“Um … okay.” I was hungry, too, but decided not to mention it. Somehow, it didn’t seem like something I should admit to. After a night like we’d had, who thinks of food?
I did. Which made me wonder. On the one hand, I felt like I should feel worse. Like maybe in shock from the horror of it all, or something. I kept waiting for the guilt to sneak up on me, but it just didn’t happen. I even felt a tiny sense of anticipation. Despite everything that had happened, we were going somewhere new.
I’d never left Missouri before. I’d only been out of Gypsum a few times, on school field trips to Hannibal and St. Joseph, to see Mark Twain’s childhood home and the Pony Express Museum. But I’d never been to a city.
My stomach growled again. To cover the sound, I asked Prairie something that had been bothering me.
“How could you not have known my mom was pregnant?”
Prairie’s jaw tensed and she didn’t look at me. She hadn’t slept at all, and it showed in the faint lines under her eyes and around her mouth.
“When I left Gypsum, I moved to Chicago. I wrote to Clover almost every day,” she finally said. “I knew there would be trouble if Alice ever found out that Clover knew where I was, so I told her to make up a story that we’d had a really bad fight and that we swore we’d never speak to each other again.”
“Why would Gram care?”
“She had … plans for me. Just like I think she did for you.”
Her words filled me with dread. “What do you mean?”
“You have to think about who Alice was, when she was younger. She tried to be a Healer for a long time before she gave up. Mary told me that Alice was devastated when she finally had to accept that she didn’t have the gift. She never got over her failure, and to cope with it she turned all her misery into blame.”
“Blame? But who could she blame for that?”
“Alice decided that the reason she was damaged was that the Tarbells had mixed their blood with outsiders. That they’d married and bore children outside the families, and that had corrupted the lineage.”
“What do you mean, the families? What families?”
“Our ancestors all emigrated here together. The Morries, the Tarbells, we’re all descended from the same village in Ireland.”
“We’re Irish?”
“Yes.” Prairie smiled, but it didn’t reach her troubled eyes. “Our ancestors lived in the same village for centuries. When they came here, they started over. New names, new skills, new homes, but the plan was always that they would stay together. They were known as the Banished, and they—”
“Wait.” I cut her off. What had Milla said—Ain’t any of us Banished got any say in things. “Why were they called that?”
“No one remembers anymore. I mean, there were all these stories. When your mom and I were little, Mary would tell us bedtime stories about faeries and blessings and curses.”
“You don’t believe in them.”
“I …” Prairie hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “It’s not that I don’t believe. The blessings were real, even if I can’t explain them, even if they don’t fit neatly with what science tells us. The Banished are united by some … powerful things. Mary always told me that we Tarbells were meant to serve the Banished, to heal them when they needed us. But that wasn’t the whole story. The rest of the women had a responsibility to keep the village, the people, together after they left Ireland. That’s why we can sense each other, why we are drawn to each other.”
At last, an explanation for the way I felt when I was around the Morries, even if it sounded crazy. A part of me was relieved that I hadn’t imagined it. That it might be real, even if it was something out of a fable. “What else?”
“Well, when they left Ireland the men were all given the gift of visions. They could see into the future, or see things that were happening elsewhere. It was meant to protect them from enemies, disasters, even things like storms that could damage the crops.”
“The Morries have visions?” I thought of the boys at school, their shadowed faces angry, stubborn, bleak. All but Sawyer’s.
“Not much anymore. That gift, that power, is mostly gone.”
“What happened to it?”
Prairie sighed. “A few generations ago, everything started to fall apart. I guess it came from marrying outside the Banished, it weakened the gift. Mary said she remembered the first broken Healer, when she was a little girl: a Tarbell daughter born like Alice, sick and weak and mean. But she didn’t grow to adulthood. Mary said the strongest Healers were pure Banished. I think it broke her heart when one of her own daughters was … damaged. And Alice could never accept it. I think she always believed that if she could just go back to the source of the gift, she could somehow heal herself.”
Go back to the source … to Ireland? My pulse quickened as I thought of the airplane ticket to Dublin. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” I said, and explained about the folder I’d found in Gram’s room.
Hailey frowned. “So Alice really meant to go. She used to talk about it, sometimes … only, I can’t imagine it would have made a difference. I don’t know how it could change anything just to go back to the village.”
“If it did, then all the Morries—”
“—could be fixed?” Prairie said gently. “It doesn’t work that way, Hailey. The changes in the Banished, they’re deep in the foundations of who they are now. They are afraid of each other. Of what they’ve become. The men … they’ve lost their, their moral compass, I guess you’d say. A lot of them are addicts. They don’t want to work, they don’t take care of their families.”
“But not all of them,” I said, thinking of Sawyer.
“Oh, definitely not. There are still Banished men who are born with all the determination and idealism of the ones who first settled here. But in general … well, I guess that’s how it got to be called Trashtown. You know, I saw a picture once, that Mary had. It was almost a hundred years old and you wouldn’t even know it was Trashtown. Little houses all fixed up, flower beds, happy families, everyone dressed up and smiling.”
I thought about the Morries at school, their patched and dirty clothes, the sickly, malnourished way they looked. I thought of Milla, the combination of fury and fear she wore on her face.
“I don’t understand why they hate me so much now. The Morries.”
“It’s fear, Hailey. They think that after Alice was born … damaged … that the gift was turned into a curse. They don’t believe you truly have the power to heal, just like they never believed Clover or I could. They’re afraid that if you try to heal someone you’ll end up cursing them instead.”
“You never healed anyone when you lived here?”
“Alice wouldn’t let us. She made us go to school in Tipton so we wouldn’t be around the Morries. Mary taught us in secret. Alice always said she’d beat us if she ever caught us healing.”
“Why?”
“I think because she never got over being damaged. She tried to heal, you know, when she was young. Mary told me. And she couldn’t bear the thought that her daughters could do something she couldn’t.”
“And so you just … didn’t?” I tried to imagine resisting the urge, now that I knew what I could do.
“I … took care of people sometimes, but usually I didn’t even tell them. You know—a friend with a strawberry birthmark. Another one with bruises from when her stepfather beat her.”
We rode in silence for a while, each lost in our own thoughts. “Did you ever know your dad?”
“No, and Alice never told me who he was. I never even knew if Clover had the same father.”
I couldn’t imagine Gram young. Couldn’t imagine a man falling in love with her, wanting a child with her. “What about your grandfather?”
“No. He died young, not long after Alice was born, and Mary never talked about him. All Alice ever told me about him was that he was mixed blood.”
“Was he?”
“Yes. There were
n’t very many purebloods left even a generation ago, and Mary’s husband was part Cherokee and part German.”
“How can you be sure about that?”
Prairie gave me a quick, sad smile before returning her attention to the road. “I studied genetics, when I finally went to college. And then I worked in a lab. By the time Bryce hired me, I’d traced my origins pretty thoroughly.”
“You can tell all that? Just from blood?”
“You’d be surprised. The tests are a little complex, but you can track your heredity with considerable accuracy.”
I thought for a moment. “Could you … test me? I mean, could you figure out what my dad was?”
“Not the way you’re thinking, Hailey. Unless you were doing full-on DNA testing and looking for genetic paternity or something like that. And besides, if you’re wondering about the healing, it doesn’t matter. Alice was wrong. As long as a Healer’s partner is part Banished, she will pass on the gift, nine times out of ten.”
“You can tell that from your testing?” I demanded, surprised.
“No. That, I learned from Mary. It’s not exactly scientific, but I have no reason to doubt it’s true. Mary told me that some Healers are more powerful than others, depending on the blood of their fathers. And other factors too, some of which I doubt we’ll ever understand. Like Alice. I don’t know why the gift was corrupted in her. I … sometimes I can almost feel pity for her, for the way she was born, with the powers stunted along with her body. But then …”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. I guessed we both had our memories, of Gram’s meanness, her cruelty. Yes, it was possible to feel compassion for her … until you remembered who she was.
“So Gram wanted to make sure you married one of the Banished,” I guessed. “So your children didn’t end up like her.”
“That’s right,” Prairie said. “But it went further than that. Alice started to feel that she was responsible for ensuring that the Tarbell line continued. She used to say that when I graduated from high school, she’d choose one of the purebloods for me.”
“And when you left—”
“There was only Clover. And I’ve always wondered …”
It took only a moment for me to figure it out. “You think Gram … chose someone for my mom. Once she realized you weren’t coming back.”
“Yes,” Prairie said softly. “I think she didn’t want to wait until Clover graduated. And I think she—Clover—didn’t have any choice in the matter, that he—whoever he was—he must have …”
As Prairie struggled to find the right words, I realized why her pain showed through whenever she talked about Clover. About my mother. Gram had sacrificed her, had handed her off to one of the Morries—someone like the cruel-eyed, shadow-fleeting boys I knew from the halls of Gypsum High—so that she could be impregnated by a pureblood. So that her child would carry on the Tarbell legacy and be a true Healer.
Horror washed over me, closing my throat so it was difficult to breathe. I was the child of a violation of someone even younger than me. When I thought of my mother, alone, having lost the one person who cared about her, who could protect her, my heart fractured.
“Did she die in childbirth?” I asked. I had to know.
“Oh, Hailey.” Prairie took a deep breath. “No. Clover killed herself.”
“She …”
But I couldn’t speak. I had always thought of my mother as a stranger, until I met Prairie. Gram had said she was mentally disabled and I had believed her, and somehow that made my mother less real to me. I felt like I had been born of nothing, in a way, like I had just appeared one day in the house I grew up in.
“You were a few weeks old when she died,” Prairie continued quietly. “Bryce’s investigators found the records at the county office, and he told me a few days ago. I was … devastated, thinking about how frightened Clover must have been.”
“How did she … you know?”
“She hanged herself, Hailey. In the bedroom closet. Bryce found the police reports.”
My closet. No wonder I had been drawn to that tiny space; no wonder I’d found the secret hiding place. It was her presence I’d felt there, her sadness. “But … why …”
“I think she felt like she was out of options. She was too ashamed to tell me she was pregnant. And I think she knew that if she had told me, I would have come back. I think she was protecting me, in her own way.”
“But what about …” I swallowed the lump in my throat. What about me? I was thinking. Didn’t she care about me? Didn’t she want to make sure her baby was all right?
“You must never think that your mother didn’t love you,” Prairie said fiercely. “Clover loved you with all her heart. But she knew that Alice would have taken you from her, like she tried to take everything. Alice saw you as the future of the Tarbells, and that was all she cared about. A last chance for her to get it right. A last chance to purify the bloodline.”
You are the future, Hailey.
“And she wouldn’t have allowed anything to interfere with that. I am sure that she would have put Clover out on the street before she let her raise you.”
I could barely absorb the full horror of what Prairie was saying. I thought of all the times Gram whispered and laughed with Dun Acey, the way he looked at me with his hungry eyes. I wondered if he was the one Gram had chosen for me, the man who would father my child, the pureblood Banished who would ensure that my baby was a Healer.
I thought I would throw up. I made a strangled sound in my throat and Prairie looked at me in alarm.
“Hailey, are you all right? The exit’s coming up in a minute—can you make it?”
“I think so,” I said, swallowing hard. “Just … tell me the rest. All of it. How did you find out my mom was dead? What did you do?”
“When she stopped answering my letters, I got worried. I had saved a little money by then, so I took a bus back to Gypsum to get her. But when I got to the house … she wasn’t there, and Alice told me she had killed herself. I was just going to leave; all I could think to do was get out of there, out of the house, away from Alice. But she stopped me. She told me that she could make people think I did it. She said Clover had been talking about the huge fight we’d had.…”
“The one you told her to make up? When you wrote to her?”
“Yes. And she said I’d better not let any of the authorities find out I was in town, or they’d take me in for questioning or worse. Now I understand she was just trying to make sure that I never came back. Because if I ever found out about you, I might fight for you. And she was not about to lose you.”
That was the final piece of the puzzle. Now I had the whole story of why I’d grown up without a mother. She hadn’t abandoned me on purpose.
And if Prairie had come for me long ago, I wouldn’t have Chub. I looked over the seat at him, rosy-cheeked in sleep, his mouth a sweet little O.
Until Chub, I had grown up with no love at all. But he had given me a reason to keep going, to keep trying.
Prairie had saved me last night, I thought as we reached the exit. But maybe Chub had saved me first.
We coasted off the highway, almost directly into an enormous parking lot. I was starving, and I knew Chub would be too the minute he woke up.
“We’re going to eat here?”
“I’m afraid so. There’s a McDonald’s in the Walmart. I’ll pick up what we need while you take Chub and get breakfast for the two of you.”
“What about you?”
Prairie smiled, unexpectedly and genuinely. “If you would get me a sausage and egg biscuit, I would be very grateful. I haven’t had one of those in ages. Oh, and some hash browns, maybe. And an orange juice. And a giant coffee, all right?”
She pressed some money into my hands and I closed my fingers over it. “How do you like your coffee?”
“Black’s fine. Listen, Hailey, you’ve got some bruising. It might be better if you …” She reached out and pushed my hair
across my forehead, arranging it so that it hung over the side of my face.
Prairie had taken off her jacket. At least there was no blood on her silk top. She’d combed her hair and put on lipstick, but she still looked like she’d been up all night.
“I need to walk Rascal,” I said, leaning over to check on him. He was lying on the floor of the car, head resting on his paws.
“Okay, I’ll get Chub ready.”
By the time I had taken Rascal for a quick trip to a grassy median, Prairie had Chub out of the car. He was pointing to the giant store and making excited noises. I opened the car door and Rascal jumped obediently into the backseat.
As we walked through the huge parking lot, I decided two things: first, today was the day I was going to start drinking coffee. And second, I too would drink it black. Cream and sugar were things that could slow a person down.
By now, back in Gypsum, the Ellises would have realized their car was missing, wouldn’t they? They would have gone out to get the paper, or let the cat in, and if they glanced over to the carport … although it was Saturday. Maybe they were sleeping in.
A quarter mile away, if the cops hadn’t already been called to the scene, Old Man Burnett was waking up to discover a giant hole in his barn and a car crashed in his creek. Not to mention Prairie’s car, that old brown Volvo, abandoned behind the barn.
I wondered how long it would take for someone to stumble on the carnage at our house. Gram was well known to a few people in Gypsum and the surrounding county, but they weren’t the kind to call the authorities. It would probably be someone else—someone selling aluminum siding or checking the water meter—who would end up making that awful discovery.
Inside the store, an old man with a bright blue vest shoved a shopping cart toward us. “Welcome to Walmart,” he said.
“Thanks, I … we’re just going to, uh, have breakfast,” I said, certain he would see how nervous I was and know something was wrong. But as Prairie slipped into the crowd of shoppers, he turned away from me and pushed the cart at the people who came through the door after us.
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