White Space by Ilsa J. Bick Read Free Book Online Page A

fabric of reality, is rendered with stunning effect in this very bizarre little Victorian pastiche that exists only in fragments itself and yet is thoroughly
blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah
.”
    Numb, Emma grayed out. Who gave a wet fart what McDermott had in mind? How had she copied a manuscript she hadn’t known existed?
    Hating Kramer would’ve been easy; he was
such
an asshole. But she couldn’t, not really. From his perspective, she was a cheater, a plagiarist, the academic scum of the earth. But he just didn’t know the whole sordid story.
    No one did.
8
    EVERYTHING SHE KNEW about her bio parents fit the back of a stamp, with room to spare. Dear Old Drug-Addled Dad tried a two-point set to see if Baby really bounced against a backboard. (Uh, that would be no.) Mommy Dearest boogied before Dad tested whether
she
might be less sucky on a layup. Later, Daddy hung himself in lockup because
—oops
—someone forgot to confiscate the shoelaces of his All Stars. Big whoopsie-daisy there.
    Cue ten years of Child Protective Services and a parade of foster parents, group homes, doctors, staring shrinks, clucking social workers. Her headaches got worse, thanks to Dear Old Dad. All that head trauma started off a chain reaction of growing fractures. She got older and uglier as her skull grew lumpier and bumpier.
    Then Jasper, a crusty old sea dog with a fondness for bourbon, Big Band, and paint, showed up. Why he wanted to foster a kid, especially one with her history and looks, she never could figure. (Before her surgeries, she could have been a stunt double for those bubble-heads playing the Mos Eisley Cantina.) Jasper got her surgerized so her brain wouldn’t go
ker-splat
all over the floor. Fixed up her face, too. Then he whisked her away from all the do-gooders to an ancient stone cottage
waaay
up north overlooking Devil’s Cauldron, a dark blue inlet of rust-red sandstone layered over ancient volcanic rock on the northern tip of Madeline Island in Lake Superior.
    By day, Jasper piloted charters and wandered around in a ratty cardigan and muttered to himself. Nights, he tossed back a couple belts, cranked up a wheezy old cassette recorder, and slathered canvasses with eerie, surreal landscapes choked with bizarre creatures, as Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin burbled, or
Bleak House
or
The Old Curiosity Shop
or a dozen other Dickens novels and stories spun themselves out on the air. Some of the creatures Jasper painted, she recognized: woolly mammoths, dinosaurs, prehistoric benthic creatures, weird insects with three-foot wingspans. Others—the ones with stalk-eyes and tentacles and screaming needle-toothed navels—were so Lovecraft, they looked like they’d slithered from the deep wells of inky nightmares.
    What Emma never did understand was that when he finished, Jasper pulled a Jackson Pollock, slopping thick white paint onto each and every canvas. When she complained there was nothing left to see—and what was the
point
?—Jasper would toss back another shot and explain that the creatures, which existed in the Dark Passages between all the
Nows
, weretoo powerful to let out:
Every time you pull them onto White Space, you risk breaking that
Now. (And oh well, when he put it
that
way, it all became so
clear
. So much for a straight answer.)
    With a story as Harry Potter as this, Jasper ought to have been a wizard. She should have had strange powers. But no, Jasper was just odd; a small army of surgeons stenciled a road map of skillfully hidden scars onto her scalp and gave her a normal, if titanium-enriched, skull; and she loved Jasper so much that seeing him as he was now hurt like nails hammered into her heart.
9
    AND NOTHING BAD happened once she was with Jasper. Summers, she biked around Madeline or kayaked over to Devils Island with Jasper, slipping in and out of sandstone sea caves or wandering the forested sandstone while her guardian sketched. Jasper said the island got its name from the old Ojibwe legend that