Winterwood

He stares at me, and there is sorrow in him—a feeling I understand. I know. I want to reach out and touch him, place my hand on his. On his cheek, on his chest. I want to tell him it’s going to be okay. But the moment slips past. Gone.

“My grandmother used to say that our dreams washed away the day,” I tell him, words that often soothed me. “That sleep was the best remedy for most things.”

I pull back the blankets and slip into bed. Oliver walks around to the other side, then hesitates before lying down beside me, and I wonder what he’s thinking, his breath rising heavy in his lungs, his eyes lidded like he’s trying not to look directly at me. As if I were a distraction—one he couldn’t trust.

I blow out the single candle on the bedside table, and in a blink, the room feels impossibly dark. Even the moonlight fades beyond thick clouds. The mattress shifts when Oliver lowers his head onto the pillow, and he stares up at the ceiling, at the odd assortment of things—ferns and bits of tree bark and green, tacked and draped above my bed. I feel embarrassed: They are childish things. Things collected by a little girl who believes in luck and mossy dreams.

It occurs to me that my house is filled with strangers: with a boy who I found in the forest and a girl who up until a few days ago would have probably laughed at me if I’d asked to borrow a pencil in history class. And I like the feeling: a house brimming, bursting. Filled with so many beating hearts.

For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel alone.

The loft fills with the rise and fall of our breathing, and the stillness in between. And I feel wholly at ease, like Oliver belongs in my bed, like he’s slept here a hundred times before and it’s just how it’s always been.

But then the silence starts to itch at me, my mind unable to sleep, and I feel Oliver shift beside me—still awake.

“Why did you get sent to the camp?” I ask, a question I’ve wondered about since I first found him in the woods. But I’ve been too afraid to ask. Too afraid to hear the answer.

His breathing changes, turns shallow, and I can just barely make out the line of tension along his jaw. “My uncle sent me here, didn’t want to deal with me anymore.…”

There is a pause at the end of his statement—the hollow place where more words should be. Where his thoughts broke in half.

“You’ve always lived with your uncle?” I ask carefully, afraid maybe I’m asking things he won’t want to answer.

He waits so long before he speaks I’m afraid he never will. But then he clears his throat. “No. My parents died a year ago—” His voice catches, then re-forms. “It was a car accident. Two miles from our house.”

A sharp pain pings through my chest. I never should have asked. “I’m so sorry,” I say, but my words sound useless—itty-bitty things that slide right off the skin like oil on water. Never being absorbed.

“I hardly knew my uncle; he never wanted me to live with him,” he continues. “So he sent me here.” He scrubs a hand through his hair, then drops his hand to his side. “Even if I escape this place, I have nowhere to go.”

I almost say sorry again but catch myself. He doesn’t want to hear sorry. I hated the way it sounded when people said it to me after Grandma died, the pity dripping off their tongues. The awful, mournful look in their eyes. The sorrys didn’t change anything.

Oliver wants to hear that wrongs can be made right. That moments in our past can be undone. That I am a Walker and I can bring back the dead.

But I can’t fix anything. The past is already decided.

I close my eyes, and I feel painfully hollow. My own emptiness engulfed by his, becoming the same. We are both alone. Both on our own. I squeeze my eyes tighter and pretend everything is different. I pretend Oliver never went missing the night of the storm. I pretend I never found him inside the Wicker Woods. I pretend he belongs at Jackjaw Lake, just like me, that his parents never died and he grew up a few houses down the shore and we’ve known each other our whole lives. I pretend we used to wade out into the shallow water in summer, me in my yellow ruffle swimsuit, he with his long boyish arms tanned by the sun, and he’d try to pull me under the water, laughing until our lungs ached. Refusing to go inside even once the watermelon-tinted sun had set. I pretend he was my first kiss.

I pretend I can keep him forever, my found thing.

I reach out and touch Oliver’s hand, winding my fingers through his. And his hand flexes softly against mine—he doesn’t pull away.

Don’t let go, I think. Or we both might drift away. We both might forget what’s real. We’ll forget how slippery time can be—how ruthless and mean. If you blink, you might miss everything.