Wood Sprites

“I’ll send a driver to go get it.”

* * *

Within an hour, Fritz had been fetched from their house. In the meantime, the twins had been fed a dinner of hot oatmeal and given a hot bath. They were dressed in long white nightgowns, obviously brand-new and still warm from the dryer.

Every moment of Anna or Celine fussing at them was like sandpaper against Louise’s nerves. Finally she could take no more. She pushed Anna toward the door, crying, “We just want to be alone!”

Louise got Jillian into the bed with Nikola and fiddled with the controls she found in the headboard to close the elevator doors and raise the bed up to the loft. In the small fortress, she undid the storage lid and let Joy out.

The baby dragon whimpered in distress and cuddled against Louise’s chin.

“We’re all together,” Louise whispered the only comfort that they had. “We have each other.”

She found the light switch and turned off the lights. In the darkness, familiar stars spread across the ceiling. Strangely, some forty years earlier, Esme had painted her ceiling with glow-in-the-dark paint, a low-tech equivalent of their holographic star field.

Between the familiar constellations were words visible only to someone who knew which dots were out of place.

“Don’t give up hope.”

* * *

Louise had felt weirdly hollow, like she’d been filled nearly to bursting with burning grief and then slowly drained. The residue of unbearable pain coated her, but every thought and action now dropped into a vast, echoing pit. Jillian could not stop crying. Joy sat on the pillows and stroked Jillian’s hair. Jillian wept even in her sleep.

Nikola lay beside Louise. “What is happening? Why are we here? Why didn’t we go home?”

“Something happened to Mom and Dad.” Louise felt the words tumble through her, burning as they struck sides, to vanish into the emptiness. The darkness swallowed everything up, leaving nothing but the remembrance of pain.

“What does that mean?”

“It means they’re gone away and they’re never coming back.” Louise had been little when Grandma Johnson and Grandma Mayer had died, but it set a pattern. Each time there had been a tiny funeral, sparsely attended by Aunt Kitty and old people that Louise didn’t know. They would clean out the house, taking first the treasures. The old photographs. The family Bible. The beloved Christmas ornaments. Then there would be the mountain of unwanted things to be given away to Goodwill.

After that — nothing. No calls. No visits. No cards in the mail. A painful emptiness that at first was constantly tripped over but slowly healed to nothing.

As much as Louise wanted to go home, she dreaded it. It would be another step along the familiar road. The house would be too still. Too silent. They would gather up what they wanted, constrained by common sense, and be forced to throw out everything else. Their mother’s beloved shoes. Their father’s wine cork collection. The everyday dishes.

The house would be emptied, and then it would be gone and there would be nothing left at all of their parents.

The grief came flooding back, surging up through her throat, hot and burning, to spill out as fiery tears.

Nikola gave a raw whimper of pain. “Why do we feel so bad? What’s wrong with us? Are we going to die?”

She scrubbed away her tears and hugged him tight. “No, no, you’re just sad. You’re okay. It will go away.”

“This is sad? Sad is horrible.”

“Yes, it is.”

“How do you stop being sad?”

“You think of something happy.”

“Like being real and able to hug back? And being able to smell flowers? And eat cake?”

Louise hugged him tighter. “Yes, think of being real.”

* * *

She tried to sleep. She knew that she did a little, in that she became aware that she had been dreaming, and thus must have been asleep. Alexander haunted her dreams, pursued by monsters. At four in the morning, she gave up and cautiously lowered the bed.

“What are you doing?” Nikola whispered as she stripped off the long white nightgown and dressed in her stage ninja clothes.

“Joy is going to wake up hungry. I’m going to find her something to eat.” She pulled the pillowcase off her pillow.

“Okay.” Nikola padded to the door and waited expectantly for her. Much as Louise didn’t want to creep around the big scary house alone, she knew that there was less of a chance of her getting caught if she didn’t take Nikola. He just wasn’t built with sneaking in mind.

“Stay here,” she said.

“We want to come with you.”

“You need to stay here and keep Jillian and Joy safe.”

“Joy never listens to us. She says we’re just a dumb babies.”

“You’re not dumb.” Louise responded to the part she could positively address. “There are things about the world that you know a lot more about than she does. Like the Internet and robotics.”

“Hmm.” Nikola sounded unconvinced.

“I don’t want Jillian to be alone while she’s asleep, so please, just stay here with her.”

“Okay.”