Wink Poppy Midnight (21 page)

M
Y PARENTS CAME
home from their convention and tromped out to the Gold Apple Mine and demanded I return to civilization, just like they did before when I was out at Grandpa's cabin. But I stood my ground this time, I just kept gutting the trout I'd caught earlier. My mom looked at my bloody hands
and flinched, but I was stoic just like Anton Harvey, I was the spitting image. I told my parents I loved them but that living with them was no longer an option, catching fish and sleeping on the ground and being alone a lot was what I'd been built for, this was who I was, and doing the other things, being their little angel, it made me unhappy, and being unhappy made me mean.

My dad muttered something about knowing it all along, I'd had Anton's eyes as a baby, I'd looked right at everyone in the same direct way and my dad
knew
it would come to this . . . though of course he hadn't, the liar. My mom cooed and coaxed and when that didn't work she sadly put her head in her hands, but I'd seen her do the same thing after spending the day with Grandpa, when he was alive, and she always bounced back just fine, so I wasn't worried.

I watched their car as it left, and then stared at the ruts it made in the grass for a while.

They'd be back.

But until then I was going to enjoy the silence, every last peaceful, solitary splash of it.

It was almost sunset. I got my sleeping bag off the wooden mine floor, threw it on the grass, under the stars, so close to the river that I fell asleep with my fingertips in the water.

I
TOLD THE
Yellows about Poppy. I told them she was alive and living by herself out at Gold Apple Mine, and that she just wanted to be alone. I told them the letters
were
clues, but they'd been written by Wink, not Poppy—Wink left me clues so I could follow the story to the end, like Thief, when he plays Five Lies, One Truth with the old woman on the Never-Ending Bridge. I told them the séance had been a hoax, and Wink had been behind it all.

The Yellows disbanded.

I think that's what Wink wanted, anyway.

Thomas found another girl to love, a sweet girl named Katie Kelpie who had nice curves and a nice smile and who was always laughing. She drove him around town on the back of her red Vespa and had started to teach him to play the tin whistle so he could join her Irish punk band. Katie talked a mile a minute, only pausing long enough to gaze up at Thomas and make sure he was happy, and he usually was.

I sometimes saw Buttercup and Zoe in the cemetery when I walked into town, taking gravestone rubbings and
whispering in each other's ears, like always, like nothing was missing.

Briggs.

I ran into him in the woods. It was a windy day, almost dusk. He was sitting beside a green tent and small fire, staring into space.

“If being alone out in nature is good enough for Poppy, it's good enough for me,” he said, after a while.

I just nodded.

“She never loved us, you know. Not any of us.”

I nodded again. “How long you plan on being out here in the woods, Briggs?”

He shrugged. “As long as it takes.”

I left him by his fire.

I went over to the Bell farm and walked right through the kitchen door, no knocking, because that's how things stood now. Mim was melting something over the stove, something that smelled like butter and honey and roses. Her red hair was tied back with a green scarf, and the sleeves of her black shirt were rolled up to her freckled elbows.

“Hold out your hand,” she said without looking up.

I did. She dropped a creamy dollop in the middle of my palm.

“It's shea butter dream cream. It helps you sleep.”

I rubbed my hands together. “It smells good. What will it make me dream?”

Mim didn't answer but she flashed me a mysterious smile over her shoulder. And she looked so much like Wink when she did it that I got goose bumps.

“It's so quiet,” I said. “Where is everyone?”

“Felix saw that white deer this morning and they all ran off to follow him. Wink packed a picnic for the Orphans, so they could be a while.”

I sat down at the table. There was a freshly shelled bowl of sugar snap peas and I picked up a handful of the little green guys and put them in my mouth.

Mim started filling clear glass jars with the dream balm, one careful teaspoon at a time. She paused for a second, hands on her hips. She turned away from the counter, leaned across the table, and moved the bowl of peas out of the way.

“I'm going to read the cards for you, Midnight.”

“All right,” I said.

“No, I'm going to read
Wink's
cards for you.”

That got me. “But Wink told me that you won't read your kids' cards anymore, ever since you read Bee Lee's once and learned she was going to die young.”

Mim looked at me and frowned, deep, lips tucking in at the corners. “Those weren't Bee Lee's cards. They were Wink's.”

My heart stopped beating.

It did.

I put my palm to my chest and pushed in.

“I never told her,” Mim said. “But she started reading cards at twelve, and she learned it for herself. I thought knowing her future might help. Might make her embrace life, live it to the fullest. I was wrong. And then her father up and left too, and they were so close.”

I pressed harder, my whole hand into my chest.

“I don't believe in tarot,” I said. “I don't believe in fortune-telling.”

She pulled the cards out anyway, a quick tug of the hidden pocket. She laid them on the table.

A skeleton.

A dead man pierced with swords.

A cloaked figure, five gold goblets.

Two dogs howling at the moon.

A heart with three daggers, sunk to the hilt.

“Yes,” Mim said quietly.

I didn't know what the cards meant, or what Mim saw in them, but there was sadness blazing in her Wink-green eyes.

“The cards could be wrong,” I said.

“Maybe.” Mim swept up the cards with one hand and put them back in her pocket. She turned to the glass jars and the dream balm, paused, and then looked at me over her shoulder. “Right or wrong, Wink believes them. And that changes everything.”

I
FOUND
W
INK
in the hayloft. The Orphans were put to bed at midnight and then it was just the two of us and a blanket on the hay and the moon shining in. We talked for hours. All truth, no fairy tales.

I was almost asleep when she kissed me. She kissed my neck and my chin and my ears and everything in between. She unbuttoned my shirt and I unbuttoned her strawberry overalls. She wrapped her bare arms around me and gripped my back, hard, and I swear I could feel her freckles pressing into my skin, every last one of them.

She didn't arch her spine or flip her hair.

I pulled away. I looked at her, and she smiled. She smiled right
into
me—I felt it echo in my ribs, like a shout, like a deep, deep sigh.

Her body curved into mine, chest to chest, my face in her hair.

“Wink,” I whispered, sometime close to dawn, everything quiet but the sky still black.
“Wink.”

I put my palm against her heart and waited for it to beat. And beat. And beat.

She squirmed and looked up at me. And I could see it in her eyes. She knew.

“Mim read my cards for you.”

I nodded.

I felt her shrug, her skin moving against mine.

“My heart might have two billion beats left in it, or two hundred.” She sighed. “But it doesn't matter that much. It doesn't. I used to think that I needed to be part of a story, a
big story,
one with trials and villains and temptations and rewards. That's how I would conquer it, conquer
death
.”

She sighed again, and nestled closer into me. “All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee's hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight.”

I
SAW THE
white stag on the way home. He was standing by the apple trees, gleaming like he was made of starlight. He took one long look at me and then bounded off into the dark.

I closed my eyes and made a wish.

T
HE END OF
the summer.

The end of this story.

I kept my promise to Poppy.

I sent for Leaf.

I mailed a letter west, to California, to a cabin in the Red Woods.

Leaf followed his own beat and listened to no one. I didn't know if my letter would work. Part of me wished I could ask the birds to fetch him, snatch him in their claws and carry him through the sky like Andrew in
The Raven War
. But part of me also hoped that Leaf would just come back on his own, because I asked him to.

The coyote knew he'd returned before I did. I saw him at the edge of the forest, watching the Roman Luck path. Leaf smiled when he saw the both of us waiting for him, the coyote and me.

Later, after he'd hugged Mim and Bee Lee and let Felix introduce his girlfriend and played Follow the Screams with the twins and Peach . . . he went to her. I left them alone for a while, but in the end I had to see. I snuck over to the Gold
Apple Mine, hiding in the shadows like I used to. They were there, sitting by the creek, watching the setting sun, shoulder to shoulder, blond and red.