FICTION

The children’s hospital is a ghost town at night. The daylight people – the receptionists, the administrators, the gift shop cashiers, the people who fix the vending machines – they all go home. But the rest of us. We have to stay. We can’t go home because our babies are hooked up to monitors and IVs. Home feels far away. Farther than eighty-four miles.

We’re the nighttime people. We walk the halls and we battle the ghosts.

My shoes squeak too loud. The night nurses talk too cheerfully. The machines beep too fast. This is the noise of battle.

Two of us get on the elevator together. Strangers but somehow familiar, two mothers, fellow warriors, fellow soldiers, both of us wearing signs of fighting under our puffy eyes and in our shaking fingers. We don’t speak. We’ll speak later, when the ghosts have been pushed back once again.

As we step off the elevator, the garish, too-bright light of the long hallway greets us. We don’t flinch. We’ve faced this hallway before. We know these ghosts.

The ghost of Fatigue comes first, limping around the corner, moaning at us, but my comrade straightens her back, stretches her muscles, and swats it away with a swift backhand. The ghost of Boredom follows, wailing monotonously. I hit it with my purse. There’s a heavy book in there. The ghost of Boredom explodes all over the hallway and disappears.

The ghosts of Stress and Overwhelm are harder to fight. We kick and punch and scribble notes on paper and set alarms and make lists and count pills and throttle and grapple until those ghosts fade away too.

We look at each other. We know who’s next. In a videogame, this would be the final boss. This one we can’t beat and we know it. But we can stave it off for one more night. We nod to each other and face forward.

The ghost of Fear drops, screaming, from the ceiling. We don’t strike or hit or kick. That’s useless with this one. The other mom reaches for my hand and we hold on tight as he pummels us with every terrifying sentence he can. You’re not strong enough. You can’t handle this. This is what the rest of your life is going to be. Things will never be normal again. You’re going home with tubes and machines. And then the one we can’t handle. You’re going home without your child.

We roar and charge forward, shove him away, push right through him, and march on down the hallway. He recedes and dissipates and we let go of each other. We fought him off. One more time. One more night. We’ll do it again tomorrow.

We turn the corner and I hold open the door to the twenty-four hour store for her. She buys a cold brew coffee and I get a protein shake.

“Doin’ okay?” she asks.

“Hanging in there,” I answer and hand the night cashier my money.

Henry Tilney bought the derelict old brick house on Fourth Street because it was the only thing that had reminded him of home in the three years he’d been here. Here, in the twenty-first century. He was pretty sure he had what these people called clinical depression. The electric lights, the impossibly fast vehicles, the little talking devices in everyone’s pocket, the absurd obsession with speed—it all made him weary and doleful. He wanted horses, grass, and quiet.

And Catherine, but that was impossible.

Working on the house was the first real joy he felt since landing in this time period. The library, wrapped floor to ceiling in shining wood planks and lined with empty shelving on every side, nearly made him cry with homesickness. Fortunately, a light fixture fell from the ceiling at that exact moment and shattered his sentimentality.

He threw himself into the renovations, hiding his inexperience with power tools behind a desire to do things “the old-fashioned way.” That turned out to be a blessing because it put him in touch with Brendan, who’d been teaching himself joinery and sashimono and all manner of unusual construction techniques.

They became friends, and between the two of them, began returning the brown three-story beauty to her former glory. One evening, while working in the long, narrow dining room, Henry let Catherine’s name slip.

“I think we should go with a dark stain. Give it a bit of a Gothic feel. Catherine would like that.”

Brendan lowered the sanding block. “Whoa, dude. Who’s Catherine? You’ve never even mentioned her.”

“She’s my—” He paused for so long that Brendan started grinning.

“Still need to define the relationship, huh?”

“She was my fiancé,” he said finally. “She’s gone now.”

“Gone, like, she died?”

He gave a short nod.

“Oh man. Oh man. Bro, I’m so sorry.”

From that moment, he made every decision with Catherine in mind. He never spoke of it, but it became his mission to make this a house Catherine would have loved. It had secret passages, romantic reading nooks, ladders up to hidden alcoves, and huge window seats for gazing outdoors.

When the renovations were complete, over a year later, he and Brendan toasted their success. Brendan held his glass up again. “So I have another little item to celebrate. I asked Hailey to marry me and she said yes.”

“Ah. Congratulations, my friend!”

“Yeah man. Feeling pretty lucky today.”

Henry went that same week to a lawyer and had his will drawn up. He willed the house to Brendan and Hailey in the event of his death. He made sure to include “or disappearance” in the clause. Just in case. Just in case that wretched mantel clock ever came back to life.

Another year passed. And another.

And then, the old clock began ticking.

. . .

His heart pounded when he walked into the sitting room of the vicarage. Catherine was there, bright and lovely, looking as if no time had passed at all, a length of fabric across her lap.

“What do you think of this muslin?” she asked. “Is it too dark for a wedding gown?”

He swallowed down his tears and grinned. “You can wear the most hideous muslin in all of England, as long as you marry me.”

When she ran to him and gave him one of her enthusiastic, but delightfully awkward kisses, six years of lonely misery dropped away, and time started up again.

Rilla stared at the large sign on the door of The Hog and The Dog.

“No Turn-Born Admitted.”

It had once been her favorite eatery. When the Beldars began paying her to do chores at their farm, she started coming in for a slice of sweetcheese pie. At 14, it made her feel rather mature to walk into town and buy herself a meal. But she’d visited less and less in the past months as the attitude of the new owners became clear. Her kind, those born on the turning of the seasons, weren’t welcome.

The Turn-Born possessed unusual abilities, powers that the Day-Born didn’t have and didn’t like. Rilla wasn’t sure if this divide between Turn-Born and Day-Born was getting worse, or if it had always been like this and she was just growing up and seeing it.

While she stood in the street scowling at the sign, a boy with white-blond hair walked by. She knew him from school but he was a couple of years younger. He put his hand next to his ear and wiggled his fingers, a rude gesture reserved for the Turn-Born.

Rilla’s cheeks flamed and a wave of heat rippled up from her skin. Her birthday fell on Autumn Turn, the day summer turned to autumn. Her ability was to create heat or cold. Not actual fire or ice like some Turn-Born, but an intense spike or drop in temperature.

The boy must have seen the fury on her face because he scurried away.

Heat rose from her, making the air around her undulate. She concentrated all that heat into the palm of her hand. She would pay for this later, with an exhaustion that wiped her out for hours. But for now, she focused on her hand and poured every flicker of heat into it.

She grasped the doorknob of The Hog and The Dog and held it tight. Ripples ascended from her hand, briefly visible, then gone, like elusive silver snakes. Beneath her fingers, the doorknob, the latch, the strike plate, all of it, melted together into an immovable mass.

Rilla pulled her hand away and smirked. The place only had one entrance. Until they got a metalworker out to work on it, NO ONE would be admitted to The Hog and The Dog.