1

I was trying to understand life and death, but everything was a tangled mess.

I was doodling on the edge of the notebook, writing my name in cursive, over and over: Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. Outside, rain pounded the drooping willow in our front yard, its limbs whips rattling in the wind. In the chapter of Evie of the Deepthorn I was currently writing, the water was coming down so hard that Evie thought she was blind. She was slipping through the mud and grabbing at trees to propel herself forward, digging huge black ruts in the earth with her boots. A long way back she’d become separated from her horse, Excalibur, and she could hear his mournful whinnying as he made his way through the brush. But she didn’t know if he was right or left, ahead or behind her.

I needed to understand life and death because I was stuck on the book. I didn’t know how to write anything that hadn’t happened to me, and so the things I did write came out flat. Except the sections that were based on things that I had actually experienced. Like rain. Like confusion. Like slipping in the mud. But I couldn’t have Evie wandering through the forest in inclement weather forever, forever alone — that would get boring.

For me, too.

There was lots of death in the book and I didn’t know how my characters were supposed to react. That was a major issue. It all seemed so arbitrary to me — would they burst into tears? Go insane? Get angry? I had no idea.

The previous summer my mother and I had gathered the branches that had fallen from the willow during a similar storm. Mom had seen someone twist them into baskets on a TV show. The woman on TV wore a checkered blue shirt with a little red bandana tied sweetly ’round her neck. I remember passing the television and thinking, “That person is too twee to live.” But I secretly envied them for how together they looked. I knew it was all on the surface, or at least that’s what I hoped, but I was so far from being even together only on the surface that I felt like a member of a doomed second species, meant to live in caves and serve her kind on hand and foot.

I felt so ugly moving on the earth. I could never figure out the right kind of clothing to wear or the right way to style my hair. So instead I tried my best to be anonymous, to not stick out, to wear things that wouldn’t mark me in one direction or another.

Sometimes sticking out is the worst decision you can make for yourself. Especially when you don’t know what you are.

Especially when everyone else knows you don’t know.

Anyway, we’d gathered the branches after the storm and put them in a big bucket in the laundry room. I remember looking up at the tree afterward with a kind of sadness. It had lost a lot of branches since we’d moved in. It had been majestic then, reaching from its full height of roughly thirty feet to the ground. My mother thought my dad wasn’t watering it enough. My dad thought the change was due to the neighbours paving their driveway (it had been only gravel before). I guess it didn’t matter what the issue was. Now it was thin and spindly and if you didn’t know it was a willow you might think it was any other kind of tree, though nearer to the top the branches were still long enough to make rainstorms more dramatic from my window.

The willow seemed a kind of symbol, like it stood for the way a person is stripped and made emptier with the passage of time. Some days I had the ridiculous notion to take the fallen branches and stick them back on, like with a staple gun or something, as if that were enough to turn back the clock.

After watching the TV program about willow baskets, my mom went out to Home Hardware and picked up a book on crafts you could do at home. It had a picture of the same woman from TV, with her mouth open and a crescent of cool white teeth showing coyly between her lips. A little sticker, too, in case it wasn’t obvious, reading: AS SEEN ON HOME & GARDEN TV.

When I saw the book downstairs, left in a prominent location in the kitchen, I got a bad feeling in my stomach. Somehow I knew that it had been left out for me. I tried to hide it underneath a stack of tablecloths, trying to make it disappear as casually as possible, like it was an accident, or like I was, but two days later Mom told me that she wanted me to help her with a special project. She said that we needed to spend more quality time together. She said I was getting weird, sitting upstairs alone in my room. That I would scare boys away if I cast too many spells by myself.

Getting weird?

I wondered, exactly, what boys I had scared off were going to come back once they heard that I was doing weekend wicker-basket projects with my mom.

But either way, I didn’t cast spells. I had a couple of polished Tiger Eyes that I picked up at the alternative place on Main, little polished orange-and-brown stones, and I think that’s what she was referring to. They don’t have anything to do with magic or witches or anything like that. I just think they’re pretty. And I like the idea that carrying around a pebble in your pocket can increase your blood flow and your self-awareness, which is what the little card at the store said that Tiger Eyes are supposed to do. They’re supposed to calm you. I mean, I don’t necessarily believe that, but maybe I also do, in a way. It couldn’t hurt.

In any case I’m not a witch. And I don’t pretend to be.

Maybe things would be better for me if I were.

I knew what she meant about getting out of my room, but it was the principle of the thing. She said I was being a brat and that she was trying to be nice to me. That if I didn’t even hang out with my mother I was going to lose all of my social skills and then who would love me?

I got through about half a basket before it yawned open like that egg thing at the beginning of Alien. Except instead of spitting out a xenomorph it just fell apart. It was really frustrating. I didn’t have the patience to fix it and everything I tried just made it worse. Mom told me to be quiet and stop complaining and start again — but with less attitude — and instead I threw the basket across the room. It broke into about a million pieces, the branches scattering in every direction. That felt really good. Even though I knew when I threw it that I was irrevocably bad. Like I was crossing a threshold that meant I was everything Mom said I was. But it also felt like I couldn’t have done anything else — like I was always going to break the basket. Like I was forever trapped in that action. It’s weird to feel fated to be ruined and to want to do better but also to enact that, over and over.

Then I stormed upstairs while Mom threatened to take away my TV privileges and my computer. What did I care?

“Sarah, I’m warning you!” she called up the stairs. “Sarah!”

“Fuck you!” I screamed, from the top of the stairs. “Fuck you!  ”

Not my proudest moment.

Then she grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me back to the kitchen and told me to clean up the mess and I said, “No, no, no, fuck you, fuck you!” and I squirmed away and ran out of the house. Just like that, without even shoes. I made it about a block or so before stopping to take off my socks, not that it mattered by then. They were grey and green from the grass and the asphalt. Then I wandered around barefoot, shy of seeing anyone, feeling stupid and deeply broken, until enough time had passed that I thought I could sneak back in.

I liked writing about Evie struggling through the rain, but I was scared of where she would go and what would happen to her there. Who she would talk to and how they would act.

When I wasn’t actively writing, I was thinking about all of that and watching the grass shimmer in the rain. We hadn’t cut it in a long time and it humped over, rustling and swaying in the wind. It was pretty. Or at least I thought so. Mom kept asking me to cut it, but I didn’t want to do it because that was usually Dad’s job. I thought she should do it if she cared so much.

I don’t know why Dad had let it grow so long, but I thought that maybe he was depressed.

Maybe I felt a bit depressed, too. I hadn’t wanted to do much but work on my story and look at my computer or out the window at whatever was going on out there. I had one hand on the windowpane and one hand on the lamp turned on over my notebook. The lamp gets hot, but not quite hot enough to burn. If I put my hand on it as soon as it turns on and wait for the heat to come it sort of cools down, or seems to. I mean, I can do it, somehow it’s tolerable, as opposed to waiting until the light’s been on for a while and burning my hand as soon as the hot metal touches my skin.

There’s nothing I like better than sitting at my desk when it rains and looking out the window, except opening it a crack and getting into bed and pulling the covers up and listening to the water run down the house. I know that means I’m just like every other quiet teenager on the planet.

And I don’t mind that, either. It’s nice to feel at least in one small way that I belong.

Here’s what’s going to happen in my story, in case you’re curious. Evie is going to save the whole kingdom. She’s going to kill Llor, the ice queen, and cleanse the Deepthorn of her legions. I knew that before I started writing.

Evie of the Deepthorn is not going to be postmodern, or depressing, or whatever. It’s going to be the opposite of that kind of book. It’s going to make people feel better about their lives instead of worse. When readers get to the end of Evie of the Deepthorn they’re going to feel like everything makes sense in their lives, like there is order in the universe, like cruelty can be reversed.

I’m going to feel that way, too.

*    *    *

But how do you learn about life and death when you’re just a teenager sitting alone in your room? I’d never lived in a kingdom ravaged by an ice queen.

I’d never lost a parent, let alone two.

The only person I even remembered dying was Grandma Irene, when I was seven, but she lived in Alberta and I only remembered meeting her once, when I was too young to remember much about her.

She wasn’t even my real grandma.

I was afraid that the emotional reactions in Evie of the Deepthorn made no sense at all. That they were totally fake and would seem made up. That their emptiness would reveal the limits of my experience. Which wasn’t a problem just limited to my book. One of the things that Jess always said about me was that I was too quiet and never talked about anything important, like normal people do. That I never expressed anything without prompting. Once she even told me that she and Tiff felt like I was a kind of spy — though Tiff never said that to my face, I still had reason to believe it. Not a spy in the sense that I was going to betray their secrets, but like I was taking them for my own. Like I was a person made of clay, reaching into them and pulling out whatever I found. Sticking it onto me. Like I was a dark shadow roaming the countryside and gobbling people up.

It was true that I felt that hungry, sometimes, waking up from my dreams.

“You’re like a couch cushion,” Jess told me once. By which I think she meant, you are quiet, you gather up everything that is loose, sometimes you get sat on. I must have looked sad, because then she added, “I think that and then sometimes you make me laugh.”

It didn’t make me feel much better.

A kid from my school had died the year before, but I’d never even seen him around before. I can’t remember how it happened — some kind of accident, I think. He was a few grades above mine. I’d seen his younger brother, though. He was in my year. A skinny kid who sometimes made jokes in class — witty little jokes that didn’t hurt anybody. He was pretty well-liked, I think. For a few months he walked around the hallways with a dazed look in his eyes, and everyone got out of his way. Then the crowds closed in around him and everyone forgot what had happened. Or it didn’t matter anymore.

I wanted to know some of what he did, except I didn’t want to actually know what it was like to lose someone I cared that much about, because I didn’t want that to happen to me. I didn’t even want to go outside. I tried to imagine what it was like for the younger brother to walk those hallways alone, missing the one person he probably cared about most. Knowing that everyone else knew. Feeling exposed.

I think that would be the worst part, I don’t know why. It’s bad enough having everyone assume they know things about you just based on how you look. I hate it when people look at me and see how ugly I am and imagine that I don’t have feelings, like I am without personality, like I am an empty husk, like nothing will ever happen of any value in my life just because I’m quiet and my face is covered in pimples, or the ghosts of them. It gets on my nerves being so overlooked, to see eyes pass over me like I am a fly or a distant lake. To assume that I have nothing to say, even when I’m saying it.

But then they sometimes stop and look at me, really look at me, up and down, like I’m behind one-way glass. Like they know the whole course of my life — beginning to end. Like all of my defects are theirs to discover. Like my body belongs to them. Like I’m not even there. And I don’t like that either.

I would hate it if they knew something real. Or if they thought they did. I can’t decide which is worse. For that reason I decided it was wrong to think so hard about what that kid might feel about his brother dying, that maybe it was a kind of exploitation, or violence, or something bad, and so I stopped.

*    *    *

Is there a way to access pain without getting hurt yourself? Should I be happier that the hurt I feel — dull, aching, confused — can’t be connected to any one thing? Or is it worse that what I feel seems sort of never-ending? Inherent, endless, like how Evie’s quest to defeat Llor feels to me right now? She’s still in the forest, still being pummelled by the rain, because I can’t figure out where I want to get her to go next. Because I haven’t been able to sit down and concentrate since that last rainstorm. Whenever I take out the notebook and open it to the last page I was working on, I pick up the pen and press it to the paper, sit there staring down from my window, at the street where cars are slowly moving back and forth in front of the house, where the grass — still long and glittering — waves gently in the breeze, trying to think of what happens next. And nothing comes out.

Sometimes when I get stuck I go downstairs and bring one of my dad’s Renaissance magazines up to my room, and leaf through it until I find something that gives me an idea. Once it was a detailed article on how to build an accurate thirteenth-century blacksmith’s forge in your backyard. Another time it was a photo series of knights standing in front of tents set up in a green field, knights who were knights like my dad was a knight, actually middle managers or software engineers, balding men who sat in cubicles and drove Toyota Camrys and drank Diet Cokes. But for some reason I didn’t think it would be enough to look through one of those magazines. I didn’t think I’d learn anything. I thought leafing through pictures and articles featuring the sad men and women who spent their weekends and evenings sewing costumes and handcrafting weapons and imagining themselves galloping at top speed across a plain free of modern responsibility would be depressing. I mean, it was depressing most days, probably, to most people. But it also wouldn’t teach me anything I actually wanted to learn. Those people in the magazines were just as stuck as Evie was, except for them there’s no triumph on the other side, just the sad realization that must grow with every year, that no matter how close they get to the time they love, they will never quite reach what they are looking for.

I’d like to disappear with them, too, of course — or anywhere, a part of me wants that — but I know I can’t. I’ve never been able to fully disappear, as much as I would like to. As much as I want to imagine myself walking through a forest alone, armed only with a knife or a spear and fending for myself, I know that is a hard and dangerous freedom to seek. And not really what I want, either. They never talk about that in my dad’s magazines — what a pain it must have been to find food, shelter, places to go to the bathroom. How terrible everyone must have smelled. Ironically, it’s a scrubbed-clean reality that they are escaping to, something from movies or books. Something without habit or routine, which is exactly what gets cut out of those narratives. That’s why I think it’s only in fiction where real triumph can be found.

When I was a little kid my dad would take me to the fairgrounds outside Saffronville, where maybe two or three times a summer they would stage a medieval fair. I’d dress up like a princess in an old Halloween costume and he would wear one of his chain-mail pieces and sometimes an open helmet, and he’d release the ponytail he normally wore, letting his hair fall to his shoulders, and we’d split a turkey leg and drink warm root beer and browse the shops staffed by too-affable men and women in period costume and watch men charge at one another on horseback and sword-fight with big, exaggerated blows. And I liked to do all of that, but I was always looking for something else, I think. I wanted both to believe it all and to catch them out, to escape into the fantasy, but also to destroy the illusion. That latter thing wasn’t hard to do — there was always the odd thrumming generator, pair of Adidas sneakers, plastic ketchup bottle, truck parked behind a tent. They weren’t trying to remake the entire world, just transform a little piece of it.

When I was really little I was always pointing this or that inaccuracy out to my dad. When I got older I wore a constant look of skepticism which I think convinced him that I had outgrown the fairs, and he stopped taking me and started going on his own. But it wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy them anymore, because I did; it was only that I couldn’t let myself give in to them, because I knew somehow that I could have and I didn’t want to turn into one of the men or women staffing the booths.

It was exactly like Jess said — I liked to take a look, but I didn’t want to go any further. I was a tourist.

I didn’t want it to be true, but it was true.

Sometimes, when Mom and Dad are asleep, I sneak downstairs and into the backyard, lie out on the back deck, close my eyes, and think about things with the breeze gently rolling over me and the sound of the trees and birds and bats rustling in the night, but never fall asleep, not even when I’m totally relaxed, or at least I think I don’t. Or else instead of closing my eyes, I stare straight up into the night sky, where you can’t see anything, really, but the moon and sometimes clouds and maybe a few twinkling stars or distant satellites — when I was little and Durham was smaller you could see a lot more, even the purply ribbons of the Milky Way — and think about what all of that darkness means and how it is up there but in me, too, and how I don’t understand it at all and I feel deeply broken at every moment. Sometimes it seems like a shadow is chasing me, a shadow that I can’t comprehend or understand, and I want to be good or to feel in control of myself, but that is always just out of my reach, or maybe not just out of my reach but actually on another planet, like I am on earth and it is on the moon, or it is on the moon and I am on the moon, too, but I am far away, like I am somewhere on the dark side and I’ll never see the light.

Then I wish I could put on a costume or clutch a good facsimile of a sword and thrust my way through life and, just like my dad, find some solace or comfort in something small and meaningless, something that despite all of that I could nevertheless believe in. But I know that I could never believe in anything — not for very long, in any case.