“But that’s impossible,” my mother says, and then she relaxes against her pillow, as if it suddenly all makes sense. “This conversation isn’t happening. It’s the medication.”
“We figured out a way to get Oliver out of the book,” I tell my mother. “But it meant that someone else had to take his place: me.”
“Edgar, honey, I know this has been a really difficult day for you. There are people here you can talk to who can help—”
“He’s not crazy,” Jules interrupts. “I was inside the book with him. And Delilah’s been there too. Iknowit sounds insane. And I know every fiber of your being is telling you not to believe this. But you have to, because it’strue.”
My mother turns to me. “All right,” she says, in the tone you’d use to placate someone who’s nuts.
“I know it doesn’t make sense. Somehow we edited the story so that the book would think it needed me instead. Would think thatIwas the main character, and not Oliver. And it worked, for a little while. But the book has a mind of its own. When something’s not right, it corrects itself.”
“Well, of course,” my mother says, as if I have finally begun to speak English. “What you’re describing . . . that’s what writingis.Characters get up and walk away with a plot all the time.”
She’s not getting it. “For a few months, Oliver was pretending to be me,” I tell her, remembering what she had said earlier:I saw a boy who looked like my son . . . but who I just knewwasn’t. That was what made her go to the doctor in the first place, and even if she hadn’t been delusional—just really observant—it was also what made the doctors do the tests that found the tumor.
What if they hadn’t? Would she not even know she was sick?
Would that be better?
I push aside the thought. “Oliver is Delilah’s boyfriend,” I continue. “Me . . . I was hidden inside your story.”
My mother looks from me to Delilah to Jules, as if she can’t understand our strange conspiracy. “Edgar,” she says quietly, sadly, “there’s no such thing as fairy tales.”
A long time ago, when my mother first wrote that book, she thought otherwise. I guess life can take you to a place where you are completely different from the person you used to be.
Before I know what’s happening, Jules yanks the book out of Delilah’s arms. She flips it open to the page where Oliver is climbing the tower wall. He looks up, sees a familiar face, and smiles. “Oliver,” she says, “there’s someone who wants to say hello.”
She turns the book so it’s facing my mother. Oliver’s eyes dart up, and when he sees my mother’s face, he looks shocked but recovers quickly. He grimaces and hangs on more tightly to the rock wall, doing his job, assuming that he isn’t supposed to speak.
I lean closer to my mother so that he can see my face too. “Oliver,” I tell him, “it’s okay to talk to her.”
Very slowly, his face turns toward us. “Hello,” he says shyly. “It’s quite a pleasure to officially meet you.”
My mother’s face goes white. “This is not happening.”
“I’m sorry, should I perhaps go back to hanging on the wall?” Oliver asks. “But before I do that—might I just say, I loved playing your son, for a little while. You are an excellent mother.”
After a long silence, my mother begins to speak. “When I was still a writer, I felt like the characters were speaking to me. I could hear them so clearly in my head.”
“Maybe they were,” Delilah says. “Maybe you just never answered.”
Once, when I was little, I came home from kindergarten and my mother wasn’t waiting for the bus at the end of the driveway. Hunching over, wearing my backpack like a turtle shell, I called her name. I wanted to show her the finger painting I’d done that day and give her the macaroni necklace I’d made. But she wasn’t in the kitchen making me lunch either. I began to walk through the house, opening doors, getting more and morepanicked. What if something bad had happened to her? What if something bad was about to happen to me?
The last door I opened was the door to her office. On the walls were sketches of a pirate ship, of princesses, of castles. There was a painting on her easel of a fire-breathing dragon, and a prince staring him down, all reds and oranges that looked like the coils on the stove I wasn’t supposed to touch. My mother was sitting in her chair. Her eyes were closed, and her head was tilted back so that her face was lifted to the ceiling.
“Mom,” I said, and when she didn’t answer, I repeated it a little louder.
“Shhhh,” she whispered. “They’re talking to me.”
I looked around the room, but we were completely alone. “Who?”
At that, her eyes popped open. “The characters,” she said, and she smiled.
My mother looks at me blankly when I try to explain the concept of Easter eggs in games and videos. “It’s like when you’re watchingThe Phantom Menaceand you realize that E.T. is in the Senate with the Palpatine supporters—”
Jules interrupts. “It’s like when you put your winter coat on for the first time in months and you find twenty bucks in your pocket.”
“So, something unexpected?” my mother says.
