Chapter 14

It was the second house in two days that Oak had been inside that looked both the same as her house and also totally different. The shape was the same—the short entry hall; the living room off to the left and the hallway, presumably with bedrooms, off to the right; the wooden window seat in the living room. The pass-through to the kitchen and the dining room. But everything else was different. Oak’s house had been covered in a coat of white paint right before they moved in—all the walls, all the ceilings the same bright noncolor. “Fresh and clean,” her mom had said, satisfied. And Oak hadn’t thought to question it. After all, she hadn’t even wanted to move in the first place; why would she care how the new place was painted?

Looking around Alder’s home, Oak felt suddenly very sorry that she hadn’t insisted on color. For color was everywhere here: the entry hall was a butter yellow; the table near the door was lavender; an assortment of colorfully striped hats and scarves crowded the hooks nearby, and a basket on the floor overflowed with balls of yarn and knitting needles.

Still cradling Walnut, Oak followed Alder into the living room. Her heart felt pierced through with envy; it was a riotous, joyous comfort of colors and textures and things. Here, the walls were painted a gentle blue. In the center of the room was a long, bright pink velvet couch, slightly sagging in the middle. Three afghan blankets were strewn across it, one in zigzags of bright pinks and purples and greens; another, a series of squares in every color of the rainbow, banded together by black; the third, all plum.

There was an overstuffed bookshelf with too much to take in all at once: books and knickknacks and pieces of pottery, a stuffed animal and a couple of succulents, candles. These books, she noticed, didn’t seem to be arranged in any order at all—not by subject, or color, or height. They were stacked and leaned in a mishmash mess that would probably make her mother’s eye twitch if she ever saw it.

Next to Alder’s couch was an enormous waxy green fern, so large that it practically swallowed the short table on which it perched. In Oak’s arms, Walnut struggled to get loose, so she bent down and set him on the floor. The kitten made a beeline for the fern and stood up on his hind legs to sniff it.

Alder’s kitten—who, Oak now realized, must be named after this plant—watched as her brother explored a bit. She looked on curiously as Walnut peered underneath the couch, as he reached for and batted at a ball of yarn that must have escaped from the basket in the front hall.

“Does your mom knit a lot?” Oak asked.

Alder shrugged and blushed red. “We both do,” he said.

“That’s pretty cool,” said Oak, and she walked farther into the house, through the kitchen (painted apple green) and into the dining room (violet). There she found more books and puzzles and stacks of papers. She counted seven coffee tins full of pennies and buttons and nails.

She stopped and stared at a portrait on the wall, a picture of a fat dark-haired baby who must have been Alder, and two grown-ups, all posed together beneath an enormous tree. “That’s your mom,” she said, pointing, “and is that your dad? I’ve never seen him around.”

“That’s because he’s dead,” Alder answered. His voice sounded pinched.

“Oh,” said Oak. She looked away from the portrait and she felt, suddenly, her eyes filling with unexpected tears. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” said Alder. He didn’t make eye contact with Oak. “He’s been dead since I was little, so I don’t really remember him.”

That didn’t, Oak thought, make it okay, but she understood that it was just a thing that people said, whether it was true or not. “I’m really sorry,” she said again, because she wanted Alder to know that she meant it.

After a moment, he looked up at her. “Thanks,” he said.

Then Oak returned to looking around, though her heart wasn’t in it anymore, and though the feeling she’d had before, of envy, was extinguished. “You have a record player,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to use one of these.” She thumbed through the records and pulled one out. Canary in a Coal Mine, it was called. The front cover was a picture of a yellow bird in a cage, but the door to the cage was swung open. “May I?” she asked.

Alder shrugged. “Sure.”

But Oak found that she wasn’t really sure how to make it work, other than sliding the record out of its case and placing it on the turntable. So Alder came over and flipped a switch, and the record began to spin. The arm lifted up and rotated over on top of the spinning record, then dropped down gently so that its needle rubbed against the record’s surface, along its tiny grooves. There was a scritch-scratch sound, and then music.

First, a harmonica—one long, high note, held for many moments, and then the tone dropped and a song began. Slowly it stretched out, each note attached to the one before and the one after, like taffy, but sadder. And then another instrument joined in. It sounded sort of like a guitar, but not quite.

“That’s a banjo,” Alder said, as if he could tell that Oak was wondering.

And then a man’s voice, singing.

Way down in the coal mine

Where all men are alone

Way down in the coal mine

Far away from home

Way down in the coal mine

Canary sings his tune

Way down in the coal mine

In the long, dry afternoon

Oak listened, and as she listened, she flipped over the record sleeve. There on the back was a photograph of the singer. He was young, with a thick dark beard and longish brown hair brushed back from his forehead. Oak felt a shock of recognition; she looked up to the portrait on the wall and then back down to the record sleeve in her hands. Then she glanced over at Alder to see if he had noticed what she had noticed, but he was staring off as if into space, listening.

Oak turned the record sleeve over again, so the picture of the bird was showing, and she said, “I like the music. It’s really good.” She set the sleeve down on the table.

Alder smiled, kind of shy. “I like it too,” he said, but that was all he said.

When the song was over, Alder flipped the little switch again so that the arm rotated up and away from the record, settling back into its rest, and the record slowed, then stopped.

“Come on,” Alder said, heading back into the living room. “I’ll introduce you to Mort.”

The kittens were entwined amid the unspooled yarn; like rays of floppy sunshine, the soft yellow loops of spun wool danced across the couch, the floor, wrapped around one leg of a chair.

Oak could imagine the fun the kittens had had, and she could picture the path they’d taken, batting the ball of unfurling color under the couch, across the floor, around the leg of the chair, and into a patch of warm sunshine where they had ended their play in a fuzzy pile of yarn and each other. Their eight orange-and-white-striped legs crisscrossed and tangled, their two sweet faces turned toward one another, and one of them, Fern or Walnut—it was impossible to tell which—softly snored.

“Whoa,” said Alder, and though that was all he said, Oak nodded. Because she felt certain that he was thinking the same thing she was thinking: look how much fun they have together.

Like it or not, she thought, for the good of the kittens, she and Alder were going to have to be friends.

“Okay,” she said. “Tell me about Mort.”

Alder pointed up to a shelf full of knickknacks and books. “He’s up there,” he said.

Oak stepped toward the bookshelf. What she had thought before was a kid’s stuffed animal she now saw was something else: a taxidermied opossum, oddly smiling as if it knew the secrets of the universe.

“What . . . ?”

“It was a present from my dad to my mom,” Alder said. He was pulling a chair closer to the bookshelf, and he scrambled onto it so he could reach the opossum. “They found it at some weird shop in Seattle, before I was born.” He grasped the opossum, gently but firmly, and held it out to Oak. “Here,” he said.

She hesitated. Honestly, Oak had no desire to touch that weird dead thing.

“It’s not really dead,” Alder said. “I mean, it is dead. But not, like, rotting.”

“Mm-hm,” said Oak, and because Alder was still holding it out to her, she took it. It was heavier than she’d expected, and not soft at all like the kittens; the fur was soft, but it was solid underneath. “I mean,” Oak said, walking over to the couch and sitting down, “it is dead. That’s its name, after all.”

“Its name?” Alder hopped down from the chair.

“Yeah,” said Oak.

Alder flinched a little, like maybe Oak’s tone made him feel like she thought he was stupid or something.

“I mean,” she started again, trying to make her voice gentler, “Mort means ‘dead.’ In French?”

“It does?” said Alder. “Huh.”

Now Oak felt bad that she’d told him.

“I always thought it was, like, short for Morty.”

“Totally.” Oak nodded.

“Except,” Alder said, more to himself than to Oak, “it makes way more sense that they named it Mort because it means ‘dead’ than because it’s short for Morty. Since it’s . . . dead.”

Alder looked deflated, like he was being forced to reevaluate something he’d always seen one way, as something else.

“Anyway,” said Oak, “it doesn’t really matter why they named him Mort, does it? What matters really is what the heck happened yesterday! There was a giant talking rat—”

“Opossum,” interjected Alder.

“A giant talking opossum,” Oak corrected, forcing herself to stay calm, “and we were in his house. A house that wasn’t there two seconds before, and a house that wasn’t there two seconds after we left.”

“Yeah,” said Alder, but he didn’t sound convinced.

“What’s the matter?” Oak said.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Alder, “maybe . . . we imagined it.”

“Imagined it together?” Oak was finding it increasingly difficult to regulate her tone.

“Yeah,” said Alder. “Doesn’t that happen sometimes? Like, maybe we were both sick with the same virus? Or maybe we were both exposed to, like, the same toxin? Maybe we ate something weird. What did you have for lunch yesterday?”

“Peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple,” Oak said. “I brought it from home.”

“Oh,” said Alder, deflated. “I had the school pizza. Cheese.”

Oak could see him struggling to come up with another explanation for what had happened, for what they had seen. She’d done the same thing, she supposed, while they were in Mort’s house; she’d thought maybe she had been struck by lightning and had fallen into a coma or something. But now they were back home, safe and sound, and it was clear they had been somewhere else. Oak was positively itching to figure out where, exactly, that was, and how they could have gotten there. Why didn’t Alder just want to admit it—they had experienced something extraordinary, something truly bizarre? Then they could try to figure out what had happened. And what might happen next.

She opened her mouth to explain all of this, to make Alder understand, but just then they heard a car turn into the driveway.

“We’ll talk about it later, okay?” said Alder. “That’s my mom. I don’t want her to know.”

At least they agreed about something. “I didn’t tell my mom either,” Oak said. “No reason for them to worry until we figure out what’s going on. For now, we can tell your mom we’re working on our school project, okay? We probably should anyway.”

Alder nodded and went to get his notebook from his backpack. “Family,” he said, flipping through the pages until he found his notes from class. He sat down on the floor, across from Oak, and rested his notebook on the coffee table. “We could start with the kittens,” he suggested. “They’re part of our families now, but they’re also related to each other.”

“And that sort of makes us family, too, doesn’t it?” said Oak. “Not in-laws, but . . . something?”

“Something,” said Alder, nodding. “It makes us something.”