The Love That Split the World (2 page)

“When she returned, his lodge became her home too, and she began to spend her days with one particular tree that grew there. It was a tree with blossoms made of light so bright that they illuminated all of his land. The woman loved the tree—it made her feel less strange, less out of place—and she would sit under it and talk with all the spirits and with her dead father too. She loved it so much that once, late at night when everyone was sleeping, she went out and lay with it and became pregnant.

“Around that time, her husband grew sick, and none of the medicine people could heal him, but they all told him that the illness had been caused by his wife. He knew they were right; he’d never met a person as powerful as her. He asked them what he should do. Divorce didn’t exist there. The only death that had occurred was her father’s, and no one yet understood it. But the medicine people were wise, and they found a solution.

“‘Uproot the light tree,’ they told him, ‘and call her over to it, and trick her into falling into it. Then replace the tree, and your power will be restored.’

“That same day the sorcerer dug up the tree of light, but when he looked into the hole beneath it, he saw a whole other world below. He called to his wife, and when she came he said,
‘Look, lean over, there’s another world below us.’ She knelt beside the tree and peered down through the emptiness where the roots had been. At first she saw only darkness, but then, far below that, she saw blue, a shimmering bright blue that was
beautiful.
Full of hope and joy and dreams and the same kind of light that grew all through her tree. Here was the very source of all the light that had comforted her when she was lonely. She looked at her husband, smiling, and said, ‘Who ever would have guessed that the light tree was growing right over such a beautiful place?’

“He nodded. Then, carefully, he suggested, ‘I wonder what it’s like down there.’

“She said, ‘I wonder too.’

“He said, ‘Maybe someone could go down there and find out.’

“But his wife was shocked. ‘How could anyone do that?’ she asked.

“‘Jump,’ he said.

“‘Jump?’ she said, leaning over the hole again. She tried to guess how far below the new world was, but she had no idea. She’d never seen such a great distance, she was sure.

“‘Someone as brave as you could easily do it,’ her husband said. ‘Become a gentle breeze, or a petal or blossom from the light tree, or any number of things, and jump lightly and float down, or dive like a hawk, to that beautiful world below.’

“For a long minute she stared down into that glimmering blue, that endless blue of things she’d never seen, dreams she’d never dreamed. ‘I could jump,’ she said. ‘I could float. I could fall into the shining blue.’

“‘Yes, you could,’ her husband said. For another long
minute, she stayed there, kneeling and gazing and meditating. Then she stood and flexed her hard muscles, bent her knees, raised her arms up high over her head, and dove down through the hole in her world into the beautiful blue.

“For a long while, the sorcerer—for he was no longer her husband now—watched her body tumble through the darkness. The medicine people who had advised him made their way toward his lodge and the hole where he stood. ‘She jumped,’ he told them, and then they all lifted the tree back into place and covered the hole that led to the new world.

“And because she jumped, our world began,” Grandmother concludes.

“Depending on who you ask,” I say, sitting up.

Grandmother tips her head. “Depending on who you ask.” About a third of the stories she’s told me are creation stories of some type, and no two are identical. I don’t know who all the stories belong to, precisely, although I can usually make a decent guess when the names are Squirrel and Corn Woman or Abraham and Isaac. “You know . . .” Grandmother takes a deep breath and glances down at her hands. “There’s a reason I’ve told you all these stories, Natalie.”

I sit up again. It’s not like I haven’t asked her
a million times
: Why do you show up in my room in the middle of the night to tell me these things? “You said the stories
were
the reasons.”

She sighs, and her voice becomes weaker, gruffer. “The stories matter. Separate from us, they matter. We are part of them, Natalie. We’re much smaller than them. But there’s another reason too.”

I see tears lining her dark lashes, and suddenly she seems
so much younger. “What’s wrong?” I say. “Grandmother, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t want to scare you,” she says. “But you need to be prepared for what’s coming.”

Goose bumps prickle up along my arms as Grandmother buries her face in her hands, and I get out of bed to crouch in front of her. I’ve never seen her like this. I’ve only ever seen her the one way. She grips my hands hard, and her eyes find mine. “The stories,” she says. “It’s all in the stories.”

“What is?”

“Everything. The truth. The whole world, Natalie,” she says brusquely. “That girl jumped through the hole, not knowing what would happen, and the whole world got born. You understand that, right? The
whole world
.”

“I understand,” I lie, to calm her. Because I
am
scared now, and I need her to be the Grandmother I know, so I can be the child who’s soothed from her own fear of the dark.

“Good.” Her hand grazes my cheek. “Good. Because you have only three months.”

“What are you talking about—”

“Three months to save him, Natalie.”

“Save? Save
who
?”

Her eyes, immense and milky all of a sudden, dart over my shoulder, and her mouth drops open.
“You,”
she breathes. “Already—
you’re already here
.”

I look over my shoulder, neck alive with tingles, but no one’s there.

“Don’t be afraid, Natalie. Alice will help you,” Grandmother says. “Find Alice Chan.”

When I turn back, the rocking chair is empty, still nodding back and forth as though the ancient woman has just stood from it.

I’m alone again. I’m no longer the girl who talks to God.

2

I tumble out of bed and hurry to stop the shriek of my phone alarm. I don’t know how I got back to sleep after last night’s events, but apparently I did. The moonlight has faded, and the dim streetlights lining our cul-de-sac have popped on, sprinkling yellowy glares throughout the purple-blue of my dew-dampened windowpanes. The earliest birds and backfiring pickup engines are waking up, but the chirping crickets haven’t gotten the memo that this hellish hour is technically considered “morning.”

I flick the light switch of my walk-in closet, and Gus moos unappreciatively before turning over and going right back to sleep. I’m so jealous I throw a pillow at him, and would have immediately felt horribly guilty if not for the fact that he just lets out a snore and covers his eyes with one paw.

As exhausted as I am, I still can’t shake the fear left over
from last night. For as long as I can remember, Grandmother’s been a force of calm in my life. I mean, her stories don’t tend to be happy or calming by any means, but her presence has always made me feel safe. Until last night.

What could she have been talking about?

My late-night Google trail of “Alice Chan” led to a dead end. It would seem that half the human population is composed of Alice Chans, each one less obviously significant than the last.

Three months to save him.
I shake my head as if to clear the words.

I slip on a fitted black T-shirt dress and pull a denim jacket from a hanger on the top rack. It may be eighty degrees and ninety-nine percent humidity outside, but with Principal Grant in menopause, the school’s temperature is completely
unpredictable. It’s best to be prepared. I survey the neat rows of heels that used to do something for me but now seem about as necessary as a pubic wig, and instead grab a pair of boots before walking back into my room.

Two of my walls are painted a ghastly orange, the other two a high-gloss black: Ryle High School’s colors. If that weren’t bad enough, one of the black walls has our mascot—the Raider, a one-eyed pirate with two swords crossed behind his head—taking up its majority. My bedding is white, and so are the tea-candle lantern and antique lamp on my desk. When I have headaches those are the three focal points I have to choose from, unless I feel like lying down inside my closet.

Mom and Dad decorated the room for me while I was away at dance camp the summer before seventh grade and already zealously looking forward to high school. Obviously the
garish school-spirit color scheme was the best thing ever, until about a year ago, when I realized I had eyeballs, and it became just about the worst thing ever. With a better sound system and a few more Black Eyed Peas albums, my bedroom could give Guantanamo Bay a run for its money.

In the years since the original Makeover from Hell, I’ve also added my own touches: corkboards covered in notes from friends, shadow boxes full of dance team ribbons and medals, black-and-orange pompoms stuffed behind both my desk and my dresser, a dozen or so picture frames capturing carnivals and football games and dances.

There I am, a million times over, smiling back at myself: same coarse dark hair, deep brown eyes, and dark skin; same square face and high cheekbones. There I am kissing Matt Kincaid, for the four consecutive years I kissed Matt Kincaid. Standing in the gymnasium in the dead center of the dance team’s middle row, with all the other girls of perfectly average height. Hugging Megan and making that godforsaken
Charlie’s Angels
pose, in a completely nonironic way that can never be undone, all over Gray Middle School.

Since Grandmother disappeared, I’ve felt less and less like the girl in the photos, and more and more like I needed to get out of here. I quit the dance team, quit Matt, and ever since getting in to Brown, have started to quit Kentucky altogether. And now, three months away from my grand escape and new start, Grandmother’s visit has everything feeling messy again.

“NAT—JACK—COCO—BREAKFAST!” Mom shouts up from the kitchen, and my stomach flip-flops as I pass the rocking chair and head downstairs.

I’m usually the last one out of my room in the morning. Coco, being the very definition of efficiency, is always first to the breakfast table, doubling back upstairs a few minutes later to hurry Jack along as she sounds off a checklist of things he needs for school, while simultaneously texting, braiding her hair, or applying mascara. Without her, Jack would probably routinely walk out of the house without pants, and honestly, he’d also probably manage to have a pretty good day.

Downstairs, Jack has a plate full of only bacon, which he’s shoveling into his mouth with a fork. I’m pretty sure his eyes are closed. Across from him, Coco is texting over a bowl of fruit, her pretty blue eyes lined perfectly in clean layers of eyeliner and eye shadow. She looks exactly like Mom, except for her angular nose, which comes from Dad. I’ve always wondered what that must be like, to look like our parents.

One excellent thing about being adopted is that you always get to worry you’ll end up accidentally dating someone you share a gene pool with. If I were fully Native American, I wouldn’t have to think about that in a mostly white town like Union, but they tell me my biological father was white, so that complicates things.

Mom looks up from the stove, and she clamps a hand over her mouth and gasps like her sleeve’s just caught on fire. “Oh, honey. Look at you. You’re so beautiful.” She starts shaking out her loose strawberry blond waves as if it helps to fight back emotion, then holds out her arms. I shuffle forward reluctantly into the hug. “I can’t believe it’s your last day of high school! I remember the day we brought you home like it was yesterday.”

“Yeah, I was a real crybaby.”

“Oh, stop it, you were not. You were so quiet and so curious. That whole first night we just stayed awake looking at you, and you just looked back at us and didn’t make a sound—”

“Mom,” Jack says from the table.

“We knew you were special, and now look at what a smart, talented—”

“Mom, I think something’s on fire,” Coco says, without glancing up from her phone.

“What?” Mom spins back to the stove, immediately harried by the blackening omelet caked to her cast-iron skillet.
“Shit.”

“I didn’t know you spoke French, Mom,” I say.

“Did you hear Mom say ‘shit’?” Jack asks Coco, his mouth full of more bacon.

“Yeah, she’s so weird,” Coco answers flatly. They’re polar opposites—Coco the goal-oriented perfectionist type and Jack the goofy, go-with-the-flow jock—and yet they’ve always been inseparable. I guess that’s what cohabitation in a womb for nine months does.

Mom waves a dishrag at the smoke plume. “Give me five minutes. I’ll make you another one.”

I pour myself a mug of coffee and step through the glass-paneled door onto the deck, where Dad stands, drinking coffee in his long-sleeved denim shirt, despite the hot morning mist. “Morning,” I say.

He flinches in surprise before turning back to me and ruffling my hair. “How you doin’, sugar cube?” I shrug, and Dad sets his mug down on the railing, folding his arms. “Nightmares?”

Dad has this way of knowing things, at least when it comes to me and horses, without understanding the nitty-gritty of
how
or
why,
but he won’t pry. I want to tell him everything, but I can’t speak, and I suddenly realize why: I’m terrified it’s him—what if it’s Dad I’m supposed to save?

I shake my head and lean out over the shadowy yard. Dad takes a long sip. “You remember those tantrums you used to have? I don’t know why, but I was just thinking about those. You’d lie down and scream and kick and bite and sob, no matter where we were.”

I sigh. “Some things never change.”

The sun peeks through the woods beyond our yard, turning everything golden at the fringes, even Dad’s brown eyes. It used to make me so happy when people who didn’t know any better would tell me I had his eyes. When I was little I thought maybe mine were the same shade as his because I really did belong so wholly with and to Dad.

“You know, when a horse bucks or bites, it’s just frustrated communication.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

He rubs the back of my neck like I’m a filly. “If you need to talk, I’ll always listen.” He kisses the crown of my head, then turns to go inside.

“Dad?”

He turns back. “Yeah?”

It would be a relief to tell him about Grandmother’s warning, but I can’t get the words out. Sometimes it’s so hard to speak, scary even. My heart rate goes up, my hands shake, and it feels easier to keep things in the dark than to drag them into the light. “Be careful,” I manage.

Though he furrows his thick chestnut eyebrows, he doesn’t
ask any questions. “For you, sugar cube, always.”

Three months to save him,
and I don’t even know who. I’ve got to find Alice Chan.

I skip lunch and slip off to the bathroom, where I plug in my dying phone and resume my frantic Googling. I click through every result I can (Alice Chan the Local Dentist, Alice Chan the Criminal Lawyer Two Towns Over, Alice Chan the Professor at NKU) until the bell rings, then run back to my locker. I’m getting my things for class when I feel a pair of hands slide down around my eyes. “Guess who.”

“Harry Styles?”

“So close it’s insane.”

“Okay, give me a clue.”

“I’m one of your biggest fans.”

“I’m having a hard time, because the only thing that’s coming to mind other than Harry Styles is the ghost of River Phoenix, and I wouldn’t be able to feel his hands.”

Matt uncovers my eyes and leans against the locker beside mine, smiling that perfect golden-boy smile that not even the best orthodontist could’ve faked. His sandy hair’s pushed up off his forehead, and he’s sporting his football jersey. “Natalie Cleary, has anyone ever told you you’re really weird?”

“I think at some point that assessment even became Kentucky state law, which is partly why I’m going to college in Rhode Island.”

He sticks out his bottom lip. “I’m going to miss your weird.”

“Only because you were born without any.”

“Probably.” He holds my gaze for a little too long, and his fair skin starts to flush. We’ve been broken up for nearly a year, and we’ve both done our fair share of exploring since, but sometimes those old feelings seem ready to resurface.

As if prompted by my subconscious, which definitely knows I do
not
want to end up married to Matt Kincaid, living on his farm in Union, Kentucky, I break the silence with “Although your mom only eats beige food. That’s pretty weird.”

His forehead creases. “What are you talking about?”

“She told me she hates anything that’s green. She also once said the sentence ‘I don’t like fruit.’ ”

“Lots of people feel that way.”

“Yeah, people under the age of ten.”

“And, like, lots of people in general.”

I shrug.

“Anyway,” he continues, “I was just gonna see if you were going to Senior Night.”

“I am, in fact, a senior.”

“But you’re not on any teams anymore.”

“Yeah . . . ?”

“And you and I broke up.”

“Wait—what? When?”

He rolls his eyes. “So you’re coming?”

“I’m coming.”

“Okay, cool,” he says, smiling. “We should do something after. For old times’ sake.”

“Old times?” I say suspiciously. It’s not like Matt and I totally stopped hanging out when we broke up, but ever since we relapsed into old habits six months ago, for the third time,
I’ve made it my solemn duty never to be alone with him outside school walls. The kiss itself had been fine, but the bottom line was, no matter how much I didn’t want to ruin our friendship, I did
not
want to keep dating Matt, and I was pretty sure he
did
want to keep dating me.

“I’m not sure ‘old times’ is what we should aim for, Matt.”

“
Old
, old times,” he clarifies.

Ah. That would put us squarely back in fifth grade, the dark ages before Matt Kincaid picked me to be his girlfriend and popular-girl counterpart. Even back then he was socially magnetic, the kid everyone wanted to be around, and his attention made me feel like the funniest, most interesting human on the planet.

Megan was already close with Matt, and soon he and I were friends too. By seventh grade, his glances became bashful, lingering, and that made me feel like the sun. It was another year before he kissed me, and four more until we broke up. By then, Grandmother had left, and I felt like a supernova mid–gravitational collapse, all the things I’d thought made me
me
falling away rapidly.

Matt tried to understand why I was withdrawing, why dance and popularity and school spirit had started to nauseate me. Truthfully, it wasn’t any of those things in and of themselves, and it wasn’t Matt himself either; it was what all those things brought out in me—the way that for years I did things I didn’t want to do, laughed at things that bothered me, went to parties I had no interest in because the thing that seemed most essential for my survival and happiness was being seen as Like Everyone Else in Union. Once I stopped fighting to be that person,
Matt and I started fracturing. I ended things before they could get any worse, thus sentencing us to a life of perpetual though tolerable limbo.