by Emily Henry
“Obsession,” she says. “Infatuation. And when you follow the only work left in the state to another city, what then?”
“How long have I loved you, Issa?”
She arches one eyebrow. “Always, to hear you tell it.”
“Always,” he says. “Before you would even look my way.”
“I looked your way,” she teases. “It was only that you hadn’t yet grown into your ears, so looking did little.”
“Maolissa O’Donnell,” he says, “I have loved you since you were six years old and I found you at the disappearing tree. I loved you when you, at twelve, turned up your nose and said, ‘Abe, I’m going to travel the world, probably marry a prince, so you need to understand the nature of this friendship.’”
Issa keens with laughter, and Abe winds his arms around her waist. “Tell me, Issa. Is that still your plan?”
Her smile falls, leaving tenderness and vulnerability exposed. “Sometimes,” she whispers, “I think you are the snake.”
“Issa.”
“Don’t draw me away from them only to leave me,” she says. “You say these things—you make me feel as though, if you stop loving me, I’ll die.”
“You won’t,” he murmurs. He shakes his head once. “I won’t.”
“Promise me.”
He takes her hands in his. He kisses one, then the other. “I promise you. I promise the stars. I promise the lake and falls, coywolves and robins. I promise earth and heaven: I will love you long after the last human has taken his last breath. When the stars burn out and the oceans freeze over and the whole world is ash and dust and ice, our names will still be carved into the tree of life, side by side, and I’ll still be loving you.”
Issa’s voice trembles. “Maybe in the water we’ll be reborn. When we come up, you will be only you, and I will be only me. On the other side, nothing will keep us apart.”
“Nothing will keep us apart,” he answers solemnly.
Her smile is the kind that hides something. I think of the memory of that day on the beach, when Jack the First chased her through breaking waves and her laughter spilled out like gemstones. Her love for her father is as essential to her being as her love for Abe, or either’s love for her. I think of the coyote and the wolf then, and instead of marveling at Dad’s description of them lying together, it’s the robin that awes me.
The delicate thing with soft feathers and hollow bones that lies between two wild and unpredictable beasts, untouched by both. Fearless, trusting.
Issa looks at Abe one last time. “Ready,” she whispers.
They take a running leap off the ledge, and squeals fling out of them as they drop to the water. I rush forward and watch Abe Angert and Issa O’Donnell hit the pool below. They splash; they plunge; they sink, bubbles jostling to the surface in their wake. Everything falls silent for three breaths, and then Abe tops the water, gasping, his smile vivid. He treads water, turning in slow circles.
“Issa?” The walls around the pool catch his voice and mute it. “Is!”
No answer. He glances right-left-right, dives down again. He’s gone for a long moment, too long. He resurfaces alone.
“ISSA?” The water sloshes as he twists. “IS? ISSA!”
He dives under, emerges again, hoarsely shouting her name. The cliffs absorb his voice. The water mocks him with its quiet. Still no red-gold hair or slim shoulders. No gemstone voice responding to his call.
I stumble from the ledge. Stagger, trip. Stomach bile rises in my throat, and vertigo rocks me off balance.
My head cracks against something hard, stars popping in my vision, a wall of hot whites and reds.
The colors fade; the shadows hanging over me resolve into foliage. I’m back in the forest. I just saw someone die.
I saw someone die.
I saw—
Saul. I’d forgotten about Saul. About the dead hen and the ghosts.
I lurch to my feet and run for my house, calling out for him in case he’s still in the woods. My bare feet are numb as they trample the snow, and I try to shake the Whites from my hair and clothes. There’s no time for this.
But when I reach my yard, lush grass catches my feet where there should be frost.
A warm breeze wriggles through my coat. A pile of shoes sits to the right of the porch, and the moon hangs high.
At the bottom of the hill, I see movement: a hunched blur.
“HELP!” Abe’s now familiar voice is cracking, muffled by distance. “HELP!”
Lights flick on in the windows.
“HELP!” Abe screams again. He struggles to keep his legs under him, to keep hold of the limp thing in his arms.
The front door flings open. Jack the First careens out, bad leg buckling with each step. Abe lets himself fall now, now that there’s someone to witness what’s happened. The porch light barely spills across the girl’s face.
“What happened?” Jack the First rasps. “What happened?”
He’s a record stuck on a note, skipping, scarred. He touches the sides of Issa’s face. He drags her out of Abe’s arms and across his own lap, keening with horrible bearlike sounds. “What did you do?” he screams, voice threadbare, at Abe.
A long-legged little boy with sandy hair breaks from the front door and runs across the shadowy yard. Annie chases Jack II, her nightgown fluttering, and catches his shoulders. A strangled noise dies in her throat as she sees, then understands. She shakes her head and sinks, pulling Jack II to her. His round face is scrunched. He shakes his mother off and runs for the woods, runs right past me, runs like he can never stop. Like if he looks back, he’ll die, and if he keeps moving, it won’t hurt so bad.
“What did you do?” Jack the First shrieks again.
“The falls,” Abe musters. He shakes his head. “I thought that if she could have the cherries—”
“The cherries?” Jack rasps, returning to himself.
“—if she had a healing cherry,” Abe chokes.
Jack’s on his feet, standing over the crumpled boy. He bears down on him, and Abe makes little more than a grunt when Jack kicks him in the ribs. He doesn’t scream when Jack hauls him up by the neck or hits him across the face. He collapses onto his stomach, tries to scramble away, but Jack drags him back and stomps on his shoulder.
Abe goes limp though not unconscious. There’s blood under his nose, and in this light it looks more like syrup or chocolate. It blooms across a cheek, an elbow, a gaping mouth on a pale boy.
A scream tears through me, making no sound. Stars dance behind my eyes, and the ground sways. I crumple and grip the grass between my fingers, wanting to stop this thing that’s already happened.
Feathers flickers at the far edge of the woods, weeping as only a thing without eyes can. Kneeling without knees.
Abe doesn’t see her. Does he see anything anymore? He stares at the sky, unblinking, mouth twisted as Jack hits him, sickly thud after sickly thud. Crunch after snap. Snap after thwack. There’s blood, so much blood, and I can’t tell where it comes from—Jack’s split-open knuckles or Abe’s cheek.
Whether it’s Jack’s thumb that’s broken or Abe’s eye socket.
Jack splattered in Abe’s blood or Abe splattered in Jack’s.
Jack’s heart torn in two or Abe’s drowned in the water.
A snake rustles in the grass beside me, slithering toward the woods. I wish I could close my eyes and shut out the sounds of flesh hitting flesh, lungs heaving.
The wolf at the coyote’s throat.
The robin dead in the water.
Eventually Jack’s throws come slower, his breathing heavier. He slumps sideways off Abe, onto the ground.
Annie sways in the breeze, her hair lifted off her neck.
Abe just stares, as though his mind has become untethered from his body.
There’s blood in the grass,
none of it hers, and she’s still dancing, weeping at the edge of the woods.
Jack the First crawls to Issa, presses his forehead into her shoulder. He knots his fingers into the grass beside her.
The snake is gone. It’s over. This place is broken, and now I understand.
Forty
I enter the house and am ejected into the present, a new sense of terror cleaving to me.
It’s not just me and Saul at risk tonight.
Issa’s hovering form follows me upstairs to the boys’ room. I listen for their breathing, search the dark corners and shadows for the ghost we’ve always called Nameless.
When I’m sure Shadow and Grayson are safe, I stand outside the master bedroom and listen to Toddy’s snores, then slip back downstairs, where Mom turns over on the couch, sighing in her sleep.
They’re safe. It does little to ease the spastic clip of my heart. What about Saul?
I leave the house, feet still bare and approaching frostbite, I’m sure, but I need to be able to follow wherever Issa leads.
Wherever Saul is.
Issa takes me back into the woods. They’re misty and sunlit, as though night were nothing but a dream, and in this golden haze she becomes solid: pale with strawberry hair and dimpled cheeks. She smiles sadly—the way she smiled when Abe said nothing would keep them apart—and leads me, calling for Saul as I go, through the forest.
We pass the billions of fluttering Whites, the mass of vines and branches circling O’Dang! like women holding hands around a maypole, and Issa keeps moving.
“Where is he?” I ask.
She says nothing.
Ahead, the trees thin. My heart thunders. I know where Issa’s taking me—I can already hear it.
We crest the cliff overlooking the falls. Beneath the glassy surface, delicate spheres float like lazy jellyfish, membranes in otherworldly shades of blue, purple, and white.
Warmth wafts off the water, carrying a whispered word: “June.”
I try to shut out the sound of my father’s voice. I dig my feet into the earth to keep myself from leaping in pursuit of him. “Where’s Saul?” I demand of Issa, who has shifted into a fluctuating pink aura again.
She wavers at the lip of the cliff, as if peering into the water, and every pump of my heart carries ice through my veins.
“June-bug.”
“Junie.”
“Junior.”
Dad’s voice becomes insistent, harder to block out.
“You said I would drown if I went in alone,” I snap. “Why did you bring me here?”
Issa billows, all her movement pointing to the water. The ice in my veins stops, reverses, plunges into my heart. “Did Saul go in the water?”
She dips. It’s as close to a nod as I can imagine a thing like her doing. I eye the sleek surface, and the voices escalate into a feverish pitch: “June, June, June.”
The Whites sound sinister now: hungry. Less like Dad and more like Nameless. Abe.
I step to the edge, sending rocks scrabbling down the cliff side.
“If Saul went down before we got here . . .” He would’ve been under for a full minute by now—and that’s only if he went right before we got here. “Why would he do that? He knows how dangerous it is.”
My mind spins, trying to piece the night together. I think back to the dead hen in my yard and the rabbit outside Eli’s cabin. Issa had gone there, Abe too, and Eli had told Saul what the memories had revealed in pieces to me: that Nameless hurts O’Donnells.
He would’ve come to check on me, only to find a hen dead in the snow and me already gone. Whether because he assumed I’d gone there or because he knew we were out of time—
Saul went in the water.
“June. June. June. JUNE. JUNIOR.” The voices mix with the hiss of creatures scuttling through the branches, slinking along the forest floor. The voices begin to shout over the burbling of the water as fish rise, flailing.
An inky shadow rolls across the falls.
He’s here. Maybe he planned all of this exactly as it’s happening. Maybe he knew sending Saul in would send me in after.
Maybe Abe’s here to drown me.
But it doesn’t matter. The voices are so loud they feel as if they’re coming from within my head, and the forest buzzes in anguish at the cold ghost’s presence. From this close, I feel the shapeless thing’s turmoil worm into me, stoke me into a frenzy.
“Saul,” I say, grounding myself.
Stay focused. For Saul.
I jump.
The warm water seems to reach up to snatch me, drag me down. Hundreds of waterlogged Whites scream and moan in my father’s voice. I don’t fight the pull.
I dive.
Deeper, deeper, deeper, until I have to kick hard to keep moving through the barrage of Whites. I ignore the push on my lungs, the water slipping up my nostrils, the panic saying up-up-up.
Closer to the bottom, the Whites are packed more densely. Their light dazzles so brightly I can see nothing else. I kick harder.
Closer. So close I can touch the wall of white. I can taste it.
I push myself into it. It envelops me, light everywhere. Nothing but light.
It recedes from the center of my vision, radiating toward the outsides.
I’m immersed in a memory, the whole scene washed out by the brilliant luminescence hanging over everything. I’m downstairs in my house.
Dad sits in a high-backed chair at the console table in the dining room. He’s hunched, his oversized hand gripping a pen, scribbling on a sheet of loose-leaf paper.
In the kitchen, Mom is boiling noodles. I can smell marinara, tangy and sweet and loaded with garlic. Steam spirals up from the pot, finely sheening her cheek with humidity. She sweeps her forearm up to her hairline to catch the sweat accumulating there.
“Junior?” she says. The burning whiteness seems to drape over her voice, distilling it into the pure sound of her. “Come help Mama.”
The eight-year-old girl drawing at the dining room table stands but hesitates there, between her parents—her mother at the stove a few yards to her left, her father at the desk on her right. She ignores her mother and goes to her father.
I remember.
She tries to climb on his back. He wriggles her off, leaving her to squeal and giggle and try harder. “Not now, June-Bug,” he says.
“Jackie, please,” Mom says. “Get the silverware, baby.”
She keeps climbing on him. He stops what he’s doing and pulls her off. Holding her by the elbows, he leans back to study her, smiling softly. After a few seconds of silence, he kisses the wiggling girl’s forehead. “You go help Mom, Bug.”
She huffs and turns away. Dad folds the letter he’d been working on.
I remember. This happened the night we found the dead hen.
He writes something on the outside of the note, then walks toward the door. “Be right back,” he tells me and Mom.
I strain my eyes to see the word on the folded letter: Junior.
White light bursts across my vision, and I feel the water all around me again. I kick one last time, but somehow I’ve been turned around. I’m kicking up not down, and that one kick sends me over the surface.
Forty-One
THE white is hot against my eyes. I blink it back, treading water. Slowly, color filters into the edges of my vision.
The forest is gone. So is the waterfall.
I’m in an ocean, or maybe a Great Lake, some vast gray body beneath a mist-filled sky. In the distance, I spy a white shore. A girl with red-gold hair sits at the edge of the tide. Issa.
“Hello?” I call, checking whether I’m in a memory. My voice is audible but barely; a blanket of hot wind roars over it.
The water is as dense with Whites as the pool under the falls. Billions of them filling up this massive space
. They all seem to be swimming away from the shore where Issa sits, across the softly rollicking waves where I emerged. In several places throughout the watery expanse, the Whites stop swimming out and dive down, forming little cyclones of fluff.
To gaps in the veil, I think, like the woods and the falls.
I stroke through them, grazing dozens at a time, and even though I’m not crossing thresholds, their contents flash bright across my mind.
A red sled whipping down a hill, the sweet tastelessness of a snowflake on my tongue, the crackle of a gas fireplace, and piles of snow melting on boot toes in a tray inside a green door.
A hammer in my hand, yellow floral curtains, the earthy smell of sweat, and a buttery laugh.
Popsicles staining mouths Tang-orange, slivers in my feet, fights with a mother who isn’t mine, a glass shattering in the sink, drawing blood from the skin between my thumb and forefinger.
Downy fur soft against my face.
The memories course through me, and it’s everything I can do to keep treading water. Sometimes, though, the memories feel so real I forget and start to slip beneath.
A tug of the tide pulls me back to reality, and I kick to the surface and keep swimming.
Until my arms ache. My legs ache. My shoulders burn and lungs feel like someone’s taken sandpaper to every inch of them, and still I’m far from the shore.
Issa sits, watching serenely.
“SAUL?” The wind swallows my voice. I don’t know whether I’m calling out for him or asking Issa if he’s here. I can’t let myself think about what could’ve happened to him.
I swim until it’s all I can do to keep my nose above water. And then I can’t even do that.
I kick my legs, windmill my arms, but I’m no longer above the surface, and every muscle in my body throbs with exhaustion. I open my eyes and watch armies of Whites swim past.
I see full cities beneath me—sunken homes and skyscrapers, bicycles and cobblestone and awnings, Whites cloistering around the waterlogged windows. Overlapping places, maybe, or maybe places that haven’t existed for a long time.