But then I looked up at the sky and registered with shock how unbelievably fast it had clouded over. The threatening sky was a dark, surreal gray-blue, just the color of a storm.
Its harbingers were already tugging at my clothes and making my hair fly around my face. I spit a strand out of my mouth. “Do you feel how the tree is swaying, Jay?”
In that moment, a fierce gust of wind whipped through the branches of the musical castle. It made the big mobile above our heads sing with furious angels’ voices. I looked up and saw how the fragile construction reeled in the wind, tipping to one side as its balance was disturbed. Then the mobile crashed down onto us!
It would have landed right on top of me if Jay hadn’t sensed it and pushed me aside at the last second. We fell on top of each other on the wooden board of the tree house as shards of glass rained down all around us.
“Come on, let’s get out of here!” Jay called above the howling of the storm, pulling me up. As fast as our feet could move, we climbed down the rope ladder. Then we ran hand in hand through the forest, carelessly trampling the meadow saffron, whose blossoms seemed to turn toward us like blind heads.
The boat, where was the boat? My sides ached, but Jay relentlessly urged me onward. Thorny vines tore at us like greedy hands, as if they were trying to hold us back. They scratched our skin.
The pain of the scratches is what made me realize that this was really happening. It was as if I were waking up from a deep dream. And suddenly, I was scared! I could see in Jay’s eyes that he felt the same way.
The trees groaned under the force of the storm. All around us, leaves and twigs spattered to the ground, as if an invisible person were shaking the branches in outrage. But there, up ahead—wasn’t that where we had left the boat? Yes, there it was! Finally! I almost sobbed with relief.
Jay sped up.
The last thing I remembered about the island was the kingfisher. In the midst of the tumultuous chaos, it perched on a branch near the shore in complete calmness and stared at us as we moved away. Its eyes were as cold as death.
Chapter 17
Alex
It stormed and rained almost without interruption for three days. Then came the flood. I could see it from the window of my room when I got up on that gray Saturday morning.
The bushes along the riverbank stood in muddy water and stretched their bare branches to the sky as if they were drowning. The first channels of overflowing water had already begun to lap at our yard with thirsty tongues. Of course, I had often seen our peaceful little stream transform itself into an entirely different, raging torrent, but never in such a short time. If this kept going, we would need to start stacking sandbags around our house soon.
I stared at the churning mass of water outside. It was the color of congealed blood . . .
. . . congealed blood, what nonsense! I shook my head energetically. That strange color was due to all the clay being stirred up by the river, of course. A perfectly harmless explanation. Grandma was slowly making me crazy, too, with her nervous fussing. For days now, she had been creeping through the house muttering ominous phrases under her breath. “The spirit of the river is displeased. That’s going to bring us bad luck, terrible bad luck!”
I shrugged my shoulders and slipped into my clothes. Muffled snoring came from Jay’s and Dad’s bedrooms, but I was already hungry for breakfast. I headed down the stairs.
“Grandma?”
No answer. Not a sound. Not even the dry clicking of her rosary beads. She must be in the kitchen, praying to her holy Magda—or whichever of those saints is responsible for floods, I thought. Apparently, Grandma didn’t see the slightest contradiction in being a strict Catholic and at the same time believing in superstitious garbage like river spirits.
A cool breeze greeted me as I stepped into the kitchen. The door to the terrace stood wide open and creaked quietly as the wind moved it back and forth.
Only after I closed the door did I notice the footprints.
With a feeling of dread that I couldn’t even explain to myself, I stared at the wet footprints on our wooden floor. I had to think of the tracks in our vegetable garden that Mia always talked about—of a shadow that left behind dead fish and voodoo dolls.
Now it had come inside our house. An invisible boundary had been crossed. What did it mean?
The old fears crept out of the cracks in the floor where they had been hidden for years. And with them, the memory of something I had banished to the deepest recesses of my memory. The awareness that something was out there. Something that spied on me and followed me wherever I went. It had only been glimpsed out of the corners of my eyes, but no matter how fast I turned around, I could never identify it.
I noticed I was breathing faster. The tightness in my chest grew, and with it the certainty that something dangerous was brewing over us. Jay, Mia, and me. Like a threatening cloud, it overshadowed our lives.
Don’t flip out, man! I noticed that I was close to hyperventilating and forced myself to take deep, calm breaths.
Gradually, I could think more clearly again. I crouched down to take a closer look at the footprints.
They were small and dainty, like the feet of a girl or young woman. But what crazy person still ran around barefoot in November? And most puzzling of all, what was she doing in our kitchen?
My eyes followed the tracks, which led from the terrace door to the back wall of the kitchen. I froze, blinking twice. But when I opened my eyes again, it was still there: something was smeared on our once-so-white walls in red-brown paint. The giant red letters seemed to dance around before my eyes, taunting me. Finally, I saw what was written there.
TRAITOR!
Who. . . what the hell? The fine hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up.
I dragged my father and my brother out of their beds. Now all three of us were standing in front of the smeared wall and staring at the scrawled letters.
“Well, boys,” Dad scratched his stubbly chin, baffled. “Are you two in some kind of trouble I should know about?” he asked sternly. I shrugged my shoulders, and my gaze involuntarily darted over to Jay. My brother had dark rings under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept. As soon as he had seen the writing, he had drawn his shoulders up, as if he were suddenly freezing.
As if he knew perfectly well that the message was intended for him.
But he pressed his lips together as our father continued his questioning. “Is this some stupid stunt your buddies pulled? Have you been fighting with someone?”
Silence.
Dad sighed. “Either way—get rid of this mess, or your grandmother will have a heart attack when she gets home from church! I’m going back to bed for a few minutes.” Sleeping in on Sunday mornings was sacred to him, so he trudged off toward his bedroom. At the bottom of the stairs, Dad stopped again and grumbled, “Maybe it would be better to lock the doors from now on.” Was I imagining things, or was there a touch of worry in his voice?
The wooden steps protested under our father’s weight. As soon as the creaking was quiet again, I turned to Jay. “So what’s going on?”
He tried to play innocent. “What do you mean? What should be going on?” But his eyes gave him away. His two-colored gaze wouldn’t meet mine but darted all over the room like an animal caught in a trap. “It’s nothing, Skip. Everything is okay,” he assured me.
First Mia, and now my brother was starting to be secretive, too. They were driving me crazy. “Oh, come on, Jay!” I said with irritation as I looked for a scrub brush under the kitchen sink. When I finally found one, I had a great desire to throw the thing at his thick skull. “For days you’ve been holed up in your room, even though Grandma usually has to tie you to a chair to keep you from roaming around by the river!”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, the weather’s been awful,” Jay retorted snottily, as he filled a bucket with soapy water.
I laughed derisively. “As if that had ever stopped you before!” For a while, I watched him as he
grimly scrubbed the wall. What I had thought was paint at first turned out to be river mud, thick with clay. No matter how much Jay scoured, the stuff wouldn’t come off; reddish streaks marred half of our kitchen wall, and again I was reminded of blood.
Finally, Jay put the brush down, exhausted, and leaned his head against the wall. His pale legs poked out of his too-short pajama pants like thin sticks. For some reason, I felt sorry for him.
“Sit down, you blockhead. I’ll make us some tea. And then you’ll tell me everything, alright?” I grumbled. Jay hesitantly sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed his ice-cold feet against each other.
When I opened the cabinet to take out two mugs, I found the dragonflies. They were perched like extra handles on Grandma’s rose-patterned china. “Damned bugs!” I resisted the impulse to wave my arms around my head wildly when the startled insects almost flew into my face. With an aggressive buzzing, they whirred around in our kitchen like metallic flashes. “Shouldn’t they have gone to sleep for the winter a long time ago?” I protested, shooing them out the window. Nature was all topsy-turvy.
“Everything is going haywire here lately! Yesterday flies hatched and crawled out of my cornflakes! Freaking flies, can you imagine, Jay? I almost threw up, it was so disgusting! And now this crap!” I pointed accusingly at the smeared wall. “I have no clue what’s going on here, Jay—but I’d bet my life that you know!”
I slammed his cup down on the table in front of him and the tea splashed over the top. “Whatever it is—it has to stop, do you understand!” I spluttered. Only in my thoughts, I added . . . because it’s starting to scare me!
But maybe my brother heard it anyway—he could do things like that sometimes. And finally he opened his mouth.
“It’s hard to explain, Skip,” he said evasively. “It’s like this . . .”
And just then, at the worst possible moment, there was a knock on the door to the terrace. Jay was so startled he jumped like an electric shock had jolted through his body. But it was only Mia.
Her reddish-brown hair was curled from the dampness, or from excitement. “Hi, Alex,” she gushed. “I’m sorry to burst in so early in the morning, but you have to help me . . .”
Suddenly, she spied my brother at the kitchen table and broke off. “Oh, hi Jay.”
Jay turned as red as a freshly picked cherry. If it had been anyone other than my awkward little brother, I would have sworn that . . .
“What am I supposed to help you with?” I asked. Mia seemed to have lost her train of thought.
“Um, right . . . it’s about the dog. You know, the stray that always follows me around. Recently he’s even been letting me pet him,” she added. There was a noticeable note of pride in her voice. “But now he’s been missing for two days, just disappeared, as if he’s been swallowed up by the earth. That’s never happened before, and I’m starting to worry about the lousy mutt,” Mia said sheepishly. “Maybe he got run over by a car and is lying around somewhere hurt. . . . I wanted to ask if you’d maybe help me look for him.”
“I can help, too!” Jay called in the background. “I just need to get dressed.” Before I could stop him, he had already bounded up the stairs, obviously relieved to escape a serious discussion with his big brother, at least for now.
“You’re not getting out of this—we’ll talk later!” I called after him. Mia turned to me with a questioning expression.
“It’s nothing. Of course I’ll help you look!” I assured her quickly and went to put on my tennis shoes. In the left shoe was a big toad. It looked up at me with knowing, golden eyes—and jumped away with a croak. Mia laughed. I didn’t.
After three hours of fruitless searching in a misty rain, Mia and I returned to the house, exhausted and chilled to the bone. Although we had combed the entire area, we hadn’t seen a single clue about the fate of the stray dog, not even a hair.
Mia seemed defeated, and her damp curls sagged sadly. “We can try again tomorrow,” I tried to cheer her up. “The old mutt will show up again soon, you’ll see. He’s probably curled up in the bushes somewhere, having too much fun letting us look for him.”
She looked at me, then she took my face in both hands and kissed me passionately, as if she had something to make up for.
“Wow. What was that for?” I asked when I could catch my breath again.
“To thank you for being you.”
I wanted to tell her how important she was to me, how much I loved her. The three magic words were on the tip of my tongue, but Mia put a finger to my lips. Her smile, so familiar and yet so inscrutable, was the last I saw of her before she disappeared into the gray rain.
Chapter 18
Jay
Twilight fell early in the gray November sky, getting caught in the bare branches of the willows. I had been tramping around the area for hours in search of Mia’s dog, mainly to postpone the coversation with Skip. But by now, I was so cold that I didn’t care about anything. I just wanted to go home. Still, it was a mistake to take the shortcut along the riverbank. As I walked along looking at the seething high water, out of the corner of my eye, I suddenly noticed a figure in front of me on the narrow path. I almost ran right into her.
“Oh . . . Alina!” My heart skipped a few beats and then fluttered hectically against my chest like a bird with a broken wing. Ever since my visit to the island with Mia, I had done everything in my power to avoid Alina. I had no idea how much she knew, or how angry she was . . .
“Sorry, I don’t have time for you right now,” I stammered.
But Alina didn’t make the slightest move to let me pass her. “I think you do,” she replied calmly, staring right at me.
In spite of the damp, cold air, I was sweating. I tried to tell my body there was no reason to be afraid. It was Alina, after all. But my bird-heart was doing flips and not paying any attention to me, and my legs would have liked to run away.
I swallowed. “This morning in our kitchen . . . the writing on the wall . . . and the animals. That was you, wasn’t it?” I asked. “You can’t do things like that, do you hear? Skip is already getting suspicious. You’re making a mess of everything!”
“Me? You’re the one ruining everything, Jay! Traitor!” Her voice tore the awful word into my skin, with red letters that burned. “You brought that Mia to our island! You even sang for her . . . you kissed her!”
Kissed! Alina’s voice sounded brittle, like when you break a glass. Had the kingfisher told her that? Had she been looking through its pearl eyes? At any rate, she knew everything and there was no point in lying. But I didn’t want to tell anymore lies anyway. A wild defiance welled up in me: that was my business alone, for me, Jay, alone to decide. Not Alina!
“I can kiss whoever I want!” By now, my heart was beating so loudly I could hardly hear my own words.
“Oh, our little one is getting defiant!” Alina hissed. She wore her placid face like a cracked mask now, with something foreign and frightening lurking behind it. I sensed it, her icy rage that almost froze the air between us.
“You probably think you don’t need me anymore; you want to just trade me in for a new girlfriend! Do you have any idea what that means? Without me, you’ll become just like everyone else: dependent on others, vulnerable, weak. A pathetic prisoner of your emotions!”
Alina’s laugh stabbed me in the chest like a glass knife. “Just look at you, Jay, it’s already started. You’ve fallen for this Mia, haven’t you? Even though you know she’s your brother’s girlfriend! Even though you know you can’t have her!”
The world blurred before my eyes. I wanted to turn away, but Alina held my face tightly between her hands. “My poor, Jay,” she said in a velvety voice, catching my tears with her beautiful, cold fingers. Then she put them in her mouth and sucked on them. “Salt,” Alina murmured. “Your tears never tasted salty before.” She looked at me with disbelief. “Is this really what you want to trade me for, Jay? Salt and heartache? Look at me and answer me!”
“I
. . . I don’t know . . .” I stammered, twisting under her grip. “Please, let me go. I don’t have time for this now. I have to help Mia look for her dog!”
“Oh, the dog. I don’t think you’ll find him!” Alina giggled as if she had just made a joke that only she could understand.
“Why not?” I asked hesitantly. Even as I asked the question, I had a feeling that I wouldn’t want to hear her answer.
“Well, the dog went for a little swim, you know?” Alina placed her forehead against mine, sending me her thoughts. For a heartbeat, I had a clear image of the dog. He would never eat chocolate-covered raisins again. His blue, swollen tongue hung out of his mouth; his eyes were empty and broken.
It was like a sucker punch. I jerked back from Alina, staggered, and fell in the mud. “You . . . you’re . . .” I whispered. I was so appalled I couldn’t find the words as I slid away from her backward on the seat of my pants. “Mean and . . . gruesome, that’s it! How could you do such a thing?”
“I do what I want! I’m the queen of the kingfishers,” Alina replied, tossing back her head. But her voice sounded uncertain this time. She had wanted to intimidate me, punish me for my disloyalty. But she hadn’t counted on such a strong reaction from me. I think it scared her.
“A dead stray, who cares about that? Come back to me, Jay. Come back to the river!”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t want to be like you!” With effort, I scrambled to my feet. “I’d rather be a crying human being with a heart than a kingfisher with a heart of ice,” I said quietly. Then I turned around and walked away. Away from her.
I had only gone a few steps when I heard her call: “Jay, wait! I’m sorry! Don’t go away, do you hear me?” Alina begged me. I closed my ears.
But I could still hear it: the raw heartbeat of her fear. Her pain, her rage, her astonishment that I dared to turn away from her. All of that echoed in my body.
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