Free Farthest House by Margaret Lukas Page B

its long, long chain, normally a magical spray of light and color, hung solemn and dark.
    She toed one rubber boot and then the other. With her wet boots off, she headed up the stairs. A mitten landed on one stair, the second mitten on another, and her coat at the top. She knew Mable “preferred” the coat be hung in the closet by the front door, “fitting for the poor rabbit skinned just for a child’s coat collar.” But Mable never really got angry.
    The upstairs didn’t make a clock. Two large bedrooms ran straight along the right side of the hall, then a large walk-in closet for linens and storage of every sort, followed by Tory’s room at the far end. The left side of the hall had only two bedrooms, Mémé’s, and then a long railing Willow loved to look over, spying on people in the foyer below. There she could also get a closer look at the chandelier and the colors when light struck the prisms. The last bedroom on the left was directly across from Tory’s. Willow slept on Mémé’s end of the long hall, their rooms directly across. Tossing her Jeannie bag at the door of her room, she kept hold of her pictures and hurried to Mémé’s door.
    Her grandmother lay in bed across the dim room, the blankets drawn to her chin, her cheeks and lips chalk colored. Her eyes looked ringed in purple, but they were open. “I was worried,” her words a whisper.
    “How come you’re in bed?”
    Friar lay stretched out alongside Luessy. He rolled his eyes in Willow’s direction when she approached, but he didn’t lift his head or wag his tail. “Why is Friar sad?” When her grandmother didn’t answer, Willow looked away and around the room for reassurance. On the bedside table, though they added little illumination to the room made gray by the December late-afternoon light and the storm, a dozen tapers and pillars burned in various sizes and shapes on silver candlesticks. Each shiny stick reflected a hundred tiny flames, so that they seemed to burn, too. Willow’s older drawings still hung on the oak-paneled wall, and the small door to the attic, which even Mémé had to duck to enter, was just ajar, the way Mémé liked, as if someone might come down, or she, dreaming, might want to float up. The crocheted bedspread named “Mother Moses” lay over the back of the rose-colored bedside chair. Except for Friar not jumping up to lick Willow’s face and Mémé being in bed, everything looked the same. She felt the difference then, and her eyes ran over the room again. Others were there. Mémé had company neither of them could see. Willow could almost count them, five, no six. She didn’t question how they’d come from their world to hers. They simply had.
    I felt Thomas’s presence and Sabine’s. I ached to be at the reunion of Sabine and Luessy, but I couldn’t be. Though we all inhabited the same space, they were as distanced from me as they were from Willow. I’d entered a labyrinth and shut down my focus to the pinpoint of Willow’s life. They were there for Luessy, to walk her across. I prayed Sabine felt my desire to undo my mistakes and that Thomas watched me and smiled at my journey.
    Luessy’s lips moved so slowly into a smile that they seemed to drift back from her teeth. “I knew it was time for you.”
    The heavy clouds, the snow, and the winter hour meant there were no shadows moving on the walls or on the floor. Willow marveled; Mémé never wore a watch or checked a clock. Shadows and their motion told her the time, and she could read their minute hands.
    Wanting to keep her drawings a secret until later, because secrets were a full thing she liked to hold in her belly, Willow carried them to Luessy’s desk. She stopped at seeing the top cleared of everything but a few loose pages of poems: Mémé’s favorites, which the two of them had read so many times they’d fallen free of their book binding. “Where are your stories?”
    “I’ve written them,” Luessy breathed. “Someone else must