The Door

Chapter Fifteen

In my eagerness to host the otherworldly beings, I had forgotten how unfriendly they could be.

The next morning, the Woli left without breakfast, and the Komandi filled two satchels with homemade bread and bagels before departing. No one spoke or thanked my mom for the homemade food or even said farewell. I had never really liked the Komandi, but this wasn't in line with my interactions with the Woli. Often guarded, the Amazonian warrior women had seemed curious about me when we crossed paths before, if not open and somewhat friendly.

My mom and I watched them walk down the driveway and disappear once they reached the road. I sneaked a glance at her, wondering what was going through her mind. She wore the same expression of shock she gave me last night when I initially explained everything to her. I almost sighed. It was nice to know I wasn't the only one who found all this incredibly weird. The Caretaker had brushed off my shock and awe, or flat out denied anything was happening, and acted like I was an idiot.

Seeing my mom's reaction was a form of vindication to the dead Caretaker. I wasn't the weird one here – she had been.

Uncertain whether to be disappointed or satisfied by my first encounters as an official Caretaker, I stared into space until the chilly, rainy morning made me shiver. Neither Woli nor Komandis left me with warm fuzzies about whether or not I was doing this the right way. My former Caretaker had spent every evening talking to her visitors, sometimes for hours, and these guys had been abrupt and uninterested in socializing at all.

Was I missing something? Supposed to do something differently?

"I didn't think the desert got cold," my mom said. "Come inside, Gi."

I trailed her into the house. We lingered in the foyer, and I closed the door behind us.

"So this is what you did before you disappeared?" my mom asked. "Dealt with unfriendly aliens?" She had begun to decorate for Christmas and paused to straighten a faux pine garland that had shifted when a gust of wind came through the open door.

"Mostly. Some of them are nice but they have, like, wars or something going on, so they can be kind of abrupt," I replied.

"Wars against monsters," she repeated skeptically from our discussion last night.

I nodded, my cheeks warm. I knew how crazy it sounded, but it was the truth as I understood it. I'd told her everything I could recall, except ... well, I only spoke about Teyan in passing. I was afraid to feed any sort of emotion about a man who probably didn't remember me after so long. I didn't want her asking me about him when the thought of him caused my pulse to race and simultaneously confused me.

The rest of the universe had moved on, but I couldn't. It was even harder to cope with what had happened whenever I thought of him and what might have been, had we followed a normal progression of time.

"French toast?" my mom asked.

"Sure," I said.

I pulled out the journal I bought during our latest run to town and made a note of the time. I'd jotted down the tiny bits of information I'd learned last night from the visitors, adding it to the initial notes I made about my first few weeks here. I was determined to figure out everything I possibly could about their worlds, and my duty, in place of a manual or guidance from Carey or another Caretaker.

When I was done, I tucked it away in my back pocket and went to the kitchen.

The day passed much as the previous one had, with morning chores and time spent in the garden harvesting fruits and vegetables and weeding.