Behold the Bones

by Natalie C. Parker

  I push against him. “Shit. Stop.”

  His response is a plea. “What?”

  “Sorry,” I say, stepping away. “I’m not okay.”

  That should be code to any boy with sense that stopping is a good thing, but he responds with venom. “You’re shitting me.”

  He’s a picture of disbelief with his pants pooled around his boots, plaid boxers glowing in the moonlight, and a dumbstruck expression on his face. My stomach twists. This was a bad idea from the start.

  I say, “Not even a little. Sorry, Stokes.”

  There’s not an ounce of grace about him as he gathers his pants to his waist and zips himself in. “Bitch,” he spits, then strides toward the trailer with all the pomp he can muster.

  I lean against the pine tree. Bark catches my hair and the scent of Stokes is cleansed with the warmth of a summer night, pine, smoke, the sweet hint of honeysuckle. I watch until Stokes passes through the light of the fire and around the edge of the trailer.

  My gaze drifts through the patches of night sky between the pines to the constellations there—stars like families, drawn together by proximity and stories.

  And here am I, the North Star. Brilliant and isolated, orienting everyone but connecting to no one. I am all I’ll ever be and I don’t know what that means anymore.

  I’ve never been the girl who imagines her wedding or anticipates a family like it’s a given that I’ll have both, but I’ve never considered that neither would be in the cards.

  But I’ve also never imagined myself alone. And right now, that’s all I see in my future. Me.

  And me alone.

  17

  I USED TO THINK SLEEPING in was overrated. There’s nothing worse than the feeling of waking with the sun fully alive and present inside your room. Your eyes feel assaulted and heavy, half the day is gone, and sleep becomes a tangible thing you take with you through the rest of the day. I don’t like it.

  But the morning after the party, I love it. I pull the covers over my head, ignore the call of my parents from the kitchen, and sleep, sleep, sleep until my body revolts and says, Get up, or pee in the bed.

  By the time I’ve made myself presentable for the late afternoon tryst with Nova King, my parents have gone off to do whatever it is they do on weekends, and Abigail has called my phone five times. Which is every bit as unusual as me sleeping in, which is how I know she means it. I dial her number.

  “Candy,” she says.

  “Beale,” I say.

  “When are you meeting Nova?”

  I check the time. Already after noon. Gross. “In a few hours,” I answer.

  I hear the measure of her breath on the other end. “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “Thanks, but I do think it’s better if it’s only me, and I’ll be fine. Unless she’s secretly a cannibal and is planning something culinary, she can’t hurt me. Shine can’t hurt me.”

  While Abigail decides how to react, I pad through my empty house and dig some cold pizza out of the fridge. It makes a more than decent brunch.

  “Okay,” she says, unhappy. “But call me the minute you’re done.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Call me whatever you want,” she says. “Just call me.”

  “Promise.”

  We hang up and I eat the rest of my pizza at the empty kitchen table, thinking that a friend is someone who reminds you who you are and who you want to be. Abigail reminds me that I’m not alone even when I have to do things by myself, because she’s out there, waiting for my phone call. Just knowing that bolsters me to get moving.

  It’s late afternoon when I turn up the drive to the Lillard House. I pause to marvel at how much it’s changed. The stretch of the oak tunnel is dark, but at the end, the Lillard House is bright and fearless in the sun. Though I’m here begrudgingly, a part of me looks forward to spending more time inside it.

  Nova meets me at the door.

  “Hungry?” she asks, first thing.

  I hesitate, but the truth is I can always eat.

  “There’s still leftover cake from the party,” she explains. “A lot, actually. We need help eating it.”

  She’s right. There’s enough cake to feed half the senior class, or two starving girls. We cut pieces as large as our heads and take them into the living room. Everything in this house is still and quiet. Even with most of the windows open, the abandoned feeling of the old Lillard bones lingers beneath the veneer of curtains and fresh paint. I search for any hint of a mother figure, but other than a family portrait posted over the mantel, in which their mom is a thumbnail with a smile and brown hair, there’s nothing. No mom purse, no matronly jackets slung over the couch, nothing feminine that doesn’t point directly to Nova.

  “What’s wrong with your mom?” I ask.

  Nova’s fork pauses in the air. Then she shrugs and answers without meeting my eyes. “Back pain. It’s hard for her to get out of bed most days.”

  We keep eating, but I resist the urge to be lured into a sense of comfort. “You were going to—to share some information with me?”

  She leans in. “I am.”

  I don’t know how to react, so I don’t. I just sit there, staring at her over my chocolate cake, wishing Sterling or Abigail were here to react for me.

  Finally, I manage, “Ready when you are.”

  She laughs. “Okay, but you can’t look at me like I’m nuts when I tell you.”

  I wonder if my face does anything other than look at people like they’re nuts when they talk about Shine. “Promise,” I say.

  With a gesture that I should follow, Nova sets her cake on the coffee table and jumps up. Several of these ground-floor rooms are as empty as they were for the party. They look barren and sad in daylight, but we don’t stop in any of them. She continues through the house, down a side hall to rooms I haven’t seen since they were in ruins. This portion of the house is bare with only a runner carpet and a few ancient paintings on the walls. All the doors hang open, revealing smaller rooms with unpacked boxes or sparse furniture in them. Lonely rooms.

  We stop at the only closed door on the hall. Nova knocks softly, listens, then retrieves a key from the molding over the door opposite this one, and lets us into a dark room.

  “Dad’s out filming in the swamp, but the house is so big, I always have to double-check,” she whispers.

  The room is cool and smells like old wood and a spice I can’t name. Nova presses the door closed so quietly I know only because the room is suddenly even darker. I hear her moving. Then there’s a click and a small desk lamp casts a green glow around the room. As if this weren’t eerie enough.

  I don’t have to ask where we are. Clearly, this is Mr. King’s secret lair.

  This room comes from the recent dark ages, the time before telephones and computers. There’s nothing here to connect it to the outside world. The desk is cluttered with stacks of books and papers. All unremarkable in their chaos. Behind the desk are two tall shelves packed to the gills with additional books, some of which look old enough to be my very great, very dead grandparents.

  On either side of the desk, the walls bear paintings. One of Joan of Arc, her face stuck in one of those possessed expressions with the spirit of God behind her, one of a man kneeling at the feet of a kingly ghost, and one that’s clearly Chinese or Japanese of a child cowering before a horde of terrifying creatures. It might be the way the green light makes everything look sick, but I shudder at that one.

  Nova ducks behind the desk, opens the bottom drawer, and begins to empty it. She stacks everything precisely on the floor in reverse order, taking care to remove items one at a time.

  On the corner of the desk is a small gilded frame with a picture of a woman in a cowboy hat with dirt on her face. Her smile is resigned and directed at whoever it was holding the camera. It’s the dark hair that gives her away as the elusive Mrs. King, which means someone clearly thought Mr. King was worth his salt once upon a time.

  “Your dad doesn�
��t seem like he’d notice if two of those folders were reversed.” I crouch next to Nova, straightening the edges of her pile.

  “This drawer, he would notice,” she says with surety. “Believe me.”

  When she’s pulled everything out, she presses her fingertips against a barely noticeable impression at the farthest edge of the drawer. There’s a soft click then the floor lifts away in her hand, revealing a compartment beneath that’s half as deep as the drawer. A sharp scent attacks my nose and I sneeze once violently. It’s not a stealthy sound and Nova glares her displeasure.

  “Sorry,” I whisper, rubbing another itch out of my nose.

  Inside the secret drawer are a journal and a collection of leather pouches. Nova reaches for the journal, and together we squeeze onto Mr. King’s desk chair with the book on our laps. It, at least, isn’t ancient. It looks like a standard leather journal you could find at any bookstore, assuming you have a bookstore and not the “Books and Barbecue” trailer that sits in the parking lot of the Flying J gas station. You’d be hard-pressed to find something like this in Sticks.

  Nova unties the cord and quickly flips through pages of handwritten notes, illustrations, and clippings from newspapers and magazines, coming to a stop about halfway through. The page is dated March 22, 1977—Seal Harbor, WA. Below that a yellowed newspaper clipping is glued flat and reads:

  Strange Sighting in Seal Harbor

  In the usually owlish community of Seal Harbor, sightings of what can only be described as spirits have become commonplace. Residents report being aware that the area was “a little different,” but things seem to have taken a turn for the dramatic of late.

  Said Heather Skiff, a longtime resident of Seal Harbor, “We’ve got spirits and who knows why, but we always have. Sometimes they’re just brighter than others. We aren’t worried.” That was the general sentiment around town, and in fact the town has experienced several recurrences of supernatural activity in the past. This reporter was able to dig up fourteen similar occurrences dating back to the early 1800s.

  Below the article, Mr. King has made careful notes about the little mountain town. Seal Harbor is pushed halfway up the edges of the Olympic Mountains in Washington State. He notes what sort of vegetation is normal, what sort of geography is normal, and below that he’s drawn a sketch of the same damn cherry tree that’s hiding in our swamp.

  “The hell?” I peer at the word scribbled beneath the drawing: Source?

  “You recognize it?” Nova asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, we’ve got one just like it.”

  She bobs her head, all of her hair swinging by her chin. “I thought as much. Do you know where it is?”

  I shrug.

  Nova leans in close, her eyes eager. “Your friends do. Do you think they’d take me to it?”

  It’s the eagerness that does it, sets my caution on edge. “No.”

  I can always tell when people are hiding something and in this moment, Nova is definitely hiding something. Her lips pinch against a desire to argue and she takes a second to analyze the commitment in my face. I hold steady and after she’s realized this truck ain’t for sale, she returns her attention to the journal.

  “Here, this is what I wanted to show you.”

  She presses her finger to the opposite page, where Mr. King has written a series of questions and answers. The one that captures my attention is, All power requires balance, so what’s the balance here? Then, a word underlined five times: Child?

  “I don’t understand,” I say, my mouth going dry.

  “He describes it down here,” she says, dragging her finger down a paragraph of text. “There was some old shaman type in town who talked about how these occasions of power in the world always create a site for it to root and a counterbalance. The tree is the source and the child, called the Blind Bone, is the counterbalance. They both must always exist or neither of them will.”

  “I still don’t understand. Why are you showing me this?”

  “Because,” Nova says, searching out my eyes with her own. “You’re the Blind Bone.”

  I stare at her for a second in disbelief. Then I simply say, “Bullshit.”

  Nova grins and snaps the book shut. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then explain, because I’m not going to believe it just because you say it’s true.”

  Nova sighs. “C’mon. Not here.”

  She fits the journal into the hidden compartment, then just as carefully as she removed them, replaces the stack of folders, papers, and pamphlets meant to throw snoopers off the right track. When she’s satisfied there’s no distinguishable difference between now and when we found it, she closes the drawer and switches off the light.

  Wrapped in darkness once again, we make our way to the door and into the hallway. This must be the benefit of having such a large house. There’s still no one in sight. We make it down the hallway and through the back door without encountering a single person. I’m mildly disappointed.

  Nova strides into the grass, making straight for the scrubby hill that rolls into the swamp. The one Mad Mary Sweet climbed.

  “Do we have to go down there?” I ask.

  Nova pauses. She’s so unlike Sticks. I’ve always resented the notion that it’s possible to tell when someone’s not from your neck of the woods. Mostly because when I do finally pick a school and leave this place, I want my new city to embrace me as if I’ve merely been away for a few years. But Nova is all sharp lines and angles where Sticks is all blurred edges and coils.

  “No,” she decides, returning to me.

  We settle on the back porch with our legs dangling over the edge.

  “Okay,” I say. “Explain.”

  She crosses her legs and leans in. “Like you saw in that article, Sticks isn’t unique. Shine exists in . . . well, we don’t know how many places, but in all of them there is a person, a Blind Bone, who balances that power. That’s you. You can always tell who the Blind Bone is because they naturally dispel Shine with a touch.”

  “I’d really appreciate if you stopped referring to me as the Blind Bone.”

  Her laugh is short. “Just Bone, then?”

  “Candy,” I say. “It’s worked this long. But why am I the swamp’s dedicated buzzkill?”

  “You’re not a buzzkill,” Nova says with an amused smile, one that shrinks her eyes and mouth all at once. “You’re the natural balance. You exist to keep the Shine in check—to keep it from running wild through the town or even farther. You’re like Congress.”

  “Oh my sweet baby Jesus, please pick another metaphor,” I plead, automatically flashing back to Mrs. Thompson’s class on the branches of government and the time I was forced to dress up like a bill and parade around the class. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say when, and all I remember from that day is the snickering giggles of all my classmates.

  “Fine,” she says, nodding. “How about a virus?”

  I can’t imagine where this is going. “So long as you’re not leading up to a sex joke.”

  She snorts. “You’re not the virus, you’re the vaccine. Think about the source of Shine as a sort of constantly proliferating virus.”

  This would be easier if I’d ever seen Shine, but I recall Sterling’s descriptions of the everblooming cherry tree the way she sees it. How the Wasting Shine spreads out from it in a twisted web that connects all the living things of the swamp.

  “Go on.”

  “You’re the naturally occurring vaccine that keeps that virus in check.”

  “I’m not sure I follow. . . .”

  “Focus, Candy,” she says sharply. Too sharply? “You are the boundary around the swamp, and you’re just as powerful as that source, wherever it is.”

  “No, the fence is the boundary around the swamp.” I distinctly remember Sterling explaining that Fisher and Lenora May couldn’t cross the fence without assistance. That was the boundary for them because it was the boundary of the swamp. Nothing still connected to
Shine could pass it.

  But Nova shakes her head. “That fence has never done more than deter the people of this town from treading where they shouldn’t. Believe me.”

  “But the ghosts didn’t start appearing until Sterling and Phin broke the fence and stuck a gate in it.”

  “Candy.” She says my name with importance. “That fence worked because you believed it would. It was the story you grew up with, right?”

  “Yes, it was a story. A fiction. A thing that isn’t real.”

  “Sometimes, we believe things without meaning to,” she says.

  “Bull,” I say.

  But she doesn’t believe me, and the more I think about it, neither do I. Before this summer, I would have sworn on my life and the lives of my family that something had to be seen and proved in order to be believed. But I was wrong. Sometimes, belief isn’t a matter of fact and proof; sometimes it’s a matter of trust. I’ve never seen the Shine, but I believe it’s real because I trust my friends.

  “You heal fast, don’t you,” Nova states, breaking into my thoughts. “Not immediately or perfectly, but faster than you should.”

  Instinctively, I rub the scar in my left palm. But it was an aberration, wasn’t it? Or was it only the first injury bad enough for me to notice? The cuts on my knuckles I earned from shattering my diploma should have stung much longer than they did. But they’ve been gone for days.

  Nova takes my silence as an answer. “I thought so. Bone children usually do, but there’s always a trade-off. Some are blind. Some have a single deadly allergy. Some lose their minds. Whatever it is, there’s always a trade-off.”

  Some lose their minds. The thought leaves me nauseated. I push to my feet, very ready to be done with this entire conversation.

  “Two more things.” I hold up a finger. “Why did I suddenly see that ghost at Gage’s party when I haven’t seen any of the others?”

  She shrugs. “I’m not an expert, but it’s probably something you did.”

  “I didn’t do—” The memory of shedding blood into the roots of the damned cherry tree halts my denial. “Maybe.” I raise a second finger. “Two. I am not immortal, which means there must have been a . . .” It pains me to speak the words. “. . . Blind Bone before me.”