So did her father. “Whatever happened—wherever you were—Charles Wallace was talking about mitochondria and farandolae in his delirium, and something which sounded like Echthroi—“
“And about you,” her mother added.
Meg explained flatly, “We were in one of Charles Wallace’s mitochondria.”
Mr. Murry pushed his spectacles up his nose in the same gesture which his daughter used. “So he said.” He looked at his youngest son. “I am not in a doubting mood.”
Mrs. Murry said, “Just when we thought—when we thought it was all over—Charles Wallace gasped, The Echthroi are gone!’ and suddenly his breathing started to improve.”
“All I can say,” Dennys said, “is that when Charles Wallace goes back to school, he’d better not talk the way he was doing while he was delirious.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Sandy said. “I don’t like things I don’t understand.”
“If Mother and Father hadn’t been so upset about Charles Wallace,” Dennys glared at Meg, “they’d have been furious with you for not coming right home from school.”
“Where were you, anyhow?” Sandy asked.
“Do you really expect us to swallow this stuff about your being inside Charles Wallace?”
“If you’d just be realistic for once.”
“After all, we were worried, too.”
“And then some.”
They looked at Meg, then wheeled and looked at Mr. Jenkins.
Mr. Jenkins said, “Meg is quite correct And I was with her.”
The twins replied with total and stunned silence.
Finally Dennys shrugged and said, “Maybe one day someone will get around to telling us what really went on.”
“I suppose since Charles is all right—“
“We’ll just be glad about that. All’s well that ends well and all that stuff.”
“Even if everybody’s holding out on us as usual.”
They turned to Dr. Louise: “Charles is really okay?”
“Is Charles really all right?”
Dr. Louise answered them, “It’s my opinion that he’ll be completely recovered in a day or so.”
Meg confronted Mr. Jenkins. “Okay, but what about school? Won’t the trouble there go on just as miserably as ever?”
Mr. Jenkins sounded his most acid. “I think not.”
“What will you do, Mr. Jenkins? Can you make things different?”
“I don’t know. I cannot dictate Charles Wallace’s safety. He must learn, himself, to adapt. But I have less fear of the situation than I did before. After our—uh—recent experiences, the old red schoolhouse is going to be easier to enter each morning. Now I think that I am going to find upgrading an elementary school a pleasant change, and at the moment it seems a quite possible challenge.”
The twins again looked astonished. Sandy asked in a deflated way, “Well, then, isn’t anybody hungry?”
“We were so worried about Charles, we haven’t eaten for—“
“I’d like a turkey dinner,” Charles Wallace said.
Mrs. Murry looked at him, and some of the strain eased from her face. “I’m afraid I can’t manage that, but I can thaw some steaks from the freezer.”
“Can I come down when dinner is ready?”
Dr. Louise looked at him with her sharply probing gaze. “I don’t see why not. Meg, you and Calvin stay with him until then. The rest of us will go to the kitchen to be useful. Come along, Mr. Jenkins, you can help me set the table.”
When the three of them were alone, Charles Wallace said to Calvin, “You didn’t say a word.”
“I didn’t need to.” Calvin sat on the foot of Charles Wallace’s bed. He looked as tired as Dr. Louise, and as happy. He put one hand lightly over Meg’s. “It will be good to have a feast together, and celebrate.”
Meg cried, “How can we have a feast without Progo!”
“I haven’t forgotten Progo, Meg.”
“But where is he?”
“Meg, he Xed himself.”
“But where is he?”
(Where doesn’t matter.)
Calvin’s hand pressed more strongly against Meg’s. “As Progo might say, he is Named. And so he’s all right. The
Echthroi did not get Progo, Meg. He Xed of his own volition,”
“But, Calvin—“
“Proginoskes is a cherubim, Meg. It was his own choice.”
Meg’s eyes were too bright. “I wish human beings couldn’t have feelings. I am having feelings. They hurt.”
Charles Wallace hugged her. “I didn’t imagine my dragons, did I?”
As he had intended her to, she gave a watery smile.
Immediately after dinner Dr. Louise ordered Charles Wallace back to bed. Meg held out her arms to kiss him good night. She knew that he was aware of her feeling of incompleteness without Proginoskes, and, as he kissed her cheek, he whispered, “Why don’t you and Calvin go out to the north pasture and the big rocks and look around?”
She nodded, then glanced at Calvin. Wordlessly they slipped out to the pantry and put on ski jackets. When they had left the house behind them, he said, “It’s funny to talk instead of kything, isn’t it? I suppose we’d better get used to it.”
She walked close beside him, across the rich, newly spaded earth of the garden. “There are things we aren’t going to be able to talk about in front of people except in kything.”
Calvin reached for one of her mittened hands. “I have a feeling we’re not supposed to talk about them too much.”
Meg asked, “But Blajeny—where’s Blajeny?”
Calvin’s hand held hers firmly. “I don’t know, Meg. I suspect that he’s wherever he’s been sent, Teaching.”
They paused at the stone wall.
“It’s a cold night, Meg. I don’t think Louise will come out.” He climbed the wall and moved swiftly to the two glacial rocks. The great stones loomed darkly against the sky. The grass about them was crunchy with frost. And empty.
Meg said, “Let’s go to the star-watching rock.”
The star-watching rock lay coldly under the brilliance of the stars. There was nothing there. A tear trickled down Meg’s cheek, and she wiped it away with the back of one mitten.
Calvin put his arm around her. “I know, Meg. I want to know what’s happened to Progo, too. All I know is that somehow or other, he’s all right.”
“I think I know he’s all right. But my mind would like to be in on the knowing.” She shivered.
“We’d better go in. I promised your parents we wouldn’t stay out long.”
She felt an extraordinary reluctance to leave, but she allowed Calvin to lead her away. When they reached the stone wall she stopped. “Wait a minute—“
“Louise isn’t—“ Calvin started, but a dark shadow slid out of the stones, uncoiled slowly and gracefully, and bowed to them.
“Oh, Louise,” Meg said, “Louise—“
But Louise had dropped to the wall again and disappeared somewhere within it. Nevertheless Meg felt comforted and reassured. In silence they returned to the house. In the pantry they hung their jackets on the hooks; the door to the lab was closed. So was the door to the kitchen.
Then the kitchen door blew open with a bang.
Sandy and Dennys were at the dining table, doing homework. “Hey,” Sandy said, “you don’t need to be so violent.”
“You could just open the door, you don’t have to take it off its hinges.”
“We didn’t touch the door,” Meg said. “It blew open.”
Sandy slammed his Latin text shut. “That’s nonsense. There’s hardly any wind tonight, and what there is, is coming from the opposite direction.”
Dennys looked up from his math paper. “Charles Wallace wants you to come upstairs to him, Meg. Shut the door, at any rate. It’s cold.”
Sandy got up and shut the door firmly. “You were gone long enough.”
“Did you count the stars or something?”
“We don’t have to count them,” Meg said. “They just need to be known by Name.”
Calvin’s eyes met hers for a long moment and held her gaze, not speaking, not kything, simply being.
Then she went up to Charles Wallace.