I leave the fire roaring and open a can of beans. I set it on a stone near the flames. Shiloh cozies up to me, curling his body around my leg. He sighs and rests his chin on my lap. I scratch his head and remember that I’ll never spend another night with him.
I draw my leg from under him. He nuzzles into me again. Something dark is rising in me. I want him gone. I want to forget I ever loved him. The urge is so strong I begin to shake. I give Shiloh the beans to make myself disgusted by the way he eats. He devours them sloppily, licks the can for a while, then turns to me.
“Okay.” I swallow the familiar “buddy” before it has a chance to fully form in my throat. “Time to go.”
Shiloh rises to his haunches and sits at my feet. His spine is erect, his eyes alert. His ears are cocked because the tone of my voice suggests a command.
It’s time for me to do this, but I don’t know what this is.
“Go on.” I point into the black woods.
Shiloh stares at me with wide brown eyes. After a moment, he lies down. His paw finds its way onto my knee.
I push it off and stand up.
“Get out of here.” I wave my hands, scaring him. “You’re not my dog now. I’m not your owner. You’re on your own.” I pause. “You’re free.”
He whimpers, gets up and strides in a small circle, then sits down again.
“I said go.” I lift my foot as if to kick him. He doesn’t flinch. He waits for a moment, then begins to lick my trembling fingers. The darkness that was rising dissipates. I wonder if my family knew how hard it would be to leave him. I wonder if they mean for me to kill him to stop him from following me.
“Fine,” I tell him. “One more night.”
We assume our earlier positions, my legs extended toward the fire, Shiloh sprawled across my knees. I reach for my backpack and unzip it.
I look inside at the worn blue blanket I slept with when I was young, the baseball I taught myself to catch on endless afternoons alone in our backyard. There’s a heavy photo album one of my aunts must have made. I haven’t seen it before, though I’m the only one in the pictures.
Pictures of me as a baby, a toddler, a little boy—always alone. No one ever taught me to smile, so I’m not smiling in any of the photos. They end abruptly, dwarfed by blank pages where more life should be.
I pull out the primers with which I learned to read and write. A deck of cards with naked women on them; a BB gun I used to shoot at doves, robins, squirrels. I find the only CD I’ve ever owned—a burned copy of Bunk Johnson from the free bin at a garage sale. I listened to it once in Critias’s car when my aunts and uncles were asleep.
I’m supposed to care about these things.
I toss my childhood into the fire, I watch the sparks kick up. I inhale the smell of burning plastic and feel nothing.
What worries me are the items I’ve hidden in the bottom of the bag. I’d be beaten, or worse, if the others found them, especially after the Passage. I have to let them go, tonight.
I pull out Eureka’s racing bib from a 10K she won last summer. When she unpinned it from her jersey at the finish line, it caught the wind and glided toward me. I tucked it into my pocket before anyone could see. It was warm from her body and it was mine. The safety pins are still on it. Number 102.
I find the receipt from the gas station where I dared to stand behind her in line, some of her hair tucked into the back of her t-shirt, some of it spilling out along her shoulder blade. My heart raced as I slid the receipt from the counter into my pocket, avoiding the cashier’s eyes.
West Lafayette Stop-N-Go. Cashier: Macy. Time: 1:34 p.m. Apple Mentos. $1.03.
I pull out a T-shirt that reads The Faith Healers. They’re a band from Eureka’s high school. I found the shirt at the Salvation Army—a wife-beater someone wrote the places and dates of local shows on with a permanent marker. I stole it so I could wear it in front of her. I never have. I see now how ridiculous my fantasies were that the shirt might spark a conversation:
Hey, I love that band.
Really? Me too!
Did the shirt shrink in the dryer or something?
No, I just like wearing wife-beaters two sizes too small.
These are the three things I own related to the girl I love. I hold them against my chest, then fling them into the fire. The receipt vanishes; the bib curls into flames. The shirt becomes ash. My love for her remains.
There’s one last thing in my bag. It’s replaceable and irreplaceable. There are millions like it but none of them like this. My worn copy of The Great Gatsby is the only book I can stand to read.
The book is how I know I love Eureka. When I read it I find words for what she does to me. And when I close it I always feel the awful ache upon reentering the world.
Albion’s baffling words return: He is not like the last one.
Who?
I burn Gatsby slowly, feeding him page by page into the fire. I recite the book’s last words as they burn:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
I’m expected to initiate an endless future, free from small concerns like aging, like death. But I see only blank and disappearing pages. I see a past I don’t understand swirling wordlessly around her.
The fire dwindles. It’s cold and dark and I have failed. If I could have surrendered my love for her, the rest would have melted easily away. But she is a tree whose roots embrace the center of my being. There is no uprooting her. She holds down everything else, making it impossible not to love.
I remember the cake. I unwrap the foil and shake the candles out of the box. I plunge the candles into the cake and light them, staring until their flames lick the icing. I fill my lungs with air and blow with all my might, wishing for my family not to see instantly that my Passage was a lie.
The force of my breath startles me. It smothers the campfire, blows branches off the surrounding trees. I send a bald cypress stump tumbling down into the bayou with a swampy splash.
Giving up in darkness, I pull close the dog that won’t leave, and fall asleep.
III
It is nighttime and I am standing in a desert, surrounded by dunes a hundred feet high.
An enormous bird soars above, silhouetted against the moon. I hear soft footsteps in the sand behind me.
I turn and see her. Though she is very far away, I hear the rustling of her clothes, feel the weight of her body on the sand.
As she draws closer, her face begins to change. Lines deepen around her eyes, gray comes into her hair. She was seventeen a moment ago; now she looks seventy.
By the time she is in front of me, she is stooped and frail. I recognize her easily as my Eureka, though she is close to death. She opens her mouth to speak.
Ashes pour out in an endless stream.
I awake. Three crows sail the pink sky above my opening eyes. My body is stiff and it takes a moment to recall where I am. The campsite looks like it’s been trashed by something bigger than a boy blowing out candles. Black logs lie scattered across slick leaves.
I roll over in time to see a raccoon run away with the last remnant of my cake.
Sometimes I look at people and wonder if they’re afraid to die. My family speaks of age with pity and disdain: The elderly are weak, sick, pathetic. My aunts and uncles look away from old men with walkers and women in wheelchairs, as if no one should have to endure such shameful spectacles.
I wonder if those old people would make the bargain I was supposed to make last night: Stop feeling and you get to live forever. Would Eureka?
Shiloh stirs and sighs beside me, dreaming of chasing something. He smells more like home than anything in that sad farmhouse I will return to without him. I lay my head next to his and we stare into each other’s eyes. He has to go because my heart has to go. And soon—the meeting place is a full day’s hike away. My family is always on time.
I feel around in the pack Starling gave me and find two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a bag of chips, two bottles of soda, and another can of beans. Anything will taste of nothing, go down bitter, but a sandwich at least will give me energy. I force one down and feed the beans to Shiloh. We eat slowly, watching the sun rise, listening to the gentle waving of the bayou.
I reach into my coat pocket and feel something stiff, remembering the sting of Albion’s palm across my cheek as I tear open the envelope.
It’s not one card—it’s three.
Each is twice the size of a playing card and several times as sturdy. The cards are hand-painted and brightly colored. They look old and well made. On the back they share the same design: against a metallic silver background a blue figure holds a spear pointed downward. It’s the original Seedbearer insignia, symbolic of my family’s most important pledge: Keep the enemy below the sea.
I lay the cards faceup in a row on my sleeping bag. On the first card, two triangles back to back—one a deep ocean blue, one the pastel mix of an early-morning sky—form a single triangle. In the center of that triangle, the number six is painted in dark, glittery blue.
Things you know but do not think you know, Albion said.
Chora begins her cooking every night by sprinkling six grains of salt into a pan. Albion meditates six times a day. Without knowing why, I’ve always thought of the number six as my lucky number. It has an unarticulated power in my family, like an open secret that determines everything.
The next card features a black crown at the top and a black tombstone at the bottom. In the center, thick, curving lines resemble an ocean wave. One line curls upward on the right side; another dips down on the left, connecting the crown to the tombstone. Tombstones usually stand for death, but what about the crown?
My gaze drifts to the remains of the fire. I realize that the wavelike image on the card symbolizes wind—Seedbearer wind created from breath.
Wind is the source of the Seedbearers’ power—that’s the connection to the crown. But I don’t know about the tombstone. The need to understand grips me, and for the first time, I know for certain that I will meet my family tonight. I won’t simply run away. I will ask them these questions then. That’s why Albion gave me the envelope. He knew I’d need to know the truth.
On to the last card: the point of a red, twin-lobed heart shape pricks an anatomically accurate depiction of a human heart. Half of the human heart is red; the other half is the sickly gray of rancid meat. Blood drips from the human heart.
My family has always made it clear that love drains life. It’s a mantra muttered often in my home. I’ve heard Starling say it to a sunset, Albion say it about a tragic story he overheard. Once, Critias said it under his breath while looking straight at me. It’s a warning, a weaning. I’ll be expected now to say it to myself, like an adult.
“Love drains life,” I whisper, wondering how much life there is left to drain.
Without love, I’ll be strong and supple, eighteen forever. Every time I let love or passion creep into my soul, I will age a little more. Acts of extreme detachment—such as abandoning Shiloh—reverse the aging process. This explains why my aunts and uncles range from hundreds to thousands of years old. They failed at completely shutting off emotion at eighteen, but they’ve learned to temper and offset it so that none of them looks older than fifty.