“You really think some ghost of a child is more important than my son? My son—my actual, living, breathing baby—is a few miles away, waiting for me to come home. Your brother’s dead. He’s been dead since you were a little fucking girl. I don’t know what happened the day he died, or if you had something to do with it, yeah, I’m finally saying that out loud because I’ve been thinking it for years, we all have, and no one has the guts to say it. Honestly, I don’t want to know. I don’t care. Because it’s not relevant to my son, and that’s the only thing I care about right now. I would love for this chapter of my life to be over, like, today so that I can be whatever kind of mother I need to be to him. And fuck, yeah, I need your help for that. So get it together. Say hi to William or whatever the fuck you need to do, invite him along, invite him to help us, sure, but do not opt out. You are not allowed to opt out. I will not allow your selfishness to let you think you’re more important than my living, breathing, beautiful boy.”
130
Marta’s house was squarely in my sights, so I lay on the pine needles and crawled past it on my belly. I’d go up to the ridgeline, check for fiddleheads. My stomach growled and my vision swayed. I realized I hadn’t eaten the day before. All those beans ripping through us, the long sleeps, the din of the radio, the waiting—it was hard to keep one day from the last.
But at least there were the others. Issy and Xavier and Cornelia and Ben. At least we were staying together, at Home. At least there were white pines and red squirrels and blueberries—Pinus strobus, Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, Vaccinium myrtilloides. At least summer was coming back, and Abraham hadn’t shot anyone and they hadn’t shot him. Maybe now we didn’t have to be so scared. We could be alone and be left alone and we didn’t have to be lonely.
Footsteps crunched down the trail. I was already on the ground. I backtracked, hiding the rustles in the sound of the footfalls, landing parallel to a downed, mossy log on the edge of the path. I couldn’t be seen.
Boots. A man. The sound of a motor idling on Bushrow Road. A whiff of cigarette smoke. A knock on Marta’s door. I was far back enough that I could lift my head and see through the knotty roots and branches and fallen leaves.
The sheriff.
My stomach flipped. The memory of his thing moving out of her. Why did I hate to think about it and want to think about it? Was he showing up to do it all over again? Would I lie out here and listen?
The door opened. I could see the sheriff’s back—I would have to duck whenever he came my way—but Marta’s face was obscured by the trunk of a silvering birch. He’d taken off his hat. He turned the brim in his hands. “Meant to bring you some casserole.”
“Don’t bring me her cooking.”
“How you feeling today?”
“How’d it go?”
“Like you said it would. We came in unarmed. It spooked Henry, but I reminded him to treat Abraham just like anyone else. He’s heard all sorts of stories. They eat babies, that kind of thing. I told Abraham he’s got to get off the land—he’s got ten days, far as the bank’s concerned. He smiled and slapped me on the back. Played it like he doesn’t mind one bit.” The hat stopped spinning. “I don’t get the sense he’s going to get violent.”
“He pulled a gun on Gabby.”
“Jesus. Really?”
“She left Issy behind—the girl wouldn’t come.”
“I can get him on that, you know. The kids—”
“Hold off. If you mess with the kids he’ll take it to the next lev—” Then she started to cough. The sound was wet. I could see one hand gripping the doorway, and how the sheriff wanted to reach out to bear the weight of her, but clenched a fist instead.
“We should get you in to the doctor,” he said, when the rattle had settled.
“Doctor’s not going to do anything.”
He cleared his throat. “Marta, I wanted to say—”
“She know you’re here?”
One step back. “Come down off this cursed hill. We’ll find a place for you in town.”
“She’d love that.”
“She won’t know.”
“I’d know.”
His feet were planted. He was looking right at her, but I couldn’t see whether she was looking back. “There’s nothing for you up here,” he said, after a minute.
“He’s here.”
He cleared his throat. Lifted his hat to his head. Stepped back, away. I flattened myself on the ground as he came down the four steps. He crunched back up the pathway toward Henry and the waiting patrol car.
I must have missed the sound of Marta’s door closing in the sheriff’s footsteps. But if I hadn’t, and she was still out on the porch, she’d see me. So I counted to a hundred and then to a hundred again. Surely she was back inside. I strained to hear her—Mozart on the radio, the toilet flush. But there was nothing. My leg itched. The more I tried not to think about it, the more it itched, and anyway, I had probably just missed the closing of her door in the sound of his boots crunching away, so I lifted my head.
She was standing above me, in her sweatpants and lumberjack shirt, arms folded, with a frown. “You got a tick on your face.” I swiped at my cheek, cursing, but she motioned to me to get up. “I’ll pull it out, you little snoop.”
131
“Is he going to meet with us or not?” Ben’s knee shakes the table.
Teresa shrugs. Tomas keeps chewing. It’s spaghetti with peanut sauce for dinner, too salty, too dry.
“Don’t tell me he’s still sleeping.” The utensils rattle. “I know he’s in that cabin laughing at us.” Ben points his fork toward Tomas. “He’s laughing at you, too, you know. You’re not above his ridicule, even if you get to hold the gun.”
Are we really going to decide tomorrow whether to kill Abraham? If we don’t—we aren’t, are we? But what if we are?—then is the world actually going to find out what we did? The reality of our situation is absurd and alarming. We are reduced to shoving noodles into our mouths on a table rattling with Ben’s rage.
Ben throws the fork into his bowl. He turns on Xavier. “You going to back me up?” Abraham claimed to want to bring us together but of course he has managed to tear us apart. Ben stands. He reaches toward his waistband. The others see it, too, Xavier’s eyes shock large, Cornelia gasps—he’s going for his gun—so I grab his hand. I pull Ben along, over the smooth floorboards, groaning, familiar under our steps, out into the night thrumming with peepers. The windows of the Main Lodge spill yellow. We blunder down the trail to the lake, only this time we don’t need a flashlight, even without the moon; we know this path better than any other, with memory our guide. The water shushes along the edge of the land.
“Give me the gun.”
“No.”
I reach for his waistband. I can’t have him shooting Tomas and getting the rest of us killed. He resists but then, somehow, I have the edge of it—the handle. I pull it out into the moonlight.
“What the fuck is this?”
It’s a slingshot.
“You assumed.”
To be fair, it’s an executive slingshot, made for grown men, out of some kind of titanium bullshit. But the fact remains, it’s a slingshot. Next thing I know, I’m doubled over, laughing so hard that I’m gasping for air.
“Ha ha,” he says. “Very funny.”
It is, though. It is.
“Can you stop? We have to do something.”
“What are we going to do?”
Ben laughs then, too, but it’s angry. “If even you don’t know, we’re fucked.”
I wipe the tears from my eyes and give him back his weapon of choice.
“It’s all I had,” he says.
The moon is rising now. I cut my eyes across the white line it draws along the top of the water. We can’t really make out each other’s features, but it doesn’t matter—I know the map of Ben’s face, the frown stitching together his brows, the pout of his lower lip, the way he runs his fingers over the ridge in his nose.
/> “I’m going to talk to him.” My heart is hammering at the thought of going to that cabin alone. But now I see that’s what today was for: Abraham waiting for me to become bold enough to demand an audience. He’s so many steps ahead.
“Can you wait here?” I say. “Just here, by the water, however long it takes. Promise you won’t shoot anyone? With pea gravel?”
“Fuck off.” Ben’s voice is full of laughter.
132
Marta tweezed the deer tick from my jowl, made sure it was squeezed to death, and dabbed on antibiotic ointment. She didn’t say a word beyond the task at hand, certainly not about me spying on her and the sheriff.
We walked up to the ridgeline. A light breeze tufted our hair and a red squirrel shrieked from above as it darted back and forth along a branch. Marta didn’t notice. I had to slow my steps. The spring morning unfurled—electric greens, chips and chirps and coos and quips—but Marta leaned on her walking stick and didn’t look up. She had to stop to cough. A Sayornis phoebe darted above us. Eventually we made it closer to the sky.
The fiddleheads were curled in sweet pockets of green, newborn fists nestled together. Marta unzipped her backpack and offered an old Oraweat bag, writing worn off, to gather them. “Only take what you need.” As if I didn’t know.
That omelet, so long ago. My stomach growled again, a far-off sound, as far off as that memory. She pulled out a chunk of sourdough. She held it in the air between us. My mouth filled with saliva. I didn’t think I’d ever hungered for something more, not since that first day at Home, when Issy had offered me sourdough the very first time. I remembered Persephone and those pomegranate seeds. “But Sarah threw out the Mother.”
“The gift of the Mother is that she makes herself anew.” She offered the bread again. “Sarah gave me some of hers, years ago. I feed it. I make it my own way.”
I took a bite. The doughy chew nudged open a hollowness I didn’t want to know was there. The bread in my mouth turned to mush as tears filled my eyes. Another person would have looked away, or uttered a phrase of comfort. But instead Marta said, “I felt certain Philip would come back for you.”
“People leave. Anyway, I like Home with fewer people.” Not quite the truth.
The cough set upon her again. Up close, it was an ugly thing—a monster attacking her from inside, over and over, relentless. She held a handkerchief to her mouth. Scarlet spilled into it. But she didn’t name it, just as she hadn’t named my tears. She folded the piece of checkered cloth into the smallest bundle it could make and put it in her pocket.
“I’ve worried for you since the moment we met,” she said, as if I was the one who’d just choked up blood. “That day in the forest? When I saw you throwing the hatchet?” Marta’s hand flew to her chest in the memory. She shook her head. It was the gesture of an old person, which irked me, honestly. “The prophecy.” She leaned forward. “You know about Abraham’s prophecy, don’t you?”
“I know I’m supposed to marry Ben.”
Her seriousness gave way to an unexpected smile. “Yes, I suppose that’s the part you’d focus on.” She put her hand out onto my arm. “Only I mean, that’s the part you should care about. It’s normal for a girl your age to care about that.”
What a comfort, that word.
There was a dreaminess in her eyes as she looked down over the slope, the miniaturized houses on the lakes below us, the boats finding their way out after lying dormant for so many months on shore. “Of course I dismissed the prophecy as hogwash. Abraham fancies himself a seer, and I’ve long believed it my job to prove him wrong. For so long I just wanted to prove him wrong. He’d hold up some truth of his and I’d punch it down. I thought that was enough.”
She waved her arm as though to say, dismiss what I have said, even though I could see that it went beyond just idle chatter. She blew air from her puffed cheeks and started again. “When I saw that hatchet in your hands, I thought about what he’d said about you being built to destroy. I’ll admit, it terrified me. ‘The girl will be built to destroy,’ and then, there you were, wielding that weapon.” She chuckled. “Then I noticed you couldn’t throw worth shit. Oh no, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh at you. I mean for us to be laughing together. It was a relief to see you weren’t as gifted as I feared you’d be. I let my guard down.”
Her expression grew grave. “Then you went to get the hatchet from the tree and stopped at that spot and looked down. You’d discovered the destroying angel, without even looking for it. Of all the mushrooms on all this land”—her eyes swept the cloudless sky—“the most dangerous had presented itself to you, right in front of me. I took it personally, to be honest. I felt … attacked. Oh no, not by you. Not by you, my dear. By Nature, handing the girl who he’d said would be built to destroy something built to destroy.” That cough was worming inside her, eager to reclaim her, but she wasn’t letting it, not yet. “You see, I believed I was the one Nature had chosen. I thought all that time I’d put into understanding her would help me understand…” Her eyes were sparkling. She wanted to speak, but it wasn’t the cough keeping her from speaking.
I’d never seen Marta cry. The others would be worried. If Abraham found me up here, with her … he couldn’t be allowed to think I had chosen her over him.
She put her small, soft hand onto mine.
“What I mean is, I had to give myself to believe, for the very first time, that he wasn’t delusional. That maybe he was right. Because he had said you were built to destroy, he had claimed to prophesy your coming, and then, there you were, happening upon the most poisonous mushroom out here. So I thought, perhaps I don’t know everything. Perhaps he is right about some of it.”
“I have to go.”
Her hand gripped tighter. “You see him sometimes, don’t you?” She looked to my waistband, the knot of raised fabric at my hip, like the ground cover over a destroying angel. The wind lifted, in a shiver, over the top of the ridge. She opened her hand and held it out. I knew she would wait all day. I pulled out Topsy and flopped him into her palm. She turned him over in her hands. “I saw you out there, that day. You were talking to someone. Someone no one else can see. Little William. You spoke to him.” Her voice had grown gentle. “It’s okay. You’ll feel better if you don’t have to keep it a secret.”
I nodded, just once, just a tiny bit.
“Good.”
It wasn’t. It meant I was crazy—hoping, believing, that you, a dead boy, wandered these woods. That if I did things right, you’d present yourself to me. It felt so strange, to have that truth outside.
“And he’s friendly? He doesn’t want to hurt you?”
“Of course not.” How did she know to ask about him?
“This is good,” Marta said. “This is good.” She handed Topsy back. “It means you know when you make a mistake. It means you feel remorse.”
133
Abraham’s waiting in the armchair, wearing his frayed pajamas. There’s an expectant lift to his eyebrows. He wasn’t sure I’d come alone.
“Ben wants to shoot you.”
“He’s not doing a very good job of hiding that gun. Tea? Something to eat? Teresa’s not much of a cook, I’m afraid.”
“We’ll be going tomorrow.”
“Ah yes, either way.” He looks a little sad.
I venture into the living area. Find my place on the couch. “You don’t really want us to kill you, do you?”
“You think I’m joking?”
“I mean, why? Why now, beyond your being sick? I think I understand why us—at least, why you believe it has to be us.”
“I knew you’d understand.”
“I don’t think it’s okay, that’s not what I mean about understanding. You always did go for a power trip.”
“A power trip? You think that’s why I called you all here?”
“You want to control us. Decades have gone by but you still believe you have the right.”
“That’s not it at all.”
“It’s not?”
A flash of a smile. “Well, maybe just a little. But no, wait, no, please. It’s a joke. Please, listen. I’ve had, as you put it, decades to think about this.” He stops, gathers his thoughts, his pointer fingers and thumbs forming a triangle. He is relaxed now, not afraid to show his hunger for company like mine. “I ruined your lives. I know it. I believed I was saving them, but I ruined them instead. That’s why I left without saying goodbye.”
“You left without saying goodbye—that’s how you think of it? Funny; we think of it as you having framed us for murder.”
A breath. “I didn’t frame you. I ran away.”
“And killed—who, Amos?—so that it looked like you were dead?”
“You think I had anything to do with that? I swear, that was pure coincidence. Amos was angry at me for leaving. Told me I was a coward, and I agreed, but I couldn’t stay to find out if you’d gone through with it. So I ran, and I guess he must have eaten one of the mushrooms he’d foraged. He had a stockpile, you know, in case we were invaded. He was raving at the end there. But they didn’t find the body for long enough that the forest had gotten him by then.”
“You mean buzzards. You mean they ate him.”
“I’m not proud of taking advantage. But look, I was sure the law would come after me, any moment. And then they didn’t. Nothing happened. I got some news, here and there, I figured out the foreclosure had gone through. Figured you guys had gotten away with it.”
“We killed her because you told us to. And then you left anyway, and so we had to leave, too.”
“It was so easy with you. So much easier than with the adults. At a certain point, they stopped believing, one by one. They doubted me. But you never doubted. And I never doubted you. We made a whole world we could believe in—together. I couldn’t bear that being taken from us.”
“Was there really an inheritance?”
“I thought so. At the time, I thought so. I holed up, Saskia. It wasn’t like I went out and lived gloriously. It’s been lonely. And I’m sorry about Amos. I am. But when no one came after me, and I saw the papers, and they said it was me up there in that forest, I thought, why not just die with the place? You know? A fresh start.”
Fierce Little Thing Page 27