Falling In by Frances O'Roark Dowell Page A

changeling? Not the baby in the hammock? Tears formed in the corners of her eyes, but she furiously blinked them away. She’d been so sure! Wasn’t that why the picture had fallen out of thebook into her hands? That was what Grete had intended to happen, wasn’t it? So Isabelle would know that Grete was her real mother, that her mother on the other side, in the other world, wherever it was that Isabelle had come from, had just been a substitute mother until Isabelle could find her way to her real home.
    Her mother. Isabelle had hardly thought about her mother—her “mother”—in the days she’d been at Grete’s, and suddenly she could see her pacing up and down the linoleum of their long, narrow kitchen, tugging at the handkerchief she kept anchored beneath her wristwatch, stopping to listen at the window, as though she might hear Isabelle’s voice outside in the yard.
    “Yes, girl, you’re seeing it now.” Grete’s voice broke into her thoughts. “Your mother was the baby. Your mother was the one stolen away.”
    “My mother is the changeling?” Isabelle’s mouth dropped open. Her
mother
?
    Grete walked across the porch and sat down in the rocker next to Isabelle. “Think about it, child. Ifmy babe was stolen near fifty years ago, do you think it could be you? You’re—what? Eleven? Twelve? Not even close to going on fifty.”
    “Maybe time doesn’t work the same way in every world,” Isabelle offered lamely.
    “Time is time. You can’t change it. Oh, a minute here or there, for sure. You can swallow up a week or two if need be. But years? No.”
    Isabelle started to offer another argument about how time might shift itself around, but stopped herself. Repeated herself: “My mother is the changeling?”
    Grete nodded, and Isabelle rocked back in her chair as far as she could, her head hanging back so that the world appeared upside down to her eyes. “So that makes me a half changeling, right?” she asked in an upside-down-sounding voice.
    “I suppose it does,” Grete answered. “If such a thing can be said to exist.”
    Isabelle sat straight up, and her brains twirled around in her head. Her stomach felt loopy, the way it did on the first downward slope of the rollercoaster at Fun World. “Is my mother magic? Am I half-magic?”
    “Not much magic in this family, I’m afraid,” Grete said with a shrug. “Healing powers, for sure, and thought reading. Nothing fancy. But I suppose what little of it there is, your mother has it. Don’t know if it got passed on to you or not.”
    Isabelle ransacked her memory for evidence that her mother could read minds or mend broken bones. But all she came up with were images of a normal, middle-aged woman doing normal, middle-aged things, getting ready for work, chopping an onion while a pat of butter sputtered in the pan on the stove beside her, picking bits of lint off Isabelle’s navy blue sweater.
    “Maybe you have to know that you’re magic to practice magic,” Isabelle said, feeling let down.
    “It’s possible,” Grete replied. She paused for a moment, then said, “So, tell me about her. What is she like? Does she look like me?”
    Isabelle peered at her grandmother—her grandmother!—through the dim light. Grete lookedeager, like a little kid asking about what she might get for Christmas this year. “She has blue eyes like you do. But her nose is—pudgier, I guess.”
    Grete nodded. “That would be my husband’s nose. Your mother had it even as a baby.”
    “She’s nice,” Isabelle continued. “She doesn’t yell too much. She, uh . . .”
    Grete leaned forward. “Yes?”
    Isabelle shrugged. “She’s a mom. She goes to work, she comes home to make dinner. On Saturday she goes grocery shopping.”
    “Yes, I suppose she would,” Grete said, sounding disappointed. “Oh, I do wish I could see her for myself. I can track her whereabouts and get a general idea of things. But to actually be able to see her!”
    “She got As in math