Banished

by Sophie Littlefield

  “Do you mind if I sit too?” Prairie asked.

  I shrugged—It’s a free country. She settled next to me and picked up a long, skinny twig that had blown into a crevice in the rock. Holding it loosely in her hand, she traced designs in the air. For a while neither of us said anything. Dozens of questions went through my mind. I kept thinking of the names carved into the wall.

  “If you’re my aunt, where have you been all this time?” I blurted out. It wasn’t what I meant to say, and all of a sudden tears blurred my eyes and threatened to spill down my cheeks. I wiped my sleeve hard across my face.

  “Oh, Hailey,” Prairie said, and her voice wavered. “I … had reasons for leaving when I did. I didn’t know about you. I meant to come back for your mom, but by the time I could, she … well, she died. I never even knew she was pregnant.”

  “But you … you left my mom here alone with Gram. And then she killed herself.” I didn’t bother to keep the accusation out of my voice, even though I wasn’t sure I believed what Milla had said.

  “I know.” Prairie’s voice got softer. “That’s something I have to live with every day of my life.”

  I considered telling her that I’d never leave Chub with Gram. Never.

  “Didn’t anyone come looking for you?” I asked instead.

  “Gram didn’t report me missing,” Prairie said. If she was bitter, she covered it well. “I was never officially a runaway. And the police had better things to do than search for me.”

  “But—why didn’t you come back, you know, later? After I was born?”

  I heard the crack in my voice and I hated it, hated that Prairie heard it too.

  “I didn’t know, Hailey. Alice said your mom—” She hesitated and I saw that she bit her lip the very same way I did, catching the right side of the bottom lip between her teeth. “She never let me know about you.”

  Why should I care? My mother was nothing to me. I had no memories of her. As far as I was concerned, I’d never had a mother at all.

  “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” I muttered. “Chub’s my family now. We’re fine, we don’t need anyone else.”

  Prairie nodded, more to herself than to me, I thought.

  “I see you found your mom’s hiding spot,” Prairie said gently.

  “Her … what?”

  Prairie put her hands to the back of her neck and twisted the clasp of a thin silver chain. As she closed her fingers on the pendant, I knew what I would see.

  “It’s just like yours,” she said. “When I saw it on you … well, your mom never took it off. Neither of us did. Mary—our grandmother—she gave them to us. They’re very old. She said they would protect us.”

  She handed the pendant to me, still warm from her skin. I had noticed that the stone in the necklace I wore absorbed my heat and held it, almost like it carried energy. The necklace in my hand was identical to the one around my neck, right down to the twisting, curling scrollwork that held the stone in place, the looping bale through which the chain ran.

  I handed the necklace to Prairie. It would have been nice to believe there was magic in the necklaces, but I wasn’t counting on it. “I guess we should go back,” I said.

  We didn’t talk, but the silence felt all right. When we got to the house, Gram was still sitting in her kitchen chair. She gave us a calculating smile and blew smoke in our direction. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  “I’m taking Hailey out to dinner,” Prairie said. “We’ll be a while.”

  This was news to me. Chub, who had been playing with his plastic magnet letters on the fridge, came over and pushed his face into my legs again. For just a second I was embarrassed for Prairie to see that Chub wasn’t like other kids.

  Gram stared at Prairie with her eyes narrowed down to slits. Prairie stared back. I found myself hoping Gram would blink first.

  “Fine,” Gram finally said. I could tell she was thinking hard. She had that look a lot. No matter what else you could say about her, she wasn’t stupid. I couldn’t tell you how many of her customers came to our house thinking they could put one over on her. She’d give them that look and sure enough they’d leave a lot more of their cash on the table than they had planned. If they didn’t like it, she’d tell them to take their business somewhere else, which they hardly ever did. I thought of the money and the ticket again, and wondered what she was up to.

  “Don’t wait up” was all Prairie said as she took her keys out of her purse.

  “We need to bring Chub,” I said. I wanted to find out what Prairie was really doing here, but I felt bad about leaving Chub tonight. I could tell he was upset, the way he’d hugged me so hard.

  “Chub’s not going anywhere,” Gram said. “I think he’s catching something. I don’t want him taking a chill outside.”

  I knew she was lying, but I also knew he’d be all right for an hour or two.

  I followed Prairie out to her car. We didn’t talk. She drove straight to Nolan’s, taking the shortcut back behind the Napa Auto Parts, and I was surprised she’d picked the only fancy restaurant in town.

  I was afraid the hostess wouldn’t seat us, since I was wearing jeans. But Prairie gave her a smile and said, “We’ll need some privacy, please. Would you find us a table that’s a little bit out of the way?”

  The hostess put us in a nice booth along the far wall, away from the waitress station and the kitchen. She kept sneaking looks at Prairie, and now that I had gotten over the surprise of how much our faces looked alike, I could see why Prairie drew attention.

  I was tall and skinny, but Prairie was tall and elegant. Thin, but with nice hips and breasts, and her brown hair was shiny and hung exactly right, smooth and straight and curving under just a little where it went past her shoulders. Her jacket, plain and cut low enough in the front to show a little bit of her silky top underneath, fit her so perfectly it pretty much said money with a capital M. I guess the hostess was thinking the same thing. There were very few rich families in Gypsum; almost everyone was just trying to get by.

  I was going to order the chicken sandwich. I read all the prices on the menu and added up in my head what dinner would cost. Part of me wanted to order the most expensive thing just to see what Prairie would do, to see if there was a limit to her concern for me, or maybe to see if I could get her to crack and show me who she really was. Like if under this nice exterior she was just waiting to tell me what she really wanted, and it would be something bad.

  But when the waitress came around to take the order, Prairie said, “The filet mignon sounds really good, doesn’t it, Hailey?” It was twenty-three dollars, but I hadn’t had a steak in as long as I could remember and I just said yes, it did.

  When the waitress walked away, neither of us said anything for a minute. Prairie fiddled with her knife, spinning it back and forth.

  “Tell me about your dog,” she finally said. “If you don’t mind.”

  That caught me off guard. Rascal wasn’t something I felt like talking about. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “It’s just that I can tell he’s … that something happened to him.” Her face went soft, and her eyes were sad. “Where did you get him?”

  “Um … Gram got him from a guy she knew.”

  “Alice traded him for drugs.” Prairie’s expression didn’t change.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged like it was no big deal. “Probably.”

  “Hailey … I saw the scar. What’s left of it, anyway. On his stomach.”

  I blinked. This morning the scar had almost disappeared. You had to push the fur to the side to see the faint pink line.

  I wanted to ask Prairie how she knew, but I didn’t want her to think I cared too much. Caring about things made you vulnerable. “He got hit by the Hostess truck a few days ago.”

  “Was he badly hurt?”

  “He …” I swallowed, remembering the way Rascal looked. But I didn’t want to tell her what I had done, didn’t want to have to try to explain how he’d healed so well in on
e night. “No, just a little cut.”

  Prairie watched me carefully. “I bet you must have given him good care, Hailey. What did you do?”

  Her voice was so kind that I had to look away. I swallowed hard and took a little sip of my ice water. “I, um, I just cleaned it with antiseptic and, you know, kept him inside.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Did I … what?”

  “While you were cleaning up his injuries? I mean, maybe he was scared. I know how that can be. You must have wanted to make him comfortable.”

  She knew.

  Somehow she knew that I’d healed Rascal, that something I’d done to him after the accident had fixed him, just like I’d fixed Milla during gym. I felt my face go hot. It was like she could read my mind.

  “I don’t think I said anything special,” I answered her carefully, “while I was taking care of him.”

  Prairie nodded. “All right. Well, I’m glad he’s … better.”

  “Yeah, it, um. I mean, he has that limp, you probably noticed. But that’s all.”

  The waitress came along with our salads. We thanked her and just as I was about to pick up my fork, Prairie took a deep breath.

  “I have some things to tell you, Hailey,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to do it now, when we’ve only just met, but I think it’s necessary.”

  Bad news, then; she was about to tell me what she really wanted from me. But, honestly, how much worse could my life get?

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Now I wish I’d ordered a drink,” Prairie said, smiling a little. “A really strong one. Okay, where to start? How about this—Alice isn’t as old as you think she is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think she’s turning fifty this year,” Prairie said. “Let’s see, I’ll be thirty-one, and she was nineteen when she had me, so, yes, she’s still forty-nine, barely.”

  I thought of the old pages, the names and dates written there. Alice Eugenie Tarbell, 1961. But Gram was old—she had the wrinkled face, the thin gray hair, the bent fingers that elderly people have. And she was weak. She could barely get up and down the stairs to the basement. She couldn’t do chores, which was why it was always me who mopped and swept and washed the windows and shoveled snow and carried the laundry and the groceries.

  And she was sickly. She caught colds constantly, lying in her bed for days at a time, getting up only when her customers came calling. I found her hair in clumps in the shower drain, and her nails were yellowed and cracked. If she bumped into the furniture, she’d have purple and yellow bruises. Every time she lit up a cigarette, she hacked and coughed as though her lungs were about to fall out.

  “That’s impossible,” I finally said.

  Prairie sipped at her water. “I wish you could have known your great-grandmother. My grandmother Mary, Alice’s mother.”

  I thought of the photo in the cheap frame, the woman’s bright red lips and sparkling eyes. My great-grandmother—I could barely imagine it.

  “She died when I was ten,” Prairie continued, “but she was beautiful and strong and fun and smart … so smart. Most of the women in our family are.”

  “What happened to Gram, then?”

  “Well, here’s part of what I need to tell you, Hailey. Tarbell women—all your ancestors—are incredibly healthy and strong. It’s—well, it’s our birthright, I guess you might say. In our blood. Tell me, I bet you hardly ever get sick, right?”

  “Uh … not much.”

  “And you’re strong—stronger than the other kids. And more coordinated, right?”

  I just shrugged.

  “Well, like I said, it’s in our genes. Except that every so often, maybe every five or six generations, there is an aberration.”

  “A what?”

  “Someone born who doesn’t fit the genetic pattern. Like Alice. Where the rest of the Tarbell women have phenomenal genes, Alice has been in poor health her entire life. She’s aging much too quickly, her tissues are decaying. I don’t imagine she’ll live to see her fifty-fifth birthday.”

  I thought of Milla and what she’d said about the necklaces, about how they were cursed. How do you think your grandmother got the way she is?

  I didn’t say it, but if it was true, and Gram had been cursed, I wasn’t sorry. Gram could die tomorrow for all I cared. I did the addition in my head—I’d be twenty. Twenty, and free of Gram—my heart lightened at the thought.

  An idea came to me, a missing piece of the puzzle of my life that maybe Prairie could supply. “Did you and my mom have the same dad? Do you know who he is?”

  Prairie shook her head. I’d wondered, sometimes, looking at Gram with her withered skin and bent body, if she had ever been young, if a man had ever loved her. It didn’t seem possible.

  “Alice never talked about that part of her life.”

  “What about my dad?” I asked. “Like maybe my mom had a boyfriend or something?”

  Prairie gave me a look that was so full of sadness I almost wished I hadn’t asked. “Clover was my younger sister. When I left Gypsum, she was only fourteen. She was already pregnant with you. I never knew.”

  Fourteen. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I knew it was possible—they talked about it in Health enough.

  “She would be … twenty-nine,” I said. Barely old enough to be a mother of a kid, much less someone my age.

  “Yes … Clover, your mom, she was very shy. She didn’t really have many friends at school. And nothing like a boyfriend.”

  So she was like me, then. I knew what it was like not to have friends. “But maybe Gram knows something.”

  Prairie pressed her lips together for a moment as though trying to figure out what to say next. “If she knows, I’m afraid she’ll never tell.”

  “Why not?”

  “I know how hard it is to live with Alice,” Prairie said gently. “I … remember. She doesn’t have the power that she wishes she had, and the way she is … it’s left her angry and bitter. Maybe even unable to love anyone. I think it was hard on your mother, harder than it was on me. Clover was sensitive, and sometimes I think it bothered her more when Alice was mean to me than when she did something to her. I just … steeled myself, I guess. I decided a long time ago I wouldn’t let her hurt me, and for the most part it worked.”

  I knew what she meant, though I didn’t say it. You told yourself her words were nothing. When she refused to talk to you, you reminded yourself that you didn’t care. You shut off the part of your heart that wanted a mother, a grandmother, and you made it through by remembering every day that she couldn’t hurt you if you didn’t let her, if you didn’t make the mistake of caring too much.

  My mother hadn’t been able to do that.

  “Whose child is Chub?” Prairie asked.

  I felt my face get hot. “We got him from one of Gram’s customers. He’s Gram’s foster child.”

  “For the state money,” Prairie said thoughtfully. “Right?”

  I nodded, surprised that she figured it out so quick. “Yes, but I think she also wanted him to be like … a project. Something she could fix. He has, um, problems? I mean, he’s slow. He’s really great and all, but he isn’t really developing as fast as he should be.”

  I felt disloyal saying it. I waited for Prairie to say something mean about him, to make some careless criticism, and I was ready to hate her if she said the wrong thing. But she just nodded, her eyes sad. “He seems like a sweet boy. You take very good care of him. That must be hard.”

  “No.” The word came out harsher than I intended. “I mean, I don’t mind. It’s not hard, it’s fun.”

  I didn’t tell her how Gram had acted different for a while, after she applied with the state. I didn’t want to admit that I’d been dumb enough to hope things had really changed during that brief time when Gram kept the house clean and cooked real meals and didn’t do any business out of the cellar. That I had almost believed she could change Chub.

  “Do you kno
w his real name?” Prairie asked gently.

  I stared at my plate. “No. Just Chub.”

  I’d thought about changing it. Charlie, I’d suggested to Gram, but she’d laughed and said she guessed he had a good enough name already. And the thing was, Chub knew his name, he answered to it. I figured he had enough confusion in his life that we didn’t need to go adding any more.

  “That’s fine,” Prairie said. “What about a last name?”

  “Gram knows it, but she never let me see any of the papers,” I said. “She just says he’s a Tarbell now.”

  Prairie nodded. She had that look again, the one I was pretty sure meant a lot of thinking and figuring was going on.

  The waitress came with our dinner, and I dug in. I couldn’t believe how good the steak was. Tender and buttery and salty—the best thing I’d ever tasted.

  Prairie barely touched hers. She sighed and sliced off a tiny corner and slipped it into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed, but it looked to me like she didn’t even taste it. As hard as she was trying to seem calm, I could tell she was uneasy, almost frightened. I wanted to know why.

  I set down my knife and fork. “Why are you here? What do you want from me?”

  Prairie looked me right in the eye—something hardly anyone had ever done—and took a deep breath.

  “I’m taking you with me,” she said. “You can’t stay here with Alice anymore.”

  My heart did a little flip at her words. Leaving—even if it wasn’t the way I planned, even if it was with a stranger—the thought was almost irresistible. I wanted to say Okay, fine, let’s do it. To hell with school, with the stupid Cleans who’d made fun of me forever. To hell with our falling-down house, the weedy yard, the long walk to the grocery. Anywhere would be better than here. I was tempted to say “Sure, let’s go right now,” before she changed her mind.