A Year Without Autumn (5 page)

I step out and shut the doors behind me.

Autumn’s condo is right at the end of the hallway. I knock our special rap on the door.
Tap-tappity-tap-tap,
pause,
tap-tap.

Nothing.

I knock again and then peer over the railing to the parking lot. Three cars down there, but not Autumn’s. You don’t easily miss a bright-red Porsche. Where are they? I bang heavily on the door one last time before giving up and turning away.

I run down the stairs this time and out to the front of the building. For a second, I think I hear Autumn’s voice and I stop and listen, but I don’t hear it again. Maybe they’ve gone out for the morning.

I try our spot by the lake, but someone else is there. A group of young kids and two sets of parents. That’s
our
place! But I don’t stop to argue with them. It’s not as if there’s a law against other people going there.

The shore looks bigger than yesterday. It seems to reach even farther back, a whole beach of gray-and-white stones.

Maybe Autumn’s at the weir. I run down there and call her name. Two teenage boys seem to be trying to cross the weir. They must be nuts! It’s so high at the moment, they’re bound to kill themselves. I edge toward them. That’s when I see something
really
odd. The weir — it’s not rushing and gushing over the top like Niagara Falls anymore. It’s more like a little stream, a slow, shallow dribble over the long wall that stretches across the river.

How did that happen? I suppose it hasn’t rained overnight. Is that all it takes — one night of no rain?

On the way back to our condo, I have a quick look in the rec center. Maybe Autumn and her family have gone for a swim, especially since we didn’t have any plans till this afternoon. No one in that family ever sits down for longer than half a minute.

But they’re not there. They must have gone for a walk or something.

Without telling me?

I decide to try their condo one last time. My frustration seems to have given me energy, so I wander around to the other side of their building, run up the stairs, and march down the corridor to their condo.

Tap-tappity-tap-tap. Tap-tap.

Come on, Autumn. Be in. I don’t want to have to go home.

There’s a noise behind the door. “Who is it?” a voice calls. A strange voice. Pleasant and sweet, it reminds me of a birdcall — but it’s not the voice of anyone in Autumn’s family.

“It’s me,” I call back, slightly uncertainly. “Jenni.”

“Jenni who?” the voice sings back to me.

“Jenni! Um . . . do you want to let me in?” I ask, even more uncertainly. Whose voice
is
that?

The door opens. A woman I’ve never seen in my life is holding on to the doorknob. Probably in her fifties, she’s got graying hair tied back in a ponytail, and she’s wearing a long, floaty red dress and gold flip-flops. She smiles at me. “Can I help you, dear?” she asks.

“Who are you?” I gasp, stepping back to check the door. Number 210. Autumn’s condo.

“Who are
you
?” the woman retorts.

“Autumn’s friend.”

“Autumn’s friend? What does that mean?”

“My friend’s parents own this condo.”

“I’m afraid they don’t. This is my condo. You must have made a mistake, dear. Sorry.” She smiles kindly at me and moves to close the door.

“Wait!” The woman pauses, the door open just wide enough so I can see her eyes. “Have you definitely got the right week?” I ask. “They own it the last week of August. Are you just leaving?” My questions don’t make sense, even to me. She can’t be leaving! They’ve already arrived. They got here last night. “Are you staying with them?” I ask, searching my memory to work out who she could be. I’ve met Autumn’s grandma. It’s not her. A friend of the family?

“I’ve told you, dear,” the woman says. “This is my condo, my week. I arrived yesterday; I don’t know anything about your friend.” She smiles again, slightly more woodenly this time. “As I said, I’m ever so sorry I can’t help you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll get back to my needlepoint. Is there anything else?”

“I . . .”

The woman waits a bit longer.

“Well, all right, then,” she says. “I’ll be going. Sorry again, dear. Hope you find your friend.” And with that, she closes the door.

I stare at the number: 210. I trace each digit with my fingers. Two, one, zero. It
is
their condo. Am I going crazy?

Finally, I turn to go home, walking blindly down the hallway, completely shaken. The old elevator is standing open, waiting for me. I walk into it in a daze, close the outer door, pull the metal gate closed, and hit the button for the first floor. All the way home, I go over what just happened, arguing and reasoning with myself to try to make sense of it. I must have gotten the wrong condo. Maybe they changed it without telling me. They
must
have. Or I went to the wrong floor by mistake.

By the time I get back to our condo, I’ve just about managed to convince myself that the whole thing was my own stupid mistake. Nothing to worry about at all. I’m not losing my mind. There’ll be a simple explanation. There’s got to be.

Dad’s
hunched over the living-room table, writing. “Autumn’s been looking for you,” he says without glancing up.

“What? She’s been here?”

“You just missed her. Left five minutes ago. Maybe ten. Said she’d been looking all over for you. Listen, what d’you think of this? ‘The river raced ruggedly down the hill, falling over itself as though it was in a hurry.’” He looks up. “It’s the opening of my novel.”

“It’s great, Dad. I thought you’d already begun your novel.”

Dad leans back over his notebook. “Starting a new one. I just got a fresh idea. It’s this place — it inspires me. We should come here more often.”

I get some orange juice from the fridge. “Did Autumn say where she was going?”

“Back to their condo.”

“Back to their condo?”

“That’s what I said.”

“And she left ten minutes ago?” I sip my juice.

“Correct.”

“Dad, have they swapped their condo?”

“Good grief, Jen, what’s with the Spanish Inquisition? Not that I know of. Why don’t you ask her when she comes by? She said she’d come back in a bit.”

Of course. I’ll just ask her. There’ll be a simple explanation. “Where’s Mom?” I ask.

“Taken Craig for a swim.”

“Are they —?”

“Look, Jenni, I’m just trying to do some work. No offense, but do you mind . . . ?”

I shake my head as I wash my glass out in the sink. Let him convince himself he’s writing an internationally best-selling blockbuster.

Something catches my eye outside the window and I look up. Autumn. At last! I run to the door to let her in.

“Where’ve you
been
?” we squeal in unison before I grab her arm and drag her inside.

“Hi, Mr. Green,” she calls through the door. Dad waves a hand absentmindedly in reply. We go upstairs to my room, and I close the door behind us. “I couldn’t find you anywhere — it was like you’d disappeared into thin air!” Autumn says.

“I know! What on earth happened?”

“Spooky!” she says, laughing and pretending to play creepy music on a piano in midair.

“I know. Completely bizarre. I couldn’t make any sense of it at first, but I’ve realized I must have just made a mistake with your condo.”

“My condo?”

“Yeah. When did you change it?”

“Change what?” Autumn tilts her head at me, waiting for me to explain.

“The . . . the . . . your . . . condo?” I falter.

“We haven’t changed it,” Autumn says, screwing up her nose at me.

“And your car,” I add, feeling like an idiot. “It wasn’t there.”

“Of course it was, you dope!” Autumn says. Then she half covers her eyes and walks around the room banging into things. “You must have had blinders on.”

She walks into the side of the bed and does this really over-the-top fall onto it, making me laugh. She’s right — it was obviously just me being stupid. I force it out of my mind and convince myself that there’ll be an explanation.

“Hey, I’ve got a present for you,” she says, sitting up and pulling something out of her pocket. “Close your eyes and hold out your hand.”

I do as she says, and she places something on my palm. I close my hand around it.

“Open your eyes!”

It’s a necklace made from some pebbles with wire mesh holding them in place. It’s lovely and unusual: exactly the kind of thing Autumn does — and the kind of thing that makes her so amazing.

“I made it last night,” she says, grinning broadly. “They’re from our place. It’s a friendship necklace.”

I sit down next to her and hug her. “I love it. Thank you.” Autumn watches me as I tie it around my neck.

“You’re welcome,” she says, jumping off the bed. “So — tell me more about the weird stuff. Maybe you weren’t walking around with blinders on after all. Maybe our car was abducted by aliens.”

“What would aliens want with a bright-red Porsche?” I ask, laughing.

“Maybe they’re going to turn it into a spaceship and use it for races between their planet and ours.” She goes over to the French door and opens it up. The river roars loudly past.

“Or maybe they come from a planet where everything’s red,” I say. “Bit by bit, they’re going to steal all the red things from our planet.”

Autumn jumps up and down and claps her hands. “Yeah, that’s it!” she exclaims. “Yay — no more beets!”

“No more tomatoes!”

“Oh.” Autumn slumps back onto the bed, her smile gone.

“What is it?” I ask.

“No more ketchup,” she says glumly. An instant later, she brightens up again. “Oh, well — we’ll just have to hope it’s not the aliens at all and that it was just you not noticing our car.”

I pause for a moment, remembering all the other things that were different. “No, it was more than that,” I say tentatively.

“Like what?” Autumn looks intensely into my eyes. Then she glances around the room. She picks up one of my sneakers and shoves it under the bed. “Lost your shoes as well, did you?” Then she puts on a fake mysterious voice. “Hey,” she says, pointing at the floor, “I’m sure there was a shoe down there before. It’s such a mystery!”

I laugh and shove her onto the bed. “No, really. It was
definitely
more than that,” I say seriously. “Where were you, anyway?”

Autumn shrugs. “The lake, the weir, at home, looking for you.”

All the same places I’d been.
How could we have missed each other at every place?

“Autumn.”

She’s reaching under the bed, fiddling with the arm of one of Craig’s discarded robots. It comes off in her hand. “Uh-huh?”

“It was strange. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Ooh, goody!” Autumn puts down the robot’s arm and crosses her legs. “Come on, then. Tell me more.”

“Only if you promise not to make fun of me.”

Autumn pulls an ultra-serious face. “I promise,” she says solemnly.

So I tell her about going to her condo and about the woman in the floaty dress and how I couldn’t see Autumn or her family anywhere.

“Cool!” she says. “I must have turned invisible!”

“I’m being serious!”

“
I’m
being serious. What other explanation is there?”

“Autumn, you seriously think you’ve become invisible?”

“Why not? If you can clone people and you can find out your whole life is a TV show, what makes you so convinced you can’t become invisible?”

“Autumn, those were stories!”

“Who says this isn’t?”

I pick up some LEGOs from the floor and throw them onto Craig’s bed. Why does he have to make such a mess? “How come my dad could see you, then?” I ask. “And what about the woman in the condo? And where was your car?”

“I said. It was there all morning,” Autumn says. “You did go to the right place, didn’t you?”

“Building C, number 210. End condo, second floor.”

“Yep, that’s us.” Autumn jumps off the bed and bounds over to the window again. It’s started raining, fat splodges squashing lazily against the glass. She pulls the French door closed and stands looking out. “OK, I can’t explain that,” she says finally.

“I must have gotten it wrong,” I say. “Had a brain drain. I did. I went to the wrong condo — I’m sure of it now.” I don’t know who I’m more determined to convince — Autumn or myself. Autumn seems happy enough with my conclusion — even if I’m not so sure. Seeing as I don’t have a better explanation, I decide to ignore the bit of my brain that’s silently trying to argue against my words.

“Well, that’s that, then,” Autumn says, turning around. “And I suppose we probably just kept missing each other. I guess I didn’t turn invisible after all.”

“I guess.”

“Shame.”

“Yeah.”

The front door bangs. “We’re home!” Mom calls.

Autumn jumps off the bed and glances at her watch. “I need to go home for lunch. Come by at two, OK?”

“OK.”

Autumn pokes her head into the living room as we pass. “Hi, Mrs. Green.”

“Hi, Autumn,” Mom replies as she hangs Craig’s towel over the radiator.

“Did you swim?” I ask.

Mom smiles and pats her stomach. “With this? It’d be like a blue whale getting in the pool!”