Boy from the Woods (9781311684776) (36 page)

Julia’s head
spun. Now she finally understood why he seemed to just
know
so
many things, and how he’d been able to find Anne. How he had known
about her taste in books and her love for music, and how he had
recognized her own song. He was her oak – a soul supporting and
consoling her whenever times were tough. And in return, she had
touched
him
, woken him up from slumber, offering him a chance at a new
and different life.

“Why are you telling me all this now?” she
asked in a choked voice. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

His ensuing silence frightened her. He
exhaled, then said: “Because I thought I wouldn’t need to.”

Her heart turned cold. “But now you do?”

“Yes. Now I
do.” He looked at her, a lone tear rolling down his cheek.
“Because you see, I can’t stay.”

She gaped at
him uncomprehendingly. Actually, she didn’t
want
to
comprehend.

“This is not
how it’s supposed to go,” he continued reluctantly. “I no longer
feel at home in this body. I get sick more and more often. The
forest is calling me, forcing me to die the natural way.
To come back later. To really be reborn as a human.
That’s the way it has always been, and that is
the way it must be now.”

Slowly but surely, his words sank in.

“No.” Julia
grabbed his hand, looking at him helplessly, flinging her arms
around his body,
not
his body. If only she could do more. If only she
could embrace his soul, hold on to him until they would both rise
above and come back to this world much later.
“You
can’t do this. Don’t go. Please, please don’t leave me.”

“I have to,”
he mumbled into her hair, a stifled sob in his voice.
“I have to leave.
And now you know
why.”

He stepped out of her embrace and looked at
her in silence. Then, he cupped her face in his hands and kissed
her. He kissed her softly, his lips landing everywhere on her nose,
her cheeks, her mouth, her eyelids when she closed them and started
to cry.

“I love you more than I have ever loved
anyone in this world,” he whispered.

They stood
there for a long time, under the moonlight, their gaze locked on
each other, their fingers intertwined. And Julia couldn’t believe
this would be the last time.
It wasn’t fair. It was
too soon.

She wiped the tears from her eyes with a
trembling hand. “How long?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know. I can feel
my strength decline.”
His thumb caressed
her other hand resting in his. Once again, she pressed herself
against him with a soft cry.

“Do you have a name?” she asked. “I want to
know your real name.”

He shook his head. “It’s
not a name like humans have.
I don’t know
if you’ll be able to understand if I open your mind to hear
it.”

“Please try,” she urged him. “Please. I want
to know who I am in love with.”

She remained in the circle of his arms,
feeling him pressing his forehead against hers. For just a second,
it was like something squeezed the insides of her skull, and then
the doors of her mind flew wide open. She closed her eyes and
gasped as she heard an indescribably beautiful sound. It was the
whisper of the wind playing in the trees of the woods, a tinkling
of little bells, the turning of the earth as it spun silently in
space, the rustling of flowers budding in a rush as if caught on
fast-motion camera. It was the life force coursing through
everything, compressed into a single syllable.

He let go of
her and lifted her face. “That’s my name,” he mumbled.
“But to you, I will always be Michael.”

“It sounded splendid,” she whispered in awe.
“You are splendid. I love you so much.”

Once more, he kissed her – the ghost of the
oak who had fallen in love with her, the boy from the woods who had
reached out to her as Michael. She clung to him tightly. She didn’t
want to let go.

But then a tremor shook the forest floor.
Julia looked around in panic. What was this… an earthquake? What
was happening?

She cried out in fear when she was swept off
her feet and tumbled backward, Michael’s hands slipping from hers.
Her back hit the floor, her hands grasping desperately at the
carpet under her fingers.

Julia blinked her eyes and froze.

She wasn’t in the forest at all. She was
sitting on the floor of her bedroom wearing sweaty pajamas.
Outside, the sun was shining, but her curtains were still closed.
Her comforter had slipped off the bed with her.

In a daze,
she rubbed her face. Unbelievable. “A dream,” she muttered
hoarsely, just to hear her own voice and make sure she was awake
this time.
“I dreamed it all.”

Julia got up on wobbly
legs. It hadn’t really happened .
She
hadn’t gone into the forest and she hadn’t talked to Michael, but
it had all felt so real that she was still in a complete stupor.
She stumbled into the hallway to use the bathroom and freshen up.
Absently, she got dressed in a summer dress and her ballerina
flats.

Her cell
showed the time: nine-thirty.
Good.
That meant Michael was probably awake as well by now. With
a frown, she scrolled through her list of contacts and called his
number. Apparently, his phone was switched off, because it went
straight to voicemail.
Oh well – she’d just show up
unannounced. He wouldn’t mind.
He was
only doing the afternoon shift today, and she really needed to see
him right now. She had to get that awful dream out of her system
ASAP, and holding him in her arms and telling him about her strange
dream would definitely help a lot. And yet, her plan felt wrong.
Everything about this morning felt wrong.

“I’m going to
see Michael!” she hollered through the kitchen window when she saw
her mom sitting in the back
yard with a
cup of coffee and toast.

“Have fun,”
her mom called back. “What time will you be back? Your father is
coming here this afternoon to return Anne.”

“I’ll be home
for lunch,” Julia promised, her voice quavering with false cheer.
Whistling shrilly, she left the house and quickly walked to the bus
stop. Pretending to be more upbeat than she really was would help
chase away the shadows of her nightmare before arriving at
Michael’s house. In order to distract herself from her dark
thoughts, Julia pulled out her player and flipped through the
playlist until she got to her favorite Chopin tracks.

After a
twenty-minute ride, she got off at the corner of Michael’s street.
As Julia put away her MP3 player, she started to walk faster to get
to his house as soon as she coul
d. An
inexplicable feeling of dread was mounting in the pit of her
stomach, and she wanted to get rid of right
now
.

And then her
heart stopped. The blue flashing lights of an ambulance reflected
off the front of his big, luxurious mansion. A group of people were
huddled together on the drive.

“Julia.” She felt a hand
on her shoulder.
Axel stood next to
her.

“What’s going on?” she asked anxiously.

Axel’s face was
ashen.
“I got here five minutes ago. We
were supposed to swap some London photos. His mother…” His voice
cracked. “She was standing on the drive in front of his house,
crying, clutching her cell.
‘Not again’, she kept
saying.”

Julia swallowed. “Not
again
what
?”

“Jules... he’s gone,” Axel whispered. “He’s
dead. He died in his sleep.”

It was as if
someone hit her on the temple with a heavy club, sucking away all
the light and love from her body and soul. Julia couldn’t breathe.
The next thing she knew, she was on t
he
cold tiles of the drive, staring up at the blue sky above. The back
of her head hurt terribly. People were gathered around her, and
someone was holding her hand.
How had she ended up
here?

“Where’s Axel?” she croaked.

The person
holding her hand squeezed her fingers.
“I’m right
here. You fainted, okay? Just stay put, someone’s getting you some
water.”

She wanted to
lie down forever. In fact, she never wanted to get up again. Just
like
he
was never going to get up again.
Michael was
gone – he had been taken away from her.
Only now did it fully sink in.

“How can he
be
dead
?” she squeaked despondently, turning her head to look at
her cousin.

Axel looked
at her with doleful eyes. “I heard those paramedics tell his
parents that he had brain damage. They asked his mom and dad
whether he’d suffered from strange behavioral changes lately.
Apparently
he suffered a cerebral
hemorrhage.”

Julia was
lost for words, her brain whirring, thoughts racing through her
mind about last night’s dream and what it could mean. She’d talked
to him, and he had told her he had to leave, and why.
Was it all true? Was that how he had chosen to tell her the
truth?

She would
never find out now – there was no way to ask him anymore. He would
never again hold her in his arms like he
had done after yesterday’s picnic, under a starry sky. He
would never kiss her in the moonlight of her dreams
anymore.

Desperate,
howling sobs started to climb up through her body, escaping from
her throat. Julia
managed to sit up and
swatted away the glass of water someone was holding in front of
her.

“Please take
me home,”
she begged Axel. He nodded and
quietly helped her getting to her feet. Julia looked around, her
gaze landing on Michael’s parents, their faces drained of color.
They looked broken and lost, standing next to the ambulance
containing the body of their only son. She looked up at Axel and he
supported her as she stumbled toward them.

“He’s dead,” Michael’s mother said blankly,
her red-rimmed eyes full of sorrow. She extended her arms and
pulled Julia in a tight embrace that took her breath away.
Michael’s father stroked her shoulder. Julia couldn’t look at the
gurney inside the ambulance – it was just a body, a lifeless shell.
Nothing to say goodbye to. He was somewhere else, she was sure of
that.

“He loved
you,” Michael’s father told her quietly, handing her the photo
frame from Michael’s nightstand with a trembling hand. The picture
of the two of them hugging had always been next to his bed.
“Here, you should have this.”

His parents
kept talking to her, but the words slipped past her. Julia hoped
Axel was paying attention, because she wouldn’t be able to remember
what Mr
. and Mrs. Kolbe told her – about
the funeral, whether she wanted to play something on the piano
during the ceremony, because Michael had loved to hear her
play.

“I will call you later,” she managed to choke
out. “I’m going home now. Sorry.”

Axel took her
to his car parked on the curb. Silently, he drove to
Birkensiedlung, Julia sitting next to him like a statue.

“I called
Gaby, by the way,” he finally broke the silence. “She’ll come to
your place as soon as possible.”

“Thanks.”
She stared out the window unseeingly, only
coming back to the waking world when Axel turned into her street.
She had to do so many things. Everyone had to know – she should
call her other friends, as well as tell her mom, her grandmother,
and Anne…

“Why don’t
yo
u sit outside?” Axel suggested when he
saw her clutching her phone in despair as she got out of the car.
“I’ll take care of things. Talk to your mom. Make some phone
calls.”

With a shaky breath, Julia sat down in the
lawn chair her mom had used to relax in with a cup of coffee this
very morning. She closed her eyes and heard Axel crunch past her on
the gravel drive. Through the open window of the living room, she
caught fragments of phone conversations that she couldn’t quite
follow.

“Hey… what the hell happened to you?” A
familiar voice caused her to open her eyes. She blinked up at
Thorsten’s anxious face. As he squatted down next to her chair, he
took her hands in his. “I saw Axel taking you home in his car. You
sick or something?”

Julia shook her
head.
“He died,” she said, her voice
sounding way too loud in her own ears. The more she said the words,
the truer they’d become. If she remained still, maybe he would come
back. Maybe her silence would undo his death. But she knew she
couldn’t keep quiet. She
wanted
to talk about him – tell
everybody why he had stolen her heart.
Say his
name.

“Michael,” she added, when Thorsten gazed at
her uncomprehendingly.

“Michael
?” His voice shot up. “What the.... what
are you talking about? You can’t be serious. Did he have an
accident, or...?”

“No.” Her
throat felt raw. “They said he had brain damage.
He
died last night. Instantly. He didn’t suffer.” Michael’s words in
her dream.