Page 54 of Broken Things

The song of the birds for mirth,

One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on earth.”

“Dorothy Frances Gurney,” he finishes.

For a minute we just stand there, looking out over the water. The ocean is calm tonight and crawls soundlessly over the gravel on the beach. The moon cuts itself into tiny slivers on the waves.

“Not a bad place to be dead,” Abby says. “You know, relatively speaking.”

Owen hoists himself up onto the stone wall. For a second he stands there, silhouetted, his hair silvered by the moon, and I think that he too could be an angel—wingless, bound to earth. Then, without a word, he drops.

We all crowd forward to the wall, leaning over to see the way the land abruptly drops away, as if someone has just excavated it with a giant scoop.

This side of the seawall is six, maybe eight feet tall. In places it has been shored up with netting. Owen has landed between the rocks that go tumbling down toward the beach, splintering slowly into smaller and smaller bits until they’re sucked into the waves to become sand.

“What are you doing?” Brynn whispers, even though there’s no one around to hear us. But it feels wrong to shout over somebody’s grave. I remember how Summer used to tell us to hold our breath when the bus went past the Episcopal church on Carol and its narrow yard, brown with churned-up mud and patchy grass and the accidental look of its crooked graves. She said that the dead were always angry and the sound of breathing infuriated them with jealousy, that they would come for us in our sleep ifwe weren’t careful. And now she’s buried there among the other tumbledown gravestones, in a cheap casket her foster parents picked out, cinched and stitched and stuffed into clothing she would have hated.

Another vengeful spirit. Another soldier for the angry dead.

Owen doesn’t answer. He’s still picking his way between the rocks, some as large as golf carts, moving parallel to the seawall. For a moment he disappears in the shadows. Then he reappears, pedaling up one side of an enormous rock, keeping low and using his hands for purchase, until he reaches a surface beaten flat by the wind and can stand.

“Owen!” Brynn tries again to get his attention, but he ignores her.

Now he’s feeling along the seawall, like a blind person trying to get his bearings in a new room, working his fingers through the bright orange netting that’s doing its best to girdle the wall in place. In places whole chunks of the wall are missing, gap-toothed black spaces crusted with lichen and moss. Other portions of the wall have been recently rebuilt. The stone is newer, a flat gray that reflects the moon. I wonder how many years it will take before the wind and the ocean swallow the whole thing.

Owen has gotten an arm through the netting. From here, it looks like the wall has his arm to the elbow and is sucking on him like a bone. Slowly, as he works it, one of the larger stones shimmies outward. A final grunt, and then he crouches, freeing something from beneath the tight foot of the netting. With his shoulder, he shoves the stone back into place.

Then he drops down to the beach and darts toward us through the shadows, tucking the plastic-wrapped object under his arm like a football. He has to find a new way up to us. The rocks, knuckled against one another, form a rudimentary staircase. Even so, he has a hard time getting back over the wall.

“Here.” He passes up a small box, straitjacketed in plastic and duct tape, before heaving himself over the wall, teetering for a second on his stomach with his legs still dangling over the beach before Wade gives him a hand. He sits up, breathing hard, his face sheened with sweat, his black eye worse than ever. “Go ahead,” he says. “Open it.”

I kneel in the grass. The plastic is wet and slicked with dirt. A beetle tracks ponderously across its surface. I flick it into the grass. My fingers are clumsy and I realize they’re shaking.

“Let me.” Brynn shoves me aside. We’ve all gone quiet. Even the wind has disappeared. There’s no sound at all but the tape protesting as she pries it loose, revealing the lockbox, the secret that Owen spent five years protecting. Even Brynn hesitates before she thumbs the latches loose.

Inside, the pages have been rolled and bent to fit the box. They are, miraculously, dry. For a second, I imagine they still smell faintly of apple shampoo. Brynn loosens the whole bundle of them—dozens and dozens of pages—smoothing them out on a thigh.

Under the moonlight, the title page plays tricks with the eye and seems itself to be glowing.

Return to Lovelorn, it says.

Summer was walking alone in the arena because her friends were lame and ditched her. The tournament was over. When no one was around, the arena seemed much bigger. Like a big, empty eggshell. There were still massive bloodstains everywhere in the dirt.

And then she heard a voice. A whisper, really.

“Don’t be afraid.”

She spun around, totally freaked, because obviously whenever someone tells you not to be afraid, well... it never works. For a second she didn’t see anyone. Then she saw a flicker, and she blinked, and she saw a shadow like a single brush of dark paint.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” the Shadow said. It was smaller than Summer expected. Friendlier, too.

—FromReturn to Lovelornby Summer Marks

Brynn

Now

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