The Crossing

And that someone, in a certain type of way, was me. By writing it all down I was saving everything. Preserving the moments that can be easily forgotten. Saving them not for me. Not even for you. But for everyone.

Clarence published me only once a month after that. He added crime. He added sports. He added terrorism. He added politics. He poured it all on. Milk onto cereal. But once a month people got better news. They got to hear about that fair. And after it had come and gone, I wrote another piece on it, so that they would know that just because they couldn’t see it anymore didn’t mean it wasn’t still out there. Still alive. Still pouring light up into darkness.

We changed the title of my column to The Art of Hopefulness not long after that. It was your mother’s suggestion. “Hope,” she said, “is just imagination put into practice.” I couldn’t tell if it was my horoscope for the day or her own idea.

FIVE

“Keep walking,” Tommy said. He nudged me in the back and got me going again. I didn’t know that I had stopped walking. I only knew that I was cold and tired and that, in spite of myself, I couldn’t stop thinking about Gannon and his father.

“Do you think they’re okay?”

“Of course they are,” Tommy replied. “You wouldn’t have let us leave them if they weren’t going to be okay.” He looked off into the distance. “We need to find a ride before they find them.”

“I know,” I said.

“I know you know,” Tommy said. “But do you know your hands are shaking?”

I looked down and found my hands trembling. “When did that start?” I asked.

Tommy took my hands in his and held them like small birds. He took a deep breath and exhaled over them, then rubbed my fingers and blew on them again. “Come on, you Ember. Let’s get you warmed up.” My warming fingers felt of pins and needles.

“Don’t call me that,” I said.

“Why not? I think it’s a cool name.”

“Jesus, Tommy.”

“Did I ever tell you the one about the Ember who walked into the blacked-out bar?... He asked for a light beer.” Then he smiled but, as usual, didn’t laugh.

“That doesn’t even make any sense.”

“Whatever,” Tommy said. “How about this, then: What’s hypothermia?”

“What?”

“Just tell me something about it,” Tommy said. “The weirder the better. There’s always something weird in that brain of yours.” He smiled, still rubbing my hands together like kindling.

“Hypothermia,” I began, my words shivering just a little, “is when the body core reaches a temperature below thirty-five degrees Celsius or ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit.”

“Ain’t it always like ninety-six or something?” Tommy interrupted.

Whether he was doing it to annoy me or didn’t honestly know, I couldn’t tell. “No,” I said. “Normal body temperature is ninety-eight-point-six.”

“Well, ninety-five isn’t too far off,” Tommy said. “Hardly anything when you really think about it.”

“Can I finish?” I asked, more than a little annoyed at the interruption.

“I mean, think about it,” Tommy said. “Three degrees? Just three degrees? Come on!” He laughed a goofy, ignorant laugh that arched his back and seemed to show all thirty-two of his teeth at once. It was the first time I’d seen him laugh like that in over a year.

When we first got into the foster care system Tommy had become obsessed with telling terrible jokes. Jokes like, “Two flies are on the porch together. Which one is the actor? The one on the screen.”

When they didn’t get a laugh, they got a grimace. Either reaction gave Tommy the same amount of delight. He would throw his head back and laugh and show all of his teeth just like he was doing now and those were some of the few occasions when Tommy seemed to forget himself and be happy.

But then I stopped laughing at his jokes and so he stopped telling them and I got to see him smile less and less often because, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t smile. Somewhere along the way I had forgotten how and, in doing so, I had stolen my brother’s laughter.

But he had somehow found it again in the days since receiving his draft notice. Maybe waiting to die is something we should all be able to laugh about.

“I’m ignoring you,” I said.

“Not very well,” Tommy replied. “Now keep talking.”

“Hypothermia symptoms depend on how far the body temperature has fallen,” I said. “It usually starts with shivering in the extremities on account of how they lose temperature the fastest and exhibit vasoconstriction.”

“What’s vasoconstruction?” Tommy asked. “Is that like building something out of Vaseline?”

“Vasoconstriction,” I corrected him.

“That’s what I said,” Tommy fired back.

“It’s when the blood vessels constrict in order to reduce blood flow,” I said. “Basically the body begins trying to hoard all of the blood...” My voice trailed off. I took a deep breath. The cold was suddenly swelling up around me like a fog.

“Don’t stop now,” Tommy said, managing a smile. “That vasoconstruction thing’s got me on the edge of my seat.”

“Vasoconstriction.”

“Again: that’s what I said.”

Tommy’s smile was wide and proud.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“Don’t do what?”

“Handle me. Don’t handle me like this. I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine, Ginny,” Tommy said. “You’re freezing and I’m just trying to remind you that you’re smart enough to know it. The first symptom you mentioned was shivering, right?” He let go of my hands. We both watched. For a moment they were okay, but then the trembling returned.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. I shoved my hands into my pockets and started walking again. Though the sky was still dark the thin light I saw in the distance began to grow, backlighting the trees. They became ghosts, beautiful and eternal.

After a few steps, Tommy was at my side again. “Okay,” he said. “You’ll be fine. But in the meantime, where’s my weird fact? You still owe me one.”

“You’re still trying to distract me,” I said.

“Yep,” Tommy replied. “Now come on.”

After a few more steps, I began, “Okay. Two things: terminal-burrowing and paradoxical undressing.”

“Is that like getting naked at a party?” Tommy asked.

“Neither has been studied very much,” I said, ignoring the interruption, “but basically in the late stages of hypothermia there’s a thing called terminal-burrowing. Basically, people will try to dig a hole and curl up, even if that might not be the best thing to do.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” Tommy said. “It’s like digging one of those things in the snow for yourself.”

“An igloo?”

“That’s what I said.”

“No,” I replied. “It’s totally irrational. People will crawl under beds, behind desks, under couches. And to make it worse, a lot of the time they’re naked when they do it.”

“How’d they get naked?” Tommy asked with a smirk. “Because that seems like the best part of the story and you skipped right over it.”

“Paradoxical undressing,” I replied. “Somewhere around thirty-five percent of people that die of hypothermia are found naked. It’s believed that what happens is the vasoconstriction—”

“Vasoconstruction.”

“That’s what I... Screw you, Tommy.” I cleared my throat to drown out the sound of Tommy’s laughter. “The blood vessels eventually get exhausted, like a muscle that’s been tensed too long, and so they suddenly stop constricting and let all of the blood flow. The body warms up all of a sudden and, even though you’re literally freezing to death, you feel hot. Sometimes people even start sweating.”

“So people start taking their clothes off?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And then sometimes, after they’ve taken off all of their clothes, they get that burrowing instinct. They’re found naked and frozen in some hole someplace.”

“Next time I ask you for a weird fact,” Tommy said, “just stop me. Or better yet, just tell me something to do with numbers. Numbers can’t be as bad as people getting naked and dying in a hole someplace.”

“You’re going to be okay,” I said.

“I know,” Tommy replied, no small amount of pride in his voice.

“I mean you’re not going to die in some hole,” I said. I felt my voice soften.

We walked several steps before Tommy answered. His eyes had narrowed and his chin stuck forward like the bow of a tugboat. It was obvious he knew that I was trying to tell him something subtle. Trying to make a point without hammering him over the head with it. I could almost hear the gears working in his mind, grinding in their slow, methodical, limited way.

“I hear you,” Tommy repeated. A patina of doubt clung to his voice.

“I can’t get along without you,” I said.

“I hear you,” Tommy repeated.

“Hey, here’s another weird fact for you.”

“Oh no,” Tommy said, palming his face.

“No, this one’s fun. So in ancient Greece they used to believe that, in the very beginning, men and women were one creature. Two heads, four arms, four legs, all of that.”

“First naked people digging holes and now this,” Tommy said from behind his hand. I could hear him holding back a laugh.

I reached over and pulled his hand away and, sure enough, there was Tommy’s wide, toothy smile. The one he didn’t show nearly as much as he used to. “Don’t interrupt me,” I said, and I was smiling too, even though I hadn’t intended to. “So men and women were one and then the gods threw down lightning bolts and split them into two. But the thing was that it split the soul in half. So men and women are always trying to find the other half of their soul.”

“That sounds like some weird kind of horror movie.”

“No,” I said and laughed. “The thing is, the story is about dating and marriage. It’s about how people fall in love. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was about brothers and sisters? What if you’re the other half of my soul and I’m the other half of yours?”

Tommy’s toothy smile faded, replaced by a warm, contemplative grin that bordered on embarrassment. “Leave it to you to think of a thing like that at a time like this,” he said.

“If I could be half of anybody, Tommy, I’d want it to be you.”

The words came from somewhere I hadn’t intended. But I meant them all just then. Looking back now, I wonder how I ever drifted away from believing them. I wonder how I betrayed my brother, who really was the other half of my soul, like I did.

* * *

The miles came and went. I counted off each footstep as a way of keeping my mind from drifting back to the cold that was always gnawing at the edges of me. I followed in Tommy’s shadow as the wind came down from somewhere in the world far, far away and poured over us both. No matter how hard the wind, Tommy never wavered. It was easy to follow him if I let myself.

Without speaking Tommy reached back and took my hand and pulled me off the road and down into the large ditch bordering it. When I started to ask what was going on he put a finger to my lips and slid closer to the grass and turned and looked up at the sky and seemed only to wait. After a few seconds I heard the sound of the car coming.

I held my breath and waited as the sound hissed closer. The wind pushed and pulled the sound so that the car seemed to be coming from all directions at once, like standing inside a bell after it’s been struck, but the glare of the headlights showed that the car was coming from the direction from which we had just come. There was no reason to believe that it wasn’t Gannon.

The seconds stretched out long.

The car came and the car passed, giving no indication that it had ever seen us.

After it had passed Tommy lifted his head and watched the car recede into the dark. “We should get off the road,” he said. “At least for a while.”

I only nodded and followed my brother’s lead.

He led us down the embankment toward a wall of dark trees that grew up along the road in dark, scruffy shadow. The bark shone in the dim starlight and bounced a reedy light off the cold, hard earth. The air inside the forest was denser, warmer. The sound of our footfalls and rustling of our clothes bounced around from tree to tree and came back to us sounding like the movement of a dozen other people. As if, at any moment, we might turn a corner and find our own faces peeking out at us from behind some tree.

“Stop,” Tommy said.

After a few seconds of standing in the cold, dense forest, I heard the sound. It was a gentle rustling at first, like canvas rubbing flesh. And then came the low, rhythmic thud of footfalls followed by young lungs pushing and pulling at the cold, thick air.

A light flared in our eyes, blinding us both.

“Who are you?” a hard, female voice hissed. “What are you doing out here?”

She held up a hand to beat back the light just as Tommy did the same. Then he took a step forward, putting himself between me and whoever was behind the flashlight.

Tommy lowered his hand and looked directly into the glare. Then, having nothing productive come of it, he shielded his eyes and over his shoulder whispered to me, “Who do you think they are, Ginny?”

I already knew who they were, even before the light was lowered and our eyes were able to adjust so we could finally see them.

There were almost ten of them standing in the forest before us, beneath the dim starlight. Embers, each and every one. And all of them old enough to be drafted. All of them trying to get away from the war.

Save for one, they stood with their heads down, coats pulled up to their ears, legs trembling from cold and fatigue, as though everything in their lives was being carried on their shoulders and was pushing them into the earth, grinding them down with each moment.

“Hey!” Tommy said before I could stop him.

In unison, they all trained their eyes on him. “We’re not police or draft,” Tommy said. “We’re just on our way to Florida,” he continued. “Heading down to watch the launch. How about you guys?”

After a long moment and a watchful stare, the person holding the flashlight spoke. She was dark-skinned with her hair cut close like a soldier’s. She had hard eyes. And when she spoke, her voice was confident as steel. “You both about the right age,” she said, looking us up and down. “You been drafted yet? You don’t have to go. None of us has to. If you’re smart you’ll come with us.” Her voice was still firm, but there was sympathy in it. Almost pity. In spite of whatever compassion might have been there, she never let her eyes leave me as I moved closer to Tommy and placed my hand inside his pocket. Gannon’s gun was still there.

“Like my brother told you, we’re heading down to watch the launch,” I said.

The girl with the hard eyes barked a sharp laugh. “Is your map broken? Because you’re a long way from Florida.”

Tommy managed a smile. Then he squinted, looking over the group, and I could see that his brain had finally figured out what it was seeing. Now if only I could stop him before—“You’re dodgers, aren’t you?” Tommy asked, almost happily.

A tremble went through the group. The girl with the hard eyes seemed to harden even more. “And if we are?” she asked, the question bordering on a threat.

All over the country there had been groups of Embers running from the war. In some parts of the country it was becoming a rite of passage. The biggest case had been dubbed “The Dublin Disappearance.” Twenty-seven high school seniors simply didn’t show up for school one day. By the time the school and the parents found out about it, the kids had a three-day head start. They’d orchestrated it so that their parents had given them permission to go off on a weekend camping trip. But by Sunday night the kids weren’t back and then on Monday morning when time came for school, the kids still weren’t there.

It was late Monday afternoon when a package arrived at the school containing all of the students’ cell phones and all twenty-seven draft letters with the words NO THANK YOU scrawled across them. It had become the slogan of the movement, a polite refusal to be a part of things, a deference so polite that it seemed as though they were only turning down an offer of dessert at the end of a meal. All across the country NO THANK YOU began showing up in the empty beds of seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds who had been drafted.

It was just over two months ago—seventy-seven days, to be exact, which my memory always was—since The Dublin Disappearance.

In the beginning the story filled the news outlets. The people came on television and blamed the government, blamed the war, blamed the parents, blamed the students. There was no shortage of places to point. But when the days turned to weeks and the students still weren’t found, the concern shifted. They were called cowards and deemed “lacking in moral fortitude” by one of the pundits. “A generation of polite cowards” is what some people called them.

Slowly, compassion for frightened kids hardened into anger at cowardly brats.

More weeks came and went and a couple of the students were found. They were caught not far from the Canadian border by a pair of local hunters who had been chasing both deer and dodgers—their words. The pair was sent to jail and there they sat right up until one of them couldn’t take it anymore and decided that the war would be better. So his lawyer spoke to the judge and, sure enough, he went off to the war and died a miserable death but got called a hero for it.

Still, NO THANK YOU showed up spray-painted on walls, plastered on websites, written on abandoned draft notices and left in the middle of schools increasingly diminished by the war’s insatiable appetite. The three words, I understood, weren’t a refusal, but a plea.

“Where are you guys from?” Tommy asked, sounding as clueless and trusting as he always sounded.

“Nowhere,” the girl with the hard eyes said. “Just passing through.”

“Good,” I replied.

“You really headed to the launch?” someone behind the girl with the hard eyes asked.

“Yep,” Tommy replied brightly.

But I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl in the lead and she wouldn’t take her eyes off me. My hand was still in Tommy’s pocket, clamped around the handle of Gannon’s gun. I stared at the girl’s close-cropped hair, the eyes that didn’t seem to blink, only watch and wait, as if she had seen beyond the darkness surrounding them and was able to observe everything, maybe even the whole world, in one swift movement.

“You’ve already been to the war, haven’t you?” I asked.

The girl’s eyes narrowed, then relaxed. “Yeah,” she said.

“Tell me,” Tommy said, almost breathless. “Tell me how it was.”

“It’s a war,” the girl replied. “How could it ever be anything other than terrible?” Her eyes lowered and she was no longer looking at us. She was looking inward, remembering, perhaps. Tommy and I both wanted to know what she saw. There is always a foolish curiosity about war. So many writers and filmmakers have tried to tell us about it, so many veterans, poems, songs. The oldest stories are stories of war. But still, all of us who have never been there wonder how much of the stories is true.

“Really?” Tommy asked, a bit of awe in his voice. “And you made it back okay. You really came back okay.” He turned to me and pointed at the girl with the hard eyes. “You see? I told you. I told you!” Then he laughed and took my hand out of his pocket, making me let go of the weapon. “It’s all going to be okay,” Tommy said, but whether he was speaking of now or of the future was difficult to say.

“Did I mention that I got drafted?” Tommy blurted out.

“You don’t have to go,” one of the other teenagers said. Then, “Just say, ‘No Thank You.’” Their eyes cut from Tommy to me and back to Tommy, pleading.

Tommy dismissed them with his hand. “I’m going to go and come back and be okay.”

“Good for you,” the girl with the hard eyes said.

“You’ll see,” Tommy replied, and he turned to me as he said the words. Then he turned and looked back over his shoulder, as if he was able to see Gannon in the distance, still locked in that car on the side of the road. “But for now,” Tommy said, “my sister and I need to get going.”

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