The In-Between

by Rebecca K. S. Ansari

  Jess began to leave, but Gus held up a hand to stop her. “No. Stay. This will only take a second, I promise.”

  “Okay . . .” Cooper looked back and forth between Jess and Gus. Traffic was at a near standstill, and exhaust fumes filled the air around them.

  “I know we said we’d stay apart, but I needed to find you guys . . . to say goodbye.”

  “What?” both Cooper and Jess said together.

  Gus pushed himself upright. “Yeah. The good news is that our whole staying-apart plan just got a lot easier. The bad news is that, apparently, I’m heading back home today.”

  Cooper was speechless. He had always known Gus would go back to Oklahoma, back to his parents, at some point. He was never planning to live with his grandmother forever. Cooper just hadn’t considered it could be so soon.

  “But what about school?” Jess said.

  “Yeah, you can’t leave midsemester,” Cooper said, even as he knew how ridiculous his words sounded, as if no one had ever left in the middle of the year. But his mind was spinning around the true reason for his distress: that he needed Gus here, he needed his friendship. He couldn’t lose someone important again. Instead he said, “I mean, have your parents even worked things out yet?”

  “I can’t really tell,” Gus said with a sad laugh. “But my grandma is done playing parent. It’s gonna be okay, though.” It sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as Cooper and Jess.

  “If your parents are never around, what do they care if you stay here? You could move in with us!” Cooper’s mom’s words echoed in his mind: I want to have someone to share happiness with. “If you go home, you’re going to be so . . . alone.”

  “Yeah. But it’s okay, Coop,” Gus said. “I wish I didn’t have to go either, but I’m glad I was here for a while, at least. That we actually got to know each other. It’s been a long time since . . . well, I don’t know if I’ve ever had friends like you guys.”

  Cooper’s throat tightened and his eyes burned. He nodded at Gus’s words, agreeing with them down to his toes.

  “So. I should go,” Gus said and took a few slow steps away. Jess ran over to him and enveloped him in a hug, which Gus returned fiercely, but Cooper found he couldn’t move. No words, no hugs. Every fiber of him refused to participate in this farewell.

  Gus appeared to understand. He offered Cooper a warm smile and small wave before turning and walking away.

  “So, is it over then?” Jess said quietly.

  It took Cooper a moment to understand what she meant. He had almost forgotten about Elena, about the impending disaster. And in that moment, he almost didn’t care. All he really wanted was for his friend to stay, no matter the risk.

  “This sucks,” Cooper whispered. He turned away and ran his fingers through his hair. This wasn’t the kind of hurt that made Cooper want to scream and rage over the river. Instead he felt drained. Empty.

  It was then that a crack, like the sound of a ball on a bat, shot through the air.

  The sound came from under their feet. Cooper’s and Jess’s eyes snapped downward.

  “What was that?” Jess asked, her voice thin. “Did someone get rear-ended or something?”

  Cooper didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Because he was looking toward the end of the bridge.

  At her.

  Coming toward them from the north, her white-blond hair whipping in the wind, was Elena. Her Vigilantes shield shimmered brightly in the afternoon sunlight. The red of the raven’s eye and the swords’ hilts glowed intensely.

  Jess gasped, “Oh no.”

  Both Jess and Cooper whipped around to see that, though Gus was far from them, he was still on the bridge, walking south.

  They were all here together. The time was now.

  Disaster had finally come for them.

  28

  “Run!” Cooper yelled as he and his sister took off after Gus. How had they let this happen? They had been safe for weeks by staying apart.

  Cooper looked ahead, hoping that Gus had already gotten off the bridge, but instead was horrified to see his friend walking back toward them.

  “Gus!” Cooper yelled. “Turn around! Get off the bridge!”

  Another CRACK shot out, and though there was no movement accompanying these sounds, it was followed by the slow sighing creak of metal bending against its will.

  Cooper streaked past car after car, realizing with dread that none of the people inside the cars, their radios or phones blaring, had heard the ominous sounds. So many vehicles, each firmly locked in rush-hour traffic. Could he knock on every window and convince all of them they were in great danger? How much time did they have?

  As if in response, a third loud report came, this time with a violent shudder.

  “Gus!” Cooper said as they met. “Turn around!” Both he and Jess tried to grab Gus’s arms, to pull him along with them. But Gus managed to shake them both off and continue his march toward Elena.

  Cooper pulled up to go back for his friend, but Gus yelled, “Keep going! Both of you, get off the bridge.” There was a calm, steady determination in Gus’s words. Cooper watched the distance between them grow as a few drivers opened their doors and stood up to assess the situation. Fear clutched at his chest. What was Gus trying to do?

  A plan hatched in Cooper’s mind. He held his ground and shouted, “Elena!” as another gut-twisting shudder rocked the bridge. “You don’t have to do this! All of us, all four of us, can get off this bridge. Please!”

  Elena had now reached the middle of the bridge, the spot where Cooper had spent so many hours, and Gus continued until he was right in front of her. Then Elena rested her hands on his shoulders and looked him in the eye, saying something only he could hear.

  “No one has to die!” Cooper howled against the wind. “Come with us now! We can all be safe!”

  Then Gus turned and looked squarely at Cooper. He drew his arm back and flung his journal in a high arc toward Cooper, its brilliant white pages fluttering like a hundred-winged butterfly. Cooper caught it, pages splayed.

  A chill tickled at the back of his neck, a rising sense of dread. Between his fingers, he saw the heading of each page.

  Dearest Mother,

  “Oh no,” Cooper uttered with full understanding, all fight in him now gone.

  Gus pulled at the sleeve of his sweatshirt, removing one arm and then the other. He lifted the garment up and over his head, and Jess gasped. Cooper didn’t know if he felt unsteady because of the shaking cement under his feet or from his world being knocked off its axis.

  Beneath Gus’s sweatshirt was a white V-neck T-shirt, with a golden emblem stitched to the chest. A raven clutching a banner.

  “No,” Cooper uttered, shaking his head. This couldn’t be the answer. It had been right in front of them all along.

  I’m heading back home, Gus had said. It’s gonna be okay.

  Of course.

  My sister’s out in the living world right now, on a quest, Elena had told him. Cooper had simply assumed Elena meant somewhere else, some other city, some other tragedy.

  Cooper felt lightheaded as so many memories began exploding in his mind: Gus alone at the bus stop. Gus sitting in no-man’s-land in row three. The moment Zack had sat down next to him in the lunchroom. Sorry to leave you alone like that.

  Ms. Dreffel had screamed at Cooper and Jess that day on her porch as if no one had entered her home in years. That was because no one had. Gus didn’t live at Ms. Dreffel’s. He lived down the hall from Elena, in that second messy bedroom, invisible to everyone but Cooper and Jess.

  Gus took Elena’s hand, a mirror image of Cooper and Jess.

  Two lives for two lives. It made so much more sense.

  Then Gus flickered. For a moment so brief Cooper wasn’t sure he saw it, a girl with long braids and a familiar smile stood beside Elena. She wore a heavy woolen coat and a kind expression. It was unmistakably Gus behind her eyes. Then the Gus that Cooper knew reappeared.

  Jess
cried out in surprise. Cooper shouted out to them one more time. “Please! Don’t do this. Both of you, come with us!”

  “This is the way it works,” Elena said calmly, her voice carrying over the distance unnaturally. “The only way it works.”

  “Go,” Gus said, nodding.

  “No . . . ,” Cooper said, the word dying on his lips. Another cracking sound filled the air, but it was accompanied with a flash that emanated from Gus and Elena themselves, bright as lightning. Both Cooper and Jess had to turn away, shielding their eyes, but when they peered again at Gus and Elena, there was a slight glow to their outlines. They appeared more solidly rooted where they stood, and their colors were more vivid, more saturated.

  Some people had begun to get out of their cars and run for the ends of the bridge, and they yelled at Elena and Gus to run as they did. Everyone could see the blond girl and the kind boy with the matching crests now. They would be found among the rubble. After.

  I’m glad I was here for a while, Cooper heard, and he didn’t know if Gus said it now or if Gus’s words from earlier were echoing in his mind. The final word was punctuated by the loudest bang yet, and the bridge quaked with such force that Jess had to reach out to the handrail to stay on her feet. The angle of the sidewalk tipped forward with a horrifying lurch. The sounds of car doors opening and the distressed cries of dozens of people, began to fill the air. The truth of what was happening was now undeniable.

  “This isn’t your future anymore,” Elena said, louder but still calm. “It’s ours.”

  With a hefty tug from Jess, Cooper started to move, but not before one last shared glance with Gus. His friend nodded gravely.

  Cooper turned and ran as fast as he could. Tears streamed down his face, fueled by terror, confusion, and heartbreak.

  The crumbling began. The northern edge of the bridge tore away from its land-secured moorings, ripping free as if it were a piece of notebook paper. The highway, along with the cars on it, began to fall.

  Jess and Cooper both screamed as they ran south, faster, faster. Cooper gripped the binding of the journal so hard it bent. Even as they closed in on the end of the bridge, it still appeared terrifyingly far away.

  The bridge collapsed in sections, one support beam at a time, into the river below. With each chunk, Cooper could hear catastrophe gaining on them from behind, the metal struts beneath them buckling and screaming more loudly with each step. He wanted to cover his ears and his eyes to shut out the horror of what was happening. Many people had made it off the bridge, but so many were still trapped. Why couldn’t he and Jess somehow save them all? Why did he deserve to live when so many others wouldn’t?

  “Faster!” Jess yelled. Cooper heard the segment of bridge directly behind them give way, the unearthly din of fracturing cement and wrenching beams only slightly louder in Cooper’s ears than his heaving breaths.

  We’re not going to make it! his mind screamed.

  Then, as if a strong wind had come up behind them, they moved forward faster than their legs should have carried them. Cooper felt like he had when he was learning how to ride a bike and his dad had gently placed a hand on his back to propel him forward. He and Jess reached the next bridge section at the moment that the section they’d been on fell away. This new slab, incredibly, began to shift upward, like a giant asphalt teeter-totter, until the tilt became so steep that gravity took over. Jess cried out, and Cooper felt certain his heart was going to burst from its bony cage as they fell and started sliding forward.

  They skidded thirty or so feet on the surface of the asphalt before coming to rest firmly against the front bumper of a car. There was a final, colossal crashing, splashing sound before an eerie quiet descended, made all the more notable by two distant car horns, blaring on the other riverbank.

  Just like that, it was over.

  They were sitting fifty feet below where they’d been moments earlier, the southern tip of this slab of the bridge having come to rest on the south bank of the river. A row of trees and a small frontage road stretched to either side of Cooper and Jess.

  “Are you okay?” Cooper said.

  Jess nodded, tears having cut tracks down her face. “I think so.”

  With bloodied hands and ripped pants, they stood. Their section of the bridge now lay bent in two, like a giant letter L, part aiming straight up for the sky, still buttressed by metal that hadn’t failed, and part flat on the river’s shoulder. A crumpled elbow of rubble lay between. The slab they had escaped seconds before the tilt now lay crumpled in the river.

  Jess offered Cooper a hand, and they each stepped carefully as they moved around debris and damaged cars toward solid land.

  “Are you kids okay?” a man asked, helping them down to a patch of grass. He had blood coming from a cut on his forehead.

  “Yeah. I think so,” Jess said again.

  Once they stood on the riverbank, Cooper and Jess walked far enough to the side to see the entirety of the disaster. What they saw defied belief. Much of the bridge was in the river, and cars were scattered all around like a child’s Matchbox set that had been thrown in a tantrum. The smells of motor oil, gasoline, and smoke clogged the air. A huge chunk of road lay mangled on the opposite riverbank, similar to theirs, and other sections still dangled from support beams at terrifying angles.

  Jess buried her face in Cooper’s side. He put an arm around her, wishing there was someone bigger yet, beside him, who he could bury his face against.

  The stillness lasted for a minute or so before sound and motion erupted everywhere. Shouting, sirens, crying.

  Cooper and Jess, however, remained stock-still, side by side, watching it all.

  Finally Jess said, “They’re gone, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah,” Cooper whispered. “They are.”

  Unidentified, all over again.

  29

  They hadn’t saved Elena. Or Gus.

  Elena and Gus were back in the In-Between now, either awakening to the next tragedy or . . .

  Cooper felt a hole open in his chest at the thought of both of their fate. He needed to believe, as he watched the dust and smoke rise from the rubble, that there was some way it was going to be okay. Maybe this time, that gilded door in the In-Between would unlock—maybe it would open and finally allow Elena and Gus through. Surely they had done enough to finally be granted passage to their parents in the Beyond.

  But why would this time be any different? Elena and Gus had done their job. Enter, die, return. And repeat. And repeat.

  Cooper and Jess had changed nothing.

  Jess slowly turned away from the scene before them and muttered, “We should go home.”

  Cooper took one last look at the void above the river that should have held a bridge, and a taste of bile filled the back of his throat. He felt heavy with the weight of failure, helplessness, and loss. Not only had he failed Elena and Gus, he hadn’t been able to save any of the others on the bridge. All those other people. It was staggering.

  They had only walked half a block before Cooper had to put his hands on his knees to steady himself against a wave of emotion that bent him in half. He cried. Unrestrained, unfettered, and unabashed. He cried for all the people who had still been on the bridge, for Jess and all she had been through, for Elena and the sacrifice she’d made again. For Gus, his best friend.

  Jess came to her brother’s side and put an arm around him. Cooper clutched his way up to her shoulders, wrapped his arms around her neck, and buried his face. He put some of this impossible weight on her. She held it just fine.

  Jess hugged him and gently smoothed the back of his hair with one hand, the way he had done for her so many times before. She didn’t say Shhhh, there there or It’s okay. It wasn’t okay. How could it ever be okay?

  “We were never in control of any of it, Jess,” Cooper said. The bridge, his parents’ divorce, Jess’s diabetes . . . there were endless aspects in his life where Cooper and Jess didn’t get a say. His knees buckled as these thoughts
threatened to crush him. Jess held fast.

  When he finally pulled away from his sister, she tipped her head toward Gus’s journal, still in Cooper’s grip. “I think we should read it.”

  “I . . . I don’t know if I can.”

  “He gave it to us for a reason.” Jess gently pulled Cooper down to sit on the curb and took the book. She held it on her lap and ran her hand over the cover that had been half worn away during its slide down the asphalt.

  Cooper didn’t stop Jess from opening the journal, but he turned away. “He knew all along. All this time, Gus knew all the answers.”

  Jess began flipping through the pages of the journal. “Cooper, all of these entries are like that letter you found, and look at this.” Inside the cover, against the binding, were the frayed remains of multiple pages that had been torn out. “It’s the same handwriting. It was never Elena at all. That letter was written by Gus.”

  Cooper nodded.

  Jess thumbed through dozens of entries, some detailing events as far back as the 1800s, from Peru, California, and Tibet. Japan, Canada, and Australia. Letter after letter detailed tragedies they had never found.

  “That day Gus said he was calling his grandma from our driveway,” Jess said slowly, the truth dawning, “he didn’t call Ms. Dreffel. He called Elena, didn’t he? He must have told her we were starting to figure things out, because she wouldn’t say a word to us after that. She slammed the door in your face and never sat on the swing again.”

  Gus had tied an intricate knot, and Cooper realized it was going to take them a long time to unravel all the threads. The phone call, the bus rides, their lunch in Mrs. Wishingrad’s room . . . So many clues to the truth they had both missed.

  Suddenly Jess smacked both hands down on the open pages. “Cooper, here’s one in England!” She quickly ran her finger over the text. “It’s from 1928. This must be the train.” She traced the lines with her finger as she read aloud, hopping to keywords and phrases in the narrative:

  “‘A bittersweet quest . . . I’d never been back home. Lamplighters, sidecar motorbikes, automobiles . . . Bristol Temple Meads Station!’ This is it, Coop! The train that crashed in Charfield was from Bristol.” She read on, now more thoroughly: