I take a slow step forward. She buries her face in her arms and continues whispering.
I kneel in front of her. “I’m here to help you,” I say.
Emma Claring doesn’t look up. “Why can’t I wake up?” she whispers. Her voice hitches.
“Some dreams,” I say, “are harder to shake.”
Her rocking slows, and her head rolls side to side against her arms.
“But do you know what’s great about dreams?” I mimic the tone my mother used to use
with me, with Ben. Soothing, patient. “Once you know you’re in a dream, you can control
it. You can change it. You can find a way out.”
Emma looks up at me over her crossed arms, eyes shining and wide.
“Do you want me to show you how?” I ask.
She nods.
“I want you to close your eyes”—she does—“and imagine a door.” I look around at this
stretch of hall, every door unmarked, and wish I’d taken the time to find another
Returns door nearby. “Now, on the door, I want you to imagine a white circle, filled
in. And behind the door, I want you to imagine a room filled with light. Nothing but
light. Can you see it?”
The girl nods.
“Okay. Open your eyes.” I push myself up. “Let’s go find your door.”
“But there are so many,” she whispers.
I smile. “It will be an adventure.”
She reaches out and takes my hand. I stiffen on instinct, even though I know her touch
is simply that, a touch, so unlike the wave of thought and feeling that comes with
grazing a living person’s skin. She may be full of memories, but I can’t see them.
Only the Librarians in the Archive know how to read the dead.
Emma looks up at me, and I give her hand a small squeeze and lead her back around
the corner and down the hall, trying to retrace my steps. As we weave through the
Narrows, I wonder what made her wake up. The vast majority of names on my list are
children and teens, restless but not necessarily bad—just those who died before they
could fully live. What kind of kid was she? What did she die of? And then I hear Da’s
voice, warning about curiosity. I know there’s a reason Keepers aren’t taught to read
Histories. To us, their pasts are irrelevant.
I feel Emma’s hand twist nervously in mine.
“It’s okay,” I say quietly as we reach another hall of unmarked doors. “We’ll find
it.” I hope. I haven’t exactly had a wealth of time to learn the layout of this place,
but just as I’m starting to fidget too, we turn onto another corridor, and there it
is.
Emma pulls free and runs up to the door, stretching her small fingers over the chalk
circle. They come away white as I get the key in the lock and turn, and the Returns
door opens, showering us both in brilliant light. Emma gasps.
For a moment, there is nothing but light. Like I promised.
“See?” I say, pressing my hand against her back and guiding her forward, over the
threshold and into Returns.
Emma is just turning back to see why I haven’t followed her when I close my eyes and
pull the door firmly shut between us. There’s no crying, no pounding on the door;
only a deathly quiet from the other side. I stand there for several moments with my
key in the lock, something like guilt fluttering behind my ribs. It fades as fast.
I remind myself that Returning is merciful. Returning puts the Histories back to sleep,
ends the nightmare of their ghostly waking. Still, I hate the fear that laces the
younger eyes when I lock them in.
I sometimes wonder what happens in Returns, how the Histories go back to the lifeless
bodies on the Archive shelves. Once, with this boy, I stayed to see, waited in the
doorway of the infinite white (I knew better than to step inside). But nothing happened,
not until I left. I know because I finally closed the door, only for a second, a beat,
however long it takes to lock and then unlock, and when I opened it again, the boy
was gone.
I once asked the Librarians how the Histories got out. Patrick said something about
doors opening and closing. Lisa said the Archive was a vast machine, and all machines
had glitches, gaps. Roland said he had no idea.
I suppose it doesn’t matter
how
they get out. All that matters is they do. And when they do, they must be found.
They must go back. Case open, case closed.
I push off the door and dig the slip of Archive paper from my pocket, checking to
make sure Emma’s name is gone. It is. All that’s left of her is a hand-shaped smudge
in the white chalk.
I redraw the circle and turn toward home.
“G
ET WHAT YOU WANTED
from the car?” asks Dad as I walk in.
He spares me the need to lie by flashing the car keys, which I neglected to take.
Never mind that, judging by the low light through the window and the fact that every
inch of the room behind him is covered with boxes, I was gone way too long. I quietly
curse the Narrows and the Archive. I’ve tried wearing a watch, but it’s useless. Doesn’t
matter how it’s made—the moment I leave the Outer, it stops working.
So now I get to pick: truth or lie.
The first trick to lying is to tell the truth as often as possible. If you start lying
about everything, big and small, it becomes impossible to keep things straight, and
you’ll get caught. Once suspicion is planted it becomes exponentially harder to sell
the next lie.
I don’t have a clean record with my parents when it comes to lying, from sneaking
out to the occasional inexplicable bruise—some Histories don’t want to be Returned—so
I have to tread carefully, and since Dad paved the way for truth, I roll with it.
Besides, sometimes a parent appreciates a little honesty, confidentiality. It makes
them feel like the favorite.
“This whole thing,” I say, slumping against the doorway, “it’s a lot of change. I
just needed some space.”
“Plenty of that here.”
“I know,” I say. “Big building.”
“Did you see all seven floors?”
“Only got to five.” The lie is effortless, delivered with an ease that would make
Da proud.
I can hear Mom several rooms away, the sounds of unpacking overlapped with radio music.
Mom hates quiet, fills every space with as much noise and movement as possible.
“See anything good?” asks Dad.
“Dust.” I shrug. “Maybe a ghost or two.”
He offers a conspiratorial smile and steps aside to let me pass.
My chest tightens at the sight of the boxes exploding across every spare inch of the
room. About half of them just say
STUFF
. If Mom was feeling ambitious, she scribbled a small list of items beneath the word,
but seeing as her handwriting is virtually illegible, we won’t know what’s in each
box until we actually open it. Like Christmas. Except we already own everything.
Dad’s about to hand me a pair of scissors when the phone rings. I didn’t know we had
a phone yet. Dad and I scramble to find it among the packing materials, when Mom shouts,
“Kitchen counter by the fridge,” and sure enough, there it is.
“Hello?” I answer, breathless.
“You disappoint me,” says a girl.
“Huh?” Everything is too strange too fast, and I can’t place the voice.
“You’ve been in your new residence for hours, and you’ve already forgotten me.”
Lyndsey. I loosen.
“How do you even know this number?” I ask. “
I
don’t know this number.”
“I’m magical,” she says. “And if you’d just get a cell…”
“I have a cell.”
“When’s the last time you charged it?”
I try to think.
“Mackenzie Bishop, if you have to think about it, it’s been too long.”
I want to deliver a comeback, but I can’t. I’ve never needed to charge the phone.
Lyndsey is—was—my next door neighbor for ten years. Was—is—my best friend.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, wading through the boxes and down a short hall. Lyndsey tells
me to hold and starts talking to someone else, covering the phone with her hand so
all I hear are vowels.
At the end of the hall there’s a door with a Post-it note stuck to it. There’s a letter
on it that vaguely resembles an
M
, so I’m going to assume this is my room. I nudge the door open with my foot and head
inside to find more boxes, an unassembled bed, and a mattress.
Lyndsey laughs at something someone says, and even sixty miles away, through a phone
and her muffled hand, the sound is threaded with light. Lyndsey Newman is made of
light. You see it in her blond curls, her sun-kissed skin, and the band of freckles
across her cheeks. You feel it when you’re near her. She possesses this unconditional
loyalty and the kind of cheer you start to suspect no longer exists in the world until
you talk to her. And she never asks the wrong questions, the ones I can’t answer.
Never makes me lie.
“You there?” she asks.
“Yeah, I’m here,” I say, nudging a box out of the way so I can reach the bed. The
frame leans against the wall, the mattress and box spring stacked on the floor.
“Has your mom gotten bored yet?” Lyndsey asks.
“Sadly, not yet,” I say, collapsing onto the bare mattress.
Ben was madly in love with Lyndsey, or as in love as a little boy can get. And she
adored him. She’s the kind of only child who dreams of siblings, so we just agreed
to share. When Ben died, Lyndsey only got brighter, fiercer. An almost defiant kind
of optimism. But when my parents told me we were moving, all I could think was,
What about
Lynds? How can she lose us both?
The day I told her about the move, I saw her strength finally waver. Something slipped
inside her, and she faltered. But moments later, she was back. A nine-out-of-ten smile—but
still, wider than what anyone in my house had been able to muster.
“You should convince her to open up an ice cream parlor in some awesome beachside
town.…” I slide my ring to the edge of my finger, then roll it back over my knuckle
as Lynds adds, “Oh, or in, like, Russia. Get out, see the world at least.”
Lyndsey has a point. My parents may be running, but I think they’re scared of running
so far they can’t look back and see what they’ve left. We’re only an hour from our
old home. Only an hour from our old lives.
“Agreed,” I say. “So when are you going to come crash in the splendor that is the
Coronado?”
“Is it incredible? Tell me it’s incredible.”
“It’s…old.”
“Is it haunted?”
Depends on the definition of haunted, really.
Ghost
is just a term used by people who don’t know about Histories.
“You’re taking an awfully long time to answer that, Mac.”
“Can’t confirm ghosts yet,” I say, “but give me time.”
I can hear her mother in the background. “Come on, Lyndsey. Mackenzie might have the
luxury of slacking, but you don’t.”
Ouch.
Slacking.
What would it feel like to slack? Not that I can argue my case. The Archive might
take issue with my exposing them just to prove that I’m a productive teen.
“Ack, sorry,” says Lyndsey. “I need to go to practice.”
“Which one?” I tease.
“Soccer.”
“Of course.”
“Talk soon, okay?” she says.
“Yeah.”
The phone goes dead.
I sit up and scan the boxes piled around the bed. They each have an
M
somewhere on the side. I’ve seen
M
’s, and
A
’s (my mother’s name is Allison) and
P
’s (my father’s name is Peter) around the living room, but no
B
’s. A sick feeling twists my stomach.
“Mom!” I call out, pushing up from the bed and heading back down the hall.
Dad is hiding out in a corner of the living room, a box cutter in one hand and a book
in the other. He seems more interested in the book.
“What’s wrong, Mac?” he asks without looking up. But Dad didn’t do this. I know he
didn’t. He might be running, too, but he’s not leading the pack.
“Mom!” I call again. I find her in her bedroom, blasting some talk show on the radio
as she unpacks.
“What is it, love?” she asks, tossing hangers onto the bed.
When I speak, the words come out quiet, as if I don’t want to ask. As if I don’t want
to know.
“Where are Ben’s boxes?”
There is a very, very long pause. “Mackenzie,” she says slowly. “This is about fresh
starts—”
“Where are they?”
“A few are in storage. The rest…”
“You didn’t.”
“Colleen said that sometimes change requires drastic—”
“You’re going to blame your therapist for throwing out Ben’s stuff? Seriously?” My
voice must have gone up, because Dad appears behind me in the doorway. Mom’s expression
collapses, and he goes to her, and suddenly I’m the bad guy for wanting to hold on
to something. Something I can read.
“Tell me you kept some of it,” I say through gritted teeth.
Mom nods, her face still buried in Dad’s collar. “A small box. Just a few things.
They’re in your room.”
I’m already in the hall. I slam my door behind me and push boxes out of the way until
I find it. Shoved in a corner. A small
B
on one side. It’s little bigger than a shoe box.
I slice the clear packing tape with Da’s key, and turn the box over on the bed, spreading
all that’s left of Ben across the mattress. My eyes burn. It’s not that Mom didn’t
keep anything, it’s that she kept the wrong things. We leave memories on objects we
love and cherish, things we use and wear down.
If Mom had kept his favorite shirt—the one with the
X
over the heart—or any of his blue pencils—even a stub—or the mile patch he won in
track, the one he kept in his pocket because he was too proud to leave it at home,
but not proud enough to put it on his backpack…but the things scattered on my bed
aren’t really his. Photos she framed for him, graded tests, a hat he wore once, a
small spelling trophy, a teddy bear he hated, and a cup he made in an art class when
he was only five or six.
I tug off my ring and reach for the first item.
Maybe there’s something.
There has to be something.
Something.
Anything
.
“It’s not a party trick, Kenzie,” you snap.
I drop the bauble and it rolls across the table. You are teaching me how to read—things, not books—and I must have made a joke, given the act a dramatic flair.
“There’s only one reason Keepers have the ability to read things,” you say sternly.
“It makes us better hunters. It helps us track down Histories.”
“It’s blank anyway,” I mutter.
“Of course it is,” you say, retrieving the trinket and turning it over between your
fingers. “It’s a paperweight. And you should have known the moment you touched it.”
I could. It had the telltale hollow quiet. It didn’t hum against my fingers. You hand
me back my ring, and I slip it on.
“Not everything holds memories,” you say. “Not every memory’s worth holding. Flat—
surfaceswalls, floors, tables, that kind of thing—they’re like canvases, great at taking in images. The smaller the object, the harder—
it is for it to hold an impression. But,” you add, holding up the paperweight so I
can see the world distorted in the glass, “if there is a memory, you should be able
to tell with a brush of your hand. That’s all the time you’ll have. If a History makes
it into the Outer”
“How would they do that?” I ask.
“Kill a Keeper? Steal a key? Both.” You cough, a racking, wet sound. “It’s not easy.”
You cough again, and I want to do something to help; but the one time I offered you
water, you growled that water wouldn’t fix a damn thing unless I meant to drown you
with it. So now we pretend the cough isn’t there, punctuating your lectures.
“But,” you say, recovering, “if a History does get out, you have to track them down,
and fast. Reading surfaces has to be second nature. This gift is not a game, Kenzie.
It’s not a magic trick. We read the past for one reason, and one alone. To hunt.”
I know what my gift is for, but it doesn’t stop me from sifting through every framed
photo, every random slip of paper, every piece of sentimental junk Mom chose, hoping
for even a whisper, a hint of a memory of Ben. And it doesn’t matter anyway because
they’re all useless. By the time I get to the stupid art camp cup, I’m desperate.
I pick it up, and my heart flutters when I feel the subtle hum against my fingertips,
like a promise; but when I close my eyes—even when I reach past the hum—there’s nothing
but pattern and light, blurred beyond readability.
I want to pitch the cup as hard as I can against the wall, add another scratch. I’m
actually about to throw it when a piece of black plastic catches my eye, and I realize
I’ve missed something. I let the cup fall back on the bed and retrieve a pair of battered
glasses pinned beneath the trophy and the bear.
My heart skips. The glasses are black, thick-rimmed, just frames, no lenses, and they’re
the only thing here that’s
really
his. Ben used to put them on when he wanted to be taken seriously. He’d make us call
him Professor Bishop, even though that was Dad’s name, and Dad never wore glasses.
I try to picture Ben wearing them. Try to remember the exact color of his eyes behind
the frames, the way he smiled just before he put them on.
And I can’t.
My chest aches as I wrap my fingers around the silly black frames. And then, just
as I’m about to set the glasses aside, I feel it, faint and far away and yet right
there in my palm. A soft hum, like a bell trailing off. The tone is feather-light,
but it’s there, and I close my eyes, take a slow, steadying breath, and reach for
the thread of memory. It’s too thin and it keeps slipping through my fingers, but
finally I catch it. The dark shifts behind my eyes and lightens into gray, and the
gray twists from a flat shade into shapes, and from shapes into an image.
There’s not even enough memory to make a full scene, only a kind of jagged picture,
the details all smeared away. But it doesn’t matter, because Ben is there—well, a
Ben-like shape—standing in front of a Dad-like shape with the glasses perched on his
nose and his chin thrust out as he looks up and tries not to smile because he thinks
that only frowns are taken seriously, and there’s just enough time for the smudged
line of his mouth to waver and crack into a grin before the memory falters and dissolves
back into gray, and gray darkens to black.