by Emily Henry
I wrap my arms around his neck and bury my face in his chest. I can’t look at it, or the house, or O’Dang! “I don’t know.”
He lowers his forehead to mine. “What do you want to do, June?”
“I want to know Dad’s okay. I want a promise that I’ll see him again. I want that love back, Saul.”
Saul tips my face up. “The kind of love your dad had for you, that’s not the kind of thing that can die. Look at Issa. This whole thing—she had us play out their lives so we could understand this fight and stop it. After everything Abe did, she brought us here for him. That kind of love—the kind that doesn’t stipulate or caveat—doesn’t die. That’s what you had with your father. That’s what I had with Bekah. That’s what we have, June, and they’re here, right now.”
“You want to stay?” A sharp pain passes through me. I never would have believed I’d feel this way, but since I dove into that water, I’m different. I WANT TO LIVE burns like an ember in my chest.
For Saul, for Mom and Toddy, Shadow, Grayson, Hannah. And for myself.
Saul shakes his head. “June, the past three years have felt like one never-ending night. And then, a few months ago, I was running through a hall of mirrors, and I collided with you, and I remembered it was just an optical illusion. Your teeth hit me in the shoulder, and I saw morning in you. And if the world can surprise me with something as bright as June O’Donnell’s teeth in my shoulder once, it can do it again.”
His thumb runs over my jaw, and his eyes tighten at the corners. “I love my sister, and until I die, I’ll never stop missing her. But I want to be good to the people I haven’t lost yet. I want to live, with you.”
He brushes tears from my eyes.
“Those are some transcendent bicuspids I’ve got,” I whisper.
He grins. “If you’d hit me with your molars, I would’ve seen the face of God right then.”
“I bet we could catch a boat to that attraction from here.”
“For sale: face of God; price: future.”
“For sale: baby shoes; misread eBay description; thought they were adult shoes.”
Saul’s laugh is all husk and warmth. He pulls me sideways so he can kiss the top of my head. “Even if you can’t see morning in me, I hope you can see it somewhere.”
My heart fills with homesickness—for all three of my parents. I look up at the house in front of us. I can imagine Mom sitting at the table, wearing her two wedding bands, staring down at the smooth wooden surface she’s washed clean a million times.
“June.” Saul tips his head toward Abe’s fluttering White as it finally reaches us. “Do you want to see it?”
I flatten my palm, and the White dances over it. Though it touches my skin, it doesn’t reveal its secrets. I think of that day in the woods. Please, Dad said as the darkness folded over him. Please show her.
I tighten my fingers around the pulsing Moment, but the memory doesn’t play out for me. This island must be more a part of our own world than this one, where merely brushing the White is enough to send its contents dancing through you. I need a threshold.
I look up at the only door within reach: the door to my own house.
“I think he left it for me,” I say. “My dad.”
Saul studies me.
“Thank you for not stating the obvious.”
He laughs. “What, in this impossible place, could possibly be obvious, June?”
“That I’m holding a message from my dad in my hands, and the only apparent way to see it is to go through that door, probably back to Five Fingers. Away from him.”
“I thought ‘the obvious’ was that you already had dozens of messages from him: about how much he loved you and what he wanted for you. The obvious is that whether you had that White or not, your dad would want you to go back to your life and live it well.”
“I want to say goodbye first.”
“It’s not goodbye.” Saul threads his hand through mine. We circle the far side of the island and stand with our toes in the water. There are islands coming closer, others moving out, and there, at the edge of sight, the thin line of the horizon: dark greens and browns, the hazy half image of mountains spearing the sky. Saul sweeps my hair behind my shoulders, and the wind carries it out behind me. I lock my fingers into his, and we stare.
“Are you there?” I whisper.
There’s silence, but it’s Dad’s. Bekah’s. The specific silence that can come only from their mouths. I know. I have to believe.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you,” Saul says, and I know he’s not talking to me, just like I wasn’t talking to him.
I cup my hands around my mouth and scream, as loud as I can, as big and long as I can so it will be a promise with gravity and truth. “SEE YOU.”
Saul laughs beside me and lifts his T-shirt to wipe his eyes. He cups his hands around his mouth and screams: “SEE YOU.”
We stand for one more beat of silence, and then we turn back toward the house.
We climb the steps to the porch, and I stop Saul by the arm. “I think . . . I think I need to see this alone.”
“You’re sure? This is what you want?”
I nod, and Saul pulls me into one last hug, then kisses my forehead. “See you on the other side, Jack.”
I gather all of myself, and it’s not that much. All the Jacks that clung to me, all the ghosts, are gone, and I’m just me.
Light.
Breezy.
Free.
Jack IV.
I go through the door.
Instead of stepping into my house, I find myself in the side yard, behind a dark, writhing shape. Abe’s ghost is watching through the window as my father sits at the console table in the kitchen, scribbling a note. Every so often, Dad stops and looks up through the pane of glass, straight at Abe.
I watch the eight-year-old version of me climbing on Dad and see him frown and disentangle her from him. “I’ll be right back,” his muffled voice comes. He disappears down the hall.
I follow Abe’s fluctuating form to the front of the house, where Dad is bounding down the porch steps into the night. He’s holding a note, labeled JUNIOR, clipped to a leather-bound book. I follow him into the woods.
Suddenly, the night blinks away, replaced by golden light and soft fog. I trudge through the strange quiet, listening to my father’s breaths, counting the beats of his heart, all the way to O’Dang!
When we reach it, Dad climbs, one arm over the other, to the first level of branches, to a hollow made by an animal. He pulls the book and note from his jacket and glances toward Abe—at me—then at the book. He tucks it in the hole.
He left something for me. He left a note for me, something I’ve never seen before.
I go toward the tree as if to climb it, but he’s already climbing down.
I chase his long strides back to the yard, to the sudden night and porch-light glow, the overgrown ivy and shaggy grass, the cicada chirp and twinkle of stars and glint of coywolf eyeshade.
Dad stops beneath the Jack’s Tart tree, eyes lifted to the moon. He looks over his shoulder at Abe—at me—and gives a closed-mouth grin, full tears rolling down his cheeks.
Dad, I say, though of course I have no voice. He faces the house again.
This is the last time I’ll see him, at least for a long time. I’m shaking like a leaf despite the warmth as I cut a circle to stand in front of him.
His eyes flash up to my bedroom window, then drop again. They look right at me, or through me. “June-Bug,” his voice squeezes out as a throaty whisper.
Dad. My heart races so fast I vibrate with it.
He holds his arms out to his sides, like he’s hugging the house, the night, the world. His eyes neither shift nor focus. They stare, wide open, lashes thick with tears. I reach out and touch his hand, feel its warmth and solidness. �
�Look,” he whispers.
I follow his eyes to the stars. Once, when we lay gazing up at the night, he told me the stars we saw were only the tiniest fraction of the stars that burned above us.
I’m looking.
His eyes move vaguely back and forth. “I don’t know if you’ll find this, Bug.” His voice is small. “I hope that if you find any of them, if you figure out how the Whites work, this is the one you find. I think I’m running out of time.” His breath catches in his chest, and he wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I wanted to be a better man than my father, but I made so many mistakes. Someday you’ll know that. I hope you know the good parts too. I hope you know I loved you.”
He waves his free arm up in a slow arc across the sky. “You look for me there, baby,” he says. “I’ll look up. We’ll see the same stars.”
I remember something else he told me about stars: that their light traveled so far we might see some shining that had already burned out. They might reach us after their lives had ended. The light was real and warm, though it came from something that, elsewhere, no longer existed.
What if there are no stars in that other place, Dad? I ask, starting to cry.
He opens his arms again—this time as if to hug me, and I walk into them. I feel his heartbeat against my chest, warm and real though it comes from someone who, here, no longer exists. I love you so much, I say.
“I love you so much,” he says.
Don’t ever let go of me.
“I’ll never let go of you, June,” he says. “The first time I held you, I saw it all. I didn’t miss any of it. I hope you find this. I hope you know. Go live, baby. The world’s waiting.”
Dad.
Abe’s torn-free memory shivers, breaks. Darkness spills in through it like water through holes in a ship. The woods break. The coywolves come apart like dandelions. The stars wink out. Dad’s heart keeps beating. Dad’s arms stay warm. “See you, June-bug,” he says.
See you.
Forty-Four
I crash through. There isn’t a doorway to go by. Instead the memory crumbles around me. I don’t have the presence of mind to hold my arms up over my head.
I simply sob. I feel my tired legs collapsing and then solid arms around me. “You’re okay,” he says again and again.
“He loved me,” I cry.
“He loves you.”
“I miss him.”
Saul holds me. We lean together on the front porch, and it’s not the front porch of the other place. It’s the true front porch. Of the here, the now. The one with a frosty cherry tree ringed with sweet saplings.
The hill Jonathan Alroy O’Donnell came to. The hill Jack the First stood on. The hill Jack II rode his bike across and where Jack III showed me the stars. Our home. A thin place.
Where life goes on and the stars keep shining and the person who loved me most has moved on but his heart has somehow stayed behind.
“We’re home.”
Saul nods.
I touch the doorknob. It’s unlocked. I start to shake again, but this time with happiness, relief. Because of what I’ve come home to.
All the things of the present I’d forgotten to treasure: a mother with dreams and long, elegant fingers that dance in all they do, a stepfather who fixes broken toilets and cleans teeth and protects me like his own, brothers with boundless energy and chalkboard-fingernail voices and sometimes sweetness just for me.
And Saul, a boy who loved me when history said he couldn’t.
“I’m home,” I cry. “Mom! Toddy! Shadow! Grayson!”
The stair lights flick on.
“I’m home.”
“Baby,” Mom’s voice says.
I am so happy, so relieved. For the first time, I feel big.
• • •
We’ve been gone three days, they tell us.
They thought the worst.
The police were looking, Hannah was panicking, Eli was found wandering in the street, his home torn up.
Tonight, they agree to ask no questions. (“But we will talk about this tomorrow.”)
Tomorrow, the answers will matter again, but they’ll still be impossible things.
Hannah gets here in twenty minutes, and we’re crying on the floor in the living room. Grayson and Shadow are shy, unsure how to be around the sister they thought had left them and broke their parents’ hearts.
Only I will ever know how seriously I considered doing just that. How could I willingly do that to them?
The answer, deep down, is that I couldn’t have. There’s too much in this world, under the slowly dying stars, that I love.
For Saul, I know what hurts worst is Eli.
“We’ll see him tomorrow,” Mom promises. She’s the one who got him into the assisted living facility after Saul disappeared, when the police found him in the median of the highway, disgruntled and murmuring with bloody hands.
“It should’ve been me,” Saul says.
“You’re here now,” Mom says. “There’s still time.”
“Maybe,” Saul says. “Or maybe he won’t know me.”
Mom hesitates. “He talks about you. He has your pictures on the walls.”
And in this way, I know we did break a curse when we washed each other clean. Because my mother, an O’Donnell, or the former wife of one, at least, visited New York Times best-selling author Eli Angert these past three days. An O’Donnell paid his bills and made sure he had books to read and pictures on the wall. An O’Donnell took an Angert a box of dried cherries, and an Angert accepted them.
He had taken them between his teeth, and tears had flooded his eyes. They taste like home, he’d said.
“The ghosts are gone now,” I tell Mom quietly.
She smiles knowingly. Or maybe skeptically. It’s hard to say—it’s the same smile she gave when Dad told stories from his trips or talked about the magic tree in the forest.
“I know Dad wasn’t perfect,” I say. “I know . . . he used to leave.”
Mom laughs. “Of course he wasn’t perfect. But he was ours. And we were his.”
“Was that enough?”
Her eyes sweep over my face. “When it came down to it, yes. That was enough.”
For the first time since this started, I’m sure my father wasn’t a liar. A liar would’ve changed his memories. A liar would’ve projected that shiny version of his proposal to Mom, the version he always told, not kept the truth close to his heart, guarded in a little sphere of white. “It was enough.”
We eat even though we’re not hungry yet.
“So you don’t get sick,” Toddy says gently, tousling my hair. “It’s good to keep a little something in your stomach.”
He wanted to take us to the hospital but settled for scheduling doctors’ appointments in the morning. We eat everything they put in front of us: two bowls of bland tomato soup, one half-frozen piece of turtle cheesecake, a peanut butter sandwich apiece, slabs of reheated macaroni casserole. I let them wrap blankets around me. I let Mom comb through the tangles in my hair. Every gesture is an I love you, and I collect them, my way to say, It is so good to be loved by you. I drink every cup of water they bring, and when Mom surreptitiously pours each of us a tiny taste of whiskey, I let its warmth settle in my stomach, thinking fondly of the worst movie of all time.
“How’s Nate?” I ask Hannah, and she laughs in surprise.
“He’s going to be good. He’s going to be really good when he gets my message that you’re both okay.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
She wraps an arm around me and clears her throat. “I knew you’d never leave me, Junie.”
I kiss my forefinger and middle. She kisses hers. “Never. Not in the important ways.” But the sting is still there in my chest, and I pull away, fighting tears. “I think I need to step outside for a se
cond.”
Everyone tenses, Mom and Toddy especially, but they nod and let me go. This time, I won’t pass into a memory. Our families’ Moments are gone, but there’s still something unnerving about passing through this doorway, knowing how it conspired with memory and magic to show me so much. I sit down on the porch and breathe in the pine. I can almost see the outline of Dad standing in the yard. I look up at the stars, and I see him there too.
I feel his stories burbling up in my chest, and I know that tomorrow I’ll begin to write them down for Ms. deGeest, and this time I’ll tell the truth.
The door clicks open, and Saul lowers himself to sit beside me. After a minute I say, “The night we met, I didn’t see you coming either.”
He smiles. “I would try to make out with you right now, but I don’t know if in the last three days your mom and Todd had a chance to teach Shadow and Grayson about the birds and the bees, and I’m too tired to explain it.”
I laugh despite myself. It’s easier than I would’ve guessed. “Tomorrow then.”
“Tomorrow,” he agrees.
“And the next day. And the day after that. In every room and every Five Fingers establishment.”
“A Makeout Tour,” he says. “Maybe we can do a signing.”
“And what about after that?”
His dark eyes are serious despite the trace of smile in the corner of his mouth. “I don’t know, Jack. College? Grad school? Indonesia with Takumi and Sarah? The world is your oyster.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be here with Eli,” he says. “For now, at least. And after now, I’ll still be close, if you still want me.”
“Nowhere the stars can’t reach you?”
“If I have anything to say about it, I’ll be well within celestial-light range.”
“Good,” I say.
“Good.”
We sit for hours, the door opening every once in a while as, one by one, the others join us on the porch until we’re a row of seven. From one end, Toddy passes a box of dried Jack’s Tart. I cradle one between my teeth.
“Look.” Mom points across the yard toward the first streak of yellow. “Morning’s coming.”