Into the Wild(29)

Julie couldn’t have agreed more. “I’m sorry!”

Gothel relaxed her hold on Julie’s shoulders. “Suppose I should have expected it, given who your mother is.” She smiled at Julie. “She used to be the one to bring me back to myself.” Hobbling nearer to the stream, Gothel eased herself down onto one of the boulders. Julie nearly shrieked—what was she doing? They didn’t have time for sitting. They had to rescue Mom! Gothel continued, “She was the one who found the trick of it, you know: leaving reminders for herself, jump-starting all our memories every time each of us forgot.”

What was she talking about? “Grandma, we can’t stay here.” She tugged on her hand. “We have to find Mom and get out of here. The Wild’s practically across Northboro already.”

Gothel stayed seated on the rock. “You are so like your mother,” she said.

She wasn’t at all like Mom. Julie didn’t understand half of the things Mom said and did. Like having the dwarves over for dinner. Or caring about her stupid hair salon. Or not understanding why Julie was miserable at school and miserable at home. Or worst of all: leaving Julie alone while the Wild took over the world. Julie wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Her cheeks felt stiff, and she had a sour taste in her mouth. “Grandma . . . I wished she wasn’t my mother.”

“Zel knew you didn’t mean it,” Gothel said.

She thought of the look on Mom’s face and knew that Grandma was just saying that to make her feel better. She took a deep breath. “I did mean it,” she said. “When I said it, I meant it. But I didn’t mean . . . for this . . .” She waved her arm at the thick trees, blocking the sky.

“That’s the beauty of the real world,” Gothel said. “Wishing doesn’t make it so. Outside the Wild, it’s actions that matter. Your choices matter.” Her grandmother reached over and squeezed her hand. “This isn’t your fault. Your wish didn’t make any of this happen.”

Cindy had said the same thing—it wasn’t possible that her wish had caused this. It wasn’t a magic wish. Julie already knew that. But what if Mom thought that Julie wanted her back in the Wild? What if Mom believed that Julie truly wanted her gone? “Grandma, where’s Mom?”

“Right where I put her,” Gothel said.

“Really?” Julie said, feeling a smile spread over her face. Grandma had kept Mom safe! It was going to be over soon. It was all okay.

“I’m afraid so,” Gothel said. “She’s in her tower.”

Or not “all okay.” Julie let go of her grandmother’s hand as if it had stung her.

Gothel sighed. “It’s a new tower. She’ll have to make new reminders. She’ll have to be clever with them—the Wild knows all her old tricks.”

“Reminders?” Julie asked.

“The Wild doesn’t transform everything every time; it only changes what’s necessary for the story to happen. So Zel used to leave clues for herself to trigger her memories. She called them her ‘reminders.’ Sometimes she wrote letters to herself on the walls of her tower, different stones each time. Sometimes she left clues in her embroidery. Sometimes she shaped hints out of strands of her hair. Near the end, she wrote messages with her own blood.”

Mom did that? Wrote in her own blood? Julie couldn’t imagine her dainty mother doing anything like that. “Why?”

“When you end a story, the Wild locks you down deep inside yourself and forces you to reenact the first event of that story. That beginning is all you know, until and unless someone or something makes you remember,” she said. “That’s how it traps you.” She smiled wanly at Julie. “You are fortunate that this isn’t a sequence at the end of a story. If it were an ending, you too would have lost your memory and you’d now be the poor stepdaughter sent into the woods on your stepmother’s whim. You wouldn’t remember ever being anything different.”

If that was true (and she believed everything except Mom and the blood), there was no time to waste. Had Mom ended a story? When Grandma rescued her, would Mom remember Julie? Julie wasn’t sure she could stand it if Mom didn’t know her. Julie took Grandma’s hand. “But now you do remember, and we can go find Mom.”

Gothel extracted her hand from Julie’s. “It’s not that simple.”

But . . . but she remembered! Now she could come with Julie, rescue Mom, shrink the Wild, and leave. There was nothing stopping her now. “Why not?”