Winterwood

If Grandma were here, she would look at the trees, the dark snow-filled sky, my eyes, and she would know if this was all a dream. She would know why I didn’t drown in the lake. Why ash-clouds don’t rise up beneath my feet.

But right now, she feels very, very far away.

I stop at the shore and cross my arms, my mouth dipping open. There are no blackened trees, no spinning sparks weaving through the sky. The row of summer homes and the boys’ camp at the far side of the lake have not been reduced to ash. And up in the pines, my home still stands.

Nothing has burned.

I inch closer to the shoreline, the air crackling and settling, and through the falling snow I hear voices, boys shouting, laughing.

It’s coming from across the lake.

Maybe I should go back to the house, get warm beside the fire, let my skin and hair and clothes thaw. But I don’t. I follow the sound of the boys. The familiar pitch of their voices. Because something is wrong. Something has changed.

Everything is terrifyingly different.

I pass the marina and the boathouse and Mr. Perkins’s cabin. Light gleams from inside—not just candlelight, but buzzing, humming electricity light. The power has come back on. At the window, Mr. Perkins is gazing out at the snow, and he waves a hand at me, smiling. He didn’t flee down the road to escape the fire—because there is no fire.

I’m not dead. I didn’t drown in the lake. Mr. Perkins can see me.

But something is wrong.

Something that flickers across my mind—just out of reach.

Something I can’t explain.

I move quicker toward the sound of the boys, toward a voice I think might be Oliver’s. And when I reach the cemetery—the odd-shaped land where the dead have been buried—the breath hitches in my lungs.

The boys stand among the graves. All of them.

Shadowy figures in the falling snow: Jasper and Rhett and Lin. They laugh, passing around a bottle and taking long gulps of the dark liquid inside. Max is there too, leaning against a gravestone, blond hair nearly the same color as the snow.

And Oliver: his arms crossed, standing apart from the others.

They’re all here. Even though they shouldn’t be.

I pause near the gate, my heart wobbling against my rib cage, unsure why they’ve gathered in the cemetery. Why the trees aren’t burnt. Why nothing is as it was.

“You have to say her name three times,” Jasper coaxes, his bony elbow resting on the grave of my ancestor. Jasper, who is alive. Not buried in the soil inside the Wicker Woods. The scene before me swims in and out of focus, thoughts muddled—unable to pinpoint a memory, a moment that makes sense.

“Whose?” Oliver asks, and Jasper points a finger at the gravestone. The place where Willa Walker has been laid in the ground—the Walker who wept into the lake and made it bottomless. The same grave that Oliver told me the boys made him stand over and whisper her name three times—the first part of his initiation.

“If you say her name three times, you’ll summon her up from the grave,” I hear Rhett say, a serious measure to his voice. A grimness that reminds me of when he broke into my house and pulled me from bed.

“Legend says that Willa Walker wept into Jackjaw Lake and made it bottomless,” Jasper adds, smirking.

Oliver makes a sound, and Max moves closer to him, his shoulders pulled back. “You don’t believe us?” Max asks. And my head starts to vibrate again, hearing their words, watching as Oliver peers down at the grave and reluctantly speaks Willa’s name three times—I know where I am.

I know: This is the night of the storm.

This is the night Oliver breaks through the ice and sinks into the dark. This is the night he drowns.

When the electricity will spark and then die. When the road will be snowed in.

Time has spun and tottered and turned itself inside out. Or I have unraveled it. I have done this. Brought myself back to this night. Back, back, back.

I am at the place where it all began.

Little pops of light break across my vision—the now familiar prick of déjà vu. The air wavers against my eardrums, as if I’m falling, tumbling, losing all sense of gravity. This has all happened before.

On that awful, awful night.

And I feel like I might be sick.

“Dude, you should see your face,” Jasper says now—just like Oliver described. And he claps a hand on Oliver’s shoulder, laughing, the sound carrying up into the treetops, startling a blackbird that caws from a nearby spruce tree and takes to the sky.

This has all happened before.