I get up from my chair and cross to the bookcases. There are forty-six journals in all, dating back to the early 1200s, that have been kept and restored, as well as a handful of books and treatises on the wood and the workings of the council. I pull them out, one by one, and stack them on the floor. I don’t know what I expect to find this time that I haven’t found before. Dad’s journal that I’ve never once seen in my life hidden behind another book?
But there’s nothing. The bookcases are empty, and the shelves are smooth. No latches, no doors, no hollow spaces. I lean against the fireplace, cold stone seeping the warmth from my skin, and look around at the mess I made for nothing.
It’s all been for nothing.
I look up at the ceiling, knocking the back of my head against the mantel. “Where is it, Dad? Huh? Didn’t you think you owed it to me to let me in on your secrets? Didn’t you—?”
My elbow scrapes against a sharp point in the middle of the fireplace. I suck in a breath. It’s a shallow cut, the kind that sends a million nerve endings into overdrive. A thin line of red bubbles to the surface. I rub my fingers against the sharp stone—someone should really sand it down—and it moves.
It moves. Just a little to the right. I dig my fingertips into the grooves and wiggle it forward. The stone is half the length of my forearm, and it takes a solid heave to pry it loose from the stones surrounding it. It smacks into my stomach, pushing the breath from my lungs. I lay it down gently on the carpet and look inside the hole it left behind. My fingers shake.
A journal. A fat, dusty, leather-bound journal.
I pull it out, and right there on the front are Dad’s initials: JP, 1989–
I take it to the desk, open to the first page, and start reading.
*
June 10, 1989
8:35 a.m.
This is it, graduation day. Everyone else I know is going through a mixture of emotions—excitement for summer vacation, anxiety over moving away and all the decisions that will come with starting college in the fall. What will they major in, where will they live? Will they like their roommates, will they like their professors? Will college really be any different from high school? Will the ones who could coast by in their classes actually have to put effort into their chosen degrees? How will our valedictorian—who told everyone who would listen that she’s starting summer classes at Yale next week—handle the change from the little pond to the big one? Will she still be the big fish, or will she drive herself crazy trying to compete with thousands of other students just like her?
But graduation day is not the first step to my future. It is the last step of my past. Dad officially retires today. He’s on his last patrol as I write this, and this afternoon, directly following my graduation ceremony, I will conduct the afternoon patrol by myself.
Dad tells me not to worry, that he’ll ease me into the role of primary guardian, and even then, I won’t be on my own. His body won’t let him ignore the wood completely, not until he’s dead and buried. And then there’s Joe, of course, my permanent link to the council. Still, it’s a lonely feeling, knowing this is all my life will ever be.
Dreaming of anything else is pointless.
June 10, 1989
9:05 p.m.
Sent two travelers back this afternoon. A kid from 1964 Chicago, and a woman from 1602 London.
Now that the sun’s finally down, we’re going out to eat to “celebrate.”
What a joke.
June 17, 1989
10:45 p.m.
Joe took me to my first meeting as the primary guardian. That’s the one thing Dad says he’s most excited about, never having to make the journey to their headquarters again. I had only been to one meeting before, when I was ten and Dad had to observe some archaic ritual in which the council recognized I would begin my training as a guardian. It was a lot more exciting back then, before I realized what this destiny really was.
A prison sentence.
Three travelers today. San Francisco, 1911.
Johannesburg, 2026. Tenochtitlán, 1456.
Although it doesn’t sound like it from these first entries, I know Dad and Uncle Joe became best friends before too long, and by the time Dad got married and Mom was pregnant with me, he and Joe were like brothers. There were picture albums full of the three of them together in front of Christmas trees or around the kitchen table, taking me to the zoo when I was a toddler or dropping me off for my first day of school. Wherever Dad and Mom went, Uncle Joe followed.
Dad’s relationship with the wood, it turns out, was always a conflicted one, but the journal entries get less hostile the older he gets. Although he doesn’t directly say it, I think Mom is the reason for this.
Things start to take a turn again on the night before my tenth birthday. Dad writes about how he’s going to tell me about the wood in the morning, starting me on a path that is centuries in the making, but he’s conflicted about it. How can I, in all good conscience, he writes, subject my daughter to the same fate that has tied me to this place all these years? How can I take away from her the dream that she can be anything she wants to be when she grows up? How can I shackle her to this place for the rest of her life?
But he doesn’t have a choice. I’ve been shackled since birth, just like every Parish before me.
It’s four in the morning by the time I’ve skimmed through the entries and made it to Dad’s last year. These entries are harder to read. The pen strokes are darker, as if he tried to punch the ink through the paper, and in the margins are sideways notes scribbled like afterthoughts: What’s the point? Is this really all there is? All there will ever be?
His anger is palpable on every page—toward the wood; the travelers; the council; even the sun, for rising every morning—and I flip back through the entries, making up a sick game to figure out when exactly that anger turned to hatred. When exactly he started drinking too much. When exactly he started fading away from us. Wondering if he really disappeared because he stepped off the path, or because there just wasn’t enough will left inside him to exist.
I give up looking—procrastinating, really—and finally turn to the last pages. The first entry in this section is dated a week before he disappeared.
It seems my disillusionment with the wood has begun to affect Joe, of all people. He keeps making odd comments he wants me to think are offhand, but Joe is too deliberate for his words to be anything but calculated. It started with a simple agreement with me one day, when I drunkenly wondered aloud what the point of it all was, why my daughter had to suffer the same fate as the rest of the imprisoned Parish line. Why she couldn’t have more. And now it has progressed to Joe openly questioning the council, saying he believes it’s time for a change.
He has something up his sleeve. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m going to find out.
My eyes shift to the last entry my dad ever wrote, and suddenly I don’t want to read it. I want to hold on to this moment where a part of him is still alive. I want to run my fingers over his handwriting and imagine he’s upstairs sleeping, and I’ve crept down here to read his secret, most private thoughts, and he’ll kill me in the morning if he finds out, but I’ll smile when he does, because he’ll be alive.
My eyes burn and I think: no more.