The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  “Abra!” a familiar voice called.

  It was her father. He gently lifted her up off the ground and carried her to her bed, wheeling her IV rack alongside. He laid her down softly, plumped her pillows, and pulled the covers up over her.

  “Where have you been?” he asked, worry in his voice. “You’re in no state to be wandering around.”

  She looked up at him through tired eyes. “Dad,” she whispered, “where did you go? Did you see the doctor, the woman?” But she didn’t have the strength to say or do anything else. Immediately she passed into a deep sleep where she dreamed again of hanging from a tree and seeing Mr. Tennin lean in to say something, something crucial, only to have the end of the dream interrupt him.

  The next day, when she woke up, her breakfast tray was there. Her father was sleeping beside her bed in a plush chair with hard wooden armrests. She sat up, already feeling much better, though her injuries ached. She reached for the small plastic cup of orange juice. That’s when she saw the handwritten note.

  Get better. I’ll see you soon.

  It was signed only with two curling letters of the alphabet.

  KN

  1

  Samuel

  A MAN FOLLOWS ME down the sidewalk. He is bald and his eyes are circled with wrinkles, and the wrinkles are like ripples moving outward from the place where two stones fell into dark water. His cheeks are dragged down by time and heavy memories. Skin dangles under his chin. But among the wrinkles are tattoos of small, five-pointed stars that scatter up in a mist toward his temples. His stretched, see-through earlobes gape with large gauges. Piercings dot his eyebrows and lips. More piercings than I’ve seen before, more than I thought possible on one face.

  It’s not his wrinkles or the tattoos or the piercings that make me the most nervous. It’s his eyes, eyes that have the look of the ocean my mother crossed in my dreams. They have a never-ending feel to them that’s hard to describe, something I would not have recognized had I not crossed paths with Mr. Tennin and Mr. Jinn so long ago. This man following me is one of them. I can tell you that much. I can tell by his eyes.

  Can you kill someone like Mr. Jinn and go unpunished?

  Probably not.

  I’ve spent the last few months looking through Abra’s journal, thinking back over the day the angels fell, and I have to wonder if we have truly gotten away with it. Did Abra and I eliminate Mr. Jinn without any consequences? I seem to remember being scared when I was a kid, frightened that we would pay for what we had done. But as the years went by, the feeling faded. I stopped being afraid. I started to wonder if it had all actually happened, or if the memory I had of two angels fighting over a Tree was only part of a dream, or a dream within a dream. Children are so good at pretending. Maybe Abra and I had made it all up.

  But things changed. Abra is gone, dead, leaving me her journal and the sword. Why did she leave it to me, when I still can’t even hold it? Did she want me to hide it? Use it? More than anyone on the planet, I’m aware of its significance, but what am I supposed to do with it? Having it in the house feels like hiding a state secret.

  All of this is flying through my mind at lightning speed because this bald man with the star tattoos is following me through Deen, toward Mr. Pelle’s Antiques.

  Back to where it all started.

  I glance down the alley that is still there between Pelle’s and the pizza place. I stare at the baseball field off in the distance. It’s not used for baseball anymore. Baseball has been abandoned, at least here in Deen, and the field drowns in brown weeds and overgrown, leafless trees. Saplings are entwined in the chain-link fence that used to be a backstop. When a strong wind blows, the winter branches clatter and scrape against the metal.

  I’m not sure which is worse: land that’s been swallowed up by “progress,” or land that’s been forgotten. We want things to stay the same, but the roads between “now” and “back then” are always changing, and by the time you manage to return home, if you can ever find your winding way, you realize it was never actually yours, not forever. These homes of ours, these fields, the things that make up the landscape of our childhood, they are only ever ours for such a short time, and they owe us nothing.

  I look down the sidewalk. The man is still there, pacing, stopping, looking up at me occasionally. The piercings around his eyes glitter in the cold light. I take a deep breath, and when he turns away for a moment, I limp and sort of stumble into the narrow alley. My cane catches on the gravel and slips on the frozen dirt. I panic. I move quickly, or as quickly as I can. I look over my shoulder, expecting him to be right there, running toward me. I get to the side door of Pelle’s Antiques, the same one I ran through so many years ago while trying to get out of the rain.

  Trying to escape the lightning.

  I’m sure it’s locked, but I pull on the handle anyway.

  It opens.

  I’ve only just said that nothing stays the same, but when I walk through the doorway into the warehouse area of Pelle’s Antiques, I realize I’m wrong. This place has not changed, not one bit. It even smells the same. There are old mirrors and dressers and bed frames without mattresses. There are lamps without bulbs and wardrobes begging to be hid in. And through it all, through the furniture and the shadows and the shapes, there is a narrow path, the same narrow path. I’m sure there are doors to all kinds of places right there in the warehouse area of Pelle’s Antiques. I’m sure you could find a door to anywhere in the universe, if you knew which hutch to look behind, which empty window to open and crawl through.

  I go down that path between all things, through the shadows and gaping holes and dust. I feel like I’m walking on a tightrope between worlds and that the slightest misstep could send me plummeting into somewhere else.

  “Mr. Chambers,” a voice says quietly, and even though my eyes are still adjusting to the dark, I know it’s the man. The man with the stars around his eyes and the invisible mission on his shoulders. The shadows seem to creep away from us, back into the corners of the room, and I’m left staring at his unique face. I become lost in it, the way a child becomes lost staring up into the night sky.

  “Samuel Chambers,” he says, and I nod, even though he’s not asking a question. He knows who I am. That much I can tell.

  “Can we talk?” he asks.

  I don’t know what else to say, so I nod again, waiting for fire to fall from above and eliminate me as retribution for the long-ago death of Mr. Jinn. I wait for him to snuff me out. But he does not. Instead, he sighs, moves to put his hand on my shoulder, and then seems to think better of it.

  “Good,” he says. “I didn’t want to scare you off.”

  He moves toward the door that leads outside, the door I just came through. I walk slowly behind him, and as we get out onto the sidewalk, I lean more heavily on my cane than I have for some time.

  “Where can we go?” he asks.

  I look up and down the street. There is no good place to talk privately in this town, no quiet spot, and if I take him to the diner or the coffee shop or the pizza parlor, if I go into those places with this man who looks the way he looks, the entire town will be wagging their collective tongues about it. Jerry, the man who takes care of my farm, will come looking for me, wondering if everything is okay. He’ll ask if I need money—that’s the first thing he asks when something out of the ordinary happens, as if money is the answer to every unasked question, every strange occurrence.

  “I live ten minutes away,” I say in a tired voice. “We could go there.”

  “Yes, but I’ll need a ride, if that’s okay. I don’t have a car.”

  “Of course you don’t,” I say. “How’d you get here?”

  He looks at me and raises his pierced eyebrows, smiling.

  “Of course you did,” I mutter. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

  “Call me Mr. Henry,” he says.

  “When people tell me to call them something,” I say in a low voice, clearing my throat, “it makes me wonder
if it’s their real name.”

  He smiles again. The collection of wrinkles and tattoos and piercings makes it difficult for me to tell if it’s a friendly smile or a leering one. The air feels suddenly icy, the way it feels before the snow falls.

  We walk back to my cold car and get in. We drive north, leaving Deen behind us. I can see the car’s exhaust clouding up, and everything is silent under the gray sky.

  There is beauty in a barren winter day, the way the sky drifts lower and the cut cornstalks stand in their dry rows like beard stubble on a very old, very kind face. The mountains, covered in their leafless trees, are somewhere between brown, gray, and deep violet, or maybe all of those at once, and there are streaks of ice lining the shadowy places like diamond veins.

  The wind kicks up and batters the car. There is the smell of new snow in the air.

  2

  I PARK IN THE FARMHOUSE LANE and sit there without moving. Thirty seconds pass. A minute.

  “Are you okay?” Mr. Henry asks. We didn’t say a word during the entire drive. I had the feeling that he was waiting for me to ask him questions, but I wasn’t in the mood. Besides, he’s the one who wanted to talk. He can start whenever he’s good and ready.

  “I’m fine,” I say, suddenly regretting my decision to bring him here to my home. I wonder if it would offend him if I turn the car back on, drive into town, and ask him to get out.

  “Are we going to go in?” he asks.

  “Wait.”

  The last thing I need is Jerry seeing me go into the house with this character. I look around for him or his son, but it’s the time of day when they are usually back at their own farm. They spend less time here in the winter. The fruit trees are old, cold twigs—it’s impossible to believe fruit will grow from them again in the spring, when life returns to everything. The garden is only the remains of dead plants, the husks of things not harvested. Can those of us facing the winter of our lives somehow gather the courage to believe spring will come again?

  “Okay,” I say with a sigh. “Let’s go.”

  We get out, and the sound of the two car doors slamming in quick succession sends pigeons flying out from under the eaves of the barn. They dart and swoop for the woods across the street, up into the cold gray forest of the eastern mountains. The slamming doors sound foreign under the blanket of winter. I shuffle through the brittle grass, in the direction of the house, and he moves to steady me by holding my elbow but pulls away when I glare at him.

  We get inside where it’s warm, and I go into the kitchen to make coffee because I have a feeling this is going to be a long conversation.

  “What do you want?” I ask him, breaking the silence.

  He sits down in a chair in the dining room. He is a large man. It seems unusual to me that a man who looks so old could still be so solid. When he talks I notice a distant clicking and realize it comes from a piercing in his tongue, a metal stud, tapping like Morse code against his teeth.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Abra.”

  “No, I mean what do you want in your coffee? Sugar? Cream?”

  “Oh yes. I’m sorry. I drink it black.” He pauses. “But that is why I’m here. I need to talk to you about Abra.”

  I feel a growing sense of alarm. I’m suddenly on high alert. I know why this man is here. I know what he has come for.

  The sword.

  “Abra? What about her?” I ask, avoiding his eyes, trying to sound light, trying to sound innocent. “I didn’t speak with Abra for many years, you know. Many years. We grew apart.”

  I pour two cups of coffee, my nerves on edge. The glass spout of the coffeepot chatters against each of our porcelain mugs like the teeth of a cold man. Steam rises, swirling, and the smell calms my nerves.

  “Yours is here on the counter,” I say as I make my way to the table, holding my own scalding mug.

  I had forgotten the very particular feeling that comes when sitting across the table from someone like him, someone who is what he is, but when he returns to the table and settles in, it comes rushing back: the sense that you are not sitting across from a person as much as you are sitting across from an era, an epoch. Looking at this man was like looking at the Grand Canyon and seeing all those lines in the rock, all those different ages of the earth.

  “Did you know anything about what she did after the summer your mother died?” he asks.

  “How do you know about my mother?” I ask.

  “Everyone knows about your mother,” he says with a hint of impatience. I clench my jaw at this strange reference to my mother. I wonder who he means by “everyone.” I want to ask him about my mother, but I don’t. I don’t know why. Maybe he’s good at steering a conversation, or maybe I want to say as little as possible. Or maybe I’m afraid that I’ll find out something about her, something strange, something disappointing.

  “Your mother,” he says before shaking his head, changing course. “What do you know about what Abra did after your mother’s passing?”

  “She was my best friend. I gave her some things. Our friendship died. No, it didn’t die—it wasn’t that dramatic. We grew apart.”

  “You could have helped her, you know,” he says, sipping his coffee, glancing at me over the rim of his cup.

  I shake my head and look down. “No,” I murmur into my own coffee. “I was never strong enough.”

  “Come now. That’s not true?” he says, his voice turning the words into a question.

  I look at him. “Apparently you know the story. I don’t have to tell you about it.”

  “Our weaknesses are poised to become our greatest strengths. If we are patient and if we believe. The switch will often happen when we most need it to. Weakness”—he pauses, tilting his head from one side to the other—“to strength.”

  “I don’t think that switch ever happened in me.”

  “Maybe you haven’t needed it yet,” he says. “What did you give her?”

  “That summer? I gave her the box. With everything.”

  He nods. He knows about the box. Of course he does. Mr. Tennin had it—they probably all wanted it after what happened at the Tree.

  “Recently. Did you give her anything recently? Or did she give you anything?”

  I stare into the black depths of my drink, and it feels like I’m still staring into this man’s eyes. His eyes are everywhere.

  I picture the box I put into her coffin. The atlas. The notes. I put those items in there because I thought everything was over. I thought Abra’s death meant the end of all this. But then her husband gave me the sword and the journal. Why?

  “I can’t help you. I don’t know you.”

  I say these things in a voice that I hope will communicate that it’s time for him to leave. I am too old for this. I have nothing to do with whatever real or imagined saga is going on around me, behind the curtain.

  That phrase sticks in my mind: behind the curtain. That’s how Abra and I used to talk about the strange things that happened, as if normal life was on one side of a veil, and the other things—the Tree, Mr. Tennin, Mr. Jinn, the Amarok—were behind it. If we looked hard enough in those days, we could see the rustling. But not now. I have not seen it for many, many years.

  “I appreciate your . . . discretion. But there is something Abra had that we need.” He waits, then speaks again in a careful, insinuating tone. “I think you might have it. Here.”

  My heart pounds. I have no way of knowing which side this man is on. I have no way of knowing if he is a Mr. Tennin or a Mr. Jinn. I look in his eyes, desperately searching for something. Kindness, maybe.

  “There’s nothing here for you,” I say, nerves stealing my breath.

  He nods. His dangling earlobes sway. He reaches up and strokes his eyebrow with its seven small piercings all in a line. The space between them is the space between stars, which means that he and I, across the table from each other, must be light-years apart. How long do his words take to reach me? How many worlds have fallen in the time it takes
me to refill his coffee?

  “Do you have time for a story, Mr. Chambers?” he asks.

  “I have as much time as I have,” I say, shrugging. “Look at me. I have no friends. I have no family. I have very little money. Time is all I have.”

  He smiles a sad smile. “You have less time than you think. This is a long story.”

  I take a drink of coffee.

  “It’s about Abra,” he says.

  I nod, and the sadness rises again, this time without the apprehension.

  “Let me put it this way,” he says. “It’s primarily about Abra, but there are others involved. It took me time to gather all these stories together. Decades. There were large gaps. Recently I had to reopen doors that were meant never to be opened again. I spoke with people who were there when these events took place, and with others like me. I sat in the shadows for years, looking for answers, always looking. Always seeing, rarely comprehending. I went very close to the Edge.”

  His voice fades. The wind kicks against the door. The windows rattle. Sleet falls for a minute or two, tapping against the glass, but it turns to snow, a swirling cloud of thick, hypnotic flakes.

  “Do you know about her trip to New Orleans?” he asks.

  “Only the basics,” I say. “She mentioned it in her journal, but it was only a few paragraphs. Something terrible happened there, something she didn’t want to write about. She was different after that. Her journal went from descriptive and flowery to matter-of-fact.”

  Mr. Henry sighs and nods. “How about Egypt?” he asks. “Jerusalem? Paris? Rio? The South Pole? Sydney?”

  I am stunned but try not to let it show. I had no idea.

  “Those are only the major journeys she took. There were smaller trips. Side trips, you might say. New Orleans was . . . unexpected. For all of us. And we only knew about the Tree growing there after Tennin fell. By then Abra held the sword. The shadows were rising everywhere. People like me were turning. No one could be trusted. Two Trees at once! Who could have ever imagined? Jinn’s replacement was . . . ruthless. Her name was Koli Naal. She wanted it all,” he says, shaking his head. “She wanted every last thing. Not only the Tree. Not only everything and everyone here.”