by Phoebe North
She’d lost him, too—I knew she felt that, looking at her and how she steadied her sad gaze out the foggy bus window. But her loss was nothing like mine. I had been trying hard to make myself strong—but my resolve was beginning to waver. As the days passed with no news, doubts had begun to seep in, sour and bitter as a lemon peel. Mom thought Vidya knew something. And we had been friendly, once. She’d been nice, even—telling me to join Madrigals. What harm would come from talking to her?
So I pressed forward through the aisle. When I sat down next to her, she didn’t look at me, only kept her eyes cast out the window.
“What do you want?” she whispered, and I was surprised to find her voice had an edge to it. Her chin was already trembling, like she was wobbling right on the verge of tears.
“Jamie’s still missing,” I told her. I was surprised, too, by how it sounded like there was an accusation in my voice. Outside of my parents, I’d hardly spoken to anyone about Jamie, so I didn’t have any practice at it. I didn’t know how to talk about him without sounding angry, or mournful, or both.
“I know that,” she said. She wiped the corner of her eye against her hand.
“Well,” I pressed her, “don’t you have any idea where he is? The two of you spend so much time together—”
“I don’t know!” She was trying to keep her voice down and failing. A few kids glanced at us. The bus driver’s eyes darted to meet mine in the rearview mirror. “I told the police already that I don’t know!”
“Maybe he told you to keep it a secret. Or maybe you don’t think it’s safe to tell me. I’m his sister, Vidya. Please, you have to—”
“I don’t have to tell you anything!” She finally turned to look at me, and I saw how angry she was, her hair a wild cloud around her, her mouth a bruisey pink.
She’s beautiful. The ridiculous thought flashed through my mind. I could kiss her, right there on the bus, in front of the band nerds and everybody else. I’d never kissed anybody before, but I could imagine what it would feel like. Soft. Warm. Sweet. Still, I knew it was wrong. She didn’t want to kiss me. She just wanted to be left alone. My shoulders slumped.
“Okay,” I told her. “I get it.” I waited until the next stop, grabbed my backpack, and stood. But as I started off toward my seat by the front of the bus, her voice called out to me. Stopping me.
“Annie, I swear, I really don’t know where he is,” she told me. “For all I know, he might as well be in Gumlea.”
I turned to look at her.
“Take a seat,” the bus driver said to me. I sat down, dismayed, then glanced back at her. But she’d sunk low in her own seat, out of sight.
Jamie had promised me he hadn’t told her about Gumlea. Told her we’d just made up stories together—that was all. But the details, the geography, the name—those were supposed to be ours. How did she know that word? Had he lied to me? Or had the truth come out later, during some gray afternoon on Neal’s sofa? Holding hands with her while the other kids drank and joked around, and maybe he had leaned in and whispered our secrets to her: Annie and I called our kingdom Gumlea. I know it sounds babyish, but it was magical. . . .
My heart was pounding. I clutched my backpack to my chest. What else did she know about us? Did she know I was the Emperata, and he the Nameless Boy? Did she know about our plans to open the Veil together? To let all that magic come tumbling out?
I glanced back toward her one last time as our bus pulled up to my curb. He might as well be in Gumlea, she’d said, like it was an absurd idea. But maybe she knew something that I didn’t about my brother. She wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t confirm or deny anything I was thinking. I shook my head. At last, on shaky legs, I stood and stepped out onto the curb.
In Gumlea.
I thought of him stepping backward the day he’d disappeared. I’d seen him go into the woods. The police said that I had been mistaken. He was probably miles away by then, careening toward Pennsylvania.
But what if he wasn’t?
I had a dream that night. I was walking slowly down a creaking set of stairs, ambling through the pitch-dark. In the distance, I heard a rustle. A whimper.
“Who’s there?”
It was Jamie’s voice. My brother, calling out to me through the darkness. As my feet hit the wooden boards, the ground beneath seemed to sway. I came closer. There was no candlelight in this space. The air tasted like salt, or blood, I wasn’t sure which. Narrow strips of moonlight were cast through the ceiling. Shadows shifted around us. In skinny flashes, I saw the pale light of Jamie’s naked body. And something rough and splintered. Rope. There was rope.
I realized I was holding something. A wooden chalice, the liquid almost spilling as the ground gave another lurch. I wanted to say something to my brother. Offer him some comfort. He was trapped here, in this ship’s cabin beneath the ocean. But all I could do was hold out the cup.
“Here,” I said, and as he frantically drank, his eyes met mine. We had the same eyes, as always. And we were both afraid.
I jerked myself awake, my heart pounding through the darkness. As I peeled the covers back from my sweating body, I could almost feel the bed still swaying under me.
The pirate, I thought. The pirate has him.
It was a ridiculous notion, more dream than reality. But I thought it with clarity. With absolute certainty. Maybe Vidya hadn’t known where Jamie went. But on some level, she might have been right. We had exhausted all other possibilities. He wasn’t here. They hadn’t found him in Pennsylvania. He was trapped somewhere, unable to return to me.
What if he was trapped in Gumlea?
As I considered the possibility, I went to my desk and pulled my binder of maps from the bottom drawer. One by one, I hung the maps back up on the wall, fitting each sheet onto the darker rectangle of wallpaper like I was putting together a jigsaw puzzle. When I was done, I stood back and studied my work. In my mind, I was tracing a line across an ocean, one that led from the Island of Feral Children toward the King’s dominion. But something happened in the middle. The path got murky, unclear. I shook my head. It was ridiculous. Jamie wasn’t in Gumlea. Gumlea wasn’t real. They’d found his backpack at a rest stop. But still . . .
The pirate has him, I thought. The pirate has him and he can’t escape.
I’d seen him go into the woods. Stepping backward. Slipping into our kingdom. Gumlea was a real place: a fistful of forest behind our house, strewn with litter, full of kids. But if you let your eyes cross, just a little—if you knew how to walk, what words to say—it could almost become real, couldn’t it? There had been a time when I believed that. A time when I’d seen Gumlea for everything it was.
I left the maps on the walls and tucked myself back into bed. But I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I was haunted by the image of Jamie—no, of the Nameless Boy—tied up in that skinny bed in the bottom of a ship, his eyes wide open and full of terrors.
22
JACK WONDERED WHAT THE LADY Pirate had put in his drink.
First, he slept, strange dreams, thick dreams, about a naked glass eye examining his every movement and projecting distorted silhouettes to the creaking boards behind him.
Then he was sick all over the bed, not once, but again and again. Until he was empty. Until he was clean of everything he once had been. In snatches of thought between the murk in his brain, Jack wondered if this was what the sacred pool had done to the other children. Like an antiseptic, killing everything that was light inside him, filling him, instead, with inky black.
Sometimes, he sensed the pirate there with him, cleaning him, laying tender hands on him, putting him in fresh clothing, singing him sea shanties, whistling through the gaps in his teeth. But more often, he was alone.
Eli and I clung to one another that autumn and into the winter, when Mom and Dad were preoccupied with police reports and lawyers and hating one another. Every evening, after Dad would heat up another casserole provided by some kind old lady at Gram and Poppy’s church, my brother and
I would tuck our bodies against each other on the sofa and pull Jamie’s old nubby comforter, the one that had been on his bed the day he disappeared, up over ourselves and watch TV. The show didn’t matter. Sometimes, we’d just watch HGTV all night long, our faces blank as some woman showed a couple pictures of the house they could have. What was important was that there was noise, and that it wasn’t Mom and Dad’s noise—arguing, again, about whether Vidya had anything to do with his disappearance—and that it wasn’t the noise in either of our heads. The noise said that now, after weeks had passed, and months had passed, and Hanukkah and Christmas and New Year’s came and went and with Valentine’s Day fast approaching, our brother was never coming home.
Sometimes Eli slumped under the blankets and would start to cry. I’d take his soggy body and hold him against me. I wanted to cry, too, but I couldn’t. I needed to be strong for him. G-d, someone had to be. The worst nights were punctuated by the noise of cabinet doors slamming, dishes slamming, Mom telling Dad she couldn’t stand to look at him anymore and Dad telling Mom to keep her voice down, damn it, because the kids were right in the next room, as Eli’s head was a heavy weight on my chest and his tears soaked through my T-shirt.
Saturdays, I woke up early, did my homework before the sun even touched the sky, and then went out walking in the woods that had once been Gumlea. I had to do something. I couldn’t stay home. The trees were dusted with snow. Everything felt fresh and alive and promising. I kept waiting to find Jamie there, or some sign of him. His sneaker, maybe, trapped beneath a log. His sigil, carved into a tree. But there was nothing useful. Instead, only trash.
Once, after the snow had melted, I found a cardboard box, soaked through with rain. Inside were stacks of pornographic magazines. I knelt down in the mud and thumbed through them. They were old, the women’s hair all blown out into copper clouds, the makeup on their lips pinky orange, their tans bright. Their breasts . . .
I looked around. There were black-winged birds above me, worms pulsing through the dirt, but no one else. I knelt down in the mud, behind the box, and slid my hand along the hot skin of my belly. In the cold forest behind my house, in late January, while life at home fell apart, I looked at ancient magazines and touched myself until shivering waves washed over me and there were a thousand stars exploding into broad daylight overhead. For a moment, there was nothing. Only my body, the heat of my skin, the clammy cold of my hands, and pleasure.
Then I took my hand out of my jeans, threw the magazine into the box, and trudged back to the hollow misery of home. I showered, whispering my gratitude to the King, and dressed, and microwaved some chicken nuggets for Eli for lunch. Then I sat down on the couch beside him and pretended to be a person again.
The next time I returned to the forest, the box was gone. There was no brother in the woods for me, and no joy, however fleeting, either.
I don’t blame my parents. Dad was busy, with work and with fielding phone calls from the police, even though those came fewer and farther in between. Mom was busy, too. At first, her theory that Vidya had somehow led Jamie away from us kept her in a vise grip. Sometimes, I would stare at Vidya in chorus, watching her shift from foot to foot, her hair swaying like a waterfall behind her. I’d remember what she’d said, about how he might as well be in Gumlea. And I’d consider telling my mother that she’d said that. But deep down, I knew no good would come of it. Mom had never understood Gumlea. She’d only think it was some trick of Vidya’s.
Eventually, though, my mom began to let that theory die. Instead, she disappeared into Dad’s office every night, where she spent all night on some Facebook community for parents of missing and exploited children. Someone there told her to make a website for Jamie, so she did. www.wheresjames[redacted].com. The banner image on the top was Jamie’s bar mitzvah picture, a false portrait of a boy who had been gone far longer than those thin, dark months. Under that was a space for guests to leave messages or information. As the text began flooding in from friends of Jamie’s and family acquaintances and people from synagogue and Gram and Poppy’s church, Mom spent more and more time in the office, reading and rereading them.
“What do you think of this one?” she’d ask me when I passed on my way to the kitchen, Jamie’s blanket lumpy over my shoulders. Then, before I could answer, she’d rattled it off: “I hope you find news of your son soon. G-d bless. Kevin Monahan.”
“What am I supposed to think?” I asked. Mom’s face was blue, her eyes fixed on the screen.
“I think there might be a clue in it. ‘Find news’? That’s odd phrasing, don’t you think?”
I sighed, rolled my eyes, and walked on. Mom didn’t notice.
I didn’t blame her then. She was devastated. We all were. And I don’t blame her now. Something I’d learn years later was that our brains are good at putting together patterns from nothing. I did it, too. All those years searching for cairns in the woods, and swearing I’d found them in what was really just a pile of randomly toppled rocks. And that March, I was still casting my eyes out the bus and counting the Winter Watchers in the shadows. They were everywhere that spring, their dark curls limp and wet, piercings dangling from every naked knob of flesh. I saw them at the mall and in the trees and on television as Eli changed the channels. They stood there, their familiars at their sides, watching me with silent eyes. They were judging me, I was sure of it. Because I hadn’t saved Jamie. Because I hadn’t opened the Veil. Because I was still here and not there.
I wanted to go after him. Of course I did. But I didn’t know how. We’d invented elaborate rituals that made the impossible real. We needed knives, salt, blood sacrifices, potions. All of this had existed only in our minds, only in fantasy. I needed them now here, with me, in my actual hands. I needed real, actual magic. But our world was ordinary and drab, without the least bit of magic in it.
Anyway, Eli needed me. That’s what I told myself. No one else was watching out for him. Not Mom and not Dad. He was too little to understand, still. Almost eight. But still a half boy, who sometimes cried in his sleep and needed cups of milk warmed up in the microwave. I was the only one still paying enough attention to hear him, to sit by the bed while he sipped and slurped, to take the empty mug from him and tuck him in again.
I was needed here.
Until one Sunday, everything changed. Dad came into the living room, dressed in the same khaki pants and button-down he always wore, and declared that he was going to church. He said we were welcome to come, me and Eli. My little brother scrambled up from the sofa like we’d just been invited to Six Flags. But I stayed there, frozen.
It had been months since we’d been to synagogue. We’d kept going right up until my bat mitzvah, but that had been September. It was spring now, and that awful day had faded into memory. It hurt less now when I thought about it, even though I mostly tried not to remember. But I was still me. Still Jewish. Whether or not I went to synagogue didn’t really change a thing.
“I don’t think Mom would like that,” I said, pulling the blanket up beneath my chin. She wasn’t there. She was gone already, to a meetup of her Facebook friends, if you could call them that, where they would drink mimosas and talk about all the ways they’d gone wrong as parents and chased their children away.
Dad just looked at me and gave me a smile that wasn’t really a smile, too wide at the corners. “How do you feel about it?”
“It’s not really my thing,” I said. I made my voice as flat as I could. I wasn’t sure, really, how I felt about it. I was Jewish. Jesus sounded okay—for other people. For Dad, if he wanted him. Eli, too, I guess. But not for me.
Dad’s fake face smiled for a moment longer. Then he nodded. “Suit yourself. You know the rules, then.” He gave my foot a little squeeze through the blanket and headed upstairs to get Eli dressed.
Of course I knew the rules. Don’t answer the door. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t do anything Jamie might have done. Don’t disappear.
But I wanted to. I pulled the bla
nket—which didn’t smell like my brother anymore, only smelled like corn chip crumbs and my own body—over my head, and did my best to pretend that I was somewhere else.
23
HE THOUGHT OF ANNIT. HE thought of Ijah. He thought of the fairy he had watched bleed to death on the island’s soil. Maybe this was his payment for every cruel and evil thing he’d ever done. Couldn’t he have paid more attention to the Laws? Couldn’t he have made reparations to the King? Couldn’t he have made that damned tithe, like Annit had asked? He told himself that could have killed a million harpies, if only he’d wanted to.
Jack knew in his trembling, bound hands that he couldn’t have. But that didn’t stop him from feeling full of regret.
I woke up to the sound of thunder. No, to the sound of the garage door thundering closed. Sitting up in the darkness, I blinked three times, waiting for my bedroom around me to take shape. I’d been dreaming of the Wide Salt Sea again, and Jamie trapped beneath it, waves tossing his lifeless body like a rag doll, trailing seaweed like streamers behind him. For a long time, I couldn’t shake that image, or the cold, dead feeling of my hands, until voices outside pulled me to life.
I went to the window. Mom and Dad were standing on the front lawn, arguing in whispered tones. But my windows were thin; the curtains, thinner. I heard it all.
“How could you do that without asking me?”
“How could I? Where were you? What was I supposed to do?”
“They’re Jewish, Marc. We decided that fourteen years ago. It’s too late to change your mind.”