look at the copyright.”

Now I saw, in tiny type lining one side of the page, the sickening words:
Extraordinary World Studio Souvenirs.
^TM

“And the photo's been doctored, quite a lot,” he went on, pointing to the fuzzy outlines of the images on the postcard.

“I see,” Mom said flatly. “I didn't notice that before.”

“The Extraordinary World doesn't exist?” Millie asked, her voice cracking. “You don't think we can find it?”

Prospero turned to look at her searchingly. “My young friend, I
know
you can't.”

Just then, with the worst sense of timing ever, the front door opened and in came . . . not my dad, but possibly the world's shabbiest looking guardian angel. He appeared to be about nineteen, gawky and skinny, and was wearing a crumpled bowler hat. He was flickering dimly, and staring at all of us hopefully and a little shyly.

Dad appeared behind him, looking hopeful too. He peered around at us and smiled.

“Well, here he is!” he said, holding a hand toward the angel as if he were a rabbit he'd pulled out of a hat. We all stared back at him in stunned silence.

Dad took in the scene before him, and his smile began to fade. Still, he asked brightly, “What'd I miss?”

It's been three days since
I last wrote. To the west, a grayness is gathering—low clouds stretching across the sky. Prospero says a storm front's coming across the Pacific. Virgil, our guardian angel (even now it feels ridiculous to write that!—the idea of him being a guardian is like the idea of Dinky the farting dog being descended from wolves), is outside making curlicues in the air beyond the windows. He seems to be trying to get Millie's attention as she sits by the window staring out listlessly. It's unlikely he'll get it.

Here's what I know about Virgil so far. He has a flickering, transparent halo that floats above his ridiculous bowler hat, and like the hat, it's crumpled on one side. He's one of the lowest order of guardian angel—I don't
know much about angels, but I know those are the angels who didn't rebel against the gods at all but just came along with the others to live on earth because they had nothing else going on.

Mom says he isn't “the sharpest needle in the sewing box.” Last night he went out to get burritos at a place he knows—one of the few surviving burrito kitchens in all of LA, which caters to the shipping trade down by the docks—and when he came back he flew smack into the main loft window, which made me snort into my hand and Millie go into one of the empty bedrooms and slam the door.

He always straightens his posture whenever Millie sashays through the room. His devout admiration only increases her disgust. For one thing, he's translucent (angels are wisps of air, only barely touchable) and she's flesh and blood, so it could never work out between them anyway, but also he isn't nearly as good looking as Millie is. He's wiry and too tall and like I said, his halo is practically decrepit (maybe that's why he wears the bowler, to distract people), and instead of having a steady angelic glow, he blinks on and off like the lightbulbs in Luck City.

I do have to admit he seems to have a kind heart. He
calls us all “ma'am” and “sir”—even me and Oliver and Sam—and always tips his hat to us when we enter or leave a room. And he seems eager to help: He tried to make coffee for my mom this morning, but ended up setting a small oil fire in the kitchen, and then levitated around the room blushing and saying, “Wow, I'm sooooooo sorry. Wow, just, sorr-Y,” as Mom put the fire out.

“I can't be around that buffoon a minute longer,” Millie said, and disappeared up to the loft. She does that a lot.

Oliver, I can tell, feels sorry for him, but I think he's holding himself back from being nicer to him because of his loyalty to me. He knows that I don't want to have anything to do with him.

Only Mouse has been welcoming and kind. He likes to reach out his little hand and pat Virgil's wispy knee, as if to tell him everything will be all right. The sight makes me want to scream a little bit, because it was Sam that our angel was supposed to protect. I can barely look at Sam without wanting to scream, actually. I don't want to contemplate what we're going to do to protect him now. The truth is, I have no idea what we
can
do, and that's too scary to think about. It makes me so angry, it feels like I might burst into a million tiny pieces of rage,
each one like a shard of glass. It feels like all the jagged glass pieces of me could float all over the world and stab everything.

*  *  *

My dad insists that Virgil is a good fit for us and that he wants to explain, but none of us are willing to hear it. I keep wondering why someone who can solve any equation and can easily quote the second law of thermodynamics has no common sense. Or, much more importantly, how he can be such a liar.

He's been sleeping alone on a mattress in the observatory. Mom hasn't said a word to him since that day at lunch.

At her request, Prospero has been helping us gather the things we need to get back home: giving us blankets, stocking up our food supplies with about a hundred cans of Progresso and Chef Boyardee, and fixing an old Land Rover he's had sitting out back behind the observatory for years, loading the back with drums of whale oil. It's big, with giant tires, and he says if any car can get us home, it's that one. He says he knows of some old roads and paths that could probably get us as far as eastern Arizona, and then from there we could wind our way back to the main road again.

All of us voted on this plan except for Dad—we've decided he no longer gets a vote. But there's no happiness in the thought of heading back the way we came. Sam keeps saying that, out the window, the smiling man hasn't been smiling at him recently, but only frowning a little, like he's sad. “Maybe we should just let him come in,” he keeps suggesting. A couple of times Mom has disappeared into another room after he's said that.

How can you live with something that is impossible to live with? How can you accept something that's impossible to accept?

Prospero estimates we can leave in two days, and Mom agrees that's what we want to do. Dad hasn't said anything about it either way. Not that I care.

*  *  *

Last night I heard a beautiful sound down the hall and went to see what it was. I found Mom in the cloud gallery, playing a dusty violin she'd found among Prospero's treasure troves of old junk. With her head tilted up to the glass dome that lets Prospero observe the clouds, she played with her eyes closed, her head moving back and forth as if the music held her on a string. When she finished, she turned to see me standing there.

“That sounds really good,” I said. “You're a good player, Mom.”

She smiled sadly. “I'm good at lots of things I don't get to do much anymore,” she said. “If your dad were more
present
, and could look after you guys more, I could—” She stopped herself short, looking like she regretted saying anything.

I walked up beside her and looked up at the dome with her—which gave a sweeping view of the clouds that had been gathering bigger and bigger throughout the day.

“It's an amazing sky,” she said. “Even with all those clouds.” Her lips quivered.

That's my mom. She sees the good in everything.

I found my Dad outside
the aviary this morning, gazing at the western horizon with a pair of binoculars. If you stand in that spot you can catch a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean through the trees.

He didn't look over at my approach, though I was sure he heard me.

“Dad,” I said. He kept his eyes to his binoculars. “Dad,” I said again. Enraged, I stepped in front of him and tilted the lenses at my face so that all he could see was my cheek, magnified a thousand times. He lowered his hands and looked at me.

“You need to come out to the dirt track and help pack the Land Rover.”

He nodded. “Okay, Gracie.” He rubbed meekly at
the stubble on his chin. There were lines on his forehead and around his eyes that I'd never noticed before, and maybe even some new freckles. I realized that he has been getting older on this trip. We all have, of course. But my dad's always seemed exactly the same to me, like he never changes. In the past few months, he has.

I stood there wishing he'd say something annoying, but he just looked down at his shoes. Still, I wanted to yell out every bad thought I'd ever had about him.

“You're a liar,” I finally said.

“I'm sorry.”

Angry tears threatened to spill out, but I held them in. “That's not good enough. I'll never forgive you. Never.”

A squawking arose from the aviary, and we both peered inside through the big screen window. A turkey was chasing a duck around in circles, and a few chickens were flapping their way out of the fray. When they settled down, we turned back to each other.

“Gracie, I'm so sorry I hurt you. I know what you must think of me. But I don't think I was wrong.”

I goggled at him. I couldn't believe my ears. I wondered if the pressure building inside me was the feeling
you get before you spontaneously combust. I wanted to turn into a weapon that could hurt him.

“I didn't have any other choice,” he went on. “If we'd stayed at home or at Grandma's, we would have just been waiting there to give Sam up. I thought, even if we had the tiniest bit of hope, it was better than none at all. So I had to convince you, and Grandma agreed with me.”

He leaned back against the white wall of the aviary, looking deeply tired. “When we were flying in and I spotted the observatory from the air, I was so elated. I thought this was my shot. I figured there was a chance Prospero might help us; I thought he might believe the same things I did. I knew it wasn't a sure thing by a long shot, but I hoped. He's been researching these kinds of things for years, and I've always admired him. I always thought if anyone could find the Extraordinary World, he could.”

My anger was now congealing into a ball in my belly, like a lump of raw dough.

“But, Gracie,” he said, looking up at me, “even if Prospero doesn't believe it exists, and even though I don't have proof, my gut still tells me it does. I believe it for no reason I can explain. It's not very mathematical or logical to say that, but I just do.”

“You should have trusted us enough to tell us the truth,” I said flatly.

Dad gazed into my eyes. “Would you have trusted me back?” he asked.

I tried to come up with an answer, but it got stuck in my throat. Dad didn't seem to be waiting for one. He wasn't trying to make me feel guilty. He was just standing there, clenching and unclenching his hands.

“I know you all don't think much of my theories and my way of doing things. But I can't give Sam up. I can't let him go. I wish I could make the Cloud take me instead of him, but I can't. So I think we have to keep trying . . . I mean, trying anything at all. And that”—he waved a hand out toward the ocean—“is the only thing I can come up with. We need to keep going.”

I leaned back against the wall beside him. My anger was leaking out when I wanted so badly to hold it in.

The thing is, it's easy to be mad at Dad when I just think of him as someone who's in charge of me, and whose word always goes whether he's right or wrong. But at that moment he just seemed—not so much like a dad but like any person who didn't have things figured out. Maybe the world is a mystery to everyone, even the smartest people or the oldest people, even Prospero . . .
maybe even Michael Kowalski's old grandma down the street who I originally thought the Cloud was coming for. Maybe you get really old and things are still as mysterious as ever.

I guess it makes me think that the mistakes I make and the mistakes my dad or any other adult makes aren't all that different. Which feels like a grown-up realization, and which also makes me think I never want to have children, because they'll always be mad at me like I'm always mad at my dad.

Anyway, leaning there beside him, I felt the idea of going home slipping out of my grasp.

“Prospero could be wrong,” I said. “He's only human.”