“Oh no. Oh no. What happened?” she asked breathlessly. “Please, don’t tell me…”
I looked over at my parents. While my mother looked just as shocked as Ada did, my father was watching us with one finely-tuned suspicious eye. I had to wonder what he knew. What had my mother and sister told him? What could he possibly believe?
But before I could say anything, he cleared his throat and said, “I think we all need to have a good long talk. I need to hear this story from you both, not just them,” he said, jerking his head to Ada and his wife. “And then we’ll see what our next steps are.”
A fire truck roared down Broadway, bathing our faces in red light. Dex reached for my hand and squeezed it. Small comfort, but it was there. I was going to need it. For this and for everything we still had to go through.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
We all gathered in our hotel room. For the briefest, strangest moment, I thought we should ask Maximus if he wanted to join us. The realization that he couldn’t made me break down in tears again.
Dex wasn’t doing much better but he put his arm around me and took the reins, trying to explain to my father exactly what happened, from the start. Of course, my dad didn’t understand and didn’t want to. He kept interjecting the story with exasperated exhales and rolls of the eyes and the occasional, “Please, be serious now.”
I thought my mom would have backpedaled and retreated to her old ways. I thought she would have ignored everything that had happened. I thought she would have sided with my dad because that’s what she’s always done, for as long as I could remember.
But she didn’t. She even told my father to be quiet and just listen and when Dex looked to me, her and Ada for approval on the story, she was nodding in agreement. I had to say, I was proud of her. I would have never thought this would happen.
“And you said the house burned down?” my father asked incredulously when Dex started to wrap things up. Dex did have the insight to leave out the part of him dying and me having to go into the Thin Veil to get him. It wouldn’t matter to him, in the end. Everything was so unbelievable as it was.
Sirens wailed in the background, as if on cue. I jerked my head in their direction. “Or it’s currently burning down.”
My father sighed and put his head in his hands and slowly rocked back and forth in his seat. “You could be held for arson charges,” he mumbled.
“We didn’t do anything!” I spat out defensively.
“You broke into a house.”
“It was abandoned, Daniel,” my mother said, her tone just as harsh as his. Ada raised her eyebrows in surprise.
“Abandoned or not,” he looked to Dex sharply, “and from the way you described it, it didn’t sound abandoned at all, you can’t just trespass. If you they find any hint that you were there.”
“They won’t,” I told him.
“And how do you know that? You may have dropped some little clue. The NYPD are pretty smart, they can piece it together just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
I sighed. I didn’t know how I knew, I guess because I wasn’t even sure how much of that house was real. I was certain that if we looked into records of it, we’d find it totally empty and unlived in. The furniture, the Christmas tree, the appliances – those only existed to us, in whatever little hell we stumbled upon. Just like the lighthouse burned down on Uncle Al’s property, this place would do the same and there wouldn’t be a trace of anything.
“I just know,” I told him with finality.
“And your friend, your damn friend,” he swore, suddenly getting to his feet. “You left him there?”
“The fire got him,” I said, also glad that Dex skirted the cat-sized spider thing. “We couldn’t…” And I couldn’t finish the sentence.
My father walked over to the window, staring out at the cityscape. “No. No, I can’t believe any of this. Maximus is going to walk in through that door at any moment.”
“No!” Dex cried out, his voice rough and impassioned. “He won’t.” His eyes began to well up and he looked away. My heart kept breaking again and again. I held on to him tight. My anchor I almost lost. My anchor in this storm.
“Honey, please,” my mom said, getting up and going to my father.
“No, no, no,” he said, stepping away from her touch and keeping his gaze focused on anywhere but the people in this room. “You’ve all gone mad. You’ve been drugged. LSD. That’s all there is to it. You all had a bad trip and in a few days you’re going to realize that. This trip has gone to shit. We need to get out of here immediately.”