Lisa Marshall Crosses into Clivilius

Eli Smith arrived at the Marshalls' bungalow in the Avenues a little after seven in the evening, as arranged. Lisa Marshall had been ready for most of the day. A single suitcase stood in the hallway, packed and repacked over the preceding week, and almost everything else she owned was still where it had always been: her clothes in the wardrobe, her books on the shelves, her name on the mail on the kitchen bench.

Will Marshall had known for weeks that this evening was coming, and had spent most of them trying to make it not happen. He was civil when Eli came in, and the three of them stood in the kitchen for a few minutes in something close to ordinary conversation. Then Lisa asked him, one more time, to come with them. Will said what he had said every time before. His work was here, his parents were here, his life was here, and he would not walk through a wall into a place he could not see, on the word of a family that had already disappeared into it.

The argument that followed was short and turned quickly on Eli. Will told him that the Smiths had taken his wife from him, that none of them had asked what it would cost anyone else, and that he was not welcome in the house. Eli did not argue back. Lisa did, sharply, and for a moment the two of them were shouting across the kitchen in a way neither had done in the whole of their marriage. Will stopped first. He picked up his keys from the bench, walked past them both and out of the front door, and pulled it shut hard enough to rattle the glass.

Lisa went to the front window. She watched him back the car out of the drive and turn into the street, and she waited for the brake lights to come on at the corner, as they always did when he forgot something and came back. They did not. The car went on down the hill and out of sight. Ruby, the Golden Retriever, stood whining at the front door, and Lisa stayed at the window for some minutes after there was nothing left to see.

When she turned round, she told Eli she was ready. She filled Ruby's water bowl, left the porch light on, and wheeled her suitcase into the study. Eli opened his portal against the study wall, beside the bookshelf Will had built for her. The plaster gave way to a churning mass of colour, the colours turning through one another and throwing off sparks where they met, and the light of it moved across the shelves.

Eli took the suitcase. Lisa stood for a moment longer, looking at the shelf rather than the portal. Then, at the last moment, she reached up and took down a worn paperback copy of The Little Prince from the middle shelf: the book she and Will had read aloud to each other on the beach at Laie in their first year together, its margins full of both their handwriting. She held it against her chest, followed her brother through, and came out on the hard dust of the fenced compound in Bixbus.