The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(58)

“What are you?” I asked my reflection in a choked whisper. “What fucking are you? What do you want to be?”

I had a vision then, a memory so saturated in color and sensation you could almost call it a flashback, of my mother cutting my hair in the bathroom mirror. A photo of Jean Seberg propped on the sink and the burn of her exhales wafting past my eyes, when she used to smoke while she trimmed.

I breathed in, breathed the memory away. Then I tucked my overgrown ends behind my ears and left the bathroom. But my mother was already gone.



* * *



I was walking back toward the bookshop, along the rustling edge of Washington Square Park, when I felt something in the air. A funny cold little poke, as if someone had pushed aside the atmosphere like a curtain and stuck a finger through. A moment later, a paper airplane pirouetted over my shoulder like a Blue Angel, landing nose first in a laurel bush.

I looked back, just in case a little kid was about to come running after it, but the sidewalk was empty. I swore I smelled a sinuous note in the air, the scent of not New York. Not laurel leaves or pollution or street food or perfume, but something compounded of the molecules and stardust of far, far away. Maybe I could catch it next time, I thought. Catch that little rift in the air with my fingernails, and peel it back to find him.

For now, I could unfold the airplane and read his letter.





30


Dear Alice,

Soon I’ll need a break from magical things. I’ll want to walk through a door that’s just a door. I’ll want to talk to a stranger who’s in no way mysterious. If you could see the view from where I’m writing this, you’d understand why.

Fuck it, I think I want all that now. Right now, I want to read books that stay on the page and ride the subway and eat dim sum and I want to hold your hand. I wonder if I’d be brave enough to say this to your face. I think I would. I asked you out once, remember? I kind of want to take that sentence back, but that’s not the way the magic works.

I’m almost ready to come home. I’ve got a way to get there, too, or at least the promise of one. There’s just one more wonder I’m out to see. It’s something out of a book again. It’s called the Night Country, and I don’t want to explain it till I’ve seen it. Someone called it the “very last secret,” whatever that means. I guess it means I won’t know what it is till I get there. It’ll either be heaven or it’ll be hell, but either way an adventure.

I want to write to you again, but what I want even more is to watch your face when you look up from a book one day and see mine. One day soon. I’m gonna be so shy when I see you again. It’s just, by now I’ve said as much to you in letters as I did in life.

Be patient with me, okay? When I see you and my tongue tangles up. Be patient.

I’ll see you after the Night Country.





31


How did stories seep through the walls between worlds?

They came in through the cracks. Althea’s stolen fairy tales, those bloody little coils of princesses and kings, they made the cracks.

But the tale of the Night Country. Ella telling me here, Finch hearing it there, wherever there might be—it made me nervous. More than nervous. The coincidence of it was sand beneath my skin.

When we’d first met, Finch and I, our meetings sang with a strange resonance. Something grew up between us, something gossamer fine. We’d torn it down, with my stupidity and his betrayal, and then the different things we wanted divided us. Now here we were, years and worlds between us, and still he could find me by letter.

And one tale could find us both. Already fairy tales had brought us together, imprisoned us, spilled our blood, and carried us ruthlessly apart. What might this one do?

I left Ella a rambling voicemail. I called Sophia, again, then sent a text.

I know you’re not talking to me but this is important. Please please please just tell me where are you??

She didn’t respond. For hours, as I dozed fitfully in the back room of the bookshop and sleepwalked under the sun and read Finch’s latest letter again and again, my eyes blurring and my hands gripping the page.

When she finally responded the relief hit me like a sugar rush.

I’m not not talking to you.

I stared at my phone and understood, suddenly, how Ella must’ve felt, trying to chase me down by text and getting nothing but a cursory message after hours of silence.

Okay but we need to talk NOW something’s happening. Where are you?

Her response was unexpected.

Going to a party

There was a delay, long enough that I knew she was debating it, then:

Want to come?

Send the info, I texted. I’ll see you there.



* * *



Party could mean a lot of things, and I barely knew how to dress in the best of times. I changed into jeans and my cleanest shirt and put lipstick on, a burgundy that made me look like a little kid sneaking wine at a dinner party. Then I rubbed it off and put on eyeliner instead. With my mouth still bruised with leftover color and my hair a tangled cloud, dark below and pale at the roots, I looked older. Sophia would never make it past seventeen, but I was already on the other side. From here on out, I’d be leaving her behind.

Unless she left me behind first.

She hadn’t said whose party it was, or how she knew them. It was in a condo building in Tribeca, so new you could smell it. The entrance was all wasted space, granite walls and complicated light fixtures and the trickle of water running over stone. A bored guy sat behind the front desk, staring at his iPad.