It had been two weeks since Lita last saw her brother.
He had left one morning, halfway through his second pancake, chair pushed back and patio door wide open. Lita supposed disappeared might be a better word for it, but that made it seem as if she didn’t know where he went. She could see the footsteps in the snow leading out into their backyard, disappearing from her line of sight in the thick forest, and something told her that the lonely trail went deep into the trees. Maybe it was because of this abnormal normality with which she treated the situation that nobody else seemed to notice his disappearance. Nobody came knocking on their front door with a is Andrew home? He hasn’t been showing up to class, and Lita didn’t go knocking on other front doors with a have you seen my brother Andrew? Seventeen, kind of short, black hair? Lita had thrown his pancake away, cleaned up the dishes, and gone to school alone.
The apparent indifference that Lita acted with was not out of apathy towards her brother. Lita loved him, and his absence was heavy in the atmosphere of their home, but she was not a rash person. Andrew used to laugh at the meticulousness of her morning routine: wake up at 8:00, get out of bed at 8:01 exactly, carry out a seven-step morning hygiene routine, get dressed, eat a piece of toast and a fried egg, then depart for school. He would probably laugh at the new additions to her schedule, Lita thought. When she came home from school, she would observe the dimensions of the unmelting trail of footprints, measure the temperature of the inexplicably colder snow surrounding the footprints, and then test how long she could stare into the black point in the forest where Andrew disappeared. These statistics were then carefully inserted into a thoughtfully-crafted spreadsheet. After a week, the only numbers that changed were the minutes that Lita could bear consistently staring into the trees--they were increasing. Something was changing, and she knew it wasn’t her eyes adjusting to the brightness of the snow. The feeling of deep unease that Andrew’s distant footsteps invoked was waning. They were beckoning her to follow.
Of course, Lita had a plan. She believed that everything had an explanation, everything could be taken apart and analyzed, and nothing could elude her preparations. Her beliefs were rock-solid, stubborn, Andrew called her, but where was he now? Andrew went where the currents pulled him, and now he was somewhere in the vast negative space of their endless backyard forest. Lita couldn’t afford to be anything but stubborn. She would confront the thing that had taken Andrew--or maybe, the nothing, the nullity--scientifically, and then when it called for her she would go with the intent of making a round trip. Andrew didn’t plan for the future, but Lita did, and that was how she was going to save him.
On Tuesday, Lita stared into the forest for ninety-five minutes. Her spreadsheet indicated that the amount of time she would be entranced increased by twenty percent each day, this day being the twenty-fifth day. The draw of the nullity was going to peak soon, she theorized. She didn’t know for sure--whatever Andrew felt she hadn’t noticed. He might not have noticed himself. Lita could imagine the signs going straight over his head, the nullity simply ordering him to come forth on the final day without Andrew feeling any unrest. It irked her, but she could save it for when she found him.
The next morning, Lita woke up at 8:00. She got out of bed at 8:01, washed up in the bathroom, got dressed, and sat down with breakfast. Halfway through her fried egg, she stood up, fork clattering onto her plate, and gathered her things: snow boots, winter jacket, school backpack--she fully intended to go to school if they returned early enough--and Andrew’s coat, which he had left behind. It was time.
Sliding open the patio door, winter wind stinging her cheeks, Lita puffed a breath into the crisp air and took a crunching step next to Andrew’s first footprint. Every step she took landed next to one of his footprints, and she could imagine that her movements mirrored his that day, both of them trudging through the snow with the nullity drawing them in. Lita’s footprints were bigger, though, because she was wearing snow boots when Andrew was most likely wearing his slippers. Is most likely wearing his slippers, she reminded herself.
As soon as Lita stepped into the threshold of the forest, the trees curved around and enveloped her, and she felt a strange sort of serenity. Restless tranquility. These observations were made with a clinical distance, of course, but Lita silently resolved to make her trip as efficient as possible. Andrew would be there at the nullity she was walking towards, she was sure of it, and he would look back at her when she stood at the edge, calling his name.
The sun was rising, but the forest became impossibly darker, branches spooning shade onto the snow. Each step Lita took, snow crushing beneath her feet, made an echoless sound. The shadows around her brushed past at a seemingly increasing rate, though her steps were constant--it felt as if she was walking forward on a conveyor belt going the same way, speeding her up to her destination. As if the steps she took didn’t matter, because she would arrive at the same place anyway.
Lita wondered what Andrew had felt. Did he sense the same unease yet still move towards the nullity?
She wondered if the brother she was trying to find was the same brother she ate breakfast with three weeks ago.
The entire forest halted, and Lita shook her thoughts off, though they stuck to the corners of her mind. She didn’t have time to process her peripheral thoughts, however, because everything around her was rapidly shifting. One moment she was at a lightless forest clearing, the next a stretching riverbank, then a winding path, a dilapidated cottage, and finally a gaping chasm.
Lita could see everything and nothing at the same time. The chasm had an impossible form and no form at all; there was no light and yet there were colors extending far past the rainbow spectrum. It was beyond words--beyond numbers, beyond what her eyes could communicate to her brain.
Shrimp colors, Andrew would have said, and the sudden thought startled Lita, his voice echoing in her frozen mind. Andrew--FIND ANDREW, the only rudimentary thought she could scrape together, and then she saw him, standing at the edge of the chasm in his pajama pants and slippers, both an arm’s reach and a mile away from her. He was staring into the core, or what could be the core of a shapeless, centerless nothingness, unkempt hair blowing in the directionless wind.
“ANDREW,” Lita cried out, and she felt tiny, her words muffled in the velvet folds of darkness. Her throat felt raw, like she had screamed for hours, and she realized that she had not spoken Andrew’s name since she last saw him, so perhaps it was the same thing.
Andrew turned--he turned and looked at Lita with the most open expression of amazement she had ever seen, eyes wide and face slack. “Lita,” he whispered, “look,” and her heart plummeted into her stomach because it was not her presence that he was in awe of. Andrew was pointing at the nullity.
“I brought you your jacket,” Lita croaked helplessly.
Their footsteps melted when spring came.