Henry digs a flashlight out of the trunk and leads us down an old dirt road, if it can even be called a road anymore. It’s overrun with weeds and lined with sticker bushes that snatch at my sleeves like little hands as I pass.
The flashlight makes the forest seem strange, washing out the trees, casting jumpy shadows that move along with us. I’d be happier in the dark, honestly. The light just means our eyes have no chance to adjust. Jack hands me the Mountain Dew bottle.
“What was your name again?” he asks. I tell him and take a sip of whatever is in the bottle. It burns, but I swallow it, writing a smug little speech in my mind about how this is all the pastor’s fault, how he drove me to it by expecting the worst of me, how I would probably be home safe in bed if it weren’t for him. Oh ye of little faith heed not the call of the something or other lest you face my eternal judgment. Prince of peace! I take another sip of the foul, numbing stuff in the bottle and hand it back.
The bridge, when we finally reach it, is tiny, barely wide enough for a car, with rusted metal guardrails and moss dappling the pavement. It arches over Monday Creek, the orange-brown rivulet of spit and mine runoff that winds through Lester. Savannah is giggling. She runs out onto the bridge and Jack runs after her. He’s at least a foot taller than her, so he has to bend down pretty far to whisper something into her ear. He takes her hand and they run the rest of the way across the bridge. I feel a pang as the two of them disappear into the trees. I start out onto the bridge, but stop halfway, uncertain.
“I wouldn’t believe it,” Henry says behind me, “if I hadn’t heard it my own self.”
I turn.
“The crying, I mean,” he says.
“It was probably the wind,” I say.
“No way. I know the wind.”
I’ve been here before, actually, with my sister, though not recently. The bridge is somewhere roughly north of Lester, I’m pretty sure. My sister is a far better navigator than me, so I always let her lead the way. We never heard anything strange when we came. Just owls and insects. The normal cries of the forest at night.
“Has anybody seen them?” I ask Henry. “The ghosts?”
“I don’t know. Probably.” He’s got the flashlight pointing down at his side. I snatch it away from him and point it at the creek, sweep it back and forth like a searchlight.
“Just imagine,” I say, as serious as I can manage, “if we were looking down and all of a sudden we saw a pair of eyes looking back up at us.”
“Shut up,” says Henry. He tries to grab the flashlight, but I jerk it out of his reach.
“Or a tiny baby hand,” I say, “reaching out of the water.” I flick the flashlight off and on, off and on. The beam catches on a branch sticking out of the mud by the bank and Henry gasps. I laugh. The night is making us young again. I can almost forget that we aren’t kids anymore, that we aren’t friends. That we are teenagers, a boy and a girl alone and there are rules about that.
“Quit it, Jo,” Henry says.
I swing the flashlight beam toward the woods on the far side of the bridge, where Savannah went, but I can’t see anything except trees. Maybe I should have gone after her. I don’t really know Jack; don’t know what kind of guy he is. He was too old to hang out with us when we were kids. He’d be playing video games with his friends, telling us to fuck off. And he’s eighteen now. I know what they say about older guys. The kind of things they expect from girls.
Henry takes advantage of my distraction to grab for the flashlight again. His hand closes over mine. I swing the flashlight beam so it shines in his eyes. He squeezes them shut but doesn’t let go. His eyelids glow red in the light.
Tonight is magic. Tonight doesn’t count. This is my chance. Savannah will never forgive me if I don’t take it. Henry and I are almost exactly the same height, so all I have to do is lean forward a little and then my lips are grazing his. I close my eyes, too.
There’s a moment of perfect stillness and then Henry presses his mouth against mine. I press back. He lets go of the flashlight, moves his hands to grasp my shoulders. I grab the fabric of his T-shirt in my fists, pull him toward me. It’s like kissing Savannah, only better, maybe, because I think he actually means it. I get this feeling in my chest like when I’m running, like when I’m racing my sister, moving so fast my feet barely touch the ground. Nearly flying, every nerve in my body alive. I feel Henry’s tongue pushing at my lips like a little animal trying to crawl into the earth, and that’s when I hear it.
An unearthly wail. High and pained. So loud and so close.
Not like a baby. Not like an animal either. Henry and I pull away from each other at the same time. His face looks how I’m sure mine does. Eyes wide and startled.
“There it is,” he whispers.
“Shit,” I say, and I am, for a moment, genuinely afraid.
Just as suddenly as the wail started, it stops. I reach out to take Henry’s hand again, but before I can, something comes barreling out of nowhere and knocks him to the ground. Knocks him right over and it’s her. It’s my sister. She’s here, on the bridge with us. Here in her blue dress.
I don’t understand. Can’t believe it. Can’t breathe.
Henry is on his back and she is pinning him down, straddling him, her dress bunching up around her hips. For a second I think she’s going to kiss him, think that she saw me kiss him and was jealous, wanting him too, but then her hands are around his neck and I think of my sister, my sister who I know so well, think of her snatching up rabbits, squirrels, mourning doves, how I’ve seen her a thousand times, her hands so quick, her thin hands snapping their necks like dry spaghetti.
I think of that and I scream.
CHAPTER FOUR
The last time anyone in town saw my mother alive was at the Country Lanes bowling alley in Needle. She sat in a booth eating onion rings, silent, her belly huge, while Logan Cantrell and his younger brother, Brandon, bowled frame after frame. About a week later, Brandon showed up before the sun and banged on Grandma Margaret’s front door. When she answered he shoved a bundle wrapped in a hunting jacket into her arms and ran off.
That bundle was me.
Lee and I are twins. We look enough alike that when I peered out my window one night ten years ago and saw her standing at the edge of Grandma Margaret’s yard, wearing an oversized T-shirt as a dress, legs all mud to the knees, I knew right away that she was my sister.
I was five. I’d believed up until that moment that I was an only child, but at five the world was endlessly surprising, my picture of reality pliable as Play-Doh. In a way I’d already been expecting something like this to happen—for someone to show up out of the blue and change everything. Except I thought it would be my mother, coming back to get me.