The Love That Split the World (31 page)

“You think God loves me like you do?”

“I think He or She or It loves us like we love Beau. I think God loves us fucking well, Natalie Cleary.”

Tears flood my vision. I nod once then turn, walk into my closet for the last time, slip through my window, hop down into my beautiful, blue-green swamp of a yard, and get into my car. Before I pull away, I see Grandmother standing in the closet, silhouetted by light. She leans forward over the windowsill and
shouts to me, loud and clear, “Her name was Bridget. Our
ishki
’s name was Bridget, and she never stopped caring.”

Bridget
. I whisper her name to myself twice, and then I fold it in my chest with everyone else who’s a part of me, all the people some version of me has already known and those who—I have to believe—some version of me will meet someday. Then I drive back to the intersection and pull onto the shoulder one last time, chills alive over every centimeter of my skin. But I’m not panicking, despite my fear. I’m not dizzy, despite the swelling lightness in my chest and head. I’m staying, I think, I’m staying until the end and for whatever comes after.

I want you to understand something, Natalie. No matter how hard it feels, you don’t need to be afraid to move on. There’s always more to see and feel.

32

I stand in the middle of the road, facing the direction from which I know I’ll see the car from my nightmares come, drifting mindlessly across the yellow line. For now, the rain has let up, and the night is still. This time, when I think of that song I first heard Beau play, it comes to me—a measure of it, at least—and I take time by the hand with no more than a gentle tug, sending it unwinding backward right through me.

Night turns to day turns to night in flashes, like a yellow-
gold strobe light. Cars zoom past as blurs of color on either side of me, whipping my hair around my face, shaking my clothes out until they’re dry.

I don’t know how I’ll know it’s time, but I believe I will.

I watch several accidents reverse until I see a maroon blot against the creek—a pile of crushed metal unfolding again and
pulling back onto the road, parting ways with a black pickup. I go just past that before I stop focusing on Beau’s song, on the wheel of time, and let the world fall back into its rhythm.

Neither Beau’s dad’s car nor my mom’s are in sight, but a shiver trickles down my vertebrae, letting me know—as Grandmother must have known when I told her of my impending Closing—that this is the same night. I feel the night air itself thick with expectation, like the still woods and the mute crickets and the barometric pressure and the floating clouds and ancient rocks are all holding their breath, preparing to weep for me.

At the end of all this, the end of the world, I stand on a yellow line of paint and look up into the night sky, searching the stars. “Are you there?” I whisper.

I feel nothing but the warm breath the night’s held on to since the Sun’s last setting, the soft glow of the Moon, the
distant heartbeat of Thunder, the lick of Fire, and the flash of Rainbow, and while none of these is the voice of my father or the face of my mother, I know—with certainty—that I am somebody’s child, that I am deeply loved. And when the headlights reach around the bend at the end of my line of sight, that’s enough.

It’s enough when I glance over my shoulder and see the truck rumbling from the opposite direction, bouncing drunkenly between the shoulder and the median.

It’s enough when I face the glare, peer through it to the maroon car beyond, and step into the middle of the lane. Because I found myself in the stories Grandmother told and in the hearts of those who loved me.

I start walking toward the end, heading off my own
accident. All the while, time shudders around me. It pulls against me, like a river current trying to drag me back to my own time. I find a stone in the road, and I take it in my hand. There’s not much time until I’ll be whisked away from all this, certainly not enough time to redo this if it doesn’t work. I have one chance to make any sort of change, and so I dig my heels in with every step and keep moving. In a way, I become the dark and mysterious mass from my dreams, moving toward myself.

I think of the blueness the girl fell into in Grandmother’s story, endless possibility. Even that can be terrifying. I have to believe in whatever lies within the blue, that within its primordial goop there’s another Beau, another Natalie, another summer containing all time, when we’ll stop asking who we are and let ourselves be savored fiercely by the world. And if there is no other Natalie on the other side of this, I have to believe there’s at least a long and exceptional life for the person I love. The tears start to fall; my speed increases.

Goodbye, Sun. Goodnight, Moon. Thank you, Thunder. I love you, Fire. Goodbye, Rainbow.

And Mom, who stroked my hair when I woke from nightmares drenched in sweat.

And Dad, who squeezed my neck on the deck overlooking the mist, as he told me he’d always listen.

And Matt, who loved me first.

And Megan, who loved me best.

And Rachel, who loved me fiercely.

And my Bridget, who loved me selflessly.

And Beau—Beau Wilkes, who loved me until the end.

I stop walking as the lights bear down on me. They swell.
Brighter and brighter and brighter still, until they’re a pool of clear blue. A beautiful, perfectly broken new world I would die to see. For a moment, I imagine the dark outline of a hunched woman, her smile and her wrinkly hand lifting. She was there. The Grandmother I know said she never saw Beau’s and my future, but she was there. She stood on our porch and looked through our window. And maybe she’d come there to look at the past with the Beau she’d already lost, while I stood there looking toward his future without me, with someone else. But maybe, just maybe, she—that old, crooked version of me—had just come home from the grocery store. Maybe she was standing on the porch her husband had built for her, weighed down by bags of beer and cereal, when she thought she saw something familiar in the window. Maybe she stopped and felt her insides shiver because, for an instant, she could’ve sworn she saw herself, sixty years younger, standing in the living room with arms coiled around the love of her life. Maybe she lifted up her hand to say,
I’m here. I’m still here after all this time
.

I had meant to throw the stone in my hand at the hood of the car, but it’s becoming hard to see. Time is whipping against me, every breath a fight to stay.

Now, now is the moment I have in life—no future, no past. Now is the moment I have to choose how I live, and now is quickly collapsing. I let the stone fall out of my hand as I lift my arms up over my head.
I’m here,
I think. Maybe that will be enough to undo everything, but if not . . . if not, I’m still a happy kind of sad. “I’M HERE.”

The headlights grow. And then they consume me, fold me in their endless arms, and I feel nothing.

Nothing but warmth.

Though I see a dark orb swelling behind the car, beyond the light, trying to catch me and tear me back into place before time falls shut.

Though I hear the screech and thud, even the sharp intake of breath from behind the glass.

Though I hear the door swing open and the desperate breathing.

And very last, the last thing I’ll ever hear, my mother’s words:
“There’s no one there. I swear I saw a girl. There’s no one there. She’s—”

And that’s when I’m lost, and in my place, the world gets born.

33

There once was a girl who fell in love with a ghost. When she looked through him, she saw the world as it was made to be: warm, lush, aching with growth and quaking with tenderness. Through the boy, she saw the web of time, and how every moment—past, future, good, and bad—had conspired to tell their love story.

She loved the ghost boy so much that she thought the feeling alone might be enough to fix everything that had ever broken. In her. In him. In the whole world.

And because she loved him like this, she finally understood how deeply she was loved.

She knew she would do anything for the ghost boy. She would fold herself around him to protect him. She would drink out all the darkness from him and pour out all her light on him. She would rebuild the whole world for him.

One day, a voice spoke to her from above. Perhaps it came as a quiet whisper, carried on a gentle wind. Some say it was in the rumble of thunder or the crunch of stiff summer grass. Still others describe it as the delicate flutter of moth wings.

“My child,” the voice said. “It is I, Love, the maker of worlds. If you want the ghost boy to live again, bring him out beneath the moon tonight, and I will send Death down to trade your life for his.”

The girl loved the ghost boy so much that she felt only the smallest hesitation. There’s little to fear when you love. There’s nothing to fear when you
are
loved. So the girl took her ghost lover out into the valley beneath the moon that night and found Death’s own knife waiting for her. It was strange, that Death was not chasing her, coming to collect her, or swallowing her whole.

Instead the girl was standing beneath the stars, the soft
breath of the grass warming her ankles, the heartbeat of the world thudding gently, devotedly against her feet, and the crickets singing a lullaby. She looked into her ghost boy’s eyes, and the softness of his smile filled her heart so quickly that it began to break as she brought the knife toward her chest.

The sky split open then.

The stars fell like silver rain.

The world stopped turning. The Universe held its breath.

The voice came again. “Stop. Set down Death’s knife. I’ve seen your heart and that you withhold nothing for yourself. You know my face. You recognize my love for you, as you know your own for the ghost boy. You know what you would do for him, and so you understand now that, for you, my beloved, I would fix the whole world.”

Then the moonlight fell down too: a brilliant sheet of white that cleansed the whole valley and left the world utterly dark, perfectly quiet as it was in the beginning, before all things. And in the dark, the girl fell into a dreamless sleep.

When she awoke next, the sun was starting to rise. Birds were singing. She remembered nothing, not the night before nor any night that came before it.

It was the first day of her life, and when she looked up the side of the valley, she saw a boy watching her. He looked familiar and unfamiliar at once, like someone whose vague notion she’d seen in a dream.

“I missed you,” she heard herself call to him—though was it possible to miss someone you didn’t know? Her chest hurt then, an immeasurable burst of pain.

“Every day,” he answered softly. “All the time.”

He came toward her, the early sunlight glinting off his skin and hair and
eyes.

If you’ve finished this book, you probably suspect by now that I’ve been treated better by the people around me than any person can reasonably expect in this world. My heart is full and my words fall short. Here are some people I want to thank:

The First Nations whose stories are seen here: Iroquois (The Woman Who Fell From the Sky), Natchez (Adoption of the Human Race), Sioux (Teton Ghost Story), Seneca (Brother Black and Brother Red), Caddo (The Flood), Creek (The Yamasee and the Flood), Onondaga-Iroquois (The Vampire Skeleton), and Kwakiutl (Ghost Country). There are several beautiful variations of each of these stories, and I highly recommend
that anyone who’s unfamiliar take time to sit with them, whenever possible, with the interpretation of a scholar from each tale’s respective nation. This book wouldn’t be the same
without these mesmerizing and unquantifiable stories, and I’m forever changed by what I discovered in them.

Gramma and Grampa, for beginning a tradition of gentleness and love that still defines our family; you are the people I want to be when I grow up. Mom and Dad, for reading to us in the hallway between our rooms so many nights, and for always doing the voices. To my brothers and sisters-in-law, thank you for being the kind of people who fight through the hard things and appreciate the good.

K.A. Applegate, for my first book crush (a boy who is literally trapped as a hawk for the majority of the series). Lois Lowry, for teaching me that words can forever change your world. J.K. Rowling, for smart girls, tender boys, deep magic, and love that casts out fear. Madeline L’Engle and Kurt Vonnegut, for an addiction to Weird.

Ms. Hanke, for that first writing assignment. Ms. Neugabauer, for that detention. Ms. Richards, for not punishing me when I turned in the choose-your-own-adventure story in which all roads led to you locking us in the flame-engulfed classroom and picking us off with arrows.

Rhoda Janzen, for giving me someone to look up to and up to, and for telling me I could do this, and I should. Beth Trembley, for teaching me how. Heather Sellers, from whom I first heard the phrase love you into the world. Sarah B., Peter S., Pablo P., Stephen H., Steven I., Martha G., Jesus M., Dean Reynolds, and the rest of the Hope College faculty, for creating the perfect
little adult-incubator, despite the frozen lake next door.

Daniel Nayeri, who unwittingly encouraged me to keep going on at least two separate occasions, and John Silvis for his
beautiful NYCAMS program, may it rest in peace. Or alternatively, someday be resurrected.

Bri Cavallaro and Anna Breslaw, for talking me up/down/all around: you are beautiful and rare gems. Candice the Queen, for reading an early draft of this book plus, I think, three alternate endings, and helping me admit which was the right one.

The online YA community, book bloggers, and Sweet Sixteens: I’m so impossibly lucky to have been embraced by you. Don’t play dumb. You know who you are.

Noosha, for being my first fan, my best friend, a life-changing love. Megan, for being my sister, my warmth, the person to whom I’ll never say goodbye.

Lana Popovic, my incredible agent, for reading my first book in 23 hours and this one in 36, for always making time, for dissecting my manuscripts and operating on them; for your sass, feist, smarts, and love. And for getting me to watch Fringe.

Liz Tingue, the editor I wanted to make mine, whom I now get to call mine, in the least creepy way possible. You saw the spark in this wild, weird, sprawling, and sometimes slow book. You knew what this story wanted to be, and you believed it would get there. Thank you for speaking my language, for loving Beau and Natalie, and for being the hilarious, glittering, genius bombshell of a human being you are.

Marissa Grossman and Jessica Harriton, whose capable yet elegant hands helped knead this story into shape and then pack it into mailers.

Anthony Elder, for giving me a cover that could make hardened criminals and jaded dystopian heroines fall to their knees weeping.

Ben Schrank, for essentially handing me my dream on a glowing, LED platter, and occasionally favoriting my tweets (can’t wait for anthropologists to study this sentence in the year 3000) just to remind me He’s Always Watching from the clouds.

Jennifer Dee, Rachel Lodi, and Anna Jarzab—you know what you did. You are each uniquely amazing.

Krista Ahlberg, Phyllis DeBlanche, Shari Beck, Jenna Pocius, the rest of Razorbill/Penguin team, and every penguin, for being incredible, hardworking, resilient, and adorable.

Everyone who picks up, reads, borrows, buys, or lends this book: if you love this, I hope you know it’s yours. If you don’t, I hope you find $20 in your dirty laundry to make up for it.

For everyone I’ve missed: frankly, you deserve better.

Finally, thank you to Joey, who stole my heart at seventeen, when I was young(er) and stupid(er), and daily gives me a steadfast, quiet love I never knew I needed until I had it. You make this whole world soft for me, and I love all of the yous I’ve known, will know, will never meet. I love you in every moment.

And to the Love who dreamed the world, who gave me breath, and who gingerly passed me this idea page by page: thank you for that time you wept, and for loving me
well.