She listens to him, tears swimming in her eyes, then looks at me. “He wants to talk to you.”
It takes me a second to register the phone being held out to me, and another second for my body to actually move. My sock feet pad across the carpet of the living room and onto the linoleum. I take the phone from Mom’s hand and wrap the cord around my finger.
“Hello?”
Mom slips out of the kitchen and up the stairs, the old floorboards creaking beneath her.
“You okay?”
He sounds tired. The bone-deep kind that only starts to show on the surface after it’s already rotted away the core.
“Not really.”
“What happened?”
“Brightonshire,” I say. “He came back at sundown.”
Joe pauses. A teakettle whines on the other end of the line. I imagine him walking through his studio apartment overlooking the river, passing the artifacts he’s collected over the years: a funerary-instructions tablet from ancient Egypt, a vase from Babylon, a Renaissance tapestry from Venice. I guess those are the perks of being immortal. Dad used to say there were downsides, too, darker parts of Joe that he never showed anyone except Dad.
“Your mom said she had to pull you out,” he says, and now I imagine him sitting at his claw-foot Victorian dining table with a mug of tea. “That all she could see were your fingers and that something had ahold of the rest of you.”
I nod.
“Win? You there?”
“Yeah,” I say, leaning against the counter. “The path. It … it turned on me.”
“You’re lucky you made it out.”
“I know.”
“Don’t let it happen again.”
It’s his good-bye voice. I learned to recognize it when I was young. He has a habit of hanging up the phone before I’m ready.
“Uncle Joe—” My breath hitches in my throat.
“Yeah?”
“I heard his voice again.”
Joe sighs. “He’s not in there, Win. He’s gone.”
He says more, but I don’t listen. It’s nothing I haven’t heard already. I just stare at the moon breaking over the trees, striping the darkness with silver, like Uncle Joe’s hair, until he hangs up.
I place the phone back in its cradle on the wall.
I don’t know why I’m so shaken up. My dad, Uncle Joe—they both warned me what would happen if I stayed in the wood after dark. Still, it feels like my family dog contracted rabies, and now it’s sitting in there, hiding in the trees. Waiting for me.
I dread going back in tomorrow.
XII
I sleep in.
I don’t know if Mom turned off my alarm or if I forgot to set it, but it’s the first time in years I’ve missed my morning patrol. Not a big deal when I wasn’t the sole guardian of my territory, but Dad isn’t here to pick up the slack anymore.
I throw on a tee and a pair of jeans, not even bothering with brushing my hair or my teeth. There’s no time. Mom has a mug of coffee and a bran muffin waiting for me on the counter, along with a note. Working late. Leftovers tonight?
I look at the oven clock. Ten minutes until I’m supposed to pick up Mer. Twenty-five minutes until we’re officially late for first period. I pour the coffee into a travel mug, wrap the muffin in a napkin, and head out onto the back porch.
*
I check my watch—nine minutes—set my backpack and thermos on the porch steps, then head into the wood with my knife out and ready.
It looks like my wood again. No tar-like quicksand on the paths. No tree limbs reaching for me like witches’ hands. The sun is a finger’s width high in the sky to my left. I can almost believe last night was a dream if I try hard enough.
That’s the thing about the wood. It blurs the line between what’s real and what isn’t. Makes you think you’re crazy for seeing things no one else sees, like dead people walking and uncles who fade in sifts of sand. If I ever told Mer what goes on in here, she’d send me to an institution.
It feels like my wood again, too. No cold blasts of phantom air, no shadows shifting between the trees. Everything looks as it should. The trees sigh like they’re happy to see me. The paths stretch out in front of me in dizzying swirls and tangled knots, paint dripping off the leaves, slowly changing the wood from summer green to autumn fire.
I don’t have time to do a full sweep—though full is a relative term in a never-ending forest—so I stick to the paths closest to my threshold, listening for any sign of disturbance, but I don’t feel another presence, and I’m confident no travelers have slipped through this morning. At one point, I think I hear a child crying, but it’s only a robin warbling in the tree to my right, just outside the wood.
I check my watch as soon as I cross my threshold. Great, I have exactly two minutes to make an eight-minute drive. I tuck my knife into my backpack, swing the backpack onto my shoulder, and grab my thermos. Then I jump into Dad’s car, throw my backpack on the backseat, and peel out of the driveway.
Meredith’s sitting on her porch when I pull up. Her brow furrows as she slides into the passenger seat.
“Well, don’t you look radiant this Thursday morning,” she says as I pull back onto 315. “You sick or something?”
“Overslept.”
“Well, we can’t let Trevor see you looking like this.” She takes out her makeup bag and almost shoves a mascara wand up my nose.
“Must you?” I ask, groaning as the light in front of me turns red. It’ll be a miracle if we make it on time.
“Oh, I’m afraid I must.”
“At least save the mascara for when I’m not driving.”
She hands me a hair tie as we sit there, and I let her dab some concealer under my eyes as I pull my hair into a ponytail. I learned long ago that there’s no point in fighting Meredith when she’s made up her mind about something. At least not about something as unimportant in the grand scheme of things as makeup.
We pull into the parking lot with three minutes to spare, and I skid into first period just as the bell stops ringing.
I try to concentrate in my classes, but I’m tense and my mind keeps drifting back to the wood, my body waiting for the inevitable tug I’ll feel when Brightonshire decides to make his next move. I test out various explanations to give my teachers if I need to leave. With Mr. Harris, my precalc teacher, it’s a known fact that all I have to do is go up to his desk and whisper “female problems” and he’ll hand over a hall pass, no questions asked, even to a no-good truant like me. Madame Bent, my French teacher—French, of course, being the one class I don’t have to try in at all—will give one away if you say you need a mental break, but only on the days she isn’t properly caffeinated.
When I make it to seventh period without feeling even a twinge that something might be wrong, the anxiety swirling through my stomach starts to subside. Maybe I won’t need an excuse after all.