We’re coming up to the last days of the accident season. Things almost always get worse now, before it ends. Last year at this point, Alice broke two fingers; they got caught in a car door when Nick was driving her home from a party. Two years before that was when Sam broke his nose playing soccer. (The bone set almost right; you can only see the slightest deviation to the line of his profile when he looks at you a certain way. I tell him it makes him look daring, like a pirate.) A few years before that, I broke my leg and Alice put her arm through a glass door. One year my mother fractured her collarbone; another I ran barefoot into the base of the sink and lost an entire toenail to the bathroom floor.
And that’s not counting the hundreds of cuts and scrapes and bruises, the knocks and frights for our lives. The could-have-beens, the almosts, the heads that didn’t quite crack on the marble tiles at that particular angle, the jagged glass that didn’t quite hit that particular vein, the water that didn’t quite fill the lungs before being expelled again. But we never talk about those.
Today my mother got hit by a car. She is shaken up and bruised and her arm is broken in two places, but, Gracie says, she is lucky to be alive. Every time she says it (and she’s said it three times already), my mother winces. We pretend not to notice. At home, we all fuss over her and she tries to shoo us away.
“I’m all right,” she says. “I’m fine—just leave me alone with a glass of wine and a shitty film.”
We bring her pillows and more pillows, painkillers, chocolate; we bring her and Gracie wine and we sneak another bottle upstairs for us for later. We pick out shitty films where no one ever gets hurt, except maybe their feelings, but only because of a misunderstanding that turns out all right in the end. We leave her and Gracie in the front room and go out into the back garden, where the trees are swaying but we can’t feel the breeze from the grass.
The sky is getting dark already; autumn light always catches me by surprise—the evening seems later than the time tells me it is. We huddle together in a protective circle and Bea rolls a joint with some of the weed Martin’s dad grows in his shed. It takes her a long time, even though she often smokes her own rolled-tobacco cigarettes. While we wait, shoulder to shoulder to keep out the wind that is picking up and skipping around the garden, gathering the darkish clouds around above us, threatening rain, I take out the sheet of paper from lunchtime and we finish the exquisite corpse.
I can identify everyone’s lines immediately. Bea’s are the brutal ones, the ones that’ll stay with you. Sam’s are spit-quick and playful. Kim’s are simple, like song lyrics. Niamh’s make references to other poems we’re studying in class. Alice’s must be the metaphor-laden ones that never really say what they mean. Mine are just mine; just there, hiding in among everyone else’s.
The poem is a chimera, multi-headed, multi-tongued. It’s all over the place and confusing, and all the more beautiful for that. Bea says she’ll scan it and print us all a copy to keep.
“Typing it out wouldn’t be the same,” she says. “The different handwritings are part of the poem.”
I think about the typed-up secrets and Elsie’s disappearance and I ask Alice if there’s anyone in her year Elsie actually talks to. “I mean, outside the secrets booth,” I say. Bea licks the rolling papers one last time to seal everything together and sparks the joint to life with an old Zippo lighter that used to be her dad’s.
Alice thinks about it for a while. “No,” she says. “I guess she’s never really had any friends.”
“Not since you, anyway,” Sam says to me.
In the gloom of the garden lit by papery embers and the glow of the kitchen behind the apple tree, I think about how Elsie and I just drifted apart as children; or rather, I drifted and Elsie just stayed exactly the same. The thought makes me strangely sad. I wonder why I’d never really thought of Elsie until that day last week when I noticed her in the first photo.
Sam is saying, “But there must be someone she at least talks to more than, I don’t know, nothing?”
We all think about it for a bit. “Not in my year,” Alice says finally. “But Elsie’s in your year anyway—you guys would know more than me.”
“No,” I say slowly. On either side of me, Sam and Bea shake their heads. “I always thought Elsie was in your year.”
“She’s not in my year, Cara.”
“But she’s been here ever since we were . . .” Bea says slowly. Smoke swirls around our faces. The ground is very firm beneath my palms. I lick my lips.
“Yeah, but she was with us the whole time in elementary school too.” Sam leans forward and pulls up some grass in the middle of our little circle. “Like, she was around when we were in fifth grade.”
I rub my arms. “I guess she must be in our year and we just didn’t notice,” I say. My voice sounds a little wobbly. I wonder how it’s possible to so completely overlook someone you once considered your friend. I feel horrible.
Sam takes a long drag of the joint. When he exhales, he makes the smoke into circles. Bea giggles softly and pokes her tongue into one. Then we all crack up. We roll around on the grass with laughter, and I pretend that I’ve forgotten about forgetting Elsie. Sam puffs out some more circles and we all join in tonguing them. He tries to teach us to breathe them out like that, but only Alice even comes close, and her smoke signals are more like fat snakes. When I say this, we all laugh some more.
“But there are no snakes in Ireland!” Bea giggles, spreading her arms wide. She loses her balance and knocks into Alice. Now we are mostly laughing at her. Slightly cowed, Bea stays propped up by Alice’s shoulder and unfolds our exquisite corpse again and reads it out loud.
It is like a ghost story written in verse form. Stanzas. Meter and rhyme, although none of it rhymes. Just meter, then. She takes one line from each of us and strings them together to make a sort of chorus that she repeats throughout the poem like a song: So let’s raise our glasses to the accident season,/ To the river beneath us where we sink our souls,/ To the bruises and secrets, to the ghosts in the ceiling,/ One more drink for the watery road.
In the dusky light of the garden the world does look watery. Beside me, Sam slips in and out of sight, black and white, and Alice’s skin has taken on a greenish hue from the bushes beside her. Bea’s hair—curls tangled by the wind—sticks out from her head like she’s in water. My own head feels light and airy and strange.
When it gets too cold and there are no more smoke circles to blow, we go inside. My mother is still in the living room with Gracie; they are laughing about something and their voices from down the hall sound very far away. We tiptoe up the stairs anyway.
We decide to all sleep in the same room. Since Alice’s is the biggest, we haul my mattress and then Sam’s mattress across the landing and (not without some difficulty) through the door to her bedroom. We are trying to be quiet so my mother won’t suspect anything, but it’s probably a lot more likely that she just doesn’t care what we’re up to, if we aren’t splitting skin or breaking bones. Which really leaves room for a good bit of mischief.
Finally, when our mattresses and duvets and pillows are in Alice’s room, we take Alice’s mattress down from her bedframe too, so that the floor is carpeted in mattresses. We all put on our pajamas and sit bunched up in duvets and propped up by pillows and we stay up most of the night talking and drinking, gossiping and giggling, and hiding from half-remembered things.
When we finally fall asleep we are like puppies in a litter. I dream about the changelings again. In my dream they are weak; they have been in the human world for far too long. The woodsprite, the girl who looks like a forest, was once able to make trees grow and flowers bloom. She was in love with a boy she thought was human, but he was really a wolf in disguise. Now her leafy heart is broken and she is forgetting the language of the trees.
The mermaid, the girl who looks like the sea, used to be able to make the rain come, to call
up water from the ground, to stop tears. But now her eyes are dried up and her throat is like a desert. The ghost boy, the boy who flickers like a silent-film reel, used to be able to fade in and out of sight, in and out of reality. He was able to slip seamlessly into stories, music, dreams. But now it’s his heart that feels like it is fading away. The fairy girl, the girl with wings growing out of her back, used to be able to fly. But now she is stuck to the ground, dancing in her silver Converse and wishing for the sky.
I wake up thinking I’ve fallen after trying to fly. I have ended up in the crack between two mattresses. Alice and Bea are sharing the same duvet, and when I look over at Sam, he is awake beside me.
“I can’t sleep,” he whispers. “Come for a walk with me?” He puts a finger to his lips and motions toward the door.
We put our boots and coats on over our pajamas and go outside. I stop in the hall for a moment and open the door to the living room just a crack. My mother and Gracie are both fast asleep, my mother lying on the couch and Gracie curled up in an armchair. There are several empty bottles of wine on the coffee table and discarded chocolate wrappers all over the floor. I smile and quietly shut the door.
Sam and I walk down to the river. We don’t really say anything, and halfway down the road, when the light of our front porch has been hidden by trees, Sam takes my hand. We haven’t brought a flashlight and the sky is full of clouds, but we can still somehow see where we are going. The night is so warm it seems like summer, but there are clouds gathering overhead, threatening to bring us all back to autumn. Still, there’s something eerie about the weather this October, but it’s dry and mild and the leaves crinkle underfoot, and in this dreamlike state I think it’s kind of perfect.
When we reach the river, we take off our boots before the grass steeps downward to the bank, and we carry them in our hands and clamber down barefoot. Across the water the trees are whispering leafy secrets to each other, or maybe to us, but we don’t have the right language to understand. Even the wind is warm.
Sam stops us right before the riverbank, and when I notice what’s wrong, we both just stand there and stare at the water.
The river is frozen. The current is still. The occasional rock pokes through the ice like a broken tooth, but the rest of the river is a shelf of frosted glass. Sam drops his boots and reaches for my hand.
This can’t be possible, I think. This is a dream.
And it does feel dreamlike, all of it: Sam’s hand in mine, the warm air on my cheeks, the warm grass beneath my bare feet, the bright sheen to the cloudy sky, the river that has frozen on a strange mild night. This couldn’t be anything but a dream.
That’s why I hardly hesitate when dream-Sam’s hand tightens on my dream hand and we walk out onto the ice. The cold numbs our feet. Our skin sticks to the frost like it would to a Band-Aid, but we walk out anyway. When we reach the middle of the river, we start to laugh. We face each other and hold hands, and we laugh and laugh as if we are the river, as if we’re making the sounds it makes when it isn’t still. We stare down at our bare feet on the frozen-over water, and when we look back at each other, our eyes are wide and we are so close, and for just the tiniest moment I think that Sam might bridge the distance between our mouths and kiss me, and for an even tinier moment I kind of wish he would.
I freeze like the water beneath us. Sam is like my brother. Where are these thoughts coming from? I try to blink them out of my head, but all I can see are the freckles on his skin.
A crazy thought comes into my head: This isn’t a dream. This isn’t a dream and I just thought about kissing Sam. This isn’t a dream and I’m out on the ice of a frozen river in the middle of the accident season.
That’s when the ice cracks.
I give a little scream. Our grip on each other’s hands tightens. For a few heartbeats we stay still as statues, as ice sculptures, but when the ice cracks again we start to slide carefully toward the riverbank. We try to spread our weight. We tread carefully. The ice cracks. We move faster. It cracks again. Soon we are running, our hands still gripped together, our feet freezing and slipping, and the cracks are multiplying like music notes and Sam is falling but I’m pulling him along until we finally reach the grass of the riverbank, where we collapse, panting, hands still held.
We lie on our backs and look up at the clear night sky. Our feet are still touching the ice. We don’t ask Is this happening?; we don’t look at each other reassuringly and say It’s always happening; we don’t say anything and Sam doesn’t move to kiss me again. If that’s even what he was doing.
We realize it immediately when we sit up: We’re on the opposite side of the river. Somehow we must’ve got turned around. On this side, the trees look down at us like the ridiculous children that we are. From the other side, our boots wave their laces. The wind is picking up.
“No way I’m crossing that again,” Sam says. His voice is husky, as if from sleep.
“We can go the long way and cross at the main bridge,” I tell him. “But without our boots . . .”
“It’s either that or drowning.”
“I’ve never been the biggest fan of drowning.”
Sam kisses the knuckles of my hand he’s holding. “Come on, then, little sister,” he says. “Let’s go home, out of this weird night.”
“I’m not your sister,” I remind him, and I lead him into the forest, where it’s easier to follow the path than to navigate the rocks on this side of the river.
The path brings us to Elsie’s clearing. The dream catchers are still there. They spin in the wind like exotic birds dancing. Their feathers are weather-tattered now, though, and they are missing strings and beads. But there’s something else tacked on the trees; something new. A lot of somethings. I walk up to one of the trees to look closer. Sam follows, naturally, as our hands are still joined. “Paper?” he says, with uncertainty.
They look like sheets of brown paper, hundreds of them, stapled to every tree. “More like sandpaper, actually,” I say to Sam, noticing their texture. He holds out a hand and touches one. His fingers come away sticky.
“Flypaper.” One summer when we were little and my mother’d had a particularly successful run of painting sales, we all went on vacation to the Pyrenees. We rented a little house outside a village and spent our days hiking and our evenings using sugar to bait flies into our hands. My mother hated the flies; she hung flypapers on the ceiling and above every door, and Christopher, who is taller than any of us, kept getting his hair caught in the stuff with the flies. I look quickly at Sam, wondering if he’s remembering the same thing, but he’s still staring at the flypaper, deep in thought.
“I just don’t get it,” he says finally.
“I know what you mean.” We walk away and leave the clearing behind. The flypapers gleam wetly on the trees and the dream catchers shake in the wind. Twigs stick into the soles of my feet, the flesh too soft from always wearing shoes. “I just wish I knew where she was.”
“We have to find her, Cara,” Sam says. “Seriously.”
“I know,” I whisper. I am so glad he agrees with me. I feel the need to speak to Elsie like an urgency; my blood beats with it. “We have to find her soon.”
10
Gracie is too hungover to drive us to school the next morning, and my mother can’t drive with a broken arm, so the four of us walk all the way, our own heads tight and pounding from last night. We squint in the weak morning light. Alice and Bea, who seem to be in a slightly better state than me and Sam, walk a little way in front of us, heads inclined toward each other, deep in conversation. Sam and I walk silently, farther apart.
We don’t talk about leaving the house last night, but I think it is more so that we don’t persuade each other it wasn’t real than to pretend it didn’t happen. It would be too easy to let logic tell us that the river couldn’t be frozen on a warm night, that there couldn’t possibly be a spooky clearing in the
woods filled with dream catchers and flypapers and a tiny doll version of a possibly missing girl set like the bait in a mousetrap. But maybe we also don’t talk about it because of our hands held, our bodies close, Sam’s eyes aligned with mine as we stood on the ice.
We woke up with our hands side by side but not touching, and this morning it’s like we’re being careful not to get too close. My thoughts tangle between the words brother and ex-stepbrother, first focusing on the difference between the two and then rejecting it. It’s the same thing, I tell myself firmly. Sam is my brother. It’s beyond wrong to be thinking like this. My brain ends up tangled with so much shame and confusion that I just try to leave it be, ignore any thoughts that flash through it and just concentrate on the straps of my school bag on the bruise on my shoulder, on the taste of cold toast in my mouth as I walk, on the feel of the road under my Converse. (Sam and I silently pick up our Docs from the riverbank on the way to school but they are waterlogged with morning dew and entirely unwearable, so we are both stuck with thin-soled footwear for the day.)
Elsie’s invitation to the party sits in the front pocket of my school bag. I touch it throughout the day like a talisman. The need to find her haunts me, taunts me with how easy it should be and how difficult it actually is. And I don’t know why, but I feel as though we are running out of time.
I tell Bea about the flypaper trees during math class, but she doesn’t seem to be listening. She keeps texting under the table and won’t tell me who she’s talking to.
“Ugh. Please don’t tell me you’re ignoring me to text Carl Gallagher,” I say with a grimace.
Bea smiles mysteriously. “Every good witch needs a couple of secrets.”
I am about to remind Bea that she never keeps secrets, when it hits me. “The secrets booth!”
Sam turns around from his seat in front of us. “What about it?”
“Of course,” I say, mostly to myself. “There are always articles and local news stories about it, right? Elsie’s bound to be mentioned in them.”
The Accident Season Page 10