He was innocent once. He was not innocent anymore. He’d finally made himself worthy of his cell.
The house gave a last shriek and sank into itself. The screeching and rumbling was terrifying, but the silence that followed was worse. Zoe’s mother stood and rushed into the rubble, desperate to find her son’s body—desperate to hold it in her arms.
Dervish strutted toward her.
“Tell me, woman,” he called out, “are you aware of who it is that caused you all this pain? Are you aware of who savaged your family and brought down your house?”
Zoe’s mother was searching frantically through the wreckage. She stopped for a moment. She straightened up, and turned.
“He did,” she said.
She was pointing at X.
Dervish smiled, his tiny rodent’s teeth flashing.
“A wise answer,” he said. “Perhaps you can convince him to return to the Lowlands before I must extinguish your heartbeat, too.”
“Why don’t you just take him yourself?” cried Zoe’s mother. “Why don’t you take him right now instead of—instead of all this?”
“A superlative question!” said Dervish. “FINALLY I meet someone intelligent! Our friend X must come willingly so that I know he has learned his lesson well—and truly been brought to heel. Also, madam, I will not lie to you: ‘all this,’ as you call it, is more fun.”
Dervish motioned to the other lords. They swirled toward him in unison. They raced over the snow toward the decimated sea of trees that used to be a forest—Zoe would have said they zoomed—and vanished one by one.
X drew close to Ripper, his face a picture of agony.
“I will not be the cause of more savagery,” he said. “I will return to the Lowlands as the lords demand, but first I must ask a final kindness of you.”
“I will do anything you ask, even if it involves mayhem or murder,” said Ripper. She thought for a second, then added, “Especially if it does.”
“I ask only that you carry a message to Zoe,” said X. “Tell her the Lowlands will not hold me long. Tell her that, even as I grovel at the lords’ feet, I will secretly do the very things I am promised are impossible. I will find my parents—and I will find a way back to her. Whatever portion of ‘forever’ I am allowed, I mean to spend with her.”
X spoke a few more words, and then Ripper pulled him into a sorrowful hug.
Behind them, Zoe’s mother continued to search for Jonah’s body. They joined her without speaking, picking miserably through the rubble. Every minute that passed without finding him was torture. Zoe’s mother moaned in an almost animal way. Once again, X tried to block out the sound. He listened for something, anything else. He heard grouse flapping around a shattered stump. He heard deer politely crunching through the snow.
And then, listening harder, listening deeper, he heard a sort of rustling beneath the ruins. It was so soft that Zoe’s mother had not noticed it.
The noise was coming from belowground—from where the basement used to be.
X staggered toward the sound.
Ripper followed. She heard it now, too.
Finally, Zoe’s mother turned, as well. In her daze, she’d picked up a twisted hanger and a shattered skateboard. She seemed not to know why she was holding them.
She dropped them and waded through the wreckage to what was left of the basement stairs. They were blocked with crumbling plaster, mangled kitchen chairs, a ruined floor lamp, and a hundred other fragments of the Bissells’ lives.
She and X and Ripper hurled everything to the side. They cleared a path down. They were in the middle of what used to be the basement—it was just a concrete pit now, open to the sky—when they found the source of the noise.
It was coming from the empty old freezer that lay on the floor.
They watched as the lid creaked open. They watched as three trembling beings emerged in exactly this order: two black dogs and the pale little boy who had saved them.
twenty-three
Zoe emerged from the woods and hiked the twisting ribbon of road back toward the beach. She was so numb she didn’t feel the cold. She was so shell-shocked she couldn’t think, beyond wishing—as she had since she was younger than Jonah even—that the cold months weren’t always so snowy and so long. After Bert had gotten senile and absolutely everything seemed to tick him off, he’d liked to say that winter just didn’t know when to shut up.
She passed the spot where the truck had been parked on the shoulder of the road. It was gone now, the only evidence of its existence two muddy ruts in the snow. The truck must have been her father’s. As she walked, she said a silent prayer that she’d never see him again. She remembered what Banger had said to her at the hot springs: “You can’t do what I did to my family and expect them to forgive you … Best thing would be if they decided I was just a bad dream.”
Jonah and their mother deserved to heal.
So did she.
When Zoe got to the beach, she stood awhile and stared down at the row of huts on their stilts: yellow, red, blue. The tide was out, which gave the beach a desolate look. The birds were gone, too. They’d pulled the plastic bags out of the red hut, down the white ladder, and onto the rocks, where they’d torn them apart and feasted on the remains of Zoe and X’s breakfast: French toast, onion rings, chocolate cake.
A raw wind curled in from the ocean. Zoe zipped her coat up to her throat, and headed down to the water in the dark, her feet click-clacking over the loose bed of stones. She rounded up the garbage at the base of the hut. It was gross and cold and scattered everywhere. The plastic bags had filled with air and sailed down the beach. She managed to catch one and stuff it into a pocket. The second one floated out over the water before she could get to it. She didn’t feel like walking into the surf, even in her boots. She watched it go.