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“Someone should help that woman,” Jane mutters to herself. It’s funny the way crazy people can cause you to start losing your own grasp on reality. Stunning, really, the things Jane had almost begun to believe. It’s so nice to be back in her morning room, surrounded by familiar things, with Jasper, a completely normal basset hound of Earth, snoozing under the bed in the other room. How wonderful to be making a deadly boring black umbrella. Her fingers move smoothly through her collection of runners.
Tu Reviens is making noises around her, pulling her out of herself. “Is someone shouting?” Jane says aloud, because it’s hard to distinguish the house’s moans, watery hums, and breaths of heat from other kinds of noises, and she thinks she might hear someone shouting.
When the shouting gets closer and resolves itself into Ravi’s voice, raised in anger, Jane goes to her gold-tiled bathroom, rifles through her toiletries, and unearths a pair of earplugs.
In her new, underwater sort of silence, Jane chooses a runner for the umbrella’s shaft. She threads ribs onto tying wire; she slices and sews gores together. It’s slow, focused work.
It should be meditative work, but Jane’s mind keeps spinning off. Had Aunt Magnolia ever stood in a boat, looking down at a deep, cold, unexplored stretch of ocean, and been terrified? Had she ever stood there, wrestling with herself over whether to stay in the boat or drop herself in?
As far as Jane knows, Aunt Magnolia had always eventually decided to drop herself in. Face what scared her and open herself to whatever she might learn.
Why not try, Janie?
Dammit, Jane thinks to herself, dropping her unfinished umbrella on the worktable. She covers her face with her hands and thinks to herself repeatedly, Dammit. She grips the table. When her fingertips find a rough patch, she opens her eyes to the discovery of a carving, a blue whale and its calf. Next, along the top edge of the table, she finds a carving of a peaceful whale shark and its babies. Ivy must’ve made this strong, beautiful table.
Jane takes a jellyfish breath.
Aunt Magnolia? Is this why you wanted me to come to this house? Is this what you wanted me to try?
Removing her earplugs and choosing two umbrellas, Jane leaves her rooms.
* * *
Ravi is in the corridor, headed in her direction. His face is stormy. “Where are you going?” he asks in an accusatory tone.
“I haven’t decided,” Jane says, which is true.
“Really?” says Ravi, his voice milder. He stops before her, too close again. Her body responds, moving until her back is to the wall and Ravi is almost up against her. He’s so close that she has to bend her head back a little to see into his face.
“Ravi,” Jane says, uncertain what’s happening, and alarmed. “What are you doing?”
He brings his mouth near to hers. Then, slowly, he takes her upper lip between his lips, lightly. Her breath catches; her lips part. His skin is scratchy, his mouth curious and insistent, and her mouth responds. His hands are on her, his body pressing her against the wall. She wants Ravi to press harder and fix her to the earth, and this terrifies her, because she knows, Jane knows, that Ravi is not someone she should do this with. It might be casual for him, but it would not be casual for her.
Maybe her hands are more intelligent than the rest of her body, or maybe the intelligence is in her umbrellas. Jane wedges both of them between her body and Ravi’s and pushes him off.
He backs away, unprotesting. He tilts his head, studying her face. “Okay,” he says. “Are you angry at me?”
“No,” she says. “But please don’t do it again.”
“All right,” he says. “I won’t.” He’s speaking plainly, sincerely. But if he’s the kind of person who understands so easily, then is she so sure she doesn’t want him to kiss her again? A feeling touches Jane, a feather touch. What is it? Resentment? No. Envy. Jane wishes she could be that casual about kissing, about sex. She thinks it must be nice to have kissed so much that it’s no big deal. As she continues down the hall, she hears his door shutting.
It strikes her as funny, what she’s just said no to, considering what she’s willingly walking toward.
Then Jane sees the figure up ahead, standing at the top of the corridor near the courtyard, watching her. It’s Ivy. Ivy is standing there in her ratty blue sweater, a daffodil behind her ear, tall and still, as if she’s been standing there watching for some time. Ivy saw the kiss.
What had it looked like to her?
Ivy pushes her glasses higher on her face, then raises a hand in greeting. It’s a friendly gesture. It tips Jane’s panic into immediate relief, then, just as quickly, into despair. Doesn’t Ivy care that Jane was just kissing Ravi? Is it completely irrelevant to her?
Jane’s own hands are again behaving intelligently, one hand passing its umbrella to the other, then raising itself in response. Jane hopes Ivy can’t read her face, because she has no idea what expression she’s wearing. When Ivy turns and walks out of sight, Jane stands there for a moment, wondering how a tiny, earthbound thing like the question of whom to kiss can possibly be as confusing as transdimensional velociraptors.
* * *
The first Mrs. Thrash responds to the bellpull so quickly that Jane wonders if she’s been waiting for her inside the door. Mrs. Thrash peeks surreptitiously up and down the hall, then says, “Come up, Janie dear, come up.”
Jane’s black umbrella is still uncompleted, the canopy unfixed to the ribs, flapping around like the robes of an absentminded professor in a high wind. It’s missing its finishings too, like the curved handle and the metal tips. Nonetheless, the first Mrs. Thrash is appreciative. “The elegance radiates,” she says. “I can see that it will be as graceful as a clean transdimensional jump.”
Jane grunts a skeptical thanks to this.
She’s brought the brown-copper-rose satin too, the one she used yesterday on the yacht to make herself feel better, the heroic-journey umbrella, just to keep from feeling misrepresented by her own work. “I don’t usually make plain black umbrellas,” she says. “But you inspired me to try something that’d be appropriate in multiple dimensions.” She adds, cautiously, “Metaphorically speaking, of course,” because while it’s true that she’s brought herself here, it doesn’t mean she’s decided anything.
“An honorable objective,” says the first Mrs. Thrash. “Come up and visit the velociraptors. They’re very fond of you.”
As Jane climbs the stairs to the next level, she thinks of Jasper longingly, Jasper, the plain old dog, who she now remembers is sleeping under the bed in her rooms. “I need to get back soon,” she says. “The dog is closed in my rooms.”
“I understand,” says the first Mrs. Thrash.
The red trapdoor in the ceiling is ajar. Its many locks line the edges of the opening like teeth in the square mouth of a living house.
“Of course,” the first Mrs. Thrash adds, “there’s no rain in UD17.”
“What?” Jane says. “Rain?”
“They don’t have umbrellas,” she says. “But every invention is likely to find some use there, especially anything that might be classed as historical costume. Imagination and fashion are both valued in UD17.”
“No kidding,” Jane says, wishing someone, anyone, were here to share incredulous glances with. “Why is there no rain?”
“Because there’s no planet,” says the first Mrs. Thrash. “After the UD17 earthlings lost their Earth, they fled to the edges of their solar system and built a huge number of ships and space stations, arranged in a sphere, to mimic Earth’s surface, but much smaller, of course. It’s like an empty eggshell, or a beach ball—nothing in the middle. Some of the space stations are truly gargantuan—Mexico City, Beijing, Los Angeles, Bombay—but even they aren’t large enough to have much in the way of atmospheric phenomena. Anyway, water reclamation is far too important for them to indulge in the whimsy of l
etting it rain.”
“Lost their Earth?” Jane says. “How did that happen?”
“Alien attack,” she says, her attention still on the umbrellas, which she’s opening and closing in succession, admiring the smoothness of their operation and their fine, sharp ferrules. “The planet was blown apart. Hadn’t I mentioned the alien invasion?”
“Sure,” Jane says.
“Consequently,” she says, “when you cross through the portal into my counterpart’s tower on the Tu Reviens of UD17, you find yourself aboard a cleverly representational spaceship-castle on its own island dock.”
“Uh-huh.” Then Jane understands. “The house is a ship, in danger of being boarded by pirates.”
The first Mrs. Thrash’s face grows grim. “So very worrisome,” she says. “We simply cannot have criminals doing what they like with the portals. What sort of havoc will ensue?” Then she peers at Jane with an intent expression that makes Jane nervous. “I don’t suppose you have any experience with pirates?”
“None whatsoever,” Jane says firmly.
“You might distract them,” she says, handing the umbrellas back abruptly. “You’re young, but you’re rather intriguing, with your umbrella-making and all. Funny I haven’t run across your counterpart in any other Tu Reviens, isn’t it? We could use you to create a distraction somehow, while UD17 Ravi and UD17 I rough the pirates up a bit.”
This is patently absurd, even for a delusion. “And how is UD17 you at roughing people up?”
“You’re right, of course,” says the first Mrs. Thrash with an enormous, gloomy sigh. “It’s an appalling plan. I’m no good at fisticuffs. I like an antagonist I can verbally manipulate or trick into performing my will, or, as a final resort, jab with a bit of live electrical wire. Here, come up and see the portal, it’ll help you stop presuming I’m crazy.”
“I don’t presume you’re crazy,” Jane protests with rising panic as the first Mrs. Thrash herds her toward the staircase to the level above. It’s like the woman can shove people along with the force of her will. Jane is halfway up before she realizes she’s acquiesced.
“It’s very sweet of you to say so, Janie dear,” says the first Mrs. Thrash. “The pirates fly these tiny little ships, you see. They’re much stealthier than the chappies in Treasure Island. They can dock themselves on the roofs and walls of the house. If they’re determined enough, and if the house is in a mild enough mood, the pirates will board.”
“I see,” Jane says as she passes through the red trapdoor in the ceiling. “The house has moods, does it?”
The room beyond is empty of furnishings and decoration. There’s not even a rug or a folding chair. Jane steps in cautiously, then sidles toward the wall. For some reason, the emptiness of the room makes her jumpy. Wouldn’t a delusional woman with an imaginary transdimensional portal have something set up in this room, some sort of silver capsule with seats and a steering wheel, and a sign on it that says CAUTION: TRANSDIMENSIONAL PORTAL?
