by Emily Henry
Hannah kisses the index and middle fingers on her right hand, and I do the same. “Love you, baby girl.”
“Love you more.” I climb from the car and jog to the porch, listening to the crunch of gravel as Hannah reverses into the ring of woods.
I pull my keys out but freeze, a sudden prickling on my neck. When I turn back toward the yard, Hannah’s headlights have vanished beyond the hill. Everything is dark and still, apart from the twin glints of eyes a few yards beyond the porch.
A lone coywolf stands with its reddish tail high and front leg bent, its narrow face caught in the edge of the porch light and its fox-like ears trained toward me.
I don’t know quite what makes me do it, but I lean down, slowly, to untie my sandals, my gaze still locked with the coywolf’s eyeshade.
Tapetum lucidum, Dad explained to me as a kid. Eyeshade. A special reflective surface behind the retina that lets some animals see better at night. It gives the image another surface to bounce off of toward the brain, if the first one fails in the dark.
The coywolf watches me step out of my salmon-colored espadrilles and lift them by their leather ties. I take a few cautious steps, set the shoes on the walkway, then retreat.
The coywolf sets her foot down and picks her way toward my shoes, haunches rolling as she moves. In one swift motion, she drops her snout, snatches the shoes, and darts into the trees.
I stare after her, a laugh building in my chest, followed by an ache. I can picture it so clearly: Dad’s back and mine silhouetted by the moonlight as we sat in the yard listening to the cicadas and crickets. So many calm nights when we just listened to our thin place for hours. “Can you hear it, June-bug?” he would whisper. “The heartbeat of the world?”
Eventually we’d hear the door creak on its hinges and Mom’s bare feet patter across the porch. “Bedtime,” she’d hum, and Dad would look back at her and smile, say nothing. Then she would float down to the grass and sit on my other side, pulling my head against her chest to run her hands through my hair.
“Magic,” I whisper, aching for those lost nights. I turn to go inside and find one lone Window White bobbing in the doorframe. I cup it in my hand, its softness barely palpable as I lift it toward my face. Something strange happens then: One moment it’s floating along my lifeline, the next it seems to disperse into my skin, as if it were never there. I wait for it to reappear, but when it doesn’t, I stifle a shiver and let myself inside.
The house is dark and silent as I creep through, nearly tripping over an amorphous pile of shoes in the foyer. Mom and Toddy aren’t great at laying down the law, and while I’m not a particularly tidy person, the hands-off approach works even worse with Grayson and Shadow. They’re always leaving their stuff all over the house, and I’m always tripping over it.
I steady myself on the credenza against the wall, and my stomach twists and jerks low at the sight of the vase full of blue hydrangeas resting there. I wonder where Mom got them. After Dad died, she let the bush out front wither to nothing, and when the winter snow finally thawed, she yanked it up by the roots and left it down on the curb with the trash.
The sight of it, for some reason, had started to make me sick to my stomach; sometimes when I saw it, I forgot how to breathe. For ten years Mom made sure there were never hydrangeas in the house.
I push the vase behind the only framed picture that sits there: one of Mom and me—I’m just a toddler—both of us perched in Dad’s lap in the yard, wearing crowns of weeds we made together.
An ache begins behind my heart and spreads through my chest like roots.
People used to ask if it bugged me how quickly Mom and Toddy got together. I’d tell them it bugged me more when people didn’t mind their own business. Those who didn’t really know Dad would balk; those who did would laugh.
The general consensus in Five Fingers seemed to be that Mom married Toddy because she was helpless without Dad, because he didn’t have life insurance and she didn’t want to work or know how to fix the toilet when the tank wouldn’t stop running. Because she was too pretty to be alone. All these arguments I now understand to be Midwestern ways of shrugging and saying, She’s French.
For as long as I can remember, my friends’ parents have regarded Mom with a mix of intrigue and wariness. But if they assume she doesn’t know how to work hard, it’s only because she makes work look easy. Earthy and romantic.
She won’t wash a dish unless the lather of the soap will please her hands at that moment. She doesn’t bake a pie unless she can delight in rolling the dough, in using flour-covered hands to brush the sweat off her forehead, in pressing the crust’s lip with perfect dessert-fork indents. She can turn something as strenuous as toiling in the garden into an almost euphoric ritual.
But she also regularly gets massages, visits gourmet shops to buy tiny blocks of herbed cheeses that cost the same as oversized bags of shredded cheddar, and has her favorite perfume shipped to her from Europe.
In Five Fingers, shoe-stealing coywolves are less of a mystery than she is. But she always says that what she loved best about Dad was that, to him, she wasn’t a mystery at all.
I sometimes think that’s also what drew her to Toddy. He’s stable and predictable. Kind. Plus he and Dad knew each other all their lives.
I think Mom married Todd Kemper because they understood one another and what they had lost. They fell in love while they held each other in the wake of that loss, and, together, in the bitter work of staying upright while their hearts broke, they found something sweet.
He’ll never be Dad. And, yes, sometimes that bothers me. But with Toddy, there’s no pressure to strip, bleach, or scrape Dad from the walls. He’s in the floral wallpaper that lines the kitchen and the deep grooves in the mudroom’s hardwood floor, where we stomped around in ice skates. With Toddy, it’s okay to keep all the old pictures on the walls, to leave the albums set out in the wicker basket by the massive television he brought when he moved in. It wasn’t even a question that Mom would keep wearing that first, jewel-less wedding band on her ring finger, beneath the one with the large princess-cut diamond that Toddy added.
He gave me a ring at the ceremony too. It was beautiful—peridot and two side diamonds—but I couldn’t bring myself to love it like the fifty-cent spider necklace Dad got me from the quarter machine at Camponelli’s Pizza.
My eyes trail away from the photograph but carefully avoid the hydrangeas as I turn up the creaky staircase. I reach the end of the hallway and ease open my door but then come up short.
My room should be dark, but it’s not. Should be empty and silent, but it’s not.
Wave after wave of this paralyzing shock crashes over me, but no matter how many times I blink, nothing changes.
The lamp beside the bed casts a shallow pool of golden light across the worn pink-and-blue quilt, the little dark-haired girl tucked into it, and the gap-toothed man sitting at her feet.
I’m looking at myself. I’m looking at Dad.
Eight
“DAD,” I choke, but there’s no sound. I try again, feel the vibrations in my throat, the movement of my tongue and lips, but still no sound.
“Tell me another one,” the little girl—me—says from the bed.
Dad scratches the strawberry scruff on his chin. “Another one, huh, June-bug?”
“When Great-Great-Great-Great-Grampa Jonathan found our hill.”
Dad nudges the younger me aside and swings his booted feet up onto the bed as he stretches out beside her. “So how’s it start again, Junior?”
“Jonathan set out looking for a place to call home.”
I take a shaky step forward, and neither of them looks at me.
“So he did,” Dad says. He wraps an arm around the girl’s skinny shoulders and kisses the crown of her head. My eyes shut for a long moment before I force myself to open them again, to keep watching. “And he looke
d all down the East Coast, but it was too hot and sticky, and the water was too salty, and the hills were too hilly. And when he planted cherry trees, their roots wriggled and writhed in the dirt, and their branches withered, and when the cherries came, they tasted like tears, and not the good kind.”
“Was he sad?” she asks.
“Nah. Jacks don’t get sad, and we get that from him.”
“Was he scared?”
“Do Jacks get scared, June-bug?”
“Was he lonely?”
“Jacks like a lot of alone time,” Dad says. “They also love an adventure, and Jonathan Alroy O’Donnell had plenty of both. He knew he’d find the right place, and that’s why he never settled down anywhere else, no matter how many friends he made and adventures he had in a single place. You know, the night of Annie Oakley’s debut at the Baughman and Butler Shooting Show, Jonathan bought her a soda and they spent the whole night wandering Cincinnati together. By the time the sun came up, they’d caught a band of bank robbers on the Ohio River, planted a dozen cherry trees, and gotten engaged. But Jonathan was looking for a home, and the cherries didn’t take to the Ohio soil, so in the end, they parted ways, and he went south to Florida—too hot and sticky for the cherries, of course—then out west, and you know what he found?”
The pink floral drapes billow like wisps of hair as a warm breeze pushes through the open window, carrying quarter-sized specks of ethereal white: Window Whites.
I remember this moment. It’s coming back to me, as it happens.
“He found sand.” It’s not a guess—it’s the answer Dad taught me. Every part of every story was a line in a play we performed hundreds of times. I’d nearly forgotten about that.
“Sand,” Dad repeats. “So much sand and sunlight. The cherries he grew there, they lacked that first-snow-of-the-year tingle a good Jack’s Tart always has. But Jonathan took advantage of being in California, even if his cherries didn’t. Jacks—you know Jonathan was the first Jack—are good at getting things un-lost. The gold rush was winding down, so on his way north to Washington, Jonathan followed the Siskiyou Trail. But one day, as he waded in the Columbia River, he dropped a cherry pit in the water and it jumped back out like a snake had bit it.
“He saw a glint there, and when he brushed aside the river muck, he found a solid brick of gold. Most people would’ve thought, A brick of gold? Nothing more valuable than that. But Jonathan wasn’t most people. He knew you couldn’t eat a brick of gold or bake it into your favorite pie. You couldn’t bite into it and taste the whole world in its juice. So you know what he did?”
The girl sits up, her tangle of waves splaying against the headboard. “He traded it for more pits,” she says.
Dad leans forward, grinning. “That’s right, June-bug.”
Tears prick my eyes, and the world slants in too many directions. I don’t understand how this is happening. How I can see him so clearly. He’s here, and of all the impossible things that happen on our land, something like this never has.
Dad, I say, still voiceless, and move toward him. His eyes stay locked on the sleepy eight-year-old in the ratty CHERRYFEST T-shirt. I study the wrinkle in his forehead, the uneven tan from always riding with his left side half out the car window.
“So he went up the coast,” Dad goes on. “And when he got to Washington, he liked it. Don’t get me wrong—he did like it. But still, the ocean was too dark, and it rained too much, and it lacked that Special Thing, that home thing.”
“So he came to Michigan.” I mouth the words, but it’s not my voice I hear. Or it’s mine, but a slimmer, scraggly, younger version.
Dad’s eyes crinkle and take on a gloss. I don’t remember that—I don’t remember him on the verge of tears maybe ever, so how can I see it now?
“He came across the North, and by then it was winter, and he passed through all kinds of snowstorms and blizzards and over lakes made entirely of ice.”
“And was he scared then?”
“No way, Junior!” Dad replies. “He was having the time of his life. He loved the wildness of it. But he couldn’t stand the landlocked-ness. Minnesota was better—tons of water there—but it wasn’t a perfect fit. So he went on through Wisconsin and Illinois and over the lake into Michigan. It was spring when he finally reached the tiny town of Five Fingers, between the Five Fingers offshoot of Torch Lake and Lake Michigan. The water was a beautiful turquoise—so clear you could see your hand through it—and the rocks and cliffs were all red and gold, like a sunset. The forests were thick and thriving, full of pure sunlight and cool shadows and tiny, fluttering things. The women were strong as sequoias but lovely as the northern lights, which you could see on a clear night, a great blanket of green and purple and blue spread across the sky.
“Most dirt’s just dirt, but in Five Fingers, the dirt sang. It coursed. It wanted to make life. It beat like it had a heart, and Jonathan, he knew this was home right off the bat. So he trekked through the woods until he came to a grassy hill, and he climbed it to choose where he would plant his first tree. But do you know what he found at the top of that hill?”
“A coyote.”
“That’s right.” Dad nods. “And what else?”
“And a wolf.”
“And?”
“A robin.”
“Sleeping on the wolf’s haunch,” Dad finishes. “My great-great-great-grandfather knew right then that he’d stumbled into a thin place, a plot of land where, on a sunny day or a starlit night, you might get a glance at heaven. And he tore up a bit of earth and packed a cherry pit down nice and neat, and right there, he sat and watched the first tree grow before his eyes. By morning, the grass was covered in dew, and the boughs were heavy with plump cherries, and when he bit into the glossy skin, his eyes teared up. Home, he said, it tastes like home. And it was.”
“I love that story,” the little girl says.
I love that story.
“Someday I’m gonna write it down,” Dad murmurs. “I’m gonna write down all my stories for you, June-bug, so you can know just where you came from.” He rustles her hair and kisses her head again, and then my tears blur the scene.
You didn’t write them down, I want to say. They’re already lost, shadows flitting across my memory. You’re lost.
And yet there he is, just out of reach. Real and impossible.
“Night, Junior.” Dad stands to go. He ticks the lamp off and strides right past me, like I’m invisible, a ghost.
I chase him. “Dad,” I beg. “Dad! Please.”
He doesn’t hear, and by the time I reach the hallway, it’s dark, empty, as if he were never there.
Something tickles against my palm. I gasp and jump as the white tuft emerges from my lifeline, hovers for just a moment, then drifts toward the stairs.
I follow it, chase him—wherever he went.
He’s dead, I think, his trillions of cells sprinkled in Lake Michigan, and that little girl back there hasn’t existed in ten years. But still I’m running down the steps, searching for him, dodging the pile of shoes at the bottom, though it’s unnecessary because, somehow, all those shoes have vanished.
I don’t understand.
Why is this happening?
Why did I see him, and why is he gone again so soon?
I spin uselessly, tear through the dark kitchen. Dining room. Living room. The sunroom off the side of the house, its windows overlooking the hill and woods and stars. I find nothing. No one.
I barrel back up to my bedroom.
The lamp’s off. The window’s shut, the Whites gone. I’m alone.
But he was here.
At least I think he was.
Nine
“HAPPY Wednesday! Happy first day of senior year,” Hannah sings down the hallway as she literally prances toward me. Her hair is slicked into an alarmingly neat fishtail braid that, combined with her gingham
dress, makes her look like she should be running through a field of daisies, arms spread wide to catch the sun.
I swing my locker shut and kiss my fingers to greet hers. “You glorious sunburst of a person, did the birds dress you this morning?”
“Basically!”
It’s been four days since I saw Dad in my bedroom, and, unable to bring myself to tell Mom what happened, I called Hannah immediately. After days of texting her feverishly during every break she took from her AP summer homework, it’s a relief to finally be with her in person.
She slumps against the forest green lockers and jogs her violin case up her shoulder. “P.S. One of those little birdies passed along a rumor that Saul’s planning on sticking around for a while.”
“Oh?” My stomach clenches, and I forget what people usually do with their hands. “I thought you two weren’t speaking after your messy split.”
“Relax,” she says. “I’m not going down that rabbit hole again.”
Relax? Who, me? The girl leaning against her locker with her thumbs hooked into her belt loops like the hard-ass female cop in a CBS crime thriller? I am the definition of relaxed.
“Nate told me,” she adds. “He thinks the four of us should ‘totally chill again soon.’”
A pulse of heat drops low in my stomach. “Oof.”
She laughs. “That’s essentially the reaction I expected.”
“I just . . . sort of think . . . Nate likes you.”
Her face twists into a mask of not-quite-repulsion. “Nate?”
“Mhm.”
“Nate Baars?”
“Yep.”
“Nate, who walks like he’s auditioning for the role of Cop Number Three?”
“The very same, Han.” I rearrange my books in my arms, thinnest to thickest.