The Wayward Portal · Story 2 · A Strangewoven story

A story from Strangewoven

Rose had changed her coat three times before breakfast.

The first was too heavy. The second had a missing button. The third was perfectly suitable, which left her with nothing to do except put on the first one again.

Aren watched from the kitchen doorway.

“Should we take all three?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

He glanced at his sister.

Aven quietly removed the second coat from the bag she was packing.

Rose saw her do it.

For a moment, nobody moved.

Then Rose laughed, sat down, and covered her face.

“I don’t know what to wear to a place I’ve been missing for forty-five years.”

Aven knelt beside her chair.

“Something with pockets. You’ll want your hands free.”

Rose lowered hers.

“For what?”

“We don’t know yet.”

That, apparently, was useful advice. Rose kept the first coat.

In its pocket she placed a wooden bird with one short wing.

---

Daniel was waiting beyond the passage.

He had brought coffee in a flask, a bag of pastries, and the concerned expression of a man who had slept very little and expected to discover why.

Before bringing Rose through, the twins inspected every support. Aren checked the diverted watercourse while Aven measured the fine marks they had drawn across several stone joints the previous evening.

Nothing had shifted.

The old spillway was working. Water hurried beneath the threshold without eating into its foundations.

“We still need a permanent support here,” Aven said, touching the brace beneath the cracked lintel. “And someone should monitor it while we’re away.”

Their father had volunteered. He arrived carrying his own tools, exchanged a few quiet words with Rose, and settled beside the arch as though watching a doorway into another world were an ordinary family obligation.

Rose kissed his cheek.

“If your grandchildren suggest improving anything else, discourage them.”

“How firmly?”

“You married into the family. You know.”

Then she turned toward Washington.

The forest beyond was wet with morning rain.

She stepped across.

Daniel reached for her, but Rose lifted one hand. He stopped.

She stood on the mossy ground, eyes closed, breathing.

The twins waited behind her.

A bird called somewhere among the trees.

Rose opened her eyes.

“I remember that one.”

Daniel nodded.

She reached for his hand herself.

---

At the truck, Rose paused again.

“You always wanted a blue one.”

“I wanted a fast one.”

“You’re sixty, Danny. We’ll allow the revision.”

He opened the passenger door for her.

Aven studied the back seat, then folded her long legs into the space behind Daniel. Aren climbed in on the other side.

Daniel showed them the seat belts.

“They keep you in place if we stop suddenly.”

Aren examined the latch, pulled the belt sharply, and felt it lock.

His expression changed.

“That’s well made.”

“You say that as though you’re surprised,” Daniel said.

“I haven’t seen the rest yet.”

The engine started.

Aren stopped examining the latch.

Aven leaned slightly forward, listening.

Neither spoke until the truck began to move.

Then Aren said, very quietly in their valley’s language, “Do you suppose he knows how many things are happening under there?”

“He seems calm.”

“You seemed calm when the mill wheel came off.”

“I was deciding where to stand.”

From the front seat, Rose said in the same language, “He knows how to drive. Stop planning an escape.”

Aven settled back.

Aren left the belt fastened.

Outside, trees moved past faster than either twin had ever traveled.

Rose watched them too.

At a bend in the road, she touched the window.

“There used to be a clear view here.”

Daniel slowed a little.

Young trees crowded the slope.

“Grew back,” he said.

“Yes.” Rose kept looking. “Of course they did.”

---

Daniel’s wife met them at the door before he had switched off the engine.

Helen carried a dish towel in one hand. Apparently she had forgotten it was there.

She looked at Rose, then at her husband.

“You weren’t dreaming.”

“I did wonder,” he admitted.

Rose began to introduce herself.

Helen hugged her instead.

“I’ve heard about you for thirty-two years,” she said. “Come inside.”

For the next hour, Rose discovered that it was possible to miss people she had only just met.

There were photographs everywhere: Daniel on his wedding day; two children growing taller from frame to frame; a granddaughter with missing front teeth, then the same girl older and grinning beside a crooked cake.

Rose moved slowly along the shelf.

Helen told her names. Daniel supplied details that Helen corrected.

In the kitchen, Aven turned on a tap and studied the mixer handle. Aren stood in front of the refrigerator.

“Cold storage?” he asked.

“Yes,” Helen said.

“Continuously?”

“Unless the power goes out.”

He looked at Aven.

She looked back.

“No,” Rose said from the sitting room.

“We haven’t asked anything,” Aren replied.

“I can hear you thinking about taking it apart.”

Helen opened the refrigerator, took out a jug, and shut it again.

“After lunch, I’ll show you the freezer.”

Aven put a hand on her brother’s shoulder.

“Be strong.”

---

Rose had asked to see the old house.

Daniel had telephoned its owners that morning. They had agreed to a visit, and a woman named Ruth met them at the gate with a key to the side garden.

“We’ve added on at the back,” she explained. “But the front rooms are much the same.”

Rose stared at the house.

It was smaller than Aren had expected from her stories. Yellow siding. A narrow porch. A window that had once belonged to a twenty-year-old girl who expected to come home before supper.

“You don’t have to,” Daniel said.

Rose shook her head.

“I’d like to see the garden first.”

They followed her around the side.

She stopped beneath a cedar.

Its trunk rose thick and furrowed beside the fence. A branch reached over the neighboring yard.

Rose put her palm against the bark.

“Dad wanted this out.”

Daniel smiled faintly.

“Said it would get too big.”

“He appears to have been right.”

She walked around it. Her hand stayed against the trunk until her arm could stretch no farther.

“We planted it,” she told the twins. “Your uncle and I. It came up somewhere it shouldn’t, so we moved it here. He said it was his tree because he dug the hole.”

“You supervised.”

“Somebody had to.”

Aren glanced at Aven.

She raised one eyebrow.

He abandoned whatever he had been about to say.

Near the fence stood a low wooden bench. One end had sunk into the soil. Rose brushed wet leaves from its seat.

“Dad made this.”

Ruth nodded. “We keep meaning to repair it.”

The twins crouched at opposite ends.

Aven pressed the frame, testing its movement. Aren felt beneath a joint, then looked across at her.

She nodded.

“The timber’s sound,” she said. “It needs a new foot and two pegs.”

“We could do it,” Aren offered.

Ruth glanced at Rose.

Rose was looking at the bench.

“Would you mind?” she asked.

“Not at all.”

Daniel folded his arms.

“Should I be worried about how much this repair might expand?”

“Your turn to supervise,” Aven said.

---

Daniel had tools in the truck.

Ruth found a piece of hardwood in her shed and brought it out with a tray of tea. She watched the twins lift the bench onto level ground, each carrying an end without difficulty.

“You make that look easy.”

“It’s mostly agreeing when to put it down,” Aven said.

They worked beneath the cedar while Rose and Daniel sat on chairs from the porch.

Rose told him about her husband, who had died six years earlier. How he had first found her trying to move a fallen stone with a broken branch. How he had helped, then returned with tools the next morning. How he had kept returning even after she finally admitted she didn’t know what to try next.

“Did he believe you?” Daniel asked.

“Yes.”

“About all of it?”

“He said he’d never seen anyone so disappointed to be standing in a perfectly good valley.”

Daniel laughed.

Rose turned the wooden bird in her hands.

“He helped me search. For years. After a while, we went less often. But he never told me to stop.”

The twins worked quietly.

When the replacement foot was fitted, Aren reached for a peg.

Aven put the mallet into his hand instead.

He looked at her.

She looked at the peg, which he was already holding between his teeth.

Daniel noticed.

“So it doesn’t always work.”

Aren removed the peg.

“We allow each other occasional privacy of thought.”

“Usually by accident,” Aven said.

By the time the tea had cooled, the bench stood straight beneath the cedar.

Rose sat first. Daniel joined her.

She moved her hand along the edge, finding a shallow notch in the wood.

“I did that,” she said. “Dropped a shovel.”

Daniel turned toward her.

“You told Dad it was me.”

Rose considered this.

“I was hoping you’d forgotten.”

---

They went to the cemetery after lunch.

The twins stayed back while Rose knelt beside her parents’ headstone. Daniel stood nearby, his hands in his jacket pockets.

Aren watched a leaf turn slowly in a puddle.

After a while, Aven sat beside him on the low wall.

“I thought today would make her happier,” he said in their valley’s language.

“Some of it has.”

Across the grass, Rose was talking. They could not hear her words.

“I wish we’d found it sooner.”

Aven nudged his boot with hers.

“So do I.”

She offered no calculation of how old they had been, or how deeply the entrance had been buried. He knew those things.

They waited until Rose rose and brushed the damp from her coat.

When she reached them, she took one hand from each.

“I’ve been telling them about you,” she said.

---

The light was fading when they returned to Daniel’s house.

Helen had packed food for their journey back. Daniel brought out a box of family photographs so Rose could choose some to take home.

At the bottom lay a clothbound album with a loose spine.

“Dad kept that one,” Daniel said. “Pictures he collected. Old logging camps, roads, that sort of thing.”

Rose turned the pages.

Aven was sketching the repaired bench in her notebook. Beside it she had drawn the passage’s cracked lintel and a proposed permanent support.

She looked up when Rose stopped turning pages.

“What is it?”

Rose rotated the album.

The photograph was faded almost brown. Three men stood beside stacked timber. Behind them, partly hidden by brush, a stone arch opened into a dark hillside.

Aren moved closer.

Along the arch ran two concentric bands.

Beneath them lay a row of shallow sockets.

Aven set her notebook beside the photograph.

The carving matched.

“Is that our passage?” Daniel asked.

“It might be,” Aren said.

But Aven shook her head.

“Look at the water channel. It turns left. Ours turns right.”

“Could the picture be reversed?” Helen asked.

Aven paused, then smiled at her.

“It could. Thank you.”

They studied the image again.

One man held a board with writing on it, but the letters were too faded to settle the question. The hillside had been cleared. Without the trees, even Daniel couldn’t be certain where it was.

Rose pointed to the arch’s upper corner.

“That stone is whole.”

Aren nodded. “Ours broke in the collapse.”

“No,” she said. “Before that. I remember a missing corner above me when I first walked through. I caught my scarf on it.”

They looked at the picture in silence.

Daniel carefully lifted its edge. On the back, in faint pencil, someone had written:

Upper crossing. Autumn, 1912.

Aven read it twice.

“Upper,” Aren said.

He looked at his sister.

She had already turned to a clean page.

Rose reached across and gently closed the notebook.

“Tomorrow.”

Neither twin argued.

---

At the passage, their father reported no movement in the stones.

Rose crossed back into Veyr carrying photographs of people she was learning to know and a small packet of fallen cedar twigs Ruth had given her.

Daniel stayed on his side of the threshold.

“Same time tomorrow?” he asked.

Rose nodded, then hesitated.

He saw it.

“I’ll be here.”

“I know.”

But she stood there another moment, memorizing where he waited.

On the walk home, Aren carried the food and Aven carried their tools. Rose walked between them.

“Was it how you remembered?” Aren asked.

“Some of it.”

She took a cedar twig from her pocket and rolled it gently between her fingers.

“I thought I’d spend the day looking for things that hadn’t changed.”

“Did you find enough?” Aven asked.

Rose considered the repaired bench, the enormous tree, and her little brother’s gray hair.

“I’d like to go again,” she said.

Ahead, the lights of Veyr shone through the dusk.

“Helen says she’ll show us the freezer,” Aren said.

Aven sighed.

“We may need longer.”