Suddenly I am on the floor beside Nathaniel, my hands on his shoulders, my eyes locked with his. A moment later, he is in my arms. We rock back and forth in a vacuum, neither of us able to find words to say what we know is true.
36
Past the school playground, on the other side of the hill, in the forest-that's where the witch lives.
We all know about her. We believe. We haven't seen her, but that's a good thing, because the ones who see her are the ones who get taken away.
Ashleigh says the feeling you get when the wind climbs the back of your neck and you can't stop shivering; that's the witch coming too close. She wears a flannel jacket that turns her invisible. She sounds like leaves falling down.
Willie was in our class. He had eyes sunk so far in his head they sometimes disappeared, and he smelled like oranges. He was allowed to wear his Teva eandale even after it got cold out, and his feet would get muddy and blue, and my mother would shake her head and say, "See?" and I did-I saw, and I wished I could do it too. The thing was, one day Willie was sitting next to me at snack, dunking his graham crackers Into his milk until they all became a slushy mountain at the bottom . . . and the next day, he was gone. He was gone, and he never came back.
At the hiding spot under the slide, Ashleigh tells us that the witch has taken him. "She says your name, and after that, you can't help it, you'll do anything she says. You'll go anywhere she wants."
Lettie starts to cry. "She'll eat him. She'll eat Willie."
"Too late" Ashleigh says, and In her hand is a white, white bone.
It looks too small to come from Willie. It looks too small to come from anything that ever walked. But I know better than anyone what It is: I found it, digging under the dandelions near the fence. I was the one who gave it to Ashleigh.
"She's got Danny right now" Ashleigh says.
Miss Lydia told us during circle time that Danny was sick. We'd put his face up on the Who's Here board, flipped over to the sad side. After recess, we were all going to make him a card. "Danny's sick,"
I tell Ashleigh, but she just looks at me like I'm the dumbest pereon ever. "Did you think they would tell us the truth?" she says.
So when Miss Lydia isn't watching, we slip under the fence where the dogs and the rabbits sometimes get in-Ashleigh and Peter and Brianna and me, the bravest. We will save Danny. We will get him before the witch does.
But Miss Lydia finds us first. She makes us go inside and sit in Time Out and says we should never, never, ever leave the playground. Don't we know we could get hurt?
Brianna looks at me. Of course we know; it's why we left in the first place.
Peter starts to cry, and tells her about the witch, and what Ashleigh said. Miss Lydia's eyebrows come together like a fat black caterpillar. "Is this true?"
"Peter's a liar. He made the whole thing up," Ashleigh says, and she doesn't even blink.
That's how I know that the witch has already gotten to her.
TWO
Just so you know: if this ever happens to you, you will not be ready. You will walk down a street and wonder how people can behave as if the whole world has not been tipped on its axis. You will comb your mind for signs and signals, certain that one moment-aha!-will trip you like a twisted root. You will bang your fist so hard against the stall door in the public bathroom that your wrist will bruise; you'll start to cry when the man at the tollbooth tells you to have a nice day. You will ask yourself How come; you will ask yourself What if.
Caleb and I drive home with an elephant sitting between us. At least this is how it seems: this huge bulk driving us to our separate sides, impossible to ignore, and yet we both pretend we cannot see it. In the backseat, Nathaniel sleeps, holding a half-eaten lollipop given to him by Dr. Robichaud.
I am having trouble breathing. It is that elephant, again, sitting so close to me with one elbow crushing my chest. "He has to tell us who," I say finally, the words breaking free like a river. "He has to."
"He can't."
That is the issue, in a nutshell. Nathaniel is not able to speak, even if he wants to. He doesn't know how to read or write yet. Until he can communicate, there is no one to blame. Until he can communicate, this is not a case; this is just a heartache.
"Maybe the psychiatrist is wrong," Caleb says.
I turn in my seat. "You don't believe Nathaniel?"
"What I believe is that he hasn't said anything yet." He glances in the rearview mirror. "I don't want to keep talking about this, in front of him."
"Do you think that'll make it go away?"
Caleb doesn't respond, and there is my answer. "The next exit's ours," I say stiffly, because Caleb is still driving in the left lane.
