The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  It is possible, when we have nothing else, for stories to be the food that sustains us.

  There were other doors in the house too.

  There was the back door, with a screen that hung on its hinges like a loose tooth and left a scratched arc in the cement slab from being opened again and again. Sometimes the back screen door swung loose on windy nights and slapped the side of the house, as if someone was knocking and knocking but no one would let them in. She was not allowed to go through the back door on her own—the heavy door inside the flapping screen—and it was always locked.

  Beyond that door was a small yard surrounded by a tall wooden fence, and beyond the fence was an alley, coarse and gray, and beyond the alley a large hole in the ground where they had torn down a part of the tall building, torn it out by its roots, but that must have been a long time ago, because now they were building the rest of it up, higher and higher, floor after floor.

  The hole beside the building was huge and deep, the size of a football field, and it was surrounded by a chain-link fence. Every ten feet along the fence were red signs:

  NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT. DANGER.

  There was a plain red wooden door that led into the foundation of the tall building. The door looked very old and very important, and no building that had a red door like that could be a building full of nothing. She became obsessed by the door, and she spent as much time as she could beside her bedroom window, staring at the building, staring at the door, keeping close watch on the alley, waiting for something to happen.

  So, after her father left her room that night, after he told her that he was going to take her to the building very soon, she knew, she just knew, that it was something fabulously important, something life changing, something better than anything else she had ever seen. She fell asleep and dreamed of a tree, and dust, and a woman who held open her mouth and tried to make her eat the dust, so that she woke up gasping for breath, her mouth parched and dry.

  She walked to her bedroom door and tried the knob, but it was still locked. She was so thirsty. She considered shouting for her dad, but he didn’t like getting up in the middle of the night, so she sat down with her back to the door and fell asleep. This time she dreamed of the river and of a key longer than she was tall, a key that would open every door, if only she could lift it.

  28

  ON THE DAY RUBY would cross paths with her brother hiding in the abandoned house beside their own, she stared at the clock on the wall in her classroom. She got ready to leave. It was the last day of school before break, and she put all five of her books in her knapsack and tapped her foot in time to the second hand until the minute hand slid around to the twelve. Her teacher looked up at her, cleared her throat, and gave a slight nod. Ruby lifted the knapsack over her shoulder. It was tan, hung all the way down to her knees, and had been her mother’s bag when Ruby was a baby, before she had died in the War. That’s what her father had told her.

  The school was large and vacant, and there were no other children there except Ruby.

  She was the only student.

  Her teacher nodded again, stood up, and walked with Ruby out of the room. Ms. Levithine had soft brown hair, pink-tinted skin, and green eyes that turned a hazel kind of brown when the red light from the sky shone through the dusty windows. Ruby’s father walked her to school in the morning, and then Ms. Levithine walked her home.

  The hallways in the school were long and empty. There were many rooms, each with its own windows and chalkboards, each with its own desks and projectors. Books lined the shelves, new and unused. There were clocks in every room, perfectly synchronized, tick-tocking their way through each and every day.

  Most children are thrilled after the last day of school, excited at the prospect of summer, already dreading their return the following fall. Not Ruby. She loved school, even if she was the only child there. She loved having somewhere to go every day, some excuse to get out of the quiet house. Thinking about an entire summer ahead of her, stuck in the house with her always-working father writing, writing, writing and planning, planning, planning and eventually locking her in her room at the end of every day, filled her with a sense of dread and sadness so heavy that it nearly overwhelmed her. The last place she wanted to walk to on that last day of school was her house.

  “It’s not safe out there. The Frenzies,” her father had said to her, his voice trailing off. And when he said those words she knew he loved her, because there was genuine fear in his eyes. “It’s not safe for little girls. It’s not safe for you, Ruby.”

  Ruby walked the long halls and passed through the front door to the school. She meandered along the sidewalk, Ms. Levithine walking quietly behind her. They wandered along the city streets, and sometimes Ruby stopped and tapped her feet on the cement sidewalks as if testing the ice on a newly frozen pond, seeing if she was going to break through. Ms. Levithine would stop and wait for her to continue, never saying a word. They got as far as Mr. Hoyt’s produce stand. There were no customers there, only Mr. Hoyt standing at the back, glaring at Ruby through his deep-set eyes.

  Not everyone in the city was excited about Ruby’s father’s plans for change.

  Someone spoke, and Ruby looked around for a few moments before she realized who it was.

  “I have to go,” Ms. Levithine said, and her voice cracked from disuse. Ruby stared at her. Ms. Levithine had never spoken to her outside the classroom before. Not a word. After her first few years of school, Ruby had assumed Ms. Levithine didn’t like her or wasn’t allowed to talk to her when she wasn’t teaching. She had assumed that all children, if there were more somewhere, went to school on their own and each had their very own teacher. Ruby nodded, unblinking, now wondering why she had never thought of her teacher as a real person. Ms. Levithine turned and walked back the way they had come.

  Ruby watched her, the crumbling city rising on either side of her. Ms. Levithine walked comfortably, and Ruby knew, because her father had told her, that if you kept walking in that direction, eventually you’d get to the river. She had never seen the river, but she’d heard plenty about it, not from anyone who had seen it with their own two eyes, but from people who knew people who knew people who had seen it.

  Then Ms. Levithine did something even more unexpected: she climbed up and over the massive roadblock put in place to keep out the Frenzies. Ruby scrambled up to the top of the pile after her and watched as Ms. Levithine continued walking away from the center of the city, away from the only place Ruby had ever known, in the direction of the river.

  For a moment, Ruby wanted to follow Ms. Levithine. She so desperately wanted to see the river. She hesitated for a moment, and her father’s face came to mind, his worried face. She sighed. She couldn’t do that to him. She couldn’t run off, even if it meant perhaps seeing the river, the one that somehow flowed without a far bank. She turned and climbed back down the pile of rubble.

  As she passed street after street, nearing home, she heard a sound that made her sick to her stomach with fear. It started far away, and initially, she didn’t think about it because it was the wind and it was birds coasting through the sky that had gone brick red and it was, perhaps, people talking in their apartments high above her. But the sound was not any of those things. It was the sound of voices laughing and shouting, young voices, playful voices, mean voices. It was the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood and the occasional scream.

  It was the sound of a Frenzy.

  Ruby looked behind her down the street, back the way she had come. The street had filled with young people, at least fifty, roiling and boiling over and around one another, like a flash flood pushing through desert creek beds. It was a relatively small Frenzy, but that didn’t matter to Ruby. She was alone.

  They came along slowly, disorganized chaos, a storm of energy. Some of them threw rocks at the buildings they walked past. A few of them carried wooden boards, fighting each other, sometimes in jest and other times landing genuine blows. Some rode on each oth
er’s shoulders while others scuffled at the back of the pack.

  Ruby started running. She looked over her shoulder again and again. She fell and scuffed her palms on the rough sidewalk. She got up. She ran. She heard shouts.

  They’d seen her.

  Ruby kept running. She turned the corner onto James Street, her small legs churning. Her house was right there.

  The house to the left of hers, the house she had passed every day of the school year, was abandoned. It had a large porch, like her house did, and it had tall windows and a black front door. There were columns that held up the porch roof, and some of the glass panes on the second- and third-story windows had broken. She had asked her father about the house, why no one lived there, who owned it, but he had not looked up from his writing.

  “Nothing important, Ruby dearest. Nothing important.”

  Ruby heard the Frenzy running up the street behind her, and the sound of their feet on the pavement filled her with terror. It was like the approach of hail or locusts or the pattering of thick drops in a storm that led the hurricane along. They shouted with glee, like animals on a hunt closing in on their prey.

  “Come in here!” a voice shouted, and she saw a young man standing in the doorway of the abandoned house. “Quick!”

  He had ink-black hair and a round nose. His eyes were large and dark, and his skin was only a shade darker than the white in his eyes.

  “Hurry!” he said. She ran down to the sidewalk and up the short stairway. He pulled her through, into the darkness.

  The boy slammed the door behind them. She glanced through the glass and saw the Frenzy racing up the street.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Come on,” he said, practically dragging her farther into the dust and the darkness.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim light, but once they did she saw that there was another door in front of them, about four feet in. She was standing in the same small entryway that her own house had. She was fairly certain that the next door would be locked, but the young man stepped forward and the door creaked open.

  There was even less light in the hallway. He raced through and she reached over for the light switch and flipped it up, but nothing happened.

  The black-haired young man opened the door that led into the front room she had seen through the windows. This was a mirror room to her father’s office in her own house, the first room off the hall with two large windows that looked out onto the porch and the street. The room was empty except for a dresser with three long, thin drawers in it. It was odd, that lonely piece of furniture covered in dust.

  “Don’t stop now,” the young man hissed, and she followed the voice deeper in.

  The two of them ran through a door that led deeper into the house. There were no windows in that room, although small amounts of light crept under the door, enough so that when Ruby opened her eyes she could see the rest of the room. It seemed drab and gray. She waited to see if anyone was going to come inside, but she didn’t hear anything. Soon she found a little bravery and walked farther back into the house. The boy had gone ahead. She couldn’t see him.

  “Who are you?” she whispered. The words were muffled, like sand through a sieve.

  “There isn’t time,” the young man replied, and his voice sounded far away, as if it was under water.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Are you Ruby Jardine?”

  “Who are you?” She realized she knew him, or at least she felt like she should.

  “Are you Ruby Jardine?” he insisted.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m Ruby.”

  “Ruby,” the young man said in a quiet voice, “you’re not going to believe me.”

  He paused. She felt like she knew what he was going to say even before he said it.

  “I’m your brother. I’m Leo.”

  Shouts on the other side of the door, and it burst open. Ruby screamed. Three men jumped on the young man and dragged him outside. In his place, suddenly, unexpectedly, was Ruby’s father. He knelt down and hugged her, and over his shoulder, through the door, she watched the men drag the boy through the back gate and into the alley.

  29

  ABRA SLEPT FOR A LONG TIME after her confrontation with Beatrice and the vision she had seen in the clear pool on the rocky plain. She lost track of how long she slept there beside the pools. When she stood up, she was still exhausted, recovering from the near drowning as well as the shock of seeing what she had seen. She stumbled between the craters of water. She refused to look. Of course, she wanted to look, but she knew why Beatrice had brought her there—she could easily spend the rest of her natural life staring into each and every pool, reliving moments until all of the pools that showed her future showed only an old woman staring in pools, reliving the past.

  She wandered back into the woods, toward the city, and she slept again, a deep, dreamless sleep.

  When Abra woke up the next day, she felt rested. She sat in the trees for a few minutes, gathering her thoughts. She had completely lost track of exactly how long she had been in the city. But it felt like too long—much longer than it should have been. What if Mr. Henry grew tired of waiting? What if Leo and his sister were gone already?

  What if she never found the Tree?

  Beatrice. Where could Beatrice have gone? In some ways, Abra felt like she was starting from scratch. She glanced through the trees, across the perimeter street, and into the city. The first thing she saw was the tall building. It rose into the sky, brick red and uneven, easily the tallest building. For a few minutes she couldn’t look away. It looked perilous, unsafe, as if it might topple over at any moment. And it was hard to tell for sure from that distance, but something about it besides its tallness made it seem unsteady. It seemed too thin for its height.

  For a moment she considered heading directly in, straight for the tall building. Maybe she could find Leo again? But it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. She decided to continue on her original course, around the city’s outskirts.

  Abra came out of the woods and yawned, stretched, and started walking. That’s when she heard a faraway sound, something that started out as faint as a bee’s buzzing and grew louder, louder, so that within a few minutes she realized what it was. Some kind of vehicle was approaching.

  She jumped into the woods just in time. Three large vehicles careened out of the city and onto the street that lined the forest. They were buses but had been reinforced with a hodgepodge of metal plates so that they looked like homemade military vehicles. They screeched as they turned, gathered speed, and roared past her in the same direction she was traveling. Within a few minutes they were gone, along with their sounds, and the day around her seemed passive and unaware, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  But she had seen them. She knew she had. Three large vehicles with all metal shells and slits for windows.

  She walked faster that day and looked over her shoulder a lot. It was during that stretch of walking that she decided she couldn’t trust anyone in the city, and if she saw anyone or anything, she would hide or run.

  She walked all day, and in spite of her extra vigilance, she didn’t see anything else. Nothing, that is, until she got to the water. She didn’t see it from very far away because the city street that went along the water was ten or fifteen feet above it, but when she got within a block or two, she heard it. The breakers crashing, the lapping sound it made against the wall. She actually ran the last block, though she wasn’t sure why. It felt like the water was her destination. It felt like the water would give her everything she needed.

  Abra stopped with her feet right at the edge of the street and looked out over the water. It was a beautiful deep blue, like navy blue but more somber. She couldn’t see a farther shore, but the water definitely flowed like a river, from her right to her left. Directly to her right, the trees still grew, going right up to the edge of the water so that it would have been hard going if you de
cided to walk in that direction for any distance.

  Abra sat down and let her legs dangle over the wall, and she thought about death, about traveling over that huge ocean or river or whatever it was. She wondered what was on the other side. She wondered what all the Wailers were flying to Over There. Her eyes wandered down the street that now divided the city from the water. That’s when she saw a man, and it looked like he had fallen into the river.

  A wind came in off the ocean and drowned her voice as she shouted. She ran to the spot where she had last seen him. The fear she had felt all day about encountering someone else melted away there at the edge of the water. The river looked majestic, yes, but it also looked cold and deep. Very, very deep. And she hadn’t seen any way back up the wall, so that if you fell in there would be nowhere to go but down into the invisible depths.

  “Hello?” she shouted. “Are you there? Do you need help?”

  She heard him before she saw him. Actually, she heard the boat. It made an uneven thunking sound as the small waves pushed it up against the wall over and over again.

  Abra fell to her hands and knees and looked over the edge. Sure enough, there was a man in a boat.

  “Here,” he called up to her without even looking. “Take this and fasten it to that hook you’re sitting on.”

  Abra glanced down and saw there was a hook beneath her, sticking up out of the street. The man threw a rope ladder up to her, and she found the end of it, lifted it over the small hook. Soon the ropes danced back and forth as the man climbed up out of the boat. He carried a long rope with him and also tied that to the hook, so that the hook was lost under a mass of thick knots.