Excerpt from The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I had never seen the border up close. I sat on the floor and imagined how it would feel to cross it.

When I described my exchange with Pichegru to my mother, she didn't ask whether I was actually more interested in visiting the east or the west. She said to prioritize what the Conseil wanted to hear.

It's a trick question, Odile. Think about what you're applying for. They don't want apprentices who are curious what it's like over there. A conseiller mostly tells people they can't go.

We were on the back patio in our mismatched iron chairs, sipping cold soup for dinner. The soup was tangy and red. It was still daylight but there were some early stars. Our backyard was shaded by trees that blocked our view of the lake. I asked what she thought I should say in my paper if Pichegru's prompt was a trap.

Be honest and say you don't want to see those places. Say you're content where you are.

I worked at my father's old desk in my bedroom. The desk was so tight over my legs that I couldn't picture a grown man using it, but it gave me an idea for making my essay more personal. This helped me feel better about not technically answering the question. After all, I had to write something. I picked up my pencil.

Given the chance to visit another valley, I would not take it.

I scratched this out:

Would respectfully decline.

The only legitimate reason for requesting passage, we'd been told, was consolation. To lay eyes on a person you would never otherwise live to meet, or a person you would never see again at home. In fact, for me, there was someone like this whom I could write about. When I was four years old, my father died in the old garage next to my grandparents' orchard. If I were to go west, I could find him, and watch him for a bit. He'd be in his early twenties on the other side of the mountains, and would have met my mother only recently, hanging out by the fountain in the Place du Bâtisseur. I knew the story: she'd wished on a coin and refused to tell him, an inquisitive stranger, what her wish was. He threw a coin of his own and wished to take her out. She said he'd nullified his wish by sharing it, but she went out with him anyway. It would be tempting to go there and look. To feel like I knew him better, or like I knew him at all.

But, I wrote to Pichegru, seeing him would not console me. I might not even recognize which man he was. What good would it do, to have him pointed out from afar and be told I was looking at my father? The truth was that he was not so much a vivid loss in my life as an abstract deficit, the explanation for why our house was quieter than Clare's. The real loss belonged to my mother, and she always swore that she'd never petition for a viewing. She said she remembered enough: how he started sleeping all day, how he started seeming asleep even when he wasn't. She said her memories were what helped her not to miss him.

I concluded my essay by vowing that, as a future conseiller, I would advise petitioners to seek whatever closure they needed here in their own valley, which is to say, in the safer pastures of ordinary grief. If that was enough for my mother, then it was enough for me, and so it ought to be for anyone. Reading it back under my breath, my answer struck me as reasonably good. Moreover, it seemed like the kind of writing that might impress Pichegru. The only checkmarks he ever scrawled on my homework, regardless of the subject, were next to the toughest-minded statements that crept from my pencil. Perhaps he would see this as another one of my small severities, and approve.

It was late when I transcribed my final draft. My mother was reading in bed. She placed my essay on her book and tilted it to the lamp, her shadowy eyes scanning the page. I was nervous and looked away, finding my distorted face in her magnified makeup mirror: my jumble of curls, my too-long jaw. The paper fluttered when she handed it back.

Excerpted from The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard. Copyright © 2024 by Scott Alexander Howard. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.