"Do you want help looking through them?"
He closed his eyes and shuddered. If he didn't look at her, he could almost convince himself that she was Annie. The voice was the same, deep and soft and rich, though the inflection was wrong. Annie would have asked without that high-pitched concern in her tone. Annie would have...
Annie would have done a great many things, but she would never do any of them again. She had calmly slit her wrists two days ago, and that was the very last thing she had ever done.
"No," he said softly. "I'll do it alone."
"David-"
He flinched at the sound of his name. If he listened to her, then he knew that she would persuade him. They would look through Annie's notebooks together, turning over the pages and nodding sadly at the strange dark things their daughter- well, her daughter, and his stepdaughter- had written and convincing themselves that they should have seen this coming.
It was the very last thing he wanted to do.
He didn't know why he had the conviction that he had to go up alone. He only knew that he had it, and so he turned around and spoke sharply to his wife for the first time in thirteen years of marriage.
"Sandy, leave me alone, please. I want to look through those notebooks by myself." He softened his voice when he saw her staring at him, mouth trembling. "I- I'm sorry. But it was what she wanted. Give me an hour."
"She wrote it in a suicide note, David," said Sandy, lowering her hand and glaring at him. "She was out of her mind when she wrote that. And I'm her mother; I should be the first one to see them."
"Sandy."
For a moment longer, they looked at each other. Then Sandy sighed and turned her eyes away.
"Go up and do it," she said softly.
He turned away and went up the stairs without a word. He knew that she hadn't really decided to do what Annie had asked, or give him an hour of grace. She had convinced herself that she needed to wait the hour, before she could approach and see her daughter's notebooks spread out all over the place without starting to bawl hysterically.
It was a perfectly reasonable thing for her to think, and demonstrated good self-knowledge besides. He wasn't sure why it depressed him.
He paused at the door and waited, even though that wasted some of the hour Sandy'd given him. It seemed right to pause before he entered the domain of the dead.
Annie's room was empty. Calm. As calm as the expression on her face when they'd found her. He closed his eyes as he thought about that, and Sandy's reaction, and his own. Somehow, it would have been easier if she'd committed suicide out of crazed despair, if they'd found her with the marks of tears on her face.
But no, she'd been calm. Smiling slightly. And her note didn't mention anything about boyfriend troubles, or drug troubles, or pregnancy, or any of the other "reasons" that a fifteen-year-old girl might commit suicide. She hadn't talked about suicide beforehand, or seemed depressed. She'd waited until both he and Sandy were out of the house and not going to be back for several hours, and she'd cut her wrists expertly, so that someone wouldn't find her, or she wouldn't accidentally survive.
She hadn't acted like someone who might be expected to commit suicide. In fact, sometimes David thought that she had deliberately gone out of her way to avoid displaying the traditional signs. She hadn't wanted anyone to stop her.
"Why?" he whispered.
Well, she had said that he was to read her notebooks. David stepped towards the first one, a battered thing in a red cover half-torn off, and opened it, expecting to find it full of despairing, angsty poetry.
It wasn't. Instead, it was a rather good description of a nature scene. David frowned lightly as he read it.
There's a road here, but it's so overgrown by trailing branches that the trees remember more about it than the people do. The dogwoods along the road might still nod to each other, whispering old stories about the humans who used to walk it, but they're too busy bursting open to honor the spring, flushing and shining. The petals snow down when a wind passes, and join the branches on the ground. It looks as if a flock of birds had shed feathers here.
David blinked, shook his head, and turned the page. The scene simply ended, with no indication of where it was supposed to fit. Perhaps Annie had written it for a story. She was forever writing. But she never seemed to finish anything, and she had never-
David lowered the notebook, staring into the distance. No, Annie had never shown him anything that she'd written. Nor Sandy. Nor anyone else, as far as he knew. Her teachers praised her as quiet and studious, but not one of them had ever commented on her writing. He wondered if they'd assumed she'd been scribbling down notes on their lectures.
Wasn't that rather strange? David had entertained ambitions of being published himself, once, and written several hundred embarrassing love poems. He knew how bad they were, now, and winced at the memories of pressing them on everyone who would listen.
But that was the point. He'd pressed them on everyone who would listen. He hadn't stepped back and kept them to himself. Supposedly, young writers showed everything they wrote to everyone. They sent poems to magazines, and sprayed stories across the Internet, and talked about the novels they really were going to write, someday, when they got around to it. Annie had never mentioned any of that, just sat writing in a corner of the living room the way that some people would watch television, and shrugged off questions about what she was writing the way she did questions about school.
Hell, she'd been more communicative about school. At least, "What did you do in school today?" garnered a "Nothing." Questions about her writing earned shrugs, or even just smiles.
He looked down at the present page of the notebook.
I come over a small bridge, glimmering green like the tops of waves on a sunny day. It has carvings of birds on the side, flying with their wings spread to the fullest extension, touching each other here and there. I'll have to examine them more closely next time. I can't tell if they're gulls or herons or even something else.
The river below runs, singing, chattering to itself with a noise of trumpets and drums. I lean over the side of the bridge. I wonder if the river sings to itself like this at night, when no one else is here?
Probably. Rivers don't know any better.
A glimmer of white appears in the water, and I look up and turn around. A unicorn walks towards me, whiter than the foam that might top the waves the bridge looks like, his horn ice-blue. He looks at me, and there's blood on his flank. I run across the bridge and touch the wound, and I can hear music in my head. It sounds like the Moonlight Sonata.
I have to go back, now, but I'll return.
David frowned uneasily at the page. Fantasy, of course, and perhaps there was something here that was a clue to Annie's state of mind. But what were the mentions of returning and "next time?" It sounded as though she had written this as part of a continuing story. Where were the other pieces?
He tried to turn the next page, but it was stuck to the fourth one. He muttered and pulled.
The pages came apart, revealing a deep red blotch. David reached out to pick it up, thinking at first it was a rose petal of some kind. One of the few interests Annie had had besides writing was pressing flowers in books.
His fingers touched it, and he heard the Moonlight Sonata in his head.
David gasped out loud, and then shook his head at the rattling, papery thump. He'd dropped the notebook, and the music had vanished from his mind the moment his fingers lost contact with the red splotch. The notebook lay open to it, still, and it looked up at him. He eyed it back, and told himself it was Kool-Aid, and that he'd been imagining things. He was still in a fragile state of mind, consumed by his grief and shock. It was understandable that he might imagine something like this.
Or perhaps Annie had been self-mutilating, and cut herself, and bled on the page?
He raised the notebook back to his nose, and sniffed at it. The patch had a strange scent, that was true, but not like the coppery scent of human blood.
Human blood?
He wondered if he should have brought Sandy along after all. She was steady, the calm presence who always had a foot in the real world.
Then David closed his eyes and laughed shakily. He'd always had a foot in the real world, too, except for the time during his adolescence when he thought he'd actually be a poet. He didn't need Sandy here to steady him. It was the state of his mind that had made the Moonlight Sonata play in his head, and his state of mind that made the splotch of red smell heavy and cool and minty.
Like mint... but not exactly like. David was sure that he had never smelled anything like it before. And yet, at the same time it seemed familiar.
"Of course it does," he muttered to himself as he turned the page. "To your mind. You're reaching for memories of Annie, that's all, and making things up as you go along. You want to learn that she didn't just kill herself because of some teenage trauma."
The next page contained an elaborate description of birds flying. David studied it, and realized that it was meant as a description of the birds on the sides of the green bridge.
So. She could continue something after all. He felt a stir of uneasy pride, followed by sadness. Why had she never showed this to anyone? And if something about her writing drove her to despair, why never say anything?
Of course, if she really wanted to keep her reasons for committing suicide a secret, it was likely that she wouldn't have written anything about them down, either.
He continued flipping, eyes glancing from passage to passage. All of them had connections to each other, but the connections were of the most scanty kind. None of them endured more than a few paragraphs, and all of them were separated from each other by at least seven lines of white space. David wondered what her purpose had been in doing that. Leaving space in case she wanted to write something later, perhaps? Or had they been meant to join up?
He reached the last page, and stopped. On the last page of the notebook was a drawing, rather than writing. It had the look of a careful, elaborate tracing, of being drawn around something that had landed on the page.
He didn't know what Annie might have traced, though. The picture was of a cloven hoof, but the size of a horse's. He imagined Annie trying to hold a deer's hoof on the page while she drew it, and smiled a little.
What, then?
David shrugged. Possibly it was something that Annie had drawn from pure imagination, and she had just been so good at it that it looked as though she had drawn it from her mind.
He laid that notebook aside and turned to the others. They were piled all over the room, filled with writing. But when he looked at the first page of the second- this cover had once had a picture of two puppies nestling in a basket, but it had faded to a few dusty lines- he found another picture instead.
This one had the look of a rubbing. He frowned. Annie had gone to the cemetery to write, sometimes. Could she have taken this rubbing off a gravestone?
Not unless there was a gravestone in the cemetery with the image of a unicorn on it.
David swallowed his uneasiness. The image had a lion's tail, a single horn, and a body that was somehow more graceful than a horse's, without losing any of the strength. Frown at the picture as he could, David couldn't see the trick of how Annie had managed that.
He finally looked at the bottom of the picture, which he had been almost subconsciously avoiding.
The picture had cloven hooves.
Well, so what? He had read a little about unicorns, too, and some legends said they looked like that. So what?
He sat down on the book and continued flipping through the pages, barely admitting to himself what he was looking for. A word leaped out at him from the mass of packed prose before he found another image, though.
suicide
David turned back and began to read from the beginning of the passage. This was one of the longer ones, and he found himself having to squint to make it out. The writing was shorter than usual, as though Annie had wanted to make it fit into a certain number of lines. Some of the letters were even incomplete. She'd written it in haste, he thought.
I went back today, and found the unicorn waiting for me in the usual place. We stood there above the glimmering grasses, and he explained to me what had happened to me. It was what I suspected.
I reassured him that I understood. I was willing to pay almost any price to get the body I wanted. He warned me it wouldn't be easy. I'd have to go on a long journey, and search through the Glimmering Grasses to the Sea of Light, and learn everything about his home before I could truly be accepted there.
I understand that, too.
I did have one question. He laughed at me when I asked it. How could I pay any kind of price, he asked me, when I wanted to do it? It was something that would seem like a price to other people, because suicide always is, but that didn't matter. It wasn't a price to me. I wouldn't have to give up my soul, or make a bargain with a demon, or any of the other superstitious nonsense that gets tossed around. My soul's my own. It's the giving up of the body that has to happen.
I would have to cut my wrists, he explained. With a steel knife. The blood would have to spill out of me into water, and I would have to make sure that no one disturbed me before I died. And then I would have to wait and see what happened.
It's going to be a long time before I can do it. But I'm willing to wait.
David closed his eyes and bowed his head. Annie had been delusional. Dear God, what would this do to Sandy when she found out?
"David?"
He looked up.
Sandy stood in the door, and he expected to see the gentle, determined expression she used when it came time for him to keep his side of some bargain they'd made. But her face was pale, and she was gripping the sides of the doorframe to keep from swaying.
"What is it, Sandy?" he asked, dropping the notebook and coming over to her. Maybe the shock had finally hit her. She hadn't cried since that first time when they found Annie, a short, noisy burst of tears over almost before it began.
"They called."
"Who?"
But Sandy seemed incapable of hearing the question. She shook her head and repeated, "They called. They said-"
She fell forward. David caught her against his chest and held her up. "What?" he whispered.
"We can't even have a funeral!" cried Sandy, and began to sob so deeply it sounded as though she might start bleeding.
David cradled her, bewildered. This was harder than she'd cried over Annie, harder than he'd ever seen her cry over anything. "Why can't we have a funeral? Maybe not open-casket, but-"
It seemed to take Sandy a massive effort to interrupt him. "Annie's body is gone!"
David closed his eyes. Standing there, with Sandy in his arms, it seemed to make sense.
Just imagine for a moment, said his mind, in an almost pleasant tone of voice. Imagine that what I'm telling you is real.
Imagine that the splotch in the notebook was unicorn blood. Imagine that Annie could make those drawings because she'd actually seen and spoken to a unicorn. Imagine that she died with that calm look on her face because she was absolutely sure that she knew where she was going.
Imagine that her body's gone because she's turned into a unicorn.
David shook his head violently, ashamed of himself for thinking such things with his wife sobbing in his arms, and his poor, deluded daughter dead.
That minty smell, said the voice in his head. You've smelled it before. In the bathroom that night, remember? Annie's blood smelled like that. I wonder, if you had touched it, would it have played the Moonlight Sonata?
David shuddered, and forced his thoughts away from it. It was unreal. He would become as crazy as Annie if he thought about it much longer.
"We'll find her," he whispered to his wife. "We'll find her. I promise."
Sandy started to answer, but her voice was overridden by a clear sound from below. David hurried to the window, thinking a police car had pulled up before their house with its siren blaring. Did they have some news about Annie? Had they found-
He looked out the window.
And his mind seemed to divide in two.
The rational part told him that he was tired, and stressed, and seeing things. After all, their neighbors not far away had horses, and there were deer all through the woods around here. It wasn't that unusual to see one or the other. He could have seen one easily, and imagined it. The clear sound was proven to be a police siren, when a car pulled up at their house a moment later.
The laughing part of his mind told him that beneath him stood a unicorn, coat shining like snow irradiated by diamonds in the light of the moon, cloven hooves rising and falling with implacable grace. He could see the horn, possessed of all the slender power of the body, and ice-blue. The clear sound had been her voice, lifted in a call too rich and silvery to be called a neigh.
The rational part of his mind told him that even if he had really seen a deer or a horse there, he couldn't possibly have seen the hooves from this height. Or the eyes. Especially not the eyes.
The laughing part of his mind told him that the unicorn looked up at him with Annie's eyes. They were greener than Annie's had ever been, blazing with the clean power that filled the unicorn's whole body, but they still had Annie's soul in them. She had kept her spirit.
A deer bounded off as the police car pulled up.
A unicorn turned and trotted into the woods, moving so beautifully that David felt himself start sobbing.
Both he and Sandy were crying when the police came up, and not of much help. The police reassured them that they would get the body back, of course they would, it was an unusual crime but they would solve it, there was no need to worry about anything.
*****
"Reading again?"
David lifted his head from the notebook and gave Sandy a tired smile. "Yeah," he said softly.
"There was nothing that we could have done, honey." Sandy came over and sat beside him, clutching his hand tightly. Two years had dimmed the worst of her grief, even though they'd never found Annie's body, and she sometimes got through a week without mentioning Annie or doing anything that made either of them think of her, now. "Annie was crazy. But clever in that way crazy people are sometimes. We couldn't have stopped her."
"No." David felt sure that was the truth, though not for the reasons Sandy thought.
Sandy pressed his hand, then stood, yawning. "Well, come into bed when you're ready," she said, and wandered into the bedroom. She had tried pressuring him to come in a few times before, but learned that David wouldn't stop reading the notebooks unless he was ready to do it. She considered that he was trying to find some way to understand Annie, even though it was too late to do any good.
David sighed and turned back to the notebooks. He had read them all through twice before. This was the third time.
He was on the passage that he found the most affecting of all, when Annie described the essential ingredient of what she thought was needed to become a unicorn.
The important thing is not to run, he told me. You can flinch all you like, but if you turn away, or run, then you can't transform. You have to hold that with all the desire of your heart. You have to be ready to transform.
David closed the notebook and laid it aside. He stood up and looked down at the pile of Annie's writing for a moment. All of it full of beautiful unreal things, distracted snatches of song she had never shown anyone, and here and there a picture of a unicorn that made David's throat ache. She could have won prizes with all of this.
And she had asked him to look through the notebooks. Not Sandy. And he had seen the- the deer under the window that night, and convinced himself it was a unicorn. Not Sandy.
Sometimes, it seemed as if the notebooks were watching him. Sometimes, he woke from dreams of running- flying- on four feet, tears in his throat.
David turned away and went to bed.
Sometimes, he asked Sandy when the next time was that she would be away for several hours.
