She’s sitting in the windowsill, holding a mug of what has to be hot chocolate. Jane doesn’t like tea or coffee but she loves hot chocolate, even in the middle of summer.
I join her. She offers me the mug, and I take a sip.
“Mm,” I say. “Perfect.” I nod toward her left arm, which is cradled against her body in a makeshift sling. “How are you feeling?”
“Remarkably better,” she says. “I’m not going to be doing any heavy lifting today or anything, but the pain is . . . much less.” She purses her lips thoughtfully. “Frank said that alchemists have inhumanly long lives. I wonder what that means for our bodies healing themselves. With Elle around to heal every scrape, we never got a chance to find out.”
“I vote for not testing it too much.”
Jane smiles, but there’s a shadow in it. There’s a million reasons for all of us to be sad right now, but that’s not a reason not to ask.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s silly,” she says.
“It’s not if it bothers you.”
“Not fair. I’ve said that to you a hundred times—”
“And it’s just as true now. What’s wrong?”
She looks back out the window, and takes another long sip of hot chocolate before she speaks.
“It’s the flowers,” she says. “I remember each time I bound a flower to one of you. There was another magic in them. Something so much older than any of us, something ancient, and I was the only one of us who could tap into it. I could call to it, and it would answer, and we’d watch the flowers fill up. It was the most profound, beautiful magic I’ve ever felt. And now they’re gone.”
“We had to destroy them,” I say. “And maybe we can remake them—”
“Derry. Please. This isn’t something you need to fix. Sometimes you need to let people be sad. You need to let me be sad.”
“But . . . if you don’t have to be . . .”
“Maybe I do,” she says. “Maybe being sad for a little while is how I stop being sad. I know that you want to protect us, and that you think you can do it all on your own.” I wince. That’s the kind of bull’s-eye only a sibling who really knows you can deliver. “Right now, I don’t need you to go out and find me glass to turn into new flowers. I don’t need you to research ancient spells and figure out how to redo it. I need you to be my sister, and to let me be sad, and to let me lean on you while I mourn. You need to let us all mourn, because there is so much to mourn right now, and the only way out is through. Can you do that?”
I don’t answer immediately. I want to jump in and say Yes, yes, of course, to smooth it over, to make her happy by saying the right thing, but . . . Jane deserves more than that. She deserves a sister who actually hears what she says, and answers honestly.
“I can try extremely hard,” I say finally.
She smiles. The shadow is still there, but the smile is genuine.
“And maybe consider asking for help occasionally. You don’t have to do . . . everything on your own.”
There are words left unsaid, hanging in the air between us. I don’t have to do everything on my own. I learned that when we pulled Winnie and Jane out of the trees—I couldn’t have done that by myself. But there are things no one can help me with, and I’d never ask it of them.
I wonder if we’ll ever acknowledge out loud the truth we both know about Frank’s death.
“Hey, what do you think of witch?” I ask. Jane blinks rapidly at the sudden change of subject. “Claire said that the first girls Frank brought here called themselves witches until he convinced them it was bad. Maybe . . . maybe it’s been waiting for us to reclaim it.”
Jane’s smile starts slow, then spreads across her entire face. “I love it.”
We sit together a little longer. She gives me a few more sips of hot chocolate. When it’s all gone, she stands up, and she says, “Right. We have work to do.”
Jane, Brooke, and I gather in the living room. Violet and the little twins are outside, enjoying the new freedom. Before almost anyone else was up, Irene was already at Frank’s computer, going through his records, learning everything she could.
We are all, perhaps, putting off the inevitable hard emotional work we’re going to have to do, but I think we’re allowed that respite for a few days more.
‘Where do we start?’ I ask.
I don’t miss Frank. I don’t feel guilty or conflicted about his fate, but I do miss knowing that someone else will take care of the practicalities. We’ve never had to worry about buying food or toiletries. We’re not sure if there are bills that need paying, or if Frank found a way around all of that. He kept us off the grid—by necessity, considering he planned to kill all of us—so maybe he kept the whole house off the grid, too. He spent a good chunk of his immortality becoming a technological expert. It’s not out of the question.
Jane’s the first to suggest going into town. The others immediately protest.
‘You saw how often Frank came back beat up,’ Brooke signs.
‘Did he really get beat up, though?’ I ask. My siblings look at me questioningly. I shrug. ‘He lied about a lot. He could have faked it—just another way to keep us in line.’
No one knows what to say to that. How far did Frank’s lies go?
‘Either way,’ Jane signs finally, ‘I think we should go.’ Her signing is clumsy with one arm in a sling, and she has to rely on fingerspelling more than usual. ‘We’ll have to eventually, and I think it’s better we go before it becomes a need. Scout it out. Get accustomed. None of us knows how to drive, so we’ll have to figure that out, but we have Frank’s truck. And . . . Winnie.’
Her body isn’t in the little twins’ room anymore. Before we went to sleep, Irene and I wrapped her in sheets while Brooke took care of the twins, and we put her in the little alcove by the back door. We took on scrubbing the blood together. We expected it to be a hard job, that the blood would have stained the hardwood. Instead, it came up easy. Not even half an hour later and we were sitting back, wiping our foreheads, examining a clean floor.
Not even half an hour, and all the evidence of Winnie’s death was gone.
I don’t know how to feel about that.
The little twins refuse to sleep in there. They carried Olivia’s terrariums into Brooke’s room last night to stay with her. Gabriel the beetle got a place of honor by the window.
‘We have to bury her,’ Brooke signs. ‘Next to Elle.’
‘I’ll dig the grave,’ I sign. I won’t be able to take a magic shortcut, at least not as easily or effectively as I did with Elle, but we have a shovel. I can dig the hard way.
‘We’ll work on it together,’ Jane signs. ‘Then we can have a memorial. For both of them.’
We pull Irene away from the computer, and she and Brooke take turns with the only shovel. I use what magic I can to make it faster. The digging is slow and messy. We end up covered in dirt.
When I talk to the earth, it’s not the only thing that answers.
The forest answers, too.
It whispers Come back in my dad’s voice.
We love you in my mom’s.
They know you’re lying in Elle’s.
And Winnie, whispering, The forest made me powerful. Come see what my little poltergeist is now. Come see what you could become.
I don’t listen. I try not to listen.
It will have me again soon enough.
It’s not easy to gracefully lower Winnie into her grave, but Brooke helps out with a cushion of magic air. We don’t really know how funerals are supposed to go, but we each say a little something. None of it seems right or enough. We try to form our sisters out of words, but no words can do them justice.
Violet says that they saw a funeral scene on TV where everyone threw dirt into the grave before it was filled. They don’t know what the purpose was, but it seems like a good idea, so we do it. One by one, we take a handful of dirt and throw it into Winnie’s grave, then sprinkle a little on the mound of
Elle’s.
Irene takes up the shovel and she fills the grave the rest of the way.
My magic is still low, but I think there’s enough for one last offering. I grab onto that remaining magic, harness it, and ask flowers to grow. For Winnie, a black spiny flower that I invented for her years ago. Elle’s favorite flower is crocuses—the colorful little things that pop out of the ground as winter ends and spring begins. It’s too late in the season for them, but still they surround her grave, purple and white and yellow.
The next order of business is getting to town. Out of all of us, only Jane has been behind the wheel of any vehicle. Her dad sometimes let her drive around the farm when her mom wasn’t home—very slowly, and nine years ago.
‘Elle could have helped,’ Irene tells us. ‘She was so excited to turn sixteen, even though we were still years away back then. She’d watch everything our mother did when she drove and asked a million questions. I never paid much attention.’
Since we don’t have Elle or Jane’s dad or anyone else, Irene brings Frank’s laptop out to the living room and we gather around it. She Googles “how to drive” but it just raises other questions, like, is Frank’s truck an automatic or a stick? What does that mean? Jane drove stick on the farm, she thinks. More Googling, then hunting around Frank’s truck for the information we need. More Googling. Jane tries to start the truck, but it keeps making a weird noise instead.
I squint at the laptop in Irene’s arms. We have a website up—“How to Start a Manual Car: 13 Steps (with Pictures)”—that we’ve been trying to use to just get the truck on.
“Is it in neutral?” Irene asks. “And you have the . . . clutch depressed?”
“That’s this pedal thing here, right?” Jane asks. I dutifully compare the position of her foot to the picture on the website.
“Yeah,” I say. “So, keep that down, then turn the key.”
This time, the car jerks forward, making us all shriek, and then does nothing else.
“Okay, let’s take a break,” Jane says. “This will be easier once I’m out of the sling anyway.”
Irene returns to looking through Frank’s records, but leaves the laptop with us. Jane and I settle on the couch with a video about driving a stick shift. We’re hardly three minutes in when there’s a knock on the door.
For the first time, I regret that Frank isn’t here. Frank always knew what to do with anyone who came to the house. He always protected us. He—
No.
We have plenty of ways to protect ourselves.
“Dr. Sam,” Jane says. “Right?”
It hadn’t occurred to me he’d come back. “I could scare him off,” I say. “A little magic show?”
Jane shakes her head. “No. We need him. We need access to a doctor, and we need to keep track of him.”
After a beat, I understand. “He knows too much.” Jane nods.
The knock comes again, and I go to the foyer. I pull the magic up until it tingles my right palm. I open the door.
Dr. Sam stands several steps away, as though he’d been about to leave.
“Derry,” he says. He smiles, and runs a hand through his hair, looking sheepish. The magic in my palm flares in irritation. “Is Frank around?”
I shake my head. Then, plainly, I say, “He’s dead. It’s just us now.”
His eyes go wide, and he stutters. “O-Oh. I . . . how d-did he . . .”
He looks at me, and I stare back.
He doesn’t press the subject.
I knew he wouldn’t, because that’s the thing with Dr. Sam—if it’s too hard, he’d rather not know about it at all.
“I wanted to apologize,” he says. He doesn’t say to whoever happened to be in power when I arrived, but I hear the words anyway. If Frank had answered the door, he’d be apologizing for getting caught by me. Since I’m the one standing here—
“I shouldn’t have left,” he continues. “I should have helped you.”
“Yes,” I say. “You should have.”
“And I’m sorry.”
“Good.”
His mouth works, goldfish-like. He obviously doesn’t know what to do.
He obviously expected Frank to answer.
He takes a step forward, as if to enter. Of all the choices he could make. I slam my tingling palm into the doorframe to block him. I grow thorny vines out of the wood. My forehead sweats with the effort, but Dr. Sam is hardly observant enough to notice, not when he’s scared, and oh, is he scared. He looks from the thorns to me, to the thorns, back behind me into the house.
“Derry,” he says. His voice shakes. He clears his throat and says again, “Derry.” This time he says it in that soothing doctor voice, the one he used when he gave us our shots, the one that said This will only sting a little even when it was going to sting a lot. “I can hardly just leave a group of children all alone here.”
Why not? I want to say. You did for years.
But Jane’s right. He knows too much, and we need him.
“You’re right,” I say. “We could use your help.”
His face brightens at that, and he tries to step in again. My fingernails rake against the doorframe and the thorns get a little bigger.
“At our discretion. Do for us what you did for Frank. Come when we call, stay away when we don’t. Don’t ask questions. Don’t tell anyone about us. Can you do that?”
He hesitates. “You know . . . Frank used to pay me for my services.”
I roll my eyes. Yeah. That makes sense. Why else would someone who so clearly considers himself a generally good guy do what he’s done?
Money.
“Yeah, fine. We’ll match his prices,” I say. “And we’re going through his records right now, so, don’t worry, we’ll figure them out on our own.”
“Of course,” he says. He smiles, and it’s like I can see him absolving himself of everything else. If he helps us now—even if it’s just for money—wouldn’t all his other actions be forgiven? He definitely thinks so. “Of course. In that case, I can help. Do you need anything right now? Food, or . . .”
I’m about to say no and send him on his way, but I stop. “Actually,” I say. “I think you can help us.”
Ten minutes later, Jane’s in the driver’s seat of Frank’s truck with Dr. Sam beside her, teaching her. Violet and Irene lounge in the back. No one says it out loud, but no one thinks it’s a good idea for someone to be alone with Dr. Sam.
His presence has reminded me of something else. Dr. Sam isn’t Frank’s only ally. Frank had psychics he went to see. There were people who gave him the locations of the witches.
Will they come looking for him? Was he a customer, or a friend?
I think we have to make sure there’s nothing to find, and Frank’s body is still in the forest.
I have an idea for what to do about that.
While driving lessons go on, I ask Brooke to do me a favor.
‘A bonfire?’ she signs, making sure she got it right.
‘A big one.’
She twists her mouth to the side, then asks, ‘Why? And tell me the truth.’
I hesitate. I wasn’t going to tell anyone until it was done, so there wasn’t a chance for anyone to stop me. Brooke just waits. She’ll know if I lie. I don’t know if she’ll do something about it, or if I’ll be met with that resignation I thought I saw on Jane’s face when she found out I killed Frank. Like it’s confirmation of who I am.
I don’t want to be the kind of person who lies this much to her siblings.
So, I tell her. When I’m done, she sighs, and rubs her eyes.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think it would be good for us,’ I sign. I bite my lip, then add in slow, jerky motions, as if it’s being forced out of me, ‘but if you think it’s not a good idea . . .’
‘Then you’d do it in secret?’ she asks.
‘No, no,’ I sign, not sure I’m telling the truth.
‘You want my honest opinion?’
‘
I really do.’
‘I think we need to be discussing this with everyone. It can’t be on us to decide. And if the majority vote is no . . .’
I nod. ‘Yeah. I understand.’
We wait for Dr. Sam to leave before we gather everyone. I tell them my plan, just as I told it to Brooke. It seemed like a better idea when it was just her. With all these other eyes watching me . . . it seems gruesome. It seems like an incomprehensible thing to suggest to my siblings, including a pair of eight-year-olds.
Irene’s all in, immediately. Violet is much less sure about it. Olivia and London have a lot of questions, and I can’t answer all of them, but I try. Jane . . . I’m not sure. She’s taking it seriously. She’s considering it. I don’t know which way she’ll vote.
I only need three of them to win, technically, but I want all of them. This needs to be for all of us. I argue my case as well as I can.
Still, when the vote comes down, it surprises me that it’s unanimous. Even Brooke agrees once she realizes everyone else wants it.
So, a little before dusk, I return to the forest with a big blanket from Frank’s bed—the better to drag his body with.
The forest is happy to have me back. It floods me with warmth and magic enough to make my eyes sting with the threat of tears.
It’ll come back. He said it comes back. I’ll have this much magic again, and it’ll be all mine.
The forest wasn’t as kind to Frank’s body as it was to Elle’s. The animals have already been at it. I remember the word for it—predation. I like that word. They’ve taken his softest parts, and it’s not a pretty sight. My stomach roils, but I don’t flinch away.
I could just leave him here to keep rotting and rotting into nothing. It would be easier. But I want to be rid of the evidence, and I think it would do us all good to get the kind of closure I’m planning.
I also don’t want the forest to have him. It’s already spread farther, past its borders. I’m not sure how much taking his body will help to stop that, if at all. Maybe the surge of power at his death was all the forest needed.
Or maybe the forest can drain him slowly, like he was going to drain us.
Maybe it isn’t animal predation on his body. What animals are there to do the predation? Lightning bugs? My creature?
A Dark and Starless Forest Page 24