The Water and the Wild Read online

  Lottie stumbled backward. In the dimness, she could only just make out the outline of the girl emerging from the closet. She was approaching Lottie softly (impossibly softly!) with arms raised as though to show she was harmless. Lottie fumbled with the switch of a nearby lamp. In a snap, soft light filled the room. When Lottie’s eyes adjusted, they met a pair of blazing blue ones.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “The window,” chirped the girl.

  Lottie looked at the window that Mrs. Yates had slammed shut that morning.

  “The window’s closed.”

  “Not anymore, it isn’t,” said the girl, who walked to the window and flung it open. She turned around, leaning against the ledge and letting out a noisy yawn. “Shall we go?”

  “Get out, would you?” Lottie said, her face growing hot. “What do you mean by barging in here?” She paused and frowned. “And go where?”

  Then Lottie realized something. “Are you wearing my clothes?”

  The girl flung a scarf, Lottie’s scarf, over her shoulder with flourish. “What a silly question to ask at a time like this!”

  Lottie had had too long a day for this. She glared. “Are you going to leave on your own, or should I give you a nice shove out that window?”

  The girl clung fiercely onto the ledge. “Don’t even think about it! I’ve come here for you, Lottie Fiske, and I don’t mean to leave without you.”

  Lottie opened her mouth, then shut it, then opened it again. “How do you know my name?”

  “Oh, I know a lot more than that,” the girl said. Her eyes twinkled in a way that made Lottie want to pop her in the nose.

  “Like what, exactly?” Lottie asked instead.

  The girl tugged off Lottie’s scarf and tossed it back toward the closet. “Such an ugly shade of green,” she remarked to herself. “Like a rotten avocado.”

  Then she held out a slip of paper. “Here.”

  Lottie snatched the paper out of the girl’s hand. In familiarly bad handwriting, it read:

  This is better.

  Lottie read the note three times. Then she looked up. “You’re the letter-writer?”

  “Me?” The girl snorted. “Of course not. It’s from my father.”

  Lottie held the paper up. “What does this even mean? What’s better?”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said thoughtfully. “Me, I guess. You’re supposed to come back with me.”

  “Why,” said Lottie, “would I go anywhere with you?”

  “Look,” said the girl, taking a step closer to Lottie. “You believe in magic, don’t you?”

  Lottie did, but she did not want to say that aloud. She only admitted that to herself when she was under her green apple tree and her copper box was open. She nodded cautiously.

  “Well, what if I told you that my father, the greatest healer on the island, is making a medicine that will cure anything?”

  Lottie frowned. “That’s not magic. That’s science.”

  “I thought you said you believed in magic.”

  “I believe in magic within reason,” amended Lottie.

  “Magic within reason wouldn’t be magic,” said the girl. “Now, are you coming or not?”

  “Out the window?” asked Lottie.

  “Yes,” the girl said seriously.

  It had to be a dream, Lottie thought. She must have already passed out on her bed hours before this, only to dream up a girl in her closet with all the answers to her problems. Well! she thought, Isn’t it better? Isn’t anything better than waiting for two, maybe three weeks to go by?

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  The other girl was already out the window and balanced on one of the green apple tree’s branches.

  “I knew you’d agree,” she said. “Now, give me your hand.”

  “Hang on,” said Lottie. “I’ve got to get my coat.”

  Lottie peeled her wet, periwinkle coat off the floor. Then, because the breeze blowing through the window felt particularly chilly, she scooped up the green scarf that the other girl had discarded and shoved it in her coat pocket. She braced herself against her window ledge.

  Then the girl grabbed Lottie’s arm, and Lottie suddenly found herself sliding most uncomfortably down a tree branch.

  “I’m Adelaide, by the way,” the girl said, winging her legs down to the next branch.

  Lottie heard the dull thuds of apples hitting the ground below as the girls’ descent knocked them loose. Lottie supposed that, had anyone across the square been watching, it must have looked like a ridiculous spectacle—two girls dropping from tree branch to tree branch, the girl named Adelaide in three graceful swings and Lottie in many more clumsy ones.

  Lottie hit the damp grass with a solid pomp. A shower of apples gave their thudding applause at her successful landing.

  “Do you think Mrs. Yates heard us?” she asked.

  “Not a chance,” said Adelaide, who was rustling in the folds of her billowy skirt. “You people have atrocious hearing.”

  “Where are we going? Do you live in town?”

  “No,” said Adelaide. Then, “Well, yes.”

  The girl pulled something from her pocket. Lottie gasped. A lavender finch was perched on Adelaide’s finger. Not only that, but Adelaide was whispering something to it. The finch gave a single chirp, then fluttered up and alighted on the lowest branch of the apple tree.

  “As to where we’re going,” said Adelaide, hopping up so that both of her hands grabbed ahold of the branch where the finch had landed, “you might call it going down. Or up, depending on your perspective.”

  The branch Adelaide hung from bent reluctantly and then swung down to the ground with a terrific screech, like brittle fingernails grating against metal. What had once been the dull brown bark of the apple tree trunk now began to shine and glint like silver in the moonlight. With a great creaking shudder, the branches, leaves, even the trunk itself started to shift and shake. One moment, the apple tree looked like the dear friend that Lottie had known and loved her whole life. The next, the tree’s trunk had whorled into a splintery, human-sized opening.

  Adelaide let go of the branch, wiped her hands on her skirt, and gave a low whistle. The lavender finch flitted back to her hand.

  “What did you just do?” Lottie whispered.

  “Pulled the silver bough,” said Adelaide, as naturally as she might say that she had eaten peas for supper.

  She tucked the lavender finch into her pocket.

  “But—you can’t do that to a bird,” Lottie said stupidly.

  Adelaide looked confused. “Of course I can. Lila lives in my pocket. Doesn’t yours?”

  Yes, this must be a dream, Lottie decided. It was all pretend. Until now, all of that pretend had been neatly locked in her copper box. But her copper box was shut tight; Lottie could see it even now, winking out from under the tree roots. How had she managed to let the magic out?

  “My what?”

  If Adelaide had heard Lottie, she did not bother to reply. She pushed her aside and looked the tree over, up and down. Then she marched right up to the dark opening, motioning for Lottie to follow.

  “In we go,” she said.

  Lottie shook her head. “I’d rather not,” she said. “Trees and I aren’t on good terms right now.”

  Adelaide rounded Lottie and nudged her forward. “It’s perfectly safe. How do you think I got here?”

  Lottie wondered. It now seemed very likely to her that Adelaide had escaped from Hopewell Manor, the lunatic asylum on the mainland. Then again, Adelaide wasn’t the only one seeing doors in trees. But before Lottie could further contemplate her own sanity, Adelaide had given her a firm shove into the tree and hopped in after.

  “Wait!” Lottie cried, but Adelaide was already crowding in.

  The bark door closed in on them, and they were cast into darkness.

  “By the way,” Adelaide said, “this might hurt.”

  “What might—?”

>   There was great groan, followed by a snap. The tree shuddered. Suddenly, it felt like lead weights were pressing in on Lottie from her sides, her kneecaps, her fingertips, her toe tips, and even her ear tips.

  “What’s going on?” she choked out to Adelaide. “Make it stop!”

  The pressure grew heavier, as though Lottie were being condensed into a jar. The bridge of her nose tingled, and her ears filled up with a gauzy dullness. She was being pressed, pressed, pressed. But just when Lottie thought that her brains would be shoved down into her small intestine, the pressure stopped as quickly as it had started. There was a short silence. Then there was a rush of wind. Lottie’s wet, stringy hair whipped up on her face. Her feet left the floor of the tree—or was it a tree anymore?

  “What’s happening?!” she shrieked.

  “We’re going down, of course,” called Adelaide, who sounded perfectly calm. “The tree’s shooting us down, and then back up. Down and up.”

  “It only feels like down to me!” Lottie called back.

  It was just then that Lottie’s toes whipped up past her nose and over her face. She tumbled up into a heap on the ceiling. She tumbled down into a heap on the floor.

  Then the pressure, the wind, and the flipping stopped. A single flame, encased in a glass lantern, flickered to life above Lottie’s head. She looked around to see who had lit it, but there was only Adelaide, who was still standing, arms folded, looking quite at ease.

  “All right?” Adelaide smiled.

  “No!” said Lottie. “And I’m not going to be all right until you tell me what’s going on.”

  “I told you.” Adelaide sighed. “We went down through your world. Now we’re going up through mine.” Adelaide clasped her hands neatly in front of her. “I much prefer my half of the ride.”

  This tree-room had to be like an elevator, then, Lottie decided. A sort of underground, topsy-turvy elevator that connected the front garden of Thirsby Square to—

  “Your world?” repeated Lottie. “What do you mean, your world?”

  “You’ll see for yourself in a minute,” Adelaide said, offering Lottie a hand to help her to her feet. “Better now? I told you it might hurt. You get used to it after a while, once your body’s accustomed to root shooting.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Root shooting. Shooting through the roots. What we just did.”

  Lottie glared at Adelaide. Lottie wasn’t stupid, and she didn’t appreciate Adelaide looking at her as though she were. Still, Mrs. Yates had taught her once that politeness was the best response to rudeness.

  “I never really introduced myself,” she said, extending her hand for a shake. “I’m Lottie Fiske. But I guess you already know that.”

  Adelaide shook Lottie’s hand with mock formality.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we know.”

  The rest of the ride was silent. If Adelaide had not told Lottie that they were going up, Lottie wouldn’t have thought that she was moving in any direction at all. The “elevator,” Lottie found on closer inspection, was covered in peeling Victorian-style wallpaper. A soot-spotted mirror hung on one of the walls.

  A shuddering sound broke the silence. Then, quite suddenly, one of the elevator walls began to warp and splinter, revealing a little crack of light at its center. The crack grew larger and larger, filling the elevator with more and more bright light until suddenly the opening was big enough to walk through.

  “Now you may step out,” said Adelaide. “Go on. It just takes a little adjusting, that’s all.”

  Lottie stepped out, shading her eyes. They were indoors, and they were standing in the grandest foyer that Lottie had ever seen. The floor was made of glinting black-and-ivory-checkered marble, and to Lottie’s left, two giant fir trees—far more exciting than the fake ficus plants that Mrs. Yates kept in the boardinghouse—guarded a stone archway. The light came from a great silver chandelier that hung from a domed ceiling overhead, and that ceiling was carved in a way that reminded Lottie of a certain type of flower—an iris, she thought it was.

  A breeze was sweeping through the room, as though someone had left a window open. In the breeze sung a faint, sweet smell of garden. Lottie turned back to see where she and Adelaide had come from. There was her green apple tree, but it was horribly out of place; its branches were stuffed and spiraled inside a small closet.

  Lottie turned to Adelaide.

  “How did you stuff my apple tree in there?”

  Adelaide gave Lottie the same look she’d been giving her all this time, as though Lottie were dense. “That’s not your apple tree. It’s ours. Obviously. It’s in our closet.”

  “Who keeps a tree in their closet?”

  “Who keeps atrocious periwinkle coats in theirs?”

  Adelaide didn’t catch the scowl that Lottie gave her. She was too busy pulling the lavender finch named Lila from her pocket. The tiny creature gave a high, blithe twipper! and fluttered to a perch in one of the foyer’s great fir trees. Then Adelaide smiled smugly at Lottie.

  “Welcome,” she announced, “to Iris Gate, home of the Wilfers.”

  Only now did Lottie really look at Adelaide. The girl turned out to be quite a lot taller than Lottie was. Long, straight, acorn-colored hair framed her radish-shaped face. She had high and full cheeks, and when her front teeth slipped out from her smile, Lottie noticed that one of them was chipped.

  Adelaide tugged Lottie across the great foyer to a velvet settee outside a set of wooden doors.

  “I’ll be back,” Adelaide said, opening one of the doors. “I need to let someone know you’re here.”

  “Your dad, right?” said Lottie. “The one who can cure Eliot.”

  But Adelaide had already slipped out of the foyer.

  Lottie sat on the settee, chin propped on her knees. To her right loomed a spiraling marble staircase and to her left a wall of floor-length doors made entirely of glass. One of the doors was wide open to the night beyond, and that, Lottie guessed, was the source of the nice garden scent in the room. Just ahead of Lottie was the stone archway, which looked unsettlingly like a great big gaping mouth, opened wide to devour the rest of the room, herself included. She shivered and hoped that Adelaide would hurry up.

  When Lottie leaned back, she discovered that a row of portraits hung on the wall, circling her with a host of somber, oil-painted faces. When she set eyes on the picture just above her, Lottie jumped out of her seat. A portly man with finely combed whiskers and unforgiving black eyes glowered down at her. He gave Lottie a distinct impression of black licorice. Underneath his pair of grotesque buckled shoes read the name Quincy Francis Eugene Wilfer. Lottie cracked a smile. With a name like that, the painted man was not half so frightening. Lottie made an equally ferocious face up at Mr. Quincy Francis Eugene Wilfer to see what he would do about it.

  “It’s a nice collection, isn’t it?”

  Lottie whirled around, a snarling expression still stuck on her face. A boy stood before her wearing the most curious of expressions himself. He looked somewhat shy and somewhat sly, and he had bright, blazing blue eyes. One of the boy’s arms was bandaged up from wrist to elbow, and that curious face of his was badly bruised along the right cheekbone. His voice was familiar, though clearer now than the last time Lottie had heard it. She sank back onto the settee, blushing. This was the injured boy from the break room of the Flying Squirrel. Lottie was sure of it.

  “You’re Adelaide’s brother,” Lottie guessed. “You’ve got the same eyes.”

  But the moment she said it, Lottie realized that she had been wrong. The boy’s eyes weren’t blue at all. They were—yellow? Yes! A dirty yellow, the color of honey mustard.

  “Your eyes,” Lottie began. “Weren’t they just—”

  But the boy interrupted.

  “I’m Oliver,” he said. “Oliver Wilfer.”

  “How d’you do?” said Lottie, offering her hand to him.

  Rather than take it, Oliver squinted, and Lottie was sure of it this time: t
he boy’s eyes were changing colors. Now they were neither blue nor yellow, but a dull gray—just a shade deeper than her own.

  “Do you mind if I join you?” the boy asked, nodding toward the settee.

  “Yes. No! I mean no, I don’t mind.” Lottie’s blush grew deeper.

  Oliver sat down cautiously on the very edge of the settee, his peculiar eyes never leaving Lottie.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m Lottie,” she said hurriedly, in place of an answer.

  She was busy wondering just how hideous that Quincy Francis Eugene Wilfer impression of hers had been. Mrs. Yates had taught her that first impressions were everything, and now she was afraid that this Oliver boy was going to forever think of her with crossed eyes and a flipped lower lip.

  “Oh, I know who you are,” said Oliver. “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, and true plain hearts do in the faces rest.”

  “Beg your pardon?” Lottie sputtered. It sounded like the boy had switched, midsentence, into a foreign language.

  “It’s poetry,” Oliver said matter-of-factly.

  Lottie did not know how to respond to that, so she tried another question.

  “Where are we?”

  Oliver frowned and scratched his ear. “Where do you think we are?”

  “In a dream,” Lottie said. “Or maybe . . . maybe I’m dead. Maybe the tree killed me after all.”

  “The apple tree didn’t kill you.”

  “How do you know?” said Lottie, looking up at Oliver, whose face had grown slyer.

  Rather than answer, he pointed to the row of glass doors.

  “If you’d like to know where you are, why not take a look?”

  Lottie got up, and Oliver followed her to the open door. The scent of flowers grew stronger on the night air, and so did new smells of pine, of smoke, and of fresh-fallen water. She was standing on a terrace in the middle of a dim garden full of irises. Oliver pointed Lottie’s gaze to a higher point, beyond the garden. She peered into the light of the half moon, and slowly images came into focus: rows of cobblestone streets, wooden roofs, and flickers of lamplight; and towering over all of these things were trees, hundreds and hundreds of trees. Lottie had never seen so many trees in one place except in pictures from her geography textbook about places like the Black Forest and the Cascade Mountains.