The Shadows We Know by Heart

by Jennifer Park

  They pull out black duffel bags and camo backpacks from the back of the car, nothing I’ve ever seen before in this house. Mom slings the packs over her shoulders, knocks her shoes against the tire, and disappears around the side of the house.

  It’s much too late to process any of what I just saw, and I decide I’ll deal with it in the morning. I ease into bed, tension leaving as I hear the familiar sounds downstairs. I close my eyes, remembering the party and how Ben’s eyes would meet mine, how his smile would linger when it reached his eyes. But then I drift, and my thoughts turn to green eyes and dark forests, to cold shadows and warm hands on my skin.

  The loud crack in the forest gets me to my feet.

  I fly out of bed and stare at the trees, but there is only darkness where the moon doesn’t reach. Slowly, registering each shape before moving on, my eyes make their way from the apple tree to the distant stump bathed in moonlight. And there someone, or something, is sitting.

  The figure is so still, perched on the flat wood like a statue. I think it’s the boy, only because he looks so small from this distance. I mean, at one o’clock in the morning, it sure isn’t going to be Old Man Watson.

  Adrenaline surges, even as a voice screams inside my head, telling me this is the most stupid thing I’ve done yet. Ignoring it, I grab my boots and tiptoe down the stairs. I’m halfway through the kitchen when I realize I’m not alone.

  A quiet sniff halts me in my tracks. Mom is sitting at the table, her head propped up on her hands, palms pressed to her eyelids. I feel like a deer in headlights. My head swivels, wondering if I can get back up the stairs without her knowing.

  The silver flask is lying on its side next to a pile of crumpled Kleenex.

  And a photograph.

  It’s surrounded by the tissues, but nothing touches it, as if she was at least careful enough to protect it in her sorrow. I recognize the photo. I have the same one, tucked within a book on my shelf.

  A sob escapes her. I’ve stood here too long. As I back up, I sneak a glance through the back door window. The boy’s still there, waiting, but I have no choice. I tiptoe up the stairs to my room.

  I don’t know how long Mom will stay down there. I should have said something to her, but then we would both have to acknowledge her secret lying there empty on the kitchen table.

  Not even close to tired now, I stand in front of the window. Something tickles my foot and I flip on the bedside lamp, afraid it was a spider. Seeing nothing, I turn it off, too late realizing what I’ve done. He’s seen me, and likely took that flash of light as a signal. Sure enough, when my eyes adjust back to the darkness, I find him running across the field, straight for the house.

  Crap. Mom’s going to see him, I know it. Or maybe she’s too wrapped up to notice anything but her pain. One can only hope. God, sometimes I’m heartless. I push off the bed and shove my lack of compassion out of my mind, because a wild boy, raised by monsters, is running through the field to my house.

  So instead of closing my window, I’m raising it.

  There are so many reasons why I should lock it and hide. Or tell Dad. Or tell anyone.

  But I won’t. Because that’s the thing about having a secret like this. It’s yours. Totally and completely. Because if I slide out this window, no one on earth will know about it. Just me. And him.

  And something about that just feels . . . inevitable.

  Leaving my boots behind, I crawl through onto the roof of the back porch. Perched on the shingles, I watch as he slows to a stop near the apple tree, waiting in the shadows. Inching toward the edge, I peer down at the ground below. If this goes badly, I won’t be able to explain why I was on the roof. Certainly not why I was trying to jump off of it. The magnolia tree sits just within reach, but I don’t dare try to reach for the closest limb. It’s a risk, and Mom would likely hear.

  The boy leaves the shadows of the tree and stands in full moonlight. His bronze skin is now pale, his messy brown hair flecked with strands of silver. Though his eyes are dark, I know their shade. A deep emerald green, the color of the forest after a summer rain. I wonder if he’s ever smiled. If he’s ever had a reason to.

  The next thing I know I’m falling forward. The shingles slip out of my fingers as I scramble for a hold. My heel hits the edge of the gutter. I jerk it away with a gasp, both out of pain and fear that someone heard me, but all that accomplishes is sending me over the edge of the roof.

  For a split second I hear my dad’s sermon voice, telling me I’m being punished for my deceitful actions, that this is what I deserve. And then all thought is wiped away when I land in a pair of steel-like arms.

  “Ohthankgod,” I mumble, eyes closed, prepared for the impact of hard ground that didn’t come. The boy goes down on one knee, his breath whooshing across my face as he stops my descent inches from the grass. I can’t believe I’m alive, and he looks completely surprised that he caught me, which will probably freak me out if I dwell on it too long. His heart is racing against my skin, making me embarrassingly aware that I’m in thin cotton pajamas, little more than shorts and a tank top.

  Suddenly he rises to his feet, lifting me like I’m nothing, and moves into the shadows of the magnolia. I’m hoping he’ll let me go, but if anything, I think his arms tighten around me more. The wind picks up, sending wild strands of his hair blowing across his face and mine.

  “Can you . . . put me down?” I clear my throat nervously. He’s staring at my neon-painted toenails glowing in the moonlight. His head jerks around, his eyes staring intently at me, at my mouth. A faint line forms between his brows.

  “Down?” I point to the ground. He tosses his head in an effort to move his hair, and something seems familiar about the motion. Probably because Matt does the same thing.

  Slowly he puts me on my feet. As his arms fall away, leaving me chilled, a light flickers in the kitchen, like someone moved in front of a night-light.

  I don’t think, just react.

  I grab his hand and pull until we’re running around the corner of the house toward the storage shed. His hand is warm, and it grips mine like we’ve done this before, another thing that rings familiar. The moon is bright and unhindered on the far side of the shed, but we are completely hidden from the house now. I gaze fleetingly across the pasture, wondering if he came alone to find me, wondering what he risked if he did.

  Our hands are still linked, and, blushing, I try to disentangle mine from his. He doesn’t seem to want to let go. He stares like he can’t get enough of watching me, like looking at a human isn’t something he’s done in a while. Maybe he hasn’t.

  There are a million questions I want to ask him. But they all fade away when he takes a step closer. I can’t meet his concentrated gaze for long, so I let my eyes drop.

  Obviously a mistake.

  His body is cut in shadow and light, nothing but angles and sharp lines that tell me any part of him would likely be hard as stone if I were brave enough to touch it. The boy tilts his head. His eyes become swathed in darkness while his hair glows with moonlight.

  Guilt stabs at me, as if I’m committing a sin just by letting him stand here and stare at me. It’s just that I’ve never felt so seen before. The forest has come to me, not the other way around.

  I’m not Leah, the preacher’s daughter; not Leah, Matt’s sister; not Leah Roberts, whose family went through that terrible incident.

  I’m just me. A girl, nameless, standing with a nameless boy who might need rescuing more than her.

  chapter eight

  This time, when his gaze meets mine, I don’t look away.

  But when the solid crack of wood echoes through the forest, he scans the tree line. Fists clench, his chest heaves, and I can’t tell if he’s scared, worried, or angry. When he takes a step away, I find myself reaching out to him.

  “Wait. Stay.” I don’t even know if he understands me. I don’t even understand me. Standing here in the moonlight with a wild boy from the woods, I’m pretty sure “sane”
isn’t in my vocabulary anymore.

  But all I want is for him not to run.

  He pauses, his gaze darting between me and the forest. When I feel him pulling away again, I blurt out the first stupid thing I can think of. “Thank you. For, you know, saving me.” I point toward the house. “I’ve never tried to climb down the roof before.”

  He tilts his head, frowning as his eyes search mine. We stand in silence, until the tension eases from his body. There are no more signals from the forest. I’ve read about the wood knocks, one of the Sasquatch ways of communicating, far less conspicuous than the bone-chilling howls and whoops that I hear late at night.

  “Can you talk?” I whisper.

  He releases a heavy breath, pursing his lips as a frown appears, drawing his straight eyebrows together. The boy looks at me through long, lowered lashes, giving a slight shrug.

  I bite my lip, only to release it quickly when his gaze narrows in on it.

  “My . . . my name is Leah.” I point to myself, then him. “Do you have a name?”

  His lips are moving again, whispering soundless words that I can’t make out. He visibly steels himself, and then he takes a breath. “L—lee . . . yah.” His voice is rough, straining with the effort of use. “Leeahh.”

  I reach a hand up to cover my smile. This time the word is just a whisper but clear as day. “Leah.”

  “Yes!” Too loud. I wrap my arms around myself, unable to contain my excitement. “You said my name.” I point again to him. “What’s yours?” Disappointment settles over me when he remains silent. “You don’t have a name?”

  He shakes his head.

  It occurs to me he knows enough of communication to realize that motion means “no.”

  Another crack echoes in the distance. I nearly come out of my skin, but he barely flinches. “You have to go, don’t you?”

  His eyes are pleading with me to understand. I glance down and tuck my hair over my ear when it falls across my face. It won’t stay. When I look up, his hand is already moving.

  I freeze, waiting, breathless.

  Light fingers touch my hair, hesitant and wary. He tilts his head again in that very animal-like way of his. His fingers slide down the strands as he leans forward to inhale the citrus shampoo scent I’m sure it smells like. He’s so close I stop breathing. Again. That habit has really got to stop. When he moves the hair along my face and behind my ear, my heart stumbles. Rough fingertips trail feather-soft down my skin, leaving my jawline burning.

  My eyes close because it’s easier than enduring the intensity of his gaze. Fingertips graze my eyelids, lightly brushing my lashes before sliding down my nose. The breath I finally release is shaky and loud.

  And when the primal roar echoes from the forest with angry impatience, I open my eyes to find him gone, fleeing across the field like a wraith. Once again I run back to the safety of my dark house, make sure the kitchen is empty, slip the spare key from beneath the doormat, and add one more secret to the arsenal within its walls.

  But this secret burns bright and fierce, unlike the others that smolder in the ash of long-dead fires.

  I wonder how long I will last before it consumes me.

  Dad has cleared his throat three times in the last five minutes. Matt shifts beside me as I pry my eyes open and glance up, catching Dad’s stare as my gaze drags across the choir and my eyes roll back in my head again.

  “He’s going to say something,” Ashley hisses with an accompanying elbow to my ribs.

  “No, he won’t,” I murmur, enjoying seeing the backs of my eyelids. “Then he’d have to publicly acknowledge I’m not perfect.”

  “I’m never taking you out again,” Matt whispers, but I just smile.

  It’s so warm in here from the heaters, turned on for the first time this season, resulting in the entire sanctuary smelling like burned dust, and the urge to sleep is overwhelming. Dad will be so pissed. I’m sure his eyes are doing that tight glare thing, and the muscle in his jaw is ticking. But I don’t care enough to open my eyes to see.

  “First sneaking out and drinking, now sleeping in church? What are you thinking, preacher’s daughter?” Ben whispers over my shoulder from the pew behind us. It jolts me awake like ice water, and the obvious grin in his voice makes me blush.

  “Apparently one night of hanging out with you has ruined her,” Ashley answers.

  “Well then, we need a do-over. How about today?”

  Ashley raises an eyebrow at me, but I don’t dare answer because Dad is looking over here. Again. As if he’s determined to catch us not listening or, worse, talking. Ben is perfectly hidden behind my head, so he’s out of sight at least. My luck, Dad’s going to ask me trivia questions about the sermon on the way home and then corner me over why I didn’t pay attention.

  I shrug in answer to Ben. It’s safe. Noncommittal. But he whispers, “Awesome,” and sits back against his own pew. Ashley pats me on the leg, though in consolation or congratulations, I have no idea.

  We wait in the car nearly twenty minutes for Dad to finally exit the church to join us. I don’t understand why we can’t take separate cars, but he insists. Matt’s stomach is rumbling, and Mom is picking at her nails with a slight frown when the driver’s side door opens. “Sorry I’m late. We had to reschedule the finance meeting for later this afternoon. Sheriff can’t make it until four.”

  “Oh?” Mom says distractedly, still picking at her chipped polish. Dad stares at her until she glances up at him. She sits up suddenly, alert, staring back. I have no idea what passes between them, but after a moment Dad cranks the car, and Mom looks away, fists tight in her lap.

  Sometimes I wish they’d just get a divorce. I’d rather them be separate and pleasant than together and unhappy. But then I think they’ll never be happy wherever they are or whoever they’re with.

  “Leah, what did you think of the sermon?”

  Here we go. “I think it had too many metaphors.” Let him think on that for a moment.

  “It’s Revelation, Leah,” Matt says. “It’s one big, gigantic, cataclysmic metaphor.”

  “Well, it’s really—” Dad begins.

  “I mean, come on. Do you really think a dragon with ten horns and seven heads is going to come out of the sea? It’s not even symmetrical. Where are the extra three horns? Why are there even three extra horns to begin with? Right, Dad?”

  Dad tears his gaze from the rearview mirror when he nearly rear-ends the car in front of us.

  “And explain to me how a beast is going to have two horns like a lamb. Lambs don’t have horns. They’re baby sheep. That’s the point. Don’t you think that would hurt the momma sheep to give birth to a baby with horns? That’s brutal.”

  Dad’s mouth snaps shut. He flexes his hands on the steering wheel and slowly shakes his head. “Well, I’m glad it made you think about it. I guess,” he murmurs.

  “Yeah, because it doesn’t make sense.” Matt pops his earbuds out of his pocket and plugs them into his iPod. “We were just talking about how you can already get a chip with your credit card number or something like that implanted in your hand. Did you know that? I mean, that’s mark-of-the-beast stuff. Why would you want something like that in your hand? You could never hide from anything. I’d totally chew it out like the dinosaur in Jurassic World. Just leave a big hunk of skin lying around with a beeping tracker thing.”

  There is dead silence in the car until Mom turns around. “The dinosaur chewed its skin off?”

  “Well, I mean, if you’re asking specifically, the velociraptor DNA mixed with the base genome of the T. rex gave it a higher intelligence level, allowing Indominus rex to remember where they placed her tracking implant when she was a baby. But it’s due to the addition of both cuttlefish and tree frog DNA that allowed her to camouflage herself and remove her own thermal signature, enabling her to escape in the first place.”

  For a moment Mom tries really hard not to smile. Matt caught her by surprise, and I can tell the exact moment she remem
bers why he usually hides his dinosaur obsession, because her eyes darken and shoulders sag. “I’m sorry I asked,” she says softly, turning around.

  Matt frowns but shakes it off. He winks at me, knowing his diversion was a success, and stares out the window with his earbuds blaring.

  The memory surges through my defenses, laid bare in the expanse of my mind. It was the last week of summer, and Mom and Dad took all of us to the Museum of Natural Science in Houston. Dad had to borrow the church van just to fit all of us kids. Ashley and I had the middle row, and the boys were in the back. And they tugged on our ponytails the entire three hours it took to get there. Dad even stopped at one point just to let us get out and run around an empty parking lot, screaming and chasing until we were breathless with laughter and could get back in the van like the civilized humans he expected us to be. Of course, back then he said everything with a smile that reached his eyes. And I adored him for it. Things were better when he was around, not worse. And Mom was exactly what she was supposed to be. Love and hugs and happiness, her attention on us whenever we asked for it and especially when we didn’t.

  The dinosaur exhibit literally changed the boys’ lives. From the towering skeletons to the tiniest detail behind glass, they soaked it up like water in sand. They lived and breathed anything and everything dinosaur from that moment on, both Matt and Sam. The dinosaur birthday party they had that year was over-the-top, and Dad even showed up dressed in a T. rex costume that sent all the children screaming across the yard in fake terror. The piñata was a stegosaurus, the cake was a three-foot brontosaurus that Ashley and Reed’s mom made from scratch, with tiny toy dinosaurs placed along its body, and the punch was green. It was the best party the twins had ever had.

  And it was the last.

  We spend the rest of the car ride in silence, until Dad asks Mom what’s for lunch as we pull into the driveway. “You’re welcome,” Matt whispers as we get out of the car.

  “I owe you.”

  “I know. Your price is playing video games this afternoon.”