North of Nowhere (19 page)

“What happened to you?” she asked, coming over to stand in front of me. “What’s up with your gran? Did you tell her?”

I held up a hand to ward off any more questions. “Which one do you want me to answer first?”

Sal took a breath. “Just, I thought we were telling our families. Next thing I know, you’ve disappeared, your gran’s disappeared, your mom’s asking where you both are and what’s going on, and I’m standing there opening and closing my mouth like a goldfish.”

“I’m sorry.”

Sal looked at me for a moment, then sat down on the bench next to me. “No. I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you OK? You look awful.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean . . . Jeez, I’m not doing very well here, am I?”

I shook my head. “It’s not you. It’s —”

“What? What happened with your gran?” Sal asked again. “Do you want to tell me?”

Did I? That was a good question. Would Sal think we were
all
crazy if I did? Then again, she’d shared in half the bizarre things that had happened already. Maybe she was the only person I
could
tell without worrying about what she thought. Maybe she was the only person who could help me figure any of this out.

“Yes,” I said. “I want to tell you.”

Sal listened while I emptied my brain of everything that was in it. After that, we didn’t say anything for a while. We just sat together, watching the waves come in, lapping against the sand, rocking the boats in the harbor. It all looked so peaceful and calm and gentle — it was such a lie.

Sal sat back and let out a breath. “Wow,” she said eventually.

“I know.”

“So your gran . . .”

“And Dee . . .”

Sal turned to me. “They’re . . .”

She couldn’t say the words. I didn’t blame her. You try it. Think of the craziest thought you could ever have, then imagine saying it out loud to someone as a serious possibility without feeling ridiculous beyond belief.

It’s not easy, is it?

I decided to save Sal the effort of trying. “Gran and Dee are the same person,” I said flatly.

There. I’d done it. I’d said the impossible words that we both knew were somehow true.

We sat in silence. I felt as though the words were dancing in front of me, bouncing around in the air while I tried to hold on to them and pull them into some sort of recognizable shape. I couldn’t.

“But there must be — what — fifty years between them,” Sal said eventually.

“Yep.”

Wait! She was right!
Fifty years.
“Sal, the article about Luffsands!”

“What about it?”

“It was fifty years old, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but —”

“Gran turned sixty-three this year. Dee’s thirteen. There are
exactly
fifty years between them, and the storm happened exactly fifty years ago.”

“What are you saying?” Sal asked in a whisper.

I shook my head. “I don’t know . . . but there’s something weird going on.”

“You
think
?”

“No, I mean . . . Look, I feel like a complete idiot saying this out loud, but I’m going to anyway, OK? And you’re not to laugh at me or tell me I’m crazy.”

“I’m not going to do that, Mia. If you’re crazy, I am too. I’ve seen all this stuff as well.”

“OK.” I took a breath. “So, firstly, I think it’s got something to do with the boat.”

“The boat? How?”

“I sent notes to Dee on her dad’s boat, and if we’re right about Dee and Gran being the same person, then those notes were traveling back in time fifty years.”

“OK,” Sal said slowly.

“Then you and I went to Luffsands on the same boat and found ourselves in the middle of a storm — a storm that happened fifty years ago.”

“So the boat somehow makes you travel backward and forward fifty years in time?”

“Or maybe it’s the compass,” I said, thinking out loud.

“The way it went spinning like that,” Sal added.

“Exactly.” There was something in all this, but it was beyond the reach of my thoughts. I just couldn’t get my brain to add it all together into something that worked.

I shrugged. What did I have to lose? If I’d already lost my mind, Sal was there with me. “Look, I know it’s completely cr —”

“No, you’re right,” Sal said. “That’s what’s happened to Peter! That’s why he hasn’t come home to us. He’s gone back in time — and now that that man’s taken his boat, we’ve got no way of bringing him back again.”

“That man . . . Dee’s dad,” I said.

“Mia,” Sal said, so quietly her voice was like a wisp of wind ruffling a calm sea.

“What?”

“If Dee is your gran, and that man was her father . . .”

“Yes?”

Sal swallowed. “Then who is Peter?”

I was about to answer, but two things stopped me. The first was that I couldn’t make my brain piece together an answer. Or I could, but this time I knew that if I did, I was
really
going to go crazy!

The second was the sound of shuffling footsteps behind us.

I turned my head as the footsteps came closer. I looked up. Right in front of my eyes was the last person I expected to see, and the one who had been at the center of all my thoughts for a week.

I leaped off the bench and threw my arms around him.

“Grandad!”

He sat at the dining room table with his homework. His mom was upstairs, vacuuming. His dad was still in bed. His sister, Sal, was in the kitchen, getting a snack to eat in front of the television.

Logarithms. Whoever invented logarithms? And why? What job was he ever likely to get that would depend on his knowing how many times to multiply a factor of three?

Still, Peter had never handed his homework in late, and never been in trouble, so he persevered. That was simply the kind of boy he was — and everyone knew it. He was one of the few who was liked as much by the teachers as he was by his fellow pupils. And he wasn’t about to let a
mind-bending equation change that.

So he kept his head down and concentrated on the mass of swirling numbers and formulas. If he got it all done now, he’d have the rest of the weekend to do what he wanted without it hanging over him.

But when he heard a soft “thud” coming from the hallway, his mind was sufficiently open to distraction that he was out of his chair in a flash.

He stood in the hallway and looked around. Nothing. He opened the porch door and looked down at the mat. There was something lying facedown on the floor — a magazine or pamphlet.

Peter bent down to pick it up. It was a travel brochure for a place he’d never heard of. “Come Fishing in Porthaven” it said on the front.

Fishing? Having lived in a city his whole life, fishing was not something that had ever entered his thoughts. In fact, he’d never even been on a boat! Where was Porthaven anyway? And who had delivered the brochure? The mail carrier had already come.

Curious, he opened the front door, expecting to see a teenager with a big satchel over his shoulder delivering the brochures to every house on the street. But there was no one delivering anything. The only person in sight on the street at all was a man with his back to Peter, right at the end of the road.

Peter watched him, registered that he seemed quite old, that he was wearing a big wool coat, that his hair was wispy and windblown, and that he seemed in a hurry to get away.

Just as the man was about to turn the corner, he stopped, as if he weren’t sure which direction to take. And then, very slowly, he turned back and looked down the road. His eyes met Peter’s. For the briefest of instants, the man and the boy locked eyes.

The next moment, Peter was struck by a blinding headache so fierce it made him scrunch his eyes closed and clutch his head. What was it? A migraine? Peter had never had one, so he didn’t know what they were like. All he knew was that he’d never felt pain like this in his life.

Still holding on to his head, Peter stumbled into the house. As he grew more agitated, a blotchy red rash crept around his neck. “Mom!” he called. Then he fell to his knees and waited for the pain to recede.

The mystery headache lasted for the rest of the day. Peter could do nothing that afternoon but lie on his bed in the dark.

No football. Football was the only reason Saturdays existed as far as Peter was concerned. But he had no choice.

He struggled down to join his family for dinner.

“This place looks absolutely heavenly,” his mom murmured, flipping through the brochure as she munched on an apple.

His dad frowned. “Can we afford it?” he asked. “Now that I’ve been made part-time and layoffs are looming, I could be out of a job by this time next month.”

“All the more reason to take a vacation now,” Peter’s mom insisted.

His dad leaned over to look at the brochure. “True enough,” he said. “And to be honest, I’ve always wanted to take a fishing vacation. What do you think, kids?”

Peter shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. He’d taken some aspirin but could still barely open his eyes without searing pain crashing through his head.

“I prefer horseback riding myself,” Sal said before getting up from the table and taking her plate to the sink.

“Ooh, look, they’ve got dates during spring break,” Mom pointed out. “We’d been wondering what to do then.”

Dad kissed his wife on the forehead and picked up the brochure as Peter finished his dinner and excused himself from the table. The pain was getting bad again and he needed darkness and quiet.

“Well, let’s not wonder anymore,” his dad was saying, heading for the phone as Peter headed back to his bed.

“Let’s go fishing in Porthaven.”

Grandad held me tightly for a couple of seconds, then took hold of my hands and pried them off his neck.

As I moved away, I saw that someone else had come out of the pub and was halfway toward us. Gran!

She was staring across at Grandad, her eyes as shiny as glass, her hands clenched together. He was staring back at her, too. Their gaze was like electricity: it almost crackled. Grandad stood as still as the statue on the promenade and waited for Gran to join us.

Then he wrapped his hands around hers. “Diane, I’m sorry I disappeared into thin air like that,” he said. “But I had to do it.”

Gran swallowed and nodded. She took one of her hands away from his. For a moment, I thought she was going to change her mind and walk off again.
No — please don’t! Hear him out!
I wanted to shout.

But she didn’t leave. Instead, she lifted her hand to his cheek and stroked his face. “I know that now,” she whispered.

Grandad tilted his head. “You know?” he repeated.

“You know
what
?” I added.

Gran turned to me, as if she’d only just noticed I was there. Then she smiled. “Everything,” she said.

“But —” Grandad began.

She put a finger on his lips to stop him saying any more. “I think in some part of me, I always knew,” she went on. “But I didn’t want to admit it, in case it made it all go away. In case it made
you
go away.”

Grandad wrapped his arms around Gran, pulling her close. “I love you so much,” he said, kissing her neck.

Which was the part where I kind of wondered if Sal and I should tiptoe away and pretend we’d never been there. I mean, obviously this was the best thing that had happened all week, but that still didn’t mean I wanted to watch my grandparents making out on the promenade.

I coughed gently.

Gran and Grandad moved apart a tiny bit and looked across at us. They both had the same look in their eyes. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was as if their eyes held the keys to a secret world, a world that no one else knew about. Then Grandad nodded toward us. “Let’s sit,” he said.

Sal and I shuffled along the bench as they came to join us.

Flake bounced between the two of them, shoving his head into Grandad’s lap for a pat, then rubbing against Gran’s legs.

Still holding Grandad’s hand, Gran turned to me. “I always knew there was something odd going on,” she said.

“With what?” I asked.