Chapter 13

One moment, they were being ushered out an open door; the next, Alder heard the click of the door closing.

But when he turned to look over his shoulder, there was no door.

There was no house.

Alder was standing on the stump where the tree had once been; Fern was curled in his arms, and beside him, Oak cradled Walnut and looked around, her expression as bewildered as Alder felt.

The storm had passed. Silver-gray clouds populated the sky, but they did not menace or threaten; they drifted apart, like guests at the end of a party. The air felt damp and electric. There across the lawn, pushed up against the flower bed beneath his front room window, was the broken, twisted shape of his umbrella.

Alder shivered.

“I’ve got to go,” said Oak, and she stumbled away from him toward her house.

“Wait!” Alder called after her, but Oak shook her head and didn’t turn back. He watched as she pushed open her front door and disappeared inside.

In his arms, Fern stretched her legs and squirmed as though she wanted down.

“Oh no, you don’t,” Alder said, and he headed back toward home with one last look behind him, at where the house had been.

Inside, things were so normal that it seemed impossible that he could have just experienced what he had indeed experienced.

Alder closed his front door and kicked off his shoes. Fern tucked under his arm, he went into his bedroom, where he found a puddle under the window and the screen knocked loose from its attachment. Setting Fern on the bed, Alder rehooked the screen and then shut the window firmly. Fern settled onto his pillow and began nonchalantly cleaning her tail, as if nothing peculiar had happened at all.

He was soaking wet, Alder realized suddenly, and very cold. He needed to get out of his wet clothes, but first there was something he had to check. He padded in his socks to the front room and over to the bookcase. There, just as he should be, was Mort—on all fours, opossum size, attached to his wooden base.

When he heard the doorknob twist behind him, Alder whirled around, preparing to see the other Mort burst into his house. But it was just Mom, arms full of grocery bags. She shut the door and shook her head like a wet dog, spraying water droplets.

“Looks like the storm got you, too,” she said to Alder, smiling. “That was a big one, wasn’t it?”

Alder opened his mouth, but nothing came out. How could he possibly explain what he had just experienced? As the minutes ticked by, he was rapidly beginning to doubt that any of it—the strange house, the crackling fireplace, the oversize Mort—had actually happened at all.

“You look soaked to the skin,” Mom said. She kicked off her shoes and made her way to the kitchen, putting the grocery bags on the counter. “Why don’t you go take a nice hot bath, and I’ll get dinner started.”

Alder didn’t answer. He just nodded and headed toward the bathroom. A bath. That sounded nice.

Alder filled the bathtub with water as hot as he could stand. He had to climb in slowly, inch by inch, acclimating himself to the warmth. At last, he sighed and immersed himself, dipping even his head into the water, and his ears, just his face above the surface.

It was quiet like that, and peaceful—him floating, loose-limbed, ears plugged by water. It felt safe.

And Alder found that he didn’t quite want to think about what had happened, or hadn’t happened, where he might have been, or where he might not have been. It was much more likely, he was coming to believe, that none of it had happened at all. That he had simply experienced a hallucination, or maybe just a dream.

There had been a storm, and lightning, and, after all, he’d been carrying a metal-framed umbrella.

“Stupid, stupid,” Alder chastised himself, though with his ears underwater, his voice sounded muted and far away.

Maybe a bolt of lightning had struck the umbrella, and the shock of it had knocked him unconscious, and for some reason his brain had conjured up the whole thing, like some weird fever dream. That made a whole lot more sense than an oversize, fully clothed, walking, talking Mort inhabiting a mysterious house that appeared and disappeared.

And, Alder decided, feeling better by the minute, there was no sense in worrying his mom with all of this. After all, if he told her that he’d been struck by lightning, she’d want to take him to the doctor—probably even to the emergency room—and who could tell what they would want to do there? Tests of some kind.

Alder couldn’t imagine what kind of tests they might run at the hospital, but he suspected that needles might be involved, and the drawing of blood, which Alder hated more than almost anything. At his eleven-year-old wellness check, he had been surprised, and not in a good way, by what his pediatrician cheerfully called a “screening,” which sounded like they were going to see a movie but instead involved the withdrawal of three small vials of his blood, extracted from the inside of his elbow by a needle and a long clear tube. He was in no great hurry to go through that again.

And besides, Alder told himself as he flipped the stopper to drain the tub, listening from beneath the waterline as the bath began to empty, he was perfectly fine. Whatever might have happened was behind him. What mattered was that he was safe, and Fern was safe, and the storm was over.

With that resolved, and feeling much better now, Alder dried off and put on his softest pajamas, along with thick warm socks. And then he went to join his mother for dinner.

When he woke the next morning, the sky outside his window was the brightest, clearest blue Alder had ever seen. It was becoming increasingly difficult to believe that a storm had even happened, let alone the strange, impossible oddities that were so ridiculous as to almost make Alder laugh.

Still, he double-checked all the doors and windows before he headed off to the bus stop—no reason to tempt fate, he told himself, picking up Fern for a moment and kissing her fuzzy head to say goodbye.

But when he saw that Oak was standing in the space between their two driveways, as if she were waiting for someone, he felt his stomach begin to curdle. Alder had no desire to discuss what might or might not have happened. It became evident quite quickly, however, that the conversation was going to take place with or without him.

“I’ve been waiting out here for nearly twenty minutes,” Oak said, but her tone was cheerful. “Did you sleep at all last night? I barely did. I was tossing and turning until three o’clock in the morning!”

Alder grunted, vaguely.

Oak must have taken the sound as encouragement, for she went on, “I’ve been trying to figure out what on earth happened to us. That was the weirdest thing that I have ever experienced in my life. And that . . . thing . . . you know him?”

She was talking about Mort, Alder knew, which meant that his theory about electrocution must have been wrong, if Oak had the same memory. “He’s not a thing,” Alder said, speeding up a little as they headed to the bus stop, as if he could somehow escape Oak and all her energy, all her questions. “He’s an opossum.”

“A four-foot-tall, talking opossum who wears boots and carries a pocket watch,” Oak said, too loudly, Alder thought.

“Shh,” he said crossly, though he didn’t know why it felt important that no one hear them.

“How do you know him?” Oak pressed.

They had reached the corner. And here came the bus. Alder didn’t want to talk about any of this, but he definitely didn’t want to talk about it on the bus. “Later,” he said as the bus pulled to a stop, as the doors hissed open.

“When?” said Oak, her voice insistent.

“Later,” Alder said again. He began to climb the steps and looked over his shoulder at Oak.

Her lips were pressed together in a line; her hands, on the straps of her backpack, were tight fists. It was obvious that he wasn’t getting out of this. “Come over after school,” he said begrudgingly. “I’ll show you.”

All day long, Alder kept an eye on Oak wherever he could: in Mr. Rivera’s class; at recess and at lunch; during PE, when they had to run around the track. Oak, he noticed, was surrounded by a circle of friends wherever she went, even though she was so new to the school.

It seemed, he felt, terribly unfair. He felt this especially keenly during PE, at the end of the day, when he noted that not only was Oak surrounded by a circle of friends, she also seemed to have no trouble at all taking off from the pack when she was ready to run—swifter than them all, like she was made for it.

“You should join the cross-country club,” Marcus yelled admiringly as she flew by him and Beck, who were taking turns timing each other doing sprints.

“Maybe,” Oak called back.

Marcus had never asked him if he wanted to join the cross-country club, Alder thought miserably, clutching a cramp at his side as he jogged slowly around the track. Not that he would have wanted to. But it would have been nice to be asked.

Finished with their sprints, Beck and Marcus loped onto the track. Alder watched the way they matched each other, pace for pace, Marcus lengthening his strides to keep up with Beck’s longer legs. They were laughing about something.

Were they laughing at him? Alder quickened his pace, tried to stand up straighter, to look more athletic.

Beck and Marcus had disappeared from Alder’s sight line; they were so much faster than he was that they’d rounded the bend and would be coming up behind him soon. He imagined what he looked like from behind: his T-shirt was sticking to his back, sweaty, and he knew his hair got fluffy and unruly when he ran. He probably looked ridiculous.

Here they came.

“Looking good, Alder,” called Beck as they flew by, bread-and-buttering around him.

“Thanks,” Alder called back, trying not to sound as winded as he was, but then immediately doubting his response—had Beck been sincere? Was he being mean?

Exhausted both by running and the mental effort of trying to decide what everything meant, Alder slowed to a walk, then stopped, hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. The cramp in his side had tightened to a sharp pain. He closed his eyes against the brightness of the sun.

At the end of the day, just like usual, Faith was waiting for them in the bus.

“Hiya, Alder, welcome aboard,” she said.

“Hiya, Faith,” Alder answered, but his heart just wasn’t in it.

At the top of Rollingwood Drive, Faith said, “See ya, tree kids,” as Alder followed Oak down the three black stairs. And then the bus pulled away.

Alder trudged down the hill toward home. Oak was at his side. He could feel her there, the way she rolled up onto her toes with each step.

“I’ll just pop home and drop off my stuff,” Oak said. “Then I’ll come over.”

At least Mom wasn’t home, Alder thought. Her car was gone, and a note on the kitchen counter told him that she’d be gone for a while:

Off to the bank and the post office and the library! Clean that stinky litter box.

xoxo

Mom

When she went to the library, Alder’s mom could lose track of time entirely. Once she’d sat right down in an aisle, so taken by a book’s description, and had read the whole thing then and there, cover to cover.

Meow, said Fern. She hopped down from her cushion in the patch of sunlight on the window bench and stretched, front legs sticking straight out, her rump and tail way up in the air behind her.

Alder took a minute to scratch her head, and then he got the scooper and a paper bag. The litter box, which they kept in the smaller bathroom, did smell a bit suspicious.

He’d managed to clean it, scrub his hands, and spray some air freshener in the litter box’s general direction before he heard Oak knocking at his door.

“Coming,” he called, and he picked up Fern before he opened the door so that she couldn’t dart outside.

There was Oak, and she’d brought someone—Walnut.

“Hi,” said Oak. “I thought I’d bring Walnut over to see Fern. You know, since they’re related. I don’t know . . . it just doesn’t seem right to keep siblings apart.”

Alder relaxed a bit for the first time in what felt like forever. Maybe Oak noticed it, because she smiled. Alder smiled back. He opened the door wider. “Great idea,” he said.