Brave in the Woods

by Tracy Holczer

  Also by Tracy Holczer

  The Secret Hum of a Daisy

  Everything Else in the Universe

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  Copyright © 2021 by Tracy Holczer

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Holczer, Tracy, author.

  Title: Brave in the woods / Tracy Holczer.

  Description: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2021] | Summary: “After her brother goes missing in Afghanistan, twelve-year-old Juni sets out to break a family curse in hopes it will bring her brother safely home”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020040774 (print) | LCCN 2020040775 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984813992 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984814005 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Missing persons—Fiction. | Grief—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Blessing and cursing—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.H6974 Br 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.H6974 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040774

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040775

  ISBN 9781984814005

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art © 2021 by Ileana Soon

  Cover design by Marikka Tamura

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For Kevin,

  my partner in the woods

  and in the light.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Tracy Holczer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Velvet Bones

  Freckle Growing

  Cheez Whiz and Aardvarks

  The Letter and the Memory Dream

  Never Turn Down a Quest

  A Haystack Secret

  Eating Worms

  Wild Things

  On Borrowed Time

  Vox Clamantis in Deserto

  Where the Story Ends: Summer 1960

  A Pilgrimage

  Madame Ophelia’s Crystal Emporium

  The Donner Party 2.0 (minus the Snacks)

  The Infinite Monkey Theorem

  Where the Story Ends: Summer 1960

  Trail Magic

  Hickory’s Miracle Café

  A New Perspective

  What’s Green and Has Wheels?

  Where the Story Ends: Summer 1960

  286.7 Miles

  Floor Mats and Destiny

  Handsome Dan

  An Occurrence of Wonder

  Brave and Strong

  The Watch

  Notifications

  Bee Taming

  A Little Bit Like a Miracle

  Truer Than True

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  No one knows the strength of kindred love until it is tried.

  ELIZABETH KEEGAN, 12 YEARS OLD, 1852

  VELVET BONES

  JUNIPER FELT IT when her brother disappeared.

  She was certain of this.

  Oddly, her lungs didn’t go all wonky the way they sometimes did when bad things happened. Like a hive of bees was inside her chest, using up every bit of her breath with their buzzing and swarming.

  That feeling would come later.

  Instead, when she startled awake at 2:37 in the morning on July 6—eleven and a half hours behind Afghanistan time and the explosion that started everything—she had the astonishing feeling of antlers growing in. So much so that she jumped out of bed and switched on the twinkle lights above her mirror to make sure she wasn’t turning into a woodland creature out of a fairy tale.

  And there, clear as her startled expression, she saw them. The fierce velvet antlers of a blacktail deer.

  Then they were gone, leaving Juni to hope she’d been dreaming, or she’d lost her marbles, or both. Either would have been better than the third possibility.

  Juni climbed back into bed—alongside Penelope the foster cat—and told herself it was her imagination. Because of course it was. Her grandmother Anya had been reading to Juni, Connor and their father before them the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm for as long as she could remember. Anya wanted them to understand the truth in the fairy tales, as gruesome as they were, so they might be prepared for life’s twists and turns. Honest stories, Anya had reasoned, helped people make sense of the world as it really was instead of the way everyone wished it would be.

  But Juni believed Anya’s motivation went deeper than that, even if she would never admit it properly. Because if their family legend was to be believed, they were cursed.

  Dad didn’t believe in the Grimm family legend, that the descendants of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were cursed to endure the worst of the treacherous fairy tales, penance for crossing a witch once upon a time. He liked to point out how no one in their family had ever fallen asleep for a thousand years or married a king or eaten a poisoned apple or been turned into a frog. And while that was all technically accurate, Juni had often wondered if it was the spirit of the fairy tales that haunted them more than the literal tales themselves. Their family was, after all, prone to extreme luck, both good and bad.

  No one knew this better than Juni, who was certain she had used up whatever good luck she’d been allotted simply by being born. Three miracles was what it had taken to save her. She’d cheated Death, and everyone knew Death was a sore loser.

  Juni looked up at the mural on her wall. Specifically, the watercolor Connor had painted of a ten-point buck just before he left for basic training all those months ago. It was meant to be a reminder that she had survived. The buck had been a witness.

  This calmed her. Between the buck being the last thing she saw before going to sleep each night, and a lifetime of stories about a family curse, it was no wonder Juni had dreamed a fairy-tale sort of dream. So, with nothing to be done in the middle of the night, she forced the whole shebang straight out of her mind and let Penelope’s soft purr lull her back to sleep. Morning was the only antidote to crazy midnight imaginings. All she had to do was get there.

  But the antler dream haunted her. And when they found out Connor had gone missing in action later that very day, Juni couldn’t stop thinking about the curse, how the two might be connected. There was no antidote for that. Except one only Anya could provide.

  Juni tried to be logical. She didn’t want to burden Anya with her crazy antler problem when they were all going through so much. But finally, three agonizing days later, with the feeling she was about to come apart at the joints and fall into a pile of bones, Juni couldn’t help herself.

  They sat in matching Adirondack chairs on the deck, quietly watching a summer storm build over the water. Before the valley was flooded to become Lake Alman
or, the Great Western Power Company had moved a Maidu reservation and cemetery, and Anya had always said that when thunder rolled in the sky, and whitecaps rose on the water, it was the justifiable rage of the Maidu.

  There were still forests of pine trees on the bottom, and four-foot-long catfish swimming among the branches. The lake was a melancholy place that Juni felt matched the deepest part of herself.

  “Deer are often the symbol of an impending journey,” Anya said. “Sometimes your sleeping mind knows what your wakeful mind does not.”

  “I don’t think I was sleeping when I saw the antlers.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Sure. Dreaming is normal. Seeing things is crazy.”

  “Normal? Crazy? We see what we see.”

  Thunder rumbled. The sky turned dark and threatening. Penelope jumped into Juni’s lap and tucked her paws under her own soft body. Gray like a shadow, Penelope matched the storm clouds and Juni’s mood.

  Juni whispered, “But what if he’s gone missing because of the curse? What if the dream is trying to tell me something?”

  “Oh, Juni girl, look at me.” Anya took Juni’s chin in her palm. There were smudges under Anya’s eyes. None of them had slept. “I had no business putting those ideas in your head. They were the silly ramblings of your superstitious old grandmother trying to make sense of her own life. Can you understand that?”

  But Anya looked scared, which scared Juni.

  The curse had always been feathery to Juni, like a cirrus cloud, because Anya had never really explained its origin. Nor did she talk much about her own childhood story. Instead, Juni and Connor had followed Anya around in the garden and the woods, along the creeks and rivers and on the lake, as she wove stories of distant family with the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm until all that darkness and wonder had blended into an irresistible stew. It coursed through Juni’s veins and wrapped around her heart and had her believing that her own miraculous survival, and her life yet to be lived, was part of some vast fairy tale she didn’t yet understand.

  “But look what happened to you, to Grandpa Charlie and now to Connor. The stories you’ve told about the rest of the family . . .”

  “Enough, Juni! We are in charge of our own stories, not the other way around.” Anya’s hand fluttered to her mouth. “No more talk of curses. Promise me.”

  “Okay, Anya. I promise.”

  Juni was left even more shaken. She’d never seen Anya in such a state.

  Over the days that followed, Juni desperately tried to talk herself out of believing the curse was real, that there was any meaning in her vision of antlers. It was as Anya had said—her sleeping brain had given her a symbol. That was all. She tried to believe she was no more cursed to grow deer antlers than she was to find herself trapped inside the body of a fox.

  But she couldn’t. No matter how hard Juni tried, she just couldn’t shake the feeling of those new velvet bones taking hold. That alongside losing something precious, she had gained something impossible.

  FRECKLE GROWING

  FLAT ON THE sunporch floor, propped on her elbows, Juni stared through the screen as the rising August sun lit the pine trees, a glass of lemonade with a bendy straw tilted into her mouth.

  Where is he where is he where is he?

  In the thirty-two days since they’d found out Connor had gone missing, the worry had never left Juni’s mind.

  Not when she tried to read The One and Only Ivan for the seventh time because it was her favorite book ever. Not when she worked with Anya all day turning blackberries into jam. Not when she climbed the magical juniper tree, for which she was named, to sit in the old saddle Connor had loosely tied to the widest branch.

  Especially not then.

  She worried about being cursed. She worried about the bees in her chest. She worried that school was about to happen to her again. How was she supposed to get up every morning and think about math and English and social studies when her brother had vanished? How was she supposed to sit at a school desk five miles away when the army man could come back at any moment and tell her family they’d found Connor?

  If her brain was a pie, nine-tenths of it would be Connor is Missing in Afghanistan and one-tenth would be Everything Else. Like the thought of eighth-grade PE next year with Mr. Snickleman—who, when he learned she had the nonallergic type of asthma and wasn’t allowed to run, informed her it was a mental condition—which made her want to burrow into the deepest part of her closet and never come out.

  “Juniper Creedy,” Mom said from the kitchen. A long-drawn-out whisper-snap.

  Juni jumped up, startled, knocking over her glass of lemonade. “Crap.”

  “I heard that,” Mom said. Crap but her hearing was good.

  Juni let herself through the screen door into the kitchen, where Mom had found her lemonade mess—the sugar she’d spilled on the counter alongside the lemons she’d squeezed, sticky juice already congealing. Juni hadn’t gotten around to cleaning yet. She’d wanted to watch the trees catch the sunrise.

  “I didn’t think you’d be up,” Juni said, reaching for a sponge.

  “I’ve got it,” Mom snapped again, level-ten exasperated already, and it wasn’t even seven in the morning.

  Mom’s springy dark hair stuck out every which way and looked to Juni like a bunch of tiny antlers. She’d been seeing them everywhere now—in the branches of an aspen or the shadows crisscrossing the forest floor. She’d seen them in the clouds above the lake, and the formation of stones in the creek bed.

  The only way Juni had found to get those antlers out of her head was to draw them on paper. So, she fetched her charcoals and sketchbook and slid into a wooden chair at the kitchen table. Juni also wanted to capture some piece of Mom with her charcoals before Mom dragged herself back to bed to watch Gunsmoke and The Andy Griffith Show all day on TV Land.

  Mom was under the spell of the curse. Dad, too.

  And Juni had proof: Mom and Dad thought Connor was gone. Not missing, but flat-out gone. There was nothing Juni could do to convince them otherwise. Even the army man had said, “Missing in action,” but Mom and Dad were determined to believe the worst, and believing the worst had stolen them away.

  In the Grimm tales, loved ones were sometimes turned into animals when they’d been cursed, and Juni had begun to see her mother as a sleeping bird, nestled in her cage day after day, while Dad had turned into a bear roaming the woods, ferocious and growling and knocking things down.

  Juni knew she had to find a way to bring them back, to bring Connor back, even if she had no idea where to begin. She’d been poring over her book of fairy tales, looking for clues, but hadn’t found the answer yet.

  As though hearing the call of Juni’s worried heart, Penelope came trotting into the kitchen and jumped onto the table to lick her paw. She had yellow eyes, like little round lanterns. Juni took a short break from her sketch to scratch behind Penelope’s ears, which made them both feel better.

  It was a terrible time to bring it up, but Mom was out of her birdcage, which hadn’t happened much in almost five weeks. “Did you hear yet? About Elsie?”

  Mom was still scrubbing the sticky counter. She didn’t turn around. “You have to stop pestering me about that dog. As soon as I know, you’ll know.”

  “You said we might hear in a couple of weeks.”

  “It’s been a couple of weeks?” Mom still didn’t turn around. She was looking out the window toward the pasture and Cowabunga, their Jersey cow. “Have you seen Dad this morning?”

  “He must have left before I woke up,” Juni said, smudging the charcoal with her thumb. She’d managed one perfect ghostly antler growing from the curls on Mom’s head. “Can I write the army another letter? Are you calling them every day?”

  “I’m doing the best I can, Juniper.”

  Which wasn’t true. Uncursed Mom would have been m
aking seventeen phone calls a day. Because Elsie was Connor’s military service dog, and in his first letter from Afghanistan he’d told them they had another member of the family in Elsie, the golden retriever he’d been assigned. Now that the army had retired Elsie after she’d been injured in the explosion, Juni expected she’d arrive at any moment. She belonged with them until Connor got home.

  Because of course she did.

  The cuckoo clock above the kitchen door cuckooed seven times. Mom finally turned from her cleaning and watched the little cuckoo Grandpa Charlie had carved, popping out again and again, like she’d had no idea what time it was until that very moment.

  “I’ve asked you to stop getting up so early, Juni. You know your breathing gets funny when you’re overtired.” But Juni knew it wasn’t the getting-up-early part that bothered Mom. It was where Juni went at 6:20 every morning that Mom didn’t like, even if she’d never stop her.

  Mom reached for Juni’s asthma pack on the kitchen counter. It didn’t matter to her that premature babies often developed asthma and just as often grew out of it. What mattered to Mom was that Juni almost died when she was born. So now, and for as long as Juni could remember, she’d had to blow into a peak flow meter three times every day as well as make notes about her coloring and moisture levels. Because everyone wants a record of how sweaty and red-faced they get.

  You’re fragile, Juni. Try to remember that.

  Mom’s words were forever echoing in her head.

  Just then, Anya shuffled into the kitchen, her white-gray pixie cut smoothed behind her ears, cat-eye glasses on a crystal chain around her neck. The remaining four foster cats came trotting in from the many nooks and crannies they’d hidden themselves in, Penelope joining them. She would be going to her permanent home in the next couple of days, and Juni was unbearably sad to see her go.

  “What are you two arguing about now?” Anya said as she scooped wet food onto mismatched china dishes. The cats flicked their tails and chattered their complaints, letting her know she was late. “And where is that son of mine?”