by Jess Redman
I was alone with her yesterday, with Milagros. She has her own room here at the hospital, and usually we’re all in it—me and Mom and Dad—but today Dad convinced Mom to have coffee with him in the hospital café. Mom wasn’t going to go—she never wants to leave Milagros—but she finally agreed when I told her I would watch her. I told her I’d keep my sister safe.
Milagros was sleeping in the incubator—that’s this plastic box with a cover to keep her warm—and there were all these machines around it. I was watching her, and she kept making these jerky movements. Her little arms would fly open and her whole body would sort of shudder, like someone was scaring her. And her little hands kept opening up and then squeezing shut like she wanted to hold on to something.
And I knew I wasn’t supposed to do this, but I felt like I had to—I opened one of the windows in the plastic cover. I put my hand in—it was clean, really clean, because they make you wash for two minutes when you come in. They even have picks for you to clean your nails.
And as soon as I put my finger next to her hand—she grabbed it! She grabbed my finger and she held on tight.
I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect a baby to be that strong. Especially not a baby who everyone says is so sick. Especially not a baby who everyone says is going to die.
And then she opened her eyes, so big and round and dark—and she looked right at me.
And I’d been waiting to feel it, I’d been waiting since she was born, and I felt it then. With just the two of us there, holding hands and looking at each other, I felt the heart-bird.
There’s going to be a miracle. I’m sure of it.
He had waited for the miracle.
But it had never come.
Unless it had.
The night was dark. The tree limb was black. Everything was quiet.
Wunder got up. He was going to see the witch.
Chapter 42
Wunder ran toward the woods. He ran as fast as he could, ducking behind cars and trash cans whenever he saw headlights coming his way. He didn’t want to be seen. He didn’t want to be asked questions. He didn’t want to explain himself. He just wanted to find out, once and for all, the whole truth.
It was a gusty night, and over the sound of his own footfalls Wunder could hear the long drawn-out rumbles of a brewing autumn storm. The wind seemed to push him forward. The thunder sounded like a low, faraway voice whispering words he couldn’t quite catch.
He didn’t hesitate when he reached the edge of the woods, but his breath caught in his throat as he plunged in. The wind was howling there, rushing down the paved path and through the now-bare trees, making everything not only shiver and wave, but shake and whip. His feet crunched over the debris that littered the path—dry leaves and displaced Spanish moss and whole branches that had come crashing down. And once he rushed past the live oak, once he was on the dirt trail, there were no leaves or vines blocking his view. He could see straight through to the DoorWay House.
Where, for the first time since before the funeral, the witch was not on the porch.
The house was dark. Not a single light was on. The windows that weren’t broken shone black, blank in the light of the waning crescent moon. Even the spirals on the house seemed darker than usual.
Wunder wasn’t running anymore. His breath came in shuddering gasps as he crept over to the house and then up the stairs to the porch. For so long, this place had seemed so wondrous to him—magical, sacred, otherworldly. It was the place where he had begun to believe, truly believe in miracles.
And now here he was, climbing the splintered, spiraled stairs of the DoorWay House in the dead of night. Here he was, with the stone of his heart cracking and splitting, then stilling and hardening. Here he was, having buried a sister and spoken with a witch. Here he was, having stolen and lied and spent hour after hour in a cemetery where the dead seemed gone, gone forever. Here he was, having learned the pure loves and deep sorrows of Branch Hill, having questioned the truths of life and death, having connected the dots of hundreds of souls.
And what did he believe now?
He didn’t know, he didn’t know.
But here he was.
At the door, he hesitated for a moment. Then he turned the doorknob.
Caw! A bird’s cry sounded over the noise of roaring wind and thrashing branches and rushing dead leaves. Caw!
Wunder stepped over the threshold and into the waiting pitch-black of the DoorWay House.
The vacillations of his heart only intensified inside the house. It made Wunder want to wrap his arms around himself, to try to hold himself together, but he couldn’t. He needed his hands, because there was no light. He moved forward with cautious shuffles, arms outstretched, the floor-to-ceiling spirals that usually sent him reeling hidden in the blackness.
He knew, only from memory, when the hallway ended. A few steps later, his hand hit something hard, and a noise, discordant and growling, sounded out. He spun toward the door before he realized what it was—the piano in the parlor. He put his hands out again. He kept on, farther and farther into the darkness.
In the dining room, he held on to the wooden table, letting it guide him to the doorway at its end. And it was there that he finally saw the light, just a pinprick at first.
Then a glow.
Then a radiating halo.
And in the center of it, the face of the witch.
Chapter 43
The witch was sitting at the table in the kitchen, a candle in front of her. In the flickering light, her hair looked gray. Her face looked crumpled and sunken, like a mummy’s, like a corpse’s.
“You have come,” she said in her faraway, low voice.
“I’m here,” Wunder said. His voice was high and quavering. Now that he was here, he was afraid of what might happen. Now that he was here, he wished he hadn’t come.
“You are the last one,” the witch said. “I have your invitation.”
She took an envelope from the white cloth that shrouded her and held it out to him with hands that seemed to tremble.
Wunder took the letter in both hands. It was the same as the others but with his name instead of someone else’s. He traced the tree on the wax seal, the DoorWay Tree. His fingers moved down the roots and then up the branches, to the flowers.
When he looked back up, the witch was watching him intently through her black eyes.
“You have something to say, Wunder,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes. Tell me what you have come to say.”
Wunder felt like he had when he went to see Mariah Lazar, certain that he was at the end, certain that he was about to learn everything he so desperately longed to know, everything he was so utterly terrified to know.
Only instead of asking question after question, he couldn’t seem to get even one out.
“If you’re not her,” he finally said, “if you’re not my sister, then you’re a terrible person. A horrible, terrible person. It’s not right to do what you’re doing.”
“What do you think I am doing?” the witch asked.
“I don’t know,” Wunder said. “I don’t know what you’re doing. Officer Soto said—my mother thinks—”
“Whatever your mother thought,” the witch said, “she does not think anymore. She has come to visit me twice now. In fact, she left just before you arrived.”
Wunder stared at her, stared straight through the light and into the dark of her eyes. “My mother? My mother came here?”
The witch nodded once. “Yes, yes, yes. She is very worried about you.”
“She’s not.” Wunder shook his head. “She’s not worried about me at all.”
“She is,” the witch said. “And she had many questions to ask.”
Questions. Wunder thought of his mother here, in this kitchen, and he realized what it meant. His mother, who had been so paralyzed by grief that she had hardly left her room in weeks, his mother who had fled the house shoeless at the sight of his sister’s crib—his mother
had been with the witch.
The witch who read the obituaries and spoke about the dead. The witch whose name was Milagros.
The witch who Faye and Davy were convinced was Wunder’s dead sister.
“What did you tell her?” His voice was suddenly loud, hard, the shakiness gone. “Did you tell her your name? Did you tell her who you are? What did you say to her?”
The witch smiled, a sad smile. “I gave her an invitation, and I answered what she was ready to ask. But some things—some things can never be said. Some miracles must be understood without words.”
Wunder felt the stone of his heart go horribly still at this, go cold at this, cold as the grave, cold as death.
“There are no miracles!” he cried, his words both a challenge and a plea to the witch to prove him wrong.
The witch moved back from the light. In the shadows, she pressed her fingers to her temples. “How to explain it?” Her voice seemed to have grown softer, farther away, but it was heavier too, weighed down. “All around us are miracles. Most are marvelous and wonderful and bright and so clearly seen. But not all. Because there can be miracles even in the midst of unfathomable sadness and anger, even in the depths of grief and confusion. And these, these are the hidden ones, the ones we must search for.”
“The minister isn’t searching for miracles,” Wunder told her. “Neither is Eugenia Simone. And neither is my mother.”
“Maybe they weren’t,” the witch said. “But after talking to you, they may feel differently. A long-loved wife recovering from an illness, even if only for a short time; a family saved from a fire; two tiny babies coming into this world to stay: You reminded so many in this town of their miracles, bright and shining. And you have also begun to show them the hidden miracles, the ones that are so hard to see, the ones that are so often forgotten: the never-ending memory of a cherished one; the hands of friends, new and old, reaching out to hold you up; the love you give, the love you receive, even when that love comes from someone you cannot see or hear. Wunder, even in death there are miracles, for the living and for the dead.”
“Then why did you want the DoorWay Tree?” Wunder demanded. “You said the town needed it. You said the dead needed it. If death is so miraculous, why does anyone need help? Why do you need help?”
The witch smiled her sad, sad smile. “Because sometimes all that we can understand isn’t enough. It is easy to see the beautiful in happy times. It is easy to reach for one another in the brightness. But so many things get lost, lost in time, lost in the dark spaces between sorrows. That’s what the DoorWay Tree is for, what it has always been for. The roots of the tree reach deep down into the earth, and the branches of the tree reach high up into the sky. The tree is a way to bring the hidden miracles into the light, to connect us, to show us what has been there all along.”
Wunder shook his head. “It’s just a tree,” he said. “Nothing more. What can a tree do?”
“All that it was meant to do,” the witch said. “The dead are not gone, Wunder. The living are not alone. This world is not all there is. There is more, yes, yes, yes, there is more. But sometimes we need help to see these mysteries, to reach beyond our sorrow, beyond time, beyond death. Just as a tiny hand reached out to you, reached out and held on so tight.”
When the witch said this, Wunder felt as if there was a pressure on his pointer finger. He looked down, sure he would find four small fingers and a thumb wrapped around it.
But there was nothing.
There was only the witch, watching him from across the table with her black eyes.
“Who are you?” he whispered to her. “What do you want with me? What do you want with us, with all of us?”
“Only to help,” she said. “Only to show you—” She stopped and pressed her temples again. She shook her head slowly, back and forth. “Maybe it is wrong, maybe it is more than I am allowed, but I couldn’t go on without doing this. You may not understand, but I want you to believe—I want you to believe that there are miracles.”
“I don’t,” Wunder said. He was holding on to his right pointer finger with his left hand, squeezing it as if to stanch blood flowing from a cut. The stone of his heart was so heavy and so cold and his thoughts were spiraling, and he didn’t understand, and it wasn’t enough. “I don’t believe in anything!”
He fled from the room, fled into the darkness. He could hear the witch behind him, calling his name—“Wunder, Wunder, Wunder”—but her voice had grown so soft that it was only a whisper, a faint sound that the pounding of his feet covered up.
He was going so fast that he crashed into the dining room table. He struggled back to his feet and kept going. Through the parlor and into the hall where, off balance, he careened into walls that he could not see.
Outside, the weather had grown even wilder, the winds gusting even more strongly. Rain poured down and thunder cracked, close now. If the bird was still cawing, Wunder could not hear it over the storm.
He ran past the DoorWay House sign and down the dirt trail. He ran down the paved path and back into the neat row of homes that bordered the woods. The streetlamps were on there. The world looked so ordinary.
He stopped under a light and he took out the envelope. The rain turned his name into a blurry gray puddle, then erased it entirely as he opened the flap and removed the letter:
“Behold! I tell you a miracle. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.”
Come to the highest point of Branch Hill Cemetery at sunrise on the second of November. In this place of remembrance and love, we will experience miracles, and we will all be changed. Together.
It was the same as the other letters. Exactly the same. Except for two words, scrawled at the bottom.
For Milagros.
Wunder put the paper, now soft and soaked, back into the envelope. He put the envelope into the pocket of his jeans.
He walked back on the main street. He didn’t care if anyone saw him.
When he got home, he climbed the stairs to the porch. He dragged the DoorWay Tree branch down the porch steps and to the side of the house. His bicycle was leaning there. The wagon was there too, the rope still hanging from its handle. His father had picked both up from the police station.
Wunder tied the wagon to the bicycle. Then he hoisted the branch into it, first one end and then the other.
Then he started to pedal back down the street.
Back toward the woods.
Back toward the DoorWay House.
Back to the cemetery.
Part Seven
THE TREE
Chapter 44
At the cemetery, Wunder flung open the black iron gates, then rode through them. He rode up the paved path, rode as far as he could, until he came to the base of Branch Hill.
Then he got off his bike. He pushed one end of the tree branch from the wagon, then lifted the other end. He started up the hill, dragging the limb along behind him.
He didn’t have a shovel. The shovel was in the duffel bag along with his father’s other tools that had never made it back from Benedict. The earth was hard at the top of the hill, but the rain had softened it. He pressed his hands into the mud and began to dig.
It was hard work because for every handful of dirt he scooped out, the rain washed some back in. But he didn’t stop. Down into the earth his hands went, down and down and down, until he had a hole that he thought would do.
Now the tree branch seemed even heavier. He wrestled one side into the hole, then put his hands under the other end and pushed up. But his fingers slipped and the branch came crashing to the ground.
He bent down again. He wrapped both arms around the branch and pulled it close. Then he lifted it up, all the way up this time, and he settled it down, the branch of the DoorWay Tree, down into the earth.
Into the earth that held the dead. Into the earth that held Florence Dabrowski and Quincy Simone and Avery Lazar and Faye’s grandfather. Into the earth that held the hundreds of loved ones of the people
of Branch Hill.
Into the earth that held Milagros, his sister.
He held the branch there, upright, reaching high above his head. He held on to it as tightly as he could, with all the strength he had, as the rain fell and the moon shone and the gravestones around him looked on.
And then he had to let go.
Because the branch began to spin.
It was like the world was on fast-forward, like time-lapse photography. The branch rotated, slowly, then faster and faster, shedding its sickly gray bark. Underneath, the wood was a vibrant, dark ebony. Underneath, the spirals that covered the wood were as white as ever, as bright and light as ever. Wunder watched as the branch spun. He watched as the spirals began to spin too.
The branch grew taller, thicker—a trunk. And then limbs unfolded, as if they had been inside the whole time, waiting to stretch upward. Branches sprouted from the limbs, twigs from the branches, until there was a tangle of wood, a maze of new growth, extending out and up, high, high, higher than high. And Wunder couldn’t see it, but he could feel the same thing happening under the earth, could feel the roots tunneling down deep, deep, deeper than deep.
The spirals spun.
And then came the flowers, bursting from the ends of the twigs. Pure white and startling in the darkness, they blossomed. Each one sent a jolt through Wunder, one after another, until the branches were covered, until the tree was full.
Then one flower fell.
It came floating down, coasting gently, as if on wings, petal wings, circling in tighter and tighter spirals until—
The flower landed right in Wunder’s outstretched hands.
The spirals stopped spinning. The tree stopped growing. It stood there, reaching up to the sky, reaching down into the earth. It stood there as if it had always been there, as if it was right where it was supposed to be.
Here among the dead.
Here in front of a living boy.
And suddenly Wunder understood.