American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,209

place on the other side, this elsewhere alongside our own. She said this was how She had been communicating with her.”

Kelly pauses. He takes a slow breath, in, then out. “This confused me,” he says. “I asked—communicating with who, exactly?”

For some reason Mona’s skin erupts in gooseflesh. Her heart goes cold but it pumps faster and faster and faster.

“She did not answer,” says Kelly. “But I helped Her prepare Her exit. And Mother said, all we have to do now is wait, and She turned to look into the mirror. Wait for what? I asked. What is going to happen? Mother said, Wait for her to return to me. And She would say no more, no matter what I asked.

“We waited, and waited. I grew impatient. We did not have time for this, I said. But then, to my surprise, a face appeared in the mirror. It was a very small face, a face unlike any I’d ever seen before. And it stared at us, and when it saw Mother, it said, in a language I did not then understand, ‘Oh. There you are.’ ”

Kelly looks at Mona, smiles ruefully, and scratches the side of his head. “Enter one Laura Alvarez,” he says.

“No,” says Mona.

“I’m afraid so,” says Kelly.

“No. No, that can’t be…”

“It’s the truth,” says Kelly. “You asked for the truth, and here I give it to you.”

“You’re saying my mother… she….”

“What I am saying,” says Kelly, “is that Dr. Laura Alvarez, lauded physicist and dutiful Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory employee, one day looked into the lens she’d spent a decade of her life building, and saw something looking back. This something was so remarkable, so astounding, that Dr. Alvarez stopped and stared. And then that something spoke to her, and whispered to her, and told her many things. And Dr. Alvarez listened.”

She remembers Eric Bintly’s words—She would just stare into the lens plates. With her nose about an inch away. Like she was transfixed. I caught her several times.

And a phrase she now finds even worse: I think she made a lot of changes to the lens before she left.

“My mother would never…” says Mona, but she cannot even complete the thought.

“Would never what?”

“She’d never help bring you all here,” says Mona. “She’d never work with your Mother.”

“You haven’t let me finish,” says Kelly. “My Mother had overcome many things more powerful than a thirty-five-year-old lab scientist. She was quite stronger than me, and I am quite strong in my own right.”

“So you’re… you’re saying my mother did this,” says Mona hopelessly. “She brought you here, and brought everything down on that little town.”

“Miss Mona,” says Kelly, “would you please let me finish? Allow me to say only this—Laura Alvarez never did anything of her own agency.”

“She didn’t?”

“No,” says Kelly gravely. “But, sister, to be honest… I wouldn’t take that as any consolation.”

“Why?”

Kelly begins to speak, but stops himself, troubled. Then he says, “Well. I told you that getting here is hard for us. It’s not easy to navigate across planes of reality. Especially as it was back then, when the boundaries were pretty firm. Wink wasn’t like it is now—there were no places that straddled the line, no thin parts. It was all solid.

“But Mother figured out a way. When that woman looked into the mirror, Mother… reached out to her. She could control your lens, the one on your side, if She tried, and She used it to… change her. It was something She did over time, bit by bit, dissolving that mind behind the woman’s eyes and… replacing it with something else.”

He looks at Mona, anxious, sad, like a doctor bearing terrible news. “I’m afraid Mother replaced it,” he says, “with Herself.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The ghost on that screen still watches her. Her heart still beats, her mind still flickers in its shell, her muscles tweak and twitch as they should. But she is gone.

She remembers:

It’s like there was someone else in there. In her head. Someone who wasn’t Laura at all.

And:

To be frank, the behavior of the lens can only lead me to think it was the result of external control.

But most of all Mona remembers how her mother held her on that July day back in 1981, with the sun so terribly bright and her mother’s skin so terribly soft, and how the poor woman, naked below her robe, held Mona tight and told her

I love you more than anything, but I can’t stay here, I am so sorry. I can’t stay because I