I PARK IN THE FARMHOUSE LANE and sit there without moving. Thirty seconds pass. A minute.
“Are you okay?” Mr. Henry asks. We didn’t say a word during the entire drive. I had the feeling that he was waiting for me to ask him questions, but I wasn’t in the mood. Besides, he’s the one who wanted to talk. He can start whenever he’s good and ready.
“I’m fine,” I say, suddenly regretting my decision to bring him here to my home. I wonder if it would offend him if I turn the car back on, drive into town, and ask him to get out.
“Are we going to go in?” he asks.
“Wait.”
The last thing I need is Jerry seeing me go into the house with this character. I look around for him or his son, but it’s the time of day when they are usually back at their own farm. They spend less time here in the winter. The fruit trees are old, cold twigs—it’s impossible to believe fruit will grow from them again in the spring, when life returns to everything. The garden is only the remains of dead plants, the husks of things not harvested. Can those of us facing the winter of our lives somehow gather the courage to believe spring will come again?
“Okay,” I say with a sigh. “Let’s go.”
We get out, and the sound of the two car doors slamming in quick succession sends pigeons flying out from under the eaves of the barn. They dart and swoop for the woods across the street, up into the cold gray forest of the eastern mountains. The slamming doors sound foreign under the blanket of winter. I shuffle through the brittle grass, in the direction of the house, and he moves to steady me by holding my elbow but pulls away when I glare at him.
We get inside where it’s warm, and I go into the kitchen to make coffee because I have a feeling this is going to be a long conversation.
“What do you want?” I ask him, breaking the silence.
He sits down in a chair in the dining room. He is a large man. It seems unusual to me that a man who looks so old could still be so solid. When he talks I notice a distant clicking and realize it comes from a piercing in his tongue, a metal stud, tapping like Morse code against his teeth.
“I wanted to talk to you about Abra.”
“No, I mean what do you want in your coffee? Sugar? Cream?”
“Oh yes. I’m sorry. I drink it black.” He pauses. “But that is why I’m here. I need to talk to you about Abra.”
I feel a growing sense of alarm. I’m suddenly on high alert. I know why this man is here. I know what he has come for.
The sword.
“Abra? What about her?” I ask, avoiding his eyes, trying to sound light, trying to sound innocent. “I didn’t speak with Abra for many years, you know. Many years. We grew apart.”
I pour two cups of coffee, my nerves on edge. The glass spout of the coffeepot chatters against each of our porcelain mugs like the teeth of a cold man. Steam rises, swirling, and the smell calms my nerves.
“Yours is here on the counter,” I say as I make my way to the table, holding my own scalding mug.
I had forgotten the very particular feeling that comes when sitting across the table from someone like him, someone who is what he is, but when he returns to the table and settles in, it comes rushing back: the sense that you are not sitting across from a person as much as you are sitting across from an era, an epoch. Looking at this man was like looking at the Grand Canyon and seeing all those lines in the rock, all those different ages of the earth.
“Did you know anything about what she did after the summer your mother died?” he asks.
“How do you know about my mother?” I ask.
“Everyone knows about your mother,” he says with a hint of impatience. I clench my jaw at this strange reference to my mother. I wonder who he means by “everyone.” I want to ask him about my mother, but I don’t. I don’t know why. Maybe he’s good at steering a conversation, or maybe I want to say as little as possible. Or maybe I’m afraid that I’ll find out something about her, something strange, something disappointing.
“Your mother,” he says before shaking his head, changing course. “What do you know about what Abra did after your mother’s passing?”
“She was my best friend. I gave her some things. Our friendship died. No, it didn’t die—it wasn’t that dramatic. We grew apart.”
“You could have helped her, you know,” he says, sipping his coffee, glancing at me over the rim of his cup.
I shake my head and look down. “No,” I murmur into my own coffee. “I was never strong enough.”
“Come now. That’s not true?” he says, his voice turning the words into a question.
I look at him. “Apparently you know the story. I don’t have to tell you about it.”
“Our weaknesses are poised to become our greatest strengths. If we are patient and if we believe. The switch will often happen when we most need it to. Weakness”—he pauses, tilting his head from one side to the other—“to strength.”
“I don’t think that switch ever happened in me.”
“Maybe you haven’t needed it yet,” he says. “What did you give her?”
“That summer? I gave her the box. With everything.”
He nods. He knows about the box. Of course he does. Mr. Tennin had it—they probably all wanted it after what happened at the Tree.
“Recently. Did you give her anything recently? Or did she give you anything?”
I stare into the black depths of my drink, and it feels like I’m still staring into this man’s eyes. His eyes are everywhere.
I picture the box I put into her coffin. The atlas. The notes. I put those items in there because I thought everything was over. I thought Abra’s death meant the end of all this. But then her husband gave me the sword and the journal. Why?
“I can’t help you. I don’t know you.”
I say these things in a voice that I hope will communicate that it’s time for him to leave. I am too old for this. I have nothing to do with whatever real or imagined saga is going on around me, behind the curtain.
That phrase sticks in my mind: behind the curtain. That’s how Abra and I used to talk about the strange things that happened, as if normal life was on one side of a veil, and the other things—the Tree, Mr. Tennin, Mr. Jinn, the Amarok—were behind it. If we looked hard enough in those days, we could see the rustling. But not now. I have not seen it for many, many years.
“I appreciate your . . . discretion. But there is something Abra had that we need.” He waits, then speaks again in a careful, insinuating tone. “I think you might have it. Here.”
My heart pounds. I have no way of knowing which side this man is on. I have no way of knowing if he is a Mr. Tennin or a Mr. Jinn. I look in his eyes, desperately searching for something. Kindness, maybe.
“There’s nothing here for you,” I say, nerves stealing my breath.
He nods. His dangling earlobes sway. He reaches up and strokes his eyebrow with its seven small piercings all in a line. The space between them is the space between stars, which means that he and I, across the table from each other, must be light-years apart. How long do his words take to reach me? How many worlds have fallen in the time it takes me to refill his coffee?
“Do you have time for a story, Mr. Chambers?” he asks.
“I have as much time as I have,” I say, shrugging. “Look at me. I have no friends. I have no family. I have very little money. Time is all I have.”
He smiles a sad smile. “You have less time than you think. This is a long story.”
I take a drink of coffee.
“It’s about Abra,” he says.
I nod, and the sadness rises again, this time without the apprehension.
“Let me put it this way,” he says. “It’s primarily about Abra, but there are others involved. It took me time to gather all these stories together. Decades. There were large gaps. Recently I had to reopen doors that were meant never to be opened again. I spoke with people who were there when these events took place, and with others like me. I sat in the shadows for years, looking for answers, always looking. Always seeing, rarely comprehending. I went very close to the Edge.”
His voice fades. The wind kicks against the door. The windows rattle. Sleet falls for a minute or two, tapping against the glass, but it turns to snow, a swirling cloud of thick, hypnotic flakes.
“Do you know about her trip to New Orleans?” he asks.
“Only the basics,” I say. “She mentioned it in her journal, but it was only a few paragraphs. Something terrible happened there, something she didn’t want to write about. She was different after that. Her journal went from descriptive and flowery to matter-of-fact.”
Mr. Henry sighs and nods. “How about Egypt?” he asks. “Jerusalem? Paris? Rio? The South Pole? Sydney?”
I am stunned but try not to let it show. I had no idea.
“Those are only the major journeys she took. There were smaller trips. Side trips, you might say. New Orleans was . . . unexpected. For all of us. And we only knew about the Tree growing there after Tennin fell. By then Abra held the sword. The shadows were rising everywhere. People like me were turning. No one could be trusted. Two Trees at once! Who could have ever imagined? Jinn’s replacement was . . . ruthless. Her name was Koli Naal. She wanted it all,” he says, shaking his head. “She wanted every last thing. Not only the Tree. Not only everything and everyone here.”
The name shoots through me like the memory of an intense pain. Koli Naal. I have never spoken that name to anyone.
He pauses, staring hard at me to see if I understand what he’s saying. “You’ve heard that name before,” he says, and it sounds like he feels sorry for me.
I nod.
“She wanted every last thing,” he repeats. “Those who came before her, the Mr. Jinns of the world, wanted only all of this.” He raises his arms and they take in the walls of the house, the ends of the earth. “They wanted all of you—all of humanity and all of this earth. But Koli Naal wanted even more than that. She wanted everything.”
When it’s obvious I’m not catching on, he says something in a whisper, something I can barely hear. He whispers it as if it’s blasphemy.
“She wanted Over There too.”
“Over There?” I ask.
We stare at each other there in my little farmhouse, frost on the windows, the snow sliding along the hard ground. We stare at each other over mugs of coffee that are slowly cooling. We stare at each other over eternities and galaxies, cities and friendships, swords and shadows.
He shrugs as if it will all make perfect sense to me at some point. “There was no one else who could go inside and do what needed to be done. Only Abra. Those were dark times.”
“They must have been,” I say in an even voice, “if you had to turn to a young girl to rescue you.”
When he speaks again, there is something tender there, something that begs me for understanding. Or forgiveness. I wonder if he can be trusted after all. Perhaps.
“She was the only one who could go,” he insists. “I would have gone. I hope you understand that. But it had to be her.”
I wait, and the steam from our mugs rises between us like spirits.
“The story starts four years before the Tree appeared here in Deen. Four years before the two of you killed Jinn and the Amarok and Mr. Tennin fell. Four years before your mother died.”
“I didn’t actually kill Jinn, you know,” I say in a quiet voice. “Abra took care of that.”
It feels like a cowardly thing to say, as if I’m trying to pawn all the dirt of that summer onto Abra, trying to save my own skin in case this man has come for revenge. But I have a feeling that he knows far more about those events than I do, even though I was there and he was not.
He keeps talking as if he didn’t hear me. I stare past him out the window. The snow is really coming down now. It looks like a blizzard is on the way.
“This is the story I gathered—what people told me, what I found. Some things I have had to guess at.”
He pauses, nodding his head as if satisfied with the work that went into the story he is about to tell. He leans back in his chair.
“As best as I can tell, this is what happened the day Ruby vanished from the world.”