Write the Terms Yourself

Detective Zainab Hamid doesn't sit down. That's how you know it's bad.

She stands in the middle of your Sellwood apartment, rain dripping off her coat onto the rug, and looks at the ferns. There are a lot of ferns. Maidenhair on the bookshelf, a bird's nest on the radiator, the big staghorn on its board above the couch, sulking because you haven't repotted it.

"Six weeks," she says. "Your sister's phone last pinged at a cell tower near Zigzag. Her car's gone. Her bank account hasn't moved. And you're the only person she called that night."

"I've told you what she said."

"Tell me again."

You fold your arms so she won't see your hands. "She said the moon was beautiful. She said she was finally going to stay. I thought she meant at a friend's cabin."

"Stay where?"

"I don't know." That part is true. It's the only part you can say without sounding insane.

Hamid studies you for a long moment. She's somewhere past forty, sharp-eyed, tired in the way of people who are good at their jobs. "Ms. Ferncastle. You raised her. Since she was sixteen, right? After your parents."

"Yes."

"So if your little sister ran off with somebody, you'd know. And if something happened to her, and you were involved, I'd find out." She sets a card on the counter beside your seed trays. "Call me when you're ready to tell me the rest."

The door clicks shut behind her.

You stand there until her car pulls away. Then you sit on the floor, because your legs want you to, and stare at the staghorn fern.

The rest. The rest is that Peony has believed in fairies since she was six. The rest is that for months this spring she drove up the mountain every full moon and came home at dawn with leaves in her hair and a smile she wouldn't explain. The rest is that the last thing she said on the phone was I love you, Ava, don't be mad, in a voice like someone standing at the edge of a high dive.

You can't tell a detective that.

You repot the fern because you have to do something with your hands.

It's a stupid, careful job. Staghorns grow on boards, mounted, their roots tucked into a wad of sphagnum. Peony gave you this one three birthdays ago and named it Gerald. You lift Gerald off the wall, peel back the old moss, and your fingers hit something hard and wrapped in plastic.

A freezer bag. Inside it, a notebook.

You know the notebook. Green cloth cover, Peony's terrible handwriting, doodles of mushrooms in the margins. She carried it everywhere this spring. You thought it held song lyrics.

Your hands are shaking when you open it.

The first page is a hand-drawn map. Highway 26, the turn at Zigzag, the forest road toward Lost Lake, a logging spur, a star. Next to the star: hawthorn, very old, ring of white caps, you'll know it.

The second page is a few lines, written carefully, the way she used to write her spelling words.

Stand in the ring at moonrise on the full moon. Put your hand on the hawthorn. Say: Hawthorn, hold the door. King under the hill, I have come to bargain.

The third page is a letter.

Ava. If you found this, it's because you finally repotted Gerald, which means you're sad and stalling, which means I've been gone a while. I'm okay. I promise I'm okay. I can't explain on paper. Come find me. But listen to me, for once in your life: don't let anybody else write the bargain. Don't agree to anything you didn't word yourself.

And underneath, underlined twice so hard the pen tore through:

Write the terms yourself.

You read it four times. Then you check the moon calendar taped inside your kitchen cabinet, the one you use for planting.

Full moon. Tonight.

Highway 26 is a black ribbon of rain. You drive with the wipers on high and Peony's notebook on the passenger seat like a passenger.

You pack the way a scientist packs. Headlamp. Rain shell. Pruning saw, because you always carry the pruning saw. Sample bags. A thermos of coffee. A pen. Two pens, in case.

The forest road turns to gravel. The gravel turns to mud. The rain thins and stops, and the clouds tear apart above the Douglas firs, and the moon comes up enormous and white over the shoulder of the mountain.

You park where the logging spur ends and walk.

You almost miss it. Then the trees open into a small clearing, silver with moonlight, and in the middle of it stands the oldest hawthorn you have ever seen.

You know hawthorns. Crataegus, the rose family, white flowers in May, red haws in fall. This one shouldn't exist in this forest. Its trunk is as wide as a car, twisted like wrung cloth, its branches black and thick with thorns as long as your finger. Around it, in a perfect circle, grows a ring of small white mushrooms that glow faintly, the way some fungi do on rotting wood. Except there's no rotting wood here. Only the circle.

"Okay," you say out loud, because your voice helps. "Okay, Peony."

You step over the mushrooms. The air inside the ring is warmer. It smells like crushed green leaves and something sweet underneath, like honey left in the sun.

You put your hand on the hawthorn. The bark is warm too. Warm like skin.

You open the notebook. You don't need to; you've memorized it. You say it anyway, reading it, because if you're going to lose your mind you want to do it accurately.

"Hawthorn, hold the door. King under the hill, I have come to bargain."

Nothing happens.

An owl calls somewhere. Water drips from the firs. You feel ridiculous, standing in a mushroom circle at midnight with your palm pressed to a tree, and under the ridiculousness, something worse: the sense of a door closing on the last place your sister might be.

Then the bark moves under your hand.

You jerk back. The trunk of the hawthorn is splitting, not breaking, opening, the twisted wood unwinding like a slow breath until there is a tall black seam in it, and through the seam pours light the color of new leaves.

A man steps out of the tree.

He's tall, and dressed in black, and the light behind him outlines a crown on his head made of nothing but thorns. His hair is black. His face is pale and so beautiful it reads as a threat. Cheekbones like something carved, a mouth that looks like it has never once smiled by accident, and eyes the bright, impossible green of hawthorn leaves in spring.

He looks at you the way you'd look at a storm you've been watching on the radar for a week.

"Go home," he says, "Ava Ferncastle."

He knows your name.