Now, looking out at Our Mountain from the bell tower, I shuddered at that memory, and I picked up the bear to squeeze it away. ‘Come on, Edward,’ I said to that imp of a cub as I gripped him tighter. ‘You’re out of bounds, and you’re never to come up here again without us. And if we’re all up here together and I’m pulling something out of the wall, well, then you know we’ve reached the moment where shit’s about to get real.’
The bear looked up at me, looked over at the wall. I squeezed him tighter. And then, I swear to you, he looked me in the eye before he reached up with his gorgeous little paw and scraped his claws down my face, so hard that it acid-burned and blood pearled up straight away, and I screamed and I dropped him.
‘Hey!’ I yelled, my hand to my cheek. ‘That’s not nice. You come back here and say sorry.’
But the bear just sniffed at the south-arch wall until I started after him, and then he ran, ran, ran, scrambling down the stairs, all 362 of them, while I burbled down after him, feeling raw and cross and mean.
Winter
I had to stop. My throat burned. My legs just wouldn’t.
Pete bounded ahead. He looked the way Summer did when she played charades—like someone doing just what they were born to do. I crouched on the forest floor.
‘No way.’ Edward laughed, doubling back. ‘That’s, like, less than a minute you lasted.’ He held out his hands.
I shook my head.
‘Sure you can,’ he said. ‘You can walk. You can breathe.’
‘Hardly.’ But I gave him my palms. His hands felt big but soft, like my father’s driving gloves. We started again.
‘The trick is to set a goal, like that giant tree up yonder, and then distract yourself till you get there.’
‘How?’ I wondered who still said ‘up yonder’. ‘I’m dying.’
‘I’ll say. Do you come this way often?’
‘No. The forest is creepy. And once…we found…a dead person…’ I puffed. ‘Why have we stopped?’
‘We reached the tree. Dead how?’
I stood with my hands on my knees. My ribs hurt with breathing. If I gasped a little, I didn’t have to answer. ‘Are we reading tonight?’ I asked when I could again. ‘We could go to that bit of the forest with the tree stumps to sit on. I could tell Summer that I’m counting tins in the Emporium. She hates it back there. And you could be fixing something.’
‘Some kind of dirty secret, am I?’ Edward was smiling so it didn’t sound mean.
‘I just…Summer doesn’t like to feel left out, that’s all. And I don’t like to make her sad.’
‘Well, if you can make it back to the start of the path without stopping, you’ve got yourself a deal. But don’t think I’ll enjoy it. ’Cept the part that means sitting down next to you.
‘Speaking of dead guys. That pilot…’ he said as we turned around. ‘What was the deal with that? You girls haven’t mentioned it since. Isn’t that kind of weird?’
‘We did,’ I panted. ‘Summer described her dream funeral, remember?’
‘Yeah, that was morbid. The girl has issues,’ said Edward. ‘Just tell me where he came from. I know that you know. I’ve got, like, intuition. Don’t laugh—for a guy I’m pretty sensitive.’
Perhaps it was because it had been so long. Or because Summer was the one who always told our story. Perhaps I wanted his hand on my head, fingers on my sorrow. Perhaps that is why I told him so much.
Summer
By the time I got to the bottom of the bell tower, Edward was sitting at Winter’s feet where she stood dusting the altar. His back was against her shins, his chin up and his eyes closed.
‘He scratched me—on purpose!’ I told her. ‘See? We need to punish him, that little monster.’
Winter looked horrified, and I waited for her to rip a strip from her shirt to wipe the blood off my face in that gentle dab she does so well for injured things.
But she didn’t. She bent down to rub his head, that bear. ‘Don’t call him that,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to. He’s just a baby. He doesn’t know any better.’
‘He dang well does,’ I said darkly. ‘I’m putting up a gate so he can’t get back up those stairs and TBH he should go sit in the corner to think about what he’s done.’
As I stalked out the back door to find Pops’s building stuff, I heard her whisper to him, all tender. I couldn’t make out the words, but they made me want to hammer things hard.
Everything went downhill swiftly after that. And, looking back, if I’m going to blame anyone, it isn’t just Edward alone—it’s also Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and here’s why. I’ve told you enough by now that you could probably guess how Anne’s story affected Winter. Every couple of years when she picked it off the shelf, I would groan on the inside and dredge my soul for arguments about why we should all Keep on Living in spite of all the injustice in the world. And I’d brace myself and dig out the hazelnut praline from the back of our Emporium and grab a couple of hankies we’d made from the raggedy old christening gowns we found in a chest.
Why she got it in her mind to read Anne Frank to the bear, I’ll never know, because I was usually the one who read aloud and did all the voices, and besides, even though I was faster, Winter could still read so quickly in her head that it must have felt like she was tap-dancing in quicksand to say each word individually. But when she opened it up and said to Edward, ‘This is our story,’ I felt a little panic. Because I’d never thought that we were like Anne Frank, with her coffee-puddle eyes, locked in like a caged canary at an old person’s home, death all around her and not quite knowing the point of it all but still trying to sing.
Anne was confused and Lonely (capital L) and she could have been caught any second, so no wonder she had to keep a journal and wax lyrical about all kinds of profound stuff. And, sure, we were alone, me and Winter, but we had each other and Freedom and no bickering, farting adults or sweaty adolescent boys playing with our heads like they were harp strings, and, yes, some mornings bugs flew into our tea and, truth be told, I would have liked some overhead lighting installed. But, hey, compared to what was going on out in the world, well, you’ve probably read all about that and so you’d have to agree that we had it pretty dang good. I know you’re probably wondering if we even knew what was going on out there, and I guess the answer is that we knew enough.
‘If you’re introducing him to strong female characters, wouldn’t he prefer Pippi Longstocking?’ I asked Winter. ‘There aren’t any animals in Anne Frank.’
Winter just Looked at me (capital L) and if you think she’s all windchimes and fairy floss, you’ve got her totally wrong because, believe me, Winter is boulder-stubborn. So Anne Frank it was, all day and all night.
Here’s the kicker: the bear really liked that story. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but he sat there on Winter’s lap, all innocently, and I swear that when he heard Anne’s dreams about being in love with Peter Schiff and then eye-sexing with Peter van Daan, he blushed all rosy, and if you think that’s impossible, well, you’ve never read Anne Frank to a bear—at least not all the way to the bits about the Peters.