EIGHT

“Did he see us?” Morgan took the drawing from Eli and inspected it. The fisher was definitely closer. And more than that, one arm was extended out, reaching for them. “Oh my god, he did see us!” She kept expecting snow and wind to erupt from the page at any moment. Her hands were shaking. From the cold, from the shock of it all, from the thought of some animal being sprinting at them.

She handed the drawing back to Eli, too freaked out to hold it any longer. It was like a scene from a horror movie.

Eli’s hands were not shaking at all.

“Aren’t you scared?” she asked.

He was looking at the drawing, and not at Morgan. He ran his fingers across the surface of it. “It’s still cold.”

“Eli.” Morgan snapped her fingers to get his attention.

“Huh?”

“I asked if you were scared,” she said. “Why aren’t you scared? This is a little crazy, no?”

“It reminds me of home,” he said.

“Your home is like Hoth?”

“Hoth?”

“Are you serious?” she said. “The Rebel Alliance’s secret base? Star Wars? Ring a bell?”

Eli shook his head.

“Well, if that”—she pointed at the drawing from a safe distance—“reminds you of home, trust me: your home is like Hoth.” She picked up her phone and used it to guide them out of the secret room. “And that thing is the abominable snowman creature that captured Luke.”

“That’s not a thing,” Eli said. “It’s a fisher. In Cree, the word for fisher is ochek.”

Morgan turned on her heels so fast that her hair whipped her cheeks. “Yeah? What’s the word for did you not just see a portal open to another world and that ochek running at us like it wanted to kill us?”

Her feet were wet from the floor. She took off her socks and wrung them out.

“There’s no word for that in Cree,” Eli said.

“Duh,” Morgan said. “It’s called sarcasm.”

She took one step down the first flight of stairs, but he put a hand on her shoulder. She stopped.

“What?” she said.

“Aren’t you curious?”

“I’m a little too freaked out to be curious, Eli,” she said. “We just saw a picture come to life. And it’s freaking me out that you’re not freaked out.”

She kept walking down the stairs.

“But wouldn’t you want to go through the picture? If you could?” he asked.

This time, she stopped on her own. “You mean, if there wasn’t a humanoid animal running at us? Would I want to go through a picture into another world?”

“Doesn’t that happen in your books?” he asked.

“Yes,” she stated plainly. “That happens in my fiction books.” She leaned in close to him to drive home her point. “Did you consider that he might have been mad? I mean, we were, like, humans trying to come onto his land.”

“Kind of like in real life too,” he said.

“Whatever.” Morgan ran up the stairs and snatched the picture from his hands. “We should burn it. Make sure that thing doesn’t, I don’t know, crawl out and kill us in our sleep.”

Eli, in turn, grabbed it from her. “We aren’t burning it!”

He gripped the picture with both hands, in case she tried to take it again. He wouldn’t look away from it, and when she shone her flashlight on him, she could see that he didn’t look curious anymore, but sad. It reminded him of home, and he wasn’t anywhere near home. He was here, in this attic, in this house, in the middle of some upper-middle-class neighborhood, in this city. It wasn’t long ago that he’d been in his own community.

She sat down on the top step.

“I don’t remember my home,” she said. “I wouldn’t even call it home.”

She wrapped her arms around her body. Now that the shock of what they’d seen, and heard, had begun to wear off, she noticed that her shirt was wet, and she felt cold.

“It’s not the blizzard that’s like home,” Eli said, “or the ochek.” He sat down beside her. She looked at him. He smiled. She smiled back. “It’s the open space. All the room. There was this field behind my house that was, like, forever long, and I could just play in it all day. Even when I was lost, I wasn’t lost.”

Morgan put her arm around Eli. She didn’t try to take the picture again. She even looked at it. Tried to see what he saw, remember what he remembered.

“Okay, we won’t burn it,” she said. “But can we leave it up here, in the room? Nothing will happen to it.”

“Promise?” he asked. “You won’t come back up here and throw it out later?”

“Promise,” she assured him. “And if the fisher tries to crawl out of the picture—can I remind you how crazy this all sounds?—we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“It won’t,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because we did something. I don’t think the portal will…open…unless we do the same things again.”

“Staple-gun it to the wall?”

“Maybe.”

Morgan put her hand on her face and shook her head. “We must be sleeping.” She pinched her thigh, then her arm, several times. Her skin was as numb as it was cold, but she could still feel the pinches. She didn’t wake up in bed, her ear pressed against the pillow so she could hear her heartbeat. She remained on the steps, sitting beside Eli, both of them staring at a picture that had just come alive.

“We just opened a portal to another world,” she said.

“We should go there.”

“We should go…what? No! Are you crazy?” Morgan did snatch away the drawing this time, but not to burn it. She walked back into the attic, tossed the picture into the secret room, then slammed the door.

“Maybe the ochek needed us!” Eli pleaded. “Maybe it wasn’t running after us to kill us! It was stuck in that blizzard, right?”

“It wasn’t stuck in the blizzard. There was a village behind it, remember? You drew the picture!”

“What if we’re supposed to go to the other side?” he asked. “You said it yourself: it’s a portal to another world. Why would it open now? With us right here? We can’t just ignore that.”

“Oh yes, we can,” she said. “We’ll seal this place back up and pretend like we never found it. I like my fantasy worlds in books.”

“I don’t want to pretend that we never found it!”

“You just want to pretend it’s your home because you don’t have one anymore!”

The attic fell deathly silent. Through the door to their secret room Morgan could hear drops of water land on the plywood from the sloped ceiling. Snow, left over from the blizzard, melting.

“Eli,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.” Of all the things she’d done today, this was by far the worst. “I…I was just scared.”

Instead of answering, instead of looking up at Morgan, Eli just got up and left, with his head down. She heard his steps on the stairs to the second floor. Morgan waited a moment longer, then followed behind him. By the time she walked into the hallway, he’d already shut the door to his bedroom.

Morgan went to her room. She shut the door, took off her damp clothing, put on a pair of sweats and a ratty old T-shirt, and collapsed onto her bed. She lay on her stomach with her face pushed hard into the pillow, crying, until it was as damp as the clothing she’d taken off.

---

“Morgan?”

It was Katie. How much time had passed? Minutes? An hour?

Morgan hadn’t been thinking about the portal, or about the fisher, just about Eli and what she’d said to him. How could she have said that, like she’d never gone through what he was going through right now? She was scared, like she’d told him. Scared, and the more she thought of it, jealous. That he remembered his home, and she didn’t. She’d never thought she wanted to.

Morgan didn’t say anything, but she felt Katie sit down at the foot of her bed. She looked up to see that Katie was holding the shoebox, and the first thing Katie did was put it on the ground and slide it across the carpet until it was flush against the wall.

“Have the moccasins been repurposed as a peace offering?” Morgan asked, staring out the window at a streetlight. “Because if we’re being all ‘Indigenous,’ I think I’ve learned something about smoking a pipe for that.”

It got quiet. So quiet Morgan thought she could hear Eli’s pencil scraping against paper.

“I don’t know why I say things like that,” Morgan whispered.

“I, uhhh…” Katie shifted her body to face Morgan. Morgan could see the movement out of the corner of her eye. “I googled Manitobah Mukluks. There are people who try to profit from Indigenous culture. You know, like gift shops in small towns that sell dream catchers or something? You hang them on your rearview mirror…stuff like that. Those people have bad intentions.”

Morgan turned towards Katie slightly.

Katie went on. “But Manitobah Mukluks, that’s a company owned and operated by Indigenous people. That doesn’t mean you have to wear them, Morgan.” Katie leaned forward and rubbed her palms against her knees. Were her palms sweating? “I don’t think I’m saving you by fostering you. You’re a strong young woman. You don’t need saving. I’m just…James and I…we want to make sure you’re not…” She rubbed her face. “Well, I’m just one of those good-intentioned settlers, okay?”

Morgan turned onto her back and propped herself up on a pillow.

“At the school where I teach, there isn’t a lot of diversity. The neighborhood’s a lot like this one, so…you get what I’m saying. Anyway, in my grade five class, there was this one girl. A beautiful girl. She’s Indigenous. She looked sad all the time, and scared. One day, halfway through the year, I guess after she started to trust me, she told me what she’d gone through. She was in care.” Katie shook her head, wiped at her cheek, at a tear that had fallen. “Care.”

“What’d she say?” Morgan asked.

Katie shook her head again, like Morgan shouldn’t know, or Katie couldn’t say. “I thought, if I could just show a kid love, you know? If I could give a kid a good home…”

“Then you’d somehow be helping that girl?”

“Maybe.” She nodded. “Or I could just be helping you.”

Morgan looked Katie over in the quiet that followed. She couldn’t have been older than thirty. Her light-brown hair was tied back into a loose ponytail that had been tighter at dinner. She was wearing gray yoga pants and a thin, black cardigan that she was hugging around her body. Her glasses were sliding towards the tip of her nose.

“Those moccasins,” Katie said, “the bannock…” She chuckled softly, a gentle self-admonishment, Morgan imagined. “I thought I should try to connect you with your culture, that maybe it would make things better. For you.”

Morgan sat up, leaned forward on her elbows. “Those moccasins would’ve been perfect for Eli, you know. He’s got himself figured out. He’s Indigenous. Probably goes to ceremonies and all that. I don’t think I even want to be Indigenous. I grew up white, in all these white homes. I’m not Indigenous anymore.”

Katie spoke carefully and quietly. “Does doing all that make him more Indigenous than you?”

Morgan shrugged. She didn’t know. She didn’t know what to say.

“Tell me what I can do,” Katie said. “That’s part of how I can learn, if you could just—”

“Just treat me like I’m any other human girl, that’s it. I don’t need, you know, to wear those”—she pointed at the gift Katie and James had got her—“or hang dream catchers from my window, or smudge every morning, or whatever else. Just treat me like a girl.”

Katie shuffled up the bed, closer to Morgan. Closer, but not too close. She put her hand on Morgan’s foot. “I like you, Morgan. James and I both do. We don’t want to lose you.”

“Even if I act crazy?” Morgan asked, trying to keep the tears deep down in her stomach. She’d cried enough today.

Katie smiled reassuringly. “Nothing you can do can make us want you gone, Morgan. And speaking of humans, of being a girl, girls…teens…can do that sometimes. I was a girl once, you know, believe it or not. I did way worse than slam my palm on a table or make an adult’s breakfast into a mad face.”

“It was just the whole day.” Morgan thought of every little thing she’d done, that she wished she hadn’t.

Katie didn’t say anything. She sat there for a moment, tapped Morgan on the foot a couple of times, then got up from the bed.

“I won’t run away,” Morgan blurted out before Katie had left the bedroom and closed the door.

“Then I’ll see you in the morning.” Katie turned back one last time. “And no faces on your breakfast plate, moccasins, bannock…”

“Actually, I kind of like bannock,” Morgan said. “With lots of butter. And jam sometimes.”

Katie chuckled and shut the door.

Morgan turned onto her side, stared out the window, and stayed like that until the house was dark and quiet. No movement. No snoring. She wanted to go see Eli and apologize to him. Tell him: okay, if the portal works again, if it wasn’t some crazy mind-meld hallucination they had simultaneously, they could check it out. Go through it. Just a few steps. And only if the fisher wasn’t there. If it was running at them again, no deal.

But it had been a long day, and in thinking about all this, she fell asleep.