by Phoebe North
“Look, I never converted—”
“It doesn’t matter. That’s not how it works.”
“Well, tell me how it works, then?” In the shadows, Dad put his hands on his hips. I couldn’t see his sneer, but I could imagine it.
“If the mother is Jewish—”
“Oh, come on. The boys weren’t even circumcised.”
“We had a brit shalom! You were there. You promised—”
“I only did it for you. You know that. It didn’t mean anything to me.”
“And church does?”
“Yeah, it does.”
A long, chilly silence stretched between them.
“Eli wanted to go, Shira.”
“He’s a child. It’s not up to him.”
“Who’s it up to, then?”
Mom sat down on the front steps in a huff. I couldn’t see her anymore, but I could see the angular shape of her shadow cast in the porch light. It was moving erratically as she jiggled her knee.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said, dodging the question. “Do you know I used to get invited to church groups all the time? Everyone was worried about my soul. Everyone wanted to save me. No one cared what I wanted.”
“This isn’t about you. Can you imagine what it’s been like for him? Can you think about someone else for just a minute?”
“Oh, that’s rich.”
“They welcomed us, Shira. They’ve been nothing but welcoming to us.”
“Good.” Mom’s shadow stood up. I heard the front door open. “You can sleep next to them, then.”
The door slammed shut, leaving all the windows to tremble. Dad stood frozen on the lawn, an awkward statue. When I turned away, I saw someone behind me in the darkness. For a second, I could have sworn it was Jamie, hair mussed from sleep. But then the boy who stood in the hall light opened his mouth, and Elijah’s voice came squeaking out.
“Are they mad at me?”
I went to him, picked up his cold, clammy hand, and brought him to bed with me.
“No, Eli, of course not,” I said as I tucked in Jamie’s blanket over us. My brother’s body silently shook beside me. I hugged him, even though it was the wrong body, the wrong brother, all wrong.
24
THE PIRATE SANG TO HIM. The pirate stroked his hair when he was sick again. The pirate was gentle in all the wrong ways. He didn’t want to be touched, no matter how gingerly. Not by this man. Not in this nightmare place.
Sometimes Jack felt something pressed to the small of his back. A sharp point. A knife’s edge. Digging into his tailbone, piercing his flesh through the salt-stiff fabric of his clothes.
At nights, the tongue swelled, swallowing the salt water that rushed through the ship’s teeth. Sometimes Jack thought blood seeped between them. Or maybe he had simply gone mad now. Alone. All day and all night, in the deep, groaning belly of the beast.
When I came home from school the next day, Dad was back, quietly packing his belongings into boxes in the downstairs office. I stood and watched him for a long time without his realizing I was there. When at last I spoke, asking, “What are you doing, anyway?” he jumped.
“Annie, I—”
And then I saw that his eyes were watery, which was all wrong. My father never cried, because it was something men like him never did, not even when their sons called them names or slammed the door in their faces or disappeared into nothing.
I felt a heavy wave of emotion. Once my family had been okay, but they weren’t anymore. Now Dad was crying. Now Dad was a hot mess.
Still, I held my chin high. If he was going to cry, I needed to do the opposite, make it so that every cell of my being was made out of granite. I needed to be strong for him—for us.
“Mom asked you to leave. She wants you to go to Gram and Poppy’s. And then . . .”
Dad gave his broad shoulders, cloaked in pressed cotton, a shrug. He didn’t know what came next. Nobody did.
“This isn’t about you,” he told me, even though he didn’t have to. I knew it wasn’t about me. It was about Mom and Dad, and his stupid church. It was about Jamie missing, and everything we couldn’t talk about. It was kind of about the secrets I kept—the dreams I had about Jamie trapped somewhere, and the theories I built, wild and impossible and above all, true.
But it was never about me. That was the point. I was invisible.
“It’s not that we don’t love you,” he continued. “We love you and Elijah very much.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. It sounded like something he’d gotten from a Very Special Episode of a ’90s sitcom. Only on TV, everything usually went back to normal at the end of thirty minutes. And on TV, people’s children didn’t just disappear like the writers had forgotten them, leaving a bleeding hole in the middle of the story.
Dad crouched down over the file box of taxes, dripping pitiful tears into it. Then he drew in a breath.
“You don’t have to decide now,” he began, not meeting my eyes. “But at some point, your mother might ask you where you want to live. I’ll get an apartment, something . . .”
His voice went shaky. My father was trying to find a script for a story for which there was no script. And he was failing.
“You’re asking me if I want to live with her or with you?” I said.
My father laughed a little, even though it wasn’t funny. “I suppose I am, Annie,” he said.
I saw the future stretching out in front of me, and it looked like a long braid of time. One strand was my life with Dad. Dependable, respectable Dad, who wore khakis even on his days off and went to church and had a firm handshake and kept the whirligigs from sprouting in the gutter. Dad, who sometimes got mad at you for the wrong thing, who thought you were embarrassing. Who wanted you to be normal, even though you could never be normal. Who was too hard on you. Too hard on Jamie.
The other strand was Mom, and her sometimes mean laughter, and sometimes remembering to light the candles on Friday nights but forgetting more often than not, and tucking yourself onto the sofa beside her and falling asleep with the TV on.
On the one hand, rules, stability, boring days marching on and on and on. On the other, a deep well of joy, but loneliness, too, gossiping together, but just as often fading into the already-faded wallpaper. I was the third strand, drawn between them, pulling them together even as they were pulling apart.
But there was no choice, not really. It wasn’t about Mom, or Dad, or me, or even Eli. It was about the wild woods out back past the drainage creek, and my brother trapped inside them. I dreamed about him all the time. I saw him with his hands bound up in Boy Scout knots, struggling and sick and weeping. I called out to him: I’m waiting for you. Come home. Come home.
But if he heard me, he didn’t understand, or couldn’t. He was stuck, and I didn’t know how to help him, so I was stuck, too. In this house, waiting.
I couldn’t leave. Not for Dad. Not for anyone.
My father took my silence for uncertainty. “You don’t have to decide anything now,” he said, and came close, pressing my face to his button- front shirt.
My father cried, but I didn’t. I was strong for Jamie. I could be strong for all of us.
By the time Dad found an apartment, I’d started to spend every spare moment I could in Gumlea. Alone in the woods those weeks, I tried every spell I could remember. I’d stand on one foot, hum, chant. I climbed inside the King’s tree and said a million prayers. I pricked my fingertips with Mom’s straight pins, let them bleed down onto the wormy earth. It didn’t work. But I kept trying. I was the only one trying anymore.
When the kids at school whispered about me, when the grocery clerk at ShopRite asked Mom if she’d heard anything and she just hung her head—that’s when I was most determined. The idea that Jamie was trapped in our kingdom wasn’t just a comfort in those days. It was a shield, an armor. No one else knew the truth, but I did. And only I could see how badly my brother, trapped by a pirate with a child’s face and hooks for hands, truly w
anted to come home.
In retrospect, I’m not sure why I did it, except that home was awful and school was awful and even though the world around us was bursting into spring, blossoms and throat-sticky pollen everywhere, birds singing in a cappella waves, I felt awful, too. I’d made Vows to the King and Jamie and myself and I’d always, always kept them, even when Miranda had been desperate to know everything about the stories in my notebooks, even when Jamie had told Nina and Vidya, too. But before Jamie left, I’d kept it all under lockdown.
Now Gumlea seemed all too eager to go spilling out.
On the bus one morning, I sat down beside Miranda and, without preamble, started speaking.
“I saw him slip away.”
“Hi, too,” Miranda said, and looked up from her paperback. “What?”
“Jamie. I saw him go. I think he’s in the middle kingdom.”
“Where?” she asked. When I didn’t answer, her brow pressed low over her eyes.
“You . . . saw him. Maybe you should tell your mom.”
Once, Miranda would have said Mom and Dad, but she knew about their separation. I couldn’t hide it; Eli no longer waited for me at the bus, not since he’d asked to go live with our father during the week. Mom had been livid at first, of course, but Dad convinced her, somehow, that it was best to let Eli choose where to spend his days—just like I was allowed to choose where to spend mine.
“I tried. They searched the woods. Anyway, he’s not in those woods, not anymore. He went through the Veil. He’s on a ship now. Here.”
I pulled out my notebook, the pages all overstuffed with homework assignments and maps. Paging through, I found the drawing I’d been searching for. It was done on college-lined paper. The ship’s sails billowed over the waves.
“Wow,” Miranda said. She put her finger against something I’d drawn on the mast, smudging the pencil. She touched the mermaid’s breasts. Maybe I should have been embarrassed, but I wasn’t. That drawing wasn’t telling Miranda anything she didn’t already know. “This is really nicely drawn.”
I wasn’t expecting that. I felt my cheeks heat just a little, felt my mouth go dry.
“Thank you,” I said, even though my art wasn’t the point. The point was Jamie. Trapped. In Gumlea.
“But Annie . . .” Now Miranda’s brow was going all furrowed. She spoke quickly, like she didn’t want to hurt my feelings. “This stuff about Jamie—it’s just, like, a game, right? A coping mechanism or something?”
I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, either. And I could see in her eyes that she was scared for me. Of me.
“Of course it is,” I told her, and closed my notebook quickly. Then I brightened my eyes, trying to look cheerful, curious, interested. “What are you reading, anyway?”
25
JACK WATCHED THE SUNLIGHT GLINT between teeth. He listened to the seagulls overhead and heard the shouts of men. He felt the ship lull him to sleep over and over again. Jack lost himself to easy sleep, and dreamed of Annit, and Ijah, and wondered if they missed him.
Sometimes when Jack’s eyes closed he saw the lady pirate. Sometimes she became someone else. Dark hair knotted into a loose ponytail, freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. Eyes like his, but somehow different. Younger. More free. She was saying something to him, her mouth forming soundless words. In the gray stretch of boredom, the cradle rock of the ocean churning endlessly on and on. The language was different, lost to him. But somehow Jack was able to suss out their meaning:
The knife. He has a knife. Take his knife.
Our family had fallen apart, but I was distracted. Maybe it was easier to focus on Jamie, stuck in Gumlea. Now, most nights, there were only two of us at our house. At Mom’s house. Sometimes, when she worked late or went out with her friends, I was alone there. It was a rattling skeleton of emptiness, and even Dana Scully couldn’t fill it. But if I missed Elijah or Dad, I told myself they didn’t matter. Not until Jamie was home and could fix everything. And I had to figure out how to get him home.
One night, I dreamed about a knife, shining up from the carpet on my bedroom floor. It was practically a dagger, the same length as my forearm. The blade was carved into a wave, then scalloped, the kind of blade you’d never have to sharpen. The hilt was made out of some kind of well-worn bone, with images carved into it in scratchy black. It was the same knife Jamie had shown me in Gumlea on that very first day, the one he’d conjured out of nothing but his own shining magic. The one that we’d decided would open up the Veil between worlds, back when we were children and full of ideas. Only now, for the first time, I could see the images on the blade: there was an ancient man, his beard all long and pointed. There was a girl with flowers in her hair. There was a boy between them. On the other side, there was just one figure. A wild hare.
The knife waited for me. Silver. White hilt. A gemstone buried in the center of the silver surface, a throbbing ruby.
Strange, what that dream did to me. I woke up agitated, my heart racing. I touched myself until my brain went quiet, then I threw my covers back and stalked down the steps and straight outside.
If Mom knew I was up, she’d be pissed. It was a school night. She had work in the morning. Even though I didn’t have a bedtime, she was still my parent, a rational creature who, like everyone else in this lonely world, thought nighttime was for sleeping.
But if nighttime was for sleeping, she slept too deeply those days. Sleeping pills, though she thought I didn’t know. Ever since Jamie, then Dad, then Elijah left, she took two every night with a tall glass of water from the kitchen sink. She would never know that I was up, much less that I’d gone outside. I was a good kid, after all. She didn’t have to worry about me.
The ground, still cool in the late-spring dawn, was soggy beneath my feet. Dew dotted every blue-black blade of grass. There was no wind. No crickets, not yet. Not even a moon. But there were a million billion stars that night, puked up into the sky so that the whole universe seemed sick with them. I sat down on the back steps and stared out into the woods.
He was out there somewhere, but I couldn’t reach him. Maybe it was because of puberty. Maybe I’d lost the ability to slip away between worlds, to reach out for him, to bring him back.
Maybe it was up to Jamie to come home.
But for some reason, he wouldn’t. No, couldn’t. I closed my eyes, seeing the gently curved handle of that knife. Somehow, it was key to his escape. If he had the knife, then he could come back to me, and we could fix this. Or maybe I needed the knife. I needed to find it here and pierce the Veil. Jamie could come home, and then Dad, and Eli. We could figure out how to repair our family once and for all.
I heard a voice call my name. In the dark cold yard, I stiffened. But then I realized it wasn’t Jamie. The voice didn’t come from the woods. It came from the house. Mom. I rushed inside, drawing my hooded sweatshirt around me like it might shield me from whatever might come next.
There she was, looking tired in the kitchen. “There you are. What are you doing up, sweetie?”
I shrugged. “I just couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither,” she said. She went to the tap and turned it on, catching a glass of water inside one of our colored glass tumblers. Then she got a pill out of the cabinet and handed both to me.
“This should help,” she said. “Don’t tell your dad.” Then she winked at me, like it was a secret joke between us.
I didn’t know what to say. I nodded, then swallowed back water and pill, both. My eyes were on Mom. Her smile was so faint, so small.
But my mind, my mind was on the knife.
26
THE PIRATE HAD A KNIFE had a knife had a knife and Jack could not stop thinking about the shape of the knife and the edge of the knife pressed up against his back that knife could be his escape his salvation but he could not show that he was thinking of the knife when he obediently drank down his grog and let his skeletal hands hang limp because if he let his smile show at the pressure of the knife pressed u
p against his back while the boat heaved and the pirate heaved beside him then maybe the pirate would grow more careful with his knife would not let it flash so freely in the dark deep night of the sea.
The pirate had a knife and Jack learned the shape of it without ever seeing it the carved blade the ragged blade the bone handle and the gemstones pressed inside it the pirate had a knife and Jack could not stop thinking about it maybe it was the knife that was named Jack maybe the boy was wrong and it was his name but it didn’t matter because the pirate had a knife and Jack could not stop thinking about it and the blade was the sort that never needed sharpening and usually it was warm from the pirate’s grip but one night one fateful night that faithful knife was forgotten in the sheets and Jack did not even know it was there until the ship tossed his body in a wild growing storm and his bare leg touched something cold.
The knife.
Saturdays and Sundays that summer I spent at Dad’s apartment. That’s what Mom and Dad had worked out with a mediator. They weren’t divorced, not yet, but that day was bound to come soon, and with it, lawyers and custodial agreements. Right now, they were keeping things casual and tersely friendly. I wanted to try to stay friendly with them, too, so when my father asked me if I’d like to spend weekends with him and Eli—days after they’d already decided—I shrugged and said, “Sure.”
Saturdays we ate pizza and played board games. Then Dad would make a big show of tucking Eli in on the pullout sofa, and I’d do my homework by a little clip-on reading light that looked like an alligator. If I wanted to do something, anything else—draw or read or touch myself or call Miranda—I couldn’t. The apartment was only four rooms, and only the bathroom had a door and there was no place I could hide if I didn’t want Dad to come knocking.
I missed my room on those Saturday nights, the carpet a little crusty from long-dried Play-Doh and the maps on the walls shivering in the spring breeze, the sense that my brother could come home at any moment, the bed that had been my bed since I was three years old and was supposed to be my bed until college. Who knew what would happen now, though.