Louise caught the flash of light on the auditorium camera as someone opened the door and stepped into the darkened room. She didn’t catch who it was, but she had the sudden sense of impending doom. She glanced at her phone. It was dialing again. She made a big sweeping gesture with her right to cue up Tinker Bell’s gentle tinkle of bells that was J.M. Barrie’s “fairy language” and with her left quietly cancelled the phone call.
After Jillian did Peter’s joyous flight at finding his shadow, she shortcut through the scene to get to the flying. “I’ll teach you how to jump on the wind’s back and then away we go.”
Carlos and Darius were still awkward, despite the day’s work, but luckily in a silly, laughable way. Elle was graceful and refined. Jillian managed to impart boyish swagger as she zoomed about the stage as if she had been born with wings.
As Jillian landed, crying “Now come!” and pointing out the open nursery window, Louise’s phone rang. Mr. Howe looked down at her phone as “Mom” displayed on the screen.
“Louise,” he chided.
“I was expecting my mom to call, so I had it out,” Louise lied. “Can I answer?”
The lone person in the audience clapped, distracting him.
He huffed. “Yes. Since it’s your mother.” And he stalked out to see who was on in the auditorium, applauding.
“Hello?” Louise tentatively answered her phone.
“Louise, I forgot all about the fact that you two need gowns for the gala.” Her mother sounded like she was juggling a hundred things at once. Death would fall on anyone that made her drop what she had in midair.
“Gowns?” Louise cautiously tried to weasel out of whatever her mother had planned.
“Gowns, like dresses, only fancier.”
Louise gasped as she realized who had to be in the dark auditorium. “You want Aunt Kitty to take us shopping?”
“I called the school and let them know that she was picking you up. I didn’t want you to miss her.”
Louise brought up the auditorium lights and verified her guess. “She’s here now.”
“Be good for your aunt. Love you.” And she hung up with no idea that she’d just thrown all their plans into ruin.
There was a conspiracy to put little girls in pink and yards of tulle. It was tempting to agree to the first dozen they saw, but since they’d failed to reach Lain for almost fifteen hours, they held their ground. On the fourth store, they found a black satin full-length dress that the twins loved at first sight. It had a ruched sleeveless bodice and empire waistline wrapped with a matching black pleated sash.
“Are you sure?” Aunt Kitty asked a dozen times. “It’s awfully grown-up.”
“It’s perfect.” Jillian turned in a circle to show it off to full effect.
Aunt Kitty took a video and sent it to their mother. “We’ll see what she thinks.”
A minute later a firm “No black, it’s not a funeral” text came back.
Two stores later, just shy of closing hours, they found two matching tea-length dresses of soft shimmering yellow with wide black belts. The dresses had poof skirts thanks to layers of crinoline but were fully lined, so the itchy material didn’t touch bare skin. With their mother’s texted approval, the dresses were bought and they headed home, exhausted.
They spent the last hour getting ready for bed with phones in hand, dialing, disconnecting at the first tone of the busy signal, redialing. The minutes ticked down and then Shutdown was over.
They stared numbly at the clock as it turned to midnight.
“What do we do?” Jillian asked.
Louise called April, who answered on the first ring.
“Hello?”
“Ugh!” Louise flopped back in bed. If April answered, she wasn’t on Elfhome.
“Hello?” April said again.
“It’s us,” Louise said.
“Oh.” It wasn’t a good sounding “oh” but a “but I’ve got bad news” kind of “oh.”
“What happened? Is it Alexander? Did something happen to her?”
“No, no, it’s that I didn’t get across the border.” April sounded tired, but not stressed, yet somehow Louise was sure that she had horrible news. “I’d gone to Cranberry to try and get across. Normally it’s the best bet. There was a shoot-out on Veterans Bridge, though, and things got all screwed up.”
“A shoot-out?” The post-doc had mentioned a twenty-car accident but nothing about a shoot-out.
“I’m not sure what happened — the details are really sketchy — but apparently there was a big pileup on Veterans Bridge. There was a heavily armed group of smugglers in one of the cars, and they tried to kill the cops that showed up to direct traffic. They shot at least one person, and they rigged a bomb to take out the bridge. The EIA bomb squad managed to defuse it. Then the rescue teams used Earth-based life-flight helicopters to fly out the wounded.”
All of which would have stopped traffic incoming from Cranberry completely.
