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I saw it again / Out of the corner of my eye. / Doesn’t matter where I am. / Doesn’t matter how hard I try / To get away.
It’s waiting / Waiting for me.
And so is she.
After that, the journal changes. In big, blocky letters, traced over and over again until they blurred and grayed, it says THE ROAD. And under that, Becca had written:
Don’t leave the road.
When it’s dark, don’t let go.
There are other roads. Don’t follow them.
The pages after are dense with notes about Lucy Gallows and the game—about the keys, the forest, and a city Becca never names. In between the pages, she’s tucked photos of the forest. Zachary is in some of them. There’s even a photo of Lucy’s tombstone— not that there’s a body in that grave.
Eventually the neat, bulleted notes devolve. They turn into odd nonsense. Scraps of phrases, unsettling drawings of eyes and hands and a figure that seems stretched, legs and arms too long—a man’s body, but with the head of another beast, triangular, antlers branching out and out, sometimes filling the whole page. I’ve read every word.
the birds come after the dark
seven gates
follow the rules
keep moving
And on and on. Many of the phrases read like instructions, but there are others that don’t have any clear imperative, like the one written in a spiral bursting across a page.In the house in the town in the woods on the road are the halls that breathe. The singing will lure you the smoke will infest you the words will unmake you the woman will hate you.
I’ve spent hours paging through that notebook again and again, but no secrets have unlocked themselves for me. I’ve gone to the place in the forest where Lucy Callow disappeared, in daylight and in the dark, on the full moon, in a white dress, whatever any legend says.
Because I don’t believe in ghosts, but I want to. I know Becca didn’t run away. That leaves one possibility and one impossibility, and I long for the impossible. Because if she isn’t dead, if she’s only beentaken, she can be brought back.
The front door opens, and I hear the familiar sequence of sounds that mark my mother’s arrival home: keys clattering in the dish inside the door, shoes thumping haphazardly into the corner, quick steps to the kitchen and thepoikof a cork popped from a half-full bottle. She must know about the text by now. She must have heard. It’s a small town.
I shut the journal back in the box and shove it under my bed. I pull my feet up and tuck them under me on the bed, a thousand versions of the coming conversation playing through my head, a thousand versions of how I’ll convince my mother not to worry about anything.
My mother’s footsteps come up the stairs, and she knocks lightly on my door before swinging it open. “How was school?” she asks.
So she wants to build up to it. “Fine,” I say.
She pauses. She seems to search my face, as if looking for an answer—but to what question? Does she want to know if the text upset me? Does she want to know if I was the one that sent it out?
“Good,” she says. I blink. “I’m thinking of ordering out for dinner. Pizza okay?” Apparently we aren’t going to talk about it at all.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Or Chinese.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. Briar Glen’s only Chinese restaurant is ownedby an Italian man named Aurelio, so it isn’t exactly authentic cuisine, but it’s tasty. Henry Lin’s parents run the pizzeria in a bit of gastronomical symmetry, and we order from one or the other most nights—and most of the rest, we subsist on the leftovers.
My parents aren’t divorced, officially. But even before Becca, things were strained between them. Dad stuck around for three months after. Took a job in New York, and while he says he isn’t seeing anyone, one of his coworkers keeps tagging him in joint selfies at “work events” with a borderline psychotic number of emojis. He still pays a private detective to look for Becca, gets updates every couple weeks—always another promising lead, never anything solid. Even if he’s given up, he isn’t willing to stop looking. Not yet.
Unlike Mom. She isn’t going to ask about the text, because it would mean, inevitably, talking about Becca. And that is one thing we can never do. Silence is the only way she knows how to deal with pain. As if by pretending she’s moved on, she can stop hurting. All it really means is that we’re forced to endure the pain alone, without each other to lean on.
When I lost my sister, I lost my whole family. I don’t know if I can ever get them back. But I can find Becca.
Or at least I can try.
—
