thirty-one.
“Kismet.”
“Say again?” Jude shut the shed door behind him, Rigby’s metal detector in hand.
“Kismet,” Marsden said again as they rounded the back of the boardinghouse on their way to the covert. “It means fate, or destiny—things being preordained. Your brother being the one to start all that wild ginger growing in the covert owned by my family, how that led to all of this.”
“That kind of kismet means believing Rig was always going to kill himself, no matter what. I don’t know if I can ever believe that.”
And she didn’t want to believe that she’d always been meant to drive her father away, that Shine was meant to be what she was, that her own path was never in doubt.
“Kismet about Rigby coming here to help him deal with your mom’s dying, then,” she said. “Because I really, really love the idea of that—the covert not always meaning something is ending. Or how something ending means something else is maybe beginning.”
Jude’s speckled eyes glimmered in the sun as he looked at her and then away again and Marsden thought of forest fires.
She swore he blushed.
As they walked along the fence, Marsden watched him examine all the carvings left on the splintery wood. Messages like Think of your family and We’ll miss you and God will save you. Carvings of dates and names and crosses.
He touched one. The cross was particularly elaborate, his fingers tracing the carefully etched-out details. She wondered ruefully when the artist had managed to get it done, how fast he must have had to work to not be seen by anyone in the boardinghouse. Next, he touched a message about heaven. She knew he had Rigby on his mind, was so deep in thought that he seemed lost in himself, somewhere else. Marsden’s throat ached for him and for the grief that came off him in waves.
“The part about heaven being easiest to reach from the covert, how you have to die there after touching its soil so you don’t go to hell—do you believe it?” Jude’s voice was jagged, as uneven as the Indigo.
She didn’t know what to say. Yes, and it would settle him over Rigby’s choice, however much her opinion could mean. No, and she could ask herself forever what her father must have seen in the river to have called him there instead.
Suddenly, he dropped the metal detector into the grass. He took out his truck key and began to carve into the wood of the fence, the biggest unmarked expanse he could find.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Changing things up. What’s your favorite flower?”
She thought of his doodle for Wynn at lunch at the Burger Pit, his bouquet of tulips and lilies and daises, and smiled. People never just doodled on the covert’s fence, they lamented, or wished, or mourned—but now it seemed Jude was doing just that. Doodling. On a fence that went back generations.
“Roses?” he asked.
Marsden laughed. “No.”
“Too cheesy?”
“Kind of. And too . . . perfect, I think. How about—” She frowned. She didn’t know flowers by heart, the way she knew spices, and salts, and sugars (death, even, she supposed). They had to be in front of her for her to name them. Her mind went back to yesterday. “How about sunflowers?”
It wasn’t long before the blooms darted their way in between all the crosses and sayings about heaven. Jude stopped when he ran out of room, and he shook out his hand, its fingers gone tight from clutching his key. He’d added not just sunflowers, but also wavering lines of ivy, firework-like knots of dandelions gone to seed.
Finding a nail with the metal detector, Marsden had joined in, working on a different section of the fence. She’d scrawled nonsense—stick figures, tiny hearts, tic-tac-toe—and it was nearly cathartic how easy it’d been to mark up the covert that way. How she could almost forget how ancient the wood was, how heavy the years accumulated in it, the number of ghosts it’d seen into existence—it was just a fence, just a piece of a long-dead tree, and it had no real power.
“We might have just unleashed a monster, you know,” she said, shaking her own hand out, leaving the nail on a post to be picked up on their way back out.
He laughed. “What, there’s some kind of covert fence protector spirit? And I thought I’d heard all the stories.”
She smiled. “Once Wynn sees this, she’s going to want to do the same. We might be out here all summer, inscribing our way around the whole thing.”
“I can’t tell if you’re happy about that or not.”
She wasn’t sure, either. To normalize the covert was dangerous, somehow almost disrespectful. But maybe she’d been wrong to never try to break down its odd legends, to try to lessen their grip. “Ask me this time next week. If you still need to be around.”
Jude picked up the metal detector, brushed bits of grass from the sensor pad, and then looked at her. His expression was both amused and dead serious. “Like you said, this place is bigger than it looks. Sorry if I end up being here all summer.”
“Well, there’s shade in there, anyway.” Marsden averted her eyes—she had no clue what he might see in them. That she really didn’t mind so much, his coming by every day until the fall? That she also dreaded the idea of it, the proximity to his danger an abrasion on her nerves, working away at her heart? “Ready?”
They walked into the covert, and instantly the sunlight dimmed by degrees. The smell of ginger enveloped them as they headed to where they’d last left off in their search.
It didn’t take long for Marsden to spot the thin white slash of kitchen twine in the half-light. It was tied around the trunk of a tree, and she’d gone back to mark off how much they’d covered the other day. She’d realized afterward how easy it would be for them to lose track, to simply end up going over old ground again and again. Jude never would be finished, then, forever caught in the covert’s spell, its toy as much as she knew she was. It was a fact she couldn’t change even if she wanted to—the place was in her bones, a part of her before she was even born. As tragic as Rigby’s dying here was, it would eventually be crowded away by all the deaths still to come. And Jude could move on. He’d leave his grief behind. He’d go east, find somewhere else to belong, make a life. The covert would fade for him. But Marsden—she would continue to live it.
She was still teasing apart the knot in the string with her fingers when he called her name.
“What is it?” she called back, pulling at twine. “Hold on a second.”
Silence.
“Jude?” She looked up to see how he’d gone just a bit ahead, that she could just see most of his dark hair, the jut of one shoulder, some of the wide plane of his back through the foliage of the trees.
“Marsden . . .”
He sounded farther away than she would have expected, his voice almost an echo of itself. As though the covert could bend space the way it could time, could stretch feet into miles the same way it made nights last nearly forever.
Her stomach lurched. She could still see him, but—
“Jude, wait up—this knot, I tied it way too tight . . .”
She trailed off as she watched him slowly back up. One step, then two. The metal detector was still in his hand, but forgotten, about to be dropped.
He turned to face her, and that was how she knew.