by Phoebe North
On Sunday mornings, Dad and Eli would leave for church and I’d be alone in the apartment. I’d make myself tea in Dad’s electric kettle, the one that used to be in his office, and grab his laptop and curl up under a blanket on the couch with it, the TV droning in the background. And I searched and searched and searched.
For knives.
I could not stop thinking about knives. No, that’s not true. I could not stop thinking about that knife, the hare knife, the one my brother could use to split the Veil. The gently curved handle. The firm hilt. The red ruby, shining within it, bright as fresh-spilled blood. I needed that knife. He needed that knife. I combed Amazon and eBay and Etsy and a lot of extremely dorky fantasy websites and extremely unsettling weapon websites for anything resembling that G-d damned knife.
We’d once been obsessed with knives. The two of us. Jamie had a penknife that Dad had given him, and when I was a little kid he’d sometimes lend it to me to open up a box or tear open an envelope or just stand there with it in my fisted hand, feeling tough. We’d looked at knives at the local renaissance festival and Jamie had talked about getting a sword once, before Dad said no.
But this was different. This knife was a dream knife, a magic knife. The knife that would bring Jamie back to me.
I found some with scrimshaw handles. Some with curved blades. But as I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, searching until my eyes went dull and my hands numb and all the knives blurred into one knife, the ur-knife, the knife against which all other knives could be judged, I came up empty. At last, I’d clear my browser history and toss the laptop aside and try to sleep until Dad and Eli came home from church.
When they did, all laughter and glee, every single week, talking about the sermon they’d heard or the people whose hands they shook at the end of the service, Dad would give me a small, knowing look. I suppose he thought I was looking at porn on his laptop. But that wasn’t the case at all. The truth was so much darker, so much worse.
27
JACK’S HEART RACED. HE FELT a knife’s edge of pressure at the small of his back. But it wasn’t a knife. The knife was tangled in the sheets, pulsing, shining, the ruby in the blade as red as the sky on an unlucky night was red as his heart was red as his flesh was red and his anger, so much anger, was bright, bright red.
How did Jack do it? He’ll never be able to explain. Except on that night, the ship tossed by waves, the pillow sand-damp beneath him, Jack used his anger to reach outside himself. He felt for the knife in the blankets like one might look for a light switch in a dark bathroom. He wrapped his thoughts around that carved hilt and hefted that knife through the air. His hands were waiting, bound, clutching the sheets. But they would be empty for a while longer still until he used his mind to plunge that knife’s blade into the pirate, not once, not twice, but a dozen times, until blood poured out over both of them, coating the ship’s groaning belly.
As the blood rushed in, so did the water, brackish and dark between the ship’s teeth.
Soaked up to his knees, Jack withdrew the knife.
In the past, my brother had paved the way for me. I’d known what to expect in middle school because Jamie had done it all first—the orientation and the locker assignments and the mandatory assemblies on bullying. I’d felt like an expert compared to the other kids, and I liked it that way.
Ninth grade meant new, open waters. Shark infested, with no brother to guide me. He was gone now, and I would have to muddle through it myself. The problem was that I was caring less and less lately about the real world, the one that was in front of me. Maybe it was because the real world was awful. Reams of homework, and Mom and Dad fighting every time they spoke. My brother still gone, and maybe never coming back. The kids at school ignoring me, or snickering when I gave an answer in class, or whispering when I passed by them. Or maybe it was because I was sure, in my heart, that I could do something about Jamie. I’d split open the sky, let all the creatures of Gumlea come tumbling out, and then what would school matter? It wouldn’t. Not anymore.
But our high school teachers tried to convince us that it would, that this academic year meant more than any before it. It was time to take ourselves and our futures seriously. In high school, every choice we made would make a ripple out into our adult lives. The days stretched on, each one indistinguishable from the one before. But these days were important, they said. That’s what Mr. McKavity told us, at least, at freshman orientation. It was the first day of school. It was still warmish, but the sky was gray, bleak and empty. We were sitting in the auditorium, supposedly going over the schedules we’d selected at the end of eighth grade, as we started to solidify our adult lives. But I didn’t care. I was only half listening. Hunched over my notebook. Drawing knives.
“Do you think it’s really true?” Miranda asked me, watching the wild motion of my hands. I felt irritated at her, at the whole world. I felt like that a lot these days. I wanted to be somewhere else. Out in the woods, in Gumlea, working to get my brother home. I’d managed to keep my grades up and my head down through the end of middle school, staying out of trouble. But it took more and more work lately to pretend like I was normal.
“I don’t know,” I said irritably. “I kind of think it’s all a load of bullshit.”
I was trying to draw the handle right, but it wasn’t coming out exactly as I imagined it. It looked lumpy. Weird.
“Good,” Miranda said, but she sounded uncertain as the kids started standing up around us. “I think it’s bullshit, too.”
She flashed a smile at me. I think we were supposed to feel like we were on the same team in that moment, but I knew the truth. I wasn’t on the same team as anyone.
We filed out of the auditorium with the rest of them and into the high school wing of the building. The hallways smelled like floor polish, like locker dust, like any other school. I clutched my notebook to my chest and tried to imagine how my life would change in the next year, but I couldn’t. If I couldn’t get Jamie back, it would be more of the same. The same old awfulness. The same old loneliness.
“Follow me,” Mr. McKavity was saying. “I’ll show you the cafeteria.”
Someone behind us was gushing about how there was a snack machine in the high school cafeteria, how we could eat whatever we wanted. Someone else was telling them not to be stupid, that it wasn’t like we’d be allowed to eat candy in school. Miranda looked at me pointedly, rolled her eyes. I could have smiled back at her then, but I didn’t. I looked down at my notebook instead.
“What’s that?” she asked me as we shuffled forward with the group down the hall.
I shrugged. “A knife. The one I need to get Jamie back. But I can’t draw it right. It’s just not working.”
Miranda was looking at me, not saying anything. So I looked away.
“Hey,” she asked me after a minute, as we were wedged through the cafeteria doors with the rest of them, “isn’t that your brother’s girlfriend?”
“Where?” I asked, whipping my head around, searching for Vidya. It felt like a lifetime since we’d last spoken, though it had only been a few months. Once, she’d said my brother might as well be in Gumlea, and in that moment, I had a feeling that it had been much more than a joke.
Could I talk to her? Ask her about the knife? If she knew where it had gone, where I could find it? Ask her if she knew how Jamie did it—crossing through the Veil? I once thought that nothing could have been worse than him breaking the Vows, telling Vidya about Gumlea, but now, if he had . . .
But by the time I turned, she was gone. Mr. McKavity was talking about our meal plan cards. I crossed my arms over my chest tight, holding those drawings of the knife against my heart. I told myself it didn’t matter, anyway.
A few days later, during third-period study hall, Mr. McKavity called me to his desk. In a low voice, he said that Dr. Katzenberger wanted to see me. I heard snickers from the students who had heard. Dr. Katzenberger was the school psychologist. Not the guidance counselor, but
the one who spoke to kids with problems.
I had avoided this fate so far. I’d kept my grades up, maintained my friendship with Miranda, done well in extracurriculars. I didn’t act out in class or crack jokes or even laugh at the wrong moments. I was careful, and for a reason. If anyone found out what was really happening—where Jamie had gone, and how I knew—then they would have thought I was nuts.
I’d told myself I wouldn’t let that happen. But somehow, anyway, it had. I walked down the hallways, watching the kids move like Feral Children in the classrooms. Boys flirting. Girls making fart jokes.
Dr. Katzenberger’s office had his name on the door. I knocked once. When a voice called back, “Come in,” I opened it and slipped inside, hoping that no one saw me.
But then the sight of my parents, sitting in a pair of chairs in front of the psychologist’s desk, washed all of that away.
“What are you guys doing here?” I asked, and the unspoken word was: both. What are you both doing here, and why are you conspiring together against me?
Neither of them answered. They only looked at Dr. Katzenberger. He was a large man, mustachioed, suspender-clad, and tall. His chair was the oaken kind that could tip back on its hinges.
“Take a seat, Anne,” he said.
It was Mom who spoke up for me, which was nice, I guess. “We call her Annie.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Dr. Katzenberger said as I sat down. But it sounded like he wasn’t listening at all. He leafed through a manila folder, reading something. “Your friend Miranda Morganson came to me. She was concerned.”
“Miranda,” I said, and winced. I’d been too real with Miranda. Too open. Too me.
“She said you’ve been talking about a knife, honey,” Dad said. He never called me that, not normally. But now he reached out from his chair and touched his hand to my back, just between the shoulder blades.
I shrank back. “She shouldn’t have told you that,” I said darkly. Of course, Miranda didn’t know the Laws. I could make a sacrifice in her name. An insect, maybe, something I would find in the woods . . .
Dr. Katzenberger was looking at me, grimacing. He nudged something forward along the desk. A piece of paper.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He angled his chin up, indicating that I could take the paper, so I did. It was my first geometry quiz. I’d gotten 100 percent on it.
“What?” I asked.
“Turn it over,” he said, and I swear, he was repressing an eye roll at my expense. I flipped the page.
I’d drawn knives, dozens of knives. Only they were all one knife. The same knife. Jamie’s knife. Over and over again, until I got the handle right. Eventually, my hand had gone kind of crazy. I’d started to draw the knives so close together that the page was packed with ink, overflowing, dark as blood.
“You don’t understand—” I began, but Mom, leaning forward in her seat, interrupted me.
“Annie, were you planning on hurting yourself?”
The question felt almost like an insult. I steeled myself inside, trying not to look incredulous, which is precisely how I felt. “Of course not. Don’t be stupid.”
“Don’t call your mother stupid, honey,” Dad said. Though I knew he’d said much worse about her, under his breath and in his black heart.
“I would never hurt myself,” I said, clearly and precisely, with no name-calling at all. Dr. Katzenberger nodded.
“Good. You know, Anne—”
“Annie,” said Mom.
“Yes, Annie,” Dr. Katzenberger began again. He was sitting up straighter in his seat now. “You’ve been through a lot in the past year. Your mother and father told me they separated. And then there’s the issue of your brother’s death—”
“Jamie’s not dead,” I said, my words coming swiftly as any knife. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see tears shining on Mom’s face. But it was Dad who spoke, firmly and with conviction.
“Annie, we have to face the possibility—”
“Are you serious right now?” I said firmly. I sat back in my seat. I guess I sounded like kind of a brat. But I needed them to know that I knew Jamie was out there. I couldn’t explain how I knew, not to them, but I did.
Dr. Katzenberger sighed. “This isn’t an interrogation. What you’re going through is serious, Annie. I’ve recommended a counselor to your parents. Kit Hendricks is her name. She’s wonderful. You’ll like her.”
“It doesn’t matter if I like her or not, though, does it?” I asked.
Dr. Katzenberger stared at me. His eyes were small and black in his broad, pale face. “Of course it does,” he said, his eyebrows wrinkling in concern.
I looked to Mom, and then to Dad, and then back to Mom. They had the same wrinkles, the same concern.
“Fine,” I said tersely.
Because it was fine. I’d jump through any hoops they gave me. I’d be good. I always was. I needed to stay in the King’s favor if Jamie was going to return to me. My parents were both watching me. Dad, his anger smothered in a smile, not for me, but for the school counselor. Mom couldn’t even fake it. The edges of her mouth were all wobbly, like this was some kind of personal defeat.
28
THE NIGHT WAS STARLESS, THE moons only hazy smudges beneath a Veil of gray. When Jack reached the upper deck, he was surprised to find the ship empty. A lonely wind whipped through the torn sails, tousling his hair. Ahead of him was the mermaid, but she no longer sang. Her body was slack and blue, her hair forming a lacy net over her face. Jack sighed and went to her, cutting her body down. It was the least he could do.
It was just as he went to free her from her bindings that he heard it, rising up over the sound of her body slipping into the water. It was a whisper, a murmur, a susurration. It seemed to vibrate his whole body like wind in whispery autumn leaves.
{Jamie.}
Jack turned in shock. There was no one else here. No mermaids. No pirate women. And no men. But there behind him, still as a gargoyle, sat a creature. Its ears were long and trembling. Its whiskers picked up the salt on the breeze. It was a hare, its coat a dappled gray that looked almost blue in the moonless night.
{Jamie,} she said. He drew closer. She was nearly as big as he was. {Jamie, come home.}
He didn’t move. He watched himself, mirrored in two globes of endless, formless black.
Two weeks later, on a Thursday afternoon at the beginning of ninth grade, I started counseling.
II
One
JAMES [REDACTED] WALKED OUT OF my life in the second week of ninth grade. Really, not only my life, but his own life, too. He disappeared. Nobody knows where he went, or why, not even me. That’s what I told the cops because it’s the truth. And afterward, I did what any freshman girl would do. I spent six months wearing black and too much eyeliner and writing lyrics in gel pens on the back of my book bag, and then I tried to move on.
I hate to say it, but in a way, his disappearance saved me. Not emotionally, but from, like, bodily harm. Because I hadn’t told my parents I was dating James. Up until the minute the police called our house, they thought I was a good, upstanding daughter. A nerd, really, who loved the local renaissance festival and who got decent grades when she worked at it and who had been taking mandolin lessons since sixth grade. The whole time I was dating James—almost a year! A lifetime in middle school—they thought I was hanging out at Harper Walton’s house studying, when we were all really in James’s friend Neil’s basement, getting stoned and getting kissed and other things that, still, my mom only knows the half of.
She would have murdered me under normal circumstances. But you see, James was gone. It was a tragedy. And where she comes from, there’s nothing more important than your epic first love. She never loved a guy before or after my dad, you know? They met at a basement show in college and, just like that, the shape of her entire life changed. So even though my relationship with James hadn’t been perfect—even though his sadness was too much for me sometimes, despite th
e fact that I thought the way his hair fell in his eyes was hella cute—she seemed to understand that I’d really lost something. She went easy on me, even though she took away my phone for a year and made me take the early bus straight home. In her culture, widows aren’t even people anymore—not “she”s but “it”s and I think—since James was gone and no one knew where he went—she expected me to be more a vision of a living, breathing heartbreak than a real, actual girl.
And for a long time, I was. He understood me, once, like nobody else had and I’d given up hope that anyone would look at me the same way he did ever again. But eventually, you have to move on, right? By the end of ninth grade I’d started to give up on the idea that James was ever coming back. And I didn’t want to be a woman in mourning for the rest of my life. Not at fifteen, and not now, either. I let my mom believe what she wanted. It made life easier for me. But in my heart, I started to tell myself that what James and I had hadn’t been love, anyway. After all, we were only stupid kids. Him and me, both.
Anyway, I started dating Keira in tenth grade when James was just a memory, a story I’d tell at parties when I didn’t want to really talk about myself. When I wanted to seem poetic and interesting. It usually worked. Like, that was the first thing Keira ever asked me about over texts. Not Mr. Reickert’s geometry class, which is where we met, or my secret love of the local renaissance festival or the Godzilla movies I watch with my dad, but James Fucking [Redacted]. And she ate that shit up. We dated for two months and in a new attempt at radical honesty, I brought her home to meet my parents, and things were pretty good with the two of us, or so I thought. We’d trade playlists and she said all the right things about all the right songs and she made me laugh a lot. It’s kind of stupid, but we had nicknames for people. Like Mr. Reickert was “the baker” and Anita Devlin was “Ms. Powerwasher” and Keira was “shopping cart.” I told you, it’s stupid. I was “Gemini,” even though that’s not my sign (I’m a Taurus). It was from a poem Keira wrote and then I wrote the music for, about how I have gems in my eyes. It feels embarrassing writing it out like that, but at the time, it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me. Forget stupid old eighth-grade James. When it came to Keira, I told myself I was really, truly smitten.