Hugo had been waiting for her for “like a million years.” Or so he said. And while he’d been waiting he had done a little bit of exploring, though never straying too far from the beach.
“Come on, there’s something I want to show you.”
He grabbed her hand and pulled Rose up to the crest of a sandy ridge.
“That is Castle City.”
From the horizon rose a mass of shining spires of all different shapes. Some were rounded and some were pointed. Others had jagged bits that stabbed at the sky. There were hundreds of them all collected together behind a single unbroken wall.
Around it all hung a yellow halo of sorts, giving the place the look of a city in a snow globe.
“That’s where we have to go. Because that’s where everyone is.”
“Everyone?”
“Everyone. In the whole wide world.”
“Even my daddy?”
“Especially your daddy.”
Rose looked at this boy. This Hugo. He seemed to know what he was talking about.
“Is he in trouble?” Rose almost remembered something … felt it tickling at the back of her brain. Her father’s face, worried about something.
“Yes. Kinda. Maybe. They need us to rescue them.”
“Oh.… From what?”
Hugo shrugged. “I dunno. Something bad. There’s gotta be some reason why they’re all in there and we’re the only ones out here.”
“Huh.”
Rosie sat on the edge of the ridge and considered the city. Considered everyone she loved being inside, and herself and this boy being the only people outside.
She was not used to being the person doing the rescuing. In neighborhood games, she always elected to be the princess in the tower. She had never considered being the knight. She had never considered herself a hero.
“Hugo…” She tested the feel of his name. “Aren’t you … aren’t you a little scared?”
He scoffed. “Nah. What for?”
And he smiled at her in such a way that she could not help smiling back.
* * *
Since everyone in the whole wide world was in the Castle City, there was nothing for it but for them to go there.
She and Hugo had filled their pockets with seashells and set out in the tall saw grass that lay in the direction of the city.
“How long do you think it will take us to get there?”
“Dunno. It doesn’t look too far. All morning?”
“Is it morning?”
“Feels like it, doesn’t it?”
Rose noticed that the towering blades of grass were in fact shiny with dew and that they seemed to be that particular shade of green one sees only in the early hours of the day.
“Yeah. I guess,” she said, wanting to agree with this older, smarter boy.
They walked in silence for a bit. The blades clattered against one another as they pushed them out of their path.
“You wanna sing a song?”
“A song?”
“Sure, sometimes I do that. When I’m walking. You know any?”
Rose knew lots of songs, but she was afraid Hugo might laugh at the ones she knew by heart. “If I Knew You Were Coming” and “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window” seemed too babyish to sing on an adventure.
She shrugged.
“You know this one?” His voice rose in a sweet trill across the grass: “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, You can always go…”
“Downtown!” Rose loved this song. Knew it from her time at the roller rink.
Hugo smiled at her, excited she was catching on. “When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry, Seems to help, I know…”
“Downtown!” they shouted together.
Hugo had a better hold on the lyrics than Rose, but she filled in the gaps with “dedums” and soon they were racing their way to the end.
And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along
So maybe I’ll see you there
We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares
So go downtown
Things’ll be great when you’re downtown
Don’t wait a minute more, downtown
Everything’s waiting for you, downtown
Hugo finished by grabbing Rose around the waist and swinging her in an open patch in the grass. Her bare feet swung out from beneath her and she clung to his chest, smiling up into his tucked chin.
He tumbled sideways, and they both fell to the ground. Curled into fits of giggles. Rose rolled to her side and watched as he sat up. Brushing off his hands.
“You’re funny, Hugo.”
“So are you, Rosie.”
* * *
Hugo spent the morning teaching her songs as they walked. “The Crocodile Rock.” “I Was Made to Love Her.” “The Love You Save May Be Your Own.”
Rose absorbed the lyrics and the melodies as they kept pushing forward. She almost forgot what it was they were meant to be doing … the learning of songs seemed to be reason enough to be walking through the grass. Simply spending time with Hugo.
But then the saw grass ended.
They reached a clearing, which finally afforded them a view of the horizon. Castle City remained stubbornly the same size in the distance, yet they had been walking for hours.
Hugo was quiet. Disappointed.
“We need to get there. We need to rescue them.”
Rose nodded. Serious in that way that only a child can be. Seriously serious.
“Maybe we’re doing it wrong. Maybe we need to try to get there a different way.”
* * *
The different ways they tried led them through the landscape of the island, which they discovered was an island because they spent a great long while walking on the sand and ended up in precisely the location they had left.
It was just after that journey that they found the Plank Orb bobbing awkwardly in a rocky cove.
“What is that … thing?” asked Rose, not sure what to call it. “Some kind of boat?”
Hugo waded out to it, careless of his pants getting wet.
The “thing” rocked gently in the waves. It was clearly made out of wood, the kind of blockish two-by-fours one’s father picked up at the hardware store for home projects.
But somehow these lengths had been curled around an open space, creating a kind of wooden bubble that rose and fell with the water. The whole thing was weathered and gray, splintery like an old fence.
Hugo caught the edge of something on its top. Pulled it toward him.
“There’s a way in!”
Rose watched from the shore as he hefted himself up onto the contraption and disappeared into a door at its peak.
She decidedly did not want to climb onto that thing. She decidedly did not want to follow Hugo into that darkness. Or get her skirt wet. Or any of it at all, thank you very much.
He poked his head out. “Come on, Rosie!”
Rose crossed her arms. Determined to stay.
And yet, she took a step into the water. And then another. And another. All carrying her toward the strange wood bubble and Hugo.
He held out a hand to haul her up its side and helped her down into the cavity below.
It was dark and close. The sound of water straining against wood filled the space with its thumps and groans. There were windows, round shuttered portholes covered in chipped white paint. Through these Rose could see the crystalline waters of the cove, the distant movement of fish.
“Did you see this?”
Hugo held up a length of wet chain that threaded between two small holes in the floor.
“What’s it for?”
He smiled and slammed the door above them shut, plunging them into a warm, wet dim. He crouched to the floor and yanked the chain.
The Orb lurched and dropped under the water—pulled like a bead on a string.
Rose put her hand to the window, her mouth making a perfect small “o” as the marine world swept past them at a clip. Candy-colored reefs populated with small creatures drew close before they were pulled away.
“Where are we going?”
Hugo shrugged. “Dunno. But I feel like … like it’s going to be somewhere important.”
“I feel that way, too.”
They pressed closer to the window. The sunlight cut a dancing path through the water beyond the Orb. Large bodies of whales rolled in the deep distance.
Rose thought about how she had not wanted to get into the Orb at all; how if she had stayed on that shore as she had wanted to, she never would have seen any of this. She was grateful to whatever impulse it was, shame or fear of being left behind or some other, more powerful force that had pushed her into the water.
“I like it here,” whispered Rose.
“Me too.”
* * *
It took them an hour to get her to stop crying when she finally awoke.
Her father sat vigil next to her tiny body for the five days it took for her to emerge. He had traced the events of that afternoon over and over again during that time, listening to the beeps and blips of the monitors. He tried to decide which mistake was the one that led him here, to this hospital room, talking to doctors who told him nothing.
Maybe it was the third beer. Or the fourth. Not putting on the training wheels. Pushing her to get on the bike. Letting go. Which decision had caused her little body to leap over those handlebars and meet the pavement at that particularly horrible angle? Which decision had he made that had caused his daughter to lose her tether to the conscious world?
All of them. None of them. What did it matter, when there was nothing he could do that would make Rosie wake up?
He sat there for five days, thinking the same thoughts, arriving at the same nonconclusions.
And so he was there when Rose awoke and almost immediately began to wail.
The moment Rose’s father saw her eyes, he knew it would all be okay. Thanks be to God, they were open and lucid and clear. She was upset, but in her eyes he could tell she was undamaged and blessedly awake.
He climbed onto the bed and wrapped his arms around her. Consoling. Crying warm tears himself.
“It’s okay, sweetie. You’re okay, sweetie. It’s okay.”
He thought, of course, that she was frightened by waking in a tangle of tubes and IVs. The bright sterility of the hospital room. The sticky leads that monitored her half existence for the past week.
But little Rose wasn’t frightened, she was mourning.
She cried because it wasn’t real. She cried because Hugo didn’t exist. She cried because now that she was awake, she thought he was lost to her.
Little Rose did not know while she slept in that hospital bed that she was dreaming. This was in part because she did not remember losing consciousness in her father’s panicked arms, but it was mostly because nothing about the island felt like a dream.
She knew that usually a dream slips around one’s consciousness, like the sand shifting away under your feet as the tide pulls itself into the ocean.
But the island to which Rose had been brought had felt as solid as clay beneath boots.
And so she cried. She grieved that whole day in that hospital. She quivered and sobbed as the doctors put her through a battery of tests, drawing blood and taking X-rays. The smiling nurses and happy doctors annoyed her. Her laughing mother and exuberant father were so antithetical to the deep sadness that sat inside her little body. They did not seem like they could possibly understand.
Her mother cooed and tried to settle her the way she did with all Rose’s nightmares. There, there, baby. It will be all right. Rose cringed and clutched at her mother’s chest, waiting for Hugo to disappear from her mind. Waiting for him and his wonderful island to fade like the dream that he was.
* * *
That night, tired out from the tests and the visitors, the doctors finally felt sure they could let Rosie sleep. They no longer worried that if she slept she would not wake again. Rose’s mother let her sip water from a plastic straw and turned out the lights in her hospital room. Rose closed her eyes and rolled into a fetal curl.
She fell asleep.
And there he was again.
Hugo. Waiting for her that night on the shores of his island. Ready to try again to get to Castle City. To fight the island’s monsters. To bound down the rainbow trail.
And so he would be every night for the next thirty years.
As Rose grew, so did Hugo. He matured from a beautiful boy into a beautiful man. They kept to their purpose. Reach Castle City. Rescue the people there.
And for thirty years, the city eluded them.