The Wood Read online

  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.”

  Not many would expect my mom to be a great cook, considering that most mothers who spend ten hours a day at work would rather order takeout when they get home, but cooking’s always been a stress reliever for her. As soon as she gets home, she changes out of her professor uniform of tweed slacks and a white blouse into her sweats and trusty apron. She digs through the fridge, opens her cookbook, and doesn’t say a word until the meat’s roasting or stewing or frying and the whole house smells like fresh herbs and melted butter.

  One time I joked that this was her own form of decompression, her way of becoming human again after a long day in another world wearing a hat that wasn’t labeled MOTHER or WIFE. She smiled at me and said, “Yeah. I suppose you’re right.” And then I sat down on the stool on the other side of the kitchen island and she asked me what I learned in school that day. Before Dad disappeared, it was our usual routine—me sitting at the kitchen island while Mom cooked, both of us waiting for Dad to return from his evening patrol. Both of us anxious for him to get home before the sun went down, although we hid it well behind small talk and smiles that never quite reached our eyes.

  Now, I’m the one who patrols the wood every evening, and Mom waits for me in the kitchen by herself, with no small talk to keep the anxiety at bay.

  Water sluices over my hands. I pump a dollop of soap into my palm and scrub out the creases with my fingers. The polished obsidian coin hanging from the leather straps around my wrist clinks against the sink. I turn my hands over and notice a splotch of dried blood on my forearm. Peasant girl must have nicked me when she charged. I wash it off quickly before Mom notices and walk over to the table.

  “Looks delicious.”

  “I hope it tastes as good as it looks,” Mom replies, pulling back her chair. She always says this, even after cooking one of her tried-and-true recipes. She’s always been so humble that she’s never known how to take a compliment. It was one of the reasons Dad said he fell in love with her.

  I tell her about my history paper, due at the end of the week, and the A that I got on my English test. It’s been three weeks since I had to skip a class to take care of a “disturbance” in the wood, so Mom doesn’t feel the need to remind me homeschooling is an option as she’s done on other nights. Instead, she tells me about her students and some archaeological dig in Turkey she’s thinking about joining next spring.

  We both know she won’t. I can’t leave the wood, and she can’t leave me, even though I’d be fine on my own. Even though Uncle Joe would check up on me.

  But neither of us says this.

  Only ten minutes into the meal and there’s nothing else to talk about. Silence fills the room like water in a bowl, pulling us under into our own thoughts and fears and white noise.

  IV

  Dad sits me down in the study on the morning of my tenth birthday. It’s February, and nearly a foot of snow glitters outside the frosted window. He’s made me my favorite drink, a mug of cranberry cider warmed over the stove with cinnamon sticks and a dash of orange juice. Flames crackle in the fireplace, consuming bits of old newspaper with the freshly cut wood. A bowl of scented pinecones sits in the middle of the coffee table, where it has sat since Christmas. The pinecones have lost most of their scent, but Mom sees no reason to throw anything away that still serves a purpose, even if that purpose is purely decorative.

  Dad folds himself into his favorite reading chair, ice-covered branches fracturing the window at his back, as I curl my legs up underneath me on the couch. There are presents on the dining room table and sticky buns baking in the oven, but he tells me they can wait. It is a hard thing to hear at ten years old, especially when one of the presents is shaped like the Barbie dream car I’ve wanted for months, but I scrunch my eyes down into my “serious” face anyway and set the mug on the coffee table.

  “You’re old enough now,” he begins, “to know about the wood.”

  I no longer have to try to forget my presents. They have left my mind completely.

  He launches into a story that begins here, in this old country house made of strong timber and river stone, in the year it was built, 1794, though the Parishes had been protecting the thresholds for nearly eight hundred years before that. One of our ancestors journeyed to America when he heard of a particular patch of trees in the Northwest Territory, a piece of land the Native Americans called sacred and the settlers called cursed, where people went in and never came back out. Not a totally uncommon occurrence back then, of course, but the fact that the trees in question were located next to a river made our ancestor wonder if it was connected to the wood between worlds he was sworn to protect.

  “You see, rivers are the power sources that connect the wood to our world,” Dad explains, but he must see something in my face that says I don’t understand, because he adds, “The wood is like a carousel, a spinning wheel that has no real beginning or end, just the platform where the conductor controls its power. Without power, the carousel does not turn.”

  I frown at the carpet. “But with a carousel, there’s more than one way to get in and out, right?”

  He smiles. “There are many points of entry, yes, just as there are many points of entry into the wood, but there are only a few power sources which keep the wood grounded in the space between worlds. Unlike other thresholds that open and close throughout time, the threshold behind our house and the thresholds located next to rivers around the world that act as these power sources are always open. This is why the guardians live next to these thresholds, so they can have constant access to the wood.”

  “There’s more than one guardian?”

  “Oh yes,” Dad says. “Ten families in all.”

  He explains a lot to me that morning, things I don’t fully understand until he begins my proper lessons, with old journals and guided walks through the wood. He explains how the thresholds work and talks about ley lines, points of power that intersect, and the way the never-ending flow of the river gives the wood a unique source of power. He says worlds were never meant to be crossed, and it is our job to protect the wood from travelers, and to see those travelers home safely.

  I learn that the thresholds always open at the same locations—in an alley in Los Angeles that used to be a grazing meadow, or in a market in Shanghai, or in some tiny corner of a place no one would even think to look at twice—little rips in the fabric of time. Some open for fifteen seconds, others for fifteen minutes. The longest open threshold on record was an hour, back when my dad was still in diapers. Grandpa sent a group of seventeen travelers back through the same threshold in one afternoon, herding them like cattle.

  And then the thresholds close, like scabs over a cut. Days, weeks, even years in the human realm can pass before the scab is picked and the timeline rips open once more, bleeding travelers into the wood until it scabs over again. This continues until the threshold closes for good, the cut finally healing into a scar, although this doesn’t happen as often as Dad would like.

  He grabs a book from the shelf and hands it to me. It’s an old book bound in leather with the title and author’s name etched in green. The copyright reads 1936. It is a collection of stories, paranormal events that have tak
en place around the world that have never been fully explained. He tells me to turn to chapter twenty-three, titled “Time Travel.” In it, there are a dozen stories of people disappearing from their time period only to wind up in another. One story in particular catches my eye, about a traveler wearing medieval clothing, who, according to onlookers, appeared out of nowhere in the middle of a street in downtown Chicago. One witness told police that the man shouted at passersby in Shakespearean English and stared at the buildings surrounding him as if he’d never seen anything like them. In his confusion, the man was run over by an Oldsmobile and died instantly. Some thought he had possibly escaped from an asylum, while others thought he was an actor who’d had too much to drink. Whatever the case, his identity was never discovered, leading some to believe he may not have been from their time at all.

  “These people pass through the thresholds unknowingly and end up in our wood,” he explains. “They become disoriented, and it is our job to take them back to their own time, but a few of them have slipped through the cracks in the past thousand years, since the guardians were called. These travelers journeyed through a threshold that was not their own and ended up in another time. This is dangerous for many reasons but, most important, it upsets the natural order of things. We are all supposed to exist only in our own timelines. To be dropped into another could rip apart the very fabric of our world.”

  I flip the page. There is a copy of the newspaper article detailing the accident, along with a sienna photograph of the body splayed underneath the car.

  “I want you to read that book before we begin your lessons,” he says just as the oven timer dings. He ruffles my hair. “Enough talk for one morning. I believe you have presents to open.”

  But I am not as excited about the Barbie dream car or the sticky buns. I hug the book to my chest and keep it on me at all times over the next week, reading whenever the opportunity strikes, making notes in the margins in purple ink under the notes made by my dad and my grandpa and someone else before them.

  V

  Trevor watches me in fifth-period chemistry from the other side of the room. Meredith notices and nudges me with her elbow. A drop of distilled water sloshes out of the beaker.

  I sigh. “You’re lucky that wasn’t hydrochloric acid.”

  “You should go out with him,” she says, doodling fat hearts onto her lab packet. “He’s clearly into you.”

  “I did go out with him.” For one week in sixth grade. It was enough.

  Mr. Craft walks by and Meredith fiddles with the Bunsen burner until he moves on to the next worktable. “But he’s mature now. And he’s a quarterback.”

  “Second-string,” I mumble as I watch the solution and jot down my observations.

  “Yeah, but those abs ain’t second-string.”

  I roll my eyes.

  Meredith became boy crazy right around the time Dad started teaching me about the wood. She’d talk to me about her latest crush and I’d nod as if I were listening, when really all I thought about was my next lesson. And then she would notice I wasn’t listening, and I’d spend the next hour apologizing. We had our biggest fight in eighth grade. Meredith called me a freak and I called her immature. We weren’t friends for a week.

  It was the longest week of my life. And even though she still calls me a freak sometimes for making it to junior year without having one steady boyfriend and I call her immature for caring more about gossip and boys than our upcoming ACTs, I don’t know what I’d do without her.

  She reminds me that there’s a normal life outside the wood. Reminds me that there’s something to protect that goes beyond me and my family, even if it’s something that I’ll never fully be able to enjoy. Meredith hits it on the head every time without meaning to.

  I am a freak.

  “Yeah, well, I have it on good authority that Trevor’s hoping he’ll see you at the game Friday night.” She bounces in her seat as she says this, the fluorescent lighting making her perfectly straight teeth look even whiter than usual.

  “Did he say that?”

  “No, Tommy D. did. I think he wants to ask you to homecoming.”

  “Tommy?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Trevor. Honestly, Win, I don’t know how you function sometimes.”

  I don’t know, either. It’s not like I don’t notice boys at all. Not like I don’t wish I could be more like Meredith and actually have time on my hands to go to football games and parties and homecoming dances. But even if I did have the time, there wouldn’t be any point in it. I don’t care how mature he is for his age; I doubt there’s a single high school boy in the country who would believe me when I’d inevitably have to cancel a date to send a time traveler home where he or she belongs.

  Frustrated, I huff out a breath. “Well, then why doesn’t he just ask me? Why does he have to get Tommy D’Angelo to tell you to tell me to go to the football game so he can ask me out to a dance that’s still two weeks away?”

  “Okay, look. No offense or anything, but … you’re kind of scary, Win.”

  I cut my eyes to her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Okay, maybe scary’s not the right word. You’re … intimidating. You never talk to anyone besides me. You’re totally unapproachable.”

  My brow furrows. “I talk to people.”

  “Teachers don’t count.”

  “There’s this girl in my English class who’s always asking for pens. Anna something.”

  “Arianna Andrews, and she doesn’t count, either.”

  “I talk to people,” I say again, but the bell rings and Mr. Craft is clapping his hands and telling us to turn in our packets, and I don’t think she hears me.

  It’s a lie anyway. When it comes to any semblance of a social life, I am as tiny and insignificant as the fly currently slamming its body against the window behind Mr. Craft’s desk. That’s the way it has to be. If I get too involved, make too much noise, people will notice me as more than just the brainy girl who skips class a lot and, apparently, scares people. And since being noticed can only lead to questions I can’t answer, I think I’ll stay in my silent, scary corner, thank you very much.

  Meredith takes our packets up while I clean our work area. She isn’t the greatest lab partner. She always skips steps in the instructions and never helps me clean up, but I prefer to do things on my own anyway.

  There’s no one you can count on out there to save you, Dad used to say. When the guardianship passes, you’re on your own.

  Meredith returns and shuffles her books into the crook of her arm. “You coming over this afternoon?”

  “Crap, I forgot. I’m—”

  “Busy.” Meredith sighs. “The ACTs are in three weeks. I need you, Win. I got a nineteen on my last practice test.”

  “I can’t tonight, but we’ll study all through lunch tomorrow and I promise I’m all yours this weekend.”

  She stares at the tessellated floor, brown and pitted from past chemical spills. “My parents’ll kill me if I have to go to community college.”

  I swing my backpack over my shoulder and put my arm around her as we head toward the door. “You’re not going to community college. Your GPA’s not bad, and you’re on student council. You’ll be fine if we can just nudge your score up a few points.”

  “Easy for you to say. What’d you get on your last practice test? A thirty?”

  Thirty-two, actually, but I don’t say this. It’s not like it matters anyway. I can’t go to college. I already know what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, and it doesn’t require a four-year degree. The only reason I’m even taking the test is to make Mom feel better, to make it seem like I have options when I really don’t.

  We push our way through the congested hall. A couple of guys throw a football back and forth over our heads, holding up the stampede and nearly braining every single person between them. Meredith shouts at them to knock it off, but in a teasing, flirty voice that gets her nowhere.

  “Make us,” one of the guys says, tossing the ball back to his buddy.

  The next time it zooms over our heads, I catch it one-handed.