They went to the DoorWay House the very next day. The witch was on her porch. She didn’t ask them to come inside. She didn’t ask them to have tea with her. Instead, she held out a stack of letters.
“I think you are ready for these now,” she said. “Am I right?”
Wunder glanced over at Faye. She nodded. “Are ours in here?” he asked.
The witch raised her eyebrows and studied them with her black eyes.
“Not yet,” she said finally. “Soon, I think. Yes, soon, soon, soon. But deliver these first, then come back for more. I have many, many more. And I am running out of time.”
Wunder and Faye took the letters and The Miraculous and set off. They didn’t have to discuss where they were headed. They both knew that the cemetery was the only place to do this work.
“There may be quicker ways to find these names,” Wunder said, opening The Miraculous on the bristly brown grass at the top of the hill, next to the memorial stone. “But if they’re in here, then I want to know about it.”
And they were. As the afternoon wore on, Faye and Wunder found that every name on every letter had a corresponding entry. Every person was connected, somehow, to a miracle. And, Wunder was sure, every person had also lost someone, someone they loved.
Wunder cut the entries out of The Miraculous, and Faye stapled them to the envelopes. Then they delivered the letters, the entire stack, that day.
And the next day, they went back to the DoorWay House for more.
Every day that week, the witch gave them letters. Letter after letter after letter. Letters to teachers and letters to neighbors. A letter to the owner of the Snack Shack and a letter to Wunder’s mother’s boss, Mrs. Atkins. A letter to Ms. Shunem and a letter to Vice Principal Jefferson. Letters to workers at SunShiners and letters to doctors at the hospital. A letter to Father Robles, who hugged Wunder and didn’t say a word about the Sundays he’d missed, and a letter to Faye’s pastor, Pastor Chung, who accepted it with a look of weary resignation at Faye’s cloak.
Often, Wunder wouldn’t recognize the name on a letter. But then he would open The Miraculous. He would turn page after page after silver-leafed page until he found the miracle connected to the name. He would read the story and remember the first time he’d heard it.
Most letters, he and Faye would leave without a word. Wunder would tape the envelopes to the doors, because he didn’t want them to blow away.
But sometimes, the recipients were there.
“I don’t know what this says,” Wunder would say, “but I know you’ve seen miracles and I know you’ve seen loss. And I think this letter has to do with both.”
He would stay sometimes while they read The Miraculous entry, while they read the letter. And he would feel the ghost of that old feeling, the feeling that he was connecting the dots of people’s souls.
It was different though. Before, he had collected the miracles for himself. Now he was sharing them.
One afternoon, he and Faye were in the cemetery, searching through The Miraculous for the most recent batch of names.
“I wonder if my mom will get a letter,” Faye said. She was lying on her stomach in the stubbly grass next to the stone, her cloak streaming behind her like a parachute.
“Your mom?” Wunder asked. He had in fact been thinking of his own mother ever since he realized who was getting the letters. He had been thinking about delivering a letter to her, an envelope with Austra Ellis written on it, the black tree reaching out.
“Yes, my mom,” Faye said. “Her father died, remember? My grandfather?”
“I know,” Wunder said, although he hadn’t remembered in that moment. He tried to make it up to her by asking, “But you were closer to him than she was, right?”
Faye was quiet for a long time, even longer than she was usually quiet. “I was close to him in one way,” she replied, “and she was close to him in another. But we don’t really get along, my mom and me. My grandfather never liked that. That was something he said to me before he died. He said, ‘This will bring you closer together. That’s what losing someone does.’” She wrapped her cloak around herself, tight, tight. “But I don’t think it has.”
“Maybe you’re close to her the same way she was close to him,” Wunder suggested.
“Hold on, Wundie. Let me think about that for a minute,” Faye said. Then she sighed. “No, I don’t think we are. She thinks I’m a weirdo. What about you and your parents? Are you close?”
“We were,” Wunder said. He thought about how his father had been trying to be around more but still worked late most nights. He thought about how his mother had come out of her room a few times to watch television or eat with him, but how she didn’t talk much or smile and how she always went back to her room, how she always shut the door again.
“You still are,” Faye assured him. “I’m sure you still are.” He hoped she wouldn’t say that Milagros’s death would connect them. And she didn’t. Not exactly. What she said was “Maybe we haven’t gotten to the close part yet. Maybe it takes a while.”
“Maybe,” Wunder said doubtfully. “But the people we’ve delivered letters to, so many of them seem sad and lonely. And we never see them here, in the cemetery. Everyone stays away. It doesn’t seem like losing someone brings people together. It seems like it pushes them apart.”
When Faye didn’t answer right away, Wunder looked over to find that her hood was up. She was completely hidden, a wind-blown, black cocoon.
“My mom never talks about my grandfather,” she said, barely audible. “She didn’t even want to come to the graveyard on his birthday. How can his death bring us closer if she’s afraid to think about him?” The next thing she said was so soft, so near-silent that Wunder had to put his head down next to hers to hear it. “I think about him a lot.”
Wunder didn’t sit back up. He stretched out on the ground, his hands fiddling with the blades of dry grass, his eyes on the black velvet of the hood. “I think about Milagros too,” he said. “Even though at first, I didn’t want to come to the cemetery either. And now I am, but my dad hasn’t been back and my mom has never come. And they don’t talk about her. They don’t talk about anything.”
There was no answer from the cocoon.
Wunder worried suddenly that he had offended her. He thought of what Tomás had said, that he’d known Milagros for only eight days. Faye had known her grandfather for her whole life. What if she thought he couldn’t possibly understand how she felt?
“I know—I know it’s different,” he said, fumbling for words, “losing a baby sister and losing a grandfather. But I think some of what we feel is the same.”
Faye pulled her hood off and got to her knees. Her face was flushed and her eyes were bright and wet. “Of course it is, Wundie,” she said. “That’s why we’re doing this together. Eight days or eight hundred years doesn’t matter.” She reached into her cloak and pulled out a bobby pin.
When her hair was back, she stared down at him, right into his eyes, and asked, “What does time have to do with love?”
And Wunder found himself smiling the tiniest smile back up at her. He didn’t need to worry about offending Faye. They had both been beckoned to the DoorWay House. They were both waiting for their letters. They had become friends in a cemetery. Faye understood. Even if she did call him Wundie.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing, Wundie,” Faye agreed. Then she took the next letter out of a cloak pocket. “Now let’s get back to work.”