by Vivian Wood
“The mountain.” Despite everything—despite my dry lips and parched throat and the slow anxious turn of my stomach—irritation sparks like a stubborn ember at the pit of my gut.
“The mountain,” she repeats. “And who lives in the mountain?”
I can see the gash of his fortress even from here, though it’s miles away. Only a very rich man would carve a mansion into the side of a mountain, and the man who lives there is very, very rich. I’ve heard other rumors too—that the inside of the mountain is a diamond mine, that the inside of the mountain is worse than a diamond mine, that the diamond mine is a front for terrible things. There’s no need to stand here and look at it. The mountain can’t come to us. “Luther Hades.”
The sooner we can get this two-person play over with, the sooner I can get out into the field. My mother was right about one thing—it was a mistake to say anything to her about moving out of the house. Even though I’m twenty. Even though it’s time.
She turns me to face her, one swift movement. Her gray eyes, silvery in the golden hour, bore into mine. “And what happens to pretty girls who go into the city unprotected? What would happen to you?”
I didn’t say I would go unprotected, I want to shout at her. But that would give everything away, wouldn’t it? It would. The words come out well-rehearsed. “He would find me, and he would kill me.”
“That’s right.” She screws up her lips, and for a flash of a second, all her bravado drops away. It’s back again in the next breath. “He would kill you.” My mother raises a hand to my face and draws her fingers down the side of my cheek. “And I can’t let that happen. Don’t you understand that?”
“But why?” She’s said this so many times, and today, today, I can’t stand not knowing why. I believe her. She’s said it so many times that it’s hard not to believe her. Even if there’s no reason. “Why are you so sure he’s going to kill me?”
“Does it matter why?”
“I’m twenty years old now, Mama. I deserve to know the truth.”
“You’re still a child. Far too innocent for the city. Too innocent to face the likes of Luther Hades.” She stares out at the mountain, narrow-eyed, almost as if she’s challenging him to come down to her field right now and try to get to me.
“He’s never even met me. Why would he want to kill me?”
“Because that’s what men like him do, all of them, every one. The city crawls with them. You’d never get out in one piece.” She brushes a lock of hair away from her cheek. “Trust me.”
And we’re back at the beginning again. He will kill me, because men are killers. Because men are rapists. Because men are dangerous. Especially men with money.
I understand a lot of things, but this obsession she has with Luther Hades, this burning hatred shining in her eyes… I don’t understand that. If all men are ruthless killers, then why does she hire them to work for her? There are other questions—questions I don’t dare ask. Like what happened when she met Luther Hades. She must have met him. You can’t hate a person you’ve never met. Not like this.
Can you?
Her eyes on mine tug at a far corner of my memory. The day I stitched my first poppy into the dishcloth, following a pattern she ordered from a catalogue. Her face, pale. Get into the closet and don’t make a sound. I shake it out of my head. Who can count on memories from fourteen years ago? And why, honestly why, would a man I’ve never met kill me? A secret reason? Something I’ve done without knowing I’ve done it? Impossible. I haven’t done anything. She’s never allowed me to do anything. A soft ache pulses at the center of my heart. For so long, I believed my mother knew everything. Now, I think she’s a sad, paranoid woman who just wants to keep me here so she won’t be lonely, and it’s easier to keep me here if I have nowhere else to go.
I let my shoulders sag a little. “I trust you. I won’t ask again.”
My mother catches my hand in hers and squeezes. The fingerprints on my arm smart. She takes a deep breath. “Are you working in the south fields today?”
I put on a smile. “No, I finished those yesterday.”
“There’s my good girl.”
Does she buy it? I wonder if she does while I collect the specially made basket I take into the fields, the one with ridges at the bottom to keep the blooms separate from one another. While I wave at her through the dining room window. While she paces with her phone pressed to her ear—the phone she keeps locked in her bedside table at night.
In a way, I told the truth. I do understand why she wants to keep me behind her fifteen-foot fences and away from the world. I’ve read enough books to know that mothers have some base instinct to protect their children, even if that instinct is only biological. In my mother’s case, it can’t be emotional. Like a less-valuable flower, I am one of the creations she can control.
I told the truth.
But in so many other ways, I lied.
Chapter Two
Persephone
Decker meets me at a gap in the fence a full two hours later. A gap—it’s not a gap, not empty space, per se. At this stretch of the fence, the metal slats give way to a chain-link gate. The sight of him hopping to his feet sets off a fluttering feeling low in my belly. “Persephone.” The late-afternoon sun glows brighter in his eyes, which are as green as the leaves and shot through with yellow the color of the tulips in my mother’s greenhouse. He twines his fingers through the metal. “I almost gave up on you.” That grin. That joke. He would never.
I drop the basket into the grass at the base of the fence and curl my fingers over his. He looks good in his jeans and white T-shirt. Modern, if not entirely fresh. He’s tall, lanky but muscular, like something out of the historical fiction my mother approves of in the house. She’s against the romanticization of dangers in society, which is what she said when I asked her about ordering more books online. She’d be against Decker, if she knew.
Which is why, of course, I’ve never breathed a word about him in the six months we’ve been... talking. At the fence. In midwinter, my mother got a cough, and she asked me to take a last-minute delivery to the platform. And there was Decker in an army-green coat, rubbing his hands together, cheeks pink, watching me. I couldn’t help myself. He’s got this boyish grin that makes me think of the sunrise or pulling the ribbon off a gift.
God, I wish I could touch him—and really touch him, not with the cold press of metal against my hips. If I close my eyes and imagine it with all my might, I can almost picture what it would be like to lean my head forward and feel his skin meet mine instead of the frigid kiss of the fence. If I could do that, then I’d know for certain how I feel about him. It’s probably love. Love can feel uncertain, can’t it? It can feel overwhelming and strange and more than a little dangerous.
“Don’t,” I whisper back. “My mother….”
He draws back, green eyes instantly knitted. “You changed your mind.”
I rub a thumb over the base of his knuckle. “No. God, no.” Sparkling adrenaline mixes with breathless heat. “I’m definitely leaving.”
Decker blows a breath out through thin lips, slightly chapped from working out in the sun all day. For most of my life, I was expressly forbidden from talking to any of the people my mother hired to work in the fields or in the greenhouse. For all her photos cradling the dirt, she doesn’t have enough hands to weed, water, and collect her prizewinning blooms. And her flowers do have to be tended, even if she’d rather people think they sprout naturally from the earth, picked with a gentle smile and a thankful prayer sent up by a woman in a linen outfit. The people my mother sells her flowers to desperately want them to be free-range, whatever that means. So she grows them in open fields and a glassed-in greenhouse, scattering the seeds in fistfuls meant to seem random. As if anything my mother ever does is random. Paranoid, yes. Random, no.
But even if she carefully selects every one of those handfuls, it means there are no tidy plots and rows, which would look bad in her brochure photos. It makes no sens
e. Nobody ever comes here to see what the fields are like. Why would they? She ships the flowers in tightly wrapped Styrofoam coolers to whatever wedding or event they’re having. They all go on the train at night. In a few hours, it’ll chug to a stop at a wide wooden platform thirty feet beyond where Decker stands at the fence. The night crew will load the coolers on, and they’ll be away into the night, the howl of the whistle cutting across the sky to my bedroom window.
Decker leans forward again, angling his face so he can brush his lips against my forehead from the other side. “I’ve been thinking about us. About being together without this damned fence in between us.”
I pull back an inch, skin bristling. Decker is the first person other than my mother to pay any attention to me, and yet... I’m not entirely certain I like his attention either. I’ve lived under my mother’s thumb every waking hour of my life, even during those three years she let me go to school in the city. She’s always watching, always assessing. And I’m always watching her. If I’d done a bad job, she’d never have squeezed my hand. Most nights, I dream about wide-open fields with no fences and no prying eyes. “Me too,” I murmur toward his smile, and then his words settle into my brain. “When will everything be ready?”
A broad smile spreads over his face, a strange light in his eyes. “Tonight. We’re leaving tonight.”
A surge of energy bolts through me from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, the air getting so light it barely fills my lungs. “It’s all set?”
“It’s all set.” Decker leans in hard against the fence and groans. “Christ, I wish I could touch you right now. But soon. When the train comes….” He pulls back to look deeply into my eyes. “You’ll be here when the train comes, won’t you? You’ll meet me tonight?”
“I can get out, but I don’t know if I can get back in. If you can’t open the gate, if my mother finds me out of the house—”
“It’ll be open when you get here. I swear. I have it figured out.” Decker laughs, his voice blending with the breeze rustling through the new green leaves. “I have it all figured out.” He leans in again, dropping his voice like there might be somebody listening. “By this time tonight, we’ll be on our own. I’ve got you a temporary place to stay in the city—”
“Us.”
“I’ve got us a temporary place to stay in the city, one night only, and then we’re out of here. It’s a wide-open country, Persephone. I can get a job anywhere the road takes us. We could go east, toward the ocean, or into the desert, if that’s what you want—”
“New York City,” I say without pause.
He laughs, because he’s heard that before. “Okay, okay. To the library.”
“The New York Public Library. With the lions outside.” I don’t tell him they’re named Patience and Fortitude, those lions. I’ve waited so long for this chance. I’ve used all my strength to get here. In some weird way, it almost feels like those lions are waiting for me.
“Fine,” he says, his tone generous. “We’ll head in that direction.”
I close my eyes and let the words spin a rose-tinted movie of our new life. One in which we’ll be able to check out books, an endless amount of books. Oh, God, I know it’s going to be hard, leaving everything behind. It’s not like my mother has ever let me squirrel money away into a savings account, but I’ve got a few dollars Decker slipped me here and there. And the beginning—well, the beginning of all this does make my stomach clench. But I don’t need to focus on the fake ID we’ll need to buy if we want to get anywhere without my mother knowing, or the fact that I don’t have a credit card. The other girls at school, they all had credit cards. Wasn’t much to spend money on while we were on school grounds, but that didn’t stop them from buying things. It looked so easy—type in a few numbers, press a button, reinvent yourself. Let people see you.
I never did. She’d find out somehow, the way she found out when we snuck off to have our tarot cards read. The hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. My mother won’t be at the little house Decker and I will set up for ourselves, wherever it is we land. She won’t be watching. But he will.
“You can go to work wherever you want. With a face like yours, you’re bound to get hired. You can wait tables or answer phones.” He gives a small laugh. “Maybe even work for a florist.”
The snort that escapes me is part excitement and part irritation. Decker has said this a thousand times if he’s said it once, and I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about. “No one’s going to hire me for my face.” Worry knits my brows. “Will I get hired without references?”
“Of course you will.” His fingers curve down over the fence, eyes warm. “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world. You’re worth a million bucks.”
I can’t stand it anymore and turn my head, craning my neck to look in every direction. Nothing is out of place at the forest’s edge. Sunlight pushes through the leaves like new buds and falls like strings of pearls to the ground below. Bright flowers bow their heads to the wind in a lazy dance. All the growing things fill the air with a green, fresh scent, spring tipping over into summer. Summers will never be the same after this, and I have to admit part of me aches for these summers already. There is one advantage to having a mother like mine, and it’s that she sees the value in lying out in an open field and letting the light soak into your skin. She makes certain allowances in the summer, like letting me spend an hour alone at the brook on the opposite side of the field, far from the train tracks. In the summer, she likes to pretend the train and the tracks that jut out of the earth don’t exist.
“Did you hear something?” There’s a note of anxiety in Decker’s voice.
“Nothing.” I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I should get back, though. She might decide to check on me. If I’m not there, she’ll….”
Decker releases me but lets his fingertips hang on the fence for a few heartbeats longer. “You know what time, right? It’s important.”
This is a risk for both of us. If he gets caught out—with me—he’ll never work for my mother again. Knowing her, he might not work anywhere again. I don’t want to think about what will happen to me. The doors in our house are made from heavy solid wood. I’d be no match for a good lock on one of those. But… no need to think of that, because it won’t happen. By the time the train comes, she’ll be sleeping. She won’t know we’re gone until it’s too late. “I know when the train comes, Deck. I’ll be there.”
He brings his fingertips to his lips and blows me a kiss. Something flickers across his face. Maybe it’s only a shadow from the dappled light. Decker licks his lips and grins at me again. “You’re going to feel so good with me, baby. I promise you that.”
I let myself believe him, let myself lean hard into what it will be like to belong to him. To belong to anyone other than my mother. Once we’re together, I won’t have to be so afraid. I’ll love every moment with him. I squeeze my eyes shut and will myself into the future, when he can pull me close and keep me steady while we go out into the world. I’m going to feel so good.
From far off in the distance, somewhere on the other side of the fence, a whistle sounds. That’s his cue to go. He looks like he wants to say more, but he only jogs off into the trees, following the tracks.
Tonight.
Chapter Three
Persephone
The fields never seem larger than they do in the pitch-black of night. This is only the second time I’ve gone out like this. The first was years ago, back when I discovered a slim volume of a ghost story that took place in the New York Public Library. Scary? Creepy, more like. Reading it was like having chill waves of dread lap up against my toes and then my shins and then knees, until it submerged every inch of me. It was about a woman trapped in the library forever—a booklover’s dream, maybe. Except there was no light. No electricity. No fire.
No way to read the books.
That might have made me afraid of going to the library, but it only strengthen
ed my determination to leave. At least she had been places before she got trapped. At least she read more than a few stolen books. By the time I was done reading it, I had to do something with my pounding heart and the certainty of doom, so I risked it all and went out into the night.
There was nothing in the field, of course. There never is. It’s surrounded by high fences, every inch. The house was different then too. Going out wasn’t such a finality.
Still, I walk faster now, as fast as I dare, weaving between the flowers whenever possible. I reach up and touch the flowers still twined into my hair from earlier in the day. It’s kind of sweet to wake up with petals on my pillow, and my mother would have known something was off if I spent a lot of time brushing them away. She’ll be apoplectic if I crush the blooms beneath my shoes. There’s probably nothing out here now, under the bright swell of the moon, other than stark shadows. Tree branches scrape black against the sky. I’ll admit it—I don’t want to get too close. Wind rushes by my ears, carrying the creaking of the green-heavy branches. Cicadas sing, jumping out of the way as I go. I’m disturbing them. I’m disturbing myself, but it’s the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done.
After I read that story, the New York Public Library became the symbol of freedom. A lighthouse for me to swim toward when I’m feeling mired in endless flowers. Maybe it won’t be impressive at all, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not about the building. It’s not even about the millions of books inside. It’s about being the master of my own fate, deciding where I go.
Eventually, I have no choice but to head for the forest. The slim line of trees is what separates me from the train, and the train will whisk me away to my new life. I suck in a breath. The air gets more humid by the day. Tomorrow’s dewdrops are still hovering in midair. For a moment, I see myself the way another person would, with my white dress skimming the grass. I’m a ghost, as insubstantial as a ghost. Any moment now, my feet could leave the ground and I could fly off into the sky, dissolving into midnight-blue. I wish I had something to carry other than a small beaded purse, but packing would have given me away. Decker says we can buy everything we need in the city. I was wrong before. I’m not ambivalent about him. I was only afraid, and that’s not the same thing.