by Emily Henry
“I don’t get it,” I say. “Why aren’t we allowed to come here? My dad broke the rule, and he was fine. And if the rule was made because the thin places are dangerous, wouldn’t they have kept us out of the woods?”
“Maybe—” Saul stops. A quiet rustling rises from the brush. Branches quiver and jump. The rustle grows. Louder, nearer.
“Hannah?” I whisper. Cold fear trickles down my spine. The water near the shore begins to bubble and froth. “Nate?”
All at once, a school of fish breaks the surface, mouths gaping, eyes wide and strange. Their silver bodies seize, churning the water. Two flop up onto the bank, bodies beating the mud as the fish choke over oxygen. Agitated cheeps and chirps swell through the trees. The hiss and slither of snakes undulate through the brush.
There’s one beat of silence, and then the whole forest erupts. Squirrels and birds flee from the branches, clearing out from the ledge Saul and I jumped from. White-tailed deer bolt along the shore, eyes wild. A colony of bats shrieks into the sky, and two collide, gnashing at each other as they tumble toward the earth, wings twisted in sickly angles. A snake at the edge of the cliff jerks to a stop, its sinuous upper body lifting before it strikes toward its own tail, jaw yawning as it begins to devour itself.
Saul grabs for my arm in the water and yanks me toward him, face blanching.
Up on the ledge, half-hidden in the trees, a dark and terrible silhouette billows forward. Cold stabs my heart like a shot of adrenaline. The forest seems to close in, darken, seethe as Nameless moves closer. The fish are still writhing, suffocating. A stampede of tiny wings and paws reverberates out from the shadowy ghost.
“Go!” Saul pushes me toward the falls.
We swim. As fast as we can. Stroke toward the waterfall. He throws himself over the slick ledge and hauls me up through the falls to the cave.
Inside we stand, panting, staring through the rushing stream. My heart thrums louder than the water’s angry roar, and Saul’s choppy breaths jolt through my arm. We stay frozen for minutes, waiting.
“It must be gone,” Saul says. I’m not sure he believes it.
Whites are drifting through the waterfall now, convening like tiny magnets until their combined mass is too thick to see through.
“June-bug?” The familiar voice echoes from behind me.
Everything in my body shoots up toward my throat, then plummets. I spin, searching the empty cave. I can hear my rapid breathing—we’re not in a memory—but my father’s disembodied voice reverberates against the stone again: “Jack IV?”
Shivers crawl along my skin. My eyes zigzag, finding nothing but wet rock and Whites.
“Hello?” I manage.
“June?” Saul’s eyes look almost black against his drained face. “Who are you talking to?”
“Found you, June-bug!” Dad says. “I found you.”
“Dad?” I stammer
Saul spins away from me, his shoulders suddenly rigid, then looks back. “You hear him, don’t you?”
“He’s here.” Somehow.
“No, June.” Saul’s voice is strained and low. “It’s the Whites, I think. It’s a trick.”
“He’s here.” Desperation swells in me. His voice is everywhere now, rebounding endlessly against the walls. June, June, June, it swirls around me. “Dad, can you hear me?” I scream over the chorus.
“June, it’s not them,” Saul rasps. “I hear her too, but it’s not them.”
That’s when I see it: Nameless, twitching against the cave wall. It comes forward, the Whites gliding along with it, and the voices rise in number and volume until they reach the waterfall. Saul jerks me back against the wall.
“June,” Dad’s voice says, fearful now as it’s sucked through the waterfall. “June-bug.”
The sound cuts out as the Whites pass though the falls, and I run after them. I can’t explain it, but the thought is there pulsing in my mind:
He’s here. He’s really in there this time.
You’re going to lose him again. You can’t lose him again.
Saul’s shouting something I can’t make out. I leap through the falls and hit the water, drop-drop-drop, billions of bubbles erupting, buffeting the glowing orbs away from me. There are so many, but I’m somehow convinced I’m looking right at the one that held Dad’s voice—not a memory, but Dad, my brain repeats.
I dive after it, deeper and deeper, and I keep going even when my lungs start to stutter, and still my hands can’t clasp the ball of light slipping away from me.
I’m out of breath.
Out of air.
I’ve gone too deep. There’s no way back out. Panic sets in. My lungs spasm.
Ahead of me a waterlogged voice calls out: June.
The eerie blue glow stops its descent, then timidly moves back toward me. I can’t explain it, but if I can get my hand around the White, somehow the dark spots popping across my vision won’t matter. The nameless thing at the bottom of the pool and the water seeping into my lungs won’t matter.
Nothing matters but the voice.
My fingers graze the sphere.
I see his smile: gap-toothed, bright.
Twenty-Eight
I’M coughing. So hard it hurts.
No, throwing up.
“Oh God, Junie,” I hear Hannah sob.
“She’s fine,” Nate says. “She’s fine, Han.”
“What happened? Where the hell did you guys go?”
The voices swim through darkness, emitting little meaning until my eyes focus on the faces hovering over me.
“Hi,” Saul says softly, helping me sit up. Nate passes him a blanket, which Saul and Hannah wrap around my shoulders. I’m still naked. I’d forgotten I was in the first place. It hadn’t mattered. Nothing had but the voice. There’s a hollow pang in the pit of my stomach.
“Why did you let her get in the water?” Hannah demands of Saul tearfully.
“Han, come on—we were in too,” Nate tries.
“You knew she didn’t want to! You knew she wasn’t supposed to!” Hannah’s anger bows and snaps. She’s crying again. “God, Junie. I should’ve listened to you.” She folds her arms around me and cries into my wet hair.
Saul’s eyes are intent on me, trying to understand what he must see on my face: fear and loss and hope wrapped into one.
He was down there.
“I’m okay.”
He was down there.
We’re on a lower ledge of rock, farther out from the falls. The water still glitters with the reflection of the stars, but the Whites are gone. The urge to throw myself back in and tear down to the bottom is powerful.
Saul catches my gaze. “We shouldn’t have gone in.”
What he means is: You shouldn’t do it again. Whatever you heard, it wasn’t there.
He’s wrong.
I should’ve seen it sooner. If the Whites are slipping through cracks from the other side, there’s a way for us to slip through too. All the way.
It’s in that water. He’s in that water.
“What happened, June?” Hannah asks.
“I dove too deep,” I say. “I couldn’t get back up.”
She gnaws on her bottom lip. “We should get you to a hospital.”
I scoot back from her, from all of them. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” Saul says. “You nearly drowned.”
“Let’s at least get you home,” Nate says. “Your lungs could have water in them—sleeping out in the cold is a bad idea.”
I need to go back down.
Saul touches my jaw. “June?”
The spell of the water fades when I meet his eyes. I jam my mouth shut, force a nod. “Okay.”
By the time we tear down the tents, hike back to the car, and start driving, heat blasting, to my house, the first rays
of sun are poking through the forest lining the road. Faint pinks and yellows brush past, catching the leaning, ivy-smothered telephone poles and the flapping wings of newly awakened birds.
In my mind I still hear the spastic scream of bats, see the snake swallowing its own tail. I close my eyes until the image vanishes. Nameless isn’t here. Saul and I are safe.
But for how long?
We slog partway up the driveway, and Nate parks to let me out. I’m banking on my parents still being asleep and more specifically on not having to tell them that I went to the falls with Saul Angert. That I saw the embodiment of Dad’s curse. That, by disobeying their rule, I nearly drowned. And despite that, that I don’t regret it.
Dad is there.
I strap my duffle bag, garment bag, and purse around my shoulders and shuffle up the hill. For the first time since we brought them home, I’m eager to submerse myself in the books about thin places. I need to understand how to get through. Could it be as simple as diving to the bottom?
I know we need to break the curse, but it falls to the back of my mind as other possibilities pile on top of it.
Like the possibility that I can see Dad again, not in a memory but in a place where he can look at me, talk to me, hold me.
As I approach the house, several coywolves vanish into the woods. Toddy’s truck is gone; he must be having an early gym day. I unlock the door and ease it open, trying for silence and ending up with one shrill squeak of the hinges.
At the end of the hall, Mom sits at the kitchen table in her robe. She looks so eerily like those versions of herself from the past that I wonder if, even with my shoes on, I’ve stepped into a memory. Then she looks at me, her face tear-streaked and furious.
“Where have you been, Junior?”
“Hannah’s?”
She stands and folds her arms over her chest. “And where has Hannah been? Because her mother certainly hasn’t seen her.”
“Mom,” I groan. “We went camping. I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“I had a call from your teacher.” Mom holds up a hand, and her eyes flutter closed like she can’t look at me while speaking these words.
“What are you talking about?”
“Ms. deGeest,” Mom says. “She was concerned about where you might be headed after the dance. And with whom.”
“Mom.” My stomach drops, hard and fast. “Whatever she told you, I’m sure it’s only loosely connected to the truth.”
Mom’s hands fall to her sides, and her voice drops to a whisper. “Go upstairs, Jack. I can’t look at you right now.”
“Mom.”
“You lied to me. You had Toddy and me terrified out of our minds for half the night, calling everyone we could think of. I’ve never seen him so mad. You’ll be lucky if he hasn’t already started a war with Eli Angert.”
“Toddy?” The combination of him and Eli in the same thought racks me with hot anger. “This has nothing to do with Toddy. This is about Dad’s rule, and if he were here, he’d listen to m—”
“You father is gone, June!” Mom’s scream hits me like a slap. She gathers herself in the silence. “Toddy and I are your parents, and we don’t want you anywhere near that boy. He’s trouble—”
“You can’t honestly believe that! Saul’s—”
“Enough, Junior,” Mom interrupts. The tremor in her composure tells me she doesn’t want to hear Saul’s name. “Go upstairs, now.”
Twenty-Nine
THE storm outside shakes leaves from the branches. Whites linger outside my window, as if waiting for the rain to let up before they drift back to wherever they go when they’re not here.
The other side.
The place at the bottom of the falls.
My body’s one ball of frenetic energy, legs bobbing and hands tapping. More than ever, I feel restless. Like I’m all dried out and I need the water.
Hours after our fight, Mom knocks on my door and lets herself in. She sits beside me on the bed, but I keep my eyes fixed on the rainy windowpane. She swings her legs up beside mine so we’re facing each other. “I’m sure you’re upset.” After a long silence, she continues, “I don’t expect you to understand, but the bad blood between our families runs back a long ways.”
“Why?” I ask her. “Because Jack the First lost a farm you and I have never even been on?”
“It doesn’t matter why, Junior,” she insists. “It doesn’t matter whether you think it’s a good enough reason. Your father did, and Todd and I do too. I’m telling you to stay away from the Angerts.”
“I’m eighteen.”
“Fine,” Mom says. “I’m asking you to stay away from them. And if you’re going to live under our roof, you’ll abide by that rule.”
“It’s as much my house as it is yours. Dad left it to both of us. He said it should always be owned by a Jack.”
Mom recoils, hurt. I know it was cruel, but it’s hard to care. “Do you think he would want you to own his grandfather’s house when you can’t follow his two rules for you?” she says.
“You can’t let Dad’s rules go because you feel guilty,” I snap. “You never took them seriously. But now he’s gone and you’re sticking to them even though, if he were here, I’d get him to give them up.”
Mom laughs, but the sound is empty. “Your father believed he could trace everything bad that ever happened to this family back to the Angerts. That wasn’t something you or I could’ve changed. You need to let this go, Junior. I don’t expect you to understand. I just wanted to say I’m sorry it has to be this way.”
“You could try being honest with me sometime instead.”
Mom sets a hand on my leg. “You could have too. But you didn’t. And that’s all I need to know about the effect this boy is having on you.”
She grabs my phone and my laptop from my desk, then leaves my room. “Three days,” she says from the hallway. “Then we’ll talk about you getting your phone back.”
“I kind of need my computer for homework.”
“And you can use it. Down in the kitchen, where I can see you.”
I want to scream, but I don’t argue. Mom’s never grounded me to the house before, let alone taken away my connection to the outside world.
There’s a cruel lack of Whites, but I try doorways for a while anyway before flopping onto my bed with one of the thin-place books.
Like Saul described, the essays in the book are mostly meditations on the serenity of beautiful places. But there is one excerpt, attributed to a writer named Sheridan Llewelyn, that I find myself rereading.
The Celts called these spaces “thin places,” places both visible and hidden, where the veil between this world and the next is lifted, and the light spills through. Space carved out to form the shape of God: holy ground.
The light spills through: the memories, the voices from the past.
The veil between this world and the next: the doorways that take me somewhere they shouldn’t, the misty sunlit woods that sometimes open up to me, and the pool beneath the falls. I want to think it means what I so deeply believed while under the water, that there’s a way to step through the veil and truly see Dad again.
Thunder rumbles the house, and the ivy outside my windows shivers, dispelling a few hidden Whites.
I set the book in the middle of the bed as a translucent pink blob appears in the corner. “Hi.”
Feathers wobbles, her warmth palpable despite the chill sneaking through the old bones of the house.
“Are you trying to take me somewhere? Do you know how to get to him?”
She sails forward through my windowpane. I shove it open and let a White land on my hand. But every time I try to carry it to my closet, the wispy sphere blows back toward the window where Feathers billows. Beckoning me.
I slide the window all the way up. Beneath it there’s a thin ledge, and under th
at, a platform of rickety lattice entwined in shaggy greens extends over the porch.
I swing one leg over the windowsill, setting the bare ball of my foot on the weathered wood. I give it more weight until it fully supports me. A White lands on my arm as I swing my other leg over.
Immediately, I’m down in the yard, lightning crackling to illuminate a pile of drenched shoes. A slim man with a cleft chin emerges from the woods, bent against the wind. Even with his dark hair and tailored clothes whipping in the storm, he looks neat. The angle of his cheekbones and the heat in his eyes announce him as an Angert. Something gray and mangled hangs in his hand, and he mutters to himself as he stalks to the porch and pounds the door.
A heart-shaped face framed in dark curls peeks out. My grandmother Charmaine. With a soft murmur, she sends the gap-toothed child pulling at her hip back into the house. She and the Angert man begin to argue in hushed mutters, then he tosses the mangled thing onto the porch. Charmaine bends to examine the lump: a dead rabbit.
She slips inside, and a minute later Jack II stoops his head to step out.
When Dad used to claim his father had been six foot seven, Mom would give him that You’re exaggerating look. But the way Jack II carries himself now makes his height more pronounced than in other memories, those in which he seemed to hide within himself, eyes vacant and so quiet he was nearly invisible.
His sandy head towers over the thin man. His wide mouth presses into a thin line as his eyes dip to the fleshy thing at his feet. “What are you doing here, Zeke?”
“You know what.” Zeke’s voice is a raspy growl. “I found that on my doorstep. Coywolves are agitated.”
Jack II nudges the rabbit with his foot.
Zeke runs a hand over his mouth hastily. “Call it off, Jack.”
That vacant look passes over Jack II’s face. He reminds me of a cellar door, rusted shut and covered in weeds. “Call what off?”
“The curse, dammit. This isn’t our fight, Jack.”
Jack II’s face darkens, and he crosses his burly arms. “It’s not?”
“You know as well as I do, it wasn’t Abe’s fault what happened. They were kids. As long as we keep this fight going, this”—he nudges the rabbit with his boot—“is gonna keep happening.”