Page 49 of Seasonal Fears

Jack has one chance to get them through this, and if she takes it, she’ll be hurting the woman she’s sworn to serve, and if she doesn’t, she might be getting them all killed. So she shakes her head, and says, “I’m sorry. You don’t have a choice. If you keep going, Harry’s going to be all alone. He doesn’t have a Corn Jenny. He just has me, and you, and if you go, I’ll be so busy trying to follow you that he won’t have either of us. He’ll be alone, in the middle of a coronation, and the part of you that’s already in the Winter knows he won’t survive that.” It’s possible to win without running parallel, but not without a guide. “Come back for Harry’s sake, even if you can’t stay for your own.”

Melanie’s eyes clear still further, innocence replaced by despair. Something warm touches Jack’s fingers. She glances down.

The foot she has cupped in her palm has started bleeding, the myriad gashes from the broken glass beginning to realize that human people—like Melanie still is—bleed when they get hurt. They don’t freeze.

“Thank you,” says Jack, as Harry comes running back with the first aid kit, and Melanie begins to cry.

Farmers’ Market

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 14TH, 2017: WINTER, WANING WORM MOON.

Two days of driving slowly through Northern California, two days of stopping at every rest stop and gas station they pass, two days of never staying on the highway for more than a few exits, and now the bright lights of the Bay Area are finally on the horizon, or would be, if it weren’t the middle of the day. The sun’s still high in the sky, bathing the land in watery light. That’s the only watery thing about this place: it hasn’t rained once since they crossed the state line, and for two teens from rainy Portland, that’s just shy of a terrifying miracle in the middle of February. They don’t know what to do with this.

Once again, it’s down to Jack to be the worldly one and remind them that it doesn’t rain all winter long everywhere you go; there are places where it never rains at all, and since this part of California has been experiencing a drought on and off for the last several decades, it’s probably a good thing it isn’t raining now. “California drivers have water-soluble driving skills,” she says, more than once, until both of them can recite it when half-awake and staggering back to the car after a night spent in a dive motel that makes the first one seem like a resort.

(A little after three in the afternoon the day after getting back on the road, they pull into the parking lot of that motel, Harry half-petrified with fear as he pulls out his credit card and passes it to the clerk, expecting a rejection. Instead, it goes through without a hitch, and they’re given the keys to a room so small and grimy that it doesn’t even have spiders in the corners; the spiders have standards, and are probably infesting someplace nicer. Like the dumpster. But it has a roof that doesn’t leak, and a door that locks, and a shower, even if Mel can’t bring herself to use it without leaving the door propped open and talking to Harry the whole time. He still has to come into the bathroom and help her rinse the shampoo out of her hair when her injured feet refuse to let her balance well enough to do it herself.)

(Harry hates to see Mel in pain. He’s still a little relieved when she can’t balance, when she needs him. The loss of pain seems to indicate the Winter is taking her over, and he wants his human girl more than he wants a frozen doll who summons snowflakes out of the air and doesn’t feel it when she steps on broken glass.)

(They sleep soundly if not entirely safely in that little dive motel, and they spend the second night taking turns dozing at the tables at the back of a truck stop food court, alternating naps with cups of strong, bitter coffee, talking about nothing of any importance. Certainly not the cycle and strength of seasons. Harry knows from his own grinding experience that most people wouldn’t have heard anything they didn’t want to hear, but Jack’s exhausted; making her spend another night explaining basic concepts of the universe that she wasn’t prepared to teach them both seemed more cruel than kind.)

They’re all exhausted by the time they see San Francisco stretched across the horizon in towering steel and glass, all of them worn down and ready to collapse at the slightest pressure. Maybe that’s why Jack leans up between the seats, puts a hand on Harry’s shoulder, and says, in a low, urgent voice, “Don’t go to San Francisco.”

“Is there another challenger there?” Harry doesn’t feel anything, but he wouldn’t, would he, if they were driving toward a potential Winter? Melanie and Jack would feel that, and he’d feel nothing until another Summer candidate joined the fray. They are each their own early warning systems.

“Maybe. We’re still too far away for me to tell.”

“Then why…?”

“Because Mel’s asleep.” When Harry doesn’t respond with understanding, Jack sighs. “She’s exhausted, and you’re not any better. I’m exhausted. If there’s another candidate in the area, they’re probably in San Francisco, and it’s Valentine’s Day. You deserve a break.”

Harry looks at her reflection in the rearview mirror with suspicion. “You’re the last person I expect grace and understanding from.”

“A tired Mel is a Mel who’s not buttressing herself against the Winter the way we both need her to,” says Jack. “A tired Harry is a Harry who’s not prepared to drag her back if she starts slipping. The whole point of this exercise is getting the two of you to embody your seasons, not get subsumed by them. Help me help her by helping yourself.”

“That probably wouldn’t make sense if I weren’t so tired.” Harry sighs heavily, the sound seeming to travel all the way up from the soles of his feet. “All right, if I’m not going to San Francisco, where am I going? And if you say LA, I don’t care if you’re a kid, I’m going to pull off to the side of the road and kick your ass so hard that you can’t walk for two days.”

If Harry’s threatening violence, he’s even more exhausted than Jack thought he was. She leans back in the seat, well out of reach, and looks out the window, reading a green road sign as it flashes past them. “Berkeley,” she says, with what she hopes will sound like real conviction. “You’re going to Berkeley. Big enough that you’ll be able to find someplace to crash for the night, small enough that it’s less likely to have a candidate lying in wait for the pair of you.”

“Berkeley, sure,” says Harry, without much enthusiasm. He’s tired. He just wants this all to be over.

More and more, he feels like it’s not going to be over for a long time.

It takes another hour to reach Berkeley. The highway offramp deposits them in a distinctly gentrified-looking part of town, old train depot and chic little shops sitting side by side, surrounded by trees carefully curated to look just a little wild and overgrown. Well-groomed people walk their equally well-groomed dogs down smooth, perfect sidewalks, or gather with them outside the artisanal ice cream shop, and it looks so much like Portland that Harry feels a sudden pang of homesickness.

Well, he’d been considering going to college closer to his grandparents. Maybe this whole ridiculous adventure is the world’s way of telling him he’s not built for travel. Maybe he’s one of those lucky people who grew up where he ultimately belongs.

Or maybe this is just the world saying he can find the place that makes him happy anywhere he goes, and he should head for Castleview, with its wide, beloved halls and its idiosyncratic interiors, as soon as he thinks he can get away with it. He glances at Melanie sleeping peacefully in the passenger seat with her cheek pressed up against the window and her mouth half-open, a thin thread of saliva connecting lips and chin. As long as she’s with him, he thinks he can be happy anywhere.

He could be happy here.

There’s no parking on these narrow, tree-lined streets, already packed with people who made actual plans for Valentine’s Day, who aren’t running for their lives in the face of a force too large to fully understand. So he keeps driving, following signs for the local university, a college he’d considered before he’d realized majoring in forestry at a school that had its own biodiversity and conservation club was likely to result in four years of endless harassment by his classmates once they realized he was going to keep cutting trees down. His family tried to be responsible stewards of their land and cut sustainably, but they couldn’t run a lumber business without felling a few trees. Berkeley’s program was well regarded, but it wasn’t for him, despite everything.

He never even toured the campus. He feels a little bubble of excitement work its way up through his chest. This is almost normal life. They’re driving down the coast to tour colleges, that’s all, and having a little adventure in the process. And if he tells himself that loudly enough, then maybe he can pretend to be a version of himself who’s never killed a man, who doesn’t know what it feels like to have hot blood on his hands that gets tight and sticky as it cools, who isn’t stained, indelibly, by the things he’s done.

He misses that version of himself. He didn’t even know that was a version of himself until after he’d killed him, killed him at the same time as he killed that boy whose name he may never know (whose name, as Jack so casually puts it, doesn’t really matter anymore; and she says the Ascendants don’t kill, but she took the corpses so calmly that he doesn’t quite believe her. She’s a child who’s seen death before, he’s sure of that, and he doesn’t know whether she dealt it or simply stood in its path, and he doesn’t know how much that matters, and the not knowing is maybe what disturbs him most of all).

The little shops fall away, as do the industrial bones of the old railway tracks, replaced by a sprawling, bucolic series of wooded streets and eccentric little houses that remind him more than ever of home. Home, and not home at the same time—Portland doesn’t have this much redwood, this many stairways leading to the doors. Half the houses look unstable, given how often the earth shakes down here, like they were designed by children to be knocked down.