26
THE APPROACHING LIGHT got brighter and brighter, and for a moment I felt like we were rushing forward through a tunnel, toward the light and the way out. I shielded my eyes, and the light dropped. Mr. Tennin came into view, and the church light winked back on.
“What are you kids doing out here?” he asked.
I wanted to run to him and give him a hug. I wanted to tell him all about what we had seen. But I didn’t. Instead I turned to Abra. “Hide the sword,” I whispered.
“Mr. Tennin,” I said when he got closer. My voice still shook from the close call with the Amarok. I coughed and tried to steady it. “Abra’s mom was bringing me home, but she ran out of gas.”
“Everything okay?” he asked. “You sound a little shaken up.”
In the darkness, when I couldn’t be distracted by his boring, humdrum physical appearance, I remembered that Mr. Tennin’s voice was deep and beautiful. The deepness wasn’t in the sound it made, but more in the way it seemed to lead to other things, long-ago stories or forgotten tales.
“Yeah, we’re okay,” Abra said, but her voice sounded as weak and unconvincing as mine.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go find your dad.”
We walked the rest of the way together, turning into the lane past the mailbox, walking along the garden and the growing-heavier-by-the-day apple trees. We came up to the barns and walked through the yard, past the lightning tree, to the front porch. Our feet made loud thudding noises on the boards. It was as if we had finally returned to reality.
We walked into the bright house. I could hear a baseball game on the television heading into its final stages.
“Mr. Chambers?” Mr. Tennin said. “You in there?”
“Yeah,” my dad said.
“Abra’s mother ran out of gas on the way here. You want me to drive back out there with a little gasoline to fill up her car?”
“Sure,” my dad said. “Thanks, Tennin.”
Soon Mr. Tennin and Abra headed back out into the night. I waved to Abra, and when she turned around I could see the bulge in the back of her shirt where the sword’s handle stuck out. I hoped she would keep it safe. I hoped she would keep it secret.
All I wanted to do was go to bed. But as I got to the steps, my dad called out to me from the living room.
“Boy, Mr. Jinn was here earlier this afternoon. Said he expected to see you. He left a note for you in the kitchen.”
“Okay,” I said. I walked into the kitchen and there it was, a note written in scratchy handwriting on a small white piece of paper.
I wanted to come by and talk to you about that unfinished project and give you what I owe you. Make sure you’re here tomorrow at one so I can talk to you about that. If you’re not here, I can always give your payment to your father.
I knew what he was saying. He was angry that I hadn’t yet found the Tree of Life or gone back to his house to talk about it. He wanted to feed me to the Amarok, or something worse, and that’s what he was going to do tomorrow. That’s what he meant by giving me what he owed me. And if I wasn’t there, he would do to my father what he wanted to do to me.
“You see the note?” my father asked, his voice from the next room mingled with called strikes and balls.
“Yeah,” I said, holding it in my hands, trying not to let fear fill me up and knock me over.
“Well, make sure you’re around tomorrow. He seemed pretty intent on seeing you.”
“Okay,” I said. “I will.”
I had another dream that night.
I’m playing hide-and-seek with my dad in the farmhouse. I’m very small, maybe four or five years old. I hear him counting in the kitchen.
“One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . .”
He keeps counting as I climb the steps. I stop for a moment in the hall and look at each of the doors: the bathroom door at the end of the hall, the door to my parents’ room right there beside it, my door in the middle, the empty guest room to the right. It’s not day and it’s not night. Dusk maybe. A whisper of light drifts in the windows and under the doors.
“Twenty-three . . . twenty-four . . . twenty-five . . . twenty-six . . .”
He keeps counting, and I can’t decide which room to go into. I get scared. This is when I usually run to my mother, but suddenly I’m twelve again, no longer four or five, and I remember that my mother is dead. I don’t have anyone to run to, and my dad is about to come looking for me. I don’t like the feeling of not having a safe place, a safe person.
“Thirty-eight . . . thirty-nine . . . forty . . .”
I run into the spare bedroom and look out the window. The streetlight on the corner of the church building winks on and off. Then back on again. I look to the right, and the tree blows in the wind. It’s getting dark, and lightning strikes over the eastern mountain.
“Forty-eight . . . forty-nine . . . fifty. Ready or not, here I come!”
Silence.
I wait. I picture my father searching the main level of the house. I can hear him calling out.
“Sam, are you in there? Sam, are you in here?”
I hear his feet climbing the steps, one slow step at a time. I look around the room for someplace to hide, but there’s no furniture in there, not in my dream, so I stand by the door. I decide I’ll have to let him find me, but then something strange happens.
“Sam, where are you?” the voice calls out.
But it’s not my dad’s voice anymore.
It’s Mr. Jinn’s.
I dash over to the attic door and pull it open. It doesn’t make a sound and I wonder about that. I run up the stairs and hide among the boxes. I hear his voice again, and he’s in the spare room.
“Sam, where are you?” he asks in a singsong kind of voice, and I know for sure that it’s Mr. Jinn. “I’m here to give you what I owe you.”
I tuck myself away in the back and hear thunder outside the attic. I hear his footsteps coming up the attic stairs.
Then, in the way dreams can change, I’m out in the lightning tree, way up high in the branches, and I’m reaching for a piece of fruit. I look down, and Mr. Jinn is climbing up the tree. He reaches up and grabs my foot, and I don’t know how he managed to climb so high. He’s so big and the branches are so small, and where his hand touches my heel I feel his nails claw a deep cut into my skin.
“That fruit doesn’t belong to you,” he says, and he turns into the Amarok. Then both of us are falling, falling, falling through the branches, the bright green grass rushes up at me, and as I make contact with the ground, I wake up.
“Finish feeding the lamb and come in for lunch,” my dad shouted down from the upper level of the barn. I was down on the ground floor, sweeping the walkways. I heard him and Mr. Tennin walk out the back of the barn, where the second level was even with the hill. The massive barn door slid closed behind them, the sound of it grating and far away. It became very quiet.
I walked to the corner and leaned the broad broom against the wooden wall. My sweeping had stirred up dust, so the air was full of particles floating through the rays of light like a million planets. I stopped by the lamb’s stall and picked up the fresh bottle full of milk. The lamb jumped over to the bars and bleated in a pleading voice. I smiled at it and patted it on the head. It tried to suck on my fingers, thinking everything was a bottle of some kind.
I leaned against the bars and fed the lamb. Its short tail wagged back and forth, and it jerked its head to move the milk out of the bottle. I thought about my mother and it made me want to cry again, and I got mad at myself for always wanting to cry. But still I thought about her. I remembered our last day together, how she brought me home from practice, how she stopped to let me pick up the cat, how she climbed up in the tree during the storm to save me.
The more I thought about her, the greater the ache. The more I thought about her, the more I found myself visiting old ground—I needed that Tree of Life.
Another thought lodged itself in my mind. I reviewed the previous days, and I knew who had the Tree.
Abra.
It had to be Abra.
Who else had access to it? Who else knew it was there? Only her.
That old familiar darkness simmered inside me, and I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before. Of course she had it! She must have realized what it was before I came back, picked the lock or used a spare key, and taken it. She either hid it or destroyed it.
Destroyed it.
The lamb wasn’t quite finished, but in my disgust I yanked the bottle away and put it up on the shelf. Turning, I saw Mr. Jinn behind me, surrounded by the swirling particles of dust drifting through the sunlight. And standing beside him, leaning into the shadows and almost too big to fit into the barn, was the Amarok.
I saw a flash of movement at the opposite corner of the barn and glanced over in time to see Icarus slip through the bars and flee into the shadows.
I looked back at Mr. Jinn and the Amarok, but I wasn’t scared. Why wasn’t I scared? I didn’t know, but I didn’t care.
“She took the Tree,” I said. “She hid it somewhere.”
Mr. Jinn nodded slowly. “Doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “Doesn’t surprise me one bit.”
“She’ll be here soon. Should we ask her about it?”
He thought about it for a moment. “No. Not yet. Let’s leave it. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that.”
He looked over at the Amarok. It hadn’t taken its eyes off me, as if it still waited for Mr. Jinn to give it the order to attack. It took a step in my direction, saliva hanging from its lower row of snarling teeth.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Mr. Tennin is going to help me find the other three things. Help us find the other three things.”
“Is that right?” Mr. Jinn said, and he looked downright happy to hear it. “Mr. Tennin? Well, that’s a pleasant surprise for sure.”
He seemed very pleased with everything, which I couldn’t understand based on the fact that Abra had the Tree. Why wasn’t he more worried? I was very worried.
“We’re not too late, are we? We can still bring my mom back, right?”
“Sam,” he said, “if we can get that Tree of Life, it won’t be too late for anything.”
He turned and walked away. The Amarok backed away alongside him, ducking to miss the low crossbeams in the ceiling. But before it got too far away it became unrecognizable, blending in with the midday shadows in the corners of the barn.
“What should I do?” I asked, suddenly overwhelmed at what remained to be done.
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” he said loudly without turning around. “Find the remaining items and bring everything to me.”
I heard the barn door opening. He shouted one more thing back to me.
“It’s never too late!”
I sat down and realized I was shaking. I closed my eyes and put my head back against the wall. Why did things have to change so much? Why did my mom have to die? Why did I have to make all of these decisions on my own?
When I opened my eyes, I saw the door open at the far end of the barn. Abra came down the long aisle.
“Hey,” she said.
I looked at her, and I wondered, did she have it? Was she the only thing standing between me and bringing my mom back?
“Hey,” I said.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Mr. Jinn came by.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. He did.”
“What did he say?”
“He said to get the remaining items. He’ll take care of the rest.”
“So he does have the Tree,” she said.
“What?”
“Mr. Jinn. We were right,” she said as if everything had been revealed to her. “He has the Tree. Why else wouldn’t he be concerned about you not having it? He didn’t even push you for it. When’s the last time you had a conversation with him and he wasn’t asking you over and over again for the Tree?”
I wanted to scream and shout and accuse her of being a terrible friend, a liar, someone who wanted to keep my mom under the ground in that cold, damp grave. But for some reason the darkness inside me felt stronger than ever, and it told me to remain calm. So I listened to it.
“My mom said she’ll take us to the fair, but only for an hour or so,” Abra said.
“Let’s go find the stone bowl,” I said, standing up and walking past her.