The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  The name shoots through me like the memory of an intense pain. Koli Naal. I have never spoken that name to anyone.

  He pauses, staring hard at me to see if I understand what he’s saying. “You’ve heard that name before,” he says, and it sounds like he feels sorry for me.

  I nod.

  “She wanted every last thing,” he repeats. “Those who came before her, the Mr. Jinns of the world, wanted only all of this.” He raises his arms and they take in the walls of the house, the ends of the earth. “They wanted all of you—all of humanity and all of this earth. But Koli Naal wanted even more than that. She wanted everything.”

  When it’s obvious I’m not catching on, he says something in a whisper, something I can barely hear. He whispers it as if it’s blasphemy.

  “She wanted Over There too.”

  “Over There?” I ask.

  We stare at each other there in my little farmhouse, frost on the windows, the snow sliding along the hard ground. We stare at each other over mugs of coffee that are slowly cooling. We stare at each other over eternities and galaxies, cities and friendships, swords and shadows.

  He shrugs as if it will all make perfect sense to me at some point. “There was no one else who could go inside and do what needed to be done. Only Abra. Those were dark times.”

  “They must have been,” I say in an even voice, “if you had to turn to a young girl to rescue you.”

  When he speaks again, there is something tender there, something that begs me for understanding. Or forgiveness. I wonder if he can be trusted after all. Perhaps.

  “She was the only one who could go,” he insists. “I would have gone. I hope you understand that. But it had to be her.”

  I wait, and the steam from our mugs rises between us like spirits.

  “The story starts four years before the Tree appeared here in Deen. Four years before the two of you killed Jinn and the Amarok and Mr. Tennin fell. Four years before your mother died.”

  “I didn’t actually kill Jinn, you know,” I say in a quiet voice. “Abra took care of that.”

  It feels like a cowardly thing to say, as if I’m trying to pawn all the dirt of that summer onto Abra, trying to save my own skin in case this man has come for revenge. But I have a feeling that he knows far more about those events than I do, even though I was there and he was not.

  He keeps talking as if he didn’t hear me. I stare past him out the window. The snow is really coming down now. It looks like a blizzard is on the way.

  “This is the story I gathered—what people told me, what I found. Some things I have had to guess at.”

  He pauses, nodding his head as if satisfied with the work that went into the story he is about to tell. He leans back in his chair.

  “As best as I can tell, this is what happened the day Ruby vanished from the world.”

  3

  ON THE VERY SAME DAY his sister disappeared, and only a few hours before he walked alone through the streets of New Orleans all the way to Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1, Leo Jardine hid in the closet, trying to breathe slow and quiet. He calmed himself by counting the long, straight wires in his pocket, a lock-picking set that was a gift from a great-uncle he could barely remember. He traced the wires with his finger, some jagged, some straight, and he knew them all by touch.

  This one straight as an arrow for locks that could be popped open.

  This one with teeth for reaching and twisting.

  This one with a hook on the end, like the answer to a question.

  His father and the doctor were upstairs in his sister’s room. The doctor—her last name started with an N, but he had never heard it clearly or seen it written down—reminded him of the slender, straight pick in his lock-picking set. She was firm and direct, no-nonsense. She came and went quickly, and always walked the shortest distance from here to there. She did not look to one side or the other.

  Leo leaned against the wall in the closet down the hall from the dining room, where the two always sat after his sister’s checkups, and he waited for them to come down.

  Leo’s father Amos owned a house with many doors. There was the weighty front door that opened out onto a wide front porch shaded by ancient, leaning sycamore trees, their bark shedding in strips like sunburned skin. That same front door was flanked by two windows, each clouded by thick, heavy drapes, solemn as guardian angels. When the drapes were drawn, not a speck of light could get in.

  Then there was the side door, the door everyone used, the one clinging to its hinges. It moved without a sound. It was a friendly door, one that even strangers felt comfortable knocking on or pushing open a few inches before calling inside.

  There was the back door, the one that led from the kitchen into a yard thick with overgrown azaleas planted in straight lines. Rising around them were tall cedar trees that fought their way among each other, higher, reaching for the sun. Their lower branches were dead and snapped off—only the highest branches still flaunted green needles, so far from the ground, too afraid to let go.

  Inside the house there were even more doors, some of which Leo had never been through. His father’s office door, for example—he was absolutely, positively, never-in-a-million years to go through that door. He could only imagine the consequences. He heard strange things on the other side, muffled conversations and sliding filing cabinet drawers that clicked closed. There was the latching of padlocks and the soft spinning of a safe’s dial. Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

  There was the attic door, the one that led up up up into darkness and dust. His father had never made any rules about that door, but he didn’t have to. Leo was terrified of that uppermost level, scared of what might be there.

  Perhaps the most peculiar door was the small trapdoor in the floor of the guest room closet, a door he had never had reason to lift. He noticed the small round handle the first time he explored the house, and he had pushed at the loose boards of the flat door, but it seemed harmless enough, and rather plain and boring. Curiosity about what was under it came at strange times, like the middle of the night, or when he was staying at his mother’s house. But when he was in his father’s house, when it would have made sense to open it, the thought never occurred to him.

  There were also bedroom doors and pantry doors, heavy sliding doors and soundless French doors. Most importantly, there was a closet door in the hallway just inside the front door. It was a deep closet that ran the length of the stairwell, the kind where the ceiling got lower and lower the further in you went, all the way down to nothing.

  The air where he hid smelled old and musty, and the wood floor was smooth and hesitant beneath him, ready to give him away. He stood up straight and leaned against the wall again. He left the closet door barely open because he was ten years old and still a little bit scared of the dark, a little bit worried about what crept around in the deep spaces he could not see. He had this fear that if he closed the door, he wouldn’t be able to open it again.

  Recently he had begun to doubt the stories he always believed to be true—stories about knights and dragons, angels and demons, secret worlds and invisible people. Even at ten years old, he knew belief was slipping away from him. He could feel it going, like honey through a crack in the jar. But in that closet, he could believe those things might be true. Was it the darkness? The stillness? The feeling that there were live things all around him, things he could not see?

  He peeked through the door, and a slanted line of golden light ran diagonally down his face and over his eye.

  His father’s house was a tired one, and it leaned and creaked when you walked through it. It was the kind of house that would talk to you if you were the only one there, the kind of house that sighed when it thought about all the people it had known. Many things had taken place in that house, nearly unimaginable things, some so small that they’d make no difference to you—nothing more than a sigh that marked the change of a friendship or a glance that sparked the flames of love. That house was like a kind old man: a li
ttle crazy, a little angry, but mostly quiet and reflective. And waiting. Always waiting.

  Leo felt his father and the doctor approach before he heard them, their footsteps shifting down the long flight of stairs from the third floor to the second floor to the main level. His father’s steps were loose and uneven. He walked without any semblance of a rhythm. He was the opposite of clinical, the definition of superstitious. When he walked anywhere, he hurried, his limbs flailing.

  Behind his father’s footsteps came the unremarkable steps of the doctor. Firm. Calculated. Their beat was so constant that a conductor could have directed an entire symphony under their guidance. She seemed to pause as she walked past the closet where Leo was hiding, a rest in the stanza. Leo froze in place. He thought he heard the doctor sniffing as if catching his scent, but immediately after that he thought, What a silly thing to think. People don’t sniff for things the same way animals do.

  Did they?

  The two moved past the closet, along the short hall, and sat down at the dining room table. Leo held his breath so he could hear them.

  “I’m sorry, Amos,” the doctor said, and her voice soaked into the walls of the house, ran quietly along the high oak baseboards. It seemed muffled and distant.

  “What do you mean, you’re sorry?” Leo’s father asked, his voice sounding weary. Scratchy. Leo couldn’t see him, but he could tell by the sound that his father held his hand over his own mouth while he spoke, as if trying to hold in the questions that would lead to the diagnosis he didn’t want to hear.

  The doctor sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said again, “because your daughter is not getting better. She is, in fact, declining. Fading. There is very little that I can do.”

  She said the last sentence quickly, as if trying to rid her mouth of the words. The sound of them soaked into the walls. Leo wondered where those words went. He wondered if you could find them again. He wondered if you scratched deep enough into the plaster, would you find all the words the walls had ever heard? He suddenly thought of the trapdoor in the bottom of the guest room closet. He imagined opening it, pulling all of its weight up by the small round ring, and being overcome by a wave of trapped words, emerging in an overwhelming stream like a burst of bats from a cave.

  “Fine. I’ll take her somewhere else. Someone else can help her. Not everyone is as incompetent as you.”

  “There is very little that anyone else could do,” the doctor said. She didn’t sound angry at Amos’s slight. Her words came out like her footsteps, measured and matter-of-fact. She was not threatened by his anger or grief. Her response waved off both of them like pesky flies.

  Silence settled in the house again, more imposing than a shout. Leo tried very hard not to make a sound. His father was touchy these days, as Ruby’s health declined. She was only five years old, but her breathing sounded like the wheezing of an old woman. Her skin was pale, nearly transparent, and she slept all the time. She threw up whatever she ate.

  “If you’d like,” the doctor said, “I could meet with you and your wife together, review the girl’s condition, explain our options?”

  Leo’s father laughed. “No, no, that won’t do,” he said, then paused as if trying to decide how much to say. “Her mother is away. She left last week. It’s all happened very quickly. It wouldn’t do to worry her.”

  Leo pictured his mother waiting to board a plane somewhere in some other city. He pictured her in her professional clothes, carrying her professional bag. She, too, walked straight, had goals, knew the most direct path to achieve them. But he could also imagine her chewing her fingernails, wondering if her children were okay, finding a clock and staring at it as the second hand went around and around. He had seen her do that before. He had wondered what was in her mind as she watched the moments pass.

  Leo knew his mother loved him fiercely. He could not have told you how he knew this, but he knew it. On the other hand, his father’s love for him had somehow faded, and he knew this too, in some intangible way. When Ruby became sick, her illness had become his father’s obsession, so that nothing could exist alongside it. When his father sat with his sister, Leo could say anything he wanted but his father would only nod and blink, his gaze never leaving Ruby. Sometimes, when Leo came in the house, he would find his father staring at a crack in the wall or a doorknob or a streak of light between shadows. Leo’s existence had faded from his father’s awareness. There was only Ruby and her sickness, and like a spot that burns into your vision if you stare at the sun too long, Amos couldn’t see past it.

  “Amos,” the doctor said again, as if saying the name would change things, be a key in a lock that opened the door to a better time. Her voice had gone quieter, calmer. “Amos. What are you going to do?”

  It seemed a strange question. Leo heard the inexplicable sound of his father weeping. He nearly walked out of the closet in order to see it. Unbelievable. He had thought his father incapable of tears. When he leaned forward to try to see what was going on, the floorboards creaked beneath his feet. He held his breath and stopped blinking, as if even the movement of his eyelids would give him away. The two stopped talking, and for a moment Leo was sure he had been found out.

  “Is it a curse?” Leo heard his father mumble. “Is it something I’ve done? Did I bring this on the girl?”

  “I don’t think—” the doctor began, but Leo’s father interrupted.

  “Is it this house? Is this house under some kind of an ancient spell? If I burn it down, will she recover?” His voice became louder and more urgent with each far-fetched grasp at a cure. “You know this city, Doctor. You know what people are capable of here. There is a darkness.”

  The doctor didn’t reply.

  “What if we ran? Took off. Could we leave all of this behind us?” Amos asked.

  And when he said “all of this,” Leo knew he meant everything: the sickness, the city, Leo’s mother.

  Leo.

  His father would leave everything, including him.

  Leo peered through the crack in the door again, and he could barely see the doctor, her pale white skin, the way her hands were folded on the table, fingers laced together, one finger tapping, tapping, tapping. The dining room had a low chandelier, and it shone like a spotlight on him.

  “If you want to leave—I mean really leave,” the doctor said, “I might know someone who could help you do that.”

  Amos laughed again, and the sound scared Leo. He reached into his pocket and again felt the ten pieces of wire, roughly the length of his little finger, each attached to a key ring. Each wire was a different thickness, each bent in different ways. The lock-picking set could get him to the other side of almost any door. Feeling the cold metal, the pointed ends, the familiar bending here and there—all of it comforted him.

  “My wife would find us, Doctor. No matter where we went. No matter how far. Trust me—you don’t know her like I do. I could never rest because she would find us, and then what? I’d end up in prison for kidnapping, or worse.”

  “I can assure you that she would never find you. And there is hope in this other place, hope for your daughter.”

  Amos went from laughing to sounding angry.

  “What do you mean? Hope? What’s that? I thought you said there was nothing you could do. I thought you said there was no hope.”

  “I didn’t tell you because this place,” the doctor said slowly, “is at the Edge of Over There. If you go, you can’t come back. Not ever.”

  4

  “WHERE IS IT?” Amos asked, his voice suddenly hungry. “How far?”

  The doctor leaned in closer. She sounded like a temptress, as if this was what she had wanted all along.

  “The distance isn’t important. You have to stop thinking about things the way you have before. Everything there is different. The distance, that means nothing. There is no place like it. What’s important is that you realize your daughter can find healing there. But if you go, you can never come back.”

  “What do you mea
n? Is it outside the country? I don’t have a passport.”

  The doctor lifted her hands and rubbed her temples, then repeated herself. “It’s Over There, Amos. You will, both you and your daughter, be gone. Forever. There is no coming back. Imagine a door that locks behind you, and there is no key to open it again.”

  “What do I need to do?” Amos asked without hesitating. “I would do anything to keep her alive, to get her away from here. Did you know her mother has threatened to take both children away from me? A custody battle over a dying little girl—that’s all my future holds right now.”

  His voice caught. He choked out the next sentence.

  “I need to get out of here.”

  “Why did she leave them with you now?”

  Amos spat. “Bah! She had no choice. It was all very last minute, very important. She was desperate to find someone to watch them. But this will be the last time they stay with me. You don’t know her. I’m telling you. You don’t.”

  The doctor sighed and stood up. She walked to each of the three dining room windows and pulled the heavy blinds closed. Her skin went from pale to gray in the shadows. She paced back and forth a few times in the fresh darkness before sitting back down and leaning toward Amos.

  “There’s a woman,” she began.

  “Yes?” Amos urged her.

  “There’s a woman,” she said again. “Her name is Marie Laveau.”

  The doctor waited a moment, as if to see if the name meant anything to Amos. It clearly did not, so she went on.

  “She has a key.”

  She stopped, as if reconsidering.

  “If I tell you this, there is no going back. You cannot change your mind. Once you know, either you leave or everything will be much, much worse for you.”