27

ABRA’S MOM DROPPED US OFF at the fair entrance and drove into town to run some errands, and as Abra and I walked onto the fairgrounds, I found myself feeling disappointed. At night, the fair seemed edgy and exciting. The flashing lights seared their images into my brain. The mirror maze and the haunted house felt like truly dangerous undertakings, and the shadows that drifted in the margins of the snapping tent flaps held mysteries and unknown terrors.

But during the day, the fair was ordinary. The gravel paths were filled with stale cigarette butts, and the toothless old man collecting the trash, who at night bore the appearance of a man who might steal little children, looked harmless. He even smiled at us as we walked past. Carnies lounged in their tents that lined the midway, napping or staring off at the horizon. They looked like real people during the day, not like the caricatures from fairy tales that they were at night.

When we had been at the fair after dark, finding the Tree of Life had felt like a distinct possibility. But in the light of a normal weekday, it all seemed too fantastic to be true. The Tree of Life? An Amarok? A stone bowl? Three old women and angels and a sword that burned me when I touched it? All of it seemed hard to believe, like a dream I had awoken from.

Still, we wandered down through the various sections of the fair, past the food and the animals and the kiddie rides. The rides’ lights were on, but they were bleached out by the sun. A few small children screamed as the rides whipped them around. A few of the carnies called out to us, encouraging us to try their games of skill, but their voices were ordinary and tired, and they weren’t very persistent.

We passed the Ferris wheel and the large trucks parked just below it and wandered into the section of the fair where the carnies lived during the week. It was as boring as the rest of the fair, perhaps even more so because it was completely quiet. I guess they were all still in bed after a long night. A stale summer breeze wandered through the tents and RVs, rustling the canvas and tossing the long grass from side to side. A black and white dog, tied to a stake outside the entrance to a tent, perked up its ears as we walked past but must have decided it couldn’t be bothered. It set its head back down on its paws and watched us pass without making a sound.

“There’s the tent,” Abra said, pointing down the hill to a green tent with a blue tarp over the door. I nodded. That was the tent the man had disappeared into with the bowl. Like everything else, it looked ordinary.

Could we just go in and take the bowl? If he was there, how long would we have to wait until he left? We only had an hour. We walked through the long, trampled grass and stopped outside the tent.

“Now what?” I whispered to Abra.

“Hello?” she said in not much more than a loud whisper. “Hello? Anyone in there?”

She took a deep breath, shrugged, pulled back the tarp, and looked inside. She glanced back at me with surprise on her face, then snuck carefully through the flap. I followed.

The first thing I noticed was a loud, raspy sound, so intense that I was surprised I hadn’t heard it from outside the tent. I looked around, expecting to see some kind of machine click-click-clicking. I saw the man who had taken the bowl from the old women, lying on a mat on the floor, asleep.

The sound was him snoring. Each inhale caught and snagged like a door on uneven hinges, and each exhale swept out like a new start. Abra and I took a few more steps into the large tent and stood there for a moment, staring at him. Resting on his stomach, clenched by both of his hands, was the stone bowl.

It was the only thing I saw there that didn’t seem ordinary. The stone was a gray white, and it had flecks of something in it that sparkled, the way sand glints in the morning light, or the way a granite headstone sparkles when the sun comes out from behind a cloud. It was about a foot in diameter and hollowed out, the shape of a contact lens.

“The dog?” Abra whispered and pointed, and I saw the man’s pet lying beside him, on its back, paws in the air, tongue lolling off to the side. It was asleep too. I looked at her and shook my head. I didn’t know what to do. We both took another step closer to the sleeping man and his dog. Then we heard the tent flap open just a few feet behind us.

A woman came in through the opening. She was one of those particular creations of the fair, someone you see nowhere else. Her hair was shoulder length, her face was as wrinkled as a balled-up piece of tissue paper that’s been stretched flat again, and her body was skinny, a sack of bones. A cigarette perched between her purplish lips, and the watery whites of her eyes were more yellow than white. She wore a T-shirt three sizes too big for her, and it hung down around her knees. Her jeans were torn and dirty, and she wore work boots.

In one hand she carried a butcher knife, and in the other hand she carried a white grocery bag dripping blood from the bottom corner.

Abra leaned over closer to me, and I put my hands up, preparing to talk her out of murdering us. I kept expecting her to raise the knife and charge, or cry out to the man to wake up and bash us over the head with his stone bowl, or maybe she’d even wake the dog and tell it to attack us. But she did none of these things.

She fell to her knees, dropped the knife and the bag, and started crying.

“You’re here,” she cried out. “You’re really here.”

Abra and I looked at each other. I probably would have been less startled if she had charged at us.

“Thank God,” she said, sitting back on her ankles before taking a long drag from the cigarette. She exhaled the smoke. It hung heavy in the tent, and the longer we stayed, the foggier the tent became.

“I’m sorry?” Abra said.

“You’re here,” she said again. “Those three old hags said you’d come.”

“They did?” I asked.

She nodded. “They cursed my man with that bowl, and he’s been asleep ever since.”

I looked over at her “man.” I found it hard to believe he was under any spell other than alcohol and laziness.

“He’s been sleeping there ever since that night?” Abra asked her.

She nodded again. “Came in here and lay down, and I didn’t think he was ever gonna wake up again,” she said, a fresh batch of tears flooding her eyes.

“So . . . now what?” I said.

“Take the bowl,” the woman said. “Just take that bowl and get outta here. That’s what those three old hags said, yes they did. ‘When two children come here for the bowl, and when they take the bowl, this man will wake up.’ That’s what they said, they did.”

I looked at Abra and she looked at me.

“What about the, um, dog?” I asked.

“Him too,” she said, shaking her head, regret on her face. “Him too.”

So I took a few steps toward the man, bent over, and lifted the stone bowl. His hands let go of it easily, as if he was relieved to give it up. It was heavy, with a texture like sandpaper.

When I first touched it, I thought I saw something in the bowl, like a shooting star traveling from one side to the other. But when I looked closer, all I saw was the shimmering of the stone. It had glints in it as if it were from another planet, another part of the universe. Or maybe another time.

Abra held open the tent flap for me, but the woman never got up. In fact, she leaned forward, then back on her knees, and it sounded like she was praying as we left, or saying something like a prayer. I heard the man shift on his mat, and the dog made a whining sound. We emerged into the light and I had to squint—the sun was bright outside the tent. We walked, the two of us, through that quiet, ordinary day.

Abra’s mom was so happy we showed up on time that she didn’t even ask us about the stone bowl, if she even saw it. We climbed into the back of the car without a word and put it on the seat between us. Once we got to Abra’s house, Mrs. Miller rushed inside to relieve Abra’s father of baby duty, and we were left staring at each other in the backseat of the car.

We decided to hide the bowl in the cave in the cliff at the end of the Road to Nowhere. It was a long walk and the bowl was heavy, but we made our way through the woods, always looking around, always waiting for the sound of the Amarok in the shadows.

We arrived at my mother’s grave in the cemetery in the woods. My breathing came faster, and I approached the bare, brown earth that had so recently been put on top of her coffin. Someone had left a bouquet of tulips resting against her headstone. They were yellow with streaks of red from the stem to the end of the petal. It was a deep red, like the low, evening sun. I got down on my knees and read the inscription on her stone.

Lucy Leigh Chambers

Wife and Mother

Meet Me at the Edge of the World

I noticed something protruding from under the dozen or so tulips, so I picked them up and set them on top of the headstone. And there it was, small and bright green with its own white flowers.

The Tree of Life.

Someone had removed it from the log, brought it here, and planted it in a shallow hole. The green had faded a bit, and the flowers weren’t so much white as they were ivory, a sickly version of off-white. The Tree was dying, that was easy to see. I felt the old darkness rise inside me.

“Who brought that here?” Abra asked, awe in her voice.

I didn’t know what to say. We sat there in silence. I was relieved that Abra hadn’t taken the Tree, and I was frustrated with myself for not believing her. What was happening to me that I was so suspicious of my best friend?

Yet, as I saw the plant right there in front of me, both my disbelief and my determination grew. On one hand, I found it even more difficult to believe that this small plant could somehow snatch my mother from the strong jaws of death. It was so tiny, so fragile. On the other hand, there it was—it just kept coming back to me. I thought that must mean something.

“We should leave it here,” I said.

So we did. It looked too fragile to move again anyway, so I leaned the yellow tulips with the bloodred streaks over it, keeping it mostly out of sight. I took a deep breath and stood up. I set the stone bowl up on my mother’s headstone, and I walked away.

I left Abra and the cemetery, drifting away from the rock cliff with the cave in it. I could feel Abra watching me. I could hear the river rushing out there somewhere in the trees. It was a never-ending sound, the sound of life. The roaring it made as it spilled into the valley and swept toward Deen was the sound of thousands of years of history, moving, carrying me away. I heard Abra walking along behind me, but I didn’t say anything to her. I needed a minute to think.

There were three large granite crypts between the cemetery and the river, and I wondered why they were there, planted by themselves like some kind of strange orchard. I thought people had used crypts down there in case the creek overflowed its banks, to keep the bodies up out of the floodwaters, but I didn’t know for sure.

I noticed that one of the crypts was covered in writing, a thin cursive script that stretched along the roof of the grave.

In Grateful Remembrance of Josephine M. Jinn

Going down each side of the crypt were the dates of her birth and death.

“Seventy years old,” Abra said, and I was surprised to hear her voice. I hadn’t realized she had trailed along behind me. “I wonder if she was related to Mr. Jinn?”

There was a small metal plate attached to the pillar, and there were words etched into the plate, faded words no longer legible.

I looked over at Abra. She stared at me.

“I don’t think we should give the bowl to Mr. Jinn,” she said.

“Not Mr. Tennin either,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I think I trust Mr. Tennin.”

I didn’t trust anyone. I realized I resisted choosing sides, resisted choosing between Tennin and Jinn, because I was the only person I could trust. I was on my own side now, getting as far as I could with the help of anyone who would aid me.

For a moment we stood there in the heat, and the river, still hidden off in the trees, sounded so appealing. I wished the summer had turned out differently. I wished we were boating in that river, floating down behind the church and winding our way toward town. I wished that when we finished swimming we could go back to my house, and as we went through the screen door we’d smell the chocolate chip cookies my mom was baking.

I wished. Instead we were sweating in a silent graveyard on a sweltering day, trying to figure out what to do with a stone bowl.

We walked back to my mother’s grave, and I picked up the bowl again. It was heavy, but it didn’t seem as heavy as when I had first lifted it, as if my arms were getting used to it. Or perhaps it was getting used to me.

“Are you ready to put it in the cave?” Abra asked.

As far as locations went, I thought it was a good idea. It was past Mr. Jinn’s house in a direction no one ever traveled. As long as he didn’t see us coming or going, he would never suspect that we had hidden it there.

I carried the bowl to the small cave, only fifty yards away through the trees, where the cliffs came down from the mountains. Some of the rocks were wet and slippery from recent rains, making it hard going. At one point I got caught up in a few trees and we had to climb up a short outcropping of rock, so I had to pass the bowl to Abra. I imagined her dropping it on purpose, the bowl shattering against the rocks. I imagined her laughing at my sorrow. But she didn’t drop it. She handled it as carefully as I did.

We arrived at the cave, and you could see the muddy river from there, moving fast with all the rainwater. The cliff was a huge piece of rock, nearly as big as a house, and it reached out toward the river. The cave was at the base of the cliff, about three feet high and two feet wide, and it was dark, like an empty spot where an eye used to be. I pushed the bowl in along the ground, and the weight of it made a divot, a short, hollowed-out path.

“One down,” I said. “Two to go.”

That evening after dinner I walked into the barn with my father and Mr. Tennin. The three of us stacked hay bales and cleaned out the barn. At one point my dad went down to the lower level for something, and Mr. Tennin and I were left alone, picking up the loose hay with our pitchforks and throwing it down through the hole in the floor.

“I found it,” I said quietly. “I found the first item. The stone.”

He kept working as if I hadn’t said anything, and when he spoke he barely moved his mouth, as if someone was watching us.

“Good,” he said. “Good. Now you have to find water.”

“What kind of water?” I whispered.

“It’s not water. It’s blood. Innocent blood.”

“What?” I pictured some kind of terrible sacrifice. An animal dying on an altar. A high priest raising a stone knife.

“It doesn’t have to be much,” he said. “Only a drop. Place a drop of innocent blood in the middle of the stone bowl, directly under the Tree.” He stopped and looked at me. “Have you found it yet?”

“No,” I said. The word came so quickly from my mouth that I didn’t realize what I was saying. I lied before I knew I was lying.

He stared at me for a moment. He threw another forkful of hay down the hole, and it vanished into the dark lower level. A cloud of hay dust came whooshing back up and settled all around us.

“Remember your promise to me,” he said, not looking at me as he plunged his pitchfork into the pile of straw, “because I won’t forget.”

The kindness in his voice was still there, but it was edged with force, and I knew he wouldn’t forget. Not ever.