“I want to go,” Amos said in a firm voice.
“Give me something to write with.”
“Of course, of course,” Amos stuttered, and Leo heard his chair grate against the wood floor. It banged the wall. Amos walked past the closet door, his shadow dark and cold. Leo stiffened. He wouldn’t mind if his father vanished, but he couldn’t imagine life without Ruby.
His parents’ divorce, his sister’s sickness—these things had been planted in his life, seeds of a terrible sadness, and the sadness had grown until it filled him to bursting. Ruby’s presence was the last good thing. He thought he loved her only because she was his sister, or because she was the little girl who followed him around with great devotion, but really he loved her because she was the thing that kept his belief alive. Her presence in his life was like that of a fairy, and it made him wonder if maybe, just maybe, all of those unbelievable things were somehow true.
He heard his father rummaging through a drawer in his desk down the hall. Then he came back quickly. He left a wake of scents behind him: stale cigarettes and Stetson cologne and sweat. It was a warm summer day, and the heavy stillness sifted in through the walls of the house.
The doctor took the pen and paper from Amos and scribbled a few short notes on it.
“This is her name. This is where you can find her,” she said, pointing at each line on the paper one at a time. “And this is what you need to say, word for word.”
The doctor stared at Amos while he read over the information.
“‘I need to leave,’” Amos read in a firm voice. “‘Can I use the—’”
“Stop!” the doctor shouted, looking around, angry for the first time. “Stop! Don’t say it out loud. Not now. Don’t be so foolish! Go here,” she said, and stabbed at the line on the piece of paper, “and ask for her”—she stabbed the paper again—“and say that. But not before. Not out loud. Not now.”
Amos cleared his throat. The room was silent again, but only for a moment.
“When can I go?”
“You need to go soon. Now. I can’t have someone with this kind of knowledge wandering around the city. It puts not only you at risk. There are others who would suffer if this became common knowledge.”
“But I have to pack. I have to . . .”
“You can’t take anything with you, not Over There. Nothing except the clothes on your back. Everything is there already. I don’t have time to explain it. You don’t have time.”
“Wait a second! You never said—”
“And I wouldn’t show your daughter to Marie, not at first. I don’t know that she has ever allowed a child to go. But if she refuses, tell her I sent you, and explain the child’s condition. That might sway her. She was a mother once. Remember that.”
She said it as if she was trying to reassure herself that it would work.
“She had a daughter.”
Silence. The clock on the mantel chimed six. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.
“Tonight,” the doctor said, standing. She pushed her chair in under the table. “You must go tonight or your situation will become much worse, now that you know this. Having this information is not the key to a long life in New Orleans.”
The two of them stood there for a moment staring at each other, neither one saying a word. Finally, the doctor spoke again.
“Do you have it all memorized?” she asked Amos.
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
The doctor pulled a book of matches from her pocket and struck one of them. It made a sizzling sound that lit up the dark dining room. She set the paper on fire. The smoke rose like a black promise, twisting and dancing. Leo could smell it from where he stood in the closet, the smell of burning things, the smell of endings.
“There is one more thing,” the doctor said. Leo had not thought her words could become more abrupt, more serious, but they did. Each syllable fell like iron.
“You must take this with you.”
She reached under the table and lifted something with two hands, a small plant the size of a volleyball. It looked like some type of orchid. The stem was a bright lime green, almost neon, and there were three blossoms drooping from the main stem, white as the moon. When she placed it on the table, the pot it was in grated heavily against the wood, as if it was made of stone.
Amos was mesmerized. “What is that?” he asked in a whisper so that Leo could barely hear him. “What . . . is . . . that?”
The doctor laughed, and it was a strange sound. Happy, yes, but with other things mixed in, greedy things, things that crawl out from under your bed in the middle of the night.
“This is the key to your daughter’s healing.”
Amos reached out tentatively.
“Wait,” the doctor said.
Amos’s hand stopped, then drifted back to his side.
“I have more instructions. You cannot let anyone know you have this, not here, and not on the other side of the door. No one.”
Amos nodded.
“Take this plant in the bowl to the tallest building you can find, the one in the middle of the city. Light a fire close to it. Here are some matches to take with you. There is plenty of wood in the building.”
Amos nodded again, his face filled with longing.
“Finally, and this is very important, you will need to prick Ruby’s finger and place a drop of her blood at the root of the plant.”
Amos looked disgusted. He shook his head as if almost waking from a dream. “What?”
“Listen to what I’m saying, Amos. This is her healing. The leaves on this plant, when it grows into a tree, will heal her. It will grow quickly once you light the fire and feed the tree. You must plant it in the tall building. You must guard it. The time to eat from it will come later, but in the meantime, the leaves, Amos! The leaves! Do you hear what I’m saying? Do. Not. Eat. The. Fruit. Wait until I send someone. But the leaves will heal Ruby.”
Amos’s shoulders drooped. “I don’t know if I can remember it all.”
For a moment, the doctor drew in a breath and looked ready to erupt with anger or frustration, but then she exhaled quietly. She stood up and walked around the table, her footsteps suddenly silent. She placed her pale, white hands on Amos’s shoulders, and the two of them stood there for a long time. The image made Leo uncomfortable, this strange woman with her hands on his father’s shoulders. The two of them stared at the small plant.
She lifted her hands and, for a brief moment, held tightly to Amos’s head, but her hands dropped quickly, and Leo wondered if he had even seen it happen.
“You will remember everything,” she said quietly.
She walked back to her side of the table, lifted the bowl with the plant, and placed it inside a black bag. She wiped her hands together, as if discarding small parts of something undesirable. She sighed, and everything she had said went up in a kind of drifting haze. Leo blinked, held his eyes together tightly, and opened them again.
What had just happened? He could barely remember.
“Tonight,” the doctor said again. “Be gone tonight. You have no choice now.”
She walked down the hallway in long, forceful steps, opened the front door (the door that no one ever used), and slammed it hard behind her. It made a sound like distant thunder.
5
LEO SAT DOWN INSIDE THE CLOSET, trying not to make a sound. Where could his father possibly go that was unfindable? What kind of person knew of a place like that? He felt his way through the lock picks, touching one, then another, as if the answer was there, hidden among the short wires. All the answers to all the questions.
A shadow moved over the crack in the door and hovered there like a cloud covering the sun. A large hand reached inside and opened the door a few inches.
“Leo.” Amos said his son’s name in one long sigh. There were entire conversations in that one word, explanations and admonitions and sadness. He said it three more times for good measure, as if he didn’t know what else to say. “Leo, Leo, Leo.”
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The air in the house went completely still. Leo felt like the closet had been illuminated by a spotlight. He was caught, and he squinted in the glare.
“How long have you been in there?” Amos asked, but Leo didn’t say a word.
“Too long, I suppose,” Amos continued. It was almost like he was having a conversation with an imaginary friend—he wasn’t waiting for answers. It was a one-sided discussion, and no response was necessary.
Amos looked off in the distance, as if the closet extended for miles. “Of course, you’ll need to stay in here tonight. I’m sorry, Son. Sleeping in a closet won’t be pleasant, but your mother will come first thing in the morning, as she always does. She never could leave well enough alone. I’ll leave the back door unlocked, and she’ll come in, you know how she does, shouting at me already over some such thing, this or that. Not taking off her shoes. Never taking off her shoes, bringing in the dirt.”
For a moment, Leo thought his father might be having second thoughts. His voice had taken on the tone of someone who was waking up after talking in their sleep and realizing that everything they had said before was irrelevant nonsense. But that didn’t last long.
“But I won’t be here, and neither will Ruby,” he said.
“No.” Leo found his voice. “You can’t take her. You can’t. She’s my sister.”
“If I don’t, she’ll die. Is that what you want?”
The two stayed there for what felt like a very long time, staring into each other’s eyes, both of them contemplating the one thing that meant the most in the world to each of them: Ruby. A little five-year-old girl, the center of their universe.
“But if you take her and you never come back, it’s like she’s dead anyway,” Leo whispered. “At least to me.”
“But she won’t be dead, not really, and that’s what matters,” Amos said, and it sounded like he was convincing himself now. “I don’t have a choice. Your mother will come in the morning and she’ll hear you. All you have to do is call out and she’ll open the door, she’ll let you out, and you’ll have each other. But this is Ruby’s only chance. There is no other way.”
Amos pushed the door closed slowly, as if something in him wanted his son to fight back, to push against the weight of his choices. But there was no shoving match, no test of strength, and the golden sliver of light winked out. Leo heard a loud click in the darkness, and he knew that his father had locked the door.
Leo’s father had been kind only to lock the door and not to give him a thrashing. It’s one of the ways Leo knew his father was leaving for real. That unexpected kindness.
For the next hour, he heard his father running around the house, opening drawers and slamming doors and looking, looking, looking. Leo wondered what was taking him so long. He had heard the doctor say he wasn’t allowed to take anything with him. What could his father be doing? He felt the lock picks in his pocket and knew it wouldn’t take him long to get out, but he had to do it after his father left, because if he did it before, his father would put him back in the closet and prop something against the door to keep him from escaping again. Or worse.
So, Leo waited.
The house went quiet, and Leo guessed that his father must be up on the third floor, getting Ruby ready. She was small for her age, and frail, and Leo worried that she wouldn’t survive the trip his father was about to take her on. He willed her to live. He pressed his forehead against the door and muttered a prayer, a serious prayer, one more full of earnest asking than any other prayer he had ever said. The door was cold on his forehead. He wondered if you had to close your eyes when praying in the dark.
Even after he prayed, it remained quiet, as if no one had been listening. Maybe the house heard his prayer. Maybe the house had been listening. Or maybe Someone else heard, Someone beyond the house, beyond the darkness. Beyond everything. Someone Over There.
The words of the doctor echoed in his mind. The Edge of Over There. What could it mean? Where could it be?
Leo heard his father come down the stairs again, his steps slow, and Leo knew he must be carrying Ruby. He waited until the side door closed before working one of the short lengths of wire into the hole. It was an old door with one of those skeleton-key holes, nearly large enough to see through. Leo knew how those locks worked. He could feel it adjusting at the end of the wire, ticking this way, slipping that way. For a moment he was inside the lock, testing edges, sensing the riddle, the question. Finally, a click, an answer, and the door drifted open.
He sprinted down the hall and into the outside world. It was dusk, and the fresh air felt wonderful. Everything out there was alive, especially after his time in the dark closet. Hope lived there, in that time of day before the birds began their evening song.
He knew there was no point in trying to call his mother—she would still be traveling, not getting home until at least the middle of the night and maybe not until morning. Besides, he had no phone number where he could reach her. He glanced back and forth down the street, and among the handful of cars and people he saw his father walking along the sidewalk.
Amos carried little Ruby against his chest, her head on his shoulder. They weren’t close, but Leo thought she was still sleeping. Amos walked fast but not fast enough to garner any undue attention. He even waved slightly at the people they passed. He looked like any father at the end of a long day, carrying his small, exhausted child home for an early bedtime.
In one of his hands he also carried the black bag, and Leo remembered, as if from a dream, that in that bag was the plant, the strange-looking plant with its too-green stem and small leaves and drooping white flowers. The bag was taut. The stone bowl was heavy inside it.
Leo followed. He felt calm now that he was free of the closet, now that he could keep his father in his sights. He would follow them for as long as he had to. He would follow them and follow them and when they finally stopped he would see where they stopped and he would call his mother in the morning and she would come and rescue Ruby and his father would go to prison and it would be only him and his mother and Ruby again. It made him sad to think about his father going to prison; it made him sad to think about not seeing him. But he was afraid of him now, and he would never go into that house again, not while his father and that doctor were on the loose, stealing people and talking about places you could never return from.
They walked until Leo heard the distant sound of cars on the freeway. It made him nervous, that sound of fast movement, that sound of people rushing away. He suddenly had a feeling that his father was carrying everything that mattered to him in the world. Every good thing. It made Leo pick up his feet a little faster. He didn’t care anymore if his father saw him. He had to stop him from going any further. He looked around for a weapon, and he wondered if he had the capability of attacking his father if it meant saving Ruby. He didn’t think so. He wasn’t sure.
Leo grew closer. One hundred yards, fifty yards. The streets grew broader and more spaced out. The light faded in the west and streetlights began winking on. Mosquitoes rose up out of the damp ground, and the shadows of the trees lining the streets melded together into one unending blackness. The lights of New Orleans burned like stars, hiding among the treetops.
Leo followed his father along a tall, faded wall, a mixture of brick and concrete. He knew where they were—he had ridden his bike by there a few times. It was a quiet part of town, one deep with superstition and mystery. A few of Leo’s classmates lived close by, and he knew what was on the other side of the tall wall. That knowledge made him shiver.
His father turned abruptly to the right, vanishing. Leo sprinted up to where he had turned and stared through a barely opened gate. There it was, stretching out in front of him.
Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1.
6
LEO HELD THE GATE as he walked through, making sure it didn’t close behind him, because any ten-year-old boy knows the last thing you want when entering a cemetery is for the gate to close behind you. It’s terrib
ly bad luck, and who wants to spend the night sleeping on the ground when there are bodies hidden all around you? Who knows what time the groundskeeper might arrive in the morning?
Besides, it would be scary enough if you got locked into a normal graveyard, and this was no normal graveyard.
This was Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1.
Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 was an aboveground cemetery—all the graves, instead of being below the earth, were crypts built like miniature houses. Some were plain, rectangular boxes while others had peaked roofs and elaborate doors. Some were behind tall iron gates while others were right there where you could touch them, lined up one after another, so close you could barely walk between them. Most were white, but some were crumbling brick or smooth stucco painted a bright color, like peach or pink or lime green. The rows between the crypts were long and straight.
Leo had lost sight of his father, so he headed into the cemetery, staying close to the wall, ducking behind the larger crypts, hiding in their shadows. Night had arrived. There were no lights in the cemetery, but light from the street and neighboring houses crept in over the tall wall, casting angular shadows in different directions.
Leo realized that even though he normally felt like he was losing his belief, at night his belief was still very much intact. The shadows seemed to be living things, and while he was scared, he was also excited because his belief was right there where he could see it. Perhaps this was why so many people like to watch scary movies—it reminds them of what it feels like to believe in something they cannot see.
The moon was up, high over the city. He held the lock picks tight in his pocket so they wouldn’t bump against each other while he walked. There was a dim flickering of light up ahead, close to an intersection of two of the main walkways. He leaned in against a tall crypt. It was the color of moonlight and massive, probably ten feet long. Small tufts of grass grew out of the cracks on its roof. He peered around the front. People had left small glass vases of flowers, and notes. There was rotting fruit there. The crypt was covered in handwriting.
The Edge of Over There Page 4