16

LEO WALKED AWAY from the hospital where his mother had been kept for the last eight years. She had tried so hard to find Ruby. The search, the hopelessness of it, had caused her to lose her way, and she had sunk deep into herself. One day, when the search hit yet another dead end, she passed out from exhaustion and despair. When she regained consciousness in the hospital, she was unresponsive. He visited her every day after school and lived with a distant relative on the other side of the city, a kind, older woman who walked in a hunched-over way and spoke in a whisper.

The leads had all gone cold. His mother hadn’t spoken a word in years.

As Leo left the hospital and crawled into his car, he almost turned around to go back to his mother again. It was a feeling he had every time he left, a sense that he was missing something. Instead he sat in the driver’s seat and glanced through the papers the doctors had given him. Charts and recommendations and new prescriptions, new plans, new diagnoses. All of them signed with the initials of his mother’s main doctor.

KN.

It was one of those perfect summer days that felt more like early fall. Leo rolled his windows down as he drove, and the air swept through the car. There was a coolness there, relief from week after week of heat and humidity. The trees’ leaves rustled in a refreshing breeze. Spanish moss waved from the branches like drapes in an open window.

His car wandered in the same meandering way as his mind, and before he knew it, he was driving up the street of his father’s old house. He hadn’t gone that way in a long time. When he approached it, he pulled off and stopped along the sidewalk. He parked there and thought about the ten-year-old boy he had been, the one who had drifted home from the cemetery on that early morning, the one with the lost look on his face and the gaping hole inside of him.

No one had bought the house after his father and sister disappeared. For a long time—years—it had sat there with a small “For Sale” sign in the front yard, but soon even that was gone, and as far as Leo knew the house had never sold. His mother, before she had vanished inside of herself, had complained about foreclosures and short sales, but Leo had been young and she didn’t involve him in the conversations that took place. He wondered who owned it. He wondered if anyone had been inside recently.

He wondered if the door was locked.

It was a small thought at first, the tiniest of suggestions. But it stuck the way a seashell will catch hold in the sand, and as the waves wash away everything around it, the seashell remains. Another wave, another layer of sand pulled back, and more of the shell shows through. It was a small thought, but the longer he sat there, the more prominent it became.

Leo did something he had never done in all those years of stopping to look at his father’s old house: he turned off the car. That alone felt strange enough, because it implied that he wasn’t only passing through. He was stopping. And you only stop when you have something else to do, so he climbed out of the car, looked up and down the sidewalk, glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was around, and finally approached the house, feeling skittish.

He walked up to the front door first. The large windows still stood on either side, guarding the house. He smiled when he remembered how afraid of those windows he had always been. He knocked and listened. He knocked again, and the sound of it was empty and distant, like knocking on the doorway to another universe. He reached for the knob and turned it, but it was locked, something that didn’t surprise him at all. No one had ever used that door anyway, even when people lived there—why would it be unlocked now? He looked up at the porch ceiling and remembered how he and Ruby used to come out on the front porch. She had often rested out there. Watching over her had been a full-time job, something he had sometimes resented.

Why do I always have to watch her? he’d wondered.

How he wished he could watch her again.

Leo looked around one more time before making his way to the side door of the house. The fact that no one emerged to tell him to mind his own business, stop snooping around, had him feeling more and more brave. The bushes separating the short driveway from the neighbor’s house were wild and expanding beyond their boundaries. The driveway had nearly vanished, and he had to walk sideways in some places to fit between the branches, the weeds, and the side of the house.

The screen door had fallen off completely at some point and lay on the narrow walkway. The inside door still had loose hinges and a slightly rotten door frame. If someone had ever tried to sell this house, they certainly hadn’t given it a very good effort. He looked around one more time, grabbed on to the doorknob, and tried to turn it.

It was locked.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out something that looked like a pocketknife, but if you looked closer you’d realize that instead of blades it held a series of lock picks. It was a lock-picking set, much more sophisticated than the one he had when he was ten years old. He had never lost his obsession with locks, his deep desire to open all the doors. He extended one of the picks from the set and tried to fit it into the lock, but it was too wide. He tried another, and it slipped inside. He felt around for a moment, closing his eyes, envisioning the edges, the tumblers of the lock, the teeth of the pick probing and fitting. He tried the knob again.

The door opened. He walked inside.

To say that Leo’s old house was completely still would be like saying the bottom of the sea is dark. It unnerved him when he entered. That stillness was the primary reason he didn’t close the side door behind him. If you’ve ever been in an empty house, you might understand a little bit about stillness, but even an empty house that’s currently being lived in has small signs of life. The ticking of a clock. The small gust of air moving when the air conditioner turns on. The occasional hum of the refrigerator. The smell of being.

Not Leo’s old house. It was beyond still. There were no vital signs. The clocks’ batteries had all died years ago, so they simply sat there staring down at him, their hands frozen at random times. The air ducts and vents were covered in dust. The appliances were lifeless, their displays blank. He wandered through the first floor, smelling only humidity and dust and the musty odor of disuse.

He went all the way up to the third floor and peeked into Ruby’s room, but he didn’t have the heart to stay there very long. Her bed was still there, the furniture all in its place, a time capsule from eight years before, another life. He reached up and touched the door frame, still remembering how his mother had leaned against it when he told her that Ruby was gone.

Leo, where did he take her?

I don’t know.

He had thought over that question and answer a million times since, his mother asking, him answering. Her question genuine. His answer clouded in dishonesty. He did know where his father had taken her, but no one would have believed him, so he had kept it all to himself. The woman, Marie, standing by the small fire. The sound of rock moving against rock. The darkness that followed.

He walked down the stairs, his footsteps loud and out of place. As he turned the corner at the bottom and walked past the closet, he remembered the trapdoor in the guest room closet. It was the first time he’d thought of that door for years, and he walked slowly through the house, attracted to it the way a small sliver of metal trembles on its way to the magnet. The side door was still open, and as he walked past it, shadows drifted down with the summer leaves that fell, spinning from the sycamore trees.

The guest room door was locked, which seemed strange. He didn’t remember that his father had kept that room locked. He pulled out his lock-picking set and made short work of the flimsy indoor lock. The door popped open as if it had been held there by a spring and only needed someone to nudge it. The door whined as it opened, and he walked straight to the closet door.

That door also whined, but when it stopped he could still hear something. Strange sounds coming from . . . where? Far away? Nearby? He held his breath and listened, and he realized the sounds grew closer, louder. He ran to the window and opened it to see if the sounds were coming from outside. The summer breeze blew in, warmer now, and he looked into the backyard, the space that had turned into a jungle. The azaleas were still there with their spots of color, but they had grown untrimmed and were sparse and thin the way uncared-for things will sometimes deteriorate. A snake slid through the undergrowth, its belly hissing on the leaves. Tiny lizards flicked here and there, running from their own shadows. A squirrel danced two or three steps, stopped, lifted something to its face with its two tiny hands. The whole backyard was alive and moving—everything there went on precisely as if nothing had ever happened in that house, as if that house wasn’t even there.

But the sound—Leo could still hear a sound coming from somewhere.

He turned back to face the room and looked down the hallway, the way he had come, but the noise was not coming from the main part of the house. He listened to the walls—that’s where the noise seemed to be coming from. Somewhere deep, somewhere close to where he had always imagined the words had gone, where all the words lay hidden. He walked back over to the trapdoor, and that’s when he knew it.

The sounds were coming from the other side of that door.

He got down on his hands and knees and listened. It was a slow, steady pounding sound. A tap, tap, tap. But also voices? Yes, he thought he heard voices too.

Suddenly, pounding on the trapdoor. He jumped back.

“Help!” a voice shouted. “Is anyone there? Let us out!”

Leo sat there for a moment, stunned. He thought he must be dreaming. He stared at the door, waiting to see what would happen.

“Please! Is anyone there? Help!”

“Who are you?” Leo blurted out, still staring at the trapdoor, still on his hands and knees on the floor of the guest room.

The banging stopped. The person stopped shouting.

“Who are you?” the voice asked in return, a little hesitant, a little timid.

“What are you doing in my house?” Leo asked, and it felt a little bit like a lie, that question, but also like the truth.

Silence again.

“Please let us in. I can explain.”

“Well, I have a gun,” Leo said. “So you’d better not try anything.”

He didn’t have a gun. He didn’t have anything of the sort.

“Please don’t shoot us,” a different voice said, followed quickly by a loud shushing noise.

Leo leaned forward and tried to lift the metal ring that would open the trapdoor, but it was too heavy. He stood up and grabbed on to it with two hands, lifted with all of his might. It still didn’t budge. That’s when he saw the lock, a tiny round thing that had been painted over. He scraped away some of the paint and pulled the lock picks from his pocket again. He chose the thinnest one and worked the inside of the lock.

“What are you doing? Please open the door!”

“Be patient!” Leo shouted. “It’s locked.”

“Do you have the key?”

“No,” he said.

“We’ll be stuck here forever!” the second voice whined, followed again by the shushing sound.

“One second,” Leo shouted back, biting his lip as he tried to pick the lock. Something budged, the lock turned. He put the set back in his pocket and grabbed on to the ring and pulled. The door came open easily, like peeling the skin off a banana.

“Thank you,” the first person said, climbing up out of the hole. The second person came close behind and collapsed onto the floor.

Leo looked down the hole. It was round, maybe three feet across, and went down through nothing more than rocks and brown earth. A wooden ladder came up one side, a few of its rickety rungs broken or missing. No matter how hard Leo peered down into the hole, he couldn’t see the bottom.

He looked at the two people who had come up through the trapdoor, and he was completely surprised: two teenage girls. The second one who had come up looked terrified. She sat on the floor, her back against the wall under the open window, and she looked around like a bird in a cage.

The first one, on the other hand, was already standing, and she held a short dagger in her hand. She looked strong and determined and pushed her long blonde hair out of her eyes. Leo thought she was probably a few years younger than him, but she was very pretty.

“Who are you?” Leo stammered, his eyes not leaving the blonde-haired girl.

“Who are you?” hissed the terrified girl still sitting on the floor.

“I’m Leo,” he said, still staring at the blonde girl.

She leaned the blade against the wall and took a deep breath, as if she had crossed an immeasurable distance. She looked out the window, then back at Leo.

“Is this New Orleans?” she asked, and there was something bashful in her voice, something that didn’t match the assertive way she carried herself.

He nodded. “Yeah, of course it is. So, who are you?” he asked again. “And how’d you get into my house?”

The girl smiled, and there was confidence there, the face of a person who embraced adventure. Her bashfulness fled, and Leo liked her even more. There was a strength about her: she seemed determined, and kind, and unwavering.

“I’m Abra,” she said. “I need you to help me find a tree.”