I KNEW WHERE WE WERE GOING after just a few miles, when Derek took a right at the fork in the road past Sugar Creek. We were headed for his daddy’s land, mostly poor clay soil that had yielded stingy crops of alfalfa and soybeans until Mr. Pollitt died eight or nine years back. Everyone thought Derek, the Pollitts’ only son, would take over, but instead he leased off what he could and let the rest go fallow and moved in with his mama at the far edge of Trashtown. Derek’s mama hailed from the Banished; his daddy did not. Mrs. Pollitt was long divorced from her husband and was at first more than happy to house and feed her only child and wash his clothes. I guessed it had gotten old fast, as Derek never seemed to be able to hold on to a job more than a few weeks at a time.
Next to me, Kaz gave me a reassuring smile and took my hand in his. Derek, who was leaning over the seat, keeping an eye on us, guffawed. “Aw, check it out, young love.”
“Leave ’em alone,” Rattler snapped. “ ’At boy’s got pure blood in his veins, which is a damn sight more’n you can say.”
I saw a look of hurt pass across Derek’s dull face, but he shut up.
I hadn’t realized that Rattler knew Kaz was Banished, but it made sense. I was still getting used to the ability to sense other Banished, the curious magnetism that was like a stirring of the cells when they were near. Prairie had explained that it would become second nature before long; Kaz had said that for him it was like yet another layer of vision, on top of the reality that everyone else saw and the pictures that occasionally flashed through his mind.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to be open to it, and sure enough I got a faint sense from Derek, but the connection with Rattler was almost overwhelming, like an invisible thread binding our destinies. It combined fear and familiarity with something else, something inevitable and dark but also part of me.
For my first sixteen years, I had believed that my father was dead, as Gram had wanted me to believe. How many times had I wished for a father to rescue me from Gram’s run-down house, to protect me, to cherish me?
And now, bizarrely, I had what I had wished for. “He won’t hurt us,” I whispered to Kaz.
We turned onto a weed-choked gravel drive leading into a hollow, where the old Pollitt farmhouse was tucked behind a stand of poplar trees.
“Home, sweet home,” Rattler announced, but I was certain I saw Derek flinch as he looked at the old board-framed house, the sagging porch with its toppled flowerpots spilling dirt.
The padlock on the front door was brand-new, gleaming in the beam of Rattler’s flashlight as Derek fumbled in his pocket for the key. Inside, there was a smell of decay overlaid with bleach. Rattler snapped on the lights and I saw that we were standing in a plain square parlor that contained only a couple of straight-backed chairs, a threadbare sofa and a dusty braided rug. Near the door were half a dozen trash bags overflowing with junk. Someone had been cleaning, preparing for our arrival, no doubt.
This was meant to be our new home.
“After you,” Rattler said grandly, but Kaz didn’t budge.
“Come on, now, boy, don’t be like that. You’n me, we’re practically kin, you bein’ full-blood and all.”
Kaz and I followed Derek through the parlor and up the stairs. He turned on the lights as he went. None of the bulbs were very bright, and the dim light added to the gloom of the place, illuminating torn wallpaper, worn carpets, stained and cracked ceilings.
Upstairs was a narrow hallway with a bathroom and three closed doors. Two of them bore shiny padlocks just like the one on the front door.
Rattler stepped in front of us and opened the first one.
“This was supposed to be your auntie’s room,” he said. “But you can use it till she gets here.”
When he turned on the light, I stopped short, at a loss for words.
Rattler had fixed the place up with care, a prison for his beloved that he’d filled with the things he thought she would like. The bed was neatly made up with a faded quilt, but there were extra pillows and lace-edged sheets. An embroidered runner had been draped on the little table next to the bed, and a jar of flowers stood by a dish filled with small polished pebbles. I had once had a collection like that in my own room, stones that had been tumbled smooth from a thousand years in the bottom of Sugar Creek.
Clothes were folded over an armchair pulled up to a wooden desk. They were brightly colored, things I knew Prairie would never wear. She favored dark, plain shirts and pants, gray and black and navy blue; in the stack I saw fuchsia and pink and red and orange, the colors of a summer flower bed.
A sadness stole through my heart, surprising me. Had there been a day, when Rattler and Prairie were children, when these had been my aunt’s favorite colors? As a little girl, playing with the other Banished kids, had Prairie ever been carefree? Had she and my mother picked flowers and chased dragonflies and splashed in the creek before things went bad, before they started school and learned how much the townspeople hated Trashtown, before the other children refused to play with them? Had Prairie once owned a pink dress? Had she worn it for the high school boyfriend who she’d long ago lost?
I looked around the rest of the room. The old furniture had been polished, the floors scrubbed. A stack of shiny new magazines lay on the little desk next to a photo in a silver frame.
I stepped closer. In the frame was a photo of two kids, around eleven or twelve years old. A girl with dark hair almost down to her waist balanced on a rock in the middle of a creek, a look of intense concentration on her face, the bottom of her jeans wet. A tall wiry boy leaned toward her from the edge of the photo, almost out of the frame, grinning and reaching for her, all summer-tanned skin and white teeth and too-long hair, pants too short and sleeves barely reaching his wrists, a boy who was growing toward manhood as fast as he could, who even then wanted nothing more in the world than he wanted that girl.
I swallowed hard and glanced at Rattler, and for the first time ever, he refused to meet my eyes. “Don’t you wear her things, now, Hailey-girl,” he muttered. “Derek, go on in that other room and get what-all I bought the girl.”
Derek was back in moments with a stack of jeans and T-shirts, new and shiny with the price tags still attached, which he laid on the bed without a word.
“Had to guess at your sizes,” Rattler said. “And I ain’t got anything for you, son, but we can get that took care of. I didn’t guess I’d be hostin’ you here or I would have been prepared. Now come on, we got a phone call to make.”