by Katie Henry
TO: Dr. Andrew M. Kimball, Lisa Holley Kimball, Em&m
FROM: Ellis Kimball
SUBJECT: The Things That Shall Be Hereafter
I’m safe. That feels like the first thing I should say. I’m sorry. That feels like the most important thing I should say. I’m sorry for using the emergency credit card. I’m sorry for escaping Utah. I’m sorry for the 16.5 years of worry. I know, from the moment I was born two months early, I’ve worried you.
I had to. That feels like the truest thing I could say. We all have choices, we all have agency and choices and the freedom to make them. But sometimes, something bigger than us pushes our hand. I feel like I had to. And I believe in the things I feel.
Em: It’s all going to be all right. I promise. I’ll see you soon. Keep yourself spinning.
Dad: I don’t think Mom found my secondary stash of supplies. It’s in the basement, in the clothes storage, behind my baptism dress. And I want you to know—I’ve needed you just like you needed me.
Mom: It’s okay that you don’t know how to help me. It’s okay that you don’t understand me. Sometimes I don’t understand myself, either. I’m starting to. We’ll do it together.
I love you. I hope I spend the rest of this short life by your side, and eternity, too. I changed my mind—that’s the most important thing I can say. I love you.
—Ellis
My mouse cursor hovers above the send button. I shut my eyes and listen to every familiar sound. The squeak of shoes on the beige floors. The rattle of a book cart down the hallway. The swish of turning pages. The thump of my heart beneath my ribs, beneath my skin, vulnerable and thin, but powerful all the same. Endlessly shedding and regenerating and growing. The deep layers of your skin—with your scars and freckles and birthmarks—stay with you for life. But that first layer, the one that brushes up against the world around you, that one replaces itself every twenty-seven days. Every twenty-seven days, you’re inside a new skin. Every twenty-seven days, you get a new chance.
In this skin, I made choices, good ones and bad ones, and some I’m not sure about yet. In this skin, I kissed a boy and broke my parents’ hearts and broke out of Utah. And if this is my last skin, well. I’m glad it was mine.
I hit send.
Twenty-Six
BY THE TIME I reach the trailhead, the sun’s already set. I should have gotten here earlier. I shouldn’t have spent as much time writing my final message to my family. But I owed it to them. I owed them something. It’s just that now, I have to climb this hill in the dark.
The snow is still falling, but it’s not sticking. The flakes are cold as they hit my face, but melt nearly the second after. I can’t see the ground all that well, but there’s no crunch under my boots, just slippery dirt. It’s wet snow, “bad snow,” my grandpa Jack would say, because it’s not good for skiing. It’s heavy, but it’s practically sleet.
My feet are damp, half from the snow, half from the effort of scrambling up the hill, and I wish I had wool socks. I wish I had my headlamp, the new one. With the sun down, I can barely see my own feet. At least I have a flashlight. I don’t know how Hannah’s going to get up this trail without one.
I stop, for a moment, my chest seizing in a vise. What if she doesn’t come? What if I’m up there all alone, and she never comes? She has to have seen the weather. She wouldn’t leave me. She’ll be there. She has to be there.
Just thinking about being alone at the lookout floods fear through my muscles. There are mountain lions in these hills. Years ago, one wandered into downtown and the cops shot it. In true Berkeley fashion, a funeral was held for the cat.
You could be eaten by a mountain lion.
You could be crushed by a storm-damaged tree.
Just because I hear it doesn’t mean it’s right. Just because I hear it doesn’t mean I have to listen.
You could fall off the side of this trail and smash your head open, and that’s where you’ll die. No one would find you. You’d be all alone.
There’s only me and the snow, me and the wind, me alone with myself and all my fears.
You’ll never be rid of me. I’ll always be here. You’ll always hear me.
I’ve only been given one body. I’ve only been given one brain, miswired and odd and mine. But my voice—not just what spills over my vocal cords and into the world, but the things I say to myself—that’s something I get to choose. I’ll always hear it, but that doesn’t mean I’m doomed to hear what I’ve heard before. There are so many words in this world. I can learn new ones.
I’m at a standstill now, blinking into the darkness ahead and the darkness behind me. Should I turn around? I could find my way back. I could find my way back home and hug my parents one last time. I could hold Em’s hand as the world spins off its axis. I could end life as I’ve known it in the warmth and comfort of the house I was born in, with the people who brought me into life. Who protected me. And who loved me, all of them, the best way they knew how. Or I could keep walking into the cold unknown.
I walk forward.
The higher I climb, the darker the sky gets, and the wetter the ground becomes. I should have paid more attention, when Hannah and I were here before, to the terrain. But I didn’t think I’d be walking alone. I’m careful as I go, sliding my feet more than lifting them. My hands are ready to catch me if I fall, because I desperately don’t want to. It’s amazing how much you notice when there’s nothing to see. I hear the wind whipping through the trees and shrubs. It’s harder now than when I was downtown, and it bites at my exposed ears and sends dirt and snow flying up to sting my eyes. I smell the eucalyptus grove as I pass through it, then nothing but cold air. I feel each patch of wet grass, each jagged rock, each stone groove in the trail, and I stick to the grooves as much as I can. They don’t slip as much under my shoes.
And I sense, rather than see, that I’m getting closer. The light is better, so the trees must be thinning. There’s one more turn, one more little incline before the trail flattens. Before the bench. Before the place where the light comes in. As I make that last turn and struggle up that last incline, I sense, rather than see, that I’m not alone.
“Hannah?” I whisper into the blackness, more a prayer than a call. When I round the bend, I turn to my left, and the world is bright again. All of my city is stretched before me, sparkling with light, house lights and streetlights and car lights moving down Broadway. All of Berkeley is illuminated. All of Berkeley is still there. San Francisco is hazy in the distance, but I can just make out the tops of the towers. San Francisco is still there, too.
At the cliff’s edge is a person in shadow, long hair escaping from a pulled-up blue hoodie, staring out across the icy bay.
“Hannah!” This time it is a call, a shout across the wind.
She startles and spins around, but I still only see the vaguest outline of her body. She takes a step forward, then I do, then we’re both running, colliding with each other in the dark.
“You came,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I say, my hand clutching the cotton fabric on her arms. She’s not wearing enough; where’s her coat, where are her gloves? “It’s snowing.”
“Yeah,” she says back.
“I didn’t know if you’d be here.”
I feel her muscles quivering under my hands. “I knew you would.”
I let her go, though I don’t want to, and fumble in the emergency backpack from school. I paw around until my fingers latch on to something thin, crinkly, and lifesaving. I pull it out and drape it around Hannah’s shoulders.
“What—?” I feel her fingers grab the edges.
“Space blanket. Pull it tighter.” It’ll keep her warm for now, but not forever. “You didn’t bring a coat.”
She sighs, a huff of warm breath. “I had to make a break for it.”
“Yeah, me too,” I laugh.
“How did you get over here? The bus?”
“A taxi. Then a nonstop flight from Salt Lake to Oakland. Then another ta
xi.”
“What?”
I explain, in very abridged form, my exile to and escape from Utah.
“I can’t believe it,” she says, her hair flopping onto my shoulder as she shakes her head. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“You knew I’d be here,” I say. “You didn’t think seven hundred miles was going to stop me, did you?”
She squeezes my arm, and that’s answer enough. I look out at the city. “Oh,” I say, and my breath hangs in the air like fog. “It looks like a Christmas tree. All lit up.”
Hannah whips her head around, and I realize I mentioned Christmas. Just like she said I would.
“You told me you lied,” I say. “You said you lied, but it’s snowing.”
“The dreams were real,” she tells me. “That’s what I was trying to tell you, before you left. I didn’t lie about the dreams. Just what they meant.”
“What did you think it meant?”
“Every time I woke up—” The wind howls and whips at our clothing. “Every time I woke up, I knew that I had to make it here. To this hill. When it snowed. If I came to the right spot, his favorite stop, if I was here . . .” I hear the tears, rather than see them on her face. “He’d come home.”
“Danny?”
She nods. My heart aches. It was never the apocalypse. It was never the end of the world. Hannah told me what I wanted to hear, and I heard it. Hannah told herself what she wanted to hear, too. That her brother’s safety was within her control. That if she gave up her possessions, or stopped cutting her hair, or gave up her days and nights looking for him, that she could protect him. This was just one more cosmic bargain she’d made with the universe. Nothing more.
“The other things—the city, the red sky, I don’t know,” she goes on. “They never felt real. I never really thought they would happen. But you were real. I saw you in my dream, and then I saw you in the real world, and I knew I’d see you here.” She squeezes my hand. “You were the only real thing.”
Hannah didn’t make it snow. She can’t control the weather, that was going to happen regardless. It was inevitable. But us being here wasn’t. I squeeze back, as a sudden thought strikes me.
“What if this only happened because you saw it?”
“What?”
“You saw us here, in your dreams, together. You thought it was fated to happen, that nothing could change it. But that meant you went looking for me, and found me, and I believed you. You created a way for it to happen, and that’s the only reason it did, because you already believed it would.” I grip her hand harder. “What if we made it happen?”
Just then, the wind picks up, sending freezing dust and snow into the air. Hannah coughs, and I shield my face.
“Jesus!” she yells, then coughs again. We huddle against each other, clinging to one another. The gales are hard enough, heavy enough, that it feels like we could be catapulted over the edge of the lookout point. I force my eyes open to see how close we are to the cliff drop. I look out toward the water, and my heart stops.
“Hannah!” I yell, dirt and snow in my mouth. She keeps her face turned away, so I shake her shoulder. “Look!”
Her head turns, and she must see what I see, because she gasps. The wind is churning the snow as it falls, and picking up what hasn’t melted. The world in front of us is white and gray, all sleet and sand. For a moment—just one singular moment, from one singular perspective—San Francisco disappears into the storm.
Hannah and I are still clutching each other, half blinded, when the wind falters. Across the bay, a tower spire pokes through the clouds and the snow. As the gusts diminish, slowly, bit by agonizing bit, the city comes back into view. Still clouded, still difficult to see. But there.
Beside me, Hannah is still gasping. She’s gulping for breath, over and over, like she can’t get air in her lungs.
“It’s still there,” I say, relieved and terrified all at once. “It’s still there.”
Hannah says nothing. I can’t see the expression on her face, but I know she just saw a dream transform into reality, then disappear into the ether just like San Francisco was supposed to.
“It’s still there,” she agrees, barely audible.
We’re together. We’re at the place where the light comes in, on the day one becomes two and two becomes one, and we saw San Francisco vanish. We’re here. The world is still here.
I grasp for the answer, struggle for an explanation, but there is only cold, black air and a world that continues to spin, unchanged. Hannah’s dreams were real, but the apocalypse wasn’t. Her cosmic bargain wasn’t, either. But the dreams were real; the dreams became reality and I don’t understand why. I point my flashlight all around us, searching desperately for another clue, another fact, something to help this make sense because it doesn’t make sense.
I shine my flashlight to our right, close to the sloped edge of the overlook. My vision snags, and my heart plummets into my wet shoes. My flashlight has landed on a large, prickly bush, just a short slide down the hill.
And a foot.
I stumble back, half screaming, half choking. My hand fumbles in the dark and finds Hannah’s. I latch myself on to her freezing-cold hand and squeeze so hard she yelps.
“What?” she says. “What’s wrong.”
“There’s—” My heart is threatening to launch itself out of its rib cage, my mouth is dry, adrenaline shooting through my veins. “There’s a person.”
“What?” she says again.
“In the bush, in the bush, there’s—”
I shake my flashlight at the spot to direct her eyes. Now Hannah squeezes back. “Oh God.”
The light stays on the foot. It doesn’t move. Hannah slides her own foot toward it, tentatively.
“Hey,” she calls out. “Are you okay?”
My eyes go wide. I pull her closer. “What are you doing?”
“He’s not moving,” she whispers. “If he wanted to kill us he would have.”
“You don’t know that. You do not know that.”
“He could be hurt.” She takes a step forward. Then another. I don’t let go of her hand, and she doesn’t let go of mine, so she’s dragging me with her on each step. I keep the flashlight ahead, though my hands are shaking, and we both nearly slip on a large patch of ice right at the edge. I keep the flashlight on the foot, but as we peek down the slope and into the bush, the glow expands. There’s a foot, then the tattered edge of jeans. Then a dirty hand with dirtier fingernails across a thigh. A red-and-black coat, a sweater under, a dark beard. Finally, a face, a whole person. Young. Male. Unmoving.
Hannah screams. I’m confused, because he still hasn’t moved. There’s no reason to scream. She drops my hand and slides down into the dark. I drop the flashlight, startled, and scramble to retrieve it. When I find it and focus it back, Hannah is on her knees, her entire body shaking like the trees in the wind. I lower myself down the wet, snowy slope, still sensing a trap, but not about to abandon her. One hand is on my flashlight, the other on a branch. The slope isn’t that steep, but it’s slick beneath my feet, and I don’t want to fall. She’s stopped screaming, but she’s now crying hysterically, and I still don’t understand why until she chokes out a word. One word.
“Danny.”
Oh God.
Oh my God.
I sink down next to her. Hannah’s got her hands on his shoulders, and she’s shaking him like a rag doll.
“Stop.” I reach out to her, but she bats my hand away. “Stop, Hannah, stop, he could have a—” I don’t even know what he could have, but I know you’re not supposed to shake an unconscious person. “Is he breathing?”
Hannah bursts into fresh, panicked sobs at that. My fingers feel numb and swollen, but I manage to snake my hand around hers. Danny’s got one hand clutched to his chest, a crumpled piece of paper in his fist. I start to shove his arm away so I can check his breathing better, but as I do, my flashlight illuminates the paper.
It’s orange. Day-Glo o
range.
“Our flyer,” I whisper to Hannah, but I don’t think she hears me. “He found our—” He’s here because he saw a flyer. He’s here because he alone, other than us, knew what Hannah’s prophecy meant. The place we were going, the place where the light comes in. He’s here because he wanted to protect Hannah.
I shake my head. It doesn’t matter why. It will later, but not now, because right now, he’s the one in need of protection. My fingers grasp for his coat buttons and undo them. I lean forward, then recoil at the smell. He clearly hasn’t bathed in a while, and even his sweater feels slick with sweat. Pull it together! I scream at myself, because Hannah won’t, and someone needs to. Who cares what he smells like? Your ancestors crossed the prairie in handcarts. They forded flooded rivers. They battled locusts. Put your shoulder to the wheel, Ellis.
I hold my breath and lean in, my hand searching for a heartbeat. I find it, the thumping matching mine, which isn’t good, because mine’s too fast. I feel the rise and fall of lungs, too. He’s breathing. His body is pumping blood. He’s still here.
“He’s breathing,” I croak out to Hannah. “Okay?” I feel light-headed for a moment and brace myself with a hand on the grass. It comes back wet. Not like snow. Thicker, stickier—
I direct the flashlight at my own hand. It’s red.
“Oh,” I breathe out. “Oh no.”
“What?” Hannah cries.
“He’s bleeding. We have to find where he’s—”
He must have slipped, at the edge. Fallen. Hit something.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” Hannah’s repeating over and over, clutching at Danny’s clothes.
I shake her shoulder. I need her help. “Hannah.”
She only sobs.
“Hannah!” I shake her shoulder once more, but she’s beyond hearing. She has to snap out of it. I don’t know what to do. She has to tell me what to do. I waste precious seconds staring at her helplessly before realizing: Hannah can’t tell me what to do. If anything’s going to happen, it’ll be because I did it myself.