“So now you’re testing me—is that what this is?” Dad asked.
I spoke up. “I don’t think that’s what this is.”
“Not now, Lucas,” Dad said. Then he turned back to Aidan. “I hope you’re not finding this funny, Aidan. Because I’ll tell you, none of this has been funny for us. What your mother said is true—we were terrified. And this joke of yours isn’t making it any better.”
“There’s nothing else I can tell you,” Aidan said. I think if he could have chosen to disappear again at that moment, he would have. Gratefully.
“When you say it was another world, do you mean a fantasy world or a world just like ours?” Officer Pinkus asked seriously.
“A fantasy world.”
“Were there unicorns?” Officer Ross asked, not seriously.
I could tell the answer from the look on Aidan’s face.
“There were unicorns, weren’t there?” I said.
But nobody was listening to me.
“Please don’t humor him,” Mom told Officer Pinkus. “We’ll never get the truth if we humor him.”
Officer Pinkus took a deep breath and pushed her chair back a little.
“Aidan, Lucas,” she said, “could you give me a moment with your parents? Maybe go up to your room? I’m going to ask Officer Ross to stand outside the door to the kitchen to make sure you’re not eavesdropping—so please stick to your room until we come to get you, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
Without another word, Aidan stood up and left the room without me.
12
It’s important to know that even though my brother was only a year older than me, he had a history of making me believe things I shouldn’t have fallen for.
He told me Santa had gotten lazy, and was sending presents to our parents via Amazon. So when my parents sat me down to tell me the truth about Santa, I ended up yelling at them, “Don’t lie! I know you work for him!”
He told me tooth fairies were retired dentists. It felt plausible.
He told me our grandfather had been on Normandy for D-Day. He even showed me a photo that he swore was Papa on the beach. I believed it and was so excited to talk to our dad about it, but Dad only laughed and said, “Lucas, your grandfather wasn’t even born in 1944.”
He told me there were monsters under the bed. Monsters in the closet. Unicorns in the backyard, but every time I went to the window, they’d magically vanished. He swore they could hear me coming. He said the only way they wouldn’t sense my presence would be if I rolled my tongue. But I couldn’t roll my tongue. He knew that.
All those times he’d made me a sucker were still inside me, a big ball of resentment mixed with embarrassment for falling so foolishly for whatever he’d told me. So as much as I wanted to believe him now, I also didn’t want to regret believing him later.
I didn’t want to fall for another story.
And this had to be a story.
I kept telling myself that.
It wasn’t a question of whether it was true. I knew it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.
The question was:
Why was he making things up?
13
“I knew they wouldn’t believe me,” Aidan said when we got back to our room. “And the stupid thing is that I couldn’t think of a better lie. I couldn’t think of a single other place to tell them that would’ve worked. There are too many cameras around, you know? I couldn’t just say I walked to the train station and got a train to the city—they’d check the security cameras at the station and see I was never there. Or if I said I hung out in the woods for a week—they’d ask me where, and what I lived on, and since I don’t know anything about living in the woods for a week, they’d see through me in about two seconds.”
“You could’ve said I hid you,” I volunteered. “That I brought you food. They asked me that a lot.”
“But why?”
“Because you needed my help?”
Aidan didn’t seem convinced. “I don’t mean, why would you help me. I mean, why would I leave in the first place?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Aidan stopped and looked at me now, saw that my question wasn’t about the cover story, but was about the real story instead.
“Do you really want to know?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Imagine you’re up in the attic. Imagine you feel a strange wind hitting your body and then realize it’s coming from the crack between the doors of the dresser. You go over to the dresser and open the doors, right? So you do that, and this dresser that’s been empty for ages, that is solid wood and has nothing but a wall behind it—what if this time you open it up and instead of it being empty with a wall in the back, you see white clouds in a green sky? The wind is blowing in from that space, and when you reach your arm in, you don’t hit the back of the dresser or the wall. No, you reach out into the air. And when you stick your head in, you look down and see that there’s a ladder right underneath you, leading to what looks like a silver path. What do you do then? This opening has never been there before. You have no idea how long it will last. Do you step through the opening and go down the ladder or do you slam the doors shut and run for help? You might have run for help, Lucas. But I went down the ladder. And I’ll tell you this, to answer your question: I wasn’t thinking at all about leaving anything behind. I was only thinking about what I might be moving toward.”
* * *
—
Did I believe him at that moment?
Yes. But the same way I’d believe the author of a fantasy novel I was reading. If the book is good enough, you feel like everything is true. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also entirely made up.
* * *
—
The next thing I said was stupid.
“So when did you see the unicorns?” I asked.
I didn’t mean it as a joke. I was serious. But Aidan thought I was making fun of him.
“Forget it,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand. And I should probably assume that anything I tell you is going to be repeated to them, anyway.”
“That’s not fair!” I protested.
“I should’ve just lied,” he said. “I should have come up with a better lie.”