by Emily Henry
“I’d rather do that than let go and lose him.”
“Letting go is not forgetting. It’s opening your eyes to the good that grew from the bad, the life that blooms from decay.”
“My dad was supposed to be here,” I whisper.” He was supposed to always be here. I needed him, and Abe took him from me.”
Issa lets a Moment alight on her hand. She sets it in mine and curls my fingers around it. I see a pure, bright memory: sun in my eyes, dirt underneath my fingernails, teeth sinking into a cherry, spraying tart juice on my chin.
She scoops another few and drops them over my fist. They hit my closed fingers, then bounce away. “June, Moments are like cherries. They’re meant to be relished, shared—not hoarded. You can clutch one terrible Moment or experience all the rest. Your life is slipping past in brilliant little bits, and I know it feels as though you’re holding on to him, as though opening your hand is letting him slip away.”
Now she opens my hand, and the Moment in it floats to the ground. “But when Moments pass and crumble, they become seeds. They grow into new trees. And I promise you, he’ll be in every new leaf. He will never be far from you.
“But if you don’t let go of all that Abe did, you’ll be haunted like the rest of them. You will miss the chance to live the life you want because you’ve accepted the one that’s been passed down to you.”
I swallow the knot in my throat. “Is he gone, Issa?”
Her mouth quivers. “When your father came here, he came in through the front door, no regrets. He shed his skin and stepped through a free man. He bathed in the water, and he wasn’t sad about the way things were anymore. He was ready to move on.”
I’m trying to parse out her meaning when an abrupt smile splits her face and she illuminates with happiness, bright and salient. I follow her gaze over my shoulder.
A lean boy with dark hair approaches through the mist, his angles sharpening into focus as the fog between us thins. “Saul.”
My heart flares with relief so concentrated it overwhelms me with tears. He can’t see me yet, but I know it’s him. With every bone and muscle and ligament, I know him.
I look back to Issa, but she’s turned away, wading into the water, her dress floating out around her. She turns toward me again, shielding her eyes against the light. “It’s a miracle,” she calls, grinning.
“What is?”
“That with your hand shut so tightly, he managed to slip in. That with his hands gripped like they were, he saw the shimmering possibility of a future when he met you.”
Her smile widens, but tears still prick her eyes. “Wash yourselves, June,” she calls. “Your curse will be broken. Abe won’t be able to follow you back. If that’s not enough to free him, there’s nothing else I can do. It’s his decision now. I’m moving on.”
I run down the beach toward her. “And if I don’t? Go back? If I want to stay and find him?”
Issa looks out across the water, where a series of islands has become visible, some drifting toward the shore and others away. “You swim,” she says.
“What’s there?”
Issa laughs, and while it should be eerie, it’s shiny and gorgeous. “I don’t know yet. Either way, don’t delay your decision—there are people waiting for you, Jack O’Donnell.”
I watch her shrink, feeling the wind at my back and an unbearable cleaving in my heart. Feathers, the sprite, my sweet pink ghost, is gone.
“June?”
And then I turn. I see him. And for a moment, the happiness, the light, the deeply good outweighs all the bad.
Everything in me swells, threatens to pop like an overblown balloon.
Saul’s face is sunburned and muddy. Hair sandblasted, skin bleached by Whites. Through the crashing waves and seagulls, he says my name.
I run to him, and he crushes me to his chest. His lips are cracked and bloody as he kisses me, but I don’t care. I don’t care that I’m covered in blood. I forget the scalding of my skin.
I take his mist-speckled face between my hands, and he knots his fingers into my hair and laughs, gravelly, warm, him.
“You’re alive,” he says, and I nod, and laugh, and cry. His hands stroke through my hair. “Jack O’Donnell IV, we’re alive.”
I cling to him, damp wind cycling around us. Safe, steady, whole.
“I went to the falls,” he says in a rush. “I saw Nameless and Feathers. There was a dead rabbit, and I thought the worst, June. I went to your house, but you were gone. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Issa,” I say. “Issa and Abe. That’s who the ghosts are. She brought me here.”
He presses his face into my neck, and a cracking sound climbs his throat. “I thought you were already gone. I told myself if I jumped, I could find you.” He pulls me into him, blocking me from the wind.
“I’m here.” I spread my fingers over his heart, feeling its beat. “I’m not gone.” I repeat it again, a promise.
Saul straightens, and his eyes register the blood on me. “June, what happened?” He tries to wipe it off, but it doesn’t smear.
“It’s a stain,” I tell him. “Look.” I point to the bruises on his arms. I gently lift his shirt and find more blue-black welts rising from his ribs. “Did you see what happened to Abe on the hill?”
Understanding crosses Saul’s face as his fingers skim the bruises. “You think these are from what Jack did to him? Takes chip on your shoulder to a whole new level.”
“Chip in your bloodstream,” I say. “Blood in my DNA.”
“Are we dead, June?”
“We won’t feel this close to dying when we’re dead.”
Saul laughs. “True. I’ve never been so thirsty.”
We start to walk, and the pain needling my skin hits anew with each step we take out of the mist. The sparkling water and blue sky come into view. Up and down the shore, blemishes of color become visible, all moving, like us, toward the water.
“Where are we?” Saul asks.
“The world outside ours?” I say helplessly.
One of the islands has drifted closer, a small one smack-dab in the water, on which a white farmhouse basks in the light, ivy sprawling through its lattice, flowers and a cherry tree leaning in its yard. Another island floats in tandem with it, vacant apart from a massive tree with gnarled roots.
“Your house,” Saul says. “And O’Dang!”
I nod. “You think that’s the way home?”
“Is that the way back?” Saul shouts to a barefoot woman in an olive dress. She and several other newcomers are wading into the water, splashing their wind-beaten faces. She looks up, droplets sliding off her face, then follows Saul’s gaze to the farmhouse.
“Not for me,” she shouts back. “The others said the islands come when it’s your turn.”
“Turn?” Saul asks.
She shrugs and lowers herself into the water. As she does, something strange and lovely happens. White puffs wash off her—off everyone who’s wading in. Like snakeskin being shed, snow from a window, dust bunnies blown free from a book cover.
“This is where they come from,” Saul says.
The woman’s grinning as she slurps from her cupped hands.
“Is the water drinkable?” I call.
She laughs and slicks her wet hair back. “It’s water!”
We push our faces into the crash of the tide and gulp.
We lie in it, roll through it. The snow-sand starts to wash from our hair and clothes, settling to the bottom without a fight. The Whites shed from me, but the blood doesn’t rinse off no matter how I scrub.
Saul takes my hands in his and runs his fingers through the blood, drawing wet streaks through it. He scoops water in one hand and pours it over my forearm, and the blood runs off in minuscule red rivers, though the water doesn’t seem to muddy. Pour by pour, the blood
disappears, rinsing off beneath his cupped hands until it’s gone.
Saul kisses my clean fingers, one by one.
I touch the bruises on his cheek, those on his arms. I massage the water into them, watching the dark purple fade from beneath his tattoos until the bruises become nothing. I pull his shirt over his head and wash his sides, his ribs.
I rinse his shoulders, his spine. I watch the welts vanish, and when they’re gone, I kiss his forehead, his cheeks, his mouth.
We fall under the water and sink and twist, are buoyed back up, water and Moments sliding off us like avalanches. Our Whites drift off. They crumble, one by one, and sink.
We lie back on the White-sand, smiling and breathing deep. I can’t explain the feeling in my body. At first, we’re both laughing breathlessly, and when the giddiness settles, I feel heavy, so calm I could melt into the beach, become a part of it like all our Moments. Saul’s fingers twist through mine, and he looks over to me, a million droplets glistening on him like marbles.
“I knew who you were in the mirror maze,” he says. Somehow, here, we’re below the wall of wind, above the crash of water, in a quiet slice of space. “I knew who you were, and I was so happy you didn’t seem to recognize me. I wanted to stay there as long as I could, to spend as much time as possible before you found out.”
I try to remember why. I remember what happened but not why it mattered so much, why I believed anything was keeping me and Saul apart. I think of what Issa said to Abe on top of the waterfall: that he would leave and forget her. “What if I want to travel?” I ask Saul.
“Then you’ll travel, Jack.”
“What if I want to go to college?”
“You’ll live in a dorm and join the literary magazine,” he says. “Go to readings and sneak out with your friends the night before National Poetry Day to cover the campus with poems; drink Jell-O shots and shave your head in a frat-house bathroom and quit shaving your armpits and live in a new city and learn how to make sushi and whatever else you want. I can wait.”
I close my eyes and grin at the sun—or the not-the-sun. “What if our curse makes all the stars burn out and we’re left in the dark?”
Saul touches my bottom lip, and I open my eyes. The crescents of refracted light in the water droplets on his face make him glitter like the ocean. “We aren’t cursed anymore, June.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m happy,” he whispers. “I saw all there was to see, all the worst parts, and I’m still furiously happy.”
He’s right—our blood and bruises are gone, like Issa said—but what about Abe? What happens to him now? I curl myself against Saul, pressing my face into his wet shirt. “Maybe everyone’s cursed.”
“Not us,” he murmurs in my hair.
“What makes us so special, Saul?”
“We’re in love.”
“Are we?” I whisper.
He gingerly takes the sides of my face in his hands. “June O’Donnell, I like that you know you can’t fix the thing that hurts in me. And that you understand it gets better but you never stop missing people. I like that you know no human being will ever make it okay that you lost another one. And that you’re smart and funny and willing to go on horrible double non-dates for your friend and that you want to write things that are happy, and of course I like your butt and eyes and teeth and hair and the way your fingernails are always badly painted and that when you laugh, you have no chin.
“And I don’t know what exactly makes it love, but when I saw you in the House of Mirrors, it was like I already knew exactly who you were. And I should’ve been wrong—that would’ve made more sense—but I wasn’t, and I love you. I’ll always love you. And someday maybe we’ll have a bad breakup or grow apart and—curse or not—all the stars will burn out and the planet will have another ice age, but I’ll go on loving you because I see you, June O’Donnell, and I can’t unsee you.”
He lowers his mouth to mine, and we kiss how we drank the water. Our teeth collide like they did that night in the sunroom, from too much smiling.
When we pull apart, his eyes flick down my face and out toward the twin islands docking near the shore: O’Dang! and my house.
All along I’d been so sure Dad was trying to tell me something, and even now that Saul and I are here together, legs outstretched in sparkling waves and invisible sun blanketing us, I still feel a deep ache. “One will take us home,” I murmur.
“And the other?”
I meet Saul’s dark eyes. “To them.”
“Is that for you?” the woman in the olive dress calls, tipping her head toward the farmhouse on the island. “You might want to wade out there while you can, if it is. Looks like it’s starting to drift back out.” She returns to wringing her hair out, knotting it into a braid.
She’s right. The island is floating away, a new one visible on the horizon.
Saul and I stand. “Which do we take?” he asks.
“I don’t know yet.”
We wade into the water, and when we’re in to our waists, we let our fingers fall apart. The sun on our backs and arms, we climb onto the floating island and look up at my house. “Saul?”
“June?”
Maybe for some people, falling in love is an explosion, fireworks against a black sky and tremors rumbling through the earth. One blazing moment. For me, it’s been happening for months, as quietly as a seed sprouting. Love sneaked through me, spreading roots around my heart, until, in the blink of an eye, the green of it broke the dirt: hidden one moment, there the next.
“I like your hair and arms and laugh. And the pictures you take and that you came home even though you were scared and that you apologize and expect apologies. I like that you don’t get embarrassed often but when you do, your ears turn pink, and I like your jaw and stomach and how you think about the worst things that have happened in a way that doesn’t justify them but finds the tiny specks of good circling them, and I love you. I love you, Saul Angert.”
His smile is slow and faint. “I know, Jack.”
“Cocky,” I tease.
“Confident.”
Forty-Three
WE fold our fingers together and step toward my porch. It’s nearly silent, apart from the gulls overhead. Butterflies spiral around the ivy-wrapped lattice, and birds chirp in the bushes.
Something crawls on the nape of my neck. I turn, and across the water, I see a shape moving out of the haze toward the shore where we bathed.
“June?” Saul touches my elbow, then follows my gaze.
Abe’s blue-gray button-up ripples in the wind. The worn fabric of his pants lashes his legs, and his dark hair ruffles.
I expect to feel hate, anger, fear—but I only feel sadness. His dark eyes, the sharp angles of his face—they’re so familiar, shadows of a person I love. How did the boy on the waterfall, the one who’d loved Issa since they were six, turn into the darkness that haunted us? Was it in that moment he found her? When the light left his eyes as Jack the First attacked him?
Or did it happen over years of missing her, being hated by the family she loved? In the end, he’s nothing but a mess of color: the white of memory dust, the red of the blood on his hands, the purple of the bruises the world inflicted on him.
“Our curse is broken,” I say. “He can’t follow us back. Whether he moves on is his decision.”
We watch him and he watches us for an extended moment.
He steps into the water, his pants clinging and rocking with the tide. I try to see the darkness in him or feel the cold that rushed into me whenever he was near, but here he’s nothing but a human being. A mass of guts and cells and all the Moments that hurt him.
Behind him, a little girl emerges from the mist. A woman down the beach lets out a yelp, and the girl turns toward her, a smile breaking across her face. They run for each other, the girl’s yellow braid bo
uncing behind her. Their bare feet slap the not-sand, making a sound like the heartbeat of the earth.
The woman’s knees hit the ground as the girl collides with her, their arms wrapping tightly around each other, faces burying themselves in curves and muscle and fabric.
That.
That was the moment I had wanted. A reunion.
Saul’s hand tightens, silent acquiescence: me too.
Still watching us, Abe lowers himself to his knees. Whites spit out from him like soap bubbles beneath a showerhead. He plucks one off, brings it to the surface, and meets my eyes again.
He shakes his head, opens his mouth, then closes it again. Silently he releases the White.
It doesn’t sink. It’s pulled along by the breeze straight toward me. The dead bit of memory, the outermost layer of moments, pulled away to leave behind only the supple truth.
Abe stands, his liquid eyes shifting away from us to search the horizon. He doesn’t find what he’s looking for there, and the light draws a vein down the silvery slope of his cheek.
His mouth forms words: “I’m sorry, Issa.”
He doesn’t wash any more of his time away. He turns toward the mist and returns the way he came.
“What does this mean?” Saul whispers. “I thought the curse was broken.”
“For us, it is,” I answer.
“But if he’s not moving on, he’ll keep torturing us.”
I shake my head. “He can’t come back.”
“Then why stay here?”
I stare into the mist and its white noise. “I don’t think he was ready to face her.”
Because he blamed himself for her death. Because of the way he tore through her family and broke all his promises. Issa said shame was the first curse, and when you’ve held on to shame that long, it must be nearly impossible to let go. Nearly.
Maybe not now, but someday he’ll let the girl who loved him look at him again. And when he does, she’ll be waiting.
Saul nods at the White floating toward me. “What do you think is in that?”