The Story Web

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  Lewis’s mom drove them to the social, and when Alice got out of the car, she said, “You know, my dad wasn’t feeling so well. Do you think you could go check on him?”

  It was Uncle Donny who had come to pick her up at the dance. “Where’s Mom?” she asked.

  “Busy,” he’d replied. “Your dad is still feeling sick.” Donny brought her to his house instead of taking her home. In the morning, Donny brought her to Lewis’s house.

  Her dad was gone.

  When she opened her eyes in the clearing, she saw the spiders working more quickly. The sky had grown darker with clouds, and the strands of the web glinted silver.

  A few light drops of rain fell on Alice’s face and onto the web. The spiders kept going. Alice kept the story of what she had done locked behind her lips.

  The rain came faster and then, all at once, the sky opened into a huge downpour.

  Alice snapped around toward her letters. Already they were pressed into the mud. She fell to the ground beside them and tried to gather them up. They were wet and gritty in her hands, flopping like broken fish. She watched the ink seep through the paper.

  Gone. All her father’s letters, all his stories, were gone.

  No, came a sweet voice in her head. It sounded like Ms. Engle, soft and warm as fresh cookies. You still have his stories in your heart. You can tell his stories.

  But then it turned harder, to a voice she didn’t recognize: There is only one story you have that matters. You need to tell the truth of what happened.

  Alice swallowed hard.

  It wasn’t magic, these voices in her head. It was just what she knew to be true. To save the web, she had to tell the one true story she knew that really mattered.

  “Alice?”

  It was Lewis, peering at her from under the willow branches. He looked at her, caked in mud. He looked at the letters in her hands and on the ground. A luna moth flitted around his shoulder.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she told him. Her voice cracked. Her chest ached.

  “I know,” he said with a shrug. “I went by your house, and you weren’t there.”

  “Does my mom know?”

  He shook his head. “She was sleeping. I didn’t wake her up.”

  They kept close to the ridge line of the ravine. It led straight back to his yard, and from there she could go home. The ice covered everything and rain still fell, but there was enough light that they wouldn’t get lost.

  “How’d you know where to find me?”

  He shrugged. “I just did.”

  That made sense, Alice thought, in the way that only things that didn’t make any sense at all seemed to be happening these days.

  Their feet crunched in the ice. When they got to the hill, they held on to tree branches to keep from falling.

  How many hours, Alice wondered, had the two of them spent in these woods? Days? Weeks? Years, even? It seemed possible. So much time romping and playing and joking. Now everything was different. It looked different, covered in ice, but worse than that, it felt different. The air between them was tight and hurt her lungs.

  They walked past his clubhouse, closed tight against the storm.

  When they reached the edge of the woods, he stopped. “Alice,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Do you even know what I’m apologizing for?”

  She looked at her feet.

  “I should’ve asked about your dad,” he said, his voice cracking. “I should’ve asked what happened and if he’s okay.”

  Alice looked up at him, her eyes watery. Then, without really thinking about it, she lurched at him. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed. Not like an after-a-big-win hug, which was halfway to a tackle. This was a real hug. The kind your parents give you when things are really bad.

  Alice told the school nurse to call her uncle instead of her mom. “My mom has a night shift,” she explained.

  She met Uncle Donny in the front office. Ms. Barton laughed this funny high-pitched laugh, and Uncle Donny smiled along. Alice’s mom said Uncle Donny was cursed with women, and Alice guessed that’s why he wasn’t married yet, even though he was the nicest adult she knew and also had a handsome smile.

  “Just tell me straight up,” he said to her when Alice came out of the nurse’s office. “Was there any actual barfing?”

  Alice shook her head. She wasn’t sick exactly, unless guilt was a sickness. She’d felt it mounting and mounting and mounting. Lewis’s concerned looks only made it worse. It felt like cold wet blankets and ants with itchy feet and a siren going off out of key all at once. It felt the way her dad’s letters had looked in the mud. Unlike her dad, she broke easily. She’d practically run straight to the nurse’s office.

  “Do you foresee any actual barfing in the near future?” Donny asked.

  Alice hesitated. If she said no, they might make her stay at school. “Anything is possible.”

  Uncle Donny turned to the school secretary. “Julie, could I please trouble you for a plastic bag of some sort? I just got my truck detailed.”

  Ms. Barton smiled and dug around in her desk drawer until she came up with a plastic bag far too small to capture Alice’s potential vomit. Luckily, Alice was pretty sure she wasn’t going to need it. “Thanks, Ms. Barton.”

  “Feel better, Alice,” she said.

  Uncle Donny put his hand on her shoulder and led her out of the office.

  Outside, ice fell in spiky drops that stung Alice’s face. She and Uncle Donny skated toward his red truck as if they were at the rink.

  “You can drop the act, kiddo. I won multiple Oscars for my performances as ‘Child Too Sick for School.’ You’ve done a solid job here, but you can’t fake a faker.”

  “I’m sorry you had to come get me,” Alice said.

  “You want to tell me what’s up?”

  Alice didn’t reply.

  “Okay,” Uncle Donny said. “For now. But since you’re not really sick, I’m putting you to work.” He paused. “Is that a bird on my truck?”

  The gray bird with the yellow tail called out bzeep. “Dare?” she asked and trotted over to the bird. Dare raised her good wing in a wave.

  “You know this bird?” he asked.

  “Sort of,” Alice replied.

  Bzeep! Bzeep!

  “Seems to know you.”

  “She kind of adopted me. I found her at the rink. She was hurt. I brought her home, but she keeps getting out.” She extended her hand, and the bird hopped right in.

  “Really, Alice? You’re a bird tamer now?”

  Dare looked up with her gray eyes. “I’ve been thinking about keeping her.”

  “Your mom thinks this is okay?”

  “Not exactly. It’s not like the bird is a pet or anything. I’m just helping out.”

  “You’re getting really slippery with language, kid,” he said. He glanced over at her. She turned away. Uncle Donny had the kind of gaze that could look right through you, and Alice didn’t like disappointing him.

  “I’m trying to do the right thing.”

  He scratched the top of his head. “You’re putting me in a tight spot here, Alice. Faking sick, sneaking birds—if your mom finds out I aided and abetted, I’ll be in big trouble.”

  “Please, Uncle Donny.”

  Uncle Donny smiled and frowned at the same time. “You kill me, kid. You know I can never say no to you, not when you sound so pitiful. Here’s the deal: you help me out today, you keep the bird at the rink so if your mom asks we can plausibly say that it’s our pet—”

  “She’s not a pet.”

  “It will stay at the rink. And you won’t ever, ever, ever fake out sick again. Deal?”

  Alice hesitated. She looked at Dare, who hopped back and forth and nodded. “Deal.”

  “Good.” He tugged his cap down.

  He opened the door to the truck and swung himself in. Alice sat with Dare in her lap beside
him. “Bird’s got fierce eyes,” he said. “What do you call it?”

  “Dare,” she said.

  He nodded. “Seems about right. Well, Dare, welcome. I think you’ll fit right in.”

  Dare could barely contain her excitement.

  4

  Uncle Donny told Alice to clean up the supply closet. She figured she’d be on her own, but he went into the small room with her. The walls were lined with hockey sticks and bins of tape and hockey pucks. Donny hummed as he started straightening up.

  “I was talking to Mrs. Zee about you.”

  “Ms. Zee,” Donny corrected.

  “What?”

  “She’s not married, so she’s not a Mrs.”

  “Okay, well—”

  “I think maybe she had a little crush on me back in the day.”

  “That’s not what we talked about,” Alice said, though she couldn’t help but think of the way Ms. Zee’s face had gone all soft and dewy like a honey-glazed doughnut when she talked about Uncle Donny. “You didn’t tell the truth about the moose and the hockey game. She said that the moose got stuck in the ice, and you guys helped him out.”

  Donny stopped with a loop of tape in each hand. “Huh,” he said. “You know, I think she’s right. That’s how we told it all these years, so I guess I forgot that’s not really what happened.”

  “So it’s not true?” Alice said.

  “There’s a difference between true and factual,” Donny said, and went back to gathering loose rolls of tape and tossing them into a plastic tub by the door.

  “You sound like those politicians on TV who never answer the questions. That drives Mom crazy.”

  He twirled a roll of tape around his finger. “A true story is true at its heart, even if all the facts aren’t exactly right. It’s honest.”

  Alice tried to hold that idea in her head, but it was having trouble sticking.

  “You need to be able to suss out the truth. The honest stories. That’s what matters.”

  “But if things can be true and not true—How do you ever know what’s really true?”

  Uncle Donny scratched his head. “Man, I wish your dad were here. He’s much better at explaining this stuff.” He grabbed a hockey stick that was leaning against the wall and spun it in his hands as he spoke. “It’s like all the stories about him. They’re all based in fact. He really was the best hockey player this town has ever seen. And a good man. And a hero. All that builds up into myths and legends, and you throw his big personality on top of that—” He stopped walking and took a deep breath. “It’s hard to tell the difference between honest and true, Alice, but you need to learn how. You need to figure out what’s honest and believe in it with all your heart. That’s what’s really true. And that’s how it lasts.”

  Alice tried to let this all sink in. She thought she understood what her uncle was telling her—or starting to. She got that people could manipulate facts in a dishonest way. But something still bothered her. Maybe it was an honest story that her dad had scored a goal off a moose—if anyone could get an animal assist, it was her dad—but something else had actually happened that day.

  “What really happened—how you guys rescued the moose—that’s a much better story.”

  “A better story than getting an assist from a moose?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s more like him. More what he cared about.” She paused. “It’s more true. And it’s the whole truth.”

  “I suppose you’re right about that,” he said. “I guess it’s hard to know the truth even when you’re the one it happened to.”

  Alice considered that. There were only two people who’d been there the day her dad had to leave: her father and herself. Would she ever be able to tell the whole truth? She wasn’t sure, but she did know it would be honest to say he had never meant to hurt her. She cleared her throat. “Ms. Zee said Dad was a leader. That he made space for everyone.”

  “Yep, that’s your dad. One hundred percent.”

  “Do you think I’m like that?”

  Uncle Donny twirled the hockey stick in his hand.

  “I don’t think I am,” Alice said. “I want to be—” Her voice cracked.

  “I know, hon.”

  She hung her head and looked at the bin of loaner skates: worn, dull, their laces tangled like vines in Minnow Pond. “Sometimes it feels like too big of a risk, like putting in your weakest player when you only have a one-point lead in a championship game just so everyone gets playing time. Only a thousand times worse.”

  Uncle Donny nodded. “So you put the player in. He fouls up. What do you do?”

  “Lose?”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You sulk about it. Maybe throw your gear into your locker a little too hard. Maybe smack your stick. And then what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said again.

  “You take a shower. You go to bed. The next day you get up, and you go to practice with the kid who fouled up. Because you’re a team. Because really it wasn’t just his mistake. Because if you had gotten a bigger lead, one little mess up wouldn’t have mattered. That’s how a team works.”

  “But these are just kids in school. They aren’t my team.”

  “Yes, they are. This whole town is a team. That’s the way this works. We look out for one another. We invite everyone in. We forgive and move on.”

  Alice thought of the Basic Becky dinners Izzy’s mom held that Alice’s mom was never invited to. “Some people. But not everyone.”

  “Not everyone. And maybe fewer every day.”

  Uncle Donny hung rolls of tape on a peg board. “Listen, I am in no place to tell you what to do. I only took Emily Zelonis to the dance because your dad offered to give me his signed Bobby Orr picture. But you asked if you were like your dad, and if that’s what you want, well, making everyone feel like part of the team is key.”

  Alice squatted to grab loose pucks to throw into the bin.

  They worked in silence.

  “Alice, this is looking pretty good. I feel like you’ve repaid your debt of fake illness.”

  “Thanks, Uncle Donny.” She hesitated. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Did you ever regret bringing Ms. Zee to the dance?”

  “Officially, she asked me.” He smiled. “And no. Not for one single millisecond.”

  Lewis lifted the heavy knocker on the Bird House door and let it fall. Inside, the owl hooted. A moment later, Melanie pulled open the door. She looked him up and down. “You don’t look ready to go to the web.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s just that I have practice.” Lewis never skipped hockey practice. Coach Donny had a rule: you cut practice, you didn’t skate in the next game. Missing a game wasn’t just about him. He would never let his team down like that. “I thought maybe we could do more research and work from here.”

  Melanie pointed to the bushes that flanked the door. The stems and orange-red winterberries were encased in ice as clear and shining as glass. “It’s happening.”

  “It’s just an ice storm,” Lewis said. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He looked at the berries. It looked like each one had been carefully dipped in the ice. His eyes traveled down the line of shrubs. An evergreen’s branches hung low, heavy with the ice. The spikes of the holly leaves tried to break free but couldn’t. The ground shone like nothing Lewis had ever seen in a rink or on a pond. The ice was perfectly clear, and he could see each pebble beneath it.

  Melanie stepped aside to let him in. “It’s what the book said would happen. The Freezing.” She closed the door behind him. “You can’t go to practice. We have to do something about the web.”

  “We still don’t know what to do.”

  “We have to tell stories.”

  But what stories? Nothing had worked so far. He thought of Alice out in the woods with those letters from her father. His stomach twisted as he remembered how Alice had hugged him then, and he
wished she were with them. Whatever was happening, they needed her.

  Melanie led him toward the back of the house.

  “Maybe we should call Alice,” he said.

  Melanie’s face darkened. “She doesn’t want to help.”

  “I think she does. Yesterday—” But he stopped himself. Alice had been a wreck. Maybe it wasn’t his place to tell Melanie. Maybe Alice deserved a little bit of privacy. He wasn’t really sure where his loyalties lay. Alice had been his best friend forever, but Melanie was his friend now, and they had a real, live mission.

  “Yesterday, what?”

  “Nothing,” Lewis said. He had never imagined not knowing what to do when his adventure came calling. “I just think she’s coming around.” He paused. “I think it all ties back to her dad.”

  “Maybe,” Melanie said. She took a cloak off a hook by the back door.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To the web.”

  “You can’t go alone,” he told her. It was never a good idea to go into the woods alone, but especially not on an afternoon like this.

  She clutched the cloak to her chest and looked at him with her pale blue eyes that always looked like they were ready to fill with tears. “The web needs saving,” she told him. “I’m going to go save it, and if I’m the only one who can or who will—Well, maybe that’s the way it’s meant to be.”

  Meant to be. Like the Hero’s Journey. But maybe this was his journey, too. Was this the part where he was rejecting the call? He shook his head. If this was a hero’s journey, he was the sidekick. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a role to play. “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay, what?”

  “I’ll go, too.”

  She smiled. “Good.”

  “Where’s your aunt? Should we tell her we’re leaving?”

  “She’s out on one of her walks.”

  Lewis glanced through the window of the back door. Icy rain continued to fall. “In this weather?”

  “She thought she saw a golden eagle yesterday. This isn’t one of their nesting areas, so it would be a big find.”

  Lewis figured if Melanie’s aunt felt okay with going out in the storm, then they would probably be okay, too. “We should leave a note,” he said.