The Edge of Everything

by Jeff Giles

  A man was coming toward Zoe. The water was streaming off him. She waited, barely breathing. She told herself that it had to be Banger.

  It was X.

  “You are such a show-off!” she shouted. “You scared the crap out of me!”

  X didn’t answer until he reached her. It seemed to take forever. Finally, he knelt by the pool, his beautiful face emitting its usual pale light.

  “I was so desperate for you I could not think clearly,” he said. “Might that serve as an apology?”

  Zoe smiled.

  “Yeah, that’ll work,” she said. She reached up for his hand. “Can you help me get out?”

  X leaned toward her.

  “A little closer?” she said.

  X bent over the water, obediently—and Zoe pulled him in.

  When he had righted himself, he stood waist-deep in the water, looking confused. His hair and overcoat dripped into the pool.

  “That’s what you get for scaring the hell out of me,” said Zoe. “By the way, if you were a regular person you would never have fallen for that.”

  He looked down at her body and seemed to see it for the first time.

  “Your limbs are bare,” he said.

  Zoe waited for him to look away shyly.

  Instead, he said, “They are beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “No one’s ever said that about … my limbs.”

  X pushed his hair back behind his ears. His face and neck were covered with droplets of water that picked up the light. He took off his coat. He laid it at the side of the pool. He drew Zoe close and put his hand at the small of her back. She could feel it pulsing there. All his shyness had vanished. He seemed hungrier for her than he’d ever been.

  “Are you free?” Zoe asked him. “Have the lords let you go?”

  “Do not make me answer,” he said. “Let me have this moment.”

  He took Zoe’s hands and placed them on his hips.

  She knew what he wanted her to do.

  She pushed up his shirt, her hands sliding slowly up his body. His skin was hot to the touch. The heat jumped to her own palms and traveled up her arms. She felt as if she and X were part of one continuous body now. She tried to hold his eyes, but he looked away as her fingers grazed the welts and bruises that covered his ribs.

  “Don’t be ashamed,” said Zoe, her voice a whisper. “I don’t want you to ever be ashamed, okay? You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  X nodded, but she wasn’t sure he believed her.

  Zoe tossed the shirt to the side of the pool. She missed. The shirt landed on the water and hung suspended like a jellyfish. Zoe didn’t notice. She stared at the tattoos along X’s forearms. She smiled.

  “What is it?” he said. “Tell me.”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  She’d been looking at the “giraffe” with the spiked tail.

  X pulled her even closer now and took her face in his hands. He tilted it up toward him.

  “I loved your letter,” he said.

  Zoe had forgotten about the thing. She let out a squeal of embarrassment.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “It was in the coat!”

  “I insisted that Ripper read it to me until I had committed every syllable to memory,” said X.

  “Shut up,” said Zoe. “You did not!”

  X cleared his throat.

  “‘The minute you left, I realized I loved you,’” he said. “‘Crap, I’m already running out of paper.’”

  “Stop, stop, stop,” she said.

  They stood smiling and swaying in the water. It was becoming impossible to keep their bodies apart. There was no such thing as close enough.

  X ran a thumb over her lips. She parted them at his touch.

  She waited for his mouth to come to her—and it did.

  When she emerged from the locker room in her street clothes, Zoe saw that X was trembling. Now she knew for certain what she’d already suspected: he hadn’t collected his final soul. He had defied the lords. He had come to her instead. She couldn’t imagine what the consequences would be. Under the stark fluorescent lights of the lobby, X began to look afraid. Was he afraid for himself—or for her?

  Now she understood why he hadn’t wanted to talk.

  She didn’t want to talk either.

  Instead, she wanted to show him something. But it was far. She didn’t know how they’d get there.

  X understood before she said a word.

  “Wherever you want to go, I will carry you,” he said.

  Zoe remembered how X had carried her and Jonah home through the woods. At the time, she’d been so out of it that all she remembered was a feeling of immense safety and the sight of the trees pulsing by.

  X made a basket of his arms now, and she reached around his neck. She felt warmed. Protected. Enclosed.

  Her cell phone buzzed. She fished it out of her coat, and found a text from her mom.

  You ready? it said. Should I come get you?

  Zoe sank gratefully into X’s chest.

  No, she texted back. I’ve got a ride.

  And then X launched them into the snowy night. This time, the journey in his arms was bumpy and nauseating, and Zoe realized that holding on to a comet seemed really cool until you were actually holding on to a comet. She clung to X’s neck, shouting directions. They moved faster than she thought possible. The landscape blurred by, trailing streaks of light. Zoe saw everything in flashes: the snowy ski runs; the dark, twisting river; the thick puffs of smoke that rose out of the trees as if giants were lying on their backs in the mountains and smoking cigars.

  A hundred miles rushed by. Soon, X descended and skidded to a halt, snow swirling everywhere. When they’d finally come to a stop, he set Zoe down with infinite care.

  She lurched forward and threw up.

  And then she spent the next five minutes trying to get her ears to pop. X was mortified, but Zoe reassured him.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” she said. “I thought it’d be romantic.”

  Zoe had guided him to a deserted spot in the mountains. Only now did she realize that, with the moon locked behind clouds, they wouldn’t be able to see a thing.

  X seemed unconcerned.

  “Which way are we bound?” he said.

  “That way,” she said, pointing vaguely into the darkness. “I think?”

  X knelt and placed his palms against the snow. A tunnel of light burst in front of them, 10 feet high and 20 feet wide. It illuminated the hills and evergreens as far as Zoe could see.

  She shook her head in disbelief.

  “I’m keeping you,” she said.

  seventeen

  X followed Zoe over a snowy rise. The drifts were deep, and their progress was slow. He could hear her just ahead of him, panting and swearing. Occasionally, she would turn back and say, “We’re almost there” or “Okay, I was lying, now we’re almost there.”

  He himself did not speak. He couldn’t shake the image of Zoe’s father from his brain. He kept picturing the man’s hand extended toward him, reddened and chapped from the cold and waiting to be shaken. He kept picturing his eyes—Jonah’s eyes.

  There was nothing but snow in every direction. He’d had enough of the snow.

  Finally, they staggered down the other side of the rise. At the bottom, there was a fence and a hill of rocks, on which stood a small cross and a stone Buddha. X had seen souls arrive in the Lowlands with the same images around their necks—just as he’d seen necklaces with golden stars and crescent moons. New souls never fought so hard as when the guards tried to steal them away.

  Without a word, Zoe began scaling the fence. It rattled as she climbed, and X felt a wave of concern. He wondered if he should stop her. But then he remembered that one of the things he loved most about her was that no one could ever stop her.

  Zoe dropped down on the other side of the fence and landed with a deep, muffled thud. She turned to X.

  “This is Black Teardrop,” she said. “Th
is is my father’s cave. This is where he died.”

  X’s heart lurched.

  This was the moment to tell her that her father was still alive. This was the moment.

  He couldn’t do it. The words wouldn’t come.

  He wanted to give Zoe one more minute of happiness, of innocence—of not knowing.

  Did he have to tell her the truth? What if he didn’t? He could take her father’s soul to the Lowlands and be free—and Zoe could keep believing that her dad had died in a cave. She didn’t have to know about her father’s sins. She didn’t have to know that he had run from his past as long as he could, or that when it finally caught up with him he’d chosen the most cowardly course: faking his own death and leaving her and Jonah and their mother to cry their hearts out by a tree in the backyard. Zoe could have a whole lifetime of not knowing.

  She was staring at him. Her eyes were teary. He had to say something.

  “Show me the cave,” he said.

  He leaped over the fence and joined Zoe. There were already tracks, half buried in snow. They followed them up to the cave, then climbed to where the statue and the cross sat on the ledge.

  “I feel bad for these guys standing out here in the cold,” said Zoe.

  X did not reply. His mind and heart were aching.

  “But I guess Jesus and Buddha can handle a little snow,” she said.

  She sat down on the rocks, surrounded by the light that X had summoned up. She began talking, shyly at first.

  She told him about the cave and about her father. X found it hard to concentrate on the exact words—they blew by him like a wind. She said that she’d gone caving the day before. She said that there was a moment during the descent where she suddenly knew what her dad had gone through when he died—not just the mechanics of it, but the terror, too. She said she’d felt the rope wind around his throat, as if it were her own throat. She’d seen the flame on his headlamp singe the rope, then burn through it as he struggled. She’d imagined the fall—the sudden, heart-in-your-mouth naked panic of it—as if the cave were devouring her instead.

  She paused.

  She apologized for talking so much.

  She looked at him, desperate for him to speak. But still X said nothing. And every second that he said nothing felt like a lie. Could he lie to her for the rest of their lives? And would the two of them be able to build anything on top of the lie and still call it love?

  Zoe pointed at the statues. She said her mom had left them there. She’d been shocked when she found them. She’d thought that her mother hated her father, but clearly she hadn’t been able to cut him out of her heart. None of them had. Jonah, she said, was a legit basket case.

  She picked up the piece of bark from the ledge above the Buddha and the cross.

  “See this?” she said. “‘I will come back.’ I carved that for my dad. I wanted him to know we’re not gonna just leave him here.”

  X was startled by the words.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “What do you mean you’re ‘not gonna just leave him here’?”

  “We’re gonna come back and get him,” said Zoe.

  He saw the seriousness in her eyes. No one could ever stop Zoe. This time, he thought it not with a pang of fondness, but of dread.

  “I’m sorry I’m babbling, but I’m babbling because you aren’t talking,” she said. “Why aren’t you talking? You must have a million things to say.”

  “I do,” said X miserably. “And yet no way to say them.”

  Zoe climbed down from the rocks. She took off a glove. She laid her palm against the side of his face.

  “Try,” she said. “Try just telling me one thing.”

  X took her hand from his cheek. The softness of her hand—the kindness of the gesture—only hurt him.

  “You cannot go into this cave,” he said.

  “I’m not going to,” she said. “The police are.”

  “They cannot go either,” he said, growing heated. “You must trust me. You must stop them. No one must enter this cave. Let them seal it forever.”

  Zoe pulled away from him.

  “Why?” she said.

  His mind spun in search of an answer.

  “Why should I stop them?” she said.

  “Because I am asking you to, Zoe,” he said. “Because I am begging you to. Because everything depends upon it.” He was going too far. He was saying too much. “Because I will destroy the cave with my own hands before I let anyone venture into it.”

  Zoe recoiled from him.

  “What is wrong with you?” she said. “Why should I stop them? I’m going to keep asking until you answer me. And you know me—I can go all night.”

  This time, he interrupted her before she could get the question out.

  “Nothing but the most desperate pain can be found in that cave,” he said. “You might recover from it, but I am not so strong as you, Zoe. I could not bear to watch rags made of your heart.”

  His tenderness had no effect.

  “You’re not answering me,” Zoe said angrily. “Why should I leave my father’s body in a hole? He would never have left me. Why shouldn’t we go into the cave? Tell. Me. Why.”

  X felt the answer fly up his throat, like a sickness.

  “Because your father is not there,” he said. “And because you are wrong—he did leave you. He left all of you.”

  Zoe staggered back a step, her face suddenly unrecognizable.

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  He stepped toward her. She drew back, as if in fear.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The lords gave me one last commission—one last soul I must take if I am to be free,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “Banger told me.”

  “The soul they sent me for, Zoe—it was your father,” said X. “He is alive. I have seen him.”

  The color was gone from Zoe’s face now. He reached for her again. She wouldn’t let him touch her.

  “You’ve—you’ve seen my father?”

  “In Canada,” he said. “On a barren coast. Not so many hours ago.”

  Zoe shook her head.

  “It couldn’t have been my father,” she said. “Tell me how you knew. Tell me exactly what he said.”

  “We spoke but little,” said X. “He gave off a strong scent of fish. He begged my pardon for it—he said he had been fishing through the ice.”

  Zoe’s eyes suddenly flared with hope.

  “My father didn’t fish,” she said. “He didn’t know how. If he knew how, I would know how. He would have taught me.”

  “It may be that he has learned,” X said gently. “This is a man who fled his life—who shed even his name. I suspect he lives on the margins and in the shadows now. He calls himself Leo Wrigley.”

  This last detail seemed to wound Zoe more than anything that had come before.

  “We used to have a cat named Wrigley,” she said, her voice breaking. “And Leo is—it’s Jonah’s middle name.” She was quiet a moment. “What else did he say? This is insane.”

  X searched his mind. He had spent so few moments with the man—and he had been in such a tortured state.

  “He praised the rock we were sheltered under,” he said. “He said it was sandstone, and remarked on how ‘freakin’ awesome’ it was. I grieve to tell you, Zoe. But it was your father.”

  Zoe burst into sobs.

  He reached out to her again, and yet again she shrank away. Not being able to touch her was excruciating. X clenched his hands so tightly that his nails drew blood.

  “Did you—did you take him?” said Zoe. “Did you take my father to the Lowlands?”

  “No, Zoe,” said X. “How could I? He sits on that beach still, for all I know.”

  “What did my father do?” she said. “What were his crimes?”

  “Do not ask me,” said X. “Spare yourself something.”

  Zoe rubbed frenziedly at her eyes, but the tears kept coming.

/>   “I need to know at least a little,” she said. “I mean, it was bad, what he did? Bad, like … bad, like you’re used to?”

  X shivered. Every word she spoke pierced him, but the words he was forced to speak in return were worse somehow—because they pierced her.

  “Much of it occurred in his youth,” he said. “Yet—”

  Zoe could not wait for him to complete the thought.

  “Yet what?” she said.

  “Yet I have taken souls for less,” he said. “There was blood on his hands when he was still a young man. And there is fresh blood on them today.”

  He watched as the last remnants of hope drained out of Zoe.

  “What happens now?” she said.

  He reached out to her a final time, and this time she let him hold her.

  “I regret this answer above all the others,” he said. “What happens now is for you to decide. Either your father goes free—or I do.”

  X waited for what felt like years for Zoe to speak.

  “Take me to him,” she said finally. “Take me to my father.”

  Her voice sounded so hard now. X turned from her. He stared down at the feeble metal fence, which shook and rattled in the wind.

  “Please,” she added. “Or I’ll go myself. I’ll find a way. You know I will.”

  “Yet what will you say to him, Zoe?” X said. He did not look back at her. He couldn’t. “And what will you have me do? Will you ask me to stop your own father’s breath? Will you watch as I circle his neck with my fingers? And, once I am done, will you ever be able to look at me again?”

  Zoe was silent a long time.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I want to see him with my own eyes. I want him to know … I want him to know that I know what he’s done. I don’t want him thinking he got away with this—not for one more second.” She put a hand on X’s shoulder. “Will you take me?” she said. “Even if I don’t have all the answers yet?”

  He turned back to her. Her eyes, even in distress, were so familiar. They never failed to unravel him.

  “You know that I will,” he said.

  Zoe texted her mother: I’m not going to be home tonight. I’m OK, I promise. Please trust me ONE more time.