by Jenny Goebel
Petey stopped swallowing gulps of air. His face set like stone beneath a stream of tears. I wondered how long he had wanted to say that to me. How long this storm, bigger than the one raging outside, had been building inside his puny chest.
“Petey, I …” But what could I say? I couldn’t exactly deny it, and the weight of it all was far worse than that of having broken a mirror. Whether or not I lived to see it, at least the seven-year curse had an end to it. Shame was another story.
My little brother turned tail and raced to his room, slamming his bedroom door shut behind him.
I followed him down the hall. I stood outside his door. I stared at the grains in the wood as hail beat down through the broken window in the kitchen, resounding like gunfire. Lightning flashes caused the hallway to flicker from dark, to murky light, to dark again.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand BOOM. The lightning wasn’t right on top of us but close enough. The strikes were probably the worst near the cemetery. Poor Petey. Poor Wink. Fate was tormenting me again, and both my brother and my dog were suffering for it.
I lifted my hand to knock on Petey’s door but let it fall before I rapped my knuckles. Shaking my head, I sighed and returned to the kitchen. The pieces of hail coming down were smaller than the one that had shattered the window. But they were large enough to leave little divots in the hardwood floor before they bounced up and struck my legs.
My skin stung and reddened from the barrage, but I didn’t move. I just waited until the hail subsided and then swept up the mess. I dumped shards of glass mixed with hailstones in the trash. I taped a clear plastic bag across the broken window and then I retreated to my room.
For a long time, I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling wondering if it was going to collapse in on me like everything else. At some point I must’ve shut my eyes, because the next thing I knew, I was awakening to a world that was far too quiet.
It took me a few fuzzy moments to realize that it wasn’t a loud patter of raindrops, or hail, or even a booming crash of thunder that had drawn me back to awareness. It was the quiet solitude of nighttime in the wake of a powerful storm that had roused me.
I remembered going to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July, back before the displays were banned in Fortune Falls because a luckless choreographer nearly lit the entire town on fire. It wasn’t the grand finale that was the most deafening but the seconds just after, when the air tingled with emptiness. That’s when I felt like I couldn’t hear anything—not while the fireworks were exploding.
It was the same sort of tingling emptiness that woke me. I hopped off my bed and ambled over to the window well. I could see through the glass that the pebbles in the bottom of the well were slick and wet and peppered with chunks of hail, but nothing was falling and the sky was a constant, starless black.
It had to be way past Petey’s bedtime, and I’d never tucked him in. Never had him change into his jammies or brush his teeth or anything. It was my first time watching my brother all night long, and I was failing miserably.
I trudged up the stairs, wondering if I’d find him with the lights on playing with his blocks or curled up fast asleep on his floor. The answer was neither. He just plain wasn’t there. I barreled through the doorway. Pushed pillows from his bed. Searched his closet.
“Petey!” I screamed, racing to the bathroom, then to Mom’s room, followed by the living room, and finally the kitchen. My little brother wasn’t in any of the places I checked.
Then it hit me. He’d gone to look for Wink. When the storm had died down and while I was sleeping, he’d crept out of the house. I just knew that was what had happened. I knew it like I knew any fact. Like the sky was blue, and the grass was green, and that when thirteen people dined together, the first to stand up would be the first to die.
And if Petey had gone looking for Wink, that meant he was headed straight for the cemetery.
I rocketed out the door, calling Petey’s name even though I knew he wouldn’t answer. I didn’t like being outside at night. It wasn’t that I was afraid of the dark exactly. (There were far more menacing things to be afraid of when you were unlucky and living in Fortune Falls.) It was that the dark made the wretchedly inauspicious things harder to see. Cracks were harder to see in the dark. Crows were harder to see in the dark. Black cats were harder …
Sure enough, at the end of my driveway, the black cat sat waiting like she’d been expecting me. I wouldn’t have seen her at all if it weren’t for the light I’d left on inside. It was reflected back at me by her insidious yellow eyes.
The thing was, I wasn’t even angry this time. I was past angry. I was despondent—so tired of all the gloom and doom that I couldn’t even begin to muster any fury.
Petey’s voice was echoing in my head. It’s your fault that Wink is lost, Sadie. It’s your fault Dad died.
Now when Petey tripped inside the cemetery—vines reaching out to wrap around his skinny ankles—and when he struggled against them until he could no longer hold his breath, it would once again be my fault. And I couldn’t bear the thought of a little, skeletal Petey hand forever reaching for the iron bars.
But even if I had little hope of rescuing Petey, I had to try.
I took a step forward. And then another. I swallowed and then breathed in a little of the dampened earth smell before taking yet another step.
The cat didn’t move. She just sat there like she had no other choice. Well, neither did I. I knew my next step would, undoubtedly, cross the cat’s path, but I took it anyway.
The cat looked at me, meowed, and then at the very last second, she moved aside. She deliberately sidestepped a few feet, just to get out of my way. It was strange, but there was no time to dwell on it. I wasn’t sure how far ahead of me Petey was, but I knew if I didn’t reach the cemetery before he went in, it would be too late.
I tore down the sidewalk like never before—never in daylight and certainly not at night. An owl hooted in the distance, and it roiled my stomach. I didn’t stick around long enough to hear if it hooted two times more. If it did, I didn’t want to know.
Three owl hoots in a row meant death was coming.
My strides were long and swift. With my luck, I’d both land on a crack and not make it to the cemetery in time. Then I’d have a missing dog, a dead father, a dead brother, and a mother with a broken back. If that didn’t make me the sorriest case of unlucky in all of Fortune Falls, I didn’t know what would.
My heart was pounding like a drum as I neared the gates, and my chest felt tight, like it was strapped in a straitjacket. “Petey! Wink!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Petey! Where are you?” I reached the gates at last, but no one was there. All along my head had known I’d never make it in time, but my heart must’ve thought differently for it to shatter the way it did.
Then I saw a torn scrap hanging from a thorn on a long-neglected rosebush. It had shoots growing through the iron fence. Even in the dark, I could see that the cloth was stark white. It had been ripped from Petey’s shirt.
My spirits plummeted. I felt small and useless, and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t possibly rescue Petey on my own, but there was no one to turn to for help. Even if I could somehow manage to convince someone to come, there wouldn’t be enough time.
By then, I was so desperate, I did a rash thing.
I dashed straight into the cemetery.
At least I had the sense to hold my breath as I hopped sidelong over the fallen-down gate and landed in the thick overgrowth. Once I was in, there was no turning back.
A crescent yellow moon lingered behind a wispy cloud, spilling a sliver of muted light on all the tombstones. I strained my eyes desperately searching for any sign of movement. Hoping to find a trail of matted-down weeds or broken twigs where Petey’s little feet might’ve plowed through the thicket, I dropped my gaze. When I looked back up, the movement made me dizzy. Not good. I was already beginning to feel light-headed from the lack of oxygen.
Pressing forward anyway, I blindly wove my way through the headstones and bushes, beside fallen-down crosses, and beneath scratchy tree branches. Except for the rustle of my own footsteps, it was eerily quiet. Insects and creatures of the night had been driven into holes and crevices by the rain. I found myself wanting to scream just to break the silence. To break the panic pulsing through my body and the screeching inside my head, begging for just one sweet breath.
Everything ached.
My lungs burned, and my stomach had squeezed itself into a tight, painful ball. Keeping the air in wouldn’t be a possibility for very much longer. I swiveled in the direction the gate should have been, but it wasn’t there. No matter which way I spun, I was met with nothing but darkness broken up by gray marble monuments. The monuments all looked the same. Then they began to sway.
Undulating, spinning, giant stones rippled and wobbled in my vision. I’d gone far too long without air. Stumbling and lurching, I reached forward with my hands.
Everywhere I groped my fingers were met with frigid pockets of air. Something icy caressed my cheek as if it could tease me into opening my mouth and letting it in. Walking over the graves had stirred what lay beneath. I could tell they were encircling me, like vultures encircling the dying.
Then I saw the shadowy image of a face—beaklike nose and beady eyes—jeering at me in the darkness. Angry and desolate, I made a swing for it, and my fist connected with iron. Not a face after all. Just an ornate section of the fence, with iron twisted into decorative leaves and vines.
My knuckles throbbed where they’d struck the iron, but I was never so happy to injure myself in all my life. Using the iron vines as footholds, I scrambled over the fence seconds before my diaphragm betrayed me. I wheezed in gulps of cool nighttime air. I fell to my knees and crawled. I made it about a foot away and then collapsed.
For a long moment, my brain shut down. I didn’t think. I just felt. The ground was cold and wet beneath me. I shivered. Then the chill and wetness leached in, and it was me that was cold and wet. I shivered again.
“Petey,” I whispered, and tasted salty tears on my lips. Even if I’d had the energy, I wouldn’t have wanted to lift my head. Curled in a ball, quakes ran through my body with each new sob.
It started to rain again, but I didn’t even care. I just stayed with my knees tucked to my chest as rain splattered down around me and joined the river of my tears.
And then …
Then I felt a warm, rough tongue lick my hand.
“Wink!” My heart kick-started with a tiny hum, and I lifted my head. But it wasn’t Wink at all.
The black cat released a guttural yowl. She held my eyes with her eerie yellow ones.
The hum I’d felt kindled and built into rage. I sprang to my feet and stomped at the cat. “Come on!” I taunted. “Just do it already. Cross my path. I don’t care!”
But the cat just mewed again. This time the sound was full like the moon and sorrowful like death.
“What do you have to be sad about?” I sneered.
She withered in the rain. Her scraggly black fur was dripping wet. She trembled the way Wink did at the sound of thunder. “You stupid, wretched thing!” I screamed, and turned my back on her.
I faced the cemetery once more. No, I was the wretched thing—an unlucky, cursed girl standing between a graveyard and a black cat on Friday the thirteenth. My situation was utterly hopeless.
I took a step toward the gate. I didn’t bother sucking in my breath. I closed my eyes and inhaled the chill. It numbed my mouth, my throat. Would the frosty fingers of the otherworldly things feel the same as they reached inside me? Would they freeze the hurt, the pain?
It was me Fate wanted, not Petey and Wink, not Dad, not even Cooper. At some point, Fate must have settled on killing me by degrees—ripping my heart out piece by piece as it picked off the ones I cared about most in the world.
I couldn’t fathom returning home without my brother. I took another step toward the gate. The only person I really had left now was Mom, and I knew Fate would get around to stealing her from me eventually.
I imagined all the light leaving her sleepy, dreamer eyes when she came back to an empty house in the morning. The worst was that she’d never know what happened to us. Nobody in their right mind would search for Petey and me inside the cemetery. Our bodies would most likely never be found. I thought about how hard Dad’s death had been on her, and I stopped moving forward.
If I went back over the gate, Mom would be the one left alone in the world, and she’d be left forever wondering why. I remembered her sinking her head into my curls, pressing her lips against the top of my head. In my heart, I knew that if she had to choose between having one unlucky child and two dead children, she’d choose me. She would choose me, I told myself a second time, no matter how much pain I cause her.
I turned around.
The cat was gone, but I didn’t care. Through a blur of tears and heartache, I somehow found my way home. I trudged across a lawn sprinkled with black feathers. The fake dead crows had been beaten deader by the storm. Just like me.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
I thought it was Fate, robed in black, scratching my window with a boney white hand. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
I opened my eyes. “Merrooww,” the cat moaned, staring at me through the glass. She was sitting in my window well, scratching the window with her claw. A strip of white dangled from her mouth.
“Just leave me alone.”
If Petey came back, I didn’t want to miss the sound of the door creaking open. Not if—when. Petey was a Lucky. I was sure of it. He had to have escaped the cemetery somehow. Since I’d returned home, I’d been remembering the many occasions Petey had sidestepped disaster. How often had he moved aside in the nick of time just as I knocked over a heavy lamp, or wrecked my bike, or fell down the stairs in front of him? This was the kid that gum-ball machines poured open for, and for whom soap bubbles landed on skin without popping.
Since I’d returned home, I’d been convincing myself that Petey was still alive.
“Merrowwwww,” the cat cried with the white cloth still stuck between her pointy sharp teeth. She sounded like she was dying.
I lurched out of bed and walked over to the window well, intending to pound my fist on the glass until she left. “Go away!”
Then I saw that the cloth in the cat’s mouth had been ripped from Petey’s shirt. I couldn’t tell if it was the same one I’d seen hanging from the rosebush or if it was different. I pushed the question out of my mind. All I wanted to do was touch it—to feel with my own hands something that had rubbed against my little brother’s skin not long ago.
I slid the window open, and the black cat scampered in. “Give me that!” I screeched as she evaded my grasp and scurried past me.
I ran after her, through the basement, up the stairs, and to the front door.
When I reached her, she finally dropped the cloth at my feet. When I bent over to pick it up, she mewed plaintively and looked at the door.
I ignored her as I lifted the cloth to my cheek, as I tried to soak in any little, Petey boy smells. A lump formed in my throat.
The cat walked in a circle and mewed again.
I swung the door open. I didn’t care about trapping her anymore. I just wanted her gone so I could decide what to do next—stay home and wait for Petey, or go out looking for him again. But instead of darting away as I’d expected, she just stood there waiting.
Only when I chased her out the door did she actually leave, and even then, it was just a few scampering feet, followed by another lamenting meow. Then she stopped again, gazing back at me.
“What?”
“Mew.” Two more steps.
I stepped forward and she kept walking. I stopped and she stopped. She wants me to follow her, I
thought. The cat purred as though she knew I’d finally figured it out. She ran to me, and I kneeled down out of habit, the way I used to kneel down when Wink ran to me. The black cat purred again and nudged the piece of Petey’s shirt dangling from my hand with her nose.
It was still pitch-black outside. The sun hadn’t even thought about poking its head above the horizon yet. I had plenty of time before Mom came home.
“Okay,” I said at last. “What do I possibly have to lose? Show me.”
At that, the cat trotted off, and I dashed after her. I wasn’t surprised when she headed back toward the cemetery, but then she rounded the corner of the fence and entered into Rispin Field.
I tried not to think about anything other than keeping up with the cat as she wove through the tall weeds. I didn’t want to think about whom or what we might encounter in the field or what the cat might be leading me toward. I didn’t want to stop out of fear—I had to know—but I didn’t want to get my hopes too high, either.
The sky was starting to sprinkle again, but for the time being, my tears had run dry.
Every once in a while the cat would glance back, as if checking to make sure I was still following. When I increased my speed, so did she. If the cat had any tail to speak of, I might’ve been able to lunge and snatch her up by it.
At last, I could tell that she was headed for the rocky bluff at the edge of Rispin Field. What if it’s a trap? I thought as she trotted straight for a crevice within the natural stone wall. But if what she wanted was to curse me, she’d had plenty of opportunities already.
An overhang of rock above the crevice created an inlet where the rain couldn’t reach. I slowed my speed as the cat disappeared around a boulder within the alcove. This was it. One, two, three more steps and …
Lying on the ground, behind the boulder, was the pint-size form of my little brother. The cat leapt up on a second boulder and perched herself protectively above Petey as he slept. I ran to his side and stroked my fingers through his curls. “Oh, Petey,” I crooned, relief washing over me. “Oh, Petey, you’re okay.”