ABRA STOOD BESIDE THE TRAPDOOR in Leo’s old house and looked at Mr. Henry and Ruby. Mr. Henry nodded his bald head encouragingly, and his large earlobes swayed forward and back, forward and back, like pendulums.
“Ruby will be fine,” Mr. Henry said. “I’ll watch over her until her mother comes back. She won’t be gone long now that Koli Naal has moved on. They can start a new life together.”
Abra nodded, and for some reason, a reason she could not identify, she did not want to leave. It was a beautiful city, but more than that, it felt like it existed at the center of the things on the other side of the curtain. Her own town, Deen, felt so far removed from the other side, with breaks that happened only occasionally. The other side was clouded when she was in Deen. But here, in New Orleans, there was no curtain. Things like Mr. Henry and Beatrice walked alongside people like Leo and his sister all the time. It felt like there were doors everywhere.
The short sword’s handle stuck out of Abra’s jeans, and she touched it. She wanted to stay, yes, but she was also a girl, a girl who very much wanted to go home and spend the rest of her summer in peace, and perhaps find a new litter of kittens, and fish in the river without anyone else around.
“I wrote this for your mother, in case she wonders where you’ve been,” Mr. Henry said, and Abra took the letter he offered to her. She stared at the handwriting on the envelope, and it was the same handwriting as the letters her uncle sent her mother. She looked up at Mr. Henry with a question in her eyes. He gave a barely discernible shrug. She folded the letter and put it in her pocket.
“Will she remember me?” Abra asked.
“More than that, probably,” Mr. Henry said with a twinkle in his eyes and a grin that scattered the small tattoos on his face. “You’ll probably wish she’s forgotten you, once you’re back and you have to deal with a mother whose daughter has been missing.”
Abra gave a tired smile. She was ready to see her mom, no matter what the reception was like.
“Good-bye, Abra,” Ruby said.
“I’ll come back to see you,” Abra said. “I promise.”
She stared at the girl, and though she was only a few years younger than Abra, she seemed so vulnerable, so unprotected. Abra glanced at Mr. Henry, and she knew he would watch over her.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Ruby. “I’m sorry about what happened to Leo.”
Ruby nodded in quick, jerking motions, and tears pooled in her eyes. “It’s okay,” she said. “Mr. Henry told me about what’s on the other side of the water. It’s . . . it’s okay. I’m ready to meet my mother.”
Abra took three quick steps and hugged Ruby one more time, the way a girl hugs a younger sister. She looked at Mr. Henry, and though she desperately wanted to hug him too, she only nodded, and he nodded back.
Abra lifted up the edge of the trapdoor and leaned it back against the closet wall. “I have to ask you something,” she said without looking at Mr. Henry.
“Yes?”
“All those people.”
He waited.
“All those people,” Abra continued. “The people who died in the war in the Passageway. The people who ate from the Tree, people like Marie Laveau. What happens to all of them? What will happen?”
Mr. Henry sighed. “What do you mean?”
“Everyone goes over the water. I understand that. Everyone leaves. What happens next?”
Mr. Henry took a deep breath, then let it out in a long, gentle wave. In his eyes she could see the beginning of all things, but there was an openness there too, something that told her he did not know all ends.
“How it works depends on what’s inside you—it depends on your heart and your soul. I cannot know this about you, just like I could not know it about Leo, or Beatrice, or even Koli Naal. Even Jinn! Even Jinn. We cannot see all ends. We can only see the path before us. The One who waits for us on the other side of the water will know just what to do with each of us.”
Abra nodded solemnly and knew it was important. She wanted desperately to understand it, all of it, but she knew it might take some time.
“Okay,” she said, and it was the closest thing to good-bye she could bring herself to say.
She stared at the ladder that led down into the darkness.
“Keep going down,” Mr. Henry said. “And you’ll find it leads you home.”
Abra took one step down and stopped. “You’re going to have to go first,” she said. “I’d rather not leave with you two standing there staring at me.”
Mr. Henry gave a small, gentle laugh. “Can you pull the trapdoor down behind you when you go?” he asked. “We can’t be leaving doors open. Goodness knows there are too many open doors as it is.”
Abra nodded. Mr. Henry looked at her for a moment as if checking for something in her face, something that needed to be there. He seemed to find it because he smiled again.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said.
He turned away and walked out of the room, and Ruby followed, looking over her shoulder.
Then they were gone.
Abra’s feet dangled down into the darkness, and it reminded her of the darkness in the forest that lined the dirt road that went into the city, or the darkness in the prison room when she had confronted Beatrice. She realized she wasn’t afraid of the darkness anymore. She had been in it enough times to know that darkness is nothing but fear, and fear is nothing if you go straight through it.
Fear always comes with a door, a door that leads straight through.
A breeze blew through a window barely opened, and Abra could smell the sweet scent of azaleas and summer dirt and blue sky. She could smell the tall trees and the fallen needles and could hear insects chirping and squeaking and buzzing. She thought it was a good thing to be alive, to be there in that room, that city. She thought about the Edge of Over There, and the water, and what the telescope had shown her Over There, and she knew she would be ready to go when it was her time, but for now she was content to be Abra Miller, and to follow the path in front of her.
She stood up, not because she was scared but because she wanted to see something. The house was quiet and heavy, like the feeling that settles in after a sigh. She walked quickly to the front door and opened it and looked down the road, south, away from the graveyard. She found what she was looking for.
Mr. Henry and Ruby walked side by side down the sidewalk. He was large and imposing, scary with his shiny head and his tattoos. He had somehow pulled out a change of clothes, so he wasn’t covered in blood anymore, but he was still rather scary.
Beside him, Ruby was tiny and fragile, like a flower that had recently blossomed. She looked up at him, but he didn’t return her gaze. After she looked away from him, he looked down at her, and they walked on.