“The key is choosing what you remember,” she says. “Choose the happy things, ’cause the bad things are waiting at the corners of your mind for the moment you’re not ready.”
I nod. Almost every day, I’ll be lying on my bunk and, without thinking, hop up because I have the impulse to walk to the tree house to meet Jude. Angel watches me, her eyes peeking over the top of a book, because by now she knows everything that’s flicking through my mind in those moments: The tree house is burned. The larch tree with it. I’ll never see Jude again.
? ? ?
Jude used to talk about the way his father could quote any line from the Bible. He hated that when he got older, but when we first met, he mentioned it with something like pride. He must’ve believed his father was as holy as I once thought my parents were.
After the night we met, I went out looking for him almost every day, but the forest looked different in the daylight, the shadows rearranged and the trees smaller somehow. It took about a week to find him, and the day I did, I’d already been wandering the woods hopelessly for hours, wondering if I’d imagined the cabin and the strange boy in the night. I leaned against a tree to get my breath. The woods ticked with the noise of insect bodies, the trills surging from inside sparrows’ throats as though celebrating something greater than feathers and hollow bones. I closed my eyes and listened.
Music. I could have sworn I heard music. I hadn’t heard anything like it in years. It was forbidden. I followed the sound, my neck craned till I found a mossy western larch. Above, high on a branch, Jude sat hunched over a guitar. One shoeless foot was hanging down, tapping. He was playing this little concert for nobody but himself and the birds and the trees and whatever else lived that deep in the forest.
It’s that idea that hurts worse than anything, because it’s all a pile of ash now, so burned maybe nobody will ever go there to play a song again. That’s the real tragedy, even worse than the idea of Jude being dead.
“Hi ho!” he called.
My eyes shot open. “Hi.”
He hopped out of the tree, clutching the guitar’s neck. I could see that his fingers were calloused from picking at the strings. I was very conscious of his fingers after that, followed them as they rubbed an eye or scratched his hair, which he hadn’t yet shorn off. His fingers took on an air of importance I’d never attributed to anything. If his fingers could do that, what was the rest of him like? What was inside this boy?
“You can make music,” I said.
He nodded.
“How’d you learn that?”
“My mama taught me,” he said.
“And your mother . . . you only got the one mother?”
“One mother? Yeah. You got more than that?”
“Four.”
He made a face. “That’s too many.”
“Says who?”
“Says nobody. It’s just a common fact.”
“But, if you lose one mother, you have three others to take her place.”
“Nobody could take the place of my mother,” he said seriously.
I felt nervous, like I was walking very closely to some precipice.
“You all alone out here?” I asked.
“Just my daddy and me.”
“No brothers and sisters?”
“Nope,” he said. “I bet you got a lot of siblings over there.”
I nodded.
“Bet you’re never lonely.”
I shook my head. “There are a bunch of little kids, and some older ones who are married off or getting close. I guess—I guess you’re the first person my age I’ve met in a long time.”
He scratched the underside of his chin with the head of his guitar. I knew he was thinking about how he’d never met someone his age, either.
“Why do you live out here in the forest?” I asked.
“I was born here. My momma and daddy settled here before I was born. My daddy told me once about the people down there, in the city, how the smoke and chemicals cover everything. That isn’t how man was meant to live. But this is.” He lifted a finger toward the blooming wilderness. “This is what God wanted for us all along.”
“The Prophet said the same thing.”
“You think it’s true?”
“Well, sure,” I said, tossing my shoulders up in a shrug. “It’s gotta be. I mean, the Prophet says God’s in the stars, and you can hardly see any stars in the city. If you look real hard, you can see angels playing in the forest at night. They don’t got angels in the city.”
“You’ve seen an angel?”
“’Course,” I said.
I don’t know why I lied. Every night, I’d stare into the dark canopy, even for the seconds I snatched walking from the house to the Prophet Hall, but never saw the flash of wings or blinding pixels of skin. Never. No matter how hard I looked, there was only ever just darkness between those trees.
Chapter 12
“Constance, Jedediah, Regent, Patience, Hershel, Amos, Leah, Eliezer, Prudence, Tobin, Silence, Ephraim, Solomon, Halla, Eustace, Gideon, Martha, Liberty.”
“You missed one.”
“What?”