Banished

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Banished Page 5

by Sophie Littlefield


  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 paid the 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.

  CHAPTER 6

  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 wounde
d 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.

  CHAPTER 7

  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 R
ascal’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

 

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