by Lexa Hillyer
He wondered who the girl was, the one still lurking in the darkness beneath the bleachers.
One of the Malloys? It couldn’t be Lilly—he’d just seen her, and she had definitely headed the other way. But possibly one of the other two.
Boyd’s form slowly moved aside as he walked, presumably, toward the dance.
Patrick heard the girl—sniffling, he thought now. Crying, maybe.
He should go to her, say something. But what would he say? It wasn’t his place to get involved.
Through the bleachers, he noticed movement—blond hair, shockingly bright between the silver slats of seats.
She emerged, but he couldn’t tell which one she was.
“Wait,” she called out. “Wait for me.”
Boyd stopped and turned in the distance.
Neither of them noticed Patrick, but they could have, if they were looking. Once again, he felt invisible. Within and without.
Boyd put his arm around the girl—the Malloy—and they walked back toward the well-lit school, leaving Patrick alone in the darkness of the vast football field.
The wind stung his bare arms as he rode home. He parked the motorcycle and removed his helmet, then entered the house quietly, assuming Liam and Diane would be asleep. He was startled instead to find Liam wandering the downstairs hallway in his pajamas.
“Uncle Liam. Is everything okay?”
His great-uncle stared at him blankly, then shook his head, turning and ambling back to the bedroom.
Later, up in his attic room, lying there in just his boxers, with the covers strewn off the side of the bed, Patrick couldn’t sleep. His body throbbed, on fire. He kept thinking again about Lilly. How she looked in that dress. It was only a physical thing, he told himself. Lust. Irrational and meaningless.
The mind was just a pathetic servant to the body. Maybe he’d read that somewhere too.
He rolled over. Picked his jeans up off the floor, reflexively reaching into the front right pocket for the item he’d been carrying around with him for days—the ring. The reminder that he was someone. That he would be. The ring was the start of his new life.
It was then that he remembered he’d put the ring in his jacket pocket, and he’d given his jacket to Lilly.
How could he have made such a stupid blunder? He felt bewitched, somehow, like she’d known about the ring, had cast a spell causing him to hand it over, which was of course impossible.
Dammit.
Outside the small window, the stars blinked innocently. He lay back, trying to ignore the clanging in his chest—an inexhaustible desire for something he couldn’t name . . . or maybe he could name it, he just couldn’t have it.
HOMECOMING
BY KATHERINE MALLOY
Sometimes what’s in front of us seems so far:
the end zone evasive as a horizon line,
lightning bug—a distant planet—winking in a jar.
I saw you every day, yet you couldn’t be mine.
And then it happened: at last I got my chance.
Arriving in a group, we splintered off alone,
to wander the crowd at the high school dance,
celebrating the football team coming home.
We went outside, and you invented some reason
to tell me the story of a girl gone wild,
who, in the poem by Kinnell called “Two Seasons,”
felt “weary of being mute and undefiled.”
Pressed up against the bricks, it came: the kiss.
And what I lost then, I never thought I’d miss.
Chapter Ten
Now
FEBRUARY 7
MOST FAIRY TALES ARE TOLD in threes.
Three parts: beginning, middle, and end.
Three suitors, three wishes, three nights. Three sisters.
A princess waiting to be awakened by a kiss before the end of three full moons.
Old Liam Donovan began to sketch, his dark pencil swishing across the page in a soothing motion. He liked the sound of it: one of the few things that kept his mind and hand steady.
Most people didn’t know that the first tales of Sleeping Beauty, the original versions of the story, were violent and strange. He drew an ear.
A maiden, taken in her sleep, only to awaken after birthing twins, who, desperate and hungry, sucked the poisonous flax from her fingertips and saved her life. A king tormented by her memory—the unconscious lover who haunted him still—muttering “Talia sun and moon” in his sleep.
Liam knew there was something important in all this, but he couldn’t name it, couldn’t quite organize the instinct into coherence. A television chattered on in another room, like a lost person, mumbling.
He drew. Who was he drawing? The young prince, the one who killed the king, not realizing the king was his true father? Or the girl, waking up alone and dazed, helpless, her fate forever changed by a night she couldn’t remember?
He put down the pencil to stretch his hand. Peeled back the metallic lilac wrapping on a chocolate egg. Easter candy, though it was only February. The crocuses had not yet poked up through the soil.
He had a memory—they came to him this way now, fluidly, in the middle of thoughts, interrupting his daily activity, placeless, sometimes formless, distracting. They left him disoriented. An Easter egg hunt. Dublin. The woman with the lovely eyes and teacherly skirt clapping along as he and his university friends performed a skit . . . some old Irish drinking songs, too. The egg hunt had been a tradition at UCD. She was a Polish American girl, traveling on fellowship. She wore a crown of flowers.
“I’m Diane,” she’d said.
“Diana, the huntress,” he’d replied. The goddess who became trapped in a tree. No. That was Daphne. Diana was Apollo’s twin, not his lover. The virgin who ran after deer under a full moon.
The goddess of birth, who swore never to marry.
Diane had made him forget all about Sarah, his first heartbreak, and the proposal she had rejected.
The ring she’d given back to him—a pale sapphire, like her eyes had been.
He sketched.
There was something else. The princess in the woods. The forest of high brambles that surrounded her sleeping form. The king who couldn’t forget her. Her long, beautiful hair.
Sarah. The first cut was always the deepest. He was the king who still couldn’t forget, the king who muttered her name in his sleep: Talia, sun and moon. The king who wanted to save her. Had wanted to make things right.
But the real world was much like the world of early fairy tales—full of violence and strangeness, accidents and lost chances.
He shaded in the dark eyes.
It was late. He must go to bed. Or it was early, he wasn’t sure, winter sunlight streaking through the curtain, but he was tired, in need of a nap. He stood up at his desk, lightheaded. It was possible he would fall. He wanted to cry for help, but to whom would he call out? And where would he be taken? Where was he, even now—what kingdom had he entered? He didn’t belong here: a scattered old man with wrinkled hands. A deposed king. Words and names—he used to know so many of them.
He looked at the notebook before him and didn’t understand what he had drawn, or why.
The face of a wolf, shadowed and fierce, stared back at him.
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Now
FEBRUARY 8
THERE’S AN ACRE OR TWO of rangy meadow over by Meetchum’s Farm on the outskirts of Devil’s Lake, all overgrown with goldenrod. Careful: the occasional corpses of broken rakes and harrows, stained with rust, come underfoot. Locals call it Hammer Head Field, though as far as anyone knows, it never used to have a name, until the story of the girl.
There’s rarely a breeze out there—in summers the weeds stretch up, airless, eerily still, like an old painting.
That’s where she was found, eight years ago: the girl with the hammer wedged deep into her skull. A shattering. No one seems to remember the girl’s name or exact age�
�she’d been eleven, or nineteen, on one periphery of teenhood or another. But everyone has heard of it. Of her.
There wasn’t even any story to it—that’s the strangest part, really. It’s all punchline: her body had been found like that, in the middle of the field, and the local investigators never figured out who did it. No suspects, no motive. She might have been fleeing a pursuer who knocked her out mid-sprint, or maybe she was dragged there and then done in with purpose, like the bang of a gavel—X marks the spot.
Death had always seemed like that to Tessa: anonymous and abrupt, crude in its specificity. It happened in the open but was smothered in silence, stifling as a hot day in August. It came without any good reason.
Then it walked away and never turned back.
Some people believe there’s a heaven. But if there is a heaven, Tessa never thought it’d be way up in the clouds or whatever—not if you knew anything at all about space, which is full of rock and fire, chemistry and constant motion . . . not a bunch of human souls floating around carrying their eternal peace like a scratch-off lotto ticket.
No. If there were a heaven, it’d exist in the mist that sat heavy right over Hammer Head Field in late fall, ghost white and damp and stuck revisiting the world we know, coveting the shape of things we once could touch, tracing those long ugly stocks of heather and stitch grass.
Think about it: no one wants to die, except to end great suffering, and even then, rarely. Most of us are never ready to let go. When Tessa’s grandmother lay in her sickbed those last weeks of her life, that was what she’d told them, all anxious and childlike: “I’m not ready.”
Tessa couldn’t forget that look of surprise in her nan’s eyes, as if it was all just a misunderstanding, like when someone grabs your order at the Starbucks counter by accident. “Excuse me, but that one was mine!”
Except instead of an iced latte, it’s your life, your being alive. It was supposed to be yours.
But then, one day, it isn’t.
Tessa bolted upright in bed. Her clock blinked 5:37. Outside, the dawn had just started to slice the sky from the earth, a silver scalpel line.
The dream still dogged her, dark and panting. It’d started out just her, Kit, and Lilly, as kids, playing in the yard, the sprinkler going, the grass slick and matted.
Then a movement out past the trees. A gray wolf. Low. Mangy. Lurking closer. The girls were screaming then, and Tessa was running. The yard gave way to the nature preserve by Devil’s Lake. She turned back, reaching out to Kit, who had always been slower.
Only then Kit was the wolf, snarling.
The wolf lunged.
Tessa woke.
Now she felt sick, her sheets slack with sweat.
Kit was dead; Boyd’s trial loomed at some indeterminate point in the near future. And beyond that? A void.
She got up and slipped slow-motion into her jeans. If she thought too much about the future, she’d have to think about how small and meaningless she was, just a particle in the vastness of it all.
The crumpled T-shirt on her floor went over her head.
She’d have to remember how pointless our little lives are.
Hoodie, zipped.
How your life could wink out so suddenly, without anyone watching.
Some books, shoved into a backpack.
How once you were gone, it was all over.
Her phone dinged, the sound puncturing her numb thoughts.
Your sister didn’t know when to leave things alone.
Tessa stared.
Unknown number.
Another text followed.
Don’t make the same mistake.
A bolt of fear ran through her. Don’t make the same mistake? It was a threat. Someone wanted to silence her. Someone knew . . . what? Knew she was helping Boyd. Knew more about what had happened that night out at the edge of the woods. Knew, maybe, what had really happened to Kit.
Maybe it was the person who had killed her.
Tessa’s hands shook so hard she couldn’t hold her phone. It slipped onto the lip of her bed, then fell into the tangle of dirty clothes on the floor. There was a ringing in her ears.
No, the phone was ringing, now. She couldn’t dig it out of the blankets. She was so freaked out and disoriented, all she could think was that it was going to wake up the whole house. Who would call at this hour? Was it the killer?
Then she had a worse thought: what if the person was watching her, even now?
She shot up and ran to the window, heaving, her breath tight in her chest. The phone was still ringing. Then there was a banging on her door. She gasped and turned around, just as the door burst open.
Lilly was standing in the doorway.
The phone had stopped ringing by now. Both sisters stared at each other, both breathless.
“You gonna answer that?” Lilly asked. Her voice sounded weak—far.
“Sorry, I just . . .” Tessa sank to the floor, pulling her knees up to her chin. “I had a crazy dream and then the phone was ringing and I was too scared to answer and I dropped the phone and . . . I’m just. I’m really freaking out lately.”
In the early gray light, Lilly looked like she had tears in her eyes. “No, Tess, I’m the one who’s freaking out.” She came and sat down next to Tessa, both their backs against the wall beneath the window.
Tessa turned to her sister. She had dark circles under her eyes. Clearly, Lilly wasn’t sleeping much either. “You okay?”
Lilly shook her head. “I just feel so alone right now. Ya know?”
“Yeah. I do. I really do. But . . . we still have each other. Right?”
Lilly let out a little sniffle and nodded.
Tessa rubbed her back. She wasn’t used to being this nice to Lilly, but, she supposed, a lot changes when your sister dies.
“The funeral was intense,” Lilly said softly. “It was surreal.”
“Tell me about it,” Tessa said.
Lilly laughed a little. “You weren’t even there.”
Tessa sighed. “True, I guess. I couldn’t really take it.”
“Well, that’s no surprise.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lilly turned to face her. “Oh, come on, Tess. You’re the one who likes to turn movies off just before the ending—even happy ones! You can’t handle endings. You never could!”
Tessa nudged her with her shoulder. “Well, in this case, Lilly, I really don’t think it is over yet.”
Lilly went pale. “What—what do you mean?”
“I mean, there’s more to what happened that night. Out in the woods. Don’t you think?” She almost didn’t trust her voice to go on, but she pushed through. “Come on, you can’t really think Boyd did it, right?”
“I saw him,” Lilly whispered.
“Are you sure, though?”
“It was snowing hard,” Lilly said, her voice rough, “and it was late. But I could clearly see him. He was outside the truck. He was wearing his favorite hunting hat. They were arguing, and, and . . .”
“Maybe you did see him, then,” Tessa replied, pulling herself up by the window ledge, then offering a hand to Lilly. “But you didn’t see what happened after that. You didn’t see everything.”
“So what did I miss, then? What don’t I know?”
How was she supposed to tell Lilly? That Tessa was the one who’d kissed him—not that night, but on Wednesday.
Not just that, either: how was she supposed to explain all the crazy shit that had been bubbling up in her for a while, all the stupid, big-eyed lovey-dovey crap she had been planning to tell Boyd, before that night happened. All these feelings that were still there, alive and percolating like little popcorn kernels in her chest, but now they had nowhere to go because the boy who had been her—their—best friend for years, the boy who had somehow become her crush, had been arrested in connection with Kit’s death.
Tessa stared out the window. The yard was beginning to take shape in the morning light, fuzzy and bright
. Streaks of snow still melted into the lawn. “I’m not sure.”
They were silent for a moment. “What happened to Patrick Donovan?” Tessa finally asked. “I hear he’s been missing since this weekend.”
Lilly said nothing.
Tessa turned to face her. “Lilly, do you know?”
She shook her head, looking miserable.
“Is there any reason you’d want to protect Patrick? You can tell me the truth, you know. I’ll love you no matter what.”
Lilly’s eyes got watery. “I’ve told everything I know. I just—I can’t do this alone.”
Tessa scooched closer and put her head on Lilly’s shoulder, breathing in the smell of her freshly washed hair. “You’re not alone, Lil.”
Lilly sniffled harder. “I gotta finish getting ready for school.”
Later, when she looked at her phone, Tessa realized the missed call was not from the anonymous texter. It was from the county jail. It had been Boyd trying to reach her.
VERIZON SERVICE RECORD
FEBRUARY 8, 5:45 AM
— missed call—
VERIZON SERVICE RECORD
FEBRUARY 8, 9:08 AM
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Boyd? Is it you? They said they put me through but then—
County Jail: I—yeah, it’s me. Oh, god. For a second you sounded like—her.
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [silence] Boyd, I’m scared.
County Jail: I know. But—
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: You don’t know, though. Someone knows.
County Jail: Knows what?
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Knows we’ve been talking. That I want to help you. They’re—they’re threatening me to leave it alone. I got this text message, from an anonymous number, and it’s really freaking me out.
County Jail: [sound of an inhale] That is so messed up. . . . But . . . but this could be a good thing!
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: How?
County Jail: Don’t you see? That’s evidence.
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: I found something else, too. Out in the woods, near where your truck was parked. Near where . . . it happened.
