The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  “No,” Abra said again. Every word took an incredible effort. It felt like there was a spell clamping her mouth shut.

  “When you get there,” Koli said, “you’ll find that our missions are not so far apart.”

  Abra shook her head—no, she would not. The silence between them was alive, as loud a silence as you will ever experience. Abra gripped the sword, held it with two hands out in front of her, and her white nightgown blew around her in the breeze. For a moment she felt otherworldly, a child warrior from a long-ago legend. But some of her hair drifted into her face, and she pushed it back with a shaking hand, and she was simply Abra again, a sixteen-year-old trembling with fear and adrenaline.

  “Save the man and his child. Unlock the door,” Koli said in a firm but quiet voice. “Let those who are trapped go free. Or, perhaps, do it for more selfish reasons, knowing that if you do not, your family is mine. Your clumsy bore of a father . . . your mindless mother . . . your lamb of a baby brother. Jinn didn’t have such . . . negotiating tools when dealing with your friend. Sam had already lost nearly everything. But you?”

  Koli Naal leaned her head to the side, and her voice was quiet and compassionate.

  “You are different. You do not know loss, so you fear it.”

  “If you do anything to my family . . .”

  “What, child? What will you do?”

  The walk home felt long, and Abra wanted to go back to bed. Her feet hurt from walking barefoot on the stone road and through the weeds around the church. She had been thrust back into the middle of this fight, but it didn’t feel like the wonderful adventure she remembered from before. No, it felt hard and dangerous and already hopeless, and she wondered if her first adventure had seemed that way too when she was in the middle of it. She wondered if all adventures are wonderful to talk about and reflect on but actually contain more pain and sorrow than we remember or are willing to recall.

  She walked through the front door, and there was her mom in the kitchen with her back facing her. Her wonderful mother, whom she was suddenly desperate not to lose. She wouldn’t let Koli do anything to her family. She would protect them. She would never sleep. She would pace the house at all hours, watch all the doors, sit beneath all the windows to make sure Koli could never come in.

  “I’m sorry,” Abra said in an attempt to head off her mother’s protests about going out in her nightgown. She held the sword behind her. “I wanted to go for a walk this morning . . .”

  Her mother turned around and stared blankly at her. “Child, you can wear whatever you want, but it would help me if you called before you came over for breakfast. Good thing for you I made extra this morning.”

  Child? Her mother never called her that.

  “Are you okay?” Abra asked.

  Her mother didn’t look at her this time. She kept washing a few dishes in the sink.

  “Now that you mention it, I do worry what your parents will think about you scurrying over here so often. Doesn’t your own mother want you around for breakfast some mornings?”

  “My own mother?” Abra asked, confused.

  Her mom looked over her shoulder a moment. “What’s that look on your face, child? Don’t get me wrong, I like when you visit. It’s nice having a young one around. But I worry, that’s all, about what your parents will think.”

  Abra walked slowly to the kitchen counter. Her mother didn’t look at her.

  “Who am I?” Abra asked in a quiet voice.

  Her mother looked at her and smiled a strange smile. “Who are you, child?”

  “Yes, who am I?”

  Her mother stopped washing the dishes and put a wet, sudsy hand on Abra’s shoulder. She started to laugh. She laughed and laughed, one of those good, hard laughs that leave your sides hurting and your belly sore. She stopped laughing and sighed.

  “Child, if you don’t know who you are, why don’t you hurry back to your house and ask your brother Sam?”

  A tidal wave of emotions washed over Abra: panic, grief, confusion. But when the wave receded, all it left behind was anger. Koli had done this. Koli had caused her mom to forget who she was. She knew it.

  “Now, if you’re finished asking silly questions, you’ll say hello to your friend.”

  “Who?”

  “Your friend,” Abra’s mother said, and she motioned with her chin in the direction of the dining room. “She walked in before you did.”

  Abra turned around. It was the girl she had met at the fair.

  “Beatrice?” Abra said.

  “It’s just B, remember?” she said with a laugh. Her eyes were deep pools, and they sparkled.

  15

  BEATRICE ACTED as if she was some great friend from the past, but there was nothing there—it was all pretend: the knowing glances, the nodding, the eagerness. And now she showed up at the exact moment that Abra’s mom forgot who she was? Abra’s mind spun. She wasn’t scared. She was methodically working the puzzle in front of her, trying this piece here, that piece there. And at the root of it all was Beatrice. She knew that now. Beatrice and Koli Naal.

  “We should go outside,” Abra said to Beatrice as they stood there in the house, her mother still washing dishes, humming to herself. Abra knew a confrontation with Beatrice was coming, and she thought it would be best to be outdoors, away from her mother and her baby brother, wherever he was. But Beatrice wouldn’t let her control the situation.

  “Let’s go upstairs first,” Beatrice said with that same plastic smile on her face. “I’ve never seen your room!”

  Abra’s mind raced, and she glanced at her mom to see if she’d react to Beatrice asking about her room, but if she heard it, she didn’t seem alarmed by the fact. Abra still had the sword, and she held it behind her back. It felt alive again, the sword, and there was a tingling sensation in her hand. She pictured her room, the atlas on the floor, a few of the notes spread out around it, and she didn’t want to take Beatrice up there.

  “Let’s go outside, B,” Abra insisted. “I’ll show you around.”

  “Young lady,” her mother said in a motherly voice, “you are absolutely not going anywhere until you change your clothes and put away that stick you’re carrying behind your back. I see it, so stop pretending it’s not there. Remember the extra set of clothes your mother sent for you to keep here? You go straight upstairs and change immediately. Your mother would kill me if she knew I was letting you wander around in your nightgown.”

  Abra’s mother gave her one of those looks that said, See? You can’t get anything past me.

  “Okay,” Abra said hesitantly, starting up the stairs, her face hot with anger, her mind racing. Her world was falling apart, and all because of Koli Naal, all because of the sword and the Tree and everything else. For the first time, she felt defeated. Part of her wanted out. Part of her wished someone would draw the curtain between the normal world and this new one, and she wanted to forget about it. Someone else could kill the Tree. Someone else could protect people from living forever. She wanted to be a regular girl again.

  But that was just part of her. And it wasn’t the part that won out—she was too angry, too determined to defeat Koli Naal. This was just the beginning, she knew that, and she was ready to fight.

  About halfway up the stairs she heard Beatrice.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Miller, I’ll just go up and see how Abra’s coming along,” she said in a polite voice. Abra heard her coming up the stairs.

  “Please wait outside while I change,” Abra called over her shoulder before running into her bedroom, slamming the door, and leaning against it. This Beatrice was very persistent, whoever she really was. Whatever she was. Abra felt like Beatrice was inside her head, or at least trying to get there. Abra recognized this was a strange thing to think and tried to push the thought away. But even in doing that she encountered Beatrice in there somewhere, or trying to get in. She was like a rat outside a house in the middle of winter, sniffing around the basement windows, climbing up the downspouts, inve
stigating every nook and cranny, every crack and ledge. That was Beatrice, and Abra found herself mentally running around, making sure all the doors were locked, all the holes stuffed closed.

  Abra stood in her room for a few seconds, catching her breath. She dashed to her dresser and pulled out some clothes. She dressed automatically, her mind elsewhere, thinking about her mom, her dad, her little brother.

  She could see Beatrice’s shadow moving back and forth, slowly, along the crack under the door. It gave her the feeling that it was no longer Beatrice out there, but someone entirely different. This didn’t make sense, not at all, and she pushed the thought to the back of her mind as she pulled on her jeans, socks, and sneakers.

  “Almost ready!” Abra said. Beatrice didn’t say anything back to her.

  Abra pulled a T-shirt over her head, then moved quickly to clean up the atlas and the papers. She put the sword on the floor for a moment, but before picking up the articles she stopped and stared at the open atlas. The second Tree, the one Tennin had told her about in the dream, was in New Orleans. How was she supposed to get there? She wondered about her uncle who lived there, and how long it would take her to walk a thousand miles, or however far it was. She wondered if the Trees normally appeared in such rapid succession, only a few years apart. If she interpreted the atlas and the articles correctly, it seemed like there were usually decades, sometimes centuries, between the appearances of the Tree.

  “Ouch!” someone shouted.

  Abra turned and there stood Beatrice, holding her palm, the sword at her feet. Abra stared at the open door, wondering how she had managed to come in so quietly.

  “That thing burned me!” she squealed.

  “Shh, shh,” Abra said, racing over and closing the door before her mother heard them and came up to investigate. “You can’t touch that. What are you doing in here? I asked you to wait outside.”

  “I got bored,” Beatrice said quietly, tears pooling in her eyes. “And why do you have a sword? In your room?”

  Abra shrugged. “It’s a long story. Are you okay?”

  Beatrice nodded, still staring at the sword.

  “Come here. Let me see your hand.”

  Abra held Beatrice’s hand and glanced quickly at her face. Beatrice’s palm was red, and for a moment Abra was back in the forest at the end of the Road to Nowhere, the fire raging around them, Sam’s hands badly burned. Abra had a clear vision of time, how it moves constantly, not linear but swirling like a tornado, picking up things from here and there, past and future, and mixing them together until you can’t tell yesterday from tomorrow.

  This is what it feels like to lose your mind, Abra thought. She felt displaced, unhinged, floating outside of hours and minutes and seconds. Outside of years. She was, for that moment, a No One. She was certain her father wouldn’t recognize her either. She didn’t have a home. She didn’t belong anywhere.

  “Go to the bathroom at the end of the hall,” Abra said absently, her voice coming out robotically. “Run some cold water over it for a minute or two. If it still hurts, I’ll get some salve from downstairs.”

  Beatrice left the room like a chastised puppy. She clutched her hand as if it might fall off. If Beatrice and Koli Naal were in this together, or somehow one and the same, what was she supposed to do?

  Abra stood there quietly until she heard the water turn on, the small rushing sound, and she found it strange, the different sounds water can make: the rushing of the river, the tapping of the rain on her window, the stillness of the puddle from the fair the other night, the one that looked like an escape hatch into a faraway galaxy with constellations the shape of a Ferris wheel. And now there was the soothing cold water running from a faucet.

  She picked up the sword and turned back to the atlas. That’s when the sword began to get heavier. Abra stared at it in her hand, and because she didn’t understand what was happening, at first it felt like a betrayal. Like the turning away of a once-close friend. It grew heavier and heavier until she had to rest the point of it against the floor, but the point dug into the carpet farther, farther, and it became so heavy that she had to lay it down. Her fingers nearly became trapped under it because the increase in weight happened so quickly. Soon it was pressing deep into the floor and she panicked, because what if it continued? What if it became so heavy that it broke through into the living room below her?

  The journal was right there at the point of the sword, still opened to New Orleans with its two numbers. The sword crept forward, quivering like a divining rod, the point growing closer to the dot on the map that signified the city. Abra tried to pick it up again, but she couldn’t—she could only hold on to it, and still it moved toward the atlas. She had a sense that something huge was about to happen, and something in her didn’t want it to happen. That’s the part of her that pulled on the sword, pulled in vain as it crept those few inches, pointing at New Orleans.

  Two things happened at once. Beatrice came running into the room, still holding her hand, shouting as if trying to stop whatever was happening. She grabbed Abra’s shoulder and Abra tried to push her away, but Beatrice held on tight. Her strong grip was no child’s grip. Her fingers were icy, digging into Abra’s flesh, threatening to shatter her collarbone.

  At the same time, the very point of the sword touched the dot of New Orleans in the atlas.

  A flash of light.

  The sound of Beatrice screaming.

  Abra felt a tremor through her body, like a shudder when you swallow a piece of slimy food you didn’t want to eat.

  Everything went still.

  16

  LEO WALKED AWAY from the hospital where his mother had been kept for the last eight years. She had tried so hard to find Ruby. The search, the hopelessness of it, had caused her to lose her way, and she had sunk deep into herself. One day, when the search hit yet another dead end, she passed out from exhaustion and despair. When she regained consciousness in the hospital, she was unresponsive. He visited her every day after school and lived with a distant relative on the other side of the city, a kind, older woman who walked in a hunched-over way and spoke in a whisper.

  The leads had all gone cold. His mother hadn’t spoken a word in years.

  As Leo left the hospital and crawled into his car, he almost turned around to go back to his mother again. It was a feeling he had every time he left, a sense that he was missing something. Instead he sat in the driver’s seat and glanced through the papers the doctors had given him. Charts and recommendations and new prescriptions, new plans, new diagnoses. All of them signed with the initials of his mother’s main doctor.

  KN.

  It was one of those perfect summer days that felt more like early fall. Leo rolled his windows down as he drove, and the air swept through the car. There was a coolness there, relief from week after week of heat and humidity. The trees’ leaves rustled in a refreshing breeze. Spanish moss waved from the branches like drapes in an open window.

  His car wandered in the same meandering way as his mind, and before he knew it, he was driving up the street of his father’s old house. He hadn’t gone that way in a long time. When he approached it, he pulled off and stopped along the sidewalk. He parked there and thought about the ten-year-old boy he had been, the one who had drifted home from the cemetery on that early morning, the one with the lost look on his face and the gaping hole inside of him.

  No one had bought the house after his father and sister disappeared. For a long time—years—it had sat there with a small “For Sale” sign in the front yard, but soon even that was gone, and as far as Leo knew the house had never sold. His mother, before she had vanished inside of herself, had complained about foreclosures and short sales, but Leo had been young and she didn’t involve him in the conversations that took place. He wondered who owned it. He wondered if anyone had been inside recently.

  He wondered if the door was locked.

  It was a small thought at first, the tiniest of suggestions. But it stuck the way a seashe
ll will catch hold in the sand, and as the waves wash away everything around it, the seashell remains. Another wave, another layer of sand pulled back, and more of the shell shows through. It was a small thought, but the longer he sat there, the more prominent it became.

  Leo did something he had never done in all those years of stopping to look at his father’s old house: he turned off the car. That alone felt strange enough, because it implied that he wasn’t only passing through. He was stopping. And you only stop when you have something else to do, so he climbed out of the car, looked up and down the sidewalk, glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was around, and finally approached the house, feeling skittish.

  He walked up to the front door first. The large windows still stood on either side, guarding the house. He smiled when he remembered how afraid of those windows he had always been. He knocked and listened. He knocked again, and the sound of it was empty and distant, like knocking on the doorway to another universe. He reached for the knob and turned it, but it was locked, something that didn’t surprise him at all. No one had ever used that door anyway, even when people lived there—why would it be unlocked now? He looked up at the porch ceiling and remembered how he and Ruby used to come out on the front porch. She had often rested out there. Watching over her had been a full-time job, something he had sometimes resented.

  Why do I always have to watch her? he’d wondered.

  How he wished he could watch her again.

  Leo looked around one more time before making his way to the side door of the house. The fact that no one emerged to tell him to mind his own business, stop snooping around, had him feeling more and more brave. The bushes separating the short driveway from the neighbor’s house were wild and expanding beyond their boundaries. The driveway had nearly vanished, and he had to walk sideways in some places to fit between the branches, the weeds, and the side of the house.