I glance down at the table. “I mean, I understand.”
The first strains of “The Way You Look Tonight” trickle out of the radio. Joe smiles to himself, then pushes his chair back, wooden legs squeaking across the floor as he stands and crosses the room. He taps Mom on the shoulder.
“May I have this dance?” he asks.
Mom is elbow deep in soapy water, but she arches a brow and nods. She towels herself off, then slips her hand into Uncle Joe’s. They smile as they dance back and forth across the kitchen. They don’t gaze into each other’s eyes like Mom and Dad do, all lovey-dovey-like, but they stare at each other knowingly, like old friends reliving a lifetime of memories.
Dad watches them, looking happier than I’ve seen him look in weeks. It is only then that I realize the lines around his eyes are a little deeper, and his shoulders slump down a little more than before.
Something’s different with Dad. I don’t know what, and I don’t know why.
Maybe if I did, I would’ve seen the changes coming—the nights he spent holed up in his study and the constant smell of alcohol on his breath—but right now, in this moment, I am too wrapped up in the wood to think about it for long. And when Dad scoots back his chair and cuts in, taking Mom in his arms and pressing his forehead against hers, I forget about it completely.
VIII
Ninety minutes to sundown, Uncle Joe finds me at a fork in the road, where twelve paths cross and unfurl like a starburst, winding through a particularly dense cluster of trees. A drop of sweat rolls from my hairline down my temple as I stare at my feet, willing them to move just six inches to the left and off the path. My shins burn, and my fingernails mark my palms with thin red crescents, but nothing moves below my ankles. Not even a twitch.
“Winter?”
Uncle Joe’s voice is deep and loud, like thunder rolling across my thoughts. The toe of his leather boot stops next to my heel, and I can see the shoulder of his black suit out of the corner of my eye, but I don’t look at him. I just keep staring at my shoes, waiting for something to happen.
After a beat of measured silence, I ask him, “How did he do it?”
Uncle Joe gives me the same answer he always does. “I don’t know.”
I let out a breath and look up. There’s a sharp throbbing behind my eye, like someone’s trying to drive a pickax through my cornea, and my pulse is a drum in my ears, racing toward something it can’t find. My gaze stops on a low branch in front of me, where the top of a leaf is turning yellow. The color globs down the leaf like paint and rolls over the pointed edge.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
I look for the puddle of yellow paint that logic tells me should be at the base of the tree, but there’s nothing. The color evaporates midair.
When I was younger and first witnessed the wood’s transformation from summer to fall, I told Dad it was beautiful.
He said it wasn’t beautiful. It was sarcastic. It was mocking our world, taking the things we knew to be true—leaves changing in the autumn, dying on the branches, only to be reborn in the spring—and turning them on their heads.
It was the first time Dad ever referred to the wood as having a conscience, as being a living, breathing spirit that could make decisions and change fates and stop time.
“Things will get harder now,” Uncle Joe says.
“They always do this time of year.”
Unlike the thresholds the guardians use to enter the wood (the thresholds tied to power sources), the thresholds travelers fall through are typically open for only seconds or a few minutes at a time, so not many travelers have the serendipity to walk through them at that precise moment and fall into my wood. But there’s something about the time between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. The wood becomes restless as everything surrounding it moves closer to death.
Uncle Joe’s theory is that this transition causes the veils between worlds to weaken, opening thresholds for longer periods of time. Some of the thresholds even become more apparent, taking on the shape of actual doors travelers can see. One such door led to the creation of Stonehenge, a monument to outline the portal between worlds. Luckily, the Stonehenge threshold closed for good a couple hundred years ago. I don’t even want to think about how many tourists would wind up in the wood if it still had the ability to open.
Needless to say, if I don’t stay on top of things this time of year, a deluge of travelers could flood the pathways, making it easier for one to slip by me while I’m dealing with another. This is also the time of year I skip the most classes.
Dad didn’t believe Joe’s theory about thinning veils, however. He thought the trees were just hungrier for fresh meat this time of year. Stockpiling for the long, dead winter.
Uncle Joe sighs. “You need to stop doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Trying to follow your father. It’s a very selfish thing to do.”
I know it is, but I can’t stop trying. Not if there’s a chance he’s still out there. Not if there’s a chance he needs me. But Mom needs me, too, and therein lies my dilemma. My split loyalties cleave my heart in two. What would I do if one of these times it actually worked? If I found my feet veering off the paths? Would I follow Dad, or stay for Mom?
I clear my throat. “Got anything on Brightonshire?”
Uncle Joe exhales. “Nothing. First-time offender. You could bring it up to the council if you like, but they’ll need evidence he’s actually trying to cross over, and even then there isn’t much they can do.”
“He wasn’t just some guy who walked into the wrong airspace and ended up here. He wanted to be here. He said he’d be back.”
“Yes, but can you prove it?”
I sputter. “I don’t have to prove it, Uncle Joe. He said those words. To my face.”
He sighs and takes a seat on the wrought-iron bench behind him. There’s an old-fashioned streetlamp next to him with a silver spiderweb hanging like a tiny hammock underneath the lantern casing. None of these was there seconds before.
“Unfortunately, you do. The council laws permit us to interfere with a traveler in rare cases, but only if they are certain the traveler poses a threat to the wood.”
“What sort of interference?”
He pats the seat next to him. “Sit.”
I slowly lower myself onto the bench and wait for it to dissolve under me. For Uncle Joe to disappear and for me to find myself alone in this wood, going crazy from the constant twists and turns.
But the bench is solid. Loops of cold iron dig into my back.
“It is possible for the council to force a threshold closed, but it requires strong, ancient magic. Dangerous magic. You know that saying, whenever a door closes, God opens a window? It’s like that, only the outcome could be worse than a window opening. It could be a Grand Canyon. So, the council has to be certain closing the Brightonshire threshold is the right thing to do.”
“Do I have any other options?” A Grand Canyon–sized hole that potentially hundreds of travelers could fall through doesn’t sound too appealing.