Defy the Dark (29 page)

Laughter rang out, and Skadi jumped up in excitement. Shaking her head, Dacey murmured soothingly to the dog, then looked up at Kristian again. “No. And neither are you.”

“Of course not.” Kristian squeezed her hand before letting it slip out of his. “You came to me. You showed yourself to
me
, that's why I built this place. I thought if I did, you'd come, and you'd stay. . . .”

“I didn't. I couldn't have.” It hurt Dacey to say it. “That's not how time works.”

Lighting up, Kristian started for the living room. “I can show you.”

Blood humming, Dacey followed. When she came around the corner, she saw Kristian kneel by the window-seat cubby. With a smile thrown over his shoulder, Kristian pulled out another leather-bound book.

This one was much larger than the sketchbook, and when he opened it, Dacey saw why. It was an old-fashioned photo album, each page lovingly squared with black-and-white portraits of a familiar landscape.

“I couldn't sleep,” he explained, and let her take the book from his hands. “So I left my family and took a train north, as far as I could. And then a sledge until I got here. I thought the long nights would help me sleep. I brought my Seneca to take pictures, but look.” He leaned over, turning the pages and then dropping his finger on a darkened landscape. “They came out wrong. I took more. And more, and on the last day, I saw you.”

So did she. Though the photographs were grainy, the edges a little soft like most vintage pictures, her shape there was unmistakable. This was the picture he'd sketched from; this is what she'd looked like on her first night in Tromsø, scarfless and hatless, trying to capture the northern lights for her photo-essay.

Slowly, she lifted her head to meet his green eyes. “Kristian . . .”

“So I came back in the summer.” He smiled and closed the book. “I bought the land and built this place. And I waited.”

“For me.”

Curling his fingers beneath her chin, he tipped her face up gently. “For us.”

And this time when they kissed, the world came together instead of pulling apart. Everything matched again; Dacey's heart soared. Kristian's hands were warm and rough—and real. But she broke away, pulling her fingers over her lips.

She loved her life: her parents' cute apartment in Brooklyn, her job on the school paper, and every single one of her friends back home. She loved her anxious mother and her sweet father, and the way every single day was something new for her.

At the same time, she now loved walking into a cottage in Norway to find something magical. Something epic and legendary, waiting for
her
. How many girls got to say that? How many
people
ever did?

Skadi padded over, curling to lie against them. Snuffling her nose beneath Kristian's hand, she huffed and turned her eyes up to Dacey. Which wasn't fair at all; dogs weren't allowed to throw in their two cents when it came to completely life-altering decisions.

“What's the matter?” Kristian asked.

With a deep breath, Dacey gathered herself. Then she brushed Kristian's hair from his eyes and smiled. “You're just very complicated. This is complicated. And I'm going to have to call my mother.”

Kristian blinked. “Call her what?”

“I'll explain later,” Dacey answered, and tugged him into her arms. Just the thought of explaining Kristian, polar nights, and possibly time travel to her mother made her head hurt. So she kissed the non-stock Scandinavian. She could figure out the complications in time.

Sarah Ockler

The Moth and the Spider

M
oths sucked at dying.

Cali had read somewhere that a gypsy moth's whole purpose in life was to mate. That their entire life span was less than a week, and that as long as the female laid eggs, seven days was considered a good run. Way to go. Mission accomplished.

It didn't make sense to Cali, but then, at least the creature knew why she was put on this earth. Cheek pressed against the naked, dusty floorboards beneath her bed, Cali was eye level with a moth right now, one she'd seen flitting above her head the night before. Dried up, feet curled in toward its belly.

She hoped the thing had at least accomplished its purpose before it ended up under her bed, and as she mashed the carcass between her thumb and finger, she wondered if God would do the same to her. If at the end of her whole entire life, she'd leave nothing but a silky, silver-white stain on his fingertips.

Doctor Berg would call that a morbid and unhealthy thought, detrimental to the delicate recovery process, but it made Cali smile. That was something, anyway.

Cali blew the remains of the moth across the floor, and the stairs outside her bedroom door groaned. It was definitely her mother—the floorboards didn't protest otherwise. She never heard anyone else coming or going. Take the baby, for example. By the time she was aware of his presence, he was right there in front of her, messing with her things, chattering endlessly about Elmo or hot dogs or the black-and-white cats next door. This was normal for two-year-olds, Cali'd read, but it didn't make things any better for Cali.

Maybe if she lay still, she thought tonight, held her breath, her mother would think she'd gone out.

Cali almost smiled, twice in one day. That lying-still trick never worked on anyone.

Her mother knocked four times, hard-hard-soft-soft, then pushed open the door the rest of the way. Cali wasn't allowed to keep it totally closed, anyway, so the knocking part was just a courtesy her mother thought would show Cali they were starting to trust her again.

Her mother set the tray on Cali's desk with a clatter, pills hopping around in their opaque orange containers. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe millions even. She flicked on the big overhead light and gently tapped Cali's bedpost with her slippered foot.

“Calista. You'll catch cold under there.”

“Not possible.” Cali ran her thumb over the ropy half-bracelet scar on her wrist. The ridge was comforting and familiar against the pad of her thumb, as much a part of her now as her wavy brownish hair and naturally straight teeth and the smell of her armpits. “It's a virus.”

“Out,” her mother said quietly. It was almost a plea. Cali had read about colds and viruses and how germs attack your immune system, and she knew what she was talking about. But apparently her mother didn't read about that stuff, and now she stood in a cloud of silent disappointment and waited.
I could do this all night,
her mother would probably say next.

But Cali stayed put and still her mother didn't say it.

Fine.
Cali didn't feel like playing the game tonight, anyway. She sighed and wormed her way along the floor until her upper body birthed its way out from beneath the footboard, bathed suddenly in harsh yellow light. She propped her head up, elbows on the floor, chin in hands, and watched her mother count three little white pills into a napkin. Under the bed, her legs stretched out behind her, limp. She wasn't ready to disturb them just yet.

“How are you feeling tonight?” her mother asked. She stirred soup in the plastic bowl, scraping the sides as she went. Steam curled and coiled from the rubber-coated baby spoon like twin serpents.

Cali closed her eyes. After being away for three months, it was easier to talk to her mother that way. “Fine. Better. Soup smells good.”

“Carrot ginger,” her mother said. “Your favorite.”

Was it?
Cali nodded, but she couldn't remember. Maybe her stomach remembered. Dinner was later than usual tonight, and Cali's insides growled impatiently as she crawled the rest of the way out from under the bed.

“Ready?” her mother said when Cali finally stood and they faced each other. Her mother had spent the last hour reading the baby one bedtime story after another; Cali'd heard it through the wall. She'd cooed about wolves and little pigs and then bears and monsters and fairies, and now she was standing in Cali's room, offering up the watery, reheated boxed soup and pills as if either could fix anything.

“Ready?” her mother said again.

Cali nodded. She'd been home almost two weeks now, and they were still tiptoeing around each other like strangers. Cali swore her mother sounded different before everything happened, but she couldn't for the life of her remember how. It was like the old voice had been replaced with this different version, tighter, less confident somehow, slipped in and changed like the locks while she was away. It was normal for everyone else who'd been here for the transition. Just not for Cali.

“Open up,” her mother said after Cali had tossed the pills into her mouth. The part her mother didn't speak out loud was still there in the tone, just beneath the “I know what's best for you” surface.
Being back home is a privilege. It was granted. It can be taken away.

Cali did as instructed, swallowing hard and then lifting her tongue so her mother could inspect the hidden regions of her mouth. Her mother was short—only reached Cali's collarbone—so she stretched and tilted her head and scoped out the situation.

“Good girl,” her mother finally said.

The moths that circled Cali's room heard that a lot.

Cali closed her mouth. She tried to smile, but it felt like a grimace, so she just nodded again and hoped it was enough. Mercifully, her mother left the bowl of soup and a cup of water and waddled out of the bedroom, into the hall, back down the protesting stairs, the pill bottles rattling in her pocket. Cali shut her door as far as she was allowed and jammed her fingers down into her throat, probing the soft flesh until she located the chalky lumps. She'd read about this somewhere, too—maybe on the same encyclopedic site where she'd read about the poor gypsy moths. How to hide the pills behind the bend in her tongue, how to act mellow and even-keeled, to fake the intended results as if she'd been taking them all along.

Good girl
.

She listened outside the door again. No one was there. She forced the damp pills through the tiny tear in her mattress into the hole with the others, a hidden cache tucked behind the handle they sewed on to help you flip it when one side started to sag.

 

A
ttention-seeking behavior.
That's what Doctor Berg had called this kind of thing after she'd been at the center for a month.
Not a real attempt,
he'd told her parents in their first family session, some kind of tough love, let's-all-face-the-facts-here-shall-we bullshit that was supposed to get Cali to admit her mistakes—because that's what they were, after all—and kick off the delicate recovery process. Cali had carved a ditch in the worn leather couch with her fingernail and nodded at his wise counsel. Her parents frowned and cocked their heads, watching her cautiously from behind the red rims of their eyes as if she were a poor, dumb animal.

The thing was, Cali wasn't dumb. She knew you were supposed to cut the long way if you
really
meant it, to follow the lifeline on your palm, press the blade in at the base of the wrist and slice down hard and deep toward the elbow. She'd gone crossways, though, hoping it would hurt less but still get the job done.

It didn't. And it didn't.

Now, again, she traced her silver souvenir with her moth-stained fingers.

Cali sucked at dying, too.

 

I
t was the note, see. That's where the whole problem started.

 

Dear Everyone I Know,

By the time you read this, I'll be . . .

 

It had occurred to Cali sometime last month, not long before she was released for good behavior and unexpected mental-health progress, that maybe Doctor Berg and her parents and everyone else would realize she'd meant it if she'd left a note. She'd skipped some of those vital steps last time. Skipped the note, skipped the part where you gave away your prized possessions while expressing a string of fatalistic thoughts to those around you. She hadn't known those were requirements, benchmarks, the things that separated the attention seekers from the real pros.

But now she knew. The living thought they deserved some sort of reasonable explanation for this very unreasonable action by the dead, and they needed to check off, in retrospect, all the warning signs they should've recognized.

So this time Cali had a book of Sylvia Plath poems her roommate at the center had given her and a list of the few nice things she still owned: her iPod with wireless speakers (wires were dangerous), some of her art supplies, the gift certificate to Macy's her aunt had sent to celebrate her return home. Next to each, she'd designated its new rightful owner.

The funny thing about the gift card was that she hated almost everything in Macy's, and she hated almost everything in her aunt, and it would probably take her an entire decade to cash the card in, one pair of nonoffensive socks or rubber-backed clip-on earrings at a time. And the funny thing about the poems was that reading them didn't make her feel morbid at all. They made her feel understood, less alone. Those words
got
her; they marched in and grabbed her and held on. But you couldn't walk through life with a book in front of your nose at every breath and turn, words tucked under your arm like the warm touch of a best friend, and whoever found the poems would jump to the right kinds of conclusions, and they'd see the note and the makeshift will and they'd nod somberly and say they should've known, they should've seen the signs. But at least they'd finally understand she wasn't screwing around, and maybe they would tell Doctor Berg, too, when they called for the medical files or whatever they were supposed to do in that kind of situation.

 

T
onight was the night, and after her mother had left the soup and probed her mouth and looked at her once more with those sorrowful eyes, Cali was ready to sit down and write the all-important note.

There were no sharp things left in her bedroom. If her father could've sanded the corners of the walls into harmless curves, he would've, but ultimately they concluded, over family dinner one night, that if Cali wanted to hurt herself using the corners of her walls, she couldn't possibly do it in silence. They'd be able to intervene. Still, her dangerous books were all paperbacks now, her dangerous glasses had been fitted with kid-friendly plastic lenses, her dangerous colored pencils had been confiscated. Cali had to settle for a new box of crayons, presented to her on her first night back home with a stack of soft, white stationery on which Cali had already written her list of valuable items. The crayons made Cali smile yet again, and she thought she should add those to the list as well. They were the most extravagant box of Crayolas she'd ever owned. She'd begged her mother for the ninety-six-color pack every year for a decade, back when things like crayons mattered. But her mother always said forty-eight was more than enough for any scenario a girl growing up in the great state of Maine might encounter.

Cali pulled a fresh sheet of stationery from her desk drawer and explored the color palette in the yellow-and-green box before her. Her fingers passed over the reds, which she felt were melodramatic and would detract from her message, and the blues, which were too overtly symbolic. Black was typical and uninspired and she hated the way it looked on her cloud-colored paper. She finally settled on a pink-orange one called Mango Tango and gripped the crayon between cold fingers, thinking. She didn't want to address the letter to her parents directly, even though they'd undoubtedly be the ones to find it. Her. It.

 

To Whom It
Concerns

May Concern . . .

 

Cali inspected the script, fat and slanty. Like the baby's attempt at writing his own name. She thought about his pudgy little hand holding on to a spoon or a crayon like this, drawing lopsided circles and stars with too many points. A weak pulse tingled at the bottom of her heart, a pressure, a squeeze she almost recognized, like a memory you didn't know whether you'd actually experienced or only seen in a photo. But it disappeared quickly and she underlined her words on the page twice, off to a good start.

The wind shifted and pressed itself against Cali's bedroom window. The black pines in the backyard swayed, their branches forced apart, then mashed together, and just inside the screen, a spider scurried across the sill. An orb weaver, Cali realized. She'd read about them somewhere, read that some of them didn't even make webs, despite their names. They didn't need anything so elaborate, that particular kind; they simply dangled a sticky substance from their front legs and enticed the unsuspecting little moths to approach. The moths got ensnared and the spider casually reeled them in, closer and closer. Then, predator devoured prey.

Cali appreciated that. Nature protected some, eliminated others, and left the rest to fend for themselves. Beautiful and terrible at once.

The spider explored a corner of the sill, and Cali thought this one was likely the kind that made webs, the kind that ate their own silky strands every twenty-four hours. They'd evolved from the Jurassic period, Cali remembered. A hundred and forty million years of doing the same thing every day: making a web, destroying it, making another, destroying it. The creature's bulbous body was orange and black like a tiger's, and now that Cali'd spotted it, she couldn't unsee it. The spider paced back to the other corner. The thing was trapped; she'd probably starve. Cali should do something, she thought. Open the window and the screen, maybe. Show her the way out.