All the Stars in the Sky

  "Where are you going?"

  He looked over at me. Through the picture window behind him, the empty highway lit up in the headlights of a passing car. We stared at each other until the road went dark again.

  "Don't say anything to Mom," he said.

  "Don't go into the woods, Reed. You always come home all weird."

  "It's all the same," Reed said quietly, walking to the door. He pulled it open and stood there watching me for a few seconds, and then he said: "All the woods are the same, here or at school. It's all the same. Don't worry about it, Nathan." And he stepped outside, shutting the door.

  *

  Mom got up in the middle of the night to find me sitting in the blue light of the TV screen.

  "Where's your brother?" She asked.

  "You know where he is," I said.

  She went into the kitchen and flipped the light on. "I wish he'd stay inside."

  "He told me to go to bed."

  "Yeah, well," said Mom, coming back into the living room. "I'm going to wait up for him this time." She sat down on the couch with a bag of chips. "I need to talk to him."

  "What about?"

  "You know what. Go on to bed. You don't want to be up when he gets here."

  “Why does it matter?” I asked. “He always comes home.”

  “So far,” Mom said quietly. She narrowed her eyes at me in the semi-darkness and said, “I worry about him.”

  I sighed and stood up to go to bed. “Let him run away, Mom.”

  “If he runs away…” Her voice trailed off. I looked back at her, and her eyes were so far away that I hardly recognized her.

  “What?”

  There was a long silence, full of all the things she wanted to say and couldn’t. Finally, she took a ragged breath and laughed a little. “He was born in the woods, Nathan.”

  “What? Who was?”

  “Reed. I was in the woods when I had him. It was the first thing he saw. We almost died out there, he and I.”

  I sat back down and waited for her to continue.

  She wiped a tear from her eye and laughed again, this time a sick, almost crazy laugh. “It’s no wonder he goes out there all the time,” she said.

  “It must seem like home to him,” I said, and that made her eyes go glassy. Mom stared through me, with one corner of her mouth twisted down.

  “Go to bed, Nathan,” she said coldly, so I did.

  *

  I woke up to yelling.

  "You need to stay inside when you're home!"

  "I just want to go to bed, Mom."

  "I won't have you going out there when you're home. You might as well stay gone."

  "Mom, I wish you'd take your pills."

  Reed's footsteps were heavy on the floor outside my room. He slammed his bedroom door shut behind him. I didn't get up right away this time. I waited until I heard the bathroom door open and the overhead fan turn on. I crept out into the hallway and peeked in to see Mom holding her prescription bottle, frowning and reading the label.

  *

  I overheard them talking the next morning.

  "I just don't want Nathan to get any ideas. You can mess up your own life all you want, but I want Nathan to be able to do something with himself."

  "What's the point, Mom?"

  "Don't say that. There's still hope for him." She took a sip of her coffee, and I heard him chuckle.

  "There's no hope for anyone anymore," he said to her.

  "I mean it, you leave him out of it."

  They stopped talking when I came into the kitchen.

  "Leave me out of what?"

  Mom sighed but neither of them said anything.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER THREE

  One night, Reed didn't come home at all, so we went out to look for him. We passed quiet, dark houses full of sleeping people.

  "I can't even imagine where he's gotten to," Mom said, gripping the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles were white. "Damn it," she muttered.

  We drove around town and out to the park with its swing sets and seedy cruising spots. Coming around a curve in the road, we saw him stumble naked out of the woods, his eyes huge. Mom slammed on the brakes and we both sat staring at him, his body illuminated in the beams of the headlights, filtered through dust and particles. He blinked at us with his chest heaving, and then he started to laugh. Mom threw the car door open and stepped out, huffing. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of the road.

  "Jesus, Reed. Holy shit," she said. "Get in the car. What's wrong with you?"

  "I went for a walk, Mom. Cut it out." He laughed as he pushed past Mom and yanked the back door open. "I needed to get out of the house."

  Mom poked her head in through the driver's door. "Where are your clothes?"

  "I don't need any clothes."

  "Jesus fucking Christ, Reed," Mom said again, pushing the back door shut and dropping down into the driver's seat. "You nearly gave me a heart attack."

  "Sorry," he said. Mom slammed her door and started the engine, letting it roar in the silence of the park.

  "You want to catch your death out here?" She demanded, and he started to laugh again. He laughed all the way home, with Mom clutching the steering wheel, white-knuckled.

  Back home, Reed collapsed onto the couch, laughing. Mom went right for his room, and I just stood there, staring at him. He was disgusting, dirty, and ridiculous. His eyes looked far away, focused on nothing, like they'd gone out, black as a bug's eyes.

  Mom came out of the hallway as the phone started to ring and heaved a hoodie and some pajama pants at him. "Put some clothes on, Reed." She went into the kitchen. "Yes?" She said into the phone.

  Reed finally stopped laughing and just sat there staring at the wall with the hoodie in his lap and the pants on the floor.

  "No, Jordan never came over," Mom was saying into the phone. There was a silence, and Reed giggled a little. "No, but I'll definitely call you if he does." Mom hung up emerged from the kitchen, hands on her hips. "What is it now?"

  "What?" Reed asked.

  "Jordan's mom said he told her he was coming here."

  "Weird," Reed said quietly.

  Mom stared at Reed for a long time, and he finally started getting dressed. "You need to think about the people around you," she told him.

  "I do, Mom."

  She sighed and went back into the kitchen. "He had better be okay," she said.

  "He's a smart kid," Reed mumbled, and he looked up at me as he pulled the hood over his head, his face suddenly full of shadows. "He'll figure it out."

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  CHAPTER FOUR

  The night before he was supposed to go back to school, Reed went out again. I followed him out the door.

  "Stay in there, Nathan."

  "I want to see what's out there," I told him.

  "There's nothing. I told you, it's a bunch of trees."

  "Get back in here," Mom yelled from the house.

  "If there's nothing out there, why do you keep going back?"

  We stared at each other for a few minutes. "Alright, fine," he said, and Mom slammed the door. The lights in the house went off. We started walking around the back of the house toward the tree line. The yard was a vast, white wasteland. "Just don't be afraid. That's the important thing."

  I stumbled over the dips in the ground as we got closer to the trees. "What would I be afraid of? It's not like I'm out here alone. Anyway, it's just trees," I said, but even as I said it, I could feel them watching me.

  "Come on," Reed said, breaking into a run toward the tree line, and I struggled to keep up.

  "Wait, don't run," I called to him, but he was gone.

  In the woods, the sky was swallowed by the dark frozen canopy overhead. I saw him for a second, darting between two tree trunks. "Catch up, kid," he said, and I heard his laugh echoing in the distance.

  I hurried toward where I'd seen him, snagging my parka on a branch. I struggled to keep up. I saw him her
e and there, for a few seconds at a time, and every time I thought I was closer, he was further away. Then, I was alone. The moonlight had almost no power where I stood.

  "Hey kid," he said, right in my ear, and I jumped.

  "I almost peed my pants," I told him, and he laughed. I heard his boots crunching through snow around me.

  "Keep up, we're almost there."

  "What do we do when we're there?"

  "Oh, you'll see." He laughed again, and then he was gone.

  I kept going for a long time, with my face freezing and my corneas frosting over in the dark night air. "Reed, I want to go home."

  "I'm over here," he said, his voice echoing far away. I couldn't even tell what direction it was coming from.

  "I'm going back," I called to him. "I'm too cold." I heard his laughter echoing in the distance, then all around me, everywhere, and then it faded. The stars were gone. The world was gone. I was alone, and no one would ever be able to find me here.

  I stood and listened, but I didn't hear anything else, so I turned and started back the way I'd come. I didn't know if it was really the right way, though. I walked until I thought I would collapse and freeze over in the snow, and eventually I did collapse. I fell down into the snow, letting it fall over my body, and I made a snow angel.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I woke up with my veins stalled and I started screaming.

  "Don't move, now. Everything's fine," Reed said, but it wasn't Reed, it was someone I didn't know. His voice sounded like it was underwater, echoing in waves of pain, crushing my lungs to dust.

  I couldn't feel my body. I tried to move my legs and pain was all there was. My eyes focused just as I was coming out of the woods, face up, with the stars in the sky looking down on me. I remember looking up at them and whispering "Help me, I'm dying. Help me."

  I wasn't really aware of what was happening until I was in the ambulance and Mom was holding my hand.

  "I told him to leave you out of it, god damn it," she whispered, and her face went blurry. "I didn't want you to know."

  At the hospital, Mom fell asleep in the chair by my bed, and I watched TV until she woke up.

  "Oh jeez," she said, wiping drool from the corner of her mouth. She looked over at me. "I guess I fell asleep."

  "Did Reed come home?"

  She smiled and looked over at the window, then up at the TV. "You want some Oreos or something?" she asked me.

  "I can't eat right now."

  "I told him not to drag you out there," she said softly, her eyes watching the TV.

  "He didn't drag me anywhere," I told her, and she sighed.

  Reed didn't come home. At first, I thought he went back to college, but he never came home again for any other breaks. Eventually, I realized he was gone. I spent hours looking out at the woods, thinking about him.

  I started going out to the woods on my own. At first, I just went far enough to feel the branches close behind me, standing with my eyes closed and my hands balled into fists, waiting for the silence to kill me. I could hear the blood rushing through my veins, my cells dividing. Colors danced on the backs of my eyelids. Eventually, I went all the way in, and I found the place where Reed was taking me that night. It was a hole in the fabric of the world, where no light could ever go, dark and empty and quiet. That was the end of what I thought I knew.

  *

  One night, Jordan showed up in our yard He was naked and screaming, glazed in his own vomit. Mom saw him first, and she ran outside into the snow in her pajamas. We brought him inside. Mom made him some hot chocolate and then she told me to help him take a shower. I watched him standing in the shower with the curtain open. He was this normal looking guy, but he was hunched over and scared, with his eyes not looking anywhere, not caring that I could see everything, not caring that he was getting water all over the linoleum floor. “Jordan,” I said, “Close the curtain.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  I grabbed it and tried to close it, but his hand shot out and grabbed me around the wrist, his arm tightening. “Leave it,” he said quietly.

  I backed away, pulling out of his grasp, and he watched me then, with water dripping and pouring around his naked body. He watched me like that for twenty minutes, and then he reached behind him and turned the water off, looking down at the water on the floor. “I think I’m done,” he said.

  Out in the kitchen, he wasn’t much better. He just kept saying “I can’t, I can’t” when Mom asked him if he’d seen Reed.

  After about an hour of that, Mom stood up and started pacing the kitchen. Jordan sat on one of the kitchen chairs, shivering in some of Reed’s old clothes. “I can’t tell you anything,” he said.

  Mom went over to the phone and snatched it off the wall and dialed. She stood there with one hand on her hip, waiting, and then she said into the phone: “Your son showed up at my house.”

  I could hear the excited voice on the other end of the line, and Mom looked over at Jordan with such contempt I thought she might hit him and knock him back into the cabinets.

  “Yeah, he’s here if you want to come get him. I’m sure he’d love to go home.”

  *

  On the night before I left for college, I went out to the edge of the woods and stood looking in at it with it looking back out at me. I reached out to touch the bark of the closest branch, and this time I could reach it.

  I made friends at college; stupid, lost boys who were always drunk. Bearded artists and philosophers, retching their dreams on the side of the road like magic shows, calling out for an audience to help them clean up. I might even have become one of those boys, sad and dark and twisted into spaces I didn't fit into. Kill me, I said to the walls. Kill me, floor. Drown me in my own vomit.

  There was a forest along two sides of the school, dark and silent, watching us destroy our immune systems in the light of the street lamps. I watched it follow me home, out every window up the stairs of my residence hall, out my room window at the end of the hallway. I remembered Reed saying, "The woods are all the same." Because they were.

  The first night I went out to that tree line, shaking and scared, was the last time I ever hoped to be normal. I watched my fingers reaching for the bark, trembling fingernails pulling back to reveal the nail beds, pulsing red, blood blisters boiling on the backs of my hands. I closed my eyes and smiled at the pain.

  I started to take people out with me. I took a guy from my math class out there to study, a sad awkward kid who never saw it coming. His name was Ryan and he hesitated at the edge of the woods, like he was going to run away.

  "There's nothing in here; it's just trees," I told him.

  "I should go home," he said, and I shrugged. He turned to go, but the trees already had him.

  "Run," I told him. "Just run until you can see the stars again." By then, though, the darkness was all around us, and I couldn't see him anymore. The last lights of campus were vanishing quickly as the woods expanded, filling the alleys and streets, growing over houses and shooting branches out into the void.

  I woke up climbing out of a ditch, staggering up the side of the road on all fours, and my first real memory is vomiting until I was empty. I heaved up things I hadn't even eaten, blood and bile and bits of tree bark.

  I never saw Ryan again. He never came back to math class. I sat at my desk like a brick, eyes full of insomnia, raw and red, staring at the board. The professor might as well have been speaking another language.

  Another guy, this one named Collin, I met him at a party and took him out for coffee. He was a nice enough guy, and I thought we'd be good friends. We had a lot in common, but he had to say the magic words, and that ruined everything.

  "You ever been to the woods?" He asked.

  Instantly, I was alert, looking directly into his eyes. "Have you?"

  He smiled, tilting his head a little and he stirred his coffee. "I asked you first."

  We stared at each other across the table for a while
, because people like Collin and I still tried to do normal things like have coffee, even when our blood boiled and all we could think about was the branches closing over our heads like water.

  "There's nothing there," I told him.

  "Bullshit."

  "I don't think it's a good idea."

  He laughed, taking a sip of his coffee. "Whatever. I'm going. You can come if you want."

  So we went, our boots punching holes in the snow. Far ahead, the trees stood dark and silent, watching our approach, and my stomach turned to acid.

  "I want to go back," Collin said suddenly, stopping so that I almost ran into him.

  "Listen, this was your idea," I said, and I tugged at his hand.

  "I'm so cold," he told me, but I wasn't listening.

  We entered on one side and emerged on the other with almost no memory of how we got there.

  "I want to go home," Collin said. As soon as he said it, he was gone, flying back into the trees and screaming.

  I stood there for a minute as his screams faded into the distance, and then I took a few wobbly steps back into the woods. "Collin?" I was deep in before I knew it, with the light almost gone, and then I heard his screams, all around me, deafening and then distant, echoing into space.

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  CHAPTER SIX

  One of my friends at school, his name was Alan; he was from Nebraska and he was kind of dumb. I took him out to the woods like nothing was wrong, but only after sitting in my room for days staring at the trees. I didn't go to class, I didn't go out to parties. I just sat there, watching the branches collect snow.

  Alan came up to check on me, because he hadn't heard from me.

  "What's wrong with you?" He wanted to know, and I smiled, with my brain full of things I could never tell him.

  "I wish I knew," I said.

  “Let’s go do something, huh?”

  So I got up and let him take me to a party on the edge of town, in a house that the woods had surrounded. He was curious and easy to impress, and he held the door for me that night. He sat next to me on the living room couch and we talked about class. We had astronomy at different times on different days, studying the stars.

  “Do you suppose the stars can guide you home?” Alan asked.