by Phoebe North
Of course, it was kind of a train wreck otherwise. Still, I know that was my fault. Even after we’d both met each other’s families, I could never commit, not fully. Pri knew it, saw it, how I always had one foot out the door. “Anyway, I’m happy being single these days. I know something will come along eventually, but I’m not in a hurry. How about you?”
I brace myself. And then she smiles, a slow, sly kind of smile, and my heart breaks just a little. “Yeah. I’m seeing someone. Her name’s Court. She’s . . .” and she trails off. In her silence is everything. The whole world.
“That’s great,” I say, genuinely, because I always thought Annie deserved to be loved—fully, wholeheartedly, in a way I had never been able to. I’m glad she’s found that with Court, whoever that is. But the cheese is suddenly thick and sour on my tongue. I put the sandwich back down on the napkin and change the subject before Annie notices the hurt behind my eyes. “You know, I went back to Gumlea once. Senior year.”
She puts her spoon back in her empty soup bowl with a clatter. “What?”
The betrayal is clear on her face. It’s my turn to get all jittery. I speak too quickly, my words spilling over themselves. “I wanted to show it to Harper, that mountain you’d shown me. I’d been talking about it for years. We went in on the other side, near 32. I found the picnic table, but that was it. I couldn’t find the mountain. Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it.”
The corner of Annie’s mouth quirks up. “No, don’t be stupid. It wasn’t real. Gumlea was only a metaphor.”
“But the mountain—”
“Hold on.”
She turns away from me for a second, riffling through her backpack, her brown hair veiling her face. She finally pulls out a black ballpoint pen. Shoving her plates out of the way, she turns over her soup-stained menu. Then she starts to draw a map. Not of our world, at least no place that I recognize. Mountains on one side. Mountains on the other. And between them, a thick black line. A river.
“Jamie used to call it the River Endless. I know. It’s a stupid name. He was always crap at names. He said we were born from that river. He said we return to it every night when we’re asleep. And someday, when we die—”
“We wake up on the other side,” I say faintly, watching as her hand, all stained with black ink, works. She looks at me and squints her eyes. I bet she’s trying not to think about her mom.
“Yeah,” she says. Then there’s a long pause. Too long. “I shouldn’t tell you this.”
I lean forward across the table. “Why, because of James?”
“I guess. It’s just . . . I used to wonder if Gumlea was real, but that felt crazy. Now I know that it’s not. But the truth feels even crazier.”
“What do you mean?”
“Gumlea was just a fantasy. Just kids’ stuff. It was never anything more than that. But me and Jamie . . .”
I look at her quizzically. Her freckles are paler than they used to be, or maybe it’s just the long, cold winter. Her lips are chapped. There’s something haunted behind her eyes.
She turns away from me again, going through that bag of hers. She finally pulls out a notebook and throws it down on the table between us. “Jamie is going to move back home,” she says. “To help Dad take care of Mom, when she can come home from the hospital. His fiancée was so pissed that she dumped him and wouldn’t let him get his stuff. So he had me do it.”
“So?”
“So there were all these boxes marked ‘evidence.’”
“Stuff from the trial?”
Annie bites her lip. Nods. “This was his notebook. One of them, at least. There were like a dozen. From back when he was living with that guy, I guess.”
She’s suddenly uncertain, suddenly peeling dead, dry skin from off her lip and leaving a red patch behind. She still can’t speak his name, the one on the news and all over the internet. Kevin Rapp-Palmer. The man who abducted James.
“And?” I prod.
She pushes the notebook toward me. It looks like a normal notebook, like something a high school student might carry. There are bad drawings of dragons on the front, and James’s name in blocky script. I remember his handwriting, all those notes he used to pass me between classes. The song he’d written, which Annie had given to me, back when we both thought he was dead.
I open to the middle.
The boy struggled. He thrashed until his wrists bled from the rope burn. He kicked his body against the sweating flesh of the wall, the bed frame, the meager mattress. He tossed his thin bones and even thinner skin until he was dizzy and nauseated. Then he was still again, panting, his breath sounding just like the ocean beyond. In. Out. In. And out. Reminding him that he was still alive.
How much time passed? There was no telling in the mouth. Maybe hours. Maybe days. Maybe only twenty minutes. When footsteps sounded on the boards above, muffled and distant, every muscle in his body tightened. He couldn’t let the pirate touch him.
“He always liked writing stories,” I say faintly, trying to ignore the feeling that I am doing something wrong. This story is obviously about James and Kevin. Obviously.
But when I look at Annie, her eyes are wide and trembling. “It’s not just a story,” she says. “I saw that. I thought I was imagining it. I thought . . .”
She trails off, but it’s okay. She doesn’t need to finish. She thought she was going crazy, and so did everyone else. Even me.
“You grew up together. Telling stories. Of course you’d imagine similar situations—”
She reaches into her bag one last time, and when she throws something down on the table, it lands with a muffled thud on James’s open notebook. It’s a knife. The knife I gave her, I think at first. With a white hilt and scalloped blade. But when I pick it up, I’m not so certain. The drawings don’t look right. They look cruder.
“I thought you said you buried that,” I tell her. Annie’s teeth are gritted. She’s close to tears again, and for some reason, I feel like crying, too.
“I did,” she whispers, her words creaking out. “Vidya, I did.”
I pick up the knife carefully. There’s a hare drawn on one side in Sharpie, faded now in patchy spots. A King on the other, and a boy, and a girl. But they’re ugly and strange, all wrong. I look at the notebook, the grotesque doodles in the margins. I think about what Annie has told me about school and life drawing, and the pictures she used to draw for me. All those beautiful pictures . . .
“I believe you,” I tell her. I push the knife and the book back toward her. I can’t stand to look at it all anymore. For some reason, the sight of them has turned my stomach. Maybe it’s the cheese. I wonder if I’m going to be sick.
Annie looks at me with grim satisfaction. Then she puts her things—James’s things—back in her bag.
“What did James say about this stuff?” I ask her at last. She sighs, a big, hollow sound.
“He said I could keep them if I wanted,” she says. “He said he didn’t need them anymore.”
Her voice wavers when she says that. I feel my heart squeeze. “You could always do something with them,” I offer. “Paint a picture. Write a book. Something.”
Annie laughs, but it’s dry and without humor. “People keep telling me that kind of stuff,” she tells me. “You. Court. Even Jamie.”
“Well,” I say carefully, “we know you, Annie. All of us.”
Her eyes flash up. There’s a hint of emotion there that I can’t quite read. “My whole life, everyone was always looking at him,” she says at last. “Waiting for him to do something amazing.”
I take a long, slow breath. Sigh. There’s so much I never told Annie about her brother. It never seemed like my place to do it—and it doesn’t now.
“He’s got his own problems,” I tell her simply, which is shorthand, maybe, but captures the general idea. “And you can’t just waste your whole life waiting for him.”
She looks down at the crusts of her sandwich. Picks one up. Nods. “Yeah,” she says.
&n
bsp; She chews on her crust. Shrugging, I pick up my fork and dig into the rest of my omelet.
Twenty-Six
I TRY TO PAY FOR our meal—after everything that Annie’s been through, it only feels right—but she doesn’t let me. All I can do is offer to cover the tip. We bundle ourselves up and head back out into the cold. For a second, we stand there staring at each other, a sort of “what next?” on our brows.
“You can come back to my parents’ place,” I tell her. “They’re out. Maybe we could smoke a bowl, or . . .”
I think we both know what I’m asking, that last line that I’m tossing out into the sea. Her eyebrows lift, and there’s a slight smile on the corners of her mouth, like I think she’s glad to be asked. And we could. It would be so easy to fall into one another’s arms, girlfriend or not. I know her mouth, the heat of her rib cage on me, and it wouldn’t be like falling in love, not exactly, but it would feel good for a minute, and no one would ever know but us.
But she shakes her head, like I knew she would. “Nah. I have to get back to the hospital. Jamie will stay there all night if I don’t, and Eli hates being there.”
“Okay,” I tell her, and nod. I go to offer her a hug. I don’t know what I’m doing. My arms open, and she fits stiffly inside them. And the words spill out before I can even consider them. “I could come with you if you want. You know, for support.”
She pulls back, gazing at me in surprise. Honestly, I’m surprised, too. But I shouldn’t be. I’ve always wanted to help her. To make her feel better. Deep down, I am definitely my mother’s daughter.
“Sure,” she says mildly. “I’d like that.”
“Okay,” I say, “I’ll follow you.” And then we get into our respective cars, and I follow her all the way to Kingston.
It’s a cliché to say that hospitals smell like death. I don’t know what death smells like. This hospital smells like stale air and warm pea soup. Annie is walking around like she owns the place, which I imagine is how she walks around everywhere, but my steps are small behind hers, uncertain. Because in the back of my head is a single frantic thought:
You shouldn’t be here you shouldn’t be here you should not be here.
But I’m here, streaming past the ugly hospital art. Everything is teal and pink and yellow and our footsteps echo on the floor and it’s too hot in here, but I don’t want to take my coat off, because I know I’m not going to stay for very long.
“Hey, E,” Annie says to a boy sitting in a chair in the hall. It takes me a moment to realize who he is, all acne and lumpy curls and the faint hint of a mustache that he hasn’t shaved yet. Elijah. He barely looks up from his phone as we pass, as we turn the corner into a room.
I stop short in the doorway at the sight in the bed. Wires and machines and a small body in them. Their mother is hooked up to a respirator, and though her eyes are open, she doesn’t seem to notice we’ve come in.
“Mom,” Annie says easily, like it’s nothing, sitting on the side of the bed. “I’m here.”
I just stand there.
There was a time when their mother had meant something else entirely to me. When I first heard about her, from James, it sounded like she was some kind of magical pixie—fun loving and irreverent in a way neither of my parents ever were. She understands me was what he’d told me, and I’d understood then, in the silences, what he meant. As much as I hated her later for everything she did to me, I always knew that James’s mom understood him in a way his father never did.
But later, with Annie, things had grown more complicated. I could see how her intense focus on her son had rendered Annie invisible in their family. It wasn’t that James could do no wrong and Annie always did the wrong thing. It was that she just didn’t matter in the same way. Nothing did. No one did.
And I’d hated their mother for that, too.
Now the machines beep around her. Annie strokes her mother’s fingers, trying to look brave—I think for me. I look down at the small, fragile woman who created both of them. The only two people I’ve ever let myself love. In that moment, I feel like my stomach is being torn in two. Like my heart is being torn in two. What am I even doing here?
“Who’s this?” a deep voice says behind me. And I turn and see him then. Looking tired and faded but otherwise mostly the same. Marc. Annie’s dad.
“Uh,” I say softly, biting my lip. “I was just going.”
It’s not exactly true and wouldn’t matter if it was, but it’s the only thing I can think to say. Annie’s eyes are on me. But I know suddenly, fiercely, that I do not belong here. This is a private moment. A family moment. And this is not my family.
“Okay,” Annie says, and even though there is a question in her voice, I give my hand a small, silent wave.
Then I take off down the hall.
Down the elevator. Barely hearing the bad, piped-in music. Through another hallway, the carpet pattern like something terrifying—something out of The Shining. Past the gift shop, with its garish balloons and dull-eyed stuffed animals and the fake flowers by the door. I’m almost through the lobby when I see him, and the sight stops me dead in my tracks.
It’s James.
I know, more or less, what he looks like, from that TV special that aired after he returned, which I watched with Harper in her room in horrified silence, and from my mom’s reports. Mom’s always telling me how she runs into him at the ShopRite, how once he helped her pick out a cantaloupe. She’s always suggesting I go with her. I think she hopes it’ll give me closure, seeing him. I’m always telling her that I don’t need closure. What happened to me and James—and to James himself—happened a long time ago.
But seeing him in person is different. He’s tall now. He’s got this new presence that he never had as a kid. He’s wearing a motorcycle jacket, open over his broad chest, and a soft gray T-shirt underneath it. He has sideburns. A shielded gaze. I used to think he looked just like Annie, but if I met him now, I don’t think I’d even know they were related.
And he’s not alone.
He’s talking to a man in scrubs. A doctor, I think—or maybe a nurse? The man is shorter than James. Maybe shorter than me. He’s got a round face and kind, open eyes, and I wonder for a minute if they’re talking about Annie and James’s mom, except the guy is smiling softly. He looks just so happy to be there, talking to James. I remember what that felt like, when I first met James, way back when we were in eighth grade. The magic of it. The intoxication.
And then the man leans forward and presses his cheek to James’s cheek. Kissing him. But I would have known what was happening even without the kiss. I know because once, in ancient history, I lived it, too.
The man in scrubs walks off then, past me and down the hall. I’m just standing there as James turns back to watch him go. And sees me. Standing there. Watching.
Our eyes are locked. My eyes. James’s. But I’m not really there in that hospital lobby. I’m in Neal Harriman’s basement. It’s the beginning of eighth grade. I don’t know where Neal is or where his brother is, either. James and I have been dating for only a few weeks, and though we’ve kissed until our mouths are chapped, though we’ve slipped hands under clothing to caress and squeeze, the idea of crossing that threshold has seemed impossible, until this afternoon, when we find ourselves alone in Neal’s basement, and suddenly, blushing, James procures a condom, and suddenly, blushing, I find myself consenting. It isn’t sex. Not really. Only a few giggling, unsuccessful moments of full undress before we shiver back into our clothes and snuggle together on the crumby sectional, content to tell our friends that something has happened today, that now we are adults. We’ll stay together for almost a year but never repeat this experiment, content with the magic we make with our hands and lips. Right now, some YouTube video is playing on their big TV, and his fingers are traipsing over my belly, just beneath the seam of my tank top. I feel self-conscious of the small dark hairs there, but they don’t seem to bother James. He loves my body. He tells me that all the time
. But he’s had other loves. Boys. I know all about it, though he hasn’t yet told another soul, and I haven’t, either.
Today, though, I think, he’s feeling brave.
“I’m going to do it,” he says. “I’m going to tell my dad I’m bi.”
I turn to look at him, smiling faintly. He’s terrified, obviously, and I can understand it. The pressure his father puts on him—not that different from the pressure Naniji puts on my mom.
“Do you think it’s worth it?” I ask him. “The risk?”
There’s a long silence. The video keeps playing, the only sound.
“I read something,” he says softly. “In the library. Kahlil Gibran. It was like some magic book. The passages seemed like spells.”
“What did he say?”
“‘Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.’”
He looks at me. I grimace. We giggle a little, both of us.
“Too emo for you?”
“Yeah,” I tell him, and we’re kissing again, like we’re always kissing, a pair of innocent kids on Neal’s sectional, our own magical kingdom at the heart of our world.
And now I’m twenty and I’m looking at him, remembering my disappointment back then when the conversation with his dad had never happened, how they had a big ridiculous argument about a drum kit instead. Now his eyes are soft and faintly trembling, and full of a new, raw love. I’m happy for him. I’m hopeful. I realize that this is an epilogue—overlong and unnecessary. And so I smile at him. And then I walk by him without a single word.
I’m in the parking garage when I realize that it’s time to call up Priyanka and sing her that song I’ve been working on, the one that sounds like David Bowie. When the car door closes behind me, it’s like a cord has been cut, and I’m free, I’m free, I’m free.
VI
and i wake up in the Black of Night with my heart marking out a Savage Drum Beat in my chest like i always wake up in the Black of Night for years now except the difference is that instead of waking up alone in my childhood bedroom or waking up alone in the bed i shared with a Coal-Hearted Girl i wake up in their bed their room their apartment and when i sit up panting my body slick with sweat they put a hand on the small of my back