Winterwood

by Shea Ernshaw

  I think I hear movement upstairs, Suzy waking up, or maybe just turning over in bed. The sound fades. A boy died, I think again. The words on loop, echo, echo, echo. I swallow and look back at Oliver, saying aloud the thing I can’t escape. “A boy died the night you went missing,” I say, words tumbling out, causing a strange pain inside my ribs—like being snagged by a fishing hook.

  Oliver’s brow stiffens. “What?”

  I feel my jaw contract, my eyes afraid to look away from him, afraid I’ll miss a flutter of an eyelash that might mean something. Reveal some clue Oliver is trying to hide. “A boy is dead,” I say, firmer this time.

  But Oliver’s expression tightens, like he doesn’t understand.

  “You didn’t know?” I ask.

  “No. I don’t…” He trails off, swaying a little on his feet, and I see how pale he is—the cold hasn’t left him completely yet. “I don’t remember anything. I can’t…” Again his voice breaks.

  I want to touch him, to steady him, but I keep my hands at my sides, examining every line of his face, the slope of his cheekbones. I’m looking for a lie, for something he’s hiding. But there is only muted confusion.

  “I can’t go back to the camp,” he says finally. “If the road wasn’t snowed in, I’d leave, but”—he exhales deeply—“I’m stuck here.”

  Oliver breathes and I swear the wind calms, he closes his eyes and the forest trembles against the house.

  My lost item found in the woods. Who is now more forest than boy.

  I say the next thing before I can stop myself, before I can tell myself it’s a bad idea. “Okay.” A prick of unease cuts through me. “You can stay here tonight.”

  One night, I tell myself. One more night, I’ll let him sleep here, this boy who speaks as if a soft wind stirs inside him, who can’t remember what happened to him the night another boy died. Whose eyes make me feel slightly unmoored in ways that make me want to scream. Walkers cannot trust our own hearts—our slippy, sloppy bleeding hearts. They are reckless, stupid things. Muscles that beat too fast, that cave inward when they break. Too fragile to be trusted. Yet, I let him stay.

  I lock the front door and add more logs to the stove. And when Oliver settles onto the couch, I see he still has the bag of herbs I gave him, clutched in his hand. I was certain he wouldn’t keep it—but he did.

  “Thank you,” he says to me, and I stall at the bottom of the stairs, chewing on the side of my lip, twirling the moonstone ring around my finger.

  “Can I trust you?” I ask. Too late now, I think. I’ve already let him stay. I’ve already let my heart slip two degrees off-center, let myself believe he might be different. That he isn’t like the others. That he might have the same hole inside him that I do. And if he says no, will I force him to leave? Probably not.

  He watches me with his moon-deep eyes, and my head feels fizzy and light, filled with feathers and dust, no rational thoughts skipping around up there. Only seasick thoughts. No compass or stars to steer me back to shore.

  “I don’t know,” he answers finally, and my throat feels too dry.

  A boy is dead. Dead, dead, dead. The words have now lodged themselves stiffly in my skull—planted there, where they will grow roots and thorns and venomous flowers, burrowing into my thoughts, becoming true.

  There is a storm growing inside me, inside this house, and it darkens the doorways—the dark spreading out from corners and from beneath old, creaky bed frames.

  Back in my room, I feel alone, out of place in my own bedsheets. The loft ceiling too steep and jagged, like brittle bones that might snap at the knees and shatter. I force my eyes closed, but I see only the moth, the memory of ash-white wings moving toward me in the dark. Hunting me.

  Oliver has returned from the woods.

  And something happened the night of the storm. Something bad.

  When you see a pale moth, my grandmother told me time and again, her eyes like black moons, death isn’t far behind.

  Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

  WILLA WALKER wailed and wailed and wailed.

  She was born in 1894 during the winter of an ox moon. A restless baby, she cried even when the summer stars reconfigured themselves in the sky, dancing across her hand-carved crib. Her mother, Adaline Walker, believed something to be wrong with the small child—an omen of illness or bad luck.

  When Willa was sixteen, she stood on the shore of Jackjaw Lake and wept into the shallow water. Her tears filled the lake until it overflowed—muddying the banks and turning the lake bottomless.

  Willa’s nightshade was more dangerous than most. Her tears could fill oceans if she let them. They could drown men and overflow rivers and turn the forest to water.

  The depth of Jackjaw Lake was forever unknown after that day, and Willa’s mother made her carry a handkerchief wherever she went, the thin cotton meant to catch every teardrop that fell from her cheeks. To prevent the world from drowning.

  Willa fell in love twice, and twice suffered a broken heart.

  She died on the second night of Beltane, after her twenty-third birthday. Cause unknown.

  Cure for Heartache & Unexplainable Weeping Fits:

  Two pinches skullcap

  Powder of lemon balm and Saint-John’s-wort

  Nectar from a milk thistle bee

  One horsehair, burnt at both ends

  Combine in wooden mortar. Drink or place beneath tongue.

  NORA

  I shouldn’t care.

  It shouldn’t matter that Oliver was gone from the couch when I woke and came downstairs—just like the morning after I found him inside the woods.

  But still, I stand on the porch looking out at a trail of deep footprints cut through the fresh layer of snow, veering around the twin pines that stand guard beside my house, then wandering down toward the lake. A ripple of déjà vu passes through me, just like before—the snow falling in familiar waves, every blink of my eyelashes is a second I’ve felt once, twice before. Time swivels and then lurches back into place.

  Tick, tick, thud.

  I steady myself against the porch railing, hands gripping the cold wood, and focus back on the footprints leading through the snow.

  This is the second time he’s slipped out of the house while I slept, and maybe I should feel angry. But something nags at me instead, a disquiet that won’t go away—a pulsing curiosity just behind my eyes that wants to follow his path, see where it leads. I can’t be sure what time he left the house, but when I touched his pillow, the scent of woods and earth still lingered against the cotton. Yet the warmth from his skin was long gone.

  Fin trots down the porch steps and out into the snow, sniffing at the ground.

  The sunrise is a sickly pale glow on the horizon, and maybe I shouldn’t follow his footprints, maybe I don’t want to know where he’s gone. Yet, I push my hands into my coat pockets and clomp down the steps into the snow anyway.

  A boy is dead. And maybe Oliver decided to leave in the middle of the night, tried to hike down the road to town. He’ll never make it if he did. Or maybe he’s gone somewhere else. Perhaps he has other secrets he’s trying to hide—a deep well of them.

  Fin leaps through the snow happily, trailing Oliver’s tracks, and when we reach the lake, the footprints turn left, toward the southern shore.

  The air whirls with flecks of ice; the morning sky is velvet—like fabric that was handwoven, marred by deep clouds and imperfections. Not machine made. And Oliver’s path around the lake takes me to the small marina, where docks sit frozen in the ice, waiting for spring. Canoes rest with their bellies to the sky.

  In summer, tourists converge on this side of the lake, children sprinting down the docks to fling themselves into the water, orange and cherry and watermelon Popsicles dripping onto toes and down sunburnt arms. Normal kids with normal lives—a thing I never knew. The air always smelling of sunblock and campfire smoke, the afternoons burning so brightly that nothing dark and shadowy can possibly survive.

/>   But now, the boathouse store sits boarded up for the winter, a CLOSED sign hanging crooked above the turquoise-blue door—the wind thumping it against the wood, a thwap thwap thwap that reminds me of a woodpecker searching for bugs in the trunks of spruce trees.

  “Hello!” someone calls, and I whip around to face the lake.

  Old Mr. Perkins is out on one of the docks, his green rain boots kicking through a layer of snow, the hood of his yellow slicker pulled up over his head—as if it were spring, as if the air were mild and drizzling.

  “Morning,” I call back to him.

  When Grandma was still alive, she and Mr. Perkins would often sit on the docks at sunset, chatting about the years that lay behind them—back before the tourists came, when you’d find gold on the bottom of your boots just walking around the shore, and fish swam in the lake as thick as mud. Now, from time to time, Mom and I will make the walk down to the marina to check on Mr. Perkins, especially in winter. We’ll bring along a thermos of hot cinnamon-apple tea, a sweet pumpkin cobbler straight from the oven, and jars of freshly sealed honey.

  But this time, I haven’t brought pie.

  Mr. Perkins tips his head to me, and in front of him is a broom he had been sweeping side to side, brushing the dock clean of the snow. An odd thing to be doing in winter. But Floyd Perkins has never been ordinary.

  “Docks were starting to sink,” he says, as explanation. “And my snow shovel broke.” He waves a hand at the broom, as if the solution were obvious, then squints up at the sky. “This damn snow won’t let up. It’s nearly as bad as the year your great-aunt Helena started tossing ice cubes out her window.” Mr. Perkins knows most of the Walker tales. He was here the winter Helena Walker lobbed ice cubes out the loft window each morning—a peculiar spell for conjuring snow. A spell only Helena could perform. Winter lasted eight months that year, and after that, Helena’s mother, Isolde, forbade her from summoning the snow again—placing a lock on the icebox. The thought of it still makes me smile: Helena’s wild red hair spiraling up around her as flakes seethed down from the sky.

  “The forest seems angry,” I say, nodding up at the mountains, where clouds gather against the jagged slopes to the north. It isn’t Helena Walker who’s responsible for this winter’s storms; it’s something else. A darkness over the lake—a forecast of something to come. I shiver and tamp my feet in the snow to keep the circulation moving through my limbs.

  “These woods have a temper,” he agrees, the corner of his mouth lifting. “Best not to anger it.”

  A tree all alone may grow hatred in its bark and moth-eaten leaves, a note handwritten in the margins of the spellbook reads. But an entire forest can weave malice so deep and well-rooted that no safe passage can be made through such a place. The entry was written as if it was an afterthought, but it’s always stuck with me. The severity of it. The warning that a forest cannot be trusted. The trees conspire. They watch. They’re awake.

  I turn away from the mountains and ask, “Did you see someone walk around the lake this morning?”

  Mr. Perkins wipes at his forehead, then holds his hand over his eyes, as though he is looking out across an endless blue sea, in search of land. “Who you out looking for?”

  I’m not sure I want to say, to explain about Oliver. About all of it. So I just say, “A boy from camp.”

  Mr. Perkins leans heavily against the handle of the old wiry broom, like a crutch or a cane. “Are those boys bothering you?” he asks. His face hardens into a protective look. The worried arch of his gray eyebrows, the downturn of his upper lip. He’s the closet thing I’ve ever had to a grandfather, and sometimes I think he worries about me more than my own mom does. “If those boys ever say anything to you that is less than chivalrous, you let me know.”

  He worries they’ll call me a witch to my face. That they’ll throw stones at me like locals used to when they saw a Walker roaming around the lake. He worries I might be as fragile as ice—easily shattered with a harsh word.

  But I have more of my grandma in me than he thinks. “The boys haven’t done anything,” I assure him, offering a tiny smile.

  He sticks out his chin and says, “Good, good,” before shifting his shoulders back, fighting a tired, crooked spine. His left hand begins to tremble—as it often has in recent years—and he grips it with his right, to stop the shaking. “Haven’t seen anyone out walking this morning, boy or deer or lost soul.”

  “It could have been earlier.” My lips come together, feeling foolish for even asking. For following Oliver’s tracks in the snow. “Maybe before the sun was up.” I try to imagine Oliver sneaking out from the house in the dark, without saying goodbye, and wandering down through the trees as if he were hiding something. As if he didn’t want to be followed.

  He left, and a thin edge of hurt works its way under my skin. A feeling I don’t want to feel. A pain I won’t allow to dig any deeper into my flesh. I won’t let this boy unsettle every part of me.

  Mr. Perkins shakes his head. “Sorry, not so much as a jackrabbit came by this way.” His eyes skip out over the lake, like he’s remembering something, and he scratches at his wool cap revealing the tufts of gray hair underneath. “It can be hard to find someone in these woods,” he adds, his jaw clenching, shifting side to side, “if they don’t want to be found.”

  Fin trots off ahead through the snow past the dock—back on Oliver’s trail again.

  Maybe Mr. Perkins is right. If Oliver doesn’t want to be found, maybe I should leave it alone. Go back to the house. I glance to the mountains where a dark wall of clouds is descending over the lake. “Another storm will probably hit within the hour,” I tell Mr. Perkins. “Maybe you should head back inside.”

  A chuckle escapes his throat—as if the sound began in his toes and had time to gain momentum. “Just like your grandmother,” he says, clucking his tongue. “Always worrying over me.” He waves me off and begins shuffling back down the dock. “At my age, an hour feels like an eternity.” He sweeps the snow from the edge of the dock onto the frozen ice. “Plenty of time.” Instead of saying goodbye, he hums a familiar tune under his breath, a tune my grandma used to sing. Something about lost finches flying too far east, poison berries held in their talons, seeking the weary and brokenhearted. A fable song—about time being cut short, slipping through fingertips. Hearing it makes my chest ache. A strange sadness that I will never be rid of.

  It makes me feel impossibly alone.

  Fin heads around the shore, and I think again that maybe I shouldn’t follow. But curiosity is a nagging thump inside my skull. Urging me on.

  * * *

  I push through the deep snow, beneath the stormy sky, until we reach a place where Oliver’s tracks veer away from the lake. Where they lead up into the trees—to a place I rarely visit.

  A place where the gloom of darkness never lifts. Where I’ve often seen human shadows wandering at twilight—specters who don’t yet know they’re dead. Where Walkers prefer to avoid.

  The Jackjaw Cemetery.

  The graveyard sits between the rocky shore and the forest—visible from all sides of the lake. A hundred years ago when the first settler died, the mourners walked a few yards down the shore and decided this was as good a place as any. They dug a hole where they stood, and this became the spot where the dead were lowered into the earth.

  Fin trots into the graveyard, then stops at a row of old stones, digging his nose into the snow, pawing at the ground briefly. I don’t want to be here, among the dead, but I follow Oliver’s tracks to where they end.

  My skin shivers. My temples itch like bugs crawling across my flesh. I kneel down beside the grave where Oliver’s prints came to a stop and run my palm over the face of it, wiping away the layer of snow. I know this grave—I know most of the ones that belong to my family.

  Willa Walker lies here, beneath several feet of hard-packed earth and clay.

  Boys from camp often come here to the graves of Walkers. They drink beers and howl at the moon and
rub their palms over the stones, making wishes. It’s a place to gather, to try to frighten one another. On Halloween night, kids drive up from Fir Haven and camp out among the graves, telling stories about Walkers, casting their own made-up spells, and hexing one another.

  But why did Oliver come here now, to Willa Walker’s resting place—a Walker who wept into the lake and made it bottomless? Who cried more than any Walker who ever lived. Whose tears were said to be as salty as the sea. Whose nightshade could drown the world.

  I hold my palm against the gravestone, as if I could feel the past within the worn surface. As if I could see Oliver standing over the grave and recall what he felt, conjure up the thoughts that clattered around inside his skull. If only that was my nightshade, to draw forth memories from objects. Then I’d always know the truth.

  But no memories skip through me, and I release my hand, lowering it to my side. If I were any other Walker, I might be able to glean some hint of the past, conjure some speck of moonlight to show me what I cannot see. But instead, I feel only the cold air against my neck. The snow beneath my feet. Nothing of worth.

  Still I wonder, why did Oliver come here? What was he looking for?

  What does he remember?

  My hands tremble, and I feel an odd swaying sensation in my chest, like the trees and the charcoal sky are wobbling, rolling like a ship about to capsize. It happened last night in my room, this morning on the porch. And now again. Like the world is teetering along the edges of my vision, about to slip out of alignment.

  I blink and force the sensation away.

  Beside me, Fin’s nose twitches in the air and he skims past my legs, back out through the cemetery gate—trailing the footprints that circle back around to the lake. Oliver didn’t wander any deeper into the cemetery; he didn’t linger. He came to Willa’s grave and then left.

  Maybe he hated it here as much as I do.

  The sad-looking graves and the bones resting beneath the soil. The constant wind coiling along my neck. The fear that I might see one of the dead, loping among the dying trees, unaware of what they are. Gray, rotted fingers reaching out for me. Pleading. Trying to draw me farther into the cemetery. Don’t be afraid, my grandma would tell me whenever we passed by here. All Walkers can see the dead.