WAKING UP HURT. Her head pounded and there was something in her eyes, something sticky and warm that made it hard to see.
She blinked hard and her eyes cleared, and she realized she was in a car.
Not just any car-her boyfriend’s car. It was a pretty white Celica, and she brushed her hand against her lap, feeling smooth, silky fabric, and remembered-it was prom night, and they were driving out to Boone Lake and he’d brought champagne, a bottle on ice in a cooler. She had slipped into the girls’ bathroom to fix her lip gloss and dab on a little extra perfume before they said goodbye to all their friends, to the school gym decorated with streamers and helium balloons, to the teachers, who smiled and nodded at them because they were nice kids, kids who got good grades and didn’t make trouble.
Except that her boyfriend had been drinking since they got tothe prom, and he wasn’t drunk, no, not drunk exactly, but they’d been laughing as he took the turns on State Road 9 just a little too fast, his hand slipping along the folds of her emerald green skirt.
And she hadn’t stopped him. Because she liked having his hand there. And she couldn’t wait to kiss him some more. And she liked going fast and reckless around the turns because it felt like the future, felt like the day when they would drive away from Gypsum and never come back.
But something had happened.
There were no lights in the car now, not even the glow of the dashboard. But the headlights were still on, one shining straight into the woods, to the right of the tree they’d hit.
The other beam twisted at a crazy angle. It lit up his body, lying on the ground ten feet from the car, bent in a way that didn’t look the least bit natural.
She started screaming, yanked at the buckle of her seat belt and pushed against her door-it wouldn’t open, it was stuck or jammed, and she crawled to the driver’s seat, her knees grinding on something sharp-oh, it was the windshield, the windshield had shattered, and she realized with horror that it was her boyfriend’s body that had broken it. He never wore his seat belt-he’d gone flying through the windshield, across the hood of the ruined Celica, and landed on the hard ground, broken and bleeding.
The driver’s-side door opened easily and she stumbled out of the car, tripping on the hem of her dress, her beautiful strapless dress that no one knew had come from the St. Benedict’s thrift shop in Tipton, that fit her like it had been made for her alone.
She bunched the skirt in her fists and ran to her boyfriend, stumbling in her high heels before collapsing on her knees next to him. His hand, thrown out palm-open as though he’d been reaching for something, twitched and his lips moved. His eyes were glassy and unfocused and she bent close to hear what he was trying to say.
“Hurts…,” he managed, licking his dry, cracked lips.
“No, no, please don’t…,” she murmured as she tugged his tuxedo jacket open as gently as she could.
What she saw made her throat close with fear. It was too much. There was too much damage. The wound was open and black and glistening in the moonlight, so much blood draining into the cold, dry earth.
Her hands flew to the wound, her fingers working quickly to find the edges of the gash, the words coming to her lips even before she realized she’d made a decision.
But he spoke first. “I… I love…”
His voice was so weak she almost missed it, but comprehension flickered in his beautiful brown eyes, and he looked at her the way he did when he picked her up for school, the way he had the first time she’d passed in front of his locker last year, the way he did when he searched the crowd for her face after every play at football games.
It was a look that saw her, knew her, really knew her, the way her mother never would and her father, whoever he was, never chose to. It was the look she’d hung every dream, every foolish hope on, and as he blinked twice, his eyes rolling up and going opaque, she said the words.
She said the words the way her grandmother had taught her, the syllables slipping like gossamer ribbons past her lips, words she’d chanted a hundred times on a hundred long-ago nights lit by sputtering candles and her grandmother’s eyes bright with purpose. A hundred times, a hundred nights, but tonight was the first time she prayed with all her soul that the words would work.
A twitch, a sigh-she broke off in the middle of a word whose sound was burned into her memory, but whose meaning she didn’t really know, not the way her grandmother did. Her boyfriend twitched again and blinked, and she stilled her fingers on his face.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered. “Oh, please don’t leave-” Her heart thudded hard in her chest because he wasn’t gone; he’d almost died but she’d brought him back, she’d said the words.
He was back.
She was bending to kiss him, to throw her arms around him, when his eyes blinked again and stayed open-
And there was nothing there.
“Vincent,” she breathed, her heart going cold. “Vincent, please, please, Vincent, please-”
But he said nothing. His eyes were empty and his lips were still, and the forest around them was dark and silent as a stone.
WHEN I WAS EIGHT, the social workers finally made Gram send me to school. Until then, she told the authorities she was homeschooling me, but after years of her never turning in her paperwork or showing up for the mandatory meetings, they finally got fed up and told her I had to go to regular school. Gram gave in; she knew when she was beat.
The first thing I noticed about the other kids was that they all looked like they could be on TV. I called them Cleans. Their clothes were new and ironed smooth. Their hair was shiny and combed. Their nails were trimmed and free of the black grime that I’d had under mine as long as I could remember. No one had to tell me that, compared with these other kids, I was dirty.
That didn’t stop the kids on the bus from reminding me. By the end of my first humiliating ride to school, I’d been called a bunch of names and accused of having cooties and lice and a witch for a grandmother. It was the same thing on the ride home, even though Mr. Francheski pulled the bus over, stood up and hollered, “Was all you kids raised in barns? Where’s your manners? Be nice to this new girl.”
When I got home that first day I was crying. This was long before Chub came to live with us, and even though I knew better than to hope for anything from Gram, I dropped my book bag on the floor and ran to her favorite chair, in front of the television, where she was smoking and watching Montel. I blubbered out what had happened, how the kids had said I was dirty and called me trash. Gram barely shrugged, craning her neck to see over me to the television.
“I guess you know where the soap is at,” she snapped. “And you can drag a brush through that hair, you want. Now git.”
Now, eight years later, I had washed my hair the night before and blown it out with a hair dryer I’d saved up for. I was wearing mascara and lip gloss that I’d bought with the money I’d made working for Gram.
But everything else I had was secondhand, a fact I was always conscious of as I walked the halls at Gypsum High. My clothes were never right. My backpack was never right. My shoes, my notebooks, my haircut, wrong, wrong, wrong-and everyone knew it. Gypsum might be a two-stoplight town in the middle of nowhere, Missouri, but there was a structure like anywhere else: popular kids and in-between kids and losers. And people like me, so far down there wasn’t any point in bothering to classify us.
I had gym second period. My locker was next to Claire Hewitt’s. Claire always smelled faintly of baby powder and motor oil, and her hair frizzed in a cloud around her shoulders. But as I spun my lock, even she flinched away from me.
When you’re near the bottom of the school social ladder, like Claire, the only thing that can really hurt you is to be associated with someone even lower. And there was no one lower than me. Not Claire. Not Emily Engstrom, with her limp and her lazy eye. Not even the Morries. No one at all.
I started changing into my gym clothes, not bothering to say anything to her. What would be the point?
“Hey, Hailey,” Shawna Rosen said, appearing at my side without warning. “Are those nurses’ shoes you’re wearing?”
The girls trailing her pressed in closer to me and stared down at my feet as Claire slammed her locker door shut and slipped hastily away. I could practically feel their excitement. They were never happier than when they could remind some poor girl of the enormous distance between her pathetic existence and life at the top of the heap.
Sometimes, when Shawna and her crew came after me, I stood my ground. I stared into their overly made-up eyes and telegraphed disdain. But this wasn’t one of those days. I shuffled backward, away from Shawna and into the wide aisle between locker rows, bumping into someone behind me, tripping and nearly falling. My hand shot out to steady myself against the wall of lockers, and I was dismayed to see I’d run into a group of Morries.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, but they were gone before I finished speaking, melting down another aisle without a word.
You almost never saw one of the Morries alone. They stuck together at the edge of the halls and the back of the classrooms and the cafeteria tables farthest from the food line in silent clumps of three or four. Like me, they didn’t participate in any sports or clubs or extracurricular activities. The girls wore their hair long, hanging in their faces. The boys were so skinny their dirty, frayed jeans hung off their hips.
They never volunteered in class. If they were called on, the girls would mumble so quietly that teachers soon gave up on them. The boys were bolder, surly and argumentative and sullen. They didn’t care at all about their grades.
They were called Morries after Morrin Street, the main road that ran through Trashtown, which is what everyone called the run-down neighborhood outside of Gypsum half a mile past our house. I don’t know who started calling them that, but if there had ever been a time when the Trashtown kids mixed with the Cleans at school, that time was long gone.
Shawna and her friends got bored with me and wandered off, but I still had to hustle to finish getting dressed, and I was late to gym class. Ms. Turnbull and Mr. Coughlin didn’t notice, since they were busy dragging the vaulting horses and balance beam and parallel bars out of the closet. We counted off and lined up behind the equipment. No one looked very happy about it, but my reasons were probably different from everyone else’s. It wasn’t that I was bad at this stuff. The problem was that I was good-too good.
I used to wonder if God had compensated for making me such a freak, for my lack of friends and horrible home life, with natural athletic ability. If so, I’d love to give it back. I was fast and I was strong, I could balance and throw and catch with amazing accuracy, but instead of helping me fit in with the other kids, it brought me-what else?-more trouble.
In sixth grade my PE teacher noticed I had the third-highest mile time in the school. He had me run sprints and then another mile, eight times around the track, clocking me with his stopwatch. Each time I passed him I could see his expression growing tighter and more excited. When I finished he jogged over to where I was stretching out-they were constantly harping on us about stretching after exercise-and told me he wanted me to start training with the middle-school track team.
I was so surprised I couldn’t come up with a response quick enough. It had never occurred to me that anyone would ask me to join a club or a sport. But of course I couldn’t do it. Gram would never have allowed it. She didn’t even want me attending school. If the social workers hadn’t forced her to send me, she never would have let me out of the house except to do errands.
Once, in grade school, I received an invitation to a birthday party. I ran home, my heart pounding with excitement. I knew that the girl didn’t really want me there, that her mother had made her invite every girl in the class, but I didn’t care. I had never been to a birthday party-Gram didn’t believe in celebrating birthdays, so mine passed every year with no cake, no presents, no singing-and I desperately wanted to go.
Gram read the invitation, her cracked lips moving as she sounded out the words, and then she frowned and tore it into pieces. “No need for you to mix with them kids,” she said.
Years later, when my gym teacher insisted on sending home a permission slip for track, Gram wrote in big block letters across the section of the form where she was supposed to fill in my medical information: HAILEY DOES NOT HAVE MY PERMISHION TO DO ANY SPORT.
Ever since then I’d been careful not to let anyone see me excel at anything.
But today would be tough. I was in the vault line. I stared at the old leather-covered thing, wondering how I could feign clumsiness. It would be hard; if I just hit it head-on, it would hurt plenty. But I wasn’t sure I could stop myself from hurtling over it neatly. How was it possible to act clumsy when you were sailing through the air, your instincts taking over?
I managed, but it took all my concentration. I also forced myself to stumble off the balance beam and pretended to be too weak to support myself on the parallel bars. When Mr. C glared at me and shook his head with disgust, I felt a flash of pride.
If he only knew.
I was at the back of the vault line, congratulating myself on escaping attention again, when Milla Swanson reached the front.
Milla was a Morrie, a thin girl with hair the color of mustard crusted to the lid of a jar. She approached the vault with uncertain little steps, head down as though she hoped the floor would swallow her before she got there. I was only half watching as she got to the old wooden springboard, but I saw her hesitate-instead of the step-bounce-leap they drilled into us, she wobbled and then almost tripped as she jumped toward the vault, her hands scrambling on the leather padding. That happened sometimes; kids hit the vault wrong and sort of slid or fell off the other side, usually in embarrassment with a bruise or friction mark. It had happened to me once or twice when I’d purposely messed up.
But when Milla struck the vault, momentum carried her into the side, and the impact sent her flying backward. She fell on her back, and I winced at the sound her shoulders made as they struck the springboard-that had to hurt-but then there was another thud and a reverberation I could feel through my feet on the hardwood gym floor, as her head bounced off the edge of the springboard.
The two girls at the front of the line jumped back with little shrieks, and then there was a second when no one moved as Milla rolled gently to a stop at the base of the springboard, her arms flopped out at her sides.
Someone screamed.
Ms. Turnbull and Mr. C came running, but I got to Milla first. I didn’t even know I was moving until I was crouched by her side, reaching for her hand, but Ms. Turnbull slapped my hand out of the way.
“Don’t touch!” she screamed, even though Mr. C bent down and picked up the same hand I’d been reaching for.
I backed away, but I didn’t want to. There was something inside me, some roiling force, that was making my fingers itch to touch Milla, that was sending the blood in my veins surging through my body with hot insistence. I wanted-no, I needed-to help, to put my hands on Milla. Even as I realized how bizarre my impulse was, I had to fight not to act on it.
I stepped back into the silent crowd of kids making a circle around the vault. Ms. Turnbull and Mr. C talked in hushed voices, feeling for a pulse and waving their hands in front of Milla’s eyes, which were open but unblinking. Ms. Turnbull put her face close to Milla’s as though she was going to kiss her on the lips, but then she turned away.
“She’s breathing,” we all heard her say.
“She’s unconscious,” Mr. C said in a panicked voice. I saw the flyaway ends of the hair he combed over his freckled scalp trembling as he crab-walked away from Milla’s body like she was on fire, and I realized he had no idea what to do, despite all the years he’d taught us basic CPR.
“I’m going to go call.” Ms. Turnbull scrambled to her feet and sprinted toward the gym teachers’ office.
In the seconds it took for me to break away from the crowd of kids and rush to Milla, there was not a single sound in the gym. No one spoke, or coughed, or called my name. No one tried to stop me. But when I picked up Milla’s cool, limp hand with its ragged fingernails and rough calluses, I stopped hearing anything else anyway.
At least, I heard nothing in the gym. Inside my head a strange whispered chorus started up, a murmured chant that made no sense.
A second later, my vision went. I don’t think I closed my eyes, but everything else disappeared and it was as though I was looking into time going forward and backward at once, like I’d jumped off a cliff and hovered somewhere in black empty space.
“Milla,” I whispered. I felt my lips move, so I was pretty sure I’d actually spoken, and then I had that same blood-rushing feeling again, like every bit of energy inside me was being pushed to my fingertips, where it dissipated into Milla’s body.
I let go of her hand and my fingers moved over her neck and face until they found her scalp, which was hot and damp, the hair plastered across a long bump that swelled under my touch. The rushing sensation intensified, and my own heart seemed to slow and falter, and I started to sway, but somehow I couldn’t let go, couldn’t stop touching Milla’s injured body. Just when I felt like I had exhausted the last of my will, something shoved me hard and I fell onto my shoulder. My vision and hearing returned instantly.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ms. Turnbull screamed, her face purple and her hand raised high as though she was about to hit me. Maybe she would have, except that Milla, lying at her feet, rolled over and threw up.
It turned out to be a good thing because Ms. Turnbull forgot all about me. Milla sat up, wiping her mouth against her sleeve, hiccuped a couple of times and looked like she was going to cry, but as Ms. Turnbull shouted questions at her she answered them, in a voice too low and mumbly for the rest of us to hear.
I retreated back into the crowd of kids. A couple of them started to ask me what had happened, but then the door to the gym burst open and Mr. Macklin, the vice principal, came in and started yelling at all of us to go to the locker rooms and get dressed for next period, that everything was under control and none of our concern.
I went with the rest of them, but I couldn’t help glancing back over my shoulder at Milla, who was trying to stand up even while Ms. Turnbull pushed her back down to the floor.
Milla was watching me. The look she gave me was hard to understand: fear battling contempt, with barely a trace of gratitude.
The only emotion completely absent from her face was surprise.
THAT AFTERNOON I walked to the grocery store rather than riding the bus. I needed to walk; my mind was unsettled because of what had happened in gym. I couldn’t stop playing it over and over in my head: the sound Milla’s head made hitting the floor; the way her skin felt under my fingers; the blinding, swirling feeling when I touched her.
When I got home, carrying grocery bags the last mile, Rascal bounded across the yard to meet me. He was part blue tick, part beagle, part something else. Gram got him from one of her customers after some stray got through a fence and impregnated a prize hound. The customer was going to drown the whole litter, but Gram took a shine to Rascal. For a while, anyway-she got tired of him when he wasn’t a puppy anymore.
He nuzzled my hand, then slipped in the door and went straight to Chub, who was sitting in front of an open kitchen cabinet, playing with the pots and pans while the lids rolled around on the floor.
“Russo!” Chub exclaimed, clapping his hands and throwing his arms around Rascal.
“Russo” was one of Chub’s better words. He called me Hayee, and he could say “wah” for “water,” and “chah” for “chair.” Other things he had his own special names for, sounds that had nothing to do with the actual word, like “shoshah” for “flower” and “bobbo” for “truck.” Most of the time, he didn’t make words at all, just hummed, sounds rising and falling like a song only he could hear.
I knew that there was something wrong with Chub. I tried to figure it out by doing research on the Internet, but there were so many causes of developmental delays, I didn’t even know where to start. I knew that eventually the social workers were going to demand he be tested, but I wasn’t anxious for that day to arrive because I was afraid they’d put him in some group home for kids like him. And I didn’t want Chub to go. Ever. Besides Rascal, he was all I had to love.
When Chub first came to live with us, Gram changed. She spent time with him every day, murmuring softly to him while I did the chores, holding up toys and flash cards and trying to get him to talk. Those were good days. If Chub did something new, if he crawled toward Gram or reached for the shiny blocks she held up, she felt like celebrating; she turned off the TV and didn’t drink as much and even complimented me on whatever I made for dinner.
But when he had a bad day, when he wouldn’t repeat the sounds she made, or ate dirt from the yard, Gram seemed to sink a little lower in her chair. As I got more and more attached to Chub, I realized that Gram saw him as a project, an experiment. And when she couldn’t fix what was wrong with him, she lost interest.
Within a couple of months, she was back to spending her days in the chair, watching TV and smoking. She began drinking earlier in the day and barely paid any attention to Chub, but she kept cashing the checks the state sent for his care, and he became mine to look after just like Rascal had.
“You git my cigarettes?” Gram wheezed from her chair. She asked me that every time I came home from the grocery, as though I’d ever forget. She went through a pack and a half a day. I handed her the four packs of Marlboro 100’s along with the receipt and a few coins. The cigarettes cost almost half what I’d spent at the grocery, but I knew better than to suggest Gram cut back. The one and only time I’d tried, she’d slapped my face so fast and hard it took my breath away.
Gram was mean, but she was also weak and sick most of the time, so I could stay out of her way if I tried. She woke in the morning coughing up nasty stuff and spitting into the sink, and she fell asleep drunk in her chair most nights. She ordered me around like a servant. I didn’t mind the housework so much-I had kind of a thing about keeping the house clean, and I would have done it even if she didn’t tell me to. And she paid me, even if it was a fraction of minimum wage.
I unpacked the rest of the groceries and got to work making sloppy joes. Sautéing the frozen peppers and onions, the ground beef, stirring in the tomato sauce-I’d done it a hundred times before, but it still brought me a sense of calm, especially with Chub playing at my feet and Rascal dozing in the corner of the kitchen where I kept a stack of old blankets for him to sleep on.
Gram, laughing at something Tyra Banks said on her show, farted loudly, and I thought for the thousandth time how glad I would be when Chub and I left this house for good. I knew you weren’t supposed to feel that way about your grandmother. Grandparents were supposed to be over-protective and hopelessly out of touch, but you were still supposed to love them. They were supposed to listen to your troubles and offer you advice from all their years of experience.
“Something weird happened at school today,” I said as I stirred the ketchup and onion soup mix into the skillet. Gram had never given me a single piece of advice worth remembering, and as I started to speak I already knew it was a mistake, but I had to talk to someone about Milla. “Milla Swanson got hurt in gym.”
“Uh-huh,” Gram said without taking her eyes off the television.
“I mean, like hurt pretty bad. I think she was unconscious for a while. A head injury.”
“Mmm.”
“But I… well, I think I might have… um. The thing is, I just wanted to help, you know? Because Ms. Turnbull went to call and-”
“What did you say?”
Gram’s voice, sharp and shrill, startled me. I set the spatula into the pan and looked at her. To my surprise she was struggling to push herself out of her chair, grunting with the effort.
“Just that Milla fell off the vault and hit her head.” I went to help Gram. She seized my hands and pulled herself up, her back cracking.
“Was there blood? Skin cut? Bone showing? What did you do?”
Gram’s questions had an edge to them, an urgency I had never heard from her, and I wondered what she knew that I didn’t.
“It wasn’t really any big deal. Just a bump.”
“You said she was unconscious.” There was excitement and accusation in her voice, and her eyes were bright and intent.
“Well, maybe for a minute.”
“And you touched her?”
“Um… yeah.”
“On her head?”
“Well, yes, I mean, first her hands and then, I guess, mostly on her hair.”
“What did you say?”
“What did I say?”
“It’s not a hard question, Hailey. What did you say when you were touching her?”
“I didn’t-I don’t know. I mean, I might have said her name, and something like, ‘Don’t worry,’ or, ‘It’s going to be okay.’ I really don’t remember.”
But as I answered Gram something stirred in my mind. There had been… something. A strange sound track, whispered nonsense syllables, barely audible over the rushing of my blood.
“That’s all? You didn’t say anything else?”
“No. Nothing else.” I was a little frightened by Gram’s intensity, especially when she closed one of her clawlike hands around my forearm, her long fingernails digging into my flesh.
“Have you done this before, Hailey?” she asked, leaning close enough to me that I could smell her breath, a foul combination of cigarettes and rot. I had to resist the urge to pull my arm away.
“Done what?”
Her burning eyes searched mine, and I felt like she was looking for signs that I was telling the truth-and for something else as well, something I couldn’t understand. We stood that way for what seemed like a long time, and I felt fear unwind inside my gut, fear that fed on my confusion and the high emotions of the day.
“I think you know,” Gram finally hissed, squeezing my arm with a strength that surprised me. “You know what you done. All this time I been waitin’ on you, I finally gave up, and now you gone and done it.”
I yanked away from her, my heart pounding hard. “Dinner’s going to burn,” I mumbled. I picked up the spatula and stirred the mixture in the pan, my face hot in the rising steam.
I could sense Gram standing behind me, watching. She was scariest when she was thinking. I’d rather have her hit me or yell at me any day than stare at me like that, when I didn’t have a clue what she was thinking about.
“It don’t change nothin’,” she muttered, so softly I almost didn’t hear her.
By the time I dared to turn and look, she had shuffled back to her chair, and her eyes were half closed as she watched a lawn-care commercial. I made three plates of food and got Chub set up at the table with a paper napkin and a glass of chocolate milk. I took Gram her plate and a fresh beer and set it on her TV tray. She barely grunted a response, but I kept an eye on her as Chub and I ate dinner. She ate carelessly, bits of ground beef falling to the tray or the floor, where Rascal would find them later. After a while she rubbed her napkin across her mouth and tossed it on top of her half-eaten dinner, and I breathed easier, hoping she’d forgotten the confusing conversation.
She was expecting customers that night. While I did the dishes she muttered to herself, now and then raising her voice as though she was having a conversation with someone. I was passing by her chair on my way to put Chub down, when she shot out her gnarled, yellow-nailed hand and grabbed my wrist.
“You know you’re the future, Hailey,” she said, lips twisted in a grin that revealed the gaps where she’d lost teeth. Gram wouldn’t see a dentist, so her teeth were gray in places and several were missing. “You’re the one who’s gonna carry on the legacy.”
I tugged my wrist back, but Gram held on tight. She’d said things like that before; it was nothing new. Years ago I’d asked what she meant, and Gram had got all coy and winked and said I’d know soon enough. It gave me the creeps, the way she stared at me with her milky eyes bright, almost hungry-looking.
“You got titties now, girl, don’t you,” Gram said.
Instinctively I covered my chest with my hand. It was barely even true. I was still skinny through the hips and it was clear I’d never be curvy the way Jill Kirsch and Stephanie Lee were, the way that caught the boys’ attention as they walked down the school halls.
But it was horrifying to think that Gram had noticed, that she had been looking at me… that way.
“And your monthlies,” she continued, wheezing and coughing into her sleeve.
I hadn’t made an effort to keep it a secret. When I got my period a few years earlier, I knew what to do from eavesdropping on other girls at school, and I stored my box of tampons in the bathroom medicine cabinet. But hearing her say the words made my stomach roil, and I jerked my hand so hard that her fingers bounced off the arm of her chair as I backed away.
Gram only laughed, a croaking sound that sent spit flying, some of it landing on me. I couldn’t get away from her fast enough.
“What’re you so shy for, Hailey?” Gram wheezed. “Your mama was sure hot for it. Wa’n’t right in the head and couldn’t talk sense, but that didn’t keep her from sashaying around like a cat in heat when she got grown.”
That stopped me cold. Gram never talked about my mother. All I knew about her was that she had died in childbirth and that she wasn’t “right in the head.” I thought maybe that last part was why Gram wouldn’t talk about her, some sort of grief that had got all twisted up into ugliness and silence-Gram wouldn’t even tell me her name, and there were no pictures of her in the house.
“What-what-” I stammered, and Gram’s lips curved up in smug satisfaction. She had me. I hated her for it, but she had me.
“Oh, so now you got time to talk to me,” Gram said. “Yes indeed. You don’t need to know anything about your mom other’n she was ripe as an August peach and lookin’ to get picked. Got knocked up with you soon’s the fellas come around sniffin’ at her, that one did.”
“Who-” I started, and then I licked my dry lips, hating myself for the question I was about to ask. I’d asked often enough before to know that she would never tell. “Who was my father?”
Gram’s laughter turned into a coughing fit, but the tears she wiped from her rheumy eyes were full of mean amusement. “That-” she began, then gasped her way through another round of coughs. “That’s quite the question, ain’t it? Could be anyone.”
I had learned a few things about Gram, living with her for sixteen years. I didn’t miss the narrowing of her eyes, the way she drew her lips in. Gram was lying to me. Only, I didn’t know why. What was she hiding? Sometimes it seemed like we weren’t even related to each other-she was so frail, as though her body was just waiting to die, and I had never been sick a day in my life. But she also knew me better, in some ways, than I knew myself. I hated that. I couldn’t help thinking of the conversation earlier, the way she’d asked all those questions about Milla, as though she had some secret knowledge about what had happened. One thing was sure, though: nothing would make Gram tell me anything she wanted to keep secret.
It was pointless to keep talking to her. I tried to walk away, but Gram stopped me.
“What’s your hurry, Hailey?” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray I’d already emptied twice that day, and held out her arms. “We got callers. Here, git me up.”
Only then did I hear the sound of a car in the yard. I did as she asked, seizing her hands and pulling harder than necessary, so Gram stumbled as she stood. I let her lean on me as she cracked her knuckles and worked her neck one way and the other.
When I was sure she wouldn’t fall, I took Chub to get ready for bed. Ordinarily I’d bathe him, but Gram’s callers were likely to start drinking beer and need the toilet before long.
I brushed Chub’s teeth with a soft-bristled brush and the strawberry-flavored kids’ toothpaste I’d splurged on. I wiped him down with a clean cloth and changed his pull-up. He was four, way too old to still be in diapers; I’d tried everything I could think of to get him to use the toilet, but nothing worked.
As I wiped down the sink, he wrapped his arms around my thighs and said, “Loo, Hayee.” He said this from time to time, and I was convinced it was “I love you, Hailey,” even if I didn’t have any way to prove it. I knelt down on the floor and hugged him, breathing his sweet baby scent. “Me and you,” I whispered. “Always.”
In two more years I’d be eighteen. I’d graduate from high school and the social services people would stop coming around checking on me. And if we were lucky, we’d go so far away that they’d never be able to find Chub.
On the other side of the door I heard voices, and I recognized the loudest: Dunston Acey. Not good. I tried to slip quietly to my room, but before I reached the door his whiskey-rough voice came after me.
“Hailey, come out here so’s I can see you!”
I froze, trying to decide if I could pretend I hadn’t heard him, but Gram’s voice followed: “Git the boy put down quick, girl, we got company!”
I did as they said. Once I’d sung to Chub and rubbed his back, and his breathing had gone deep and even with sleep, I couldn’t put it off any longer. They’d only come into the room and turn on the lights and wake Chub up. Nothing stopped Gram and her customers when they were partying.
I walked into the kitchen and said hello with as little enthusiasm as possible.
Three pairs of eyes regarded me-Gram and Dun and another man, who was standing in the shadows in the far corner. When he stepped into the light, I saw with a sinking heart that it was Rattler Sikes.
Of all the sorry and mean and no-good men who came through our house, Rattler was the worst. He was one of the only ones who didn’t do drugs or, as far as I knew, drink alcohol, but once in a while he’d show up in the company of some of the others and stand in the corner of the room, watching and saying little.
Everyone knew the stories about him. Rattler was one of the few people in Trashtown who got talked about by the rest of Gypsum, probably because the sheriff had been trying to nail him for years. Only, he never managed to make any charges stick.
They said Rattler did things to women. Terrible things, things that left them messed up on the outside and the inside alike. It was only Trashtown women that he went after, and maybe that was part of why the sheriff’s department couldn’t bring him down. As long as trouble stayed inside the borders of Trashtown, Gypsum people didn’t care much about what went on there.
They said that women would go out with Rattler-it was hard to imagine they went willingly-and then they’d be found wandering back into town in the early hours of the morning, sometimes barefoot, sometimes nearly naked, always unwilling or unable to talk about what had happened. None of them ever wanted to press charges, but those women were never the same again.
“My, you’re looking fine today,” Dun said, raising a bottle in my direction before taking a long drink. Gram had a policy that anything a customer drank or smoked in the house was free-for the price of a few beers and some weed, she kept them entertained and happy, and if she tacked on a premium for the harder stuff, they never complained.
“I got to git down to the basement,” Gram said, sighing and fixing a look on me. I knew what she wanted-for me to go down and get whatever it was that Dun was buying tonight. But that was the one thing she couldn’t make me do: I refused to get involved with her dealing. I wouldn’t touch the pill bottles, wouldn’t read the labels, wouldn’t help her sort and bag the weed she got from a guy who drove it up from the Ozarks once a month. I wouldn’t do any of it, and whenever she asked I reminded her that all I had to do was make one phone call and she was done.
Of course, I was bluffing. I would never do anything to bring the authorities in, because that would mean that Chub and I would be split up. Gram was stupid about some things, and this most of all: she should have known what Chub meant to me.
Instead, she got up, sighing and snorting, and shuffled off to the basement stairs. It would take her a while, holding on to the handrail and taking the steps one at a time, before she was back with their stuff. I saw the pile of wadded cash in the middle of the table. It would stay there until Dun checked his purchases and slid them in his pockets, and then Gram would stuff the money into her purse on the counter. That was how it was always done.
I took the only empty chair and waited. Gram expected me to make small talk, but that didn’t mean I had to come up with sparkling conversation.
“Nice shirt,” Dun said. “Ain’t that a purty shirt, Rattler?”
I felt myself blush; my shirt was nothing special, a plain green scoop-neck top I’d bought secondhand for fifty cents, but it was old and getting a little tight across my chest.
After that, Dun asked me about school and my grades and what I was watching on TV these days. He didn’t seem to mind that I gave him the shortest possible answers. Now and then he asked Rattler what he thought, but mostly he seemed content to do all the talking and drink his beer, popping the top off a fresh bottle when he finished one.
After what seemed like ages, Gram came clumping back up the stairs. She had two brown paper bags clutched in her hands, their tops folded down. She set them on the table in front of Dun, and the mood in the room changed.
No one was looking at me anymore. Everyone’s eyes were on the bags as Dun unrolled the paper and peered inside. After a second he reached in and pulled out the plastic bottles. He examined the labels, squinting. He looked like he wanted to eat them, plastic caps and all. When he was done checking the bottles, he stuffed them in a big flap pocket of his plaid shirt. He crumpled the brown bags and tossed them toward the trash can in the corner, where they bounced off the edge and landed on the floor.
I waited what I thought was a safe amount of time, and then got up and slid my chair in. “Well, good night,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.
As I passed by Dun, he reached out and grabbed the waistband of my jeans.
“Off to bed already, sweetheart?” he drawled, and I caught a whiff of his tobacco-stinking breath. “You need some company?”
“Aw, Dun,” Gram cackled, and slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “Don’t be pestering the child.”
“She ain’t no child no more,” Dun said, winking at Rattler. “Ain’t that right.”
“You know she’s got to get her schooling.” Gram sounded serious now, her voice scolding.
“Looks to me like she’s got herself plenty of schooling. On, on how to be smokin’ hot.” Dun cracked up at his own stupid joke, not even trying to hide the fact that he was staring right at my chest.
I jerked away from him, hard. Gram laughed along with him as I raced to my room and slammed the door.
IT WAS THEIR ANNIVERSARY. An entire year since their first official date.
That was why she was going through his things. Other women did that, didn’t they? Snooped around their boyfriends’ apartments to find the velvet boxes containing bracelets and earrings, glittering tokens of love?
It was so hard to know what normal was, even though she worked at it all the time. She shopped where other women shopped, dressed as well as any of them. She got her hair cut at a salon where they brought you champagne while you waited. Why not? She had plenty of money now.
That hadn’t always been the case. It took six years to put herself through college, working full-time and weekends too, six years of living in a sleep-deprived, caffeine-fueled haze before she finally graduated.
Six more years of research jobs after that, in labs all over the city, taking classes whenever she could to supplement what she learned on the job. Full-time graduate school was out of the question when she was still paying off her debts-the lab jobs didn’t pay enough for her to save much money, even though she kept her expenses down by living in a tiny apartment in a bad part of town.
Those were lonely years. Even if she had time to date, the memory of her first love stayed in her mind every waking moment. Her heart did not heal. Yes, it scabbed over; the agony dulled to a low ache that was as much a part of her as breathing. But she never forgot.
She wanted to atone. Her life became an effort to make up for that early mistake. If she could just find a way to use her gift to help people-but the scientific community was not interested in the work she wanted to do.
Until the day she met him. Of course, he was only her boss for the first couple of years. He’d heard about her-heard about her reputation for hard work and reliable results, but more important, he’d heard about the research she conducted on her own after hours… and the thing she could do that science could not yet explain. She had told almost no one about that part, and still-somehow-he found out. And offered to pay her three times her salary to come work for him.
And now, in his laboratory, she worked the longest hours of all, but that didn’t matter, did it? Because they were together, and they shared a vision, a dream. They were going to change the world.
That was what she told herself every morning as she steeled herself to go through the doors of the building where the lab was located. It was unmarked, with no sign out front, nothing to indicate the expensive equipment inside, the experts he had hired from around the world. But he was disciplined that way-he didn’t flaunt it, but he insisted on the best.
And he said she was the best. Without her, he often reminded her, their work would be in vain. He said that studying her was a privilege. So why had it become so hard to return his affection, his touch, lately?
It was her fault, because relationships were so much harder for her than for other women. She tried to push the thought away as she finished looking in the drawers of his dresser and considered the sleek ebony desk in the study of his beautiful penthouse apartment with its view of Lake Michigan. Because of what had happened to her all those years ago… maybe it was inevitable that it would take her so long to love again.
And she did love him, she reminded herself as she shifted objects around on the desk, careful not to disturb the placement of the papers and pens and sticky notes and binder clips. The desk was the only messy thing in his life, this private work space in his home. The rest of it-the sterile lab, the gleaming kitchen with its stainless steel appliances, the pressed shirts and suits hanging in the closets-was so neat and orderly, it was as though no real human lived there.
She suppressed a little shiver. That was not the way she ought to be thinking about her beloved. Especially since there was a chance-he’d hinted around enough, hadn’t he?-more than achance, a likelihood that he was going to propose tonight. That somewhere in this apartment was the ring he would slip on her finger, a beautiful ring, because he insisted on the best of everything, and then they would be united in marriage in addition to their passion for their work, and she would be the happiest woman in the world.
So why was she feeling sick inside?
Nerves-that was all it was, she chastised herself, quieting the resistant voice inside. She just had to see the ring. Because seeing it would confirm what she suspected, and if she confirmed that suspicion, she could prepare for it. When he got down on one knee later tonight, she’d be ready with the proper display of delight and surprise, and he’d never know that inside her a gnawing fear was growing, a certainty that something was wrong, wrong, wrong.
She had to master that fear, to hide it away where no one would ever see it, if she ever wanted to live normally. To marry, to have children, perhaps. She would never find anyone more accomplished than her boyfriend. He was wealthy and intelligent and powerful, and he had chosen her. This was real love, mature love, and if she found herself thinking about that other love it was only because of the terrible way it had ended. She’d fallen hard the very first time, but what had felt like love had probably just been infatuation.
Real love was what she had now, the product of shared interests and a cautious escalation of intimacy over time. Her beloved had been patient as their working relationship slowly grew into something more.
So she would not allow the doubts in, not today. Today was special. The day every woman dreamed of, right? As she opened the file drawers next to the desk, she forced the nagging fears back to the far corners of her mind. So he had recently made a few errors that weren’t like him. Everyone-even the most brilliant people-got distracted. The inconsistencies in the lab reports she’d mistakenly read, the test models and control populations that didn’t look anything like what they had discussed, even the files that contained references to funding sources she’d never heard about-all of that could easily be explained. She had only a bachelor’s degree, after all; everyone else in the lab-all the unfriendly staff who showed up without introduction and dove into the work without ever sharing any personal information-they were so far ahead of her that she barely understood what they were doing.
She riffled through the files in the last drawer. Suddenly, she stopped, her heart skipping as she read, and then read again, the file’s label, written neatly in his handwriting.
Her name.
Her real name.
The one no one had used in years.
Behind her she heard the door open, and the click of her boyfriend’s Italian shoes on the polished wood floors.
She didn’t move. Couldn’t move. She held the file in her hands, a file thick with papers, and stared at the name she’d thought she buried forever.
“Ah.” His deep, cultured voice came from behind her. He didn’t sound angry so much as amused. “Looking through my private files, are you, my darling?”
The germ of doubt inside her grew, and she began to shake. But still she held on to the file, as she slowly turned to face him. He offered his hand. Without thinking, she took it and allowed herself to be guided to the leather sofa, where they sat together, knees touching. His hands were warm, and even though the voice in her mind screamed in horror and fear, the part of herself that she had trained so carefully to be like everyone else, like normal women, did not pull away.
“We have a lot to talk about,” he said. “In a way, your timing is excellent. See, I recently made some discoveries about you. Yes, you. Don’t look so surprised, darling! You know I have always found you fascinating. Who could blame me for wanting to find out everything I possibly could about the woman I love? And now I can share it all with you, oh yes, because I found out something that you don’t even know about yourself, something wonderful, I think. Something exciting, that will mean great things for both of us and for our work.”
And then he called her by her real name, and the careful shell she’d built up through the years shattered into a million jagged shards, and she realized that she didn’t really know this man at all.
I DIDN’T SLEEP WELL that night, and it took longer than usual to get ready in the morning because someone had spilled a beer on the kitchen floor. I didn’t want Chub sitting in it, so I scrubbed the floor clean. Before I left, I fixed him toast and dressed him in a cute pair of overalls, then got him set up with his stacking blocks. I fed Rascal and put him out in the yard for the day.
Maybe it was because I was so tired, but I didn’t see the car across the street until the bus pulled up. It was cold for April, and I was squinting against the morning sun and blowing clouds of breath on the chilly air when I heard the bus coming and looked up. Ten yards down the road on the opposite side was a dark gray sedan with tinted windows. Our house was the only one on this stretch of road between Gypsum and Trashtown, and anyone who came to see us just drove into the yard. No one ever parked on the road like that.
I boarded the bus, then slid in next to Coby Poindexter, leaning across him so I could look out at the sedan. The driver’s-side window was cracked a few inches, but I couldn’t see inside. As the bus pulled back into the street, I twisted around and tried to see the license plate, but all I could make out was a Lexus emblem.
Could it be the cops? Undercover, watching our house because of Gram’s dealing? But cops wouldn’t drive a Lexus, would they?
“Hey,” Coby said, “how’s things in white-trash land?”
I ignored him. Today, for some reason, I felt something inside me slipping. It wasn’t that I was feeling any braver. Almost the opposite-like I was falling apart at the edges. The way Dun had treated me the night before, the mess in the kitchen this morning, the strange car across from our house: it was all too much. It didn’t leave me enough energy to keep up the mask of indifference I worked so hard at.
“Shut up, Coby,” I muttered.
It wasn’t much of a comeback, but he seemed surprised. I could sense him staring at me the rest of the way to school, but I didn’t pay any attention. When we pulled up in front of the school I bolted out the door before anyone else could talk to me, and went looking for Milla.
She wasn’t hard to find. She was standing near the second-floor water fountain with two other Morrie girls who could have been sisters, their blond hair in greasy clumps around hollow-cheeked faces with sharp, jutting chins. I thought one was named Jean-she’d been in a few of my classes over the years.
“Excuse me,” I said, louder than I intended. I was nervous. I wanted to talk to Milla about what happened, but the other girls closed ranks in front of her as though they’d practiced the move. She would have escaped down the hall except she tripped over her backpack and dropped the book she was holding. It fell to the floor, pages fluttering open.
I reached down to pick up the book just as she did and bumped my forehead against her shoulder. She yanked herself away from me with such force that I left the book on the floor.
Ever since my first week of school, when I sought them out at recess and lunch, I had found myself drawn to the Morries. Maybe it was just that we were equally pathetic, all of us badly dressed and ragged and friendless, but it felt like something more. I felt-and maybe this was no more than an orphaned child’s longing for family-like we were related somehow. Like I was one of them.
I’d asked Gram about it long ago and she’d burst out in one of her breath-rattling laughs, spittle forming at the corners of her mouth.
“You ain’t no Morrie,” she said. “You’re way better’n any Morrie girl. Don’t you forget it, now.”
I must have looked unconvinced, because she reached out her nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger and pinched the tender skin on the inside of my arm. She could pinch surprisingly hard, making hot tears jump to my eyes, but I didn’t make a sound.
“Those Morrie boys, now, they’re a whole nother matter,” she added. “But that’s for later, and don’t you pay them no mind. I’ll let you know when, that’s what.”
There were no boys around now. I looked into Milla’s watery eyes and edged closer, almost enjoying the way she shrank from me.
“What happened yesterday?” I demanded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You were unconscious. I saw… I felt it.” I didn’t say that her hands, her forehead beneath my fingers, felt worse than unconscious, they felt… wrong. Empty. Dangerous, broken, hurt.
“Didn’t you come to my house once?” I asked in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “Last year. With that guy. You know. The one with the tattoos.”
It wasn’t much of a clue, since many of Gram’s customers had tattoos, but the man I was thinking of had blue crosses circling his neck, disappearing into his stringy gray ponytail.
I could see in Milla’s eyes I’d hit a nerve. “Wasn’t me,” she mumbled, lips barely moving as she spoke.
“Yes it was. Yes it was.”
“No. I’m, I was-”
“Why are you so scared of me?” I demanded, leaning close to her face. The bell rang loud over our heads, and I could see the kids, Cleans and Morries alike, scattering off to class, but I didn’t move.
Milla shook her head, eyes open so wide I could see the pale pink veins in the white parts. “I ain’t scared of you.”
She tried to slip away to the side, but I put out my arm and blocked her, my hand flat against the wall. Anger traced white-hot trails along my nerves. I itched to hit Milla. I could feel my palm tingle where I imagined smacking it against her bloodless cheek.
But when she dodged in the other direction, I let her go. She backed away with little shuffling steps, her book forgotten on the floor. “I ain’t scared,” she said again, and I knew she was about to turn and sprint down the hall, to sit in the back of some class with the other Morries.
“I ain’t scared,” she said one final time, giving me a look that was part triumph and part impossibly sad. “But maybe you oughta be.”
I couldn’t pay attention the rest of the day. I had done something to Milla that had fixed her. I wasn’t sure what or how, and my mind danced around the memory of yesterday, trying to make sense of it.
There had been a second, when my fingers pressed against her damp, stringy hair, when it felt as though something had shifted inside me. As though some hidden piece had broken free and now rode the currents of my bloodstream, electrified by my heartbeat and changing me from the inside out. I wasn’t at all sure I liked the feeling. Being me wasn’t exactly paradise, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to change, either.
I thought of Gram and the brief time when she’d turned almost human, when we first got Chub. She had changed-or at least I thought she had. For a while she was almost like a real parent, asking me about my day, about what I learned at school. She wasn’t great at it-she didn’t listen to my answers and I still had to do most of the chores, but when I watched her working with Chub, there was a light in her eyes, and that was more than I’d seen in her before or since.
And now she was worse than ever. Was that what was in store for me? Would I end up like her, bitter and mean? I’d tried to help Milla-I hadn’t planned it, and I didn’t understand it, but I had tried. And now I wanted to make a connection with her. No: the connection was already there-I just wanted her to acknowledge it. And instead, she’d made it even clearer that she wanted nothing to do with me.
I was still lost in my thoughts when I walked to the drugstore after school, and I left without the one thing I really needed, Chub’s baby shampoo. I turned around after a couple of blocks and headed back.
When I had almost reached the store, I saw something that made my heart lurch: the car that had been parked outside our house that morning was pulling into a parking space. Two men got out of the car. They were medium height with short hair, wearing sunglasses and dark jackets. They moved fast and looked strong and muscular under their clothes, and they didn’t smile or talk.
They could be anybody, I told myself-it was probably just a coincidence that I’d seen them twice. They could have pulled over in front of our house to check a map or to pee behind a tree or something, and as for going into the drugstore, everyone in town shopped there.
On the other hand, I had never seen them before. I knew pretty much everyone in Gypsum by sight, and these guys definitely didn’t look local.
If they were cops, they weren’t from Gypsum.
But if someone had caught on that Gram was dealing drugs, maybe the local cops had called in some other agency. Like-I racked my brain, trying to remember what we’d learned in civics. There was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives… but was dealing drugs a federal crime? And who would have turned Gram in? One of her customers? Maybe they’d given up information in exchange for a better deal, if they’d been arrested for possession or something. I knew the penalties for dealing were fierce, way more serious than just getting caught with stuff.
But if they already suspected Gram, why didn’t they just get a warrant and come to the house? Maybe that was what they were doing now-trying to get enough evidence to justify a warrant. Well, they wouldn’t get it from talking to Mr. Hsiao-all I’d bought today was a box of trash bags, eyedrops for Gram and a three-pack of soap.
I needed to find out more. I waited until the men entered the shop, then walked quickly to the car. Trying to look casual, I peered through the windshield: there was nothing inside but a Styrofoam coffee cup in the cup holder.
I went back into the shop, slipping into the aisle farthest from the cash register. I studied the shaving cream and razors and strained to hear what the two men were saying to Mr. Hsiao.
“… come in regularly?” A deep voice with a slightly flat accent.
“No, like I told you, she’s as like to come in one day as the next. These kids, they don’t stick to a schedule, you know? You mind telling me what this is about?”
“An incident at her school,” a new voice said smoothly. “Can’t give the details at this point. We appreciate your cooperation. And you keeping it… under wraps.”
“And you said you were from…” That’s right, Mr. Hsiao, find out who they are, I telegraphed silently.
“State services,” the first voice said. “Here, my identification…”
There was silence for a moment; then Mr. Hsiao spoke, his voice only a little less skeptical. “Well, I’ve told you what I can. You could probably catch up with the girl, talk to her yourself, if you like.”
A moment later they were striding back out of the store. I spotted the tops of their heads going by and ducked. I counted to two hundred before leaving the store, careful not to let Mr. Hsiao see me.
I wasn’t convinced the men were from any state agency. They were too… anonymous, for one thing. Plus, Mr. Hsiao didn’t sound like he thought much of whatever ID they showed him.
Could they be some sort of competition? Drug dealers from the next town over, maybe all the way from Kansas City? Or had Gram got into something even worse? Did she owe money, had she stolen something valuable, cheated someone important?
The car was gone, but for all I knew it was on its way to our house. I needed to get home, but there were stretches of the road with no houses along them, no one to notice if something happened to me. But I had no idea what these men would want with me.
I didn’t care much what happened to Gram, but I couldn’t let anything happen to Chub. As I hesitated, torn between running home and trying to keep the men from seeing me, Sawyer Wesson came around a corner, walking with Milla. Sawyer was a Morrie, but he wasn’t like the others. He was quiet and careful and kept himself clean. We’d never spoken, but I’d noticed him watching me a few times during lunch or in school assemblies.
Milla saw me first, and her mouth tightened into a hard line. She put a hand on Sawyer’s arm, but he was in the middle of saying something to her as he tossed his cigarette to the ground and stepped on it.
“Sawyer,” I called. Panic made me bold. “Sawyer, could you please walk me home?”
Only after the words were out did I realize how they sounded. I was frightened, that was all, and I just wanted some company in case anything bad happened. Sawyer was tall and broad-shouldered, with narrow eyes and black hair that reached almost to his shoulders. If you didn’t know him, it would be easy to be intimidated by him.
He stopped and regarded me. He looked surprised, then wary, his eyes clouding with doubt.
“I mean-I didn’t-” I started to explain, but what could I say? That I thought I was being pursued by government agents or members of the mob or, or, I had no idea who?
“That’d be okay,” Sawyer said, and then I saw something I’d never seen before: his smile. It was surprising how it changed his face, making him look almost sweet.
“You were comin’ to the Burger King with me, or did you forget that,” Milla spat. She refused to look at me.
“I never said-”
“Whyn’t you just go on with her, then. Seein’ as you’re so forgetful’n all, you prob’ly forgot who she is.” If it was a bluff, it wasn’t much of one, since Sawyer walked over to me without a backward glance. I had no idea what Milla meant by “who she is.” Was she referring to what had happened in gym? To the fact that I was an outcast? Whatever she meant, Sawyer either didn’t know or didn’t care, and I felt smug satisfaction as Milla stalked off the way they’d come, defeated.
We walked half a block before I managed to think of something to say, and then at the very same moment Sawyer started to talk too.
“So how are-”
“What do you-”
And then we were both laughing and saying you first, no you. Sawyer kicked at a stone and it went flying across the road, hitting a tree trunk dead-on, and I thought about how it was for me in gym class.
“Did you ever want to play sports?” I asked.
Sawyer didn’t answer for a moment. “Sometimes. I thought… I’m pretty good, you know, at throwing. I thought maybe baseball. But…”
He didn’t need to finish. I didn’t know what his home life was like, but it was safe to assume it had certain things in common with mine.
I changed the subject, and we talked about classes and teachers. I was surprised to learn that he was considering trying to get into AP American History. He’d be the first Morrie I’d ever heard of to get into an Advanced Placement class. He asked me what I liked to do after school, and I told him about Chub, and Sawyer listened and nodded and even laughed when I told him the way Chub followed Rascal around the yard, like he thought he was part dog.
“Hey,” he said when my house came into view. “I just want to say I’m really sorry about, you know, Milla and what she said. She don’t mean anything by it.”
I doubted that was true-whatever Milla thought about me, it seemed like she felt it strongly. I tried to think of a way to ask about her, and the Morries in general, without offending Sawyer. The way he’d agreed to walk with me so readily, the way he looked at me at school when he didn’t think I’d notice-I was pretty sure he had a crush on me, and it felt good. I’d never been wanted by a boy before, and I didn’t want to mess it up by making him uncomfortable.
“I… always wondered why Milla and I were never friends,” I said carefully. I was trying to figure out what to say next when a car pulled up behind us and gunned its engine. We scrambled off the shoulder into the weedy edge of the woods.
When I turned around to look, I saw that it wasn’t a car at all but a battered old green Ford pickup. The driver rolled the window down and hung out an arm.
It was Rattler Sikes.
Cold fear shot through my body as Rattler leaned out the window and looked straight at me, but when he spoke, it was directed at Sawyer.
“Git on in the truck, boy,” he said, and I could see that his teeth were surprisingly white and straight. His eyes were a brown so dark they were almost black, flinty and sparking some strong emotion. Maybe curiosity. Maybe rage.
“I don’t-she asked me to-” Sawyer started, his gaze darting between me and Rattler.
“I didn’t ask you a question, did I, boy,” Rattler said. His tone stayed even, but there was a threat in it, a shadow of violence that reached into me and curled around my heart.
“No,” Sawyer mumbled, his chin lowered.
“Ain’t gonna tell you agin.”
Sawyer glanced at me-he didn’t meet my eyes, just gave me a quick view of his face, which was cast in misery and, it seemed to me, apology. He trudged around to the passenger side and got in. Inside the cab, he stared straight ahead.
Rattler continued to watch me. As uncomfortable as it was to be the focus of his attention, I didn’t look away. There was something in the way he looked at me, something that kept me from running.
Rattler’s voice lowered even further, a raw whisper. “You take care, hear, Hailey girl.”
The truck pulled away slowly, the tires crunching gravel and spitting up loose rocks and dead leaves. Rattler’s eyes tracked me, and just when it seemed like he would run off the road, he smacked the side of the cab with the flat of his hand and turned the wheel back straight on the road. He sped up and I smelled the exhaust from the hanging, corroded tailpipe.
I walked toward the house, and Rascal came bounding across the yard, ears flying, happy to see me-but Rattler’s voice stayed in my head. So low, I thought again, that most people wouldn’t even be able to hear it.
But I could hear. I could hear him just fine.
SHE ALMOST DIDN’T STOP outside of town, but at the last second she took the exit that led past the Show-Me Trading Post before heading out to State Road 9.
She’d left first thing in the morning after the longest night of her life, lying in the dark and replaying that horrible scene over and over, the things she had learned about her boyfriend-and the one surprise he’d saved for last.
So much would have been different, if she had only known. It didn’t help anything to think about what might have been, but deep in the night, when the silence was most profound and the dark reached all the way into her soul, it was hard to resist.
Today she would start to put things right.
The Show-Me Trading Post was even more run-down than she remembered, a ramshackle cinder-block building with gaudy displays in dirty windows, hardly the place to buy someone a gift. But she was worried that the girl, who would never have heard about her either, might be skittish. Maybe a small token, a gesture to show that she wanted to help, could smooth things over for their first meeting.
There was nothing on the shelves that felt right, though. She considered a cardboard stand displaying fruit-flavored lip gloss, a cheap-looking bead bracelet kit, a rack of fashion magazines, before settling on a generic MP3 player with earbuds. She could buy the girl something nicer later-once they were together, once she had proved that her intentions were good.
As she slipped the player off its hook on a Peg-Board rack near the back of the store, the door jangled and two men walked in, caps pulled low.
She shrank back, slipping into the shadow of a tall refrigerator that held soft drinks and beer. She had seen those men before, at the lab. They sometimes came to meet with her boyfriend in private. They didn’t look like scientists-not with their generic-looking dark jackets that did not entirely conceal the holsters underneath. Their visits were brief, and afterward her boyfriend usually grew distant for a day or two, saying little, staying in his office late and monitoring the high-res displays in his office that were tilted so that only he could see them.
One of the men talked to the cashier, showing her something small and flat. The cashier, a brassy-haired woman with glasses on a chain around her neck, answered in a voice loud enough to hear in the back of the store.
“No, don’t b’lieve so,” she said indifferently.
More murmuring as the man gestured insistently while hiscompanion glanced around. She edged back into the corner between the refrigerator and the wall and flattened her body into the small space so that she couldn’t be seen from the front of the store.
“No, never,” the cashier repeated. “But then again, I ain’t from town. I live twenty miles down to Casey, so I wouldn’t probably know her, now would I.”
The man tucked the photo away-because that was what it had to be, wasn’t it, a photo of the girl-and slid a bill onto the countertop glass, then flipped a card on top of the money.
“Call if you remember anything later,” he said in a louder voice. Her heart pounded as she watched the two men turn and make their way out of the store.
So, he hadn’t waited, then. He might have believed the story she gave him last night, her terrified attempt to convince him that finding out about the girl meant nothing more to her than good news for the research. He might have believed her lies, but it hadn’t stopped him from sending the men down to Gypsum. Clearly he was determined to move forward immediately.
She had to stop him. But she couldn’t just go bursting into the house and demand that the girl leave with her-not when there was no telling what the old lady had told her.
No-first she had to build trust.
She looked at the cheap trinket in her hand and slowly slid it back on the hook.
A gift wouldn’t help. Bribery wouldn’t help. Neither would demanding or threatening or pleading or begging.
She poured a cup of stale coffee with shaking hands. She paidthe cashier, who barely looked at her as she counted out the change, then stood in the parking lot drinking the bitter liquid before she got back into her car and drove the once-familiar streets to the house where she had grown up, a place she had hoped never to see again.
She had a near-impossible task ahead of her. And the only weapon she had was the truth.
AFTER RATTLER DROVE AWAY, I stood outside for a minute and waited for my heartbeat to slow down to normal before I went into the house. I said hello to Gram, and she grunted in my direction. Judge Judy was blaring from the television. Chub was on his stomach, scribbling with a fat crayon in a coloring book. When he saw me, he jumped up and ran over and threw his arms around my legs like he did every day, hollering, “Hayee!”
I usually loved that moment. It was the best thing in my day, getting home and making sure that Chub was safe and knowing that there was one person in my life who was always happy to see me.
Today, though, it was hard for me to return his hug without letting him see how shook up I was. I got Chub a snack and drank a glass of milk, and then I settled in with my homework, though it was almost impossible to concentrate. I kept thinking about the men in the car, and Milla and Sawyer, and Rattler. Afternoon faded into evening and I fixed dinner and gave Chub his bath. I toweled him off and dressed him in his pajamas, but it was a little early for him to go to sleep. I knew I ought to read to him, but I was still feeling upset and distracted, so I did something to help me calm down: I visited the words.
I’d found them a few years ago, carved with care into the wall of the closet in the bedroom I shared with Chub. You couldn’t see them unless you actually went inside the closet, and since Gram used to keep it jammed full of junk, I didn’t find them until I got old enough to organize the closet myself. I had taken everything out and was washing the walls one Saturday when I found the words, near the bottom of the wall, carved into the old wood paneling.
CLOVER PRAIRIE
Those two words sparked something inside me, almost like recognition. I wondered what they meant-I imagined a field full of clover, swaying gently in the breeze, the sun shining brightly.
But even as I pictured the scene, I knew it wasn’t right. I traced the words with my finger; someone had taken care, maybe using a penknife or a sharp screwdriver, going over the blocky letters until they were grooved deeply into the wood. I wasn’t the first person to trace them, I could tell. The edges were smooth, without splinters or rough edges.
I returned to the words almost every week. Something happened when I touched them, some small peace entered me, calming my anxiety and my fears.
I let my fingertips drift down the wall until they rested on the baseboard. But something wasn’t right. The piece of baseboard, extending only two feet or so along the left wall of the closet, was loose. It separated slightly from the wall, wobbling under my fingers.
I tried to shove it back, feeling for the nail that had popped out, thinking I’d get a hammer and fix it.
But there was no loose nail. Instead, the bottom came away from the wall, and I realized that it wasn’t nailed at all, only kept in place by the tension between the other walls.
In fact, this board wasn’t mitered like the others. I tugged at it, and it came away in my hands. As I felt along the edge, I realized I’d come upon a hiding place: the paneling had been cut away in the middle, making a little hidey-hole about a foot long and a few inches deep. How had I never noticed this before?
I reached cautiously inside the hole and touched something, and the strange sensation of familiarity got stronger. I knelt down and shined the flashlight into the tiny space. With my cheek pressed to the floor I could see that there was a bundle wrapped in cloth, and papers rolled and tied with a ribbon. I took everything out and spread it on the floor in the room, where the light was better. Chub had crawled up on my bed and was turning the pages of his favorite board book, humming and running his fingers over the pictures; he could entertain himself that way for hours.
I picked up a tarnished metal frame containing a picture of a young, smiling, black-haired woman. It was one of those photos from a long time ago, when they first started printing pictures in color. The colors were all too bright: the yellow of her shirt, the red of her lips. Her hair was done in an old-fashioned style, curled close to her face, but her skin was smooth and unlined and her eyes sparkled as though she had just heard something funny.
I turned the frame over and there was handwriting on the back: Mary 1968. She didn’t look like anyone I had ever met, but at the same time she was somehow… familiar. I set the frame down and unfolded a piece of fabric that had gone yellow with age.
Inside, a rectangle of white lace had been carefully rolled around a necklace. Hanging from a silver chain was a multi-faceted red stone surrounded by fancy silver scrollwork. It was beautiful and it looked very old.
The rolled pages were delicate, made of a yellowed paper that felt rough to the touch, and covered with rows of flour-ishy writing. The handwriting was faded, and it looked like it had been written with a brush or a fountain pen. I couldn’t read all the words-there were women’s names and dates on one side, and on the other side were a few lines of writing in some language that wasn’t English.
I studied the names. They started with Lucy Hester Tarbell and the year 1868. I read through the names: Sarah Beatrice Tarbell, Rita Joan Tarbell, Helen Davis Tarbell… When I got to the end I sucked in my breath at the final name: Alice Eugenie Tarbell, 1961.
I stared at Gram’s name until I realized what was wrong: if these were birth dates, it meant that she was… forty-nine years old. But that was impossible. Gram was bent and arthritic and had trouble breathing and getting out of a chair. True, she’d never told me her age, but I’d always assumed she was eighty or something, as old as I could imagine.
Could the date be something else? A marriage date, maybe, or… I racked my brain for possibilities. Maybe something religious? Gram never went to church, never even mentioned God. But I had learned in school that families sometimes recorded names, births and deaths and marriages, things like that, in a family Bible-could I have stumbled on pages torn from my family Bible?
I turned the pages over and tried to read the lines of writing.
Tá mé mol seo draíocht
Na anam an corp cara ár comhoibrí
I had barely read the first two lines when I found that my lips moved with ease, that I was pronouncing the unfamiliar words as though I’d been speaking them all my life, line after line. It felt extraordinarily good, and right, and I didn’t stop. My eyes clouded over, but I kept chanting, my voice tapering off to a whisper. When the words ran out I blinked a few times to clear my vision and saw that I had recited the entire paragraph or poem or whatever it was that had been written with such care on these pages.
I could have stopped-it wasn’t like I’d been possessed or anything like that-but the words were there inside me, and reading just the first few brought the rest to my conscious mind. I found myself wanting-needing-to speak them aloud. I scanned the page a second time and marveled at the beauty of the words, and at the way I’d been able to make the strange sounds and the accent that went with them.
And then I realized I had heard the words once before.
When I had touched Milla in the gym.
When my vision had gone dark, when the sounds of the gym had faded away and left me completely focused on the rushing feeling and Milla’s wounded body under my fingertips, my mind hadn’t been completely silent. There had been a whisper of a voice saying these same words, or perhaps it had been my own voice, I couldn’t be sure, only knew that they had unfurled like a ribbon fluttering in a breeze, there and then gone.
I ran my fingertips over the words as though touching them would answer my questions, would somehow reveal what I was supposed to do. Because I felt certain that I had been chosen for something and that Milla was part of it, and all the Morries, and Gram and Rattler Sikes and Dun and even Chub. All of it fit together in some way that I didn’t yet understand, and the thought was frightening but compelling.
I picked up the necklace and held it in the lamplight. Deep red flashes danced into the corners of the room as though the stone had an energy that splintered into pieces when the light touched it.
Chub noticed the sparkling stone and dropped his book on the bed, clapping his hands.
“Preeee!” he said, laughing-it almost sounded like “pretty.”
I slipped the necklace on, fastening the silver clasp with care, and then I sat next to Chub on the bed and let him look at it. He touched the stone gently and murmured and crawled into my lap, and I held him tight and rocked him.
I loved to sing to Chub, everything from songs from cartoons to my favorites from the radio. Today, I just hummed, a sad, wandering melody that came into my head. Chub sighed and leaned into me, and the humming turned to words, the words from the verse. If Chub found them strange, he didn’t let on. I sang, and we rocked, and when the need to replay the verses over and over finally faded, he had fallen asleep in my arms.
I carried him to his crib and tucked him under his blanket. I slipped the pendant under my shirt so Gram wouldn’t see it, and rolled the scrap of lace carefully and put it in the back of my T-shirt drawer along with the frame and the pages. When I left the room, Chub had a fistful of soft cotton blanket pressed to his chin, smiling in his sleep.
I WAS SLIDING into my usual seat at an empty lunch table the next day when I saw him. Sawyer was sitting with Milla and a few other Morries, poking at something in a Tupperware container with a plastic fork.
Only, there was something wrong. I could see it from twenty feet away. His eye was swollen and there was a purple bruise shading his cheek.
I suddenly wasn’t hungry. I threw my lunch-a sandwich and apple from home-into the trash and then walked, as casually as I could, past his table.
Up close it was worse. He had a black eye, and the other eye had an ugly red cut along the brow. In addition to the bruise on his cheek, there was something wrong with his nose; it was swollen and tilted to the right. As I passed, I couldn’t help gasping. Everyone looked up except Sawyer, who dropped his chin even lower and stared at the table.
“Whatcha lookin’ at him like that for, Hailey?” Gomez Jones demanded. “You’re whose fault that is. You done that to him.”
I couldn’t let him say that, not in front of Sawyer. “I-I-”
Milla slammed her hand down on the table angrily, making the trays and silverware jump. “Why can’t you just leave us alone?”
“Yeah, bitch-stay away,” another girl muttered.
I was getting tired of the way they treated me, especially considering what I had done for Milla. “You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me. Maybe you should try being a little grateful.”
“Oh, right. ’Cause you saved me and all, right?” Milla’s face twisted up in fury. “So I’m supposed to kiss your ass?”
“I don’t-I never said-”
“I don’t need you, none of us need you. You think you’re above the rest of us, but you’re not. You’re not. You and your grandmother, you’re broken. You’re freaks.” To my horror, Milla’s eyes filled with furious tears and she bolted from the table. After a second of silence, Sawyer pushed back his chair and went after her, not looking at me.
“Happy now?” the girl said as Gomez and the others started gathering their things. “How many of us do you want to get hurt? None of this would happen if you would just stay away.”
I stood frozen to the spot after they’d all left. I didn’t understand. I had never-never-heard a Morrie girl stand up to anyone outside their group, not in my whole life. I backed slowly away from the table, her words ringing in my ears. When I bumped into a chair, I turned and walked out of the cafeteria as quickly as I could.
Stay away. I’d broken some rule when I talked to Sawyer yesterday, and he’d paid for it. I didn’t bother asking myself who had done that to him-it had to be Rattler, though I couldn’t imagine why. I didn’t blame the Morries for being afraid of him-I was plenty afraid of him myself.
When I got home, Chub was curled up on the couch, asleep.
“How long’s he been down?” I asked Gram.
“Not long,” she said, stabbing out a cigarette in the ashtray and reaching for her pack, then crumpling it when she saw that it was empty. “I think. Or maybe a while, I don’t know.”
She had no idea, I could tell. All she cared about, unless she had visitors, was her programs. I reached for the full ashtray, carried it to the trash and wiped it clean before setting it back on the arm of her chair. I went to her room to get a fresh pack of cigarettes from where she kept them on top of her dresser. But when I closed my hand on the pack, I noticed that it was sitting on a plain manila folder.
Curious, I picked the folder up. Something fell out-a white business envelope and, to my amazement, a stack of bills secured with a rubber band.
I flipped quickly through the bills. My heart raced as I realized they were all hundreds-there had to be thousands of dollars in my hand. I set the money on the dresser as though it was on fire, then picked up the white envelope and slid a piece of paper out. After scanning it I realized that it was a plane ticket. Dated two weeks from now, it was for a flight from STL to DUB. Saint Louis to… where?
Before I could examine the ticket more carefully, I heard Gram coughing my name from the living room. I jammed the ticket back in the envelope and slid it and the money into the manila folder.
In the living room I handed the cigarettes to Gram and tried to look like nothing was out of the ordinary. I smoothed an afghan over Chub and kissed his cheek. “I’m going for a walk. Be back in a bit.”
Gram didn’t respond. I didn’t expect her to.
I didn’t bother with the leash. Rascal didn’t need it-he heeled and sat whenever I came to a stop. As we walked along the road, I tried to make sense of what I’d found. Neither of us had ever been on a plane, and I’d never seen that much money in my life. It had to have something to do with the men in the car, but what? Was she planning to make a run from the law? What had she done?
I was so intent on my thoughts that, as we rounded the curve a quarter mile from our house, I almost missed the familiar sound of the Hostess truck. It was a noisy thing with muffler problems that came along every Tuesday and Friday on its way to the Walmart in Casey. Rascal loved to chase it. Usually he wouldn’t leave my side, but there was something about the bright-colored truck that set him hurtling after it, ears flying, tongue hanging out, taking pure joy in the chase.
I didn’t worry about him-he was a smart dog, and fast, and he loved to give the truck a run for its money-but I hadn’t counted on the curve. The driver couldn’t have seen Rascal, who heard the truck’s approach before I did and spun around in the gravel on the shoulder just as it rounded the bend.
I’ve replayed that moment a thousand times in my mind. I don’t want to. I wish I could forget the sound Rascal’s body made when the grill of the truck struck him, when he narrowly missed being dragged under the wheels, when he went flying through the air and slammed into the hard-packed dirt bank.
I ran, but it felt like my arms and legs could only move at half speed, and my scream was stuck in my throat. I know the driver pulled over and got out and called to me, but I don’t remember what he said.
Somehow I made it to Rascal’s side. It was bad. It was worse than bad. I won’t say what I saw, the damage that can be done during a single instant of innocent joy. In the second that it took for me to kneel down beside Rascal and put my cheek to his head, I was covered with blood. Behind us the driver was yelling at me to put him in the truck and we’d drive to the vet, to move fast, there might be a chance-
But I knew there wasn’t any chance. Not if we went in the truck. Not if I didn’t do what needed to be done.
The rushing was already building in my body, the quickening in the blood, just like it had in the gym. But I couldn’t do it here, not in front of the trucker. I stripped off my jacket and laid it flat on the ground and, as gently as I could, dragged Rascal’s body onto the jacket. With tears welling up in my eyes and making it hard to see, I folded the fabric over Rascal’s poor torn body and lifted him. He didn’t protest. He was already slipping away.
I don’t remember what I said to the driver. I don’t know if I said anything at all. The driver was a kind man, and I think he knew that Rascal was nearly dead and he didn’t want to intrude on my last moments with my dog. I know he drove away after placing a heavy hand on my shoulder and telling me he was sorry, but I was already turning back toward home.
I laid Rascal on the porch, still nestled in my jacket. I put my face close to his and waited for his breath against my cheek, but it didn’t come. I put my hands to his torn flesh, the blood cooling and starting to crust under my fingers. I closed my eyes and let the feeling come, roiling rushing unstoppable, and the sounds of the afternoon fell away and the darkness turned to blindness and my fingers became electric as the thing inside me built and crashed and flowed from me to Rascal.
Tá mé mol seo draíocht
Na anam an corp cara ár comhoibrí
Did my lips move? Did I speak out loud? Did the words carry on the chilly spring breeze, across our ruined yard, out to the street, down to Trashtown, where frightened girls hid behind grimy windows, girls who knew more about me than I knew about myself, girls who cursed me? I don’t know, but as the words mixed with the urgent need, I sensed that it was all connected, that what I was doing was not of my own making, that it came from a source that bound us all in some way. And as the rushing slowed and my senses returned with a prickly sharp sensation, I tried to push back the nagging feeling that I was in over my head, that I was invoking powers I couldn’t control.
And then none of that mattered, because Rascal’s body twitched. A small hitch, just a tiny jerk of his paws. I blinked sight back into my eyes and saw that his lips were curled away from his teeth, but under my fingertips I felt his heart beat faintly-a weak and irregular pulse-and I realized that he wasn’t dead.
I hugged him, as gently as I could, and then I sewed him up. Thinking of it now, I can’t believe I found the courage, but I fetched the sewing basket from the back closet, easing past Gram without waking her from her afternoon nap. I washed my hands and squirted Bactine from the bottle I kept in the bathroom. I got a carpet needle and strong waxed thread and I lined up the edges of the tear in Rascal’s body as well as I could.
I apologized before I took the first stitch. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I know this is going to hurt.” But Rascal never twitched or showed the slightest sign of pain. He didn’t look at me, his eyes still unfocused, and I made a neat row of overcast stitches, knotting them off at the place in the soft white fur on his chest where the wound began. I dribbled more Bactine onto the ragged stitches, and when I was finished, I carried him inside to the mound of blankets in the kitchen, where it was warm.
I talked to him some more, and even then I think I knew something was wrong. He didn’t look at me, he just lay there, though his breathing was even and strong. I cleaned up the blood on the porch with rags and Windex, and then I carried the rags and my bloodied jacket to the burn barrel out back and stuffed them into the bottom, into the ashy remains of the last fire.
Back inside, Chub was waking up from his nap. He must have had a nightmare, because he blinked hard and started to wail and pulled at the blanket I’d covered him with. He was getting big, too big for this kind of thing, but I went to him and he wrapped his arms around me and hugged me hard. Slowly, his sobs diminished to whimpers, and he pressed his face into my neck, his tears mixing with Rascal’s blood.
RASCAL SPENT THAT NIGHT lying on the linoleum floor, close to the front door. In the morning I examined his stitches. The pink line of his scar was so faint that it was practically invisible, punctuated by the bits of thread I’d used to stitch him. Even more amazingly, fur was already growing over the area. How could flesh heal that fast-how could fur grow that fast?
Earlier, in the moments before my alarm went off, it had flashed through my mind that I had dreamed his injury. Now I was really starting to wonder. But the black threads were proof that it had happened.
I went to the front door and called his name. He got up obediently, without any stiffness or pain that I could see, and trotted outside and did his business, then came back in and returned to his blankets. I got Gram’s embroidery snips with tiny pointed blades, and a pair of tweezers. I said, “Rascal, come,” and he followed me to my room, where Chub was just beginning to stir under his mound of blankets, yawning and humming softly.
Rascal sat when I told him to, his pose show-dog perfect, erect and still. When I gently pressed on his shoulders he lay down, exposing his scar. He didn’t complain as I cut the threads and tugged them out with the tweezers. It was almost as though he didn’t feel it. I wondered if somehow the accident had damaged his nerves, had taken away his feeling without hurting the rest of him, and I prayed that he was healing on the inside as well as he was on the outside. I gathered up Gram’s tools and threw the bits of thread in the trash, then shooed Rascal out of the room.
Behind me, Chub coughed and then mumbled sleepily. “Hayee. Mockingbird.”
I turned around, Rascal forgotten in my amazement. Chub had said a word-one he’d never said before, three entire syllables as clear as a bell.
“What did you say, Chub?” I asked slowly, my mouth dry.
“Mockingbird,” he repeated.
“You-you want me to sing? Sing you the mockingbird song?”
He rubbed at his eyes, nodding. Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe he hadn’t said “mockingbird” at all but some other word.
But strange things were happening. Milla, Sawyer, Rattler… nearly losing Rascal… the money and plane ticket in Gram’s room… the things I had done without even understanding what I was doing. As I lifted Chub out of his crib and hugged him tight, the words from the pages played in my head, a whispered sound track that seemed almost like it had been running, the sound turned down, all my life.
But Chub wanted me to sing. So I lay down on my bed and held him and rested my chin on his downy hair and sang his favorite lullaby until he had enough and wiggled out of my grasp and ran out of the room to find Rascal. And then I lay there a few minutes longer, wondering what was happening to me, to us.
At school I skipped lunch to go to the library and use the Internet. I’d gotten pretty good at doing research online, trying to figure out what was wrong with Chub. Not that it helped much; there were so many things that could be wrong with him, I felt like the more I read, the less I knew.
I didn’t have much more luck when I tried to research what was wrong with Rascal. I didn’t know exactly what to search for: “fast healing” brought up natural remedies and health-food sites. Searching on Rascal’s symptoms brought up “catatonia,” which involved repetitive movements and ignoring external stimuli, but that didn’t seem to be exactly what was wrong with him.
I gave up and unfolded the piece of paper on which I’d copied a few lines from the pages I found in the closet. I smoothed it out and entered the words in the search engine. Soon it became obvious that the words were Irish, and after poking around in an online Irish-English dictionary for a while I had a pretty good idea of what the lines said:
I commend to this magic
The souls and bodies of our poor countrymen
Heal this withered flesh
These torn and cursed limbs
This tainted blood
I wished I had copied the whole page. I had no idea what kind of magic the author meant, but I felt a strange excitement building inside me. Healing: could it really be a coincidence that I’d found the words after the thing that happened to Milla in the gym… and right before Rascal had been hit by the truck?
Before I left the lab, I looked up the airport code from the ticket I’d found in Gram’s room. DUB stood for Dublin… Ireland. How could the words from the pages in the closet be related to what was happening now, to the plans that Gram was making in secret?
I didn’t know who had written those words or hidden the pages in the closet. I didn’t know what Prairie Clover meant, but it still felt like those words held the key. I had to find out more, even if the one person who could help me hated me for reasons I didn’t understand. There had to be a way to make her talk to me.
I waited until school was nearly over. When the last bell rang I bolted out of class and ran down the hall to the lab, because I knew Milla had science last period. When she shuffled out of the classroom, head down, at the end of the stream of kids, I stepped in front of her and blocked her path.
I opened my mouth to ask if we could go somewhere to talk, but her expression changed from wariness to recognition, her eyes widening and her lips parting in surprise.
“Where’d you git that?” she whispered.
“What?”
“The necklace.”
My fingers went to the red stone pendant. I hadn’t taken it off since I found it in the closet. I’d kept it under my shirt at home so Gram wouldn’t see it, but at school I’d let it hang in front.
“I-I found it.”
“Did your grandmother give it to you?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. If I could have thought of a lie that would keep her talking to me, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But I had no idea what she wanted, what would hold her interest. All I could think of was to ask her if she’d go somewhere to talk to me, somewhere private. “Look, could you, could we-”
Milla shook her head, already backing away. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“But I have to talk to you. To someone. I’m-I don’t-I’ll give you-I’ll give you money if you want, I don’t have a lot but I can get more.” I could sense that in a second she would turn and run down the hall away from me. “The necklace! I’ll give it to you.”
“Don’t take it off,” she snapped. “I don’t want that thing anywhere near me.”
I wasn’t sure what it was, what it could do, but it clearly had an effect on Milla. I held the stone delicately between my finger and thumb and twisted it in the light coming through the high windows. The sun bounced off the stone and danced across Milla’s face in bloodred streaks. Her expression went from wariness to resignation.
“You won’t let it drop, will you,” she sighed. “So let’s git this over with.”
We went to one of the practice rooms by the band room, a musty space with old acoustic tiles lining the walls, and music stands and a scarred piano. There was only one chair, so we sat on the floor, our knees pulled up, the sound of someone practicing scales on a cello reaching us faintly.
I didn’t tell her everything. I told her about the men in the car, about my fears that the authorities would separate me and Chub. I didn’t tell her about Rascal-I didn’t want her to think I was crazy. I told her about the men who came to the house, the deals Gram did out of the basement.
When I talked about Rattler, Milla dropped her gaze to the floor and went still.
“What is it?” I demanded, frustrated. “What is it with him?”
Milla didn’t answer for a moment, but when she did, her voice was so flat and quiet that I could barely hear it. “Seems like you might know.”
“Me? Why? I’ve never done anything to him-”
She jerked her head up and there was anger in her eyes. “It ain’t about what you done. Don’t you git that? Ain’t any of us Banished got any say in things. It’s all laid out.”
“Banished? I don’t-”
“That necklace you’re so proud of,” Milla said, jabbing a finger at me. “Might interest you to know that it ain’t the only one. There’s three of them come over and they’re all cursed. How do you think your grandmother got the way she is? Anyone who wears it’s cursed too.”
I touched the stone protectively. I couldn’t say why, but it seemed to me the opposite was true, that the stone was a charm keeping even worse things from happening to me. “I don’t believe you,” I whispered.
“Really? Well, your mom had one of them, and look what happened to her. That one you got’s probably hers. Your grandmother traded hers, is probably the only reason she’s still alive. Only one missing is your aunt’s, and who knows what happened to her?”
“My… what?”
“Your aunt, Hailey. Come on, don’t act stupid.”
“I don’t have an aunt-”
“You know you do. And I don’t have to sit here and listen to you sayin’ whatever comes into your head like you think I’m an idiot, like you think I’ll believe whatever you feel like sayin’-”
“I-I know you’re not stupid,” I said quickly, placing a hand on her arm, trying to calm her down, but she jerked away from my touch. “I don’t mean to, you know, make you feel bad or whatever, but I really don’t have an aunt. My mom died in childbirth and I-”
“Stop!” She wrapped her arms tight around herself as though she was cold. “Just stop. Your mom went crazy and killed herself and you know it. Bad enough your grandmother got the taint, and now ain’t no one supposed to so much as say your name. Don’t you get it? It would be better for everyone if you had never been born, Hailey.” Her voice had gone cold and nasty. “You think you’re a Healer, but who knows what you done to me? You probably cursed me.”
“My mother didn’t kill herself,” I whispered. I could have said a dozen different things, but that was what came to my lips. “She… died. Having me.”
Milla stood and pointed a shaking finger at me, her lips twisted in rage.
“I can’t-” she started, and then she backed away from me. “If you really don’t know, ask your grandmother. She’ll make you believe it.”
“Wait, wait! Ask her what?”
“Ask your grandmother,” Milla said, and then she flung the door open and ran, and I was alone with only the mournful sounds of the cello for company.
WHEN I GOT HOME, there was a car parked in the yard.
It wasn’t the dark-windowed Lexus or Rattler Sikes’s truck. It was a beat-up brown Volvo, and I knew from experience that was a whole other kind of bad news. A car like this-well maintained even if it was old, boring but socially responsible-screamed social worker.
The Department of Social Services, Family Support Division, sent people out to check on us from time to time. In theory they were supposed to visit every month. In truth I never knew when to expect them, so I could never prepare for their visits.
I bolted across the yard, ignoring Rascal, who was sitting on the porch. I let myself in the front door and hurried to the kitchen. It was worse than I feared: Gram hadn’t bothered to do anything with Chub, and he was sitting on the floor wearing only a diaper that looked like it was about to burst, crusty bits of lunch on his cheeks. When he saw me he jumped to his feet and came running, throwing his strong little arms around my legs and pushing his face into my thigh, saying, “Hayee, Hayee,” in his happy voice.
Gram hadn’t bothered to ask the social worker if she’d like some tea or coffee. She had her cigarettes in front of her, and judging by the butts in the ashtray, she hadn’t stopped smoking since our visitor arrived.
Last time one of the social workers came, she made a big deal out of Gram’s smoking. I thought it would be a bigger issue that we still didn’t have smoke detectors, and the porch stairs were still just a nail or two away from collapsing; that Chub was still barely speaking and wouldn’t use a toilet, and Gram was still refusing to let him go to preschool.
It was time for damage control.
“Hello,” I said loudly, pulling Chub’s arms away from my legs. “I’m Hailey Tarbell.”
The woman seemed to tense at the sound of my voice. She had shiny dark brown hair that came to little below her shoulders-no one I’d seen before, but that wasn’t unusual. They came and went from this job all the time.
She pushed her chair back and stood up and turned toward me and started to speak. Then she stopped and we both just stared at each other.
The face looking back at me-it was my own.
I don’t mean her face was a mirror image of mine. But she looked like me if I was older and had money for nice clothes and makeup and a good haircut.
She had eyes like mine-more gold than brown, tilted up at the corners. Her eyebrows were high and arched like mine, though I’d bet she paid good money to get hers done in a salon.
She had my mouth, thin top lip and full bottom lip. She had the high, sharp cheekbones and the wide forehead I have.
My aunt-this had to be the aunt I never knew I had!
After staring at me for a few seconds, she did something that surprised me even more-she turned back around and smacked her hand down on the table so hard Gram’s ashtray jumped, spilling ashes and butts. It had to hurt her hand, but she curled it up into a fist. For a moment I thought she was going to hit Gram, but instead she just squeezed her fist so hard her skin turned white. I realized I had stopped breathing the same instant that she put both her hands flat on the table and leaned down until her face was inches away from Gram’s and said in a low and threatening voice:
“If you ever lie to me again, Alice, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”
Then she turned back to me and all of the anger drained from her expression, leaving her looking sad and tired.
“My name’s Elizabeth Blackwell.”
Gram tipped her head back and laughed, an awful hacking laugh that showed her long yellow teeth. We both stared at Gram. Finally she ended on a skidding series of gasping coughs and wiped at her eyes with her hands.
“Now who’s lyin’,” Gram said.
The visitor blinked once, hard. Then she took a deep breath like she was trying to get her courage up to jump off the cliffs over Boone Lake.
“Okay,” she said in a voice so soft I knew it was meant just for me. “I’m not-who I said. My name’s Prairie, and I’m your aunt.”
My throat went dry. Prairie.
Clover.
“What was my mom’s name?” I said, my voice barely a whisper.
“What?”
“My mother. Your sister. What was her name?”
“Clover,” my aunt said. “Didn’t Alice ever tell you that?”
Suddenly my head felt both tight and dizzy. The words on the wall, the way they felt under my fingertips, the invisible pull they had on me… It was my mother’s name there. I wondered if she had carved the letters herself. The dizziness escalated into something more, like my whole self had lost its moorings and gone drifting away. “I’m going to get some air.”
I went out the back screen door. For some reason, when I heard her following me, I wasn’t surprised.
She stayed a couple of steps behind me while I walked toward the woods, away from the road where Rascal and I had walked together just yesterday. A short path met up with the crisscrossed web of trails through the woods that connected the farms out past the creek to Trashtown in one direction and Gypsum in the other. I went straight and in a few minutes I was at the creek. It was nearly dry-we’d had little rain or snow over the winter-and there was a flat rock half submerged in the lazy flowing water. I’d come here to sit on the rock a hundred times, thinking and tossing pebbles into the water. I went there now, dangling my feet over the edge.
“Do you mind if I sit too?” Prairie asked.
I shrugged-It’s a free country. She settled next to me and picked up a long, skinny twig that had blown into a crevice in the rock. Holding it loosely in her hand, she traced designs in the air. For a while neither of us said anything. Dozens of questions went through my mind. I kept thinking of the names carved into the wall.
“If you’re my aunt, where have you been all this time?” I blurted out. It wasn’t what I meant to say, and all of a sudden tears blurred my eyes and threatened to spill down my cheeks. I wiped my sleeve hard across my face.
“Oh, Hailey,” Prairie said, and her voice wavered. “I… had reasons for leaving when I did. I didn’t know about you. I meant to come back for your mom, but by the time I could, she… well, she died. I never even knew she was pregnant.”
“But you… you left my mom here alone with Gram. And then she killed herself.” I didn’t bother to keep the accusation out of my voice, even though I wasn’t sure I believed what Milla had said.
“I know.” Prairie’s voice got softer. “That’s something I have to live with every day of my life.”
I considered telling her that I’d never leave Chub with Gram. Never.
“Didn’t anyone come looking for you?” I asked instead.
“Gram didn’t report me missing,” Prairie said. If she was bitter, she covered it well. “I was never officially a runaway. And the police had better things to do than search for me.”
“But-why didn’t you come back, you know, later? After I was born?”
I heard the crack in my voice and I hated it, hated that Prairie heard it too.
“I didn’t know, Hailey. Alice said your mom-” She hesitated and I saw that she bit her lip the very same way I did, catching the right side of the bottom lip between her teeth. “She never let me know about you.”
Why should I care? My mother was nothing to me. I had no memories of her. As far as I was concerned, I’d never had a mother at all.
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” I muttered. “Chub’s my family now. We’re fine, we don’t need anyone else.”
Prairie nodded, more to herself than to me, I thought.
“I see you found your mom’s hiding spot,” Prairie said gently.
“Her… what?”
Prairie put her hands to the back of her neck and twisted the clasp of a thin silver chain. As she closed her fingers on the pendant, I knew what I would see.
“It’s just like yours,” she said. “When I saw it on you… well, your mom never took it off. Neither of us did. Mary-our grandmother-she gave them to us. They’re very old. She said they would protect us.”
She handed the pendant to me, still warm from her skin. I had noticed that the stone in the necklace I wore absorbed my heat and held it, almost like it carried energy. The necklace in my hand was identical to the one around my neck, right down to the twisting, curling scrollwork that held the stone in place, the looping bale through which the chain ran.
I handed the necklace to Prairie. It would have been nice to believe there was magic in the necklaces, but I wasn’t counting on it. “I guess we should go back,” I said.
We didn’t talk, but the silence felt all right. When we got to the house, Gram was still sitting in her kitchen chair. She gave us a calculating smile and blew smoke in our direction. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
“I’m taking Hailey out to dinner,” Prairie said. “We’ll be a while.”
This was news to me. Chub, who had been playing with his plastic magnet letters on the fridge, came over and pushed his face into my legs again. For just a second I was embarrassed for Prairie to see that Chub wasn’t like other kids.
Gram stared at Prairie with her eyes narrowed down to slits. Prairie stared back. I found myself hoping Gram would blink first.
“Fine,” Gram finally said. I could tell she was thinking hard. She had that look a lot. No matter what else you could say about her, she wasn’t stupid. I couldn’t tell you how many of her customers came to our house thinking they could put one over on her. She’d give them that look and sure enough they’d leave a lot more of their cash on the table than they had planned. If they didn’t like it, she’d tell them to take their business somewhere else, which they hardly ever did. I thought of the money and the ticket again, and wondered what she was up to.
“Don’t wait up” was all Prairie said as she took her keys out of her purse.
“We need to bring Chub,” I said. I wanted to find out what Prairie was really doing here, but I felt bad about leaving Chub tonight. I could tell he was upset, the way he’d hugged me so hard.
“Chub’s not going anywhere,” Gram said. “I think he’s catching something. I don’t want him taking a chill outside.”
I knew she was lying, but I also knew he’d be all right for an hour or two.
I followed Prairie out to her car. We didn’t talk. She drove straight to Nolan’s, taking the shortcut back behind the Napa Auto Parts, and I was surprised she’d picked the only fancy restaurant in town.
I was afraid the hostess wouldn’t seat us, since I was wearing jeans. But Prairie gave her a smile and said, “We’ll need some privacy, please. Would you find us a table that’s a little bit out of the way?”
The hostess put us in a nice booth along the far wall, away from the waitress station and the kitchen. She kept sneaking looks at Prairie, and now that I had gotten over the surprise of how much our faces looked alike, I could see why Prairie drew attention.
I was tall and skinny, but Prairie was tall and elegant. Thin, but with nice hips and breasts, and her brown hair was shiny and hung exactly right, smooth and straight and curving under just a little where it went past her shoulders. Her jacket, plain and cut low enough in the front to show a little bit of her silky top underneath, fit her so perfectly it pretty much said money with a capital M. I guess the hostess was thinking the same thing. There were very few rich families in Gypsum; almost everyone was just trying to get by.
I was going to order the chicken sandwich. I read all the prices on the menu and added up in my head what dinner would cost. Part of me wanted to order the most expensive thing just to see what Prairie would do, to see if there was a limit to her concern for me, or maybe to see if I could get her to crack and show me who she really was. Like if under this nice exterior she was just waiting to tell me what she really wanted, and it would be something bad.
But when the waitress came around to take the order, Prairie said, “The filet mignon sounds really good, doesn’t it, Hailey?” It was twenty-three dollars, but I hadn’t had a steak in as long as I could remember and I just said yes, it did.
When the waitress walked away, neither of us said anything for a minute. Prairie fiddled with her knife, spinning it back and forth.
“Tell me about your dog,” she finally said. “If you don’t mind.”
That caught me off guard. Rascal wasn’t something I felt like talking about. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“It’s just that I can tell he’s… that something happened to him.” Her face went soft, and her eyes were sad. “Where did you get him?”
“Um… Gram got him from a guy she knew.”
“Alice traded him for drugs.” Prairie’s expression didn’t change.
“Yeah.” I shrugged like it was no big deal. “Probably.”
“Hailey… I saw the scar. What’s left of it, anyway. On his stomach.”
I blinked. This morning the scar had almost disappeared. You had to push the fur to the side to see the faint pink line.
I wanted to ask Prairie how she knew, but I didn’t want her to think I cared too much. Caring about things made you vulnerable. “He got hit by the Hostess truck a few days ago.”
“Was he badly hurt?”
“He…” I swallowed, remembering the way Rascal looked. But I didn’t want to tell her what I had done, didn’t want to have to try to explain how he’d healed so well in one night. “No, just a little cut.”
Prairie watched me carefully. “I bet you must have given him good care, Hailey. What did you do?”
Her voice was so kind that I had to look away. I swallowed hard and took a little sip of my ice water. “I, um, I just cleaned it with antiseptic and, you know, kept him inside.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Did I… what?”
“While you were cleaning up his injuries? I mean, maybe he was scared. I know how that can be. You must have wanted to make him comfortable.”
She knew.
Somehow she knew that I’d healed Rascal, that something I’d done to him after the accident had fixed him, just like I’d fixed Milla during gym. I felt my face go hot. It was like she could read my mind.
“I don’t think I said anything special,” I answered her carefully, “while I was taking care of him.”
Prairie nodded. “All right. Well, I’m glad he’s… better.”
“Yeah, it, um. I mean, he has that limp, you probably noticed. But that’s all.”
The waitress came along with our salads. We thanked her and just as I was about to pick up my fork, Prairie took a deep breath.
“I have some things to tell you, Hailey,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to do it now, when we’ve only just met, but I think it’s necessary.”
Bad news, then; she was about to tell me what she really wanted from me. But, honestly, how much worse could my life get?
“Whatever,” I said.
“Now I wish I’d ordered a drink,” Prairie said, smiling a little. “A really strong one. Okay, where to start? How about this-Alice isn’t as old as you think she is.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think she’s turning fifty this year,” Prairie said. “Let’s see, I’ll be thirty-one, and she was nineteen when she had me, so, yes, she’s still forty-nine, barely.”
I thought of the old pages, the names and dates written there. Alice Eugenie Tarbell, 1961. But Gram was old-she had the wrinkled face, the thin gray hair, the bent fingers that elderly people have. And she was weak. She could barely get up and down the stairs to the basement. She couldn’t do chores, which was why it was always me who mopped and swept and washed the windows and shoveled snow and carried the laundry and the groceries.
And she was sickly. She caught colds constantly, lying in her bed for days at a time, getting up only when her customers came calling. I found her hair in clumps in the shower drain, and her nails were yellowed and cracked. If she bumped into the furniture, she’d have purple and yellow bruises. Every time she lit up a cigarette, she hacked and coughed as though her lungs were about to fall out.
“That’s impossible,” I finally said.
Prairie sipped at her water. “I wish you could have known your great-grandmother. My grandmother Mary, Alice’s mother.”
I thought of the photo in the cheap frame, the woman’s bright red lips and sparkling eyes. My great-grandmother-I could barely imagine it.
“She died when I was ten,” Prairie continued, “but she was beautiful and strong and fun and smart… so smart. Most of the women in our family are.”
“What happened to Gram, then?”
“Well, here’s part of what I need to tell you, Hailey. Tarbell women-all your ancestors-are incredibly healthy and strong. It’s-well, it’s our birthright, I guess you might say. In our blood. Tell me, I bet you hardly ever get sick, right?”
“Uh… not much.”
“And you’re strong-stronger than the other kids. And more coordinated, right?”
I just shrugged.
“Well, like I said, it’s in our genes. Except that every so often, maybe every five or six generations, there is an aberration.”
“A what?”
“Someone born who doesn’t fit the genetic pattern. Like Alice. Where the rest of the Tarbell women have phenomenal genes, Alice has been in poor health her entire life. She’s aging much too quickly, her tissues are decaying. I don’t imagine she’ll live to see her fifty-fifth birthday.”
I thought of Milla and what she’d said about the necklaces, about how they were cursed. How do you think your grandmother got the way she is?
I didn’t say it, but if it was true, and Gram had been cursed, I wasn’t sorry. Gram could die tomorrow for all I cared. I did the addition in my head-I’d be twenty. Twenty, and free of Gram-my heart lightened at the thought.
An idea came to me, a missing piece of the puzzle of my life that maybe Prairie could supply. “Did you and my mom have the same dad? Do you know who he is?”
Prairie shook her head. I’d wondered, sometimes, looking at Gram with her withered skin and bent body, if she had ever been young, if a man had ever loved her. It didn’t seem possible.
“Alice never talked about that part of her life.”
“What about my dad?” I asked. “Like maybe my mom had a boyfriend or something?”
Prairie gave me a look that was so full of sadness I almost wished I hadn’t asked. “Clover was my younger sister. When I left Gypsum, she was only fourteen. She was already pregnant with you. I never knew.”
Fourteen. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I knew it was possible-they talked about it in Health enough.
“She would be… twenty-nine,” I said. Barely old enough to be a mother of a kid, much less someone my age.
“Yes… Clover, your mom, she was very shy. She didn’t really have many friends at school. And nothing like a boyfriend.”
So she was like me, then. I knew what it was like not to have friends. “But maybe Gram knows something.”
Prairie pressed her lips together for a moment as though trying to figure out what to say next. “If she knows, I’m afraid she’ll never tell.”
“Why not?”
“I know how hard it is to live with Alice,” Prairie said gently. “I… remember. She doesn’t have the power that she wishes she had, and the way she is… it’s left her angry and bitter. Maybe even unable to love anyone. I think it was hard on your mother, harder than it was on me. Clover was sensitive, and sometimes I think it bothered her more when Alice was mean to me than when she did something to her. I just… steeled myself, I guess. I decided a long time ago I wouldn’t let her hurt me, and for the most part it worked.”
I knew what she meant, though I didn’t say it. You told yourself her words were nothing. When she refused to talk to you, you reminded yourself that you didn’t care. You shut off the part of your heart that wanted a mother, a grandmother, and you made it through by remembering every day that she couldn’t hurt you if you didn’t let her, if you didn’t make the mistake of caring too much.
My mother hadn’t been able to do that.
“Whose child is Chub?” Prairie asked.
I felt my face get hot. “We got him from one of Gram’s customers. He’s Gram’s foster child.”
“For the state money,” Prairie said thoughtfully. “Right?”
I nodded, surprised that she figured it out so quick. “Yes, but I think she also wanted him to be like… a project. Something she could fix. He has, um, problems? I mean, he’s slow. He’s really great and all, but he isn’t really developing as fast as he should be.”
I felt disloyal saying it. I waited for Prairie to say something mean about him, to make some careless criticism, and I was ready to hate her if she said the wrong thing. But she just nodded, her eyes sad. “He seems like a sweet boy. You take very good care of him. That must be hard.”
“No.” The word came out harsher than I intended. “I mean, I don’t mind. It’s not hard, it’s fun.”
I didn’t tell her how Gram had acted different for a while, after she applied with the state. I didn’t want to admit that I’d been dumb enough to hope things had really changed during that brief time when Gram kept the house clean and cooked real meals and didn’t do any business out of the cellar. That I had almost believed she could change Chub.
“Do you know his real name?” Prairie asked gently.
I stared at my plate. “No. Just Chub.”
I’d thought about changing it. Charlie, I’d suggested to Gram, but she’d laughed and said she guessed he had a good enough name already. And the thing was, Chub knew his name, he answered to it. I figured he had enough confusion in his life that we didn’t need to go adding any more.
“That’s fine,” Prairie said. “What about a last name?”
“Gram knows it, but she never let me see any of the papers,” I said. “She just says he’s a Tarbell now.”
Prairie nodded. She had that look again, the one I was pretty sure meant a lot of thinking and figuring was going on.
The waitress came with our dinner, and I dug in. I couldn’t believe how good the steak was. Tender and buttery and salty-the best thing I’d ever tasted.
Prairie barely touched hers. She sighed and sliced off a tiny corner and slipped it into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed, but it looked to me like she didn’t even taste it. As hard as she was trying to seem calm, I could tell she was uneasy, almost frightened. I wanted to know why.
I set down my knife and fork. “Why are you here? What do you want from me?”
Prairie looked me right in the eye-something hardly anyone had ever done-and took a deep breath.
“I’m taking you with me,” she said. “You can’t stay here with Alice anymore.”
My heart did a little flip at her words. Leaving-even if it wasn’t the way I planned, even if it was with a stranger-the thought was almost irresistible. I wanted to say Okay, fine, let’s do it. To hell with school, with the stupid Cleans who’d made fun of me forever. To hell with our falling-down house, the weedy yard, the long walk to the grocery. Anywhere would be better than here. I was tempted to say “Sure, let’s go right now,” before she changed her mind.
Instead, what I said was, “I can’t leave Chub.”
Prairie didn’t look surprised. She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin and set down her fork.
“Look,” she said, “I’ll admit I hadn’t planned on Chub. I was actually hoping to leave tonight. This complicates things a bit-but we’re still leaving. We’ll just go a little later than I planned, and we’ll take him with us.”
She said that last part kind of fast as I started to protest.
“But-but what about-”
She held up a hand to stop me. “Try not to worry. I want you to let me handle the details. At least for now. Okay? Look, I know you probably aren’t sure about me yet, and you may not completely trust me, and that’s-that stands to reason. It does. I understand. But I just-I’m not doing this lightly, Hailey. After you get to know me a little more, you’ll understand that I don’t take anything lightly.”
The way she said that, it sounded like a promise, but even more than a promise. Like something she’d worked hard to convince herself of and now she’d do anything to keep it true.
“I can’t just-”
“You can.” Prairie reached across the table and patted my hand, but I pulled away from her. “I have… resources that I’ll tell you more about later. I have some money. We can stay the night at the house and you can gather up a few things-not many, just one small suitcase. And we can’t let Alice see you packing. She doesn’t know. I told her that I was moving back to Gypsum so I could be closer to you. I told her I was going to look for a house here in town.”
“You told her…?” There was no way Gram would believe that. There was no way anyone would believe a person would come back here to live if they had a choice. “I don’t have a suitcase.”
“A box, then. Whatever you and Chub need, we can buy.”
“And then what? Where would we go?” I knew it was crazy. But it was so tempting to believe in Prairie, in what she said she could do.
“I don’t want to say just yet,” she said. “I know I’m asking a lot from you, Hailey, but I promise you that soon I’ll tell you everything. Right now I just need to focus on getting us all out of here. And you need to help me make Alice believe what I told her. Do you think you can do that?”
I didn’t say yes-but I didn’t say no, either.
WHEN WE GOT HOME, I saw that Gram had made a few plans of her own. Dun Acey’s truck was pulled up in the yard, the back fender hanging a little lower since the last time I’d seen it, the result of some accident that had probably been worse for the other guy.
Prairie pulled the Volvo into the yard about as far away from the truck as she could.
“Whose truck is that?” she asked, voice neutral, but I could hear the tension underneath her words.
“That’s Dun Acey.”
“What a surprise,” she muttered, as if it was anything but.
“You know him?”
“I knew some Aceys.” She said the name like it was poison.
She walked ahead of me. I let her, glad to have a buffer between me and whatever waited inside.
In the kitchen, Dun was tilted back in a chair across from Gram at the table. Rattler Sikes was standing at the sink, a lit cigarette in one hand. He was pouring a glass of water down his throat.
He gave me a tiny nod and then slowly lowered the glass to the sink. Leaning against the counter, he put the cigarette to his lips and drew in on it and smirked as the smoke streamed lazily out of his nostrils.
There were eight beer cans on the table, and I knew without having to be told that six were empty and Dun and Gram were working on the others.
“Hel-lo, Hailey,” Dun drawled, letting the chair legs slam down on the floor with a thud. “You’re lookin’ hotter’n August. And who’s this you got with you?”
Behind him Rattler laughed, an abrupt, rasping sound accompanied by a ghost of a smile.
Dun looked Prairie up and down the way he usually looked at me-lingering on her breasts and her legs. Dun and Rattler were both probably about Prairie’s age, but Dun had always looked old to me, with a couple of missing teeth and greasy hair falling all around his face. After he’d stared her up and down, he gave a low whistle.
“Prair-ie Tar-bell,” he said, drawing out the syllables. “I’d know you anywhere. You look even better than the day you left.”
I could feel Prairie tense up next to me. “Hello, Dunston,” she said, her voice steely. “Rattler.”
“Damn-you recognize us after all, girl. Didn’t think you would, now you gone all uptown on us. But I guess you just couldn’t stay away from us local boys forever.” Dun laughed as though that was the funniest thing he’d heard in a long time. Gram laughed with him, lighting up a fresh cigarette and ending on a hacking cough.
“I remember you.” Prairie practically chewed off the words.
“Alice tells me you’re moving back here. Ain’t that nice. Course, if you come back to try an’ git in my pants, you’re a li’l late.” Dun’s words were slurred from the beer. “I got my eye on another girl.”
Gram laughed again and they both looked at me.
“Lucky her,” Prairie said icily. “Now, if you all will excuse us, Hailey and I are tired, and I’m meeting with a realtor first thing tomorrow to look at a house, so we’re heading to bed.”
“ ‘Hailey and I are tired,’ ” Gram repeated in a high singsong voice. She did that sometimes when she was drinking, mimicking what I said.
Something told me it was a mistake to do it to Prairie, though.
I waited for her to snap back at Gram like she had earlier, but she said nothing. She put her hand on my arm and steered me toward the hall. “Come on,” she whispered.
“Goin’ to bed, are you, Prairie?” Rattler’s voice came from behind us.
I could sense Prairie tense even more, but she didn’t say anything, just practically dragged me down to my room. Once we were inside, she shut the door firmly and leaned back against it.
I went to check on Chub. He was curled up in his crib, and I was grateful Gram at least had managed to get him put down. His little fist was pressed against his cheek. He always got hot when he slept, his face taking on a rosy color. I put my hand lightly on the back of his neck and felt his heartbeat-strong and regular.
Only then did I turn back to Prairie. “If Dun and Rattler knew about you, and probably a whole lot more people knew too, how come nobody ever said anything to me?”
“Keep your voice down, Hailey,” Prairie said softly. “A lot of people are scared of Alice. Or else Alice makes it worth their while to keep their mouths shut. Besides, other than Alice’s customers, not that many people in town would remember. Alice sent us to school in Tipton because she didn’t want us mixing with the local kids. And it’s not like we ever had friends over.”
“What about Dun and Rattler? Seems like they knew you pretty well.”
“There were a few families that Alice… socialized with. The Aceys and the Sikes, a few others.”
“From Trashtown. Her customers.”
“They weren’t always customers, but-yes. Alice knew they had a taste for illegal substances. And she figured out how to capitalize on it. She had to find a way to make money, after all.”
Prairie sighed and smoothed down the fabric of her jacket, the memories clearly taking a toll on her.
“But you got out,” I said. “And…”
I almost didn’t say it. I bit my lower lip and considered staying quiet, letting the past rest. It was probably the right thing to do. But in the space of a few hours I had learned that I had lost more than I ever knew I had. So when I spoke again, my voice was bitter.
“And you left my mom here to deal with Alice by herself.”
Like me.
Prairie recoiled as if I had slapped her. “Hailey! I-It wasn’t like that. You have to know that I loved your mother more than anything in the world. I would never have left, if-if-”
“If what?”
“The thing that happened. It would have been dangerous for both of us, if I stayed.”
What could have been so bad that she had to leave town? “Did you kill someone or something?”
Sharp anguish flashed across Prairie’s face, and for a second I regretted asking. If she was a murderer, maybe I didn’t want to know.
“No,” she said quietly. “Nothing like that, but what I did made it impossible for me to stay here. You just have to believe me. And I was going to come for your mom.”
“It’s easy to make promises,” I said. “You told her you’d come back for her, and you didn’t. Now you’re trying to come in here and, what, rescue me? Because you feel guilty about what happened to my mom?”
I could feel my heart squeezing and hear my voice going high and thin. I knew I should stop. But it would be way too easy to give in to what Prairie promised-and way too dangerous. If I made the wrong decision, it wasn’t just me that would be hurt. It was Chub, too.
Before Prairie could answer, I turned away from her. “Forget it. I don’t want to know. I’m going to bed.”
“Hailey-”
“If you’re still here tomorrow, not that I expect you to be…”
I didn’t finish the sentence, because I didn’t know what to say. The truth was that I desperately wanted to believe in her. I wanted her to rescue me. But I was afraid that if I let myself trust her, she’d disappear like every other good thing I’d ever wished for.
Suddenly I was tired. Very tired.
“Hailey, we can go as soon as Rattler and Dun leave. Alice won’t wake up once she’s out. You know that.” Prairie sounded desperate.
“What I know is that I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said, edging past her to the door. “I’m going to go brush my teeth.”
When I came back, Prairie took a small toiletry kit from the bag she’d brought with her and went to the bathroom without saying a word. She looked exhausted. While she was gone, I fixed up a bed for her as well as I could. I put my sleeping bag down as a pad and added some old quilts and gave her my pillow. I made myself a pillow out of a sweatshirt.
When Prairie came back into the room, she looked at the makeshift bed and gave me a little smile.
There was one more thing I needed to do-I had to see what Gram and Dun and Rattler were up to before I could sleep. I slipped into the hall and peeked around the corner into the kitchen. The beer-can pile had grown, and Dun was slumped way down in his chair. Rattler was sitting at the table with an ashtray loaded high with butts, drinking another glass of water. Gram was saying something to him, low and serious, but his expression was stony. I wasn’t sure Dun was even awake.
As I watched, something strange happened: Rattler suddenly raised his head and stared straight ahead, right toward where I was hiding. His eyes lost their focus and he squinted as though it hurt, and he held up a palm to Gram to make her stop talking.
“Who knows I’m here?” he demanded.
“Nobody,” Gram said, chugging her beer. Some dribbled down her chin.
“No, there’s-there’s-You got that back door locked?”
“Yeah.”
“Something’s not right. A car…”
“Nah, that’s just her car.” Gram yawned, not bothering to cover her mouth. “That damn foreign thing.”
Rattler shook his head. “Men. It’s men in it.”
Gram reached for a fresh beer, untangling it from the plastic rings that held the six-pack together. Even that effort was almost too much for her. I was always amazed that as frail as she was, she could drink so much.
“You’re rusty,” Gram said. “Ain’t nothin’ happened around here in so long, you’re seeing things.”
Rattler shook his head impatiently and scowled. I shrank back into the hall-I couldn’t believe Gram wasn’t scared of him.
“I ain’t rusty, you damn woman.”
“Okay, then you’re just plum wrong. It happens.”
“It happens to the others, Alice-not me.”
Gram cackled, a sound I knew well. When she was drunk she thought plenty of things were funny.
I eased backward as quietly as I could, my heart pounding. In my room, Prairie was sitting on the floor, a quilt pulled up over her knees.
“Prairie, Rattler was talking to Gram. He says-”
But what had he said, exactly? Nothing specific, but I was thinking of the rumors, the women stumbling home barefoot in the chilly dawn.
“He’s just so creepy,” I whispered.
Prairie nodded. She didn’t seem surprised. “I don’t want you to worry about him. Let me worry about it. I’d lay odds that Dun’s passed out by now-is he?”
I nodded, my heart thudding in my throat. “I think so.”
“Okay, so one down, and Alice probably isn’t far behind. Rattler’s going to get bored sooner or later.”
“I wish he’d just leave.”
“I know,” she said. “Me too. But let me worry about them. You need to rest, if you can.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I lay down and Prairie turned the lights out, but there was enough moonlight coming in the window that I could still see her outline. She lay on her back and I could see her chest rise and fall steadily as she breathed.
“Good night, Hailey,” she said. “I’m glad we’re together.”
I didn’t answer at first. Her words had a strange effect on me-even though she’d brought even more chaos into my life, her voice was soothing, and there was a part of me that wanted very much to believe she’d come to help us. That I had some sort of family besides Gram-real family, the kind that cared about one another, like other people had.
“Good night,” I finally mumbled.
A little later, before I drifted off to sleep, I peeked at Prairie. She wasn’t lying on her back anymore. She was leaning on her side, up on her elbow, and staring at the doorknob. I closed my eyes again.
The next thing I knew, a scream tore through my dreams.
IT WAS COMING from the other side of my bedroom door, and it sounded like Gram.
Prairie bolted to my side, clapping a hand over my mouth. Before I could protest she leaned in close and whispered, “Quiet. Take Chub in the closet and close the door and stay there. Don’t come out.”
“But-”
“Do it, Hailey. Please.”
Chub was a heavy sleeper-once he was out, he could sleep through anything. I picked him up, which took some effort because he’d gotten so big, and he snuggled in next to my neck, his skin hot and damp.
I glanced back, but Prairie was gone; the door to the room was open a few inches. My heart thudded as I went to the closet.
I yanked a bunch of clothes off their hangers, put them on the floor and laid Chub on them, covering him with a long sweater that I tucked in like a blanket. I kissed his cheek and then left the closet, closing the door almost all the way.
As I crossed my room, I heard a man yell, “Stop right there!” and a pair of sharp cracks and then Prairie’s voice, speaking softly, something I couldn’t make out. I had to find out what was happening. I wasn’t worried about Gram, exactly-but I had to know what kind of trouble Prairie had brought with her.
I tiptoed down the hall, flattening my back against the wall, and peeked around the corner so I had a view into the kitchen and the living room.
What I saw made me suck in my breath.
A man stood a few feet from the door, pointing a gun at Gram and Prairie. It was one of the men from the car I’d seen at the drugstore-I recognized his gray jacket and his blond buzz cut. Gram was sitting in her chair and I could tell from the drool trail that still shone wet on her cheek that she’d passed out, like she sometimes did. She was blinking fast and patting at her hair nervously. Prairie stood behind her, hands held out at her sides.
Dun was exactly where I’d last seen him, slumped over the table, except there was a leaking pool of red coming from his mouth.
Prairie looked furious. I wanted to signal to her somehow, but I knew I couldn’t do it without the guy with the gun seeing me.
“You,” the man said in a clipped, calm voice. “Old lady. Get down on the floor. Lie on your stomach with your hands straight out to the sides.”
“You ain’t supposed to-” Gram protested. I suddenly smelled urine sharp in the air and I knew she had peed her pants.
A movement in the corner of the kitchen caught my eye. As it flashed past I realized that Rattler must have hidden behind the refrigerator-but why? Was he helping the man with the gun somehow? Before I could even finish the thought Rattler’s arm came up and there was a flash of metal as he buried Gram’s chef’s knife deep below the man’s shoulder.
I screamed. I tried to scream, anyway, but what came out was more of a choked gasp.
“Get back, Hailey!” Prairie screamed at me.
Rattler let go of the knife handle. He didn’t wait for the man to fall but threw him onto the kitchen floor as he scrabbled at the knife sticking out of his shoulder. Then Rattler reached for Prairie.
“Get Chub,” Prairie yelled. “Now. Run!”
I turned and sprinted for my room. I got Chub from the closet-he didn’t even stir in his sleep. From the other room I heard a crash and glass breaking. I looked toward the window and considered jumping out with Chub-it was only a few feet to the ground, we’d be fine-but I realized that without Prairie, and the car, there was no chance we could get away. It was a long way across the yard to the woods, and we wouldn’t have any cover.
And-I didn’t want to leave Prairie.
As I ran down the hall there was another loud crack and then a man yelled, “Get back!” I skidded to a stop just before the corner and looked around it again, shielding Chub in my arms.
Dun had slid out of his chair and onto the floor, leaving a smear of blood on the table. The guy with the knife in his shoulder sat next to him, making gasping sounds, his blood-covered hands around the knife handle. A second man stood in the doorway, pointing his gun at Rattler. It was the other man from the car, slightly shorter than his partner, with black hair and eyes and wearing a black track jacket. He stepped neatly over the pile of splintered wood and glass that had been our storm door, and placed himself squarely between Prairie and Rattler. For a second I had the crazy idea that he was protecting Prairie, that they had come here to save us from Dun and Rattler and Gram, but then the man spoke, never taking his eyes off Rattler, who slowly sank to his knees and raised his hands in the air, looking not so much afraid as amused.
“On your stomach, arms straight out, or I will shoot you,” the man barked, and Rattler complied. I saw Prairie’s hands scrambling on the counter behind her, knocking against a glass, a dirty plate, a box of Cheez-Its. The toaster was just beyond her reach. I wanted to scream at her to grab it and throw it at the guy, nail him in the head, but I couldn’t speak. I was clutching Chub so tightly that he was whimpering into my neck. I didn’t know if I should run back down the hall and take our chances with the window after all, or try to help Prairie.
Before I could decide, Gram pushed her chair back and struggled to stand.
“Stop right there, lady,” the man said. “Down on the floor like your friend here, arms out.”
But Gram lurched toward him, her gray stringy hair plastered to her drool-damp chin, her hands paddling the air at her sides. “But I’m the one who-”
“Down!” he yelled as his arm swung toward her. I could see what was going to happen in the split second before the gunshot echoed through the room, as Gram kept lurching forward, straight for him.
Except it wasn’t a single gunshot-it was two, one right after the other, and Gram flew back through the air, a misting red hole in her back. Then Rattler hurtled up off the floor, the first guy’s gun in his hand.
The shooter took longer to fall than Gram did. Rattler had shot him in the side, but it didn’t look that bad. He stumbled, putting his hands to the wound and sucking air. Rattler didn’t have any more patience with him than with his partner, and he caught him under the chin with the butt of the gun. The man fell to the sound of his own jaw breaking.
There was a second of perfect silence. I took everything in: Gram on her back with her eyes wide and staring, Dun lying next to the two men Rattler had wounded. And in the center of it all, Rattler. If I’d thought his eyes were frightening in the past, they were ten times more frightening now. As I watched from the darkness of the hallway, he slowly lowered the gun to his side, dangling it loose in his hand.
“Ladies,” he said, drawing out the word as though he was tasting it. “That was sloppy of me. What I git for doubtin’ myself. Won’t happen again. Prairie, guess we’ll take your car.”
“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Prairie spat.
Rattler shook his head. “Now, Prairie, don’t you fret. I ain’t gonna do nothin’ besides take you somewhere’s I can keep an eye on you.”
Prairie’s eyes widened and I saw fresh fear there. I couldn’t believe there could be anything worse than this-four people lying in a sea of blood on the floor, Rattler threatening us with a gun-but Prairie looked terrified.
It was her fear that finally made me move. I remembered the kitchen scissors, in a mason jar with the spatulas and spoons next to the sink, and I ran for them. I waited for the slam of the bullet even as my fingers closed on the handles of the scissors and my hip hit the counter hard. There was an “oof” behind me and the gun went off and-Was I hit? Was Prairie hit?-I whirled around and Rattler had disappeared and Prairie was still standing and I was still standing-
“Now Hailey now!” Prairie screamed. I didn’t have to be told twice. Chub wailed in my arms, struggling against me. I dropped the scissors and ran, holding him as tight as I could, and followed Prairie out the door, crunching glass under my feet, slipping on the blood, and then we were in the yard, sprinting for her car.
Rascal was sitting in the center of the yard. His eyes glowed golden in the moonlight. It looked eerie, and I couldn’t figure out why he was so calm when strangers had been breaking in, shooting, trying to kill us. Why hadn’t he come tearing after them, snarling and barking and snapping the way he did when he treed a squirrel or chased a rabbit?
I didn’t have time to dwell on that now, though. “Prairie, I have to get Rascal!” I screamed. I thrust Chub at her and she took him, protesting as I ran and picked Rascal up.
I tightened all the muscles in my back, waiting for the impact of a bullet as I ran to the car, but none came. Rascal was warm and soft in my arms, and he didn’t protest at being bounced around. I almost dropped him as I opened the car, and when he landed on the floor of the backseat, he nearly fell.
But there was no time to worry about him. Prairie had got the seat belt across Chub, and it looked like it would hold him in for now. She got in the driver’s seat and started the engine, and I barely had time to jump in the backseat with Rascal and Chub before she started rolling across the lawn, accelerating as if she meant to plow straight through the speed of sound, the speed of light, as if she meant to put an eternity between us and the wreckage of my old life.