by Phoebe North
But Mom wasn’t like that. She just wanted to find Jamie.
“The police called my parents last night,” he said hastily, before we could even ask. “I don’t know where he is. He cut last-period English yesterday. He’s never done that before.”
Mom and I chewed over this information together. But before we could respond, Neal added, with a fretful face, “He really hasn’t come home?”
Mom drew Neal close in a hug. Mom was full of hugs that day. Neal looked embarrassed, his face pressed up against my mother’s canvas jacket, while she hugged and hugged him anyway. “We’ll find him,” she said.
But we didn’t. We went home after that. I sat next to Elijah on the sofa and we both watched television while Mom and Dad took turns screaming at each other and calling the cops. Nobody made dinner that night. It was as if they forgot we were supposed to be normal people. Elijah eventually asked me to give him a bath, and I sat there in the steamy bathroom, not talking, not even thinking. When I tucked Elijah in that night and then went to bed, too early to do anything but stare into the darkness, I knew in the pit of my stomach and the thorny place in my heart that my brother was never coming home.
19
THE PIRATE’S BED WAS NARROW, hardly big enough for both their bodies. When the pirate sat beside him, the Nameless Boy felt their hip bones press. He leaned away. He smelled the pirate’s sour breath. He turned his head. When the pirate reached across him, he flinched back. But then he saw a length of something in the pirate’s hand.
Rope.
Dad insisted that Elijah and I both go to school on Monday even though I told my mother that there was no chance I’d be able to pay attention. When I said that, she thinned her lips and gave me a long, meaningful look.
“Dad and I will be doing everything we can to find him,” she said; then she ushered me out the door after Elijah, where I watched him get on his bus, then waited with Nina until our own bus rolled up to the curb.
I sat down next to Miranda in silence. I suspected the news about Jamie had already spread through the school, and Miranda’s bright tone confirmed it.
“Hey, I got a new Pokémon deck. Do you wanna see?”
I watched the trees roll by. No Winter Watchers in the woods. Nobody. Nothing. I could have been angry at her question, but instead, I felt a strange, burning sort of dullness inside.
“You don’t have to try to talk to me. We don’t have to talk today.”
“Oh . . .” Miranda looked down at her cards. Her expression seemed to collapse from inside. “I thought maybe you’d want to talk about something besides Jamie. That you’d want to be distracted.”
“I can’t be distracted,” I told her.
“Oh,” she said again.
The bus rolled into the schoolyard.
Everyone looked at me at school that day, their eyes wide and owlish. There were whispers as the bodies parted like a sea around me. Before we walked into civics class, Miranda lowered her voice and pulled me aside. She wanted to warn me. She wanted me to know that Jamie’s disappearance was all anybody could talk about on Friday, and that there were rumors. Something to do with Neal Harriman, drugs. I remembered the way the boys had looked at me that afternoon that I’d caught them in the woods. Like they wanted to murder me for being there, interfering with them.
I told myself that it was nothing. Jamie had just been trying out a new persona like a selkie might pull on a new skin. In a few months, if he returned, Jamie might decide he was a nerd, or a jock, or a surfer, even though we lived hundreds of miles from the water.
“He only smoked pot, Miranda,” I told my friend. “This isn’t Breaking Bad.”
She winced when I said it, and I knew then how awkward that sentiment sounded, coming from me. I sat at my desk and ignored the look she’d just given me, the way that everyone’s eyes were on me. Jamie might have liked becoming someone else, but I was always myself, even in that moment. I told myself that I could turn into an impenetrable pillar. There were no cracks in me. I was strong.
But as I squared my shoulders, I bit my lip. I wondered. Jamie had gone into the woods that day and not come out. Maybe he’d smoked too much. Maybe he’d tried some other drugs, something worse. I imagined him puking into the bushes. I imagined him stumbling, falling, smacking his head on a log, bleeding out on the forest floor. His body going limp, going soggy, going cold. I told myself that it was impossible. Dad had searched the woods that night. He wasn’t there anymore.
He was alive somewhere. He was fine.
I didn’t cry at school. I told myself that I was fine, too.
On Tuesday afternoon, there was a knock on our door. Elijah and I watched from his bedroom window as Mom and Dad went down to talk to the police. We held our breath together as the squad car door opened, but it was only the female cop with the squished boobs. And this time, her hardened expression had gone weak at the edges.
Lately, Mom and Dad hadn’t been touching each other. But now they walked down the front steps, leaning into one another, Dad’s hand on the small of Mom’s back. As though, in that moment, they had one heart again, one pulse, one spine. Kneeling on the window seat in Elijah’s bedroom, I found myself reaching out to touch my little brother, too. I wanted to protect him from whatever it was that had swallowed my other brother up. It was here, still. Lurking. Hungry. Waiting.
“Is James dead?” Eli asked in his innocent, boyish voice, as if those words weren’t a knife’s cut. He wasn’t supposed to say them. If we didn’t speak of it, it wouldn’t happen. But he didn’t know that. Eli had never really understood the rules—to Gumlea, to chess, to all sorts of games. Jamie always said it was because he was too young, but the look on his face now was hard. Intentional.
“No,” I said. I saw that image in my head again. Jamie someplace dark, bleeding. Jamie too sick to even stand. But I pushed those thoughts away. “If he was dead, I would know. I would feel it.”
“And you don’t?”
I watched Mom and Dad. Nobody was crying. Neither one held the other. They just spoke softly to the cops, nodding their heads.
“I don’t feel anything,” I told Elijah, and convinced myself it was true.
The cops left. Mom and Dad stood outside talking for a moment, and then Mom looked up at us. She waved, a thin, shaky wave. Elijah and I waved back. Then we climbed down from the window seat together, and left his room, and went downstairs.
Mom and Dad were standing in our front entryway. There was a cloud of fresh autumn air all around them, and for a moment, it smelled like hope. But then I saw their faces. Not hopeful, but not crushed by grief, either. Dad kept flexing his jaw. Mom furrowed her brow. I didn’t know what to make of either one. Elijah flung himself forward into Dad’s arms, and Dad lifted him up, but I hung back. Nervous.
“What did they say?” I asked. “Have they found Jamie?”
I was asking Mom, but she only looked at my father, who sucked in a breath, then shook his head.
“No. They found his backpack.”
“In the woods?” I asked quickly, remembering what the straps looked like on Jamie’s shoulders as he faded into Gumlea.
Mom’s frown deepened. “Annie, you know he’s not out there. We told you—”
“Shira, stop,” my dad said. Usually, Mom would have argued with Dad when he spoke to her in that tone. But not today. Today, she stopped.
Dad crouched down, so that he was eye level with Eli and even shorter than me. He looked at us calmly, thoughtfully. “They found his backpack in a rest stop bathroom in Pennsylvania. His phone was in there, and his wallet. All of his schoolbooks.”
“Pennsylvania?” Elijah squeaked out. “What’s he doing there?”
“We don’t know, Eli,” Mom said. “The police are going to find him, though. They’ve promised us that.”
My little brother muttered something. I couldn’t really hear it at first, not until Dad set a hand on his shoulder. “What, kiddo?”
“I want Jamie to come hom
e,” Eli said, and threw both arms around Dad. Dad picked him up like he was a baby and not a first grader.
“I do, too, kiddo,” Dad said, and, sharing a glance with Mom, he carried Eli off toward the living room.
I stood there with Mom in the foyer for a minute, next to the shoe rack, still stinky from Jamie’s sneakers.
“Are they going to give us his backpack back?”
Mom shook her head in an idle way, as if she almost wasn’t listening. “No, honey. It’s evidence.”
I’m not sure why, but this news was what finally cut me, deep inside. These were my brother’s things, the only thing I had left of him. They should have been mine.
But then, Jamie wasn’t dead. Maybe it was only right that his phone (bricked, they would tell us later, having been dunked in the rest stop sink and then returned to the bottom of his bag) and his wallet and his crumpled school papers all went somewhere else.
Just like he had.
“Okay,” I said, and turned to go upstairs, leaving Mom to stand alone by all those sandals and rain boots.
20
IT SEEMED TO HURT THE pirate to move. He winced with every hand’s pass as he showed the Nameless Boy some knots. As the boy watched with round eyes, he felt how the sheets were damp beneath him. He wondered if he’d peed himself, or if the pirate’s blankets were always wet. Like the boards around them, the sea beyond, the pirate’s eye, his breath.
“Clove hitch. Bad in wet conditions. Slips.”
The pirate let out a cough, his lungs rattling with phlegm. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. And then he said, “Wrists together. Hands out.”
It took a moment for the boy to realize what the pirate meant. So the man, sitting beside him, their shared weight sagging the tiny bed, showed him. Held out his wrists, pressed together at the pulse points, the fingers meeting so that his hands formed a sort-of heart. Shaking, the boy did as he was told. Wrists together, hands out. The pirate bound him. Then he pulled the rope taut and rose, stringing the ends from the teeth above and tying them tight.
“Cat’s paw knot,” the pirate said. “Let’s see you swim out of this one, minnow.”
Days passed. No one knew what to say to me at school, but everyone looked. Watching as I drifted between classes, tracking me out of the corners of their eyes like they were hunters and I was prey. Even worse were the smiles that the teachers gave me, close-mouthed and pitying.
“Be strong,” Mrs. Kenner told me, a hand falling on my upper arm, heavy and wrinkled like a leather baseball mitt when I went up to hand in my makeup work. “They’ll find him.”
Jamie had been in Mrs. Kenner’s class the year before. I hate her was what he’d muttered over his geography homework at night. She gives us notebook checks like we’re babies, and what does she care if our notebooks are messy so long as we learn the capital of stupid Lithuania? But my notebook was always perfect and my grades were much better than Jamie’s had been. When she touched me, I give a small, numb nod of my head and floated all the way back to my seat.
My only real comfort was Miranda. She never tried to talk to me about it, and in a way, deep down inside, that might have bothered me. But more than that, it was a relief. Some mornings on the bus, she talked to me about video games. Others, she told me about books she’d read. And on the bad days, the dark days, the days when I could hardly speak to myself, much less to her, she just sat beside me, her shoulder touching mine.
“Dykes,” Nina said, and threw a wad of notebook paper at us. Miranda lowered her brow, looked at me, and rolled her eyes.
“I’d say it’s like she never had a friend,” Miranda said to me, “except the sad thing is, we both know it’s true.”
I put my head on her shoulder. The bus chugged endlessly along, spitting out black exhaust.
The days came and went. I turned thirteen alone, without my brother to share it. The night before my bat mitzvah, my mother and father had a fight. I heard their voices buzzing through the thin plaster of my bedroom wall. Dad thought that we should cancel it. The party part, at least. It wasn’t right, celebrating without Jamie here, without knowing if he was hurt or whole, alive or—
Mom didn’t let him finish his sentence.
“Of course you wouldn’t understand, Marc,” she said. “But it’s not like we can postpone Annie becoming a woman.”
I lay there in bed, my hands on my belly. It growled under my palms. I hadn’t eaten dinner. No one had noticed.
But there was anger there, underneath the hunger, and it burned steadily. Not at them, for fighting, or because they forgot about me, but, in my darkest, most honest moments, at Jamie. That rage stayed inside me all through that night, while I dreamed of ships crashing against jagged rocks and red ocean waves seeping in through cracked boards. And it was with me over breakfast, when I picked at my bacon and eggs, and in the morning, when we arrived at the synagogue, too. I’d been assigned a much more difficult Torah portion than Jamie had. And yet I read it easily. Really, I was only half there. Instead, I was thinking of Jamie, hating Jamie, the rage burning and burning and burning. I looked up to see the sparsely populated pews, the cousins and aunts and uncles, and how they all looked distracted. They didn’t care who I was or what I’d become. All that mattered was that Jamie was gone now. He eclipsed me, even in his absence.
But the anger was counterbalanced by another, equally hefty feeling. Guilt for hating him, for feeling anything but pain and loss and loneliness. This was not a time to be thinking of myself. This was a time to think of Jamie and his possible fates: dismembered or on drugs somewhere or starving to death on some street.
My party was smaller than Jamie’s because I didn’t have as many friends, though no one said so. There were only a few tables crowded together in the VFW hall, mostly filled with family. We danced the hora. We lit candles. We ate cake. Our smiles in the photographs were false and empty. People started streaming out early. Even Miranda left without taking a favor.
Later, alone in my room, I looked at myself, tallit draped over my shoulders. I liked the heavy, smooth feeling of the fabric, like a ceremonial robe. But other than a frank jolt of pleasure at that cool sensation, I felt hollow.
A knock came at my door.
“Come in.”
It was Mom. She held a box in her hands, wrapped carefully. “I have something for you, sweetie.” It seemed I would always be sweetie, now that my brother was gone. Mom sat down on my bed, then patted the bedsheets gently. I came and sat beside her. As I carefully removed the wrapping paper, I saw her eyes sweep the walls, where the maps of Gumlea once hung.
I opened her gift. A pair of tarnished bronze candleholders, wrapped in tissue paper.
“They were my mom’s,” she said, and her voice had a strange note in it. We never talked about my mother’s parents. Her mother had died when she was a teenager. Her father, when I was a toddler. I hardly remembered him.
I touched the metal, which felt somehow warm in my hands. The surface was waxy.
“Why me?” I asked. “Why not him?”
I didn’t want to speak his name, but it seemed I didn’t have to tell her who I meant. She gave me a withering smile.
“Something the rabbi said a few years ago. Traditionally, women were the keepers of faith at home. Even though the men went to temple every day to pray, the women were the ones who kept the candles lit on the sabbath.”
A faint wick of something lit inside me at her words. Mom understood. Maybe she always had. Jamie may have been gifted, but I was the faithful one.
I wanted to hug her, but for some reason I couldn’t make myself move. Even my gaze remained fixed on the heavy candlesticks in my hands.
“Thank you,” I said softly. She leaned forward and kissed my forehead. For just a split second, the whole world smelled like Mom. Sandalwood and the delicate detergent she used to wash her clothes. Then she stood up and turned to leave.
But before she did, she looked at my walls again. Bare now, though you cou
ld still see the shadows where the maps had been. She let out a long sigh and said exactly the wrong thing:
“You and your brother and those stories you used to tell.”
Then she left me there, alone in the dark.
21
A FIGURE APPEARED AT THE top of the stairs. At first, he thought it was another man. But then he saw the smooth curve of her jaw, her slight breasts beneath her double-breasted coat. A lady pirate. He didn’t know that those existed.
“Here,” she said, and she offered him a cup, the lip spiked with terrifying splinters. But the Nameless Boy was so thirsty that he drank anyway. It tasted—it tasted like the color orange, like some overripe tropical jewel. It burned going down.
“What is that?” he finally panted. By the flickering light of her candle, he saw that her lips were chapped and badly peeling.
“Grog,” she said. She held the cup to his lips again. He drank until it was empty.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked her when he was done.
“There will come a time,” she said, “on some future day, when the walls of this ship will open, when your ropes will come loose. His back will be turned, and his passions elsewhere. That time is a door, and it’s closed now, but when it opens, I need you to slip through. You must take it, Jack. You must.”
Then she stood, slowly, carefully, ducking beneath the ceiling girders, and left again. The boy was once more alone in the dark.
And he wondered to himself: Who the hell is Jack?
Vidya hadn’t been in chorus the first week after Jamie’s disappearance. Mom and Dad said that the police had already spoken to her, but they didn’t seem satisfied by whatever it was she had said. Mom said she wanted the police to talk to Vidya again. She had to know something, my mother said. The thought tugged at me—how Jamie and Vidya had spent hours together, far from my awareness, right up until when he disappeared. A few days after my bat mitzvah, when she’d finally returned to school, I watched her on the late bus. At first, she wouldn’t meet my eyes. I hesitated by my usual seat, wondering if I should go to her. From what Mom said, if she had answers about Jamie, she was keeping them locked away.