Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(26)

“Yes. We don’t know what’s going to happen when you cross the line, and I’d rather it didn’t happen in my car.”

I sigh, but there’s nothing yielding in her: she looks at me calmly, and waits, until I reach for the door handle and let myself out, into the pitch-black night. Then I stop, steadying myself against the body of the truck. The cornfield was overwhelming: it was green and growth and hers, even if those stalks had grown in good Kentucky soil. But this . . .

This is Mill Hollow. This is the sound of insects in the trees, the hoot of owls, the distant whisper of the creek as it runs between the roots of trees so much older than I am that they probably never noticed I was here, much less mourned when I was gone. This is home. This is where I lived; this is where I died. This is everything I ever had, and everything I gave away.

The skin of my palm is tingling, and it’s somehow no surprise when I glance over and see that it has slipped below the surface of the truck. I’m insubstantial in this moment, a memory pretending to be a girl. I can’t breathe. It’s a good thing that I don’t need to. All I can do is stand, frozen, and let the night roll over me, washing me away.

I am finally, finally, home.

I step away from the truck and walk under my own power over the borderline, into Mill Hollow. I stop there, waiting for Brenda to start the truck up again and come to meet me. Nothing catches fire. Brenda finally drives those few precious feet, looking out the window, and asks, “You okay, Jenna?”

“It’s still here,” I say. “I never really believed . . . I went away. I always thought it went away too.”

“The past has a way of hanging on, even when we think it’s dead and buried,” says Brenda. “Looks like you’re not going to explode. Get back in the truck. We need to find Danny. Any chance you can track him from here?”

“No,” I say, climbing back into my seat. “I knew he was here because this is the Hollow; this is mine. But that doesn’t mean I have a map of the place tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.”

“It was worth a try,” she says philosophically. The truck rumbles around us, and we roll onward, into Mill Hollow.

Manhattan may not be the biggest city in the world, but it feels like it is: the city that never sleeps, the “Big Apple,” all those fancy names people slap on it as they struggle to put the feeling of vastness, of restlessness, of potential into something they can hold onto. It’s possible to stand at the corner of Fourteenth and Broadway and believe that when humanity is over, this city, or the ghost of this city, will be all that remains.

Mill Hollow . . . Mill Hollow is the other side of that coin. It’s silence. It’s stillness. It’s the feeling of eyes watching from the empty trees, knowing that frogs and owls and creeping night-things have their full attention fixed on you. If Manhattan is the light, Mill Hollow is the shadow, and it’s never been possible for one to exist without the other. Kentucky is a long way from New York, but distance, like time, is as much a convenience as anything else. This is my home. This has always been my home. The only reason I was able to stay away so long is that I was living in the other half of it, living in the light, but I never forgot the shadow. I never could.

Brenda keeps her eyes mostly on the road as she drives, following the black, winding path through the trees. There are no streetlights here, and the branches are tight-knit above us, blocking out starlight and moonlight alike. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” I’m lying. I don’t have the words to tell the truth. How do you put something like this into words? You don’t, that’s how. But every breath I take pulls Mill Hollow deeper into my lungs, and even if my body no longer strips the oxygen from the air, it still appreciates the reminder. I feel like I can do anything. I feel like I can fly.

“Any thoughts on where Danny would be? I’ve never been here before.”

“I haven’t been here in twenty years.”

Brenda’s laugh is swift and mocking. “What, you’re expecting me to believe this is a place that changes quickly? I’m from a small town. I know how they work. Whatever you’re thinking was here twenty years ago will probably still be here today.”

“Not everything.” Patty is gone. My parents are gone. The things that matter most about the Hollow are underground and resting peacefully . . . but in a way, that means Brenda’s right, because they’re still here. They’re never going to leave. I’m still here too. I never left, not in body, not in bone. Dusk or dark or dawn or day, I’ve been here the whole time.

Silence falls between us, too heavy with things unsaid to be companionable, stretched too thinly to be comfortable. I look out the window on the blackness, and say, slowly, “Danny never liked to go where ghosts would be. He said being dead was a clerical error, and he didn’t approve one bit. So he wouldn’t be in the graveyard. There might be a comic book store in town. There wasn’t one twenty years ago.”

“I doubt it,” says Brenda. “Town with less than three hundred people, you can’t keep the doors open on a specialty store like that. He’ll be somewhere else.”

“I know.” I want to say he’s at my family home; I want to give myself an excuse to go there, to peer through the windows and search for some sign of what my family has become. I can’t. Danny wouldn’t go there.