Mom shrugs as if to say, What can you do? She knows I’m okay. She’s seen Dad go through this a million times, what he used to call the decompression stage. The toll the body takes from walking through a world that is not its own is like jet lag times a thousand. She knows in a few minutes I’ll be back to normal and I’ll walk through the door with full control of my motor skills and ask what’s for dinner.
But her shoulders don’t relax until I stand and go through the stretching exercises Dad used to make me do to get my blood flowing again. Of course, he used to say chocolate ice cream did the same thing, taking me to Mr. Igloo whenever I skinned my knee or had my blood drawn at the doctor’s office. “You eat chocolate ice cream and your red blood cells start to multiply. Poof,” he would say, handing me a cone. “Like magic.”
Now that I’m older, I know it isn’t true, and I’m not certain the stretching does anything, either. Still, it feels good. Lets me forget he’s not here next to me, doing the same stretch with his hands on the ground between his feet. For a moment, I can almost hear him breathing, and I think if I peek through the curtain of hair covering my face, I’ll see him there in front of me.
But I never allow myself to actually look. It would hurt too much.
I start down the path toward home. Mud squishes up into the treads of my hiking boots. Crickets and cicadas buzz around me, static noise that didn’t reach me farther back in the trees.
And then there’s something else, a whisper that swims by my ear, soft as the tip of a feather stroking my skin. The breathy sound shifts and stretches itself into too many syllables, but it sounds like it says my name.
Winter.
I turn back to the wood, half expecting to see my dad standing there in the same plaid shirt he wore the first time he took me into the wood, when I was ten and he seemed indestructible. A constant in my life that would never change.
But there’s nothing. Just a darkness that stretches beyond what most people see.
III
Uncle Joe sits on the back porch, cloaked in shadows and cigar smoke. I’m fairly certain he wasn’t sitting there a moment ago, but that’s nothing new. Joe’s magic allows him to bend the normal rules of nature and space.
“Any travelers?” he asks, a stream of blue vapor seeping out of his nostrils.
The old porch beams creak under my weight as I sit next to him. “One. A peasant girl from Heian-kyō. She put up a fight, but that was my fault. My Japanese is rusty.”
“Course it is,” Joe says. “That threshold rarely opens.”
I shrug. “I should have been prepared.”
Uncle Joe scratches his chin. His black stubble is salted with white, and the silver strands weaving through his hair seem to multiply every time I see him. Joe is forty-three years old, or so he likes to say. Age is kind of relative when you’re immortal. He doesn’t have a line on his face, and his body is more ripped than our star quarterback. Age has no hold on him anywhere else, which makes me wonder if the white in his hair has anything to do with age at all, or if it came from the wood. If the things he’s seen over the last thousand or so years are finally catching up to him, or if his guilt over what happened to Dad is eating him alive, same as it’s doing to me.
It’s easy for Mom to tell me I shouldn’t feel guilty, that there’s no way to know if I could have prevented Dad’s disappearance by being out there with him that morning, but it doesn’t help. All I see when I look in a mirror anymore is my selfishness. I should have gotten up when my alarm clock went off that morning. Should have helped Dad with the morning patrol. But it was a Saturday, and my bed was warmer than the air surrounding it, and I knew Dad wouldn’t begrudge my sleeping in.
That’s the worst part about it, knowing that Dad wouldn’t have even said anything to me for missing it. For not being there. For failing him.
But whatever I’m feeling, I know Joe’s guilt must be worse. Joe has worked for the council as the Parish family intermediary for hundreds of years, a sort of liaison between the soldier (me) and the bureaucracy (the council). He checks on me, reports back to them. He’s supposed to keep me safe, just like he was supposed to keep Dad safe.
I don’t know if the other guardians are as close to their intermediaries as Dad was to Joe, but even if they hadn’t been like brothers, Joe would have still felt responsible for what happened to Dad.
I think that’s why Joe doesn’t come around the house much anymore. He can’t stand looking into my mother’s pale, lifeless eyes, not when it was his failure that stole the light from them.
Joe takes one last puff of his cigar, then makes a flicking motion with his wrist. The cigar disappears. Like magic.
“Council meeting tomorrow afternoon.” He stands. “I’ll find you when it’s time.”
He starts down the porch steps.
“Hey, Uncle Joe?”
He turns.
“Do you want to come in for dinner?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
His gaze flicks to the back windows, through which we can see Mom bustling around the kitchen, carrying plates to the dining room table. He watches her a moment longer, an unreadable expression hardening his face, then shakes his head.
“Maybe next time,” he says, his body already dissolving and scattering like a million grains of sand in the wind. I suppose doing something as normal as walking or driving is too passé for someone who can teleport.
“Yeah,” I reply, even though he’s already gone. “Maybe.”
*
A platter of roast chicken sits on the dining room table surrounded by bowls of mashed potatoes, sautéed green beans, and a leafy salad tossed with tomatoes and cucumbers. Mom and I both eat like birds. The leftovers will feed us for days, but she refuses to cut recipes.
She also refuses to move Dad’s clothes out of the closet even though it’s been almost two years. Uncle Joe says she’s not grieving properly. He says I need to talk to her, but I don’t see what good that would do. I’m holding on to Dad as tightly as she is.
Mom stands behind her usual chair. “Dinner’s ready.”
I kick off my mud-splattered boots, eyeing the third empty plate she always sets in front of Dad’s chair, and make my way into the kitchen to wash off the dirt in the cracks of my palms. “Thanks.”