32

ABRA CLOSED HER EYES for a moment, and I crawled to her, past the small depression in the ground where Mr. Tennin had fallen, past a fading Mr. Jinn, past the dead Amarok and the pile of ashes that had been the fire from the night before. We both sat with our backs against the Tree of Life, and we watched it die.

We leaned our heads back against the Tree, and I looked up at the top branches. The leaves had begun to change color, from that dark green to a blackish green, then to a reddish black, and finally to a deep, blood red. Autumn came for the Tree of Life in a matter of minutes. Seasons passing in a moment. Soon the entire Tree was waving crimson in the strong breeze.

The leaves fell and swirled in miniature twisters, and the breeze blew some of the leaves into the river and others into the flames or down the path to the Road to Nowhere. I caught a few as they fell and broke them apart. Too late. They were dry inside, and they crumbled in my hands. But even their dust soothed my skin. The blisters did not heal, but the pain dissolved. I grabbed more as they fell, and Abra rubbed them over her stomach where the Amarok had held her in its jaws. We were, both of us, in need of something to take our pain away.

Soon the entire Tree was leafless and old, and the branches clattered together like bones. The wind grew stronger and a few brittle branches fell around us. The fire rose like a wall up against the far side of the river, and a few of the trees that reached toward it from our side smoked and burst into flame. All that remained beyond the stream was ash and the blackened skeletons of tall, skinny trees still blazing, and among all of it the rocks that led up into the eastern mountain. The fire moved, devouring, looking for more fuel.

We were too tired to move, too tired to think through what had happened, but I knew we had to get out of the woods. Quickly. There was the pungent smell of smoke, the way it stung my eyes and burned in my throat, the glistening, black fur of the Amarok, the storm clouds passing over us, giving way to strands of wispy sky. The blue peeking through reminded me of the water in my dream, the eternal waves, and the white cliffs at the far side.

“My mom’s the one who took the Tree to the cemetery,” Abra said quietly, as if talking to herself.

“What?”

“My mom. She had wondered what we were doing over in the other side of the house, and she thought it was weird that the closet was locked, so she asked my dad to open the door. She found the Tree inside. ‘It reminded me of Lucy,’ she said, so she took it to her grave.”

I started weeping, full of so many emotions. Regret. Sadness. Relief. Abra reached over and held on to my hand. It hurt, but I did not pull away. My own tears felt good on my face, as if some buried piece of me had finally fought to the surface, and something about those tears reminded me of the aloe from the leaves on the Tree. There is healing, after all, in sadness, and sometimes only tears will bring it. Abra’s grip reminded me that I was human. I was here. I felt real again. I felt alive.

Mr. Jinn made a sound. He was laughing.

Abra and I stood together and walked toward him. Mr. Jinn reminded me of Mr. Tennin in the moments before he had vanished—he was weak, though not entirely powerless, but what power remained seemed to be easing its way out of him.

He moved only his eyes as he looked at us, and he kept laughing.

“What?” Abra asked, and we couldn’t show him the contempt we wanted to because part of the glory he had shown earlier lingered there with him, like a mist within the fog. It was a wonder and a splendor, even hidden as it was beneath the curse he had carried for centuries. For millennia.

He shook his head back and forth, barely, and his laughing dimmed to a weak smile. “You don’t even know, do you?” he asked. “You don’t even realize what you have done.”

That’s when I recognized it. The darkness inside me was gone. After everything that had happened, I had given it up. I believed Mr. Tennin. I hadn’t wanted the Tree to die, and maybe I couldn’t have killed it if it had been up to me, but it was gone now.

I was free.

“What don’t we know?” Abra asked.

“His mother,” he whispered, staring at me. “There’s nothing you can do to bring her back.”

He looked over at Abra. “And you . . . You have only just begun.”

He disappeared.

Abra retrieved the sword where it lay in the depression. It had returned to its normal color and size, and she held it tightly. But Mr. Jinn’s words didn’t fill me with terror anymore. I was okay, relieved even, that my mother could rest in peace. I looked around at the burning world, and I realized this was no place to bring her back to. The beach and the cliffs and the green fields beyond seemed like a wonderful place to be. Instead of anger or bitterness, I was filled with a sense of hope that I would see her again, that I could join her there. Maybe someday I could leave all of this behind.

“We have to go,” I said, feeling the heat from the fire. We hurried back to the Road to Nowhere through smoke that filled the trees like fog, then continued on to where the road was paved with stones, past Mr. Jinn’s house. We were both exhausted and coughing, our lungs burning. Abra put her arm around me and we stumbled down that road together.

I saw my father’s car careening up Kincade Road, a cloud of dust billowing out behind him. As he got closer I could see him hunched over the steering wheel, a look of desperation on his face. My father was like an approaching storm.

“Look,” I said to Abra, pointing west, away from the fire and the river, over the fields of deep green corn now approaching waist height. A long, straight line of vultures flew out of the valley and disappeared over the mountain.

My father took us to the hospital, but I remember very little about the drive. There was the rough road we bounced over, and the loose gravel pinging up under the car. There was the smell of smoke coming through the open windows, mingled with the heavy moisture of a wet July morning. There was the smooth hum of wheels on the highway, the gradual slipping in and out of sleep. There was Abra and me leaning against each other, exhausted, relieved.

The time I spent in the hospital was also a blur.

“Smoke inhalation,” the doctors said. “Third-degree burns.”

I guess the leaves hadn’t healed me completely.

Abra was in worse shape, and the two of us had trouble explaining her injuries: a series of deep punctures in her chest, in her abdomen, and down her back. A broken rib. A sliced foot. In the end, our parents and doctors chalked it up to two children who had nearly been killed in a forest fire, who had injured themselves while fleeing the oncoming flames. We were okay with that. There seemed very little benefit in explaining the details of what we had been through, and even less chance that anyone would believe us if we did.

But I do remember one thing now. Something I had forgotten for many, many years.

I remember lying in my hospital bed that first night after everyone else had left. I knew Abra was in her own room, recovering. I was thinking about how close we had come to death, and I realized I was both relieved and disappointed not to have made that journey. I missed my mom, but I realized I loved life. I wasn’t quite ready to die.

The doctor came in. I say she was a doctor, though in hindsight I have very little idea who the woman actually was. At first I thought I was dreaming because she looked so much like my mother. I thought I was having another one of my nighttime visions, and I settled into it, believing. I had come to enjoy those moments with my mother, even if they weren’t strictly real. One of the machines I was connected to let out its rhythmic beep. Another hummed on into eternity.

But then she spoke, and I knew it was no dream.

“Sam,” she said, and she even carried herself like my mother, so that I lifted myself up on my elbows and stared closer.

Could it be? I wondered if the Tree, during its brief time beside the river, had leached its life into the ground, enough that it brought her back. Maybe the roots of the Tree had reached far enough into the forest, all the way to the small cemetery and my mother’s grave. Maybe this was the beginning of some new era, when all the once-dead people in our valley would come to life, walk among us, reunite with the people they loved. For a moment I imagined the celebrations, the surprise, the joy.

But it was only the late hour talking, or the medication, or my last hopes, because when she got closer I looked into the woman’s eyes and recognized immediately that this was not my mother. The blue was not there. The humanness was missing. This person’s eyes were dark and endless.

If you’ve ever looked into the eyes of one of them, you’ll know what I mean. Her eyes were exactly like those of Mr. Jinn and Mr. Tennin—eternal, like the space between the stars.

I suddenly realized what she was.

“Why are you here?” I asked. I stared hard at her. She was dressed like a nurse, but she didn’t have a name tag on. “Who are you?” Before, when I thought she was my mother, I had wanted to get as close as possible, but now I pushed myself backward in my hospital bed, as far away from her as I could get.

She looked sad for me, as if I would never understand.

“How are you feeling?” She held up a clipboard, writing a few notes on it, and for a moment I was confused. Maybe I was imagining things. Maybe she was only trying to do her job.

“I’m okay,” I said. “It’s the middle of the night. Can we do this in the morning?”

She nodded and scribbled a few more things on her clipboard. “Your appetite okay?”

I nodded.

“Are you feeling achy at all? Sick to your stomach? Trouble breathing?”

“No,” I said. She made me feel tense, uneasy. It wasn’t the questions she was asking. It was her. It was her presence.

“Exactly what happened in the forest beside the river?” she asked, eyebrows arched, as if it was a completely normal question for a doctor to be asking a patient.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“I believe there was a gentleman there with you in the woods?”

I closed my mouth tight, bit my lip.

“Isn’t that right?” She bent closer. “I believe he worked for your father.”

“Mr. Tennin?” I whispered, and for a moment it felt like I didn’t have any control over my mouth. It felt like my lips and tongue were going to say whatever information was in my brain. She would ask, and my mind would tell her whatever she needed to know.

I shook my head. Maybe I was trying to clear the cobwebs. Maybe I was trying to wake up.

“What happened to Mr. Tennin?” she asked, and I could tell that for her, everything rested on the answer to this question.

“He fell,” I whispered.

She sighed, but I could not tell if it was a sigh of sadness or relief, or the kind of sigh when someone tells you something you already thought to be true but didn’t know for sure.

“Do you have it?” she asked, and I knew she was talking about the sword.

I couldn’t help it. I shook my head, hoping that would be enough to protect me.

“Do . . . you . . . have . . . it?” she asked again.

“No,” I said.

“Does your friend have it?” she asked.

I shook my head again. I remembered seeing Abra retrieve the sword after Mr. Jinn disappeared, and I remembered that it had seemed suddenly small, almost insignificant, like a pocketknife, as she tucked it back in her waistband. It took a great amount of willpower not to answer the woman’s question. It was like trying not to respond to someone who says something untrue about you. Words started escaping, but instead of holding them in, I turned them into my own question.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

I sensed a great tension rising in her, and it spilled into the air between us. It was a cloud of anger and resentment, and for a moment I thought she had been sent to avenge Mr. Jinn.

Whose side was she on?

“I need to talk to your friend Abra.” She said the words as if explaining something to a very small child who might not understand.

But I shook my head once again. “Who are you?”

She leaned forward and whispered her name. Her breath was ice-cold against my ear, and she lingered there a moment longer than necessary, seeming to enjoy how uncomfortable she made me. Her name was one I had never heard before, but it filled me with darkness, the kind that you can feel closing in around you.

I slept.

When I woke up the next morning I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened, though her name was etched in my mind. I doubted for many years if it had actually even happened.

I never told Abra.

Koli Naal. That was her name. Koli Naal.