“No. This is more than enough,” I say.
Jill comes at me before I realize what’s happening, sweeping me up in a hug. “It sounds like you’ve been through a lot in the last few days,” she says, her breath warm on my hair. “If something ever happened to me, I’d want someone else to step in and take care of my kiddos.”
She lets me go with a timid smile, and I wonder if she feels guilty about the look I saw on her face earlier when Ellis announced I’d be staying with them. Maybe he said something to her while I was finishing my stew—persuasive as always.
“Ellis and I are just upstairs if you need anything,” she says. “So is Neil. And Mel is just across the hall.”
Then they both, finally, leave me alone.
I turn to take in the room. For years, I’ve shared an old mattress in the cramped back of a van with Mom. Now, I have my own bed, a bathroom, a dresser, and enough room to—
Well, I’m not exactly sure what people do with this much room. Eat on the floor? Do jumping jacks?
I sit down on the hardwood, feel how solid it is under my hands. How permanent. The view outside the windows won’t change, aside from the color of the leaves. I close my eyes and lie down. And even though I know that this place isn’t safe, it’s nice to pretend, for just a moment, that this is our house. Mine and Mom’s.
For my tenth birthday, she gave me a drawing of my bedroom—the one she promised I would have, though she never told me when. There was a window seat to curl up in, with a lamp to read by. There were tall shelves along the wall, filled to bursting with books, a globe, mugs full of cut flowers, frames for photographs, and my very own radio. And in the corner, a beautiful desk and a chair with wheels.
“To practice your own artwork,” she whispered.
She and I both knew that I couldn’t draw to save my soul. I only did it because I liked when she put her hand over mine and guided the pen so we could make things together that no one in the world had ever made before.
I loved that picture so much. Even if it was only a shadow of what I really wanted. I wish I had it now.
I didn’t know then why she couldn’t give me a home. I didn’t know what we were running from. I didn’t know there was a wound in her and that I ripped it open wider every time I asked when I would get that bedroom. I didn’t understand why she tore up the picture after I asked her one too many times.
I hear someone’s throat clear. My eyes snap open.
From my angle on the floor, Melody is upside down, standing in the doorway and holding the pile of clothes that her father asked her to get for me.
I refuse to give her the satisfaction of letting her know she caught me off guard. I sit up slowly as she sets the neatly folded pile on the bed.
Then she looks down on me and raises her eyebrows, waiting for my explanation.
“It’s a nice house,” is the only thing I offer. Then, “Thanks for the clothes.”
“You’re welcome.”
I grab her wrist when she passes me, and she stiffens. I offer her a shy smile. “Wanna help me up?”
She does. When I let her go, she folds her arms across her chest.
“I want to apologize,” I say before she can turn to leave again.
She gives a heavy sigh. “For what?”
“For barging in on your life. I never meant to cause any trouble.” Look down at the floor, I imagine Mom coaching me. Now back up at her, through your eyelashes. Right, just like that. “If I could go home, I would. But I don’t know where home is anymore.”
For a second, I think I’ve got her. She bites her lip and shakes her head at the floor, and I wait for her to say she’s sorry for the way she’s acted.
But then her sharp eyes lock on mine, and she says, “I’m tired of people thinking they can take advantage of my family.”
This time, I can’t hide my reaction. I open my mouth to defend myself, but she doesn’t give me the chance.
“I hear the last person who sold a Bowman photograph to the press got a pretty penny for it.” She nods at the bedside table, where Neil left the remnants of my broken camera. “Maybe you thought you’d get another one. Or maybe—” She takes a step forward, bringing her face so close to mine that all she has to do is whisper. “You’re here about the accident.”
The accident?
“Maybe you think this will be your big break into journalism. A boost to your college admissions portfolio. An insider’s angle.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say. Because I don’t.
I tried to do more research on the Bowmans before I got here. The thing is, all the computers in the homes I broke into needed passwords. You can’t use the computers at most libraries without a library card, and to get one of those, you need a permanent address. And as far as things like newspapers and magazines, if it isn’t edible and won’t keep us warm, then it doesn’t get to take up valuable space under my shirt or in my waistband on our grocery store runs.
All I know about the Bowmans comes from Ellis’s books or from what Mom told me. After the wild success of his first book, At Our Table, he’s written ten others to date, and she made me read them all. Most of them are considered self-help, but his advice is always given through the lens of his life experience.
But now that I think about it, his most recent book hardly mentioned his daughter at all.
“If you’re some upstart reporter, you can go back to wherever the hell you came from and type up a nice big article about how Ellis Bowman’s daughter is a raging, heartless bitch. I’m fine with that. But Dad is done with the interviews. You will not squeeze one more story out of the accident. Do you hear me?”
We stare each other down for a few seconds. Without my permission, the corner of my mouth starts to twitch upward. Because I see it now, why she knew right away that I was up to no good.
The flint in her eyes matches my own. I know a girl with a chip on her shoulder when I see one—because I’m one, too. I can’t fake nice with her.
“Are you laughing at me?” she snaps.
I shake my head, wiping the half smile off my face. “No. I just—you think someone would be desperate enough to sneak into your house to get information about your family?”
“You clearly haven’t been in this town for very long.”
“I’m not here to take advantage of anyone,” I say. “I swear.”
Melody pinches her lips together and raises her eyebrows doubtfully. But she knows that she’s not going to get me to admit what I’m really here for, and I know that I’m not going to convince her that my intentions are innocent.
A stalemate. For now.
I grab the busted camera by the strap and hold it out to her. “Take it with you, if you don’t trust me.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she does. And without another word, she turns on her heel and storms out of the room. Her door slams across the hallway.
Getting the rest of her family to trust me was easy enough. But I have the feeling that not many people have tricked Melody Bowman.
At least I’ll have something to keep me busy while I wait for word from Mom.
Chapter 11
AFTER EVERYONE GOES TO bed, I crack the bedroom window and drape one of Melody’s red shirts over the ledge so Mom will know where to find me.
I expect her to come right away. I pull a chair over to the window to wait for her and start to get anxious after an hour, clenching and unclenching my hands in my lap.
Maybe an animal got her.
Maybe someone found her sneaking around and she’s locked in a jail cell.
Maybe she got so pissed off at me for getting caught, she took the van and left.
I debate climbing out the window to look for her, but I don’t think I’d be able to find her in the dark, and if the Bowmans catch me, I’ll have to come up with more lies on the spot. I’ve been listening hard at the cracked window, so I would have heard if she screamed. There’s nothing I can do until morning.
I undress in the guest bathroom, bundle my brand-new clothes—torn and stained from when I tripped in the woods—and shove them into a trash can under the sink.
It’s been three weeks since Mom and I snuck into a YMCA locker room and had real showers, so when the hot streams of clean water hit my face and wash over my shoulders, I let myself sigh. The icy pond bath of a few hours ago is just a bad dream. Black trails of dirt twine down my legs and disappear down the drain, and I stand there until my skin turns soft and starts to wrinkle. Then I stand there some more.
When I climb into bed, my skin is hot and tingly against the sheets. My stomach is full of the best stew I’ve ever had. The room is dark, quiet, and cool. I’m not cramped into a tiny tent, I’m not slapping at mosquitos every few seconds, and I can’t smell any animal shit.
But I can’t relax enough to fall asleep. I sit up in the bed with my knees drawn to my chest and pull at my hair. I breathe in and out through gritted teeth. I worry about Mom. I doubt my abilities to pull this off. I feel guilty for lying to Ellis’s family. I dread the indefinite number of days I’ll have to keep up the charade.
And then I do what I always do to chase away the emptiness and the loneliness and the fear. I make myself angry. Because anger blots out everything else, everything I don’t want to feel.
All Mom has to do to set herself burning is read from one of Ellis’s books, even though she has almost every line memorized. Just a few words can leave her seething. Because every book is peppered with his wisdom on what he thinks it means to be good.
I lie down in the bed and mouth some of the words to the ceiling.
We’ve all been in a dark place before. I can say that from experience.
Me, too, Ellis.
Think of all the things you owe the people in your life.
That’s why I’m here.
Poison can come in the form of a person.
Yes. She can.
I think of Mom when she lived here, all those years ago. How young she was when all the people she trusted turned on her. How desperately alone.
But not anymore.
I fall asleep with a rage that warms me from the pit of my stomach to the tips of my fingers. It fills me to the brim and wraps me up tight, and it whispers sweetly in the dark that maybe I am a villain, but at least I’m not a victim.
The few times Nina Holland has told the story of how her life fell apart, it always starts fifteen years ago, sitting under the shadow of Harriet’s Oak at four o’clock in the afternoon.
She leaned back against the trunk and had her sketchbook balanced on her leg while she drew a phoenix in black ink. She’d gotten the sketchbook for her sixteenth birthday the month before.
She’d read about phoenixes in an encyclopedia of mythological creatures from the library—birds that burst into flame at the end of their lives and are reborn from the ashes—and she liked the idea. Every time life got tired, you could start over with new hands and skin and eyes, and everything from the deep-throated rumble of an engine to the rotation of the sun and moon would seem like a big adventure again.
Of course, there was the fire to consider. A horrible way to die. But then, Jesus had died in pain, too, and that pain had saved the whole world.
Nina sat facing the Watering Hole, where the kitchen door was propped open and a truck was pulled up to unload supplies. A boy named Jameson had been carrying in big sacks and boxes for the last fifteen minutes, the root-thick muscles in his arms straining under his tanned skin, his dark hair slicked back with sweat. It was high summer and hovering around ninety-five degrees, and his T-shirt was drenched through before long, so he peeled it off. Even in the shade, Nina felt sweat dripping down her forehead and making the hair that had come loose from her ponytail stick to her neck.
Jameson was two years older than her, recently graduated and with no other plans on the horizon. All his friends had gotten out of town as fast as they could, and Nina had heard him make vague remarks about trade schools and community colleges, but she and everyone else in town knew that he wouldn’t go. Jameson Bowman leaving Jasper Hollow would be as likely as Clara Mountain packing up and moving to California.
Whenever Jameson cursed under the weight of a box and powered it off the ground, his shoulder blades moved in a way that was hard to look away from. But Nina made herself refocus on her drawing.
The encyclopedia entry on phoenixes hadn’t given her much to go on in the way of appearance; her notebook was full of not-quite-right attempts, but she was certain that she’d finally gotten it the way she wanted.
But she hated to think of it framed and hung up on a wall, the way her father would insist on doing. This was something more than anything else she had ever drawn. Something that came from a place down deep in her chest that she was usually too afraid to touch.
She laid her arm flat against her sketchbook and started to make slow, black lines across her skin. The sweat on her arm made the ink sputter, but she pressed down harder, until it hurt.
A voice breathed hot against her ear. “Giving yourself a tattoo?”
Nina jumped, shooting a startled line of ink right through the phoenix drawing in her notebook.
Jameson sat back on his heels, a wicked grin splitting his face. She pressed the inked side of her arm against her shirt. “Just messing around,” she said.
It was a widely accepted truth that he was infatuated with Nina. Older women were always giving her sly winks in church about it, telling her that he was staring at her, that he seemed to like the dress she was wearing, that the sanctuary was a lovely place for a wedding, that she would be just the girl to straighten him out.
“Can I see your drawing?” he asked, already reaching for her sketchbook, his other hand lightly grasping her elbow.
She pulled her arm back and picked up her sketchbook. “I’m meeting Dad for lunch.” Then she walked fast toward the Watering Hole.
He laughed low in his throat, and then she heard his slow footsteps following behind her. Because popular opinion was that Nina only pretended to resist him because a preacher’s daughter had to resist—at least at first. So long as he never gave up on her, Jameson seemed to believe, she would eventually give in to her true feelings.
The town had decided that Jameson Bowman would eventually persuade Nina Holland, and they would get married and move into the little cabin on Pearl Mountain, and she would have his children and tell them stories about how she had made their father win her over.
Jameson was handsome and nice enough. But when he left a room, she didn’t feel the pull to go after him. When he spoke, she feigned interest and hoped he would tire himself out soon. When he touched her, she felt no response deep in her core that wanted more.
The truth was that the way people talked about her and Jameson made her feel like they were trying to crowd her into a gray, windowless room and lock the door.
When Nina walked into the Watering Hole, a bell jangled erratically overhead, and a man with pale-blue eyes sitting at one of the tables looked up from the stack of papers in front of him.
Ellis Bowman was Jameson’s older brother, and Nina had known him all her life. Back when he’d worked at Sugar House Bakery, she was so little that her dad had to hold her up by the armpits to look through the display window and pick out what she wanted.
When Jameson walked in behind her, Ellis seemed to catch the desperate plea on her face.
“David needs help with dishes,” he said.
Grumbling, Jameson obeyed, and Nina watched him walk through the swinging door to the kitchen.
When Nina looked at Ellis again, his face had softened into a smile that made her smile back.
His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He kept his long, thick hair out of his face with a backward Cincinnati Reds cap. He was almost ten years older than Jameson, and his good looks were never as vivid, but he had a softness that was easy to lean into. Something to bury herself in and hide.
It occurred to Nina that this was th
e first time she’d seen the restaurant empty since it had opened a year ago, a lull between lunch and dinner. She knew Ellis had been nervous before the Watering Hole opened, because the people of Jasper Hollow weren’t known for welcoming change. Her father was the pastor of Jasper Hollow Methodist Church, and Ellis confided everything to him.
Ellis always stopped by her house after every Sunday service so he and her father could sit in the front porch rockers and talk about God, politics, and just about everything else. He was always there long enough to eat dinner with them and sometimes stayed well into the night.
Nina would sit on the porch steps and do her homework, and sometimes she’d interject once she was old enough to keep up. But mostly she just liked to look out into the dark and listen to Ellis’s voice while she watched the lightning bugs—low and gentle and as soothing as rainfall on a rooftop.
She suspected the success of the Watering Hole might have something to do with her father’s influence in town. But she was sure people kept coming back because of Ellis’s charm. He had a knack for making anyone feel like they were just the person he wanted to see.
“I’m glad you stopped in,” he said now. And even though she knew he was this friendly to everyone, the words made a thrill shiver down her spine.
She nodded at the stack of papers on the table in front of him. “What are you working on?”
Ellis rubbed the back of his neck and grinned sheepishly. “Well . . . don’t tell anyone, but it’s a book.”
“You wrote a book?”
His blush crept quickly from the collar of his shirt to his hairline. “I guess so.”
“Can I read it?”
He shook his head, his smile falling a bit. “I mean—it’s a mess. I was never too hot at English. I’m no good at all those . . . rules. I feel like the stuff I’ve got to say is fine, but no one is going to notice the good stuff because I can’t organize any of it right on the page. Not to mention that I can’t wrap my head around where to put a damn comma.”
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