The baby floats along, asleep on the inflatable raft Avie is slowly tugging through the water.
"You cannot keep it."
Marcella's feet dangle over the edge of the pool's shallow end, veiny legs submerged nearly to her knees.
"Her, Marcella. I can't keep her."
Avie pulls the raft close, gazing at the sleeping girl's tiny hands. "And I know".
The baby's makeshift cradle bobs up and down as Marcella swishes her feet back and forth. "You think keeping her close means you love her
..." She eyes Avie with a look that could very well be one of frustration or pity or both. "And that you loved him"
Her voice is gruff from twenty years of works as a Caller, securing the Fold surrounding their reality with a litany of incomprehensible equations uttered each and every morning.
She had taken her job seriously, believing aggressors from other realms threatened their own. "This is dangerous. It-------she is a beautiful curse Avie, and you must know that most folks dont see the beautiful part the way you do."
"Do you? *
Marcella snorts and lifts her legs out of the water." I wouldn't have said it if I didn't. "
The baby begins to stir. Avie picks her up and strides through the water, giving her into the arms of the older womans as the ancients once offered their first-born to the gods.
"Then help me save her, Marcella. Please. You know more about these tings that anyone. Its because of you..." There's no need to continue that thought out loud. They both know what she is reffering to. And that she is right.
After Avie's mother died, her father remarried just in time to suffer to misfortune of dying himself. This left twelve year- old Avie in the care of her new stepmother a women whose idea of dealing with the girl's unconcealed rage was to leave the room. Marcella had been married merely five weeks when her husband
took ill amd died:with so little natural attachment to her stepchild, few doubted she'd rid herself of Avie as soon as possible.
Avie could have ended up at a welfare center, looked after by some random member of CompassionCorp, but Marcella had surprised everyone, refusing to give the girl up no matter what. She had made an oath, the neighbors speculated, attending her husband in his final moments and promising him to care for his daughter. What other reason could there be.?
Marcella chose to keep Avie with her and yet still Avie felt she didn't belong with her stepmother - - - that she didn't in fact belong anywhere
because in her mind people needed to be wherever there was someone to love them. She wasn't sure where that would be but it certainly wasn't here.
A year of despair passed them by. Each day was an ordeal to be overcome, but when Avie counted them up, she could scarcely believe she'd lived so many sunrises since her father's sun had set for that last time. Marcella tried to be a mother to Avie, but she was a hard women who struggled to display any emotions, much less the kindness and sympathy Avie required.
Simply put, Marcella was failing Avie,amd no wonder . She had given up her job as a caller when Avie became her charge, but she had certainly not ceased her realm research even thought all such work beyond the confines of the caller Agency was strictly forbidden. In fact,
if anything, closeted away together in their tiny yellow cottage, she became more obsessed with it. She would disappear into her back room for hours and hours to work on her mysterious formulas, leaving Avie to her own devices, and in those days, such devices usually encompassed a dark trifecta of wallowing, pining and bitterness.
Avie, currently in wallowing mode, was scraping food off of a cook pot when Marcella came running out of her room, eyes lit with an excitement Avie had never seen before, not even on the day she had married Avie's father.
"It can be done"!
She gathered what seemed to Avie to be a random assortment of things-----a hairbrush, matches, a protein bar, and shoved them into her handbag. "I 've figured out how"
Avie, hands frozen in mind scrape. Squinted her eyes at her stepmother.
"How what?"
"the glue can be undone, the layers can be peeled apart. I' ve found the Fold"!
Avie began scrubbing again. "That's just great,Marcella."
Marcella tossed her bag onto the couch and came over to Avie, grabbing her by the shoulders. I've found a way to move through to other realms. Well, to the Dual Realm, at least. "
Avie shrugged the woman off. That's impossible. Plus it's illegal if it wasn't possible. She raised an eyebrow at Avie." Well? "
" Well, I still don't believe you"
Marcella leaned over, putting her hands on her knees as though she was talking to a small child. "Do you think Im crazy then"?
"No I know you're crazy." She turned back towards the sink "Just like I know Im stuck with you."
Marcella laughed." You are the opposite of stuck now. "
This is how it happens that they cross over into the Dual Realm for the first time.
Naturally, Avie Dosen't believe that's what's happening when Marcella,
standing in the overgrown jungle of their backyard, recites number after number, tracing strange patterns in the air with her fingers ; she still doesn't believe that's what's happening when the air shifts around them and a film of milky white, so thin ast be nearly invisible, forms in front of them ;she still doubts it when Marcella reaches her hand throught the white slip, that hand disappearing entirely where it penetrates the Fold.
When Marcella tucks her second hand within the Fold and tugs until a gap has formed, Avie Dosen't know what to think, When Marcella steps through, twisting her body sideways and stretching her hand out in order to grasp Avie's Avie is too shocked to think anything at all.
Then Avie steps through herself. Her hesitation overriden by intense curiosity.
The Fold is a distortion. Their passage through it cannot be counted in seconds or minutes or liftimes. Sunlight greets them on the other side and it is this light that makes her believe. The proof of what they have done is in the crisp autumn air and a sun angled lower in the sky then the one she'd felt on her shoulders before entering the Fold.
Now Avie knows the most impossible has been made possible. For the first time in a long time, she feels as though she's exactly where she needs to be.
