From across the garden, she heard Jack call, “Calisa?”
To the statue, she said, “Thank you. You’ve been really helpful. If you need anything…” She wasn’t certain how tocomplete that sentence. “Well, I’ll, um, come talk with you again, if you don’t mind.”
Calisa trotted across the unmowed lawn toward Jack, who was frowning at her. “I should have said this before,” Jack said, “but really important: you shouldn’t go through any of the portals. If you’re tempted.”
She thought of the two worlds she’d already stepped foot in. She’d barely seen either of them. She wanted to explore, to see what else was out there. What other realms were hidden within guest rooms? Or through broom closets? She thought of the linen closet in the bathroom where she’d found Steve—could the lizard have come through a portal? He wasn’t like any ordinary Vermont lizard. He could have come from…elsewhere. “Why not?”
“You go through a portal without Auntie Zee’s okay, she’ll fire you. She’ll fire me.”
“But why?”
“She thinks…it’s not safe. My dad…” Jack paused, swallowed. “He went through one to look for a way to help the inn. He…hasn’t come back.”
“You said…”
“I said he went for supplies for the inn,” Jack said. “That wasn’t a lie, or not entirely a lie. I simply didn’t saywherehe went. I don’t even know where he went. He didn’t tell me. Just that he was going through a door, and he’d be back soon.”
She had the sudden urge to wrap her arms around him. He looked as if he were about to crumble. “What about Auntie Zee? Can’t she tell you where he is? Can’t she go get him?”Maybe she couldn’t ask Auntie Zee questions, but Jack had known her aunt for years, possibly his whole life.
“She says…some of the doors don’t work anymore. She can’t open them again.”
Gazing at the three-story inn with myriad guest rooms and bathrooms and clothes closets and supply closets and linen closets, she wondered how many portals were inside it—and how many had failed. Calisa thought of her guest room with the red X—a room with a broken door? Was that what the X meant?
He continued. “That’s what Dad was trying to fix. He was looking for something that would fix the problem with the broken portals. After he went through…that door quit working too. It won’t reopen, at least not as a portal.”
“But…” What was he saying? Was his dadgone? Permanently?
Could that have happened to me?
“Isn’t Auntie Zee doing anything to try to get him back?” Calisa asked.
“She’s tried,” Jack said. “She’s still trying.”
Calisa looked at the inn again, at the weeds and brambles that surrounded it, at the broken shingles and occasional boarded-up window. The condition of the bed-and-breakfast…It was too dilapidated for it to have been a few weeks, as he’d originally implied. There was too much neglect here.
Softly, she asked, “How long has your father been gone?”
“Three years,” Jack said.
Chapter Thirteen
Calisa wanted to reach out and hug him. The way he said “three years”—she could hear every morning and every night of a boy waiting for his sole parent to come home, every question that went unanswered, every explanation that wasn’t enough. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged.
It was the kind of shrug when you don’t trust yourself to speak. She wished there were more she could say or do. “How can I help?” she asked.
“You can’t,” he said. “Not unless you can fix whatever’s wrong with the inn. And you didn’t even know there was anything special about this place until, like, ten minutes ago.”
Ouch, but true. “But whatiswrong with it?”
He shrugged again, and this time it was the kind of shrug that said you were so frustrated that if you didn’t shrug, you’d explode. “It’s falling apart. You can see that for yourself. Everybit of it. And that includes the portals. It used to be that the inn was full of guests all the time, every room booked. You never knew who or what you’d meet. Once there was a man with a three-headed dog—I played fetch with that dog for hours. Another summer, we had a woman who floated six inches above the ground.”
She wished she could have seen that. “They don’t come anymore?”
He shook his head. “It’s not just the portals shutting down, though that’s the worst and largest problem. It’s the place itself. No one wants to come to an inn with a leaky roof and temperamental plumbing and hit-or-miss breakfasts. Dad says that this place used to be fit for royalty. And now look at it.”
Looking at the inn, Calisa tried to imagine it: if the brambles were cleared, if the outside were painted, if the broken windows were fixed, if it didn’t look as if it had been abandoned a decade ago and was now home to a family of feral raccoons, could it be fit for royalty again?
