Page 44 of The Otherworld

I spot the silver percolator sitting on the highest shelf of the cupboard and stretch up for it, standing on my tiptoes—but I can’t reach. My fingertips brush hopelessly against the edge of the shelf. Adam limps over to help me, reaching the top shelf with ease and handing me the percolator.

“Thanks,” I say, blushing. “Papa forgets that I’m short.”

Adam regards me with a glint of amusement and curiosity in his eyes. “What else do you get from the supply man?”

“Pretty much anything we can’t make or grow ourselves,” I explain, twisting the lid off the coffee jar. A rich, nutty aroma wafts into the air, reminding me of Papa. I begin scooping coffee into the basket of the percolator. “Soap, knives, fresh rope… sacks of flour and rice. And coffee.”

I’m about to put the jar away when Adam grabs it and shakes more coffee grounds into the basket. He grins and says, “Weak coffee is a sin, Orca.”

I laugh. “Told you I didn’t know how to make it.” I pour fresh water into the pot and secure the lid on top. While I place the percolator on the stove, Adam keeps glancing around like he’s never seen a kitchen before.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” He shakes his head as if dazed. “I just… I feel like I’ve fallen through a wormhole or something.”

“A wormhole?”

“A hypothetical doorway to another region of space-time,” Adam clarifies, offering no clarity whatsoever. He pulls out a chair at the table and sits down, wincing from the pain. “Have you lived here your whole life?”

I nod, returning to the counter to fix Lucius’s breakfast. “I was born on the mainland, but this island has been my only home. Papa remembers the Otherworld, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“What is ‘the Otherworld,’ anyway?”

I turn around to look at him, realizing how peculiar I must sound. “Oh. It’s, um, the mainland. Where you come from. It’s everything that isn’t… my world.”

Adam stares at me with the same fascinated expression I’m sure I wore last night upon my first encounter with him. It’s how you stare at something mysterious and unfamiliar, yet holy in its strangeness.

“And you’ve never seen it?” he asks. “The Otherworld, I mean?”

I shake my head.

“Wow.”

“I want to. More than anything.”

“But your father won’t take you?”

“He doesn’t ever go. Except he had to this time because the coast guard wants to modernize our lighthouse. It’s a business trip. He would never go just for pleasure.” I swing open the icebox and take out some cooked fish and sweet potatoes for Lucius, who whines on the floor in anticipation of his breakfast.

The stove has heated up now, radiating warmth through the kitchen and boiling the water in the coffee percolator.

“So you live self-sustainably,” Adam says from the table, watching me peel a hard-boiled egg for Lucius. “I mean, you don’t need the rest of the world.”

“True… But I’d like to at least see it. To know what it’s like. I’ve spent my whole life watching from the lantern room, looking out at that land in the distance and imagining what it must be like to live there.” I cast a glance over my shoulder at Adam. “What is it like?”

He thinks for a moment, as if carefully considering the differences. I set the bowl of food on the floor for Lucius, who happily scrabbles over to devour it.

At last, Adam says, “It’s noisy.”

“Noisy? What makes noise?”

“Everything. Even the things that don’t make noise make noise.”

I don’t understand. But I try to. I sit at the table across from Adam and think of him as a different kind of spyglass—a magic, manly spyglass who can tell me things about the Otherworld that Papa would never breathe a word of.

“Well, go on,” I prompt when he doesn’t continue. “Besides the noise, what is it like? Do you grow your own food?”

Adam smiles a little and shakes his head.

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