Mary threw the black rock up toward the mountain, and it clattered among the shattered boulders, falling at the foot of the cliffs. She held tight to the white rock, and as she turned toward us, we formed two very short lines. I remembered when those lines used to be fifty people long, one hundred people long. But now there were only three of us on each side.
She walked between us, taking the white rock with her. Circe was crying, shoulders shaking. Miss B wiped a tear from her eyes. John kept clearing his throat. Misha nodded, as if someone was telling her something she agreed with in the deepest way. Po stared into the fire.
There was no waving, no goodbyes, no words—those had all been spoken earlier, in private. I wondered who she had met with that day, who she had spoken with. Had she told anyone else about my brother? Did one of them know more than I did?
I wished I would have taken the time to talk to her. I wished we would have sat down together. If I had visited her, would she have told me more?
I watched her walk away from the village, toward the darkness, and I was overwhelmed with anxiety for Adam, for me, for all of us. The village was emptying—how much longer until John or Po or Circe traveled east? Who would say the words for me when it was my time to go? Who would give me a gift to put in the fire or hand me the rocks?
Before Mary disappeared, I saw movement in the shadows. It was Miho and Abe, returning from the plains. And not only them—Abe carried a girl in his arms. The girl we had seen from the second tree. He stumbled at the edge of the light, went down on one knee, and laid her there in the grass.
9 Po’s Theory
“I CAN’T STAY,” Mary said, as much to herself as to us. She had come back to us when Abe appeared with the girl, and now there was a slight twinge of panic at the edge of her voice, as well as a kind of asking for permission. “I can’t. I just can’t. I made up my mind. I have to go now.” She looked around with wild eyes. I couldn’t make myself meet her gaze.
We were all looking at Abe and Miho and the girl lying in the grass. She was tiny, curled up in the fetal position, like a fawn that’s been delivered too soon. Miho squatted down and placed her hand on the girl’s shoulder, felt her neck, stroked her hair, and pushed it back behind one ear. The girl’s hooded cloth poncho was disheveled and bunched underneath her, and the rest of her clothes were also a plain tan color. Her bare feet were stained green from the long walk through the plains. I couldn’t look away.
Nothing felt stable anymore, nothing felt moored down. What was going on in this place? We had been there for ages, and within the span of two days Mary decided she was leaving, the black-haired woman came out of the mountain, and this girl came back over the plains. And people were remembering things. No one had ever come back. I had never kept things from Abe or Miho. It felt like someone had picked up the puzzle pieces of my life, a puzzle that was nearly assembled, and threw it into the air so that everything was separating and coming undone.
I wanted to tell Mary that she had to stay, at least until we found out what this girl’s appearance was all about, that it couldn’t possibly be safe out there in the dark, walking east into who knows what. What if there were others? What if this girl was trying to escape trouble? But I knew, coming from me, an appeal to stay would seem insincere.
Before anyone else could make a recommendation either way, Abe spoke up. “You’re right, Mary. You need to keep going. Everything will be well. Please. Go. This is your time.”
His words jarred me. But Mary nodded, unsteady, and then she walked into the night.
Misha took a few steps after her, and for a minute I thought she was going to leave too, without any fanfare, simply vanish into the darkness with Mary. But she stopped where we could all see her. She watched Mary walk off, and her voice came out tiny, barely a squeak. “Mary?”
“Are you sure Mary should leave?” John asked, but Abe cut him off.
“I need some food and water, right now. Hurry.”
Miho slipped into her house and came out with half a loaf of bread and a glass of water. She bent down close to the girl.
“Out of the light,” Abe mumbled, and we shifted where we stood so that the dancing firelight made its way down the bank and into the midst of our small gathering. John lumbered back up to the stone patio. I could tell he was miffed at the way Abe had ignored his concern. He threw a few more logs on the fire, sending up a shower of sparks. Soon the fire roared again, but John didn’t come back down. He stood there, staring into the fire, his massive paws fisted on his hips.
I moved closer, staring again at the girl. She had long, light brown hair. Her arms were lean with muscle, and even though she was small, her shoulders were strong. Her face was lined with determination, even when she was unconscious. A deep bag was on the ground beside her. Abe put a hand under her neck and raised her head, and with his other hand he put the glass of water to her cracked lips.
The girl’s mouth moved, barely, the way a leaf might flutter when there is no wind, so subtly you could hardly see it. Then her lips moved toward the water, and her tongue flashed between them. Abe tipped the glass a little more so that water trickled into her mouth, and she swallowed, wincing. He went on like that for a long time, giving her small sips, until some kind of relief washed over her. She became less rigid, and her head turned to the side.
Abe bent even closer, whispering in her ear, “You’re okay now. We will take care of you.”
Her eyes fluttered. Her mouth opened again with a kind of yearning that we all felt and understood. Abe raised the water, and she drank in a thirsty way this time until it was gone. She opened her eyes, looked around at us in confusion, and closed them again.
I stared off into the darkness, looking for Mary, but she was gone. It was night, the traditional time of day for heading east. The great, empty plains had swallowed her. I hoped she could find the first tree in the darkness, but I also knew that if she couldn’t, she’d wait for morning and then find her way east, one tree at a time, all the way across the plains. How long would it take her? What waited for her on the other side? There was so much that we didn’t know.
“She’s awake again,” Circe whispered.
“What do you need?” Abe asked the girl.
That’s when I noticed she was staring at me. She didn’t say anything, but she stared with intensity, as if she knew who I was.
Abe turned to Miho. “Can we keep her in your house for now?”
Miho nodded. The others murmured questions and thoughts to each other, but no one had anything productive to offer. We were all stunned.
The fire dimmed and a log fell by itself, collapsing in the space of things already burned. John hadn’t moved. He still stared into the fire. A cloud of ash moved upward in small wisps and sparks. Po had returned to his seat beside the fire not far from John, carving quietly. We had all become stir-crazy. No one wanted to go home and sit in the heavy silence that waited for us.
I walked over and sat beside Po. “What’s going on around here?” I asked him, shaking my head. “This is absurd.” I thought of the strange looks he had given me earlier that day. It seemed awkward to ask him about that directly, but I thought that maybe if we spoke, some explanation would come out.
John glanced over at us, opened his mouth to speak, then closed it and stared back into the flames. Po peeled away a small slice of wood with his knife, and it dropped to the stone patio, joining a small pile of similar shavings.
“Feels like we’re coming to the end,” he said without emotion, blowing on the walking stick, eyeing it critically before shaving off another piece.
“The end?” I asked.
He grunted, kept carving, and didn’t say anything else for a little while. There was something tender about the way he carved, something intimate, as if he wasn’t cutting the wood but coaxing it.
“What do you mean, the end?” I asked again.
He sighed and spoke without looking at me. “Think about it, Dan. What happens when that place empties out
?” He motioned with his head back toward the mountain, and returned to his carving.
“You mean what happens once the last person comes out?”
He nodded.
“I haven’t given it much thought.”
He gave a wry grin. “I don’t think anyone has.”
“But you have?”
“For years now, as long as we can remember, people came out of the mountain. Right? You’ve seen them. Beaten down. Tortured. Bloody. You came over, I came over. We can barely remember what happened to us over there, but it’s pretty clear it wasn’t some kind of party going on. ‘Escaped,’ we call it. ‘Escaped from the other side.’”
I nodded.
“Now, it also seems pretty clear to me that there were some nasty folks running that place over there. Judging by the state of us when we came over. Fair to say?”
I nodded again. “That’s fair. From what I can remember, it’s true.” I tried to sound like I’d been thinking of this for a long time. Images of some of the worst abuses came to mind, and I squeezed my eyes shut instinctively, trying to push those images back. But they never went anywhere. Not really. I could close my eyes, but I couldn’t keep the nightmares at bay. So I opened my eyes and stared into the fire.
“Okay,” Po continued, “so put all of that together and then ask yourself, when’s the last time anyone came over the mountain?”
He said this as a kind of final point in his argument, but I couldn’t help picturing the dark-haired woman who had come over the day before and was lying in my bed. The woman who had told me my brother was still over there alone, that he was the last one.
“It’s been a long time,” I said, trying to go along with his game, my voice faltering in the lie.
“What if they’re running out of people to torment?” Po asked. “What if there’s no one left over there? What if they’re gathering their forces and preparing to come over the mountain and retrieve us, take us back, use us for whatever it was they were using us for before?” His eyes grew wild and he stopped carving, punctuating his words with his knife, a stab in the air for each question mark.
I sat there as his words sifted through the air. There was no breeze. The fire burned straight up with very few sparks. John stood, walked over to the pile of wood, and threw a few more large pieces on.
“Do you think that’s what’s going to happen?” I asked Po, my voice low, not wanting to bring John into the conversation. And if that’s what he thought, why had he been glaring at me? What did I have to do with any of this?
“Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“So what are you waiting for? Why stay so close to the mountain? Why haven’t you headed east yet?”
He looked at me, squinted, and stared back at the walking stick, but he didn’t carve. “For a long time, I didn’t know why I was staying. But last night, I remembered something.”
“Really?” I asked. Po too. Not only me and Miss B and Miho and Mary, but Po was remembering too. “Something about the other side of the mountain? Or before that?”
“Before.”
“Really?” I said again, and this time I couldn’t keep the fascination out of my voice.
He nodded.
I waited. He was silent.
“Can you tell me?” I asked hesitantly, already knowing what he would say.
He gave out a small laugh. “It’s mine. I’m not giving it away, Dan. But that’s why I’m still here, why I can’t leave. I had a feeling about it for a long time, but that memory confirmed it for me.”
“Fair enough,” I said, disappointed and feeling spurned. Again.
Miho walked up to the fire. “You guys okay?” she asked.
“Anything new?” My voice came out weak and tired. Po was back into his carving, sitting right there yet also somewhere far from us.
Miho shook her head. “Do you have that book Abe likes to read to people when they first come over?”
It had been a while. I had to think about it. Did I have it, or had I last left it at Abe’s?
“Yeah, I think I do,” I said.
Po’s words still occupied my mind. What if he was right? What if we were moments away from those horrible slave masters coming out of the mountain and hauling us back to that hell?
“I’ll run up and get it. Where do you keep it?” she asked.
Po peeled back another long piece of wood and it curled in on itself, fell down onto the stone patio. I was drowning in all the recent realizations—Miho’s drawing of Adam and Mary’s memories about Adam and Po’s theory about those on the other side and the woman’s revelation that my brother was the last one.
“It’s probably on the first bookshelf by the door, up toward the top. Red spine,” I said absentmindedly. I was trying to think through some flaw in Po’s theory that would keep me from worrying about it. I’d never been able to visualize our tormentors, but that neither supported nor undermined his idea that they were coming back for us.
Minutes passed before I realized Miho was walking to my house to get the book. She was walking by herself, to my house, where the woman slept in my bed.
I ran after her, wondering what made me think I could ever keep all these lies and half-truths straight in my mind.
10 You Never Told Me Your Name
THE BREEZE RETURNED in the darkness, coming back at us from the plains, and it was sweet and melancholy. It pulled a deep sense of nostalgia from me, a kind of remembering, but not of specific things: nebulous, old memories of tears and great happiness, of devastation and celebrated rebuilding. I wondered if my memories of those old days would ever come back to me, if I would ever remember everything, or if they would always be made available in fits and starts, small pieces here and there.
The grass was nearly dry, and my feet swished along quickly as I ran first through the dark village, then through the short empty space that led to my house, and finally up to my front door. I opened it, breathless, just as Miho came out.
“Oh!” she shouted, jumping.
“I’m sorry,” I said, laughing nervously. “I’m sorry.” I looked into her eyes to see if she had found anything, to see if she had seen the strange woman in my house.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked with a laugh, raising one hand to her chest as if to slow her heart. “You scared me, Dan.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, bending over, still breathing hard. “I . . . I wanted to make sure you could find it.”
She held up the book by its spine, her laughter shifting into a small suspicion. “What is going on, Dan? You haven’t been yourself lately. What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t look up into her face or she would have convinced me without saying anything to tell her the truth, so I stayed bent over and stared down, catching my breath. “It’s Mary,” I said. “Just Mary. And now this girl.”
Miho put her hand on my head, a kind of blessing. “Dan,” she said in a quiet, breathless voice. “Oh, Dan.”
We stood there like that for longer than made sense. The two of us, I knew, were looking for something to connect to, someone to trust. And guilt seeped through my entire being. She was that for me. She was someone to trust. And I was so utterly not.
But the guilt was also compounded by a feeling of indignation that she knew more than she was telling me. I kept seeing in my mind that sketch of my brother on her table. What did she know? And why wasn’t she telling me? I felt this growing chasm between us, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it.
“I have to go,” she said, regret in her voice. “I have to take this down to Abe.” She raised the book again. “Do you want me to come back up here? I feel like we need to catch up.”
Concern etched itself around her eyes. I felt it too, the distance.
“No,” I said, standing up and shifting so that I stood between her and the rest of the house. “That’s okay. Just grabbing a few things. I’ll be right behind you.”
She reached out and touched my arm, gave a small smile I could barely see in the
dark, and drifted toward the village, swinging the book by her side while she walked.
I watched her disappear into the darkness. How could she remain so carefree? When I went inside and closed the door quietly, the latch barely made a sound.
I meandered around in the kitchen for a bit, taking out some bread and gnawing on the crust. I walked over to the rear door, opened it, and looked out over the plains. I couldn’t see very much in the dark, but the grass rustled in the wind.
I left the back door open and walked to my bedroom, paused for a moment, then went inside.
She was still there, and it looked like she had barely moved since I had left earlier in the day. She was on her side, eyes closed, hand still reaching over toward the chair where I had sat. I walked slowly to it and sat down. Why was I so afraid of her? What could she possibly do to hurt me?
Her eyes opened slowly. They were beautiful eyes. I could see this, finally, since they were healing. The redness had gone out of them. Her dark irises were soft, even inviting.
“What are you going to do?” she asked in a drowsy voice.
“About what?” I replied. There were so many things on my mind. I couldn’t narrow them down to what she might be referring to—telling everyone about her? Going east? Trying to find out more about the memories everyone was having and not telling me about? Finding out more about the girl?
“Your brother,” she stated.
“I don’t know.”
“Your brother needs you,” she said, and I felt like crying. What was there to do but wait? I couldn’t go back over the mountain, not back into that hellish place. When I thought of it, screams echoed in my mind. Pain frayed my nerves. I didn’t think I could bear it, going back in there.
“How did you make it out?” I asked. “Do you remember anything?”
She coughed, moved her hand to cover her mouth.
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