by Jess Redman
It would take seven hours to get to Benedict by train and then seven hours to get back to Branch Hill, so he wouldn’t be home until after dinner. He hoped his note would keep his parents from worrying or doing anything drastic like calling the police.
Then again, he wasn’t entirely sure that either of them would realize he was gone.
It was still dark as he carefully wheeled his bike out of the shed. He had attached his red wagon to it the night before, with a duffel bag full of supplies stowed inside. Once he got to the street and started pedaling, the supplies clanked and clacked with every pedal rotation, a mobile percussion set.
Faye and Davy were waiting at the bike rack by the train platform. Train rules allowed them to bring their bikes on board, but they had decided against it. Any extra steps would attract more attention, and they wanted to be as discreet as possible.
Wunder unhooked the wagon, which he was bringing, from his bike. The duffel bag banged and rattled and grated.
“Wundie, what do you have in there?” Faye poked the bag. It banged and rattled and grated some more.
“Things we might need,” Wunder said. “We don’t know where the tree is going to be, so I brought a hammer, screwdrivers, a wrench, wire cutters, some netting, a shovel. Oh, and a saw, of course. Only a handheld one. I wanted to bring the chain saw—”
Davy let out a yelp of protest.
“Too big though,” Wunder continued, ignoring him.
“Oh, I wish you had brought it,” Faye said. “Especially if we get caught. Nothing says innocence like a chain saw in a gym bag.”
“We won’t get caught.”
“Listen to you, so positive,” Faye said.
“I am,” Wunder said. And he smiled, a small smile. Then wider and wider, until he was grinning. It felt strange. But it felt good too, like going outside after being cooped up for a long time, like breathing in fresh air.
“All right, all right,” Faye said. “That’s enough. Let’s go get on this train that we’re probably going to get thrown off of.”
They crossed one set of tracks and then went up the ramp to the train platform. Wunder led them to the very end, as far from the ticket booth as they could get. They already had wristbands and tickets. The witch had produced these from one of the squeaky-hinged kitchen cabinets on Friday night. Wunder had wondered how long she’d had them and how she had gotten them, but he hadn’t asked. He had asked about other things though.
“You know, there are rules about kids traveling on trains,” he had said. “We’re supposed to have a parent bring us to the station and talk to the station agent.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the witch had said. “It would be easier if you were older. What I am asking you to do, it will be difficult. But not impossible, I don’t think. Not impossible.”
They had to wait only a few minutes before their train pulled up, right on time. When the doors opened, they hurried on and found seats. The train car was empty.
The conductor came around a few minutes later. She squinted down at them.
“How old are you three?” she asked. She took their tickets and squinted at each one. Then she squinted right at Davy, who shrank back in his seat. Wunder thought he probably should have handled all the tickets, being the tallest of the three. Davy looked like a third grader. “How’d you get these tickets? And what’re you going to Benedict for?”
“My father lives there,” Faye spoke up. She pinned her bangs back and fixed the conductor with a deadpan stare. “My mother says he’s an adulterer, a heathen, et cetera, but he’s my father. Last time I threatened to curse him to the seventh level of Hades, so my friends are here with me this time. They’re a calming influence.”
The conductor blinked a few times. Her eyes shifted over to Wunder, who gave her his best calming smile. Davy pulled his knees up to his chin and studied the floor.
“Anything else you’d like to know?” Faye asked.
“Not a thing,” the conductor said. She scanned their tickets and handed them back. “But your heathen father better be at the station at Benedict to pick you three up. Those are the rules.”
When she left the train car, Wunder let out a sigh of relief.
“Great job, Faye!” he cried.
“Thank you, Wundie,” Faye said. “But we still have to sneak off this train. And please stop smiling like that. It’s very unnerving.”
“Okay, I will,” Wunder promised. But he didn’t stop.
“You look insane,” Faye told him. “Certifiable.”
“I don’t think so.” Davy uncurled himself. “I think he looks happy. He always used to look like that.”
“Well, then he always used to look insane,” Faye said.
Wunder laughed, and Faye jerked her head away from him, her expression alarmed. “Stop that,” she said.
“It sounds good,” Davy said.
“It doesn’t,” Faye said. “Don’t tell him that. It sounds maniacal, and you know it.”
Wunder kept grinning. All he could think was that they were doing what the witch had asked. They were getting the tree.
And then there was going to be a miracle.
The stone of his heart was rolling from side to side to side, waiting, anticipating.
Chapter 33
As the day wore on, the train filled and emptied, filled and emptied. Faye spent the time reading a large leather-bound volume entitled The Book of the Divine Prescriptions. She said it was a very secret, very ancient text that almost no one else had read, but it had a library sticker on it, so Wunder was pretty sure that wasn’t true. Davy had brought some comic books. And Wunder had The Miraculous—dirt-flecked, leather worn, thin and gutted.
“I haven’t seen that in a while,” Davy said when he noticed what Wunder was reading.
“I put it in my closet,” Wunder confessed. “I even tried to leave it in the graveyard. But it kept coming back to me.”
“Read me one,” Davy said.
Faye closed her book. “It’s impossible to concentrate on the paranormal with this incessant chatter,” she said. “So let’s hear one of your sunshine-and-sparkles miracles, Wundie.”
Over the past few weeks, Wunder had shared more from The Miraculous than he ever had before. And every time he shared a miracle, he felt how powerful they were. He saw how they comforted, how they connected. He knew the perfect one to share with his friends.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s one. Here’s one for Davy.”
Miraculous Entry #893
I realized today that I’ve never done an entry about Davy. Davy has been my best friend since we met in day care. As babies! How miraculous is that?
It’s true that I met my other best friend, Tomás, in more “miraculous” circumstances (see Entry #97). But there are all kinds of miracles. There are everyday miracles. And I guess I just realized that meeting your best friend before you can even walk is one of those.
“The one about my mom getting better is my favorite,” Davy said. “But that’s my second favorite.” He wasn’t biting his lip. He was smiling.
Wunder smiled back at him. “It’s one of my favorites too.” Then his smile faltered as he remembered again how just two days ago, he hadn’t been friends with Davy. “I really am sorry about how I was. Before.”
Davy shrugged. “It’s okay, Wunder. You were sad. I’m still your friend. I’ll always be your friend.”
“Wundie. David.” Faye’s voice was slow but very, very loud. “We get it.”
Wunder turned to Faye. “You’re my friend too, Faye,” he said. She flipped her hood up over her head. “I hope you know that. Without you, I would never have figured out about the memorial stone and I would never have gone to see the witch and I would never—”
“Wundie! Enough!” Faye yelled, her voice shrill and deafening even through the hood. “I’m your friend too. Now read us another miracle. Something about people coming back from the dead. I think we need some more information on how that traditionally works.”
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br /> So Wunder read about Lazarus. Then he read about Bodhidharma and about the daughter of the centurion and about a woman from Mississippi who was dead for three days and then sat up in her coffin at her own funeral and asked for some sweet tea. He read about holy men who were taken up into the sky and saints who climbed out of their graves and how all of nature was reborn each spring. Every time he thought there were no more dead-coming-back-to-life entries, he would turn the page and find another. As it turned out, The Miraculous was full of resurrections.
Faye and Davy were a good audience. They asked questions and gasped at the right parts and said, “Next!” after each one. And as Wunder read, he felt more and more like he used to, like the miracles he was telling them were true, like the miracles he was telling them were proof that the world was full of love and full of mystery, a mystery that he was a part of, a mystery that never ended.
Almost like he used to, but not quite. He knew now that wasn’t the whole story. He knew there was more: darker things, painful things. But for that time, on the train, on the way to get the branch from the DoorWay Tree, all he was thinking about was the miraculous.
Chapter 34
When they reached Benedict, they rushed off the train before the conductor could come and escort them to Faye’s father who, of course, would not be there. The tool-filled wagon clang-clanked as they raced through the station.
“We made it!” Wunder cried as they burst through the doors and into early-afternoon sunshine. The train station was located in what looked like the center of the town. There was a library and a post office and a large stone town hall in front of them, then lines of shops. There were a lot of people too, going in and out of these places.
“Great, we made it,” Faye said. “Now what?”
“Now,” Wunder replied, “we have to get the branch from the tree.”
“Obviously,” Faye said. “So where is it?”
Wunder shrugged, absolutely undeterred. “Let’s start looking.”
“Hey, Wunder?” Davy said.
Faye stared at Wunder. “What do you mean”—she grinned goofily and shrugged her cloak-covered shoulders—“‘let’s start looking’! You don’t know?”
“How could I know?” Wunder asked, a little less cheerfully. “I’ve never been here before; have you? Maybe I should have called the mayor of Benedict and asked? Or come yesterday and scoped things out for us?”
“Wunder? Faye?” Davy said.
Faye swung her cloak back and stuck her finger in Wunder’s direction. “This is a town, Wundie,” she said. “A whole town. And we’re looking for one little tree.”
“It’s not little,” Davy said.
“How would you know, David?” Faye demanded, whirling toward him.
“Because,” he squeaked, hunching into himself. Keeping his arms tucked by his sides, he pointed one finger. “Look.”
Davy was pointing past the town hall, past the shops, at the very end of the main street. There was a small white building there—a church, Wunder realized, with a white bell tower and black doors. And just behind it—and above it—was something he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen right away.
A DoorWay Tree.
Davy was right; it wasn’t little, not at all. It was tall—toweringly, sky-scrapingly tall. And its wood was black, as black as the woods on a moonless night, as black as the witch’s hair, as black as death. It didn’t have leaves, not one. But what it had were thousands and thousands of bright white blossoms.
Wunder started toward the tree, pulling the wagon behind him.
But he had gone only a few steps when the doors of the church swung open and people began streaming out.
“Oh, perfect,” Faye said. “There are a million people here. What are we supposed to do? Lumberjack it up in front of a live audience?”
“We’ll figure something out,” Wunder told her. “It’s going to be fine.”
Faye frowned at him. “I’m really glad you’ve found your can-do attitude again, Wundie, but this is a serious problem.”
“As soon as everyone leaves the church,” Wunder said, “this whole place will be emptied out and we can get to work.”
Davy trembled. Faye waved her gloved hand in irritated dismissal.
They found an out-of-the-way bench on the side of the library. They could see the church from there. And they could see the tree. Wunder was too excited to get out The Miraculous again, and Faye was too grumpy and Davy too tense to listen anyway. So they sat and watched and ate the peanut butter sandwiches and apples that Wunder had packed.
The afternoon ticked away, and temperatures began to drop. Faye and Davy took turns warming up in the library, but Wunder stayed on the bench. He didn’t want to miss their chance. A steady stream of people continued coming and going—to get groceries, to visit the shops that sold things like ice cream and used books and handmade art. Benedict, it seemed, was a livelier place than Branch Hill.
“We’re just going to have to wait until it gets dark,” Wunder said as sunset grew closer and closer.
“Dark?” Davy shook his head in disbelief. “We’re going to chop down a tree in the dark?”
“Not a tree. A branch, David,” Faye said. “And we don’t have any other choice.”
“The last train to Branch Hill leaves at 8:15,” Wunder said. “As long as we make that, we’ll be okay.”
“We won’t get back to the station until three!” Davy cried. “Do you know what my mother will do to me if I come home at three in the morning?”
Wunder didn’t know exactly, but he knew it wouldn’t be pleasant. Mrs. Baum—cancer survivor, attorney-at-law, marathon runner—was not a woman to be trifled with.
“Call her and tell her you’re staying at my house,” Wunder suggested.
“She doesn’t know where I am now,” Davy said. “She’s probably already so angry. If I call her, she’s going to go crazy!”
“Lucky for me,” Faye said, “my mother probably isn’t worried at all.”
Wunder wasn’t sure what his parents would be thinking. He wondered if his mother had come out of her room today. He wondered if his father had been angry that he had skipped church yet again. Maybe they were relieved that he was gone. Maybe they had closed the door of his bedroom so they wouldn’t have to see his bed or Milagros’s crib, so they wouldn’t have to think about either of them. Maybe that was what they wanted.
“It’s going to work out,” he said loudly. “We’ve made it this far. We’re going to do it.”
Chapter 35
At seven thirty, it was dark and cold and the town of Benedict was finally still. The stores had been closed for a few hours. An evening service ended and churchgoers headed home. Soon after, the lights inside the church turned off.
“Now!” Wunder said, jumping up from the bench.
He half ran down the block of shops, pulling the wagon as smoothly as he could to keep the clanging to a minimum. He could hear Faye’s cloak flapping in the wind behind him, and he suddenly wished he had one of his own, if only for moments like these when things were dangerous and wild and exciting. A cloak, he was sure, would amplify those feelings at least a hundredfold.
At the back of the church, they came face-to-face with the DoorWay Tree for the first time.
The tree was inside a black wrought-iron fence. The fence enclosed a small plot of land that was dotted with gleaming marble and rough gray stone and glistening gold and shining silver and one statue of a majestic white bird.
The tree was in a graveyard.
“Of course,” Wunder said aloud. “Where else would it be?”
The fence was short enough that Wunder was able to throw his bag to the other side and then scramble over himself. Davy needed a boost, and Faye’s cloak got stuck and nearly ripped, but soon they were in the graveyard.
Despite its towering height, the DoorWay Tree’s branches came down low. They spread out almost as wide as the tree was tall, swooping down, ambling back up, twisting and tangling in o
ne another. The tree was a maze of limbs, a labyrinth of winding ways that finally joined together at the great, gnarled trunk.
Even so, the branches were too high for Wunder to reach from the ground.
“I should have brought a ladder,” he said in frustration after trying and failing to climb the trunk for the tenth time.
“Too late for shoulds, Wundie,” Faye told him. “Climb on David’s shoulders.”
“What? No!” Davy cried. “Wunder’s bigger than me! And I don’t want him using a saw above my head!”
“You think I do?” Faye replied.
Wunder kept trying. They couldn’t have come this whole way for nothing. There had to be something they could do. But the fence wasn’t close enough to the tree, and the eaves of the church roof were too far from it, and his fingertips barely brushed the lowest branch when he jumped.
“Use that gravestone!” Faye shrieked suddenly.
“Shhh!” Davy shushed her.
She was pointing at the bird statue. It was white and shining in the starlight, almost glowing. It seemed ethereal to Wunder. It seemed holy. There was no way he could stand on it.
“It’s the only way,” Faye said. “The dead person won’t care.” She bent down and shone her flashlight on the stone. “Ashley Bride will understand. We need this branch!”
“But the bird,” Wunder said.
“The bird?” Faye cried. “The bird? You think the bird cares? If anything, the bird wants you to do this! It was that deranged bird dive-bombing you that started all this anyway, right?”
And somehow, that was exactly what Wunder needed to hear. The bird was on his side. Ashley Bride was on his side. He was going to do this.
He climbed onto the outstretched wing tips of the bird statue. From there, he could reach one of the low limbs of the DoorWay Tree. He swung up onto it, and then wriggled backward until he came to a forked place. The branches were thick there. He hoped he could cut through one.
“Hand me the saw,” he said.
“Be careful!” Davy had his hands pressed to his mouth as Faye passed it up.