It occurs to me that my house is filled with strangers: with a boy who I found in the forest and a girl who up until a few days ago would have probably laughed at me if I’d asked to borrow a pencil in history class. And I like the feeling: a house brimming, bursting. Filled with so many beating hearts.
For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel alone.
The loft fills with the rise and fall of our breathing, and the stillness in between. And I feel wholly at ease, like Oliver belongs in my bed, like he’s slept here a hundred times before and it’s just how it’s always been.
But then the silence starts to itch at me, my mind unable to sleep, and I feel Oliver shift beside me—still awake.
“Why did you get sent to the camp?” I ask, a question I’ve wondered about since I first found him in the woods. But I’ve been too afraid to ask. Too afraid to hear the answer.
His breathing changes, turns shallow, and I can just barely make out the line of tension along his jaw. “My uncle sent me here, didn’t want to deal with me anymore.…”
There is a pause at the end of his statement—the hollow place where more words should be. Where his thoughts broke in half.
“You’ve always lived with your uncle?” I ask carefully, afraid maybe I’m asking things he won’t want to answer.
He waits so long before he speaks I’m afraid he never will. But then he clears his throat. “No. My parents died a year ago—” His voice catches, then re-forms. “It was a car accident. Two miles from our house.”
A sharp pain pings through my chest. I never should have asked. “I’m so sorry,” I say, but my words sound useless—itty-bitty things that slide right off the skin like oil on water. Never being absorbed.
“I hardly knew my uncle; he never wanted me to live with him,” he continues. “So he sent me here.” He scrubs a hand through his hair, then drops his hand to his side. “Even if I escape this place, I have nowhere to go.”
I almost say sorry again but catch myself. He doesn’t want to hear sorry. I hated the way it sounded when people said it to me after Grandma died, the pity dripping off their tongues. The awful, mournful look in their eyes. The sorrys didn’t change anything.
Oliver wants to hear that wrongs can be made right. That moments in our past can be undone. That I am a Walker and I can bring back the dead.
But I can’t fix anything. The past is already decided.
I close my eyes, and I feel painfully hollow. My own emptiness engulfed by his, becoming the same. We are both alone. Both on our own. I squeeze my eyes tighter and pretend everything is different. I pretend Oliver never went missing the night of the storm. I pretend I never found him inside the Wicker Woods. I pretend he belongs at Jackjaw Lake, just like me, that his parents never died and he grew up a few houses down the shore and we’ve known each other our whole lives. I pretend we used to wade out into the shallow water in summer, me in my yellow ruffle swimsuit, he with his long boyish arms tanned by the sun, and he’d try to pull me under the water, laughing until our lungs ached. Refusing to go inside even once the watermelon-tinted sun had set. I pretend he was my first kiss.
I pretend I can keep him forever, my found thing.
I reach out and touch Oliver’s hand, winding my fingers through his. And his hand flexes softly against mine—he doesn’t pull away.
Don’t let go, I think. Or we both might drift away. We both might forget what’s real. We’ll forget how slippery time can be—how ruthless and mean. If you blink, you might miss everything.
His breathing grows heavy, sleep drawing him under, and my wretched, traitorous heart burns a hole in my chest. I close my eyes and see only the moth—wings against the window, searching for a way in. I close my eyes and see Oliver lying in the trees, snow falling over him, burying him alive.
I slide across the floral-printed sheets, only inches away from him, our fingers still woven together. And I wish I could slip into his dreams—just like my grandmother could. I wish I could see what he sees.
Then I’d know for sure, the secrets he keeps.
Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine
IDA WALKER was born at the last hour, on the last night of the wolf moon, with chalky-blue eyes and a ribbon of blond hair that later turned black.
She sucked her thumb until she was nine and she often fell asleep in unusual places: the crook of a dogtooth elm tree, a patch of stinging nettle, between the paws of a mother wolf, on the roof of the old house during a rainstorm. Ida could sleep anywhere, even while floating on her back in Jackjaw Lake.
When she was eleven, she saw her first dream that was not her own.
She never intended to spy, but every dream she saw from then on didn’t belong to her. When Ida closed her eyes, she fell headfirst into the dreams of others while they slept. She learned to decipher those dreams with startling accuracy, but she knew that most people would not understand, or grasp, the true meaning of their dreams, so she told them fanciful fairytales instead.
Every full moon she brewed crowberry tea with spinster lemon, and she wove stories together as tightly as the braid down her back. She fell in love only once—to the man who gave her a moonstone ring that reflected the slate-blue color of her eyes, the same man who gave her a daughter who could charm wild honeybees.
Ida Walker died on a warm autumn night, the bone moth at her window.
And no regrets in her heart.
To Brew Crowberry Tea:
One handful crowberries—picked during the coldest night
One pinch poppy flowers, star anise, licorice, clover
Steep all night during a full moon. Drink before sunrise in a teacup held away from the nearest clock.
NORA
I want to trust him.
I don’t want to do what I’m about to do.
But there are things—at least one thing—he’s not telling me.
I watch the swell of his chest, the shiver of his skin while he sleeps as if he were recalling the forest, the snow, the night I found him inside the Wicker Woods. It haunts him still.
And when I’m certain he’s really asleep, I slip from bed, pressing my feet silently to the wood floor. I creep across the loft, through shadows and long patches of moonlight, avoiding the places where I know the floorboards give way an inch or two and would let out a soft shudder. Fin breathes softly from the floor. The whole house is sunken into dreams—except me.
I kneel down by the small chair beside the window, where Oliver stripped out of his coat, and feel along the thick fabric until I find a pocket. I slip my hand inside. And find nothing. My fingers trail along the collar, finding the other pocket filled with a few small twigs and broken bits of pinecone—not uncommon after tromping through the wilderness. I settle back on my heels. Maybe there is nothing to find.