Hazel 

Saturday, May 13th

Lost: Blood

The second we step out of the forest the storm lashes our skin. Ivy says something, but none of us can hear her. Only the howling of the wind and the swish of the rain and the fat gray rolls of thunder in the distance.

Ivy gestures and we follow her to the edge of the development. To the storm-drain tunnel.

We slip down into the ditch; we lose our footing in the mud. We could be a bunch of hungry trolls waiting for a traveler. Inside, the tunnel is short and dark. It smells of wet cement and stagnant water, but it’s dry. We crouch on our heels and use our phones as flashlights.

Rowan passes the lemonade bottle of poteen around, and I take a burning sip that makes me cough and splutter. Ivy’s eyes water. Rose utters a hoarse “Fuck.”

Rowan wheezes and presses a fist to his chest. “That’ll curl your hair,” he says, and everybody laughs because his hair is all brown corkscrews, just like mine. With our hair, we might have drunk straight spirits since the age of twelve. Or else we’re turning out just like our mother.

I push that thought away from my mind. I’m doing this to bring her back, even if she was a pretty shitty mom. I take a great gulp of the poteen and my throat’s aflame.

Olive winces. “I don’t think I’ll be able to taste anything ever again.”

Rowan laughs. It’s not just the taste that’s burning; the world’s already feeling kinda soft around the edges.

Rose looks up from the spellbook she’s been bent over. “There’s just one problem with this tunnel,” she says. “No tree branches to write our words on.”

But I know how to make a tree. I jump up and grab a marker and I start to draw.

Big horse chestnuts, thin willows, silver birches. Wide hazels and tall rowans, prickled rosebushes and gnarled olive trunks and climbing ivy. They rise like a black forest on the pale gray tunnel walls. Silhouettes. Ghost trees on concrete. One time Granda told me that four hundred years ago Ireland was mostly forest. You could walk from coast to coast without leaving its shade. I wonder if the ghosts of lost trees stay on in towns and fields, in motorways and housing developments. Mags says this development used to be trees. Oak Road. They named it for the trees they felled to build it and now nobody lives here except rats.

And us.

When I’ve drawn a whole forest, I sit down and I’m breathless. My heart’s right up against my ribs.

“What do we do next?” Rose whispers.

“We write our losses on the branches,” I tell her. My eyes on her eyes. Dark and wide.

I give her a red marker and she moves to the other side of the tunnel, to the big rosebush I drew. The rest of us sit in silence and watch her. Olive doesn’t say this is nonsense. Rowan doesn’t warn us it might be dangerous. We just sit all lit up from the inside with Mags’s poteen, and we watch Rose uncap the marker and turn her back to us and write her losses on the branches of the rosebush. Her shoulders move and I think she might be crying, but when she turns around again she looks furious.

Behind her, scratched hard in red ink on the black branches of the gray concrete walls, are the words Rose wrote. My virginity. My memory. My mind. My confidence. My happiness. Myself.

“Oh, Rose,” Olive whispers, and she takes her best friend in her arms and starts to cry.

And just like that, I can tell, we’re all decided. Olive, even though she doesn’t really believe. Rowan, even though he thinks it’s dangerous. Ivy, even though she didn’t seem sure. Rose. Me.

I take my granda’s old penknife out of my pocket and fold out the blade. Rose takes it.

“We need to bleed,” she whispers.

“What?” Olive says sharply. Either she didn’t read the spell all the way through or she didn’t think we’d really do the whole blood bit.

Ivy looks up at her and says, “You can’t have blood magic without a bit of blood.”

“Yeah, but—” Olive starts to say, but before she can do anything Rose has slashed the knife through the meaty part of her palm and is making a fist so that the blood drips down. Ivy holds out the jar of moss and Rose shakes her fist. The moss drinks the blood quickly.

I take the knife from Rose and cut my own hand to bleed on the moss. The slash stings. Ivy takes the knife after me. Then Rowan, even though he doesn’t look happy about it. When he holds out the knife to Olive, she shakes her head.

“No offense,” she says, “but that doesn’t seem safe.”

“Oh, no,” says Ivy. “Nothing about this is safe.”

But Olive looks at Rose, who’s bunching the end of her dress up in her hand to stop the bleeding, and she squares her shoulders.

“Fine,” says Olive. “Give it to me.” She flicks the blade across the palm of her own hand and adds her blood to the reddening moss.

Looking at it makes me woozy, even though I haven’t lost that much blood. But the poteen’s strong and the knife is sharp and the shadows are made in the branches of trees.

I remember why I’m doing this. For Rose, but also for me. So, while Rowan crushes the berries into the moss with his fingers, and Olive unscrews the lid of the oil and pours it over the bloody mess in the jar, and Rose snaps the hazel branch in two and presses the sticky, reddened moss into the center, and Ivy wraps the ivy vine around it, I write my own words on the wall.

I write them small, so no one will notice, but Rowan comes over and sees. I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know how to explain. On the hazel branch in front of me I’ve written her name. Amy Aisling Kennedy. Our mom.

“Not Dad?” Rowan asks. I don’t say anything. I pick up the bottle of poteen and take a long, hard drink.

“What about you?” I say to my brother. I hold out the red marker for him to take. He goes over to the rowan tree and he looks right at me and he writes the same thing on his branches. He doesn’t write Dad’s name on the tunnel wall either.

Amy Aisling Kennedy.

He wants her back, too. Maybe he just wants the her we used to pretend existed sometimes. The real mom. The proper mom. The mom more like Ivy’s, who kept her close, who taught her at home, who baked and built tree houses and picked fruit in the rain. Not the mom ours really was. The one who was never there. The one who was a mess. The one I’m turning into, bit by goddamn bit.

Maybe this was a bad idea.

But the words are written now, and Ivy’s scratching things in red marker on her own tree branches. My friends. This adventure. And Olive is comforting Rose by making dry jokes about lost things, and Rose is giving her a marker and she’s writing things on the gnarly olive branches like she believes in all this. My charm bracelet. My hair clip. My best friend. And Rose looks like she’s about to say something, so Olive writes some words just to make her smile. That drawing of a skunk Eoin Kavanagh gave Rose when we were eight years old. Several really great ideas for English essays. My first Barbie.

Rose laughs despite herself. She says, “Your mom probably just gave it to a thrift store.” And she takes another sip of poteen from the lemonade bottle.

“Still,” Olive says, “it’s lost and I want it found, so this spell had better work.”

But by the way she looks at Rose when she says it I know she’s not joking around.

This spell had better work.

We get kinda frantic then, like this is our last chance, like we have to drum up the magic so we all believe, so it all comes true. We write more words along the branches of the trees. Things we’ve lost. Things we’re afraid of losing. Trinkets, treasures, memories, beliefs. One of our phones goes out and we misspell words in the darkness. Spellings. Spells. The words become spells.

Homemade spirits slosh over the neck of the bottle, over our lips and our tongues. I drunkenly stumble against the side of the tunnel and graze my palm. The blood is red like the marker. Like our words on the walls. We’ve all lost blood tonight. Ivy unwinds the silver string that dangles from the hazel cross and makes spider’s webs from each of the painted branches. She loops the string around the rose thorns she has stuck into the center of each lost thing like a pin through paper, not a thorn on a concrete tunnel wall. I don’t know how they even stay up.

Outside, another dog howls.

If the lights go out, you will know the lost are listening.

If you hear dogs barking, you will know the lost have heard your call.

If you hear the howling, you will know the lost have answered.

And, just like that, the storm is eerie. Blue metallic light on concrete walls covered in shadowy trees. The howl of the wind and the dogs. Silver threads like the webs of fat spiders. Rose petals—where did we get rose petals?—by the entrance to the tunnel. Our blood on a clump of moss. We’ve all stopped writing on the walls. We breathe deep. None of us say anything for a long time. The rain falls on the roof of the tunnel outside; the wind stirs the dead leaves and the potato chip bags. Our phones go dark and we don’t turn them on again.

Then we hear a noise. The unmistakable sound of footsteps on the tunnel roof. Our eyes are wide in the darkness. The footsteps cross the roof above us and stop just at the edge where the entrance is. Our five heads swivel around together. We stare at the opening, but no one appears.

Before I know what I’m doing, I grab the glass lemonade bottle by the neck and dive for the tunnel mouth in a half-crouched run. I hear Ivy shout out behind me.

Outside, there’s the gray and the rain. My glasses blur with water, and I give them a swipe with my free hand. I look around slowly. There’s nothing. No one. I crouch back down in the entrance to the tunnel and shake my head.

“There’s no one there.”