Falling In by Frances O'Roark Dowell Page B

in school,” Isabelle said, relieved to have one more bit of information to report. “And she looks pretty when she smiles.”
    Grete smiled, and Isabelle could see her mother in the old woman’s face. Her mother, the changeling. That night, as Isabelle lay in bed, she twisted herimagination this way and that, trying to see her mother as a magical being, a person who had been taken by fairies as a baby. Her mother had been stolen by fairies! It was almost impossible to believe, but Isabelle tried as hard as she could. After all, didn’t this news change everything? Once Isabelle told her mother she was magic, who knew what sort of things the two of them—the magic mother and the half-magic daughter—might make happen.
    Which raised a question for Isabelle. No, make that two questions.
    How on earth would she ever get home?
    And just what was she doing here in the first place?



30
    When Isabelle walked into the kitchen the next morning, her eyes still cloudy with sleep, she found a knapsack leaning against the wall beside the back door. Grete stood at the stove, stirring something in a pot.
    “So you’ll be off today, then,” Grete said, not turning around. She sounded as though she were continuing a conversation instead of starting one. “To the camps north of Greenan.”
    “I will?” Isabelle asked. She rubbed her eyes. Had she missed something? “Are you kicking me out?”
    Grete glanced at Isabelle over her shoulder. “Putting you to work, is more like it. Now that I’ve brought you down here, there’s something I need you to do.”
    Isabelle stumbled against a chair, then lowered herself into it. “What do you mean, you brought me down here?”
    “Exactly that. I got you to open the door, which wasn’t difficult at all. You were ready.” Grete put a lid on the pan and set the spoon on a cloth by the stove. “I tried for years to get your mother to come, but I never could, even when she was young.”
    Isabelle puzzled over this. “Why not? She was in an orphanage. Why wouldn’t she want to come home?”
    “Because she didn’t know she had a home. And there was the problem of the imagination.” Grete turned toward Isabelle and tapped her head. “The ability to see things that aren’t there and to hope that what you see could be real. You have to be able to put your hand on a doorknob and believe that something completely unexpected lies beyond the door. Your mother never had that kind of imagination.”
    Grete began brushing little sprigs of leaves and twigs from the counter into her hand. “It took yearsto find her in the first place. Had to let my mind wander to the places in the other world I thought she might be. I could feel her, you see; and after a while, I could track her thoughts. They’d come to me in little bursts of words. Baby words at first— ‘Fire hot!’ ‘Dog bite!’—but then more complicated thinking. One day, when she was about nine, the matron at the orphanage had her memorize her address. So then I knew exactly where she was. But it turned out to be useless information. Your mother was scared of the dark. She was scared of other children. I could know her thoughts, but I couldn’t intrude on them to explain things to her.”
    She tossed the bits and pieces she’d gathered into the sink and wiped her hands on her apron. “In short, your mother was not the kind of girl who would open a door and hope she would fall into another world. So I could never get her to one of the doors.”
    Isabelle blinked. Blinked again. “There’s more than one door?”
    “What do you think, girl? There’s doors all overcreation. And the children who want to find them find them, and the children who don’t want to, don’t. Your mother didn’t want to find one—”
    “But I did,” Isabelle finished for her.
    “I knew it from the minute you were born.”
    Isabelle walked over to the counter and tore a hunk of bread from the loaf on the cutting board. “So you got me instead of