31
The sight of the little stone house with the slate roof, in the shadows of the breeze-stirred palms, filled Amity with nothing less than joy, really and truly. Her heart seemed to swell, and she felt impossibly light, like a helium-filled balloon, as if her feet were barely touching the ground, as if instead she were gliding up the flagstone walkway.
There wasn’t a Daddy Doppelgänger mowing the lawn. Birds sat on the fence, singing as if to welcome her, and a cute little lizard skittered up the walkway, leading her home.
Inside, she rushed to her room. It wasn’t empty, as it had been on Earth 1.13. Her furniture stood where it belonged. Anime posters. Yellow walls and white ceiling, instead of everything dreary beige. In this world, she had been born and lived, and a snotty boy named Rudy Starkman—in a uniform for wannabe fascists or communists or whatever—had never existed.
She extracted Snowball from her pocket and took him to his enormous cage. Safe within that wire fortress, he scampered to his water dish, took a drink, pooped in a corner where he usually left his little pellets, and then went to his exercise wheel. He ran like a maniac, his face squinched up strangely, more intense than usual, as if he might be stressed out and trying to find his bliss again.
Of course Snowball’s brain was too tiny for him to have a clue that he had been to another world and back. Nevertheless, he might be somewhat psychic and aware of the extreme emotional chaos that Amity had endured. Animals often seemed to have a sixth sense, or maybe it was just instinct.
“I won’t put you through that again,” she promised the furry white marathone
r. “But just remember, you’re the one who activated the key to everything and parked your bottom on the Return button.”
As she stepped out of her room, she was skewered by a needle of paranoia, suddenly certain that Good Boy waited in the hallway for her. She didn’t have hackles, not like dogs did, but the nape of her neck prickled; and if she’d been equipped with hackles, they would have been standing up straight and stiff.
She knew Good Boy was dead. Daddy had said so. Evidently, she was suffering post-traumatic stress. She would probably be looking for bogeymen under the bed for weeks and weeks.
Not that she would let her father know she was still spooked. Mother—Michelle—had been afraid of losing her identity, destiny, dreams, or something, and she had run out on her husband and child. Amity was never going to run from anything, unless it had big teeth and there was murder in its eyes. She didn’t want her father to entertain the slightest doubt about her.
She heard him in the kitchen and went to see what he might be doing. He was sitting at the breakfast table with Ed Harkenbach’s book and a bottle of beer.
The key to everything lay on the table.
Indicating her father’s Heineken, Amity said, “I’ll have one, too.”
“Yeah, okay, as long as the word Coke is on the label.”
She retrieved a can of the parent-approved beverage from the refrigerator and sat at the table. “Why’re you reading that?”
“To find answers to some questions, if there are any answers.”
“Like what questions?”
“The key doesn’t have a charging port. There must be a battery, but there’s nothing that opens so you can replace it. What happens if you’re on some other world and this gismo goes dead?”
“Keep reading. Maybe the book tells you.”
“Well, it’s not a book about the key to everything. It doesn’t have diagrams. Ed hadn’t invented the damn thing when he wrote it. This is all about theory. I have to take the theory and extrapolate from it, think how it might be practically applied, and the strain is giving me a migraine.”
After a hesitation, she said, “Are we going to use the key again?”
He frowned. “No. No, no. Too dangerous.”
“But just maybe we will.”
“Never.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Then why do you need to know about the battery?”
“Just in case.”
“In case what?”