by Cyn Balog
I cross my arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve brought dozens of your ancestors across. But you are … different. I’m not supposed to take you across. Not yet. But damned if you’re not giving me the hardest time keeping you out of trouble. You don’t listen. You didn’t listen when I told you that fancy pole of yours wouldn’t catch you nothing, and you don’t listen now.”
I snort. Am I really being lectured by a ghost about how to live my life? “Jack told me he was sent to take me across.”
“No,” he says, his face stone. “Jack is no good. He’s lying to you, trying to trick you.”
“I don’t understand. What does he want from me?”
He’s not looking at me anymore. He’s scanning the riverbank. I don’t think he heard my question. He reaches down and grabs my wrist. “Look. We’re not safe here. Can we go somewhere?”
“You can come back to the cabin with me.”
He hesitates. “Can you see the river from there?”
I nod.
“I think I can do that. Can’t get too far from the river.”
“Or what?”
“Or I get pulled back. The river’s like a stake in the ground with a chain tied to it. And I’m the dog.” He reaches down and helps me stand. “Can you walk good? How’s that ankle of yours?”
“It’s not too bad,” I say, putting my weight on it. I hop up and down. It’s just a numb ache, barely perceptible. I move it back and forth, testing it, but then suddenly I must do the wrong thing, because pain shoots up my leg. I shriek and fall to my knees. “Except when I do that.”
He reaches down and touches it. I feel the rough skin on his finger pad just barely swiping under my anklebone, and the whole thing begins to tingle. “Better?”
I jump. I move. I do everything I did before, but the pain does not come back. “So you did do it, last time? To my back? You can heal me?”
He nods like it’s no big deal, and we start to walk toward the cabin. He’s looking over his shoulder. Something is bothering him. As I walk behind him, I notice he is leaving a trail of small droplets of black blood on the dirt. I rush to keep up with him, and though he’s holding his arm close to his chest, I know it’s that same cut that’s bleeding. It looks as fresh as ever. I pull off my jacket and clamp it over the thing. He doesn’t argue. “Old war wound or not, I’m not letting you bleed all over the cabin.”
“Thank you,” he says softly.
“You’re Trey Vance, aren’t you?” I ask him, finally. “The boy who told on those other boys who killed the girl. I heard your story. They pulled a knife on you. That’s where you got that cut. And you jumped in the water but you couldn’t swim.”
He laughs, but there’s sadness in his voice. “That’s what happens over time. Stories get twisted out of shape. But no. I couldn’t swim. Lived my whole life by water, first in New York and then in Oklahoma, and never learned to swim. How’s that for irony? The one at my home outside of Tulsa was muddy and full of them leeches. No fun. Some kids on the river where I died even made a rhyme up about it after, as a warning.
“Trey Vance, who took a chance
And was pushed in the river grim.
He lost his life not by a knife
But because he couldn’t swim.
“They say I’m famous in twelve counties. Whenever kids don’t want to learn to swim, their mommas always say, ‘Now, little Bobby, you know what happened to Trey Vance, don’t you? Get your butt back in the water.’ ”
“Thought you said you were a ‘powerful good swimmer’?”
He nods. “That’s the good thing about this place. You get to be what you wanted most to be when you died. And hell, if I’d have been a good swimmer, I’d still be alive.”
I look down at his arm, which he’s hugging to his body. “You can heal me, but you can’t heal yourself?”
He shrugs. “That power’s beyond me.”
“Is it beyond the all-powerful Mistress of the Waters?”
“You joke about it, but that’s ’cause you don’t understand it,” he says. We cross the highway and start up the driveway. “Can’t heal the dead. But you can bring a person back to life. The Mistress of the Waters can do that. It’ll damn near destroy all her power, but she can do it. I think that’s what they want your momma for.”
“Who wants her?” I sputter.
“They want her to make them alive again.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know. Jack, I think.” His face twists. “It’s hard to get you to understand, when even I don’t know what’s what, sometimes.”
I groan. “I want to understand it, but you’re making it so damn hard. If I’m destined to become this royal-over-the-waters, shouldn’t I just go and accept my destiny?”
“No. Not now.” He stops suddenly, trying to think of the words, then exhales, defeated. “Being here is dangerous. Too dangerous for you.”
“Why? Is it because of Jack? Who sent you, anyway?”
“Mistress Nia,” he says softly. “Your momma.”
Every time someone says my mother’s name, I cringe inside. I’m so used to having that reaction to her, I can’t rid myself of it. And so when Trey says her name again, I bite down hard on my tongue and don’t say a word until we’re in the cabin. When I open the door, I can already hear loud snores emanating from one of the upstairs bedrooms. Hugo, no doubt. Our little kayak trip seems a million years away, almost as if it never happened. And the funny thing is, when I look down, I realize my clothes are completely dry. Not like they dried, but like they were never wet in the first place. They’re not stiff with river grime. My hair even smells like the shampoo I used the evening before.
I turn to Trey, about to ask him why my mother would send him as a warning, when I see him staring into the hallway mirror. There’s no reflection. I am standing behind him and yet all I see in the glass is myself. He shakes his head. “I ain’t seen myself in a mess of years. What year is it now? 1940? 1945?”
I know my eyes are bulging. “What year did you …”
He chews on his lower lip. “Last I was like you, it was 1935.”
How could he have somehow misplaced so many years? “It’s much later,” I say.
He grimaces. “It’s hard keeping track of the days here. I tried for a while but lost it.” He runs his hands through his hair. “What do I look like now? Hell?”
“Um … fine,” I say. For someone who has been dead for so many decades, he doesn’t look half bad.
He looks around the house and whistles long and loud. “This the way people living these days? This a hotel?”
“No, it’s Angela’s parents’ vacation cabin.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Just the three of them? Live here?”
I nod. “But only a couple weeks out of the year.”
“Dang, I was born at the wrong time.” He walks into the kitchen and opens the freezer. “Heh. If this ain’t one of them—what are they called? Refrigerators. We had one. Brand-new. My dad got it for my momma for her birthday.”
He turns the under-the-counter can opener on and steps backward in a hurry when it begins to whir. I help him shut it off. “That opens cans.”
“Angry little thing, ain’t it?” He shakes his head at it like it’s a naughty puppy and begins playing with some of the other appliances. I explain each one to him, and each time, he laughs and shakes his head. Then he turns to the microwave. “What’s this? This chew the food for you?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer. His eyes fasten on the fake moose antlers over the fireplace. He whistles again. “Must’ve took ten men to bring that beast down, heh?”
I don’t want to tell him they’re fake. Based on the way he reacted to everything in the kitchen, he already knows the people of today are a bunch of wusses who can’t do anything for themselves. “Um, I guess.”
There’s a noise in the foyer, probably just the house settling, but it reminds me that Angela and Justin might come home
at any minute, or Hugo might wake up. Trey has moved on to the bookcase. “Hey, I had that one, too. Journey to the Centre of the Earth. My momma bought it for me on my seventeenth birthday. Never finished it, though. Died before I could.”
He says it so matter-of-factly, it makes me gasp. “You can borrow it, if you want,” I say, since I doubt that any of us will be doing any real reading this weekend.
“Yeah?” He gets all excited, like I offered him a Porsche, and takes the book down from the shelf. He stares at it for a minute, and then gently puts it back. “I’d best not. Don’t want to muss it up.”
“Um, I’m afraid you can’t stay here. My friends will be back any minute,” I say.
“They can’t see me, kid.”
“Yeah, but I can. I can’t act normal if you’re around.”
He nods. “All right, all right. But knowing your momma wanted me to protect you, ain’t that enough for you to get yourself home?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know who to believe. Jack is telling me one thing. You’re telling me something else. All of it is so unbelievable. And I know I should be running in the other direction, but I can’t leave until I know. If my mother is here, I want to see her.”
He throws his hands up in frustration. I’m clearly getting on his nerves. “I told you. That ain’t possible. Across the river is her kingdom. She can’t abandon it. You can’t see her unless you cross the river. And you need to be dead for that. If you cross, you ain’t coming back. And you like your life, don’t you? You don’t want to leave it?”
“I do, but—”
“There’s another part to this story. Listen,” he says, his face turning to stone. “According to your momma, there’s a relation of yours from many years ago. This person would have inherited the title, but died very young, and has been living on the outskirts of your momma’s kingdom, in the shadows. The story is that ever since this person came here, they’ve been wanting to step in. They’ve been off in secret, developing these powers. This person’s been in this kingdom a long time, longer than your momma’s been ruling, and they’re awful strong. Stronger than your momma. Stronger than you, because not only was this person destined to rule, but they know more about your powers than anyone. And they’re angry. Real angry at your momma.”
I swallow. “I don’t understand. Who is this person? Jack?”
“Doesn’t matter. All it means is that you need to get.”
“Can’t my mother just come to the edge? Just so I can …” I trail off. This is so stupid. Asking to see my mother. My mother, who abandoned me. She’s dead. Gone. Even if I could see her, I shouldn’t want to.
“It doesn’t work like that, kid.”
I exhale. “Of course it doesn’t. Can you tell me something? When you die, do you stay here forever?”
“No. Everything fades. From the moment you were brought into the world, you were dying. How fast you do that is up to a lot of things. I’ve been here more years than I can count. But I guess it’s good to know that when things end, you can start again.”
I blink, fighting back the memory of my mother, sitting on the edge of my bed, telling me something so similar. Sometimes things end. And it’s comforting to be able to begin again.
He wags a finger at me. “But listen, girl. Stop getting ideas. If anything happens to you, your momma’ll skin me. Not alive, because that ain’t possible, but you get the picture. You’re all she ever talks about.”
“I—I am?” I sputter. I can’t believe that’s true. He must have me confused with someone else’s daughter. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. “I can’t leave. Not when I know my mother is over there.” I bite my lip, thinking of my mother. She left me; why wouldn’t I do the same to her? But the answer is immediate: I’m not like her. “I don’t abandon my family.”
Now he starts to pace around me, hands on hips. When he stops, his eyes burn into me. He’s angry. “If anyone could be the death of me, you’re it. You can’t do nothing about it, kid. Accept it. Just do what your momma said.”
I start to argue with him, but then I hear something. We both freeze at the sound of tires on gravel, coming nearer, up the driveway.
He reaches out and at first I think he’s going to poke me, but instead, he gently touches my cheek with his icy finger, leaving a line of tingles there. I wonder if it tingles that way because he’s not human or for another reason, but already I yearn to feel it again. I want to grab his hand and keep it there, but before I can, he says, “Go home.”
And then it’s like he was never there at all.
Chapter Sixteen
When Angela and Justin return, they look tired, not exhilarated, like I expect them to. They live for hiking and outdoors stuff, and yet Angela just collapses on the sofa without so much as a nod in my direction. Justin drops their backpacks on the foyer floor and studies me, an unfocused, confused look on his face. Finally, it’s like something switches on in his brain, because he says, “You feeling better?”
I’m standing in the kitchen, which is probably not something I should be doing if I just sprained my ankle. I start to limp over to him. “Well, uh—”
“You have your hiking boots on. Did you go outside?” He sounds suspicious, which catches me off guard. Justin is not the suspicious type.
“Yeah, I—I wanted to get some fresh air, so I just went out for a little bit,” I lie. “How was your hike?”
He kisses the top of my head. “Cool. Would have been more fun with you there, though.”
I smile at him. Of course he’s just saying that.
“I’m going to catch a shower at the Outfitters. Then we can go see that movie, okay?”
“Sounds good,” I say. A movie is the last thing on my mind, though. I can’t stop thinking of what Trey said. Someone is conspiring to overthrow the Mistress. My mother, the Mistress. This woman, the most important person of my childhood, who I adored beyond words, is only yards away. As incredible as that sounds, after all I’ve witnessed, I believe it. Inexplicably, I can almost feel her presence. It is what drew me to this place. Suddenly I realize why I haven’t been able to leave. Here, I’m enveloped by that clammy yet comforting feeling I used to get whenever she touched me. I belong here. I know now that my mother felt the same.
My mother. Even just thinking about her now, when I haven’t in so long, ties my stomach in knots. Trey said I’m all she ever talks about. And here, all this time, I’ve never talked about her. I pushed her out of my mind and off my tongue for so long, I can barely think the word without clenching my jaw. Mother.
I go upstairs into the bedroom where I left my bag and begin to change. Though there is no trace of grit on my skin or dampness anywhere from my plunge in the Dead, my clothes just feel wrong. They scratch at my skin almost as if they were full of river. The sun is beginning to set, casting orange streaks on the river across the way. I watch it as I kick off my mud-crusted boots and peel my shirt and jeans off.
I stand there in my bra and panties, rifling through my bag, looking for my lip gloss. I never go anywhere without slathering my lips in the stuff. When I find it, I step to the mirror and smudge the bubble-gum-pink color into my lips. Then I find my brush and run it through my hair, letting the hair fall loose down my back. I stand back to look at myself. Two days away from civilization, and I still look presentable. Awesome. I’m about to reach down and find my shirt when I see it.
A face among the dark trees outside.
I gasp and turn, reaching for clothes, and that’s when I make out the figure that is standing there, watching me. Jack. He knows I see him, and yet he doesn’t shy away. He doesn’t move, almost as if he is a part of the landscape. He keeps staring at me, this look—of approval? No, of wanting—on his face. His eyes are full of fire, so full I’m suddenly aware of this burning sensation that starts in my chest and radiates down between my legs.
What is wrong with me? From what Trey said, I should know Jack is bad. Trey said he’s the enemy. Still, I can’t help thinking tha
t there’s something about him I want so deeply. I drop the shirt to the floor, only because I know it would please him. I want to please him. I want it with everything I am. My fingers are not my own; they feel like they are attached to puppet strings as they reach behind my back and undo the clasp of my bra.
There’s a faint noise in the hallway. I whirl around to see that the door is open an inch. It shudders a little, and that’s when I see an eye in the opening. Refastening my bra, I recognize it just as the door opens fully and Hugo steps into the room, hitting me with a wave of foul-smelling air, a mixture of old alcohol, vomit, and morning breath. He hasn’t even cleaned himself up; he has the worst five o’clock shadow and his hair is sticking up straight at the very top, kind of like a Mohawk. Gagging, I grab my shirt and hold it over my chest as he drawls, “Hey, you.”
“What are you doing in here?” I shout. “Get out of here!”
He’s running his tongue around his mouth like it’s his toothbrush. He eyes me like he’s got something on me. “Why were you … Who was out there?”
I turn back to the window. Jack is gone. In that instant, everything I was doing just seems so stupid. What was I doing? I’m starting to blush, something I don’t want Hugo to see, or else he’ll know. He’ll know he’s gotten to me. So I grab my hairbrush and hurl it at him. “Get out!” I scream.
He ducks away and it smacks against the wall near the door, leaving a crescent-shaped dent in the plaster. “Ice Girl my ass. More like Psycho Girl,” he calls behind me.
Psycho Girl, I think, as I put on my new T-shirt and jeans, carefully looking out into the darkening forest every so often. But Jack never returns. Maybe he was never there in the first place. I’d hate for Hugo to be right, but this time, he probably is.
I’m lacing up my hiking boots when Angela comes into the room. Her hair is damp, so she must have showered. “Hi, Lucky Charms,” she says. “How’s your ankle?”
“Hi, um …” I think Angela spends most of her free time trying to think of new cereals to call me, but this time, I’m blank. “Trix?” There’s a cereal called that, right? “Much better.”