gauze
The air felt different here than in any other room in the house.
‘Thicker’ was the word that she kept coming
back to, although ‘oppressive’ seemed to work too. Neither of them was entirely
accurate, but they both captured a sense of how the atmosphere of the
room felt.
It was psychology, obviously. The air in the
room should feel different somehow, so it did feel different. This
was, after all, the last place she had seen her son.
Eleanor Garber sighed, feeling the weight of
the last few months finally compressing her to the height she felt she actually
deserved. Shrunken. Shrivelled. Diminished.
And lost.
Lost in a room she knew so well that if she
closed her eyes, she could still see its every detail.
Davey – two-year-old little Davey – had
disappeared from this very room three months ago, almost to the day. He’d been
playing with his toys, she had gone to cook him some lunch, and when she
returned, Davey had been gone.
At first it hadn’t made sense, but it hadn’t
been senseless. He’d just toddled off into another room. She’d walk in
and he’d be standing there, or crawling there, and he’d look up at her with
those innocent eyes and she’d laugh and sweep him up and hold him close and …
… and he hadn’t been in any of the other rooms.
That was when senseless entered her
life, took up residence, and refused to leave.
Time had passed.
Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow.
When it became impossible to remain in the
house another minute without straight up losing her mind she had left.
More time.
Slow, slow, slow, slow, slow.
No change.
Stagnation.
Case in point: The room was just as she had
left it. A cot with cosy bedding; rows of teddies and bunnies on every surface;
primary colours on the walls and the poster of dice naws – Davy’s
attempt at ‘dinosaurs’ that had seemed so cute back then and was now so soul-shrinkingly
tragic just thinking it hurt – a room that had once been her son’s and
not just a shell from which the creature inside had fled. She ran her fingers
through the fur of Big Ted on the bedside stand and wondered, for the
thousandth time, how it had all gone so wrong.
So horribly, disastrously, unrelentingly wrong.
The answer was: she didn’t know.
She had been in the kitchen, microwaving some
vegetables in grey pulp from a can. The label had called it ‘gravy’ but it was
pulp. However, the kid seemed to not know the difference and anyway, judging by
every other time he’d eaten anything, most of it would end up on the floor, his
hair, his bib. Davey was nothing if not creative in his ideas of where food
went.
From leaving Davey to returning with a bowl of
food had taken no more than three or four minutes. The back door was in the
kitchen, the front door was always locked.
There was nowhere Davey could have gone.
Didn’t stop him being gone, though.
It takes an instant for a life to change
forever. A single incident – an accident, a diagnosis, a madman, a car crash –
could make a person step over a line from which there was no stepping back. She’d
always known this, deep down, but she’d never had to live it.
Until she stepped into this room, a bowl of
gruel steaming in her hand.
Time went strange then. It bent and contorted,
folded and expanded. Even now she found it impossible to put together a
workable chronology for what happened next. She remembered the Winnie The Pooh
dish falling to the floor, spilling its greyness across the carpet; she
remembered the mad search; the panic; the horror; she remembered calling … someone
… Craig? … could have been … must have been … and remembered people coming
here, police, remembered concerned faces, remembered them turning sceptical … no,
no, no.
No.
Davey had been here, then he was gone.
She had been in the house.
There was no way anyone could have sneaked in,
or for Davey to have sneaked out.
Guess how that equation looked to … absolutely
fucking everyone?
Davey had given her life the purpose she had
always dreamed of. The chance to nurture a new life into whole person. A chance
to make up for the mistakes of her own parents by avoiding them with her own
child.
Davey had made her complete.
Had given her extra dimensions, had made her
3-D instead of 2.
How quickly her origami life had unfolded, how
irrevocably. All the folds that had given her joy and purpose, all the contours
and points that had made her the person she was were suddenly flattened out. Sure,
there were ghost lines remaining that showed where the folds had been, but
without an instructional diagram offering a folding pattern they could not be
redone.
2-D again.
Craig had blamed her. At first just in look and
tone of voice, but later in word and back of hand.
The police didn’t quite believe her but
could find no evidence that she had been responsible. They were still
investigating, apparently, and how was that going?
Even her own mother had doubted the accuracy of
her account.
Davey had gone – that much was clear to
everyone – but disappearing like one of those characters you read about in a
locked room mystery story? No one believed that. There was no evidence that she
had been the one to make him vanish – of course there wasn’t! – but
sidelong glances and awkward silences, and, eventually, outright accusations,
had showed her what people really thought.
What they really felt.
What they really believed.
And there was no Dr Fell, no Merrivale or
Bencolin, no Holmes, Vance, Marple or even Creek to point out their error.
They thought it was her.
They thought that she had done something
to Davey.
So her grief had been tied up with that.
Suspicion.
Innuendo.
They had taken away her means to process her
own feelings, tainting them with their distrust.
‘Davey.’ She said, little more than an
exhalation of air.
She only realised that she was crying when the
room around her shattered into crystal fragments. Her knees hit the carpet with
no knowledge, or sensation, of her falling.
The room.
The damned room.
It had swallowed her boy and burned her life to
the ground.
If only …
If only she could go back, or just send a
message to herself in the past, she would tell herself to never to leave him.
She would tell herself to sweep him up in her arms and hold onto him. She would
have …
She fell forward, eyes still awash with tears,
and then she was on all fours, feeling reduced to an animal now. To complete
the picture, the noises that came from her mouth hardly sounded human. She
cursed and implored and said her son’s name so many times it became a nonsense
word, and she sobbed and choked and growled and roared. Sounds that bubbled in
her tears and spit and snot.
What had she expected, coming back here?
That she would find closure?
A reason?
Her son?
An explanation?
Or had she hoped, deep deep down, that whoever
or whatever had taken Davey would take her too?
Whatever it was that she had wanted, had needed
with every inch of her body and mind, was not here. All there was was memories,
pain, loss, questions and …
… and air.
Thick air.
Oppressive air.
The kind of air that seemed to have physical
substance, weight, texture.
Wracked with sobs and pulling in so much more
air than she had before she realised that texture had been the concept
she’d been searching for before.
The air had texture: she could feel it in her
mouth and throat.
Soft but insubstantial.
Like cloth.
Like …
Gauze.
Such an odd thing to find herself thinking, but
it seemed accurate.
Gauze.
The air was like gauze.
She wiped away tears from her eyes with a
sleeve and the room came back, sharp.
Came back sharper, because now, down here near
the floor, she could see a near-translucent filter across a section of the air
in front of her. She realised she wouldn’t have even noticed it if she hadn’t
been on her hands and knees. It was a small area of air, about a foot above the
room’s floor, that was different to the air around it.
It looked like a cobweb, except its lines were too
straight. Too orderly. Too Precise. It looked like
like
gauze
like a part of the room had become worn thin,
down to its basic level, a kind of filmy material that separated …
Separated what from what?
What was she thinking?
Had she finally lost the final parts of her
sanity?
She reached out her fingers to touch that strange
area of space and withdrew them immediately. She was shocked to find that she had
been able to feel the air, that it had offered actual resistance to her
fingertips, although not much.
Like touching material.
Cloth.
Gauze.
She scrabbled closer to the
disturbance
air that she had touched – and how insane did
that sound: the air that she had touched? – and inspected it like
someone trying to work out the secret behind a piece of close-up magic a
conjuror might perform.
She wasn’t imagining it, that much seemed
certain.
Just inches away from it, she could see that her
first impression had been a little off. It wasn’t that the air in the room had
suddenly become thin, it was more like the reality of the room had
become thin here.
Because through the gauze she could see another
room.
Another room that was the same room.
Except it was only almost the same room.
Because there, through the gauze, it was
Davey’s room, sure, but on the wall where the picture of the primary-coloured
dinosaurs usually sat, in its place was a poster of cartoon robots.
She pulled herself up onto her knees and the
poster changed back. Cute dinosaurs, just as the poster had always been.
Dice Naws. Not robots.
She dropped down low again and looked through
the gauzy patch of air.
Robots. Not dice naws.
What the hell?
How could a poster change like that?
She put her fingers to the gauze and wasn’t
sure whether it felt hot or cold. She felt the resistance the material offered and
pushed forwards, regardless. Hot or cold, she felt her hand swallowed up by it.
She saw it appear on the other side of the
gauze-like air, saw it both close and distant at the same time as if viewing it
from two different angles and she thought about something she’d read about the
way science seemed to point towards an idea of a multiverse, with an infinite
number of universes all pressed in on each other like soap bubble, and although
it sounded mad as soon as she thought it she asked herself: is this another universe
I’m seeing?
Is my hand in another universe?
A universe that ran parallel to her own, the
same in all aspects except that in this universe Davey loved robots and not
dice naws?
Had Davey found this … tear in the gauze
between worlds and crawled through?
Had the parallel her in that universe walked
into that room three months ago and discovered another Davey in that parallel
room? Found two of them sitting there when she returned with soup?
My god!
Davey!
Because that was who she could see crawling
across the room towards her outstretched hand. In the same Babygro he’d been
wearing when she’d left him to make his vegetables-in-pulp, his chunky little
arms traversing the carpet.
Eleanor felt more tears then, running down her
cheeks, but these were tears of a different quality to the ones she’d been
crying for months. There was no sorrow to them, and when she brushed them away
she saw Davey’s eyes were looking into her own, she saw him recognise her and smile
at her in that dimpled way of his.
She lurched forward, not thinking, just pure
instinct, pushing her other arm through the tear in between universes. The
sensation of passing through the tear pushed the air from her lungs and made
her feel cold or hot, she could not tell. It didn’t matter. She grabbed hold of
Davey, wrapped her arms around him, held him tight, held him like she would
never let him go again.
Saying his name over and over, she pulled her
son back through the gauze and she heard him let out a laugh at the game they
were playing.
She sat on the floor in front of that tear in
the gauze, holding her son to her breast, washing him in tears of joy.
After a little while she wiped her face and saw
that something had changed in the room. The gauze was rippling, moving around
the large tear she had made when she lunged through, and she saw that the
material was knitting together, mending itself.
It didn’t
matter. Not now that she had her son back. She watched the threads of the tear
weaving themselves back into a solid sheet, and where it repaired itself, the air
in the room returned to normal.
Just air.
She looked down at Davey and felt a pang of
love, so sharp, so pure, that she felt herself becoming 3-D again, felt her
life rushing back into her, filling her, making her whole.
The air in the room was almost mended entirely
now. Whatever doorway had opened up between the worlds was closing.
Good. She thought,
and was about to stand when she saw something at the bottom of the air, where
there was still a tiny slit that wasn’t quite mended yet.
Movement.
She lowered her head and looked through.
Saw a pair of feet – her feet! – walk across
the carpet in that other world, saw a plastic dish fall, spilling meat pieces
in tomato sauce across the carpet, heard a woman’s voice scream the boy’s name
just before the gauze disappeared altogether, making the repair final.
She sat there holding her son, feeling a cold
heaviness settling into the pit of her stomach.
Before the tear sealed itself, the woman had screamed for her son.
She had screamed for ‘Danny’.
