Useless Bay(35)

I washed my hands and sat down.

She pulled out the tart, fluffy on top but dense underneath, sliced off two perfect wedges, put one on a plate in front of me, and saved another for herself. She seemed perfectly collected as the building shook around her.

“That statue outside. What did you call her again?”

“Who? Kwan Yin?

“Right. Her. Why do you have a statue of her on your kitchen stoop? Or does she belong to the Shepherds?”

“Nope. She’s all mine. A lot of people have statues of Kwan Yin. She’s the Buddhist goddess of forgiveness and compassion. The goddess of the sea. That’s why I said she wouldn’t mind a little ash on her head every now and then. Kwan Yin hears the cries and laments of the world, puts them in a lotus flower, and sets them free. Kinda cool, huh?”

I remembered the woman from the night before in her tattered cloak and how she’d tapped Lyudmila’s cold, dead heart with her staff and how the light had come from Lyudmila’s chest. Perhaps it had been a lotus flower before it had taken fire and floated off.

I took a deep breath. It’d been a strange day, but there was something about Hannah, something that made me think she wouldn’t judge me for what I was about to tell her. “Did Henry tell you what happened to me last night?”

Hannah sighed. “Yes,” she said. I was grateful she didn’t say, You died.

“There’s more. I haven’t told anyone, because I don’t know what to make of it myself. Ever since they brought me back to life last night . . . some weird things have been happening. . . .”

When I was done, our plates were clean and sea spray was still attacking the windows.

Hannah did not seem surprised by anything I told her.

“Do you believe me?”

She didn’t even pause before answering. “My wai po says certain places hold the possibility of pockets. Other spaces overlapping with this one. ‘Edgeworlds,’ she calls them. Places just like the ones we see, overlapping, but populated by an entirely different race of beings like the ones you describe. Our ancestors. Goddesses . . . Who am I to say what you saw or didn’t see?”

“I’ve seen ghost dogs, too,” I said. “Only not in a different world. In this one.”

“A spirit animal,” Hannah suggested. “Probably a guide. There’ve been tales of people like you. ‘Edgewalkers,’ my wai po calls them. Some people call them crazy, imagining things that aren’t there. But my wai po, she’s seen things. She has a berry farm up in Greenbank. She swears that on certain days, when the clouds hang low as fruit, she can see berries as big as your fists on her bushes, but when she reaches for them, she can never touch them. She could never find a way to bring one world into the other. But she’s convinced that there are thin places where some can. I think you might have a rare talent, Pixie.”

I heard it then, and I felt it. A tap between my eyes. The lightest of whispers and an anointing. Edgewalker.

There was truth to it. Besides, it sounded so much better than crazy.

“Wait a minute—what does wai po mean?”

“She’s my grandmother.”

“And she’s the one with the berry farm in Greenbank—the one with the big red barn?”

Hannah nodded.

“Where the island is so skinny you can practically lob pebbles from the eastern shore to the west?”

“Many have tried. It’s just a little too wide.”

I’d seen the woman manning the red barn. She was so ancient I didn’t think she could be so lively, but lively she was. When I first started search-and-rescue and discovered my first dead child, she showed up at our doorstep, didn’t even bother to introduce herself, and left a basket of loganberry syrup, blackberry preserves, and gooseberry jam with a note that read “For the Gray Family.” I caught a glimpse of her as she drove off in her truck. I always wanted to thank her for that small kindness when most people couldn’t even look at me.

Of course, with four brothers, I didn’t even get to try the loganberry syrup. It was gone the next morning.

“That’s your wai po?”

Hannah didn’t say anything.

“She’s awesome.”

I stood up and bussed our empty plates to the industrial-sized sink and rinsed them off, feeling a little less strange.

Edgewalker.

Would I be pushing it if I asked her what I had to ask next? There was something else I needed. The end of Henry’s half-told story.

As I loaded the plates into the dishwasher, I asked. “How long have you been with the Shepherd family?”

“For a long time. Since before Henry was born. I was friends with Ellen—Henry and Meredith’s mom.”

“Henry started talking tonight about the scars on his hands, and then he stopped. It was really abrupt. I don’t think he’s going to tell me any more. He said his mom went away?”

“Went away? Went away? Honey, how much did he tell you?”

“Just that he had had an abusive nanny who sounded as if she was training him for something big. That’s as far as he got. Then he shut down.”

Hannah snorted. “No shit he shut down. I’d shut down right there, too. That nanny was training him to tell Rupert that Henry’s mom had been abusing him.”

I didn’t say anything. My head hurt.