Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

a telenovela star. And she looked right through me, not recognizing me for a second.

My mother had never been prettier.

CHAPTER 14

I felt frozen in time as I stared at my mother, my brain not able to process how she was standing before me, and half expecting her to take me into her arms. I waited and waited. But it never happened.

“Are you children lost?” she asked.

I felt the tears start to sting behind my eyes. She really didn’t know me. How was this possible?

Sage said that the different planes of DW are simply alternate existences—a world in which you hadn’t had an accident, or had been born in a different city. Was this the plane where I didn’t exist at all? Was this the version of herself that my mother had really always wanted to be?

“Brady,” I whispered, turning to him. I didn’t think I could stand this for one more moment, to be in her presence, to feel the coldness coming off her.

“We were hoping to use your phone, ma’am,” Brady said, polite and calm. He had no idea who she was, of course.

The two men in the baseball caps were still standing next to us, and the first one—the one who had done all the talking—spoke softly to my mother. Once again, the words were not in English. This time, standing right next to him, I could recognize it as Russian.

My mother laughed and responded in perfect Russian, a language she did not speak a word of on our plane.

The man leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, his lips lingering a beat longer than necessary, and I was repulsed by the certainty that this weird man with the bicycle was probably my mother’s boyfriend down here.

He and the other man walked off, and we were left alone with my mother in the bustling hotel.

“Come along,” she said. “You may use the phone in the office.”

She led us behind the huge front desk, nodding to incoming guests and stopping briefly to say something in Russian to one of the clerks. The clerk nodded and handed her some mail to take with her. My mother was clearly in some kind of position of power at the hotel now. It seemed like maybe she even owned it.

The office she was referring to was not the little room where Sage had given us pizza when we first arrived. Instead, a large polished suite, which seemed to include the space where that room had been, waited for us through a door behind the front desk. All I could think when I saw it was that everything looked so sleek. Lots of highly polished marble and gold fixtures. The only things that remained from the previous incarnation of this hotel were the original chandelier and those ornate sconces, both of which now seemed perfectly in place.

We heard water run in a small bathroom in one corner of the office as my mother led us to a sofa where we could sit. We looked up to see a very clean-cut man in a suit and tie emerge, wiping his hands with a small towel. It took me a couple of seconds to recognize the man as John.

“What do we have here?” John asked.

“They were babes lost in a wood, apparently,” my mother replied. Then she turned to Brady. “You can use the phone on the coffee table.”

We looked at the neatly organized table before us and saw Sage’s old rotary phone, with an actual cord coming out of the back. Brady picked up the receiver. Even if I had wanted to try to call a real person down here, the only phone number I had memorized was my father’s. Who would Brady call?

John put his towel back in the bathroom and approached my mother, who was neatly slicing open the mail envelopes with an ornate bone-handled letter opener.

“They’re probably just hungry, you know,” he said privately to my mother, but loud enough that we could hear.

“This isn’t a soup kitchen.”

John gave her a look.

My mother temporarily let her hands, still holding envelopes and the small opener, fall to her sides in an exasperated motion.

“All right, dear,” he said. “I’ll be back in time for dinner.” He, too, gave her a kiss on the cheek and left.

Brady began to dial next to me, and my back tensed, waiting to see who would pick up, if anybody. After a moment, he put the receiver back down.

“Nobody home,” he said to my mother, who was reading her mail. “Thank you for your hospitality. We’ll be going.” And he stood up, his hand on my back to indicate that I should follow.

“I’ll have Alexei show you out,” my mother replied, not looking up.

“Oh, we know the way . . . ,” Brady started, but my mother had already pressed a button on some sort of old-fashioned intercom box sitting on her desk.

Alexei, the first man with the bicycle, must have been right outside the door, because he came in immediately. He cleared his throat, waiting for us.

Brady gently pressed on my back, clearly anxious to go. But I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my mother here. Even if she wasn’t real, even if she didn’t know me, I couldn’t help but think that I may never see her again.

Is this the way I would always remember her?

I stopped before we reached the door and turned to her. I couldn’t help myself. She didn’t even look up from her mail. She looked like a character from one of those black-and-white movies. Impossibly beautiful and impossibly cold.

“Mom?” I asked.

Brady froze by my side, and I could see his head turning from my mother’s face to my own, probably seeing the strong resemblance.

My mother, however, didn’t flinch. I needed her to look up. I needed her to recognize me. It wasn’t possible that any plane could exist in this universe in which a mother wouldn’t recognize her own daughter. Something would have to register