The Forest of Vanishing Stars(96)

She walked for twenty minutes, and she was beginning to panic when she finally saw him, his back to her, his hands clenched in fists by his sides as he stared into the black depths of the forest. She exhaled in relief. As she walked toward him, he heard her and whirled around, his eyes wild and unfamiliar. He didn’t have a gun with him, but he was crouched in a defensive posture, ready to fight. “Yona?” he asked after a few seconds, straightening back up, the shadow over his face clearing, but not all the way. “What are you doing here?”

“I was worried about you.” As she walked closer, he took a step backward, away from her, and that’s when she realized he’d been crying. There were tear tracks down his cheeks, and his eyes were bloodshot. “Zus?”

“I didn’t want you to see me like this.” He took another step backward, forcing distance between them, and though she wanted to pull him into her arms, to promise him that everything would be okay, she knew that might be a lie.

“What happened, Zus?” she asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. “Are you hurt?”

He shook his head, and another tear fell from his left eye. He swiped it away angrily. “It’s Helena,” he said, his voice strange and strangled, and it took Yona a few seconds to realize he was speaking of his daughter. He had never said her name aloud in Yona’s presence before; even when she had gently asked about his past, he had shaken his head, pressed his lips together, and told her that he could not open that door without falling apart. It was only from Chaim that she knew the truth.

“Oh, Zus,” she murmured.

He turned his back to her, staring out into the wilderness again. Overhead, the sky watched in silence. In a few hours, it would be dawn, and the forest would be alive again, the world would be alight. But for now, it felt like just the two of them in the moonlight.

It was a long time before Zus turned back around. “She would have been six today. It should have been her birthday. But I—I couldn’t save her. How can it be that I am still alive and she has been gone from this earth for two years now?”

He began to cry again, heaving sobs this time, and Yona hesitated before stepping forward and putting a tentative hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but he didn’t pull away, so she took another step, pulling him against her. He didn’t resist, and after a moment, his arms were around her, and he was sobbing into her hair. She absorbed the tremors of his grief.

“There are no words that can tell you how sorry I am, Zus,” she whispered when finally his tears had stopped falling. “I wish I had known her.”

He took a deep breath and pushed away, creating a sudden gap between them. He looked disoriented, defensive. “But don’t you see? If I had not lost her, if I had not lost Shifra, my wife, I never would have met you. This life that I have now with you, these feelings I have…” He shook his head. “It is only possible because they are dead. How can I embrace that? Am I not betraying them?”

She blinked as he took another step backward, away from her, widening the distance. It wasn’t just sadness eating at him, it was guilt, and she was at the center of it. “Zus, I—”

“There’s nothing you can say, Yona. There’s nothing anyone can say.”

It was the first time she’d heard him sound cold toward her, and it sent a chill down her spine. She knew it was his grief speaking, but it still felt like a blow. She knew that things with Zus were different than they had been with Aleksander, that what she had with him was real and true. But was love transitory? Could it run its course, disappear at a moment’s notice? What if that was what was happening here? Could a person simply decide to turn his heart off? There was so little she understood; a lifetime of reading books deep within a lonely forest had not prepared her to open her own heart the way she had.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered at last, and when he looked at her, his face softened a bit.

“Yona, I didn’t mean—” His voice caught and he stopped abruptly. She could see the storm in his eyes, the confusion, and she hated that she was the cause of it. Still, when he reached for her hand, she squeezed back, and when he pulled her to him, so that her head rested against his heart, she held him tightly. “I wish you had known them, too, Yona. I wish that life was different. That it had taken a different path. None of us should be freezing to death in the damned woods. People shouldn’t hate us in the name of God. But they do. And we are here. We are surviving. We are living to honor our dead.” His voice broke again. “We have to. Don’t we?”

She listened to his heartbeat before speaking. It was rapid and insistent, thudding against his rib cage like it was trying to break free. “I knew a nun once,” she whispered. “She told me that those of us who live good lives will be reunited in the afterlife. Do you believe that? That you will see Helena and Shifra again someday?”

He didn’t reply right away, and in the quiet, she could hear him sobbing again, could feel the tremors of grief that shook his body. “I do,” he said at last.

“Then maybe they are closer than you think, Zus.” She imagined the ghost of his wife watching them now in the forest, the way Jerusza sometimes watched her, and it was enough to make her pull away from him. Would the woman who’d loved him begrudge Yona for being here, in his arms? Would she hate Yona for taking a place she would never again be able to fill? “They are with you always,” she added after a moment. “As they should be.”