Hazel 

Sunday, May 14th

Lost: Dog (brown Labrador, answers to Lucky)

We search the development again. For my dad, or the boy who whistled “Hey Jude,” or a lost soul, or whatever was doing the howling. I message Rowan to keep an eye out on the way home, and he calls to tell me to get out of Oak Road.

“Let’s just go to Maguire’s,” he says. “Lay low for a few hours.”

But I want to find him. Them. My dad, if it was him behind my window. My mom, if it was her who left the lighter. Ash, if she’s the one who wrote the words on the tunnel walls.

Ivy rides off to meet Rowan, to watch the roads for anyone who could’ve broken in. Rose comes with me in the direction of the forest. We climb the rubble to get to the wall.

“Hazel,” says Rose. “Who are we looking for? What were you looking for after Olive found that lighter?”

“I thought maybe . . . I thought it might’ve been my mom. That the spell worked and she . . . showed up. That lighter. It’s mine, but I didn’t bring it here. To Oak Road. I left it with Mom back when me and Rowan ran away.”

Rose looks stunned. She looks all around us like my mom could just appear at the edge of the forest. When she suddenly points into the woods, I think for half a second that it could be true. But then Rose says, “Hey, isn’t that Mags’s dog?” She’s pointing toward a shape moving slowly through the trees.

“Lucky?” I call. I give a whistle. The dog turns her big brown head, but then walks on. “Yeah,” I say to Rose, frowning. “I think it is. I mean, it’s the old Lucky. Mags was carrying a puppy this morning.”

We look at each other. We climb down from the rubble. We hop over the wall into the forest and we follow the dog.

Lucky leads us through the silver birches, the fat chestnuts, and gnarly oaks, down the slope to where the trees are older, bigger, closer together. She’s not far ahead, but we’re always losing her in the trees.

When we’re almost at the lake, Rose stops and grabs my arm.

“Hazel,” she says very slowly, the way you would to an animal you didn’t want to scare. It makes me really not want to turn around.

“Yeah?”

“There wasn’t anything on this path earlier,” she says in the same voice. “Right? That stuff was all by the slope up to the development?”

Toy parts and trinkets, socks and umbrellas, key rings and cables.

I nod. “Yeah?”

“Look,” she says, and I have to turn around. The first thing I notice is the thread. Silver and shiny, the kind Ivy used to bind the lost words we wrote on the tunnel wall. It’s everywhere. It’s on the moss (sprinkled with a red something like blood); it’s in the bushes; it’s tangled around branches and between the trees. It’s wrapped around a pair of men’s black hiking boots with zippers up the sides.

I close my eyes and feel my heart drop right down my chest, knocking off each rib like the rungs of a ladder, cartwheeling down inside my belly, and landing with a splat in the cradle of my left hip. There are words written in Wite-Out on the backs of the boots—I know it without even looking. Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me. My dad’s motto. I looked it up one time. It’s Jack Kerouac. Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road. I’ve always hated that quote.

I keep thinking that I see him, and now here are his boots in the middle of this stupid forest.

Farther down the path I can just about see what looks a lot like a row of small teeth. A line of diary keys. Fingernails. Dog bones. Yellow eyes in a dog’s face blink at me from between the trees, then disappear. On the other side of the path, another dog stands silently. Rose’s hand tightens painfully around my arm.

“Hazel . . .”

But I’ve caught sight of Lucky again, just a few yards ahead of us. She’s plodding slowly toward the lake shore. I get this crazy idea in my head that she’s trying to lead me to my dad. His empty boots are ghosts behind my eyelids. I take a couple of steps toward the dog, but Rose holds me back.

“Hazel,” she says again.

“It’s Lucky,” I say, and something in my expression must’ve convinced her, because she follows me through the last of the trees to the water, her hand still tight around my arm.

Lucky leads us down to the lake, where she steps into the water and wades out. When she walks, her steps are lumbering, but once she starts to swim she glides right in. Then she puts her nose in the water and dives. Rose and I stand on the shore and we watch her go under. We wait for her to resurface, but she doesn’t come up again.

The lake is ringed by trees. We can see every edge. She couldn’t have climbed out without us noticing.

I don’t stop to think—I just run across the rocks and splash into the lake. My shoes are heavy on my bandaged feet and the water’s cold on my legs. I slip on submerged stones and flail my arms to keep my balance. I wade out and I curse the water for making me so slow, but even if I’d been as fast as a fish I know I’d never have found her. You can’t find something that isn’t there.

“Hazel,” Rose calls.

I turn in circles in the water. “Lucky?”

“Hazel, come back.”

“She was right here.”

“She’s gone, Hazel,” Rose says angrily. “And this is fucking creepy and I want to go home.”

I whistle one last time, without much hope.

“If you think I’m getting into that water after you, you can dream the fuck on,” Rose warns. “Come back or I’m leaving without you.”

I wade back. I stand dripping in front of her and she’s shivering almost as much as I am. She’s tall but I’m taller. We’re almost eye to eye.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she whispers.

I sort of wave behind me in the direction of the lake. “We followed the dog . . .”

“No, I mean I don’t know what I’m doing. Here.” She points down at her feet, which are right in front of mine. I’m dripping on the shore. I don’t know what she means and then I kinda do.

“With me,” I say like a question.

Rose sighs. “With all of this,” she answers. She looks back at the forest with its lost things, its findings, its string. With its smell of smoke and its yellow eyes watching us quietly from between the trees. “I don’t know if it’s still whatever we drank last night, or . . .” She trails off. “It’s all just kind of fucked.”

I drip lake water on the rocks and I tell her, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

Rose gives a helpless laugh. “You hardly know me,” she says.

“Sure I do.”

“I hardly know you.”

“I want you to,” I say. “Know me. But I’m afraid you won’t like what you see.”

I want to tell her, Being with you makes me feel like I deserve to be loved. Like I’m less of a monster. Like if you trust me, that means I can trust myself.

Rose shakes her head. I don’t know how to convince her when I can’t convince myself. Trust. Acceptance. I decide right then to tell her the truth. Cold dread sweeps through me. That feeling that’s been building. I feel like it’s been leading up to this. “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me,” I say softly.

“No offense,” Rose says, “but that’s a really stupid way to live.”

“Not if you’re a monster.”

Rose laughs drily. “I’ve seen pretty much every bit of your body, Hazel,” she says. “I think I’d’ve noticed the spikes and the scales.”

“I killed my parents,” I tell her. Four words. My voice is so thin, it could fit through a needle. Shaky as a leaf. Colder than cold.

I can’t feel anything. I can’t feel my skin.

“What?” she says. I take my hands out of my pockets. Half the lake spills onto the rocks. The key looks like it’s part of a shipwreck. The lighter still sparks fire. The words come out like they’re spilling on the rocks themselves.

“After our granny died and our granda went into the hospice, Rowan and I had to go back to live with Mom and Dad. We were staying in a rental place just outside Wexford. My parents were fighting, so I packed our stuff, only the things we couldn’t bear to leave behind. My dad passed out in the bedroom—they’d both been drinking. His stuff was packed, too, but I don’t think Mom knew that. She should have, though. He never stayed anywhere for very long.

“She was wasted. Asleep on the couch with a cigarette in her mouth. We’d been there three weeks and I’d lost track of how many times I’d had to take a lit cigarette out of her hand when she’d passed out pissed on the couch. It was like she’d forgotten all about what had happened to Rowan. She said she was sorry, but she never changed.”

A flicker of a question crosses Rose’s face and I explain about the locked room, the lit cigarette, the burning flat, Rowan’s scar. Rose’s eyes are wide.

“I guess I just wanted to teach her a lesson,” I tell her. “I guess I just wanted to show her what she’d done. Let her sit with her own fate. Rowan’s scarred forever because of her. Of them. Of Dad. I dunno. They’d locked the door and he’d got burned and here she was again and I was just so mad.

“I lit her cigarette. I took it off her and I lit it with my lighter and I left the lighter open and didn’t kill the flame. There was a bottle of drink spilled on the table. There wasn’t much, but I saw it. There was a magazine open beside her. The tassels of the cheap throw on the couch. It was all so close together. All it would’ve needed was a small spark.

“I lit the cigarette. I left the lighter. Rowan was already outside with our bags. I thought I saw a light. A spark. Hot ash falling. Bright enough to catch a flame. But I still left.

“And when I left I locked the door.”