I look left, right, up, down, move my arms out, then in. I feel like I’m being conducted. Sometimes he squints at me, and then at his laptop. Frank turns off the overhead lights, and Dr. Sam tells me to look at the little red light on top of his laptop. I do. It pulses in a gentle rhythm. He’s squinting at the screen of his laptop again, and the white expanse behind me grows strangely warm.
Frank and Dr. Sam don’t tell us what it’s all for or what it’s measuring. They don’t tell us what numbers get spit out, much less what they mean. I think these are the ones that tell them something about our magic.
But I don’t know anything for sure. I just follow directions until Frank turns the lights back on.
Last but not least, I sit in a chair. Dr. Sam ties a tourniquet on my arm. I stare right at the spot where the needle goes in and watch my blood drain into tube after tube.
Dr. Sam says the blood is just for “the usual tests,” whatever that means, but we’re pretty sure it’s for Frank, too. We think he’s trying to find the magic in our blood.
It’s hard to say if magic is genetic or not. Sure, we have two sets of twins who have it, but are they statistical anomalies? Or is it because they’re twins? Violet has two sisters, and by the time they left at eleven, neither one had shown magic. Same for Winnie’s brother, for Brooke’s siblings.
I’m an only child.
Or, as far as I know. I guess my parents could have moved on and had other children by now, unless they were scared to have a repeat of me.
Anyway—we think Frank might be trying to crack that particular code.
Now for my least favorite part. Frank leaves, and Dr. Sam pulls up another stool for himself. He puts on that face. Serious. Concerned. Brow furrowed, eyes kind and distant.
Dr. Sam isn’t a therapist, but he’s had “some training”—that’s what he says—and Frank likes to give us time to talk to him privately. Give us a chance to bare our souls and get our meds adjusted.
“Frank told me what’s been happening,” Dr. Sam says. “I wanted to see how you’re coping.”
“Coping?” I ask dumbly.
“You’ve been through trauma. I want you all to be equipped with proper coping mechanisms. Frank worries about how Jane’s . . . passing might affect you.”
So Frank told Dr. Sam that Jane is dead. Does he really believe that, or is it just a story?
“How it might affect us?” I ask, trying to tease out what he knows.
“Frank said you were the last person to see Jane.”
“I guess I was.”
“And considering the . . . well, the manner of her death.” Dr. Sam clears his throat. “There’s concern about imitation.”
“Imitation,” I repeat.
“Yes.”
Dr. Sam and I stare at each other. The cogs turn slowly in my head, sliding each word into place until I can see a whole picture.
“Oh! You’re afraid we’re all going to kill ourselves.” Frank must have told Dr. Sam it was a suicide. Again, I have to wonder if it’s because he really believes it, or because it was a better story than She disappeared into the forest and I haven’t been able to find her. Can’t imagine it’s easy for Frank to admit he lost one of us.
Dr. Sam chuckles, which is not what I expected. “I should have known better than to try and sugarcoat it with you, Derry. You’re a practical girl. Yes. Frank has concerns that one suicide could set off a chain reaction, and obviously we don’t want that happening.”
“So you’re evaluating us.”
“Yes. I’m hoping you’ll tell me if you’re suicidal, so that we can talk about it. Have you been feeling any desire to hurt yourself?”
“No,” I say, and that’s true. I don’t want to hurt myself.
I sometimes want to hurt others. But that’s not what he asked.
“Do you think anyone else has been?” When he sees my eyes narrow, Dr. Sam smiles. “Please don’t consider it tattling, or anything like that. If you’re worried about any of your siblings, it’s better to know now so we can help them before it’s too late.”
“I’m worried about everyone,” I say. “None of us are okay. Do I think any of them are going to kill themselves? No. But I didn’t think Jane was, either.” It’s always wiser to follow whatever story Frank has constructed for Dr. Sam. Contradict him, even on accident, and you may find yourself in time-out.
“But no one has said anything concerning?”
“No. We’re all just upset and scared and angry.”
He leans in, still with that serious, furrowed brow. “Angry? At who?”
“What?”
“Are you angry at Jane?”
“Of course not,” I say incredulously. “She didn’t do anything wrong.”
“What about your other siblings? Are you upset they’re still here when Jane is gone?”
I wrap my arms close around myself and lean away from him, feeling suddenly dizzy. “Well—no, I don’t think so—”
“Then Frank? Do you feel that he should have been able to stop this from happening?”
The dizziness reels around and around until it solidifies into frustration. “Yeah, he should have!” I snap. “He keeps us under such close watch, but Jane got lost? And he doesn’t know how or why? He lost her and he doesn’t have any answers! Yeah, I’m angry!”
I don’t realize I’m shouting until Dr. Sam tells me to calm down.
That just makes me shout louder.
“Calm down? Are you kidding me?”
Frank comes back into the room. I can see by the look on his face that shouting at Dr. Sam is a time-out sort of infraction. My heart drops.
“Frank, it’s really okay—” Dr. Sam is saying.
“It’s not. I think Derry needs some time to think about what she’s done.” Frank is practically snarling and I can’t quite breathe.
“I’m sorry—”
Frank points. “Go. Wait for me.”
I don’t need to ask what he means. I stand up, swaying just a little from the combination of blood loss and high emotion, and hurry off. Brooke reaches out as I pass her but I flinch away. Part of me wants nothing more than to curl up with any or all of my siblings, warm, safe, protected, but most of me knows that if someone touches me I’ll lash out, and I won’t be able to take it back.
I walk obediently to the time-out room. It’s on the first floor, down the long hallway. After the entrance to the basement, but before the door that leads to Frank’s rooms.
Room is a nice word for it. It’s more like a walk-in closet. In the center, there’s a stool, tall and narrow. I hate it. My legs are short and my butt is way too big for the seat, so I have to hook my ankles around the legs of the stool to stay steady and try to ignore the sharp corners digging into my flesh.
Frank’s going to expect to find me sitting on that stool when he arrives, so I do. My ankles and thighs hurt almost immediately. I don’t move. Frank can be incredibly quiet when he wants to be. I won’t be able to hear him coming and get back on the stool in time.
When he finally comes in, I don’t look at him. If I do, I’ll cry, and I don’t want him to see me cry. Whenever we cry, Frank gets this strange, satisfied glint in his eyes, and the corners of his mouth turn up in a way that makes my stomach hurt.
Not even Elle lets him see her cry if she can help it, and she loves him the most.
“Twenty minutes,” he says. “That should be enough time for you to calm down.”
He closes the door. The overhead light clicks off.
For a few blessed moments, it’s dark. A deep, soothing darkness. I slip off the stool and shut my eyes tight because I know what’s coming.
The lights flicker on. Fluorescents covering every wall, bright and white and blaring. I cover my eyes with my hands, but the light still seeps in.
The humming begins. Low at first, then louder, then low, low, loud, the pitch rising and descending—there’s no rhythm, no predictability. The sounds layer one on top of the other, discordant, im
possible to block out.
The time-out room isn’t like this for everyone. Frank customizes it for each of us. A lot of the others hate the dark and the quiet, and sticking them in a tiny room where light doesn’t even come in under the door . . .
But for me, it’s the light. The heat. The noise. It crowds around me and into me until I can barely breathe.
It’s the way time distorts, making it impossible to know if my twenty minutes are almost up or if it’s only been thirty seconds.
I try not to cry. I always try not to cry.
I always fail.
It’s worse this time, too, because Jane’s missing, and she won’t be there to hug me when I get back to our room, which she’ll have made dark by shutting the curtains and turning off the lights.
Eyes closed tight, I wrap my arms around myself in a boa constrictor hold.
Vines grow out of the floor beneath me, black, poisonous vines, wrapping around my ankles. They hiss like snakes, their thorns are fangs. They inch up, up, up, swallowing me.
They reach my knees. Another flock of vines grow up across the lights, not making it dark, but making it dim.
If only they could break through the walls, seek out a heartbeat like bloodhounds, tear into Frank—
Maybe my magic could be powerful, but not beautiful, no more beautiful than a monster. Something with fangs. With claws. Something no one can stick in a room, because it is simply too big to be contained.
I used to dream of something like that back when I was in elementary school, back when I saw people other than Frank and my siblings. The other kids would laugh at me for being fat, and even as I shrank with shame, I wished to grow into something so huge that it couldn’t be moved or hurt, like a monolith—good word—or the planet Jupiter.
The vines are winding up my thighs, and they are huge and powerful, if the rest of me could be the same—
A particularly high-pitched hum breaks through. The vines disintegrate into dust. The light floods back in. I cover my mouth with my hands, and at last, I cry. I sob, giant, wracking sobs, wailing into my palms and knowing no one can hear me outside this room. I cry because Jane’s gone. I cry because she needs me to find her and I don’t know how. I cry because the light and the sound are too much, too much, and I’m going to shake and shake until I shatter into a million pieces.
What’s worst is that I could leave. Frank doesn’t lock the time-out room door. There are no locked doors in the house, and each one is a test of our obedience and loyalty and faith in him to tell us what’s right. He’s told us what doors not to open, and so we don’t.
We’re not ever supposed to open the door during a time-out.
But I could.
But I can’t.
I’ve managed to stop the tears by the time Frank opens the door. Maybe it’s been the promised twenty minutes, maybe it’s been a hundred years. I’m no longer sure. My eyes must be puffy and red when I look up at him.
He smiles.
Something rushes into the place inside me that the sobbing hollowed out. Something with teeth. Something that could leap forward and rip out his throat.
For one wild moment, I taste copper.
“There, now,” he says. He holds out the red-wrapped sucker I’d usually have gotten at the end of my exam. “Calmer?” I’m not, but he is. Somewhere in the last twenty plus minutes he cooled down and tucked his anger away.
I nod, swallowing the copper taste. I take the sucker, like a good girl. Frank crouches until he’s a little below my level.
“It’s been a long day,” he says. “Dr. Sam is finishing up with your siblings, and after that it’ll be nearly time for dinner, but I was thinking after we’ve eaten and everyone else has gone upstairs, maybe you and I could have some ice cream and talk.” He taps his own temple. “I can tell there’s something going on in there, Derry. You’ve got to talk to someone.”
He’s not wrong. I do need to talk to someone. I’m not used to keeping so much bottled up, unsaid, left to mutate into wilder and wilder thoughts.
I usually talk to Jane, who’s obviously not an option. Winnie and Brooke get a lot of my brain-vomit too, but every time I imagine their faces when I say I saw someone in the forest, or I keep hearing things that aren’t there, or The forest is calling me back, or, worst of all, if I tell them what happened two weeks ago, what I did—
They aren’t an option either. Not just because I don’t want them to think I’m crazy.
If Violet’s dream was right, and I’m heading into some kind of metaphorical deep water, I can’t drag anyone with me. Isn’t that what I did to Jane? And look what happened to her.
Maybe I should talk to Frank, then. Maybe I’ve been selfish to expect my siblings to shoulder those burdens when Frank is right there, older, stronger.
Besides, while I’m so scared of how everyone else might react to hearing my secret, I kind of suspect that Frank might be . . . proud. I think he’d understand what I was trying to do, and he’d be proud of me for taking action. He’d be proud of the innovative use of my magic.
Frank’s watching, waiting for my answer. I nod. “That would be nice,” I say. My veins get that anxiety itch, my middle seems painfully hollow with the idea of telling him the truth about any of this, but I swallow it all down.
I need to tell someone.
Frank leads me back to the living room. I gravitate automatically toward Elle on the couch and sit at her feet—for her healing, or maybe because I want to absorb her love for Frank. It seems so much less complicated than mine. I’m forever on a precipice, loving him, hating him, wanting him to love me, wanting to kill him. Elle just looks at him like he hung the moon. She probably tells him all of her secrets, even the ones we don’t know. Not about the tunnel, or how whenever he leaves she and Irene can’t wait to dive into the lake. Other things, though. I bet Frank knows secrets about Elle that I’d never even suspect.
Maybe if I sit close to her, I’ll learn to trust him with my secrets, too.
“You okay?” she asks. Her fingers brush my shoulder. I almost feel the itch of her healing magic.
“I think so,” I say. “Just a lot happening at once.”
“It’s a really stressful time. I’m sure Frank understands. He knows how close you were to Jane.” She pauses. She lowers her voice. “He shouldn’t have put you in time-out.”
I look up at her sharply. For Elle, that might as well be blasphemy.
Elle clears her throat. “But he’s stressed out, too. To lose Jane, when he’s supposed to protect us? It’s a lot of pressure, you know. Taking care of all of us. Imagine the guilt he’s feeling.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Right.”
Elle brushes a hand softly through my hair. “He’ll make it all okay, Derry. He will.”
I badly want to believe that. I let Elle’s words carry me through the rest of the day, through dinner, until I’m sitting awkwardly at the kitchen table while Frank digs in the freezer for ice cream. After dinner, he told everyone else that they could read or do assignments or whatever they wished, but he wanted everyone in their rooms the rest of the night. He asked me to stay behind.
Frank scoops out ice cream into two bowls—rocky road for him, plain chocolate for me. He slides the bowl of chocolate in front of me and sits across the table.
“So, what’s been on your mind, kiddo?” he asks. I snort, and before I can regret it, he laughs. “Dumb question, I guess. I’m assuming your mind has been on mostly one thing.”
He looks out the kitchen window. For a wild moment, I think he already knows about the forest. He already knows I’ve been out there and that I’m connected to it and—
“Jane,” he says. Oh. “You probably can’t stop thinking about where she is.”
I hesitate. There’s a question I need to ask, but haven’t dared to. There are two reactions I can think of—Frank thinking my question is reasonable curiosity, and Frank thinking I’m accusing him.
Find me.
I can’t be the
only one searching.
“Why did you stop looking for Jane?” I ask. “You haven’t been back to the forest since the first time.”
He’s mid-bite. He pulls the spoon slowly out of his mouth, and swirls rocky road on his tongue thoughtfully. I hold my breath. I can’t tell yet which Frank I’m going to get.
He swallows.
“When I left, before, I went to see some friends of mine. I’m not sure I’ve ever told any of you about them.” He looks to me, and I shake my head. I didn’t know Frank had anyone other than Dr. Sam that he could call a friend. “They’re not as magic as any of you,” he continues. “You couldn’t call any of them a full-fledged alchemist . . . but they have some . . .” He waves his spoon about, searching for the word. “Sight. Psychic abilities. They can use tarot cards, scrying mirrors and water, bones, tea leaves.” He laughs. “A few messier ones you wouldn’t want to hear about. I usually use them to find alchemists who might need my help. I had them all looking for Jane. They all said she was gone. Lost.”
“Lost? Not dead?”
He hums, curious. “You think there’s a difference?”
I shove ice cream in my mouth to give me a moment to think about how much to say. Then, “Yeah. I do. I feel like she’s gone, too. But not dead. Just . . .” I shrug. “Lost. Like she needs finding.”
“Feel it how?” He leans in, peering at me. “Does it feel like sisterly intuition, like something you just want so badly you believe it? Or like premonition? You’ve never shown psychic tendencies before.”
I wish I could tell him that when I felt it, I was in the forest. It changes things, I think, for me to say that I feel Jane being alive when I’m in the forest where she disappeared. It sounds more real than, Yeah, when I’m huddled in my room, staring at her unmade bed, I feel like she has to be alive.
That just sounds desperate and wanting.
“I don’t know,” I say, slouching back in my chair. “I don’t know how to tell the difference.”
“Fair enough. You know, at one point I considered teaching you all a little bit about psychic talents. A primer, at least. It’s a slippery kind of magic. There are people who can always tap into it, and others might only be able to do it once or twice in their lives, or never at all.” He shrugs. “I decided that it wasn’t necessary, not unless one of you started showing signs. But maybe I should have anyway. Just in case. Maybe then you’d know.”
A Dark and Starless Forest Page 7
