The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  “Thank you,” Abra said, and they kept walking.

  41

  THE FIRST THING ABRA NOTICED when she pushed through the door was how bright and ordinary the world was after walking through that deep darkness under that red sky. She held one hand up and shielded her eyes. Ruby held onto her other hand, and when the girl saw what they had walked into, a whole new world with its different sights and smells, its blue sky and puffy white clouds, she clutched Abra’s hand even tighter.

  There was the sound of traffic on the other side of the wall that surrounded Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1. There was the smell of summer, the heavy air. There were the trees waving in a gentle breeze.

  Abra and Ruby both sat down and leaned back against the door that did not look like a door in the side of Marie Laveau’s tomb. Abra kept hoping she’d feel Leo pushing against the door, calling her name, asking to be let through, but she knew he was gone. She had seen him rise, a movement of light flashing to the sea.

  The air smelled of exhaust and heat. The ground was warm, and the sun was at its peak. Everything felt numb compared to the city on the other side of the Passageway. Everything felt like it was standing still. But there was no sense of waiting as there had been in the other city, no sense of in between. Everything was here and now.

  Abra glanced around once her eyes had adjusted to the light. That’s when she saw the feet of Mr. Henry.

  He was lying on the ground on the other side of the tomb, and only his feet were visible. Abra crawled to him and shook his foot. Ruby was right behind her.

  “Mr. Henry? Mr. Henry!”

  She saw there was blood on his legs, and when she came around the entire way to his side of the tombstone, she froze. His eyes were closed, all those piercings and tattoos completely still. His mouth was partially open, and a dried line of blood came from his nose. Was he dead?

  “Mr. Henry?” Abra said again, crawling up beside him and holding on to his hand.

  “You made it,” he whispered, opening his eyes.

  “You’re okay!” Abra said.

  “I guess being okay is a relative assessment,” Mr. Henry said, groaning and sitting up. He stared at Abra, and she felt like he might be looking inside of her. When he did that—when he looked at her, really looked—she had the sense that he immediately understood all she had gone through. If not the details, the essence.

  “Those were long days,” he said.

  “We got caught up,” Abra said. “The Tree was . . . hard to find. Beatrice was worse than we thought.”

  He nodded. “Leo?”

  Abra shook her head in short, jerky motions, and tears slid down her cheeks. Ruby started to cry.

  Mr. Henry frowned. “We walk through these doors,” he said. “We walk through doorways that should never have been opened. And then? It is all up in the air, a handful of dust tossed to the wind, and no one knows where the specks will fall.”

  “No one?” Abra asked in a whisper.

  Mr. Henry smiled at her and shook his head as if remembering something important. “Of course. Someone knows.”

  Abra wanted to believe that. She wanted to believe it with all her heart.

  “Those were long days,” he said again.

  Abra sighed but didn’t say anything.

  “I sat by this gravestone right here, in this very spot, for days. Day and night, day and night. It rained one night, and it was a cold rain for the summer, like tiny frozen stars falling from the sky. I waited and waited, and as the days passed I lost hope.”

  He laughed, and there was disbelief in the sound.

  “Me. Even me! I lost hope.”

  He looked at Abra with a confused expression, then he gazed off in the distance as if he saw himself approaching and had no idea who it was.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you again. Losing hope is like losing your breath. It’s hard to get it back on your own.”

  He looked at Ruby and tilted his head to the side. “Child,” he said. That was it. Just the one word. Child. Then he continued.

  “I waited, even without hope, and somehow the hope came back. I wondered if I should go in and find you. I wondered what would become of me if I did. Out of nowhere, Beatrice shot through that door like some terrible thing on fire, knocked me right over. We fought then, and she was weak, but she was also desperate. It was a strange dance of fire and bright light, and I’d imagine the neighbors all around here saw it, and what they saw will feed superstition for generations.”

  Mr. Henry chuckled to himself. He held the back of his hand up to his nose, wiped the blood, then looked at his hand.

  “What happened to Beatrice?” Abra asked.

  “She fell,” Mr. Henry said, and there was no joy in his voice. He pointed a wiry finger at the wall, and Abra saw a depression in the ground similar to the one Mr. Tennin had left after falling.

  “What about Koli Naal?” Abra asked.

  Mr. Henry shook his head in disgust. “Do you know she sat up on that wall and watched the whole thing happen? She watched us tangle and break stones. Just sat there like a stone herself, and when she saw Beatrice fall, when she saw all was lost, she left. Shoooo! Right up into the sky. Gone.”

  Ruby was crying again. Mr. Henry seemed so agitated he couldn’t catch his breath. Abra sat between them, and she felt responsible for everything.

  “First things first,” Mr. Henry continued, as if he hadn’t said anything yet, as if he wasn’t sure he would make it and wanted to be certain to tell her the most important bits before he died. “Use the sword to lock and seal the door.”

  “What do I do?” Abra asked.

  “Push it closed. Lock it with the sword. Run the point of it all along the crack of the door, from the bottom up to the top, along the top, and down the side again.”

  “That’s it?” Abra asked.

  “That’s it.”

  Abra stood to go and seal the door.

  Mr. Henry tried to stand but couldn’t, so he leaned against the stone and spoke to them from around the corner.

  Abra looked at Mr. Henry and he nodded, so she held up the sword, thrust it into the keyhole, and turned the blade in the door. There was a deep movement, as if the earth’s stomach growled. She pulled the sword out and ran the point of it along the crack that outlined the door. It made a scratching sound and left a bright point of light for an instant where it sealed the rock like a welder’s torch.

  All this time Ruby watched quietly, not saying a word. Abra felt her eyes on her. Ruby’s life as she had known it was over. She would never go back to the house on James Street in the Edge of Over There. She would never see her father again, at least not on this side of the water. Maybe never.

  The door to the afterlife at the grave of Marie Laveau was sealed. No living person would ever pass that way again.

  42

  BACK INSIDE THE PASSAGEWAY, in the red darkness of that first night, Sandra had made her way out of the city. She and her friends had tried to avoid the war, but it was everywhere, and she alone had survived. She tried to flee along the dirt road, wondering if Leo had been telling the truth, wondering if the door had indeed been left open. But as she made her way, she felt a deep rumbling like an earthquake, and she knew immediately that it was too late. Somehow, she knew within herself that it was the sound of the door closing. She had heard that sound once before, when she had first come through the darkness. There would be no leaving, not that way.

  Sandra felt older, as if the collapse of the Passageway was aging her. She turned, giving up on the gate, and headed back toward the city. The dirt path that led there already seemed narrower than it had been. The trees were closer and more brittle. The orange-red sky was lower—morning had arrived. The entire Passageway was contracting, becoming less, becoming only that which the dwindling population of people left in it needed.

  Maybe the path had shortened because of so much death in the Passageway during Amos’s war that very day, or maybe there was some other reason, but whatever the c
ase, Sandra made it to the city by that first evening. She kept walking, expecting to grow tired, but the tiredness never arrived. So she kept walking through the night, around the edge of the city. A fire raged so that even the night sky was orange, and she heard terrible screams and shouts and even something that sounded like celebrating, but she kept to the shadows. The only people she did see were running away in terror, fleeing into the forest, and they barely gave her a passing glance.

  She kept walking, all day long.

  By the time the light in the sky was beginning to dim, she’d arrived at the water, and she stood there at that strange confluence of water and forest and city. In the evening light, the city seemed less foreboding. Smoke still rose, but it rose into a pink-orange sky, and the shouts and screams had ended, as if peace had been found, or everyone had died. In the city’s center, every so often she could see down a long street to what looked like a massive tree growing in the middle of the city, taller than any building. It was black against the morning sky, and bare, and it made her shiver with cold or dread or something related to those things. What she didn’t realize was that the Tree, in its dying gasp, had shed itself of the building, and was now the tallest thing in that fading city.

  She wasn’t sure where to go. She had seen the Wailers, she had seen the path they followed every night, and she knew the only other place to go was over the water or through it, but how? She sat down with her feet dangling over the edge of the street, the waves crashing against the city’s wall beneath her, and she watched the sky dim. Everything seemed to come from across the water—the wind, the waves, even the light. It was as if that place over the water was the sun, and she was in the far reaches of the solar system, the light and heat barely able to reach her.

  When she didn’t know what else to do, she stood up and walked quietly along the water, the burning city to her left. She didn’t walk far before she saw a man sitting on the edge of the street, facing the river as she had not too long before. She stopped. He looked over at her.

  “Hello,” he said, his feet swinging, and that’s when she saw the boat.

  “Hi there,” Sandra said, walking slower, closer.

  “How are you?”

  She nodded. “I’m okay. No, actually, that’s not true at all. All my friends have died.”

  The two of them remained there, silent, thinking on her words.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Everyone asks that,” he said, shaking his head, clearly marveling at the sameness of humanity. “Everyone.”

  “Is that your boat?” she asked.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Crossing over.”

  “Kinda small for that, don’t you think?” she asked.

  “It does the job.”

  “Did you . . . come over the water?”

  At first he nodded, but uncertainty clouded his face. He squinted as if he wasn’t so sure. “I think so.”

  “I thought only the dead can pass over the water,” she said.

  “Well, there have been exceptions,” he said. “Some have left the earth without their bodies dying. Very few. Enoch. Elijah. A few others. But very few.”

  She stood beside him, looking down at the boat. “Why, that boat has water in the bottom!”

  “Yes, that’s right, it does.”

  Sandra sat down beside him, there at the side of the street, and leaned forward hesitantly. She didn’t want to fall in.

  “I’m lonely,” she said. “There’s nothing left for me here in this city, and I can’t leave through the gate. It’s been locked.”

  He looked at her.

  “I . . . would like to cross,” she said.

  “Well, that is an unusual problem,” he said.

  She laughed. “Yes, I suppose it is, seeing as I’m not dead.”

  He chuckled. “That is usually the way of it. What’s your name?”

  “Sandra,” she said shyly, holding out her hand, and they shook. “What’s your name?”

  “Me? Oh, that’s not important.”

  They sat there quietly for a long time.

  “Do you think this boat could get us there?” she asked.

  “I know it will take us where we need to go.”

  When the two of them climbed down the rope ladder, one at a time, it strained under their weight and swayed back and forth like a snake dancing above a clay pot. When the two of them boarded the small rowboat, it dropped nearly a foot and water spilled in over one edge.

  “Whoa!” Sandra said, hands clenched like vises on the sides of the shaking boat.

  The man took the one oar he had and started rowing, first this side, then that, and the boat shifted side to side as he rowed. The water was suddenly perfectly calm, a sheet of glass, and the ripples they made spread out in every direction, stirring the water like angels’ wings. It was almost completely dark now, and the red-black of the sky shimmered on the water.

  The boat began to sink ever so slightly as they moved forward. For every twenty feet they traveled, it sank a half inch. More water gathered in the bottom. Soon the liquid skin of the water was even with the sides of the boat.

  “We’ll never make it,” Sandra said in a resigned tone. “We’re sinking.”

  “It always seems that way, doesn’t it?” he said with a smile. He handed her a small wooden cup. It was plain, without any decoration. “You can use this if you want.”

  She scooped the water out of the boat a cup at a time. There was nothing frantic in her movements, and it was enough to keep them level with the water. The water remained calm. It was like sailing on a mirror.

  “If you get thirsty,” the man said, motioning toward the cup.

  Sandra looked at it, filled it once again, but instead of dumping it outside the boat, this time she drank it.

  It was like consuming light.

  43

  ABRA STOOD BESIDE THE TRAPDOOR in Leo’s old house and looked at Mr. Henry and Ruby. Mr. Henry nodded his bald head encouragingly, and his large earlobes swayed forward and back, forward and back, like pendulums.

  “Ruby will be fine,” Mr. Henry said. “I’ll watch over her until her mother comes back. She won’t be gone long now that Koli Naal has moved on. They can start a new life together.”

  Abra nodded, and for some reason, a reason she could not identify, she did not want to leave. It was a beautiful city, but more than that, it felt like it existed at the center of the things on the other side of the curtain. Her own town, Deen, felt so far removed from the other side, with breaks that happened only occasionally. The other side was clouded when she was in Deen. But here, in New Orleans, there was no curtain. Things like Mr. Henry and Beatrice walked alongside people like Leo and his sister all the time. It felt like there were doors everywhere.

  The short sword’s handle stuck out of Abra’s jeans, and she touched it. She wanted to stay, yes, but she was also a girl, a girl who very much wanted to go home and spend the rest of her summer in peace, and perhaps find a new litter of kittens, and fish in the river without anyone else around.

  “I wrote this for your mother, in case she wonders where you’ve been,” Mr. Henry said, and Abra took the letter he offered to her. She stared at the handwriting on the envelope, and it was the same handwriting as the letters her uncle sent her mother. She looked up at Mr. Henry with a question in her eyes. He gave a barely discernible shrug. She folded the letter and put it in her pocket.

  “Will she remember me?” Abra asked.

  “More than that, probably,” Mr. Henry said with a twinkle in his eyes and a grin that scattered the small tattoos on his face. “You’ll probably wish she’s forgotten you, once you’re back and you have to deal with a mother whose daughter has been missing.”

  Abra gave a tired smile. She was ready to see her mom, no matter what the reception was like.

  “Good-bye, Abra,” Ruby said.

  “I’ll come back to see you,” Abra said. “I promise.”


  She stared at the girl, and though she was only a few years younger than Abra, she seemed so vulnerable, so unprotected. Abra glanced at Mr. Henry, and she knew he would watch over her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Ruby. “I’m sorry about what happened to Leo.”

  Ruby nodded in quick, jerking motions, and tears pooled in her eyes. “It’s okay,” she said. “Mr. Henry told me about what’s on the other side of the water. It’s . . . it’s okay. I’m ready to meet my mother.”

  Abra took three quick steps and hugged Ruby one more time, the way a girl hugs a younger sister. She looked at Mr. Henry, and though she desperately wanted to hug him too, she only nodded, and he nodded back.

  Abra lifted up the edge of the trapdoor and leaned it back against the closet wall. “I have to ask you something,” she said without looking at Mr. Henry.

  “Yes?”

  “All those people.”

  He waited.

  “All those people,” Abra continued. “The people who died in the war in the Passageway. The people who ate from the Tree, people like Marie Laveau. What happens to all of them? What will happen?”

  Mr. Henry sighed. “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone goes over the water. I understand that. Everyone leaves. What happens next?”

  Mr. Henry took a deep breath, then let it out in a long, gentle wave. In his eyes she could see the beginning of all things, but there was an openness there too, something that told her he did not know all ends.

  “How it works depends on what’s inside you—it depends on your heart and your soul. I cannot know this about you, just like I could not know it about Leo, or Beatrice, or even Koli Naal. Even Jinn! Even Jinn. We cannot see all ends. We can only see the path before us. The One who waits for us on the other side of the water will know just what to do with each of us.”

  Abra nodded solemnly and knew it was important. She wanted desperately to understand it, all of it, but she knew it might take some time.

  “Okay,” she said, and it was the closest thing to good-bye she could bring herself to say.