Ellis glanced at Raven. Raven sensed she felt the same way she did. She didn’t want to be left alone with her.
Aunt Sondra booked a flight and left in a hurry.
Raven closed herself in the guest bedroom, unpacked the rest of her clothes, and slid the suitcase under the bed. She held the rock with an R in her palm. Today was the anniversary of Jackie’s father’s death. And she wasn’t there to help him. Even worse, Raven’s absence made the anniversary more troubling for him.
She squeezed the rock into her palm and curled around it on the bed. She felt like she had no heart inside her but that cold little stone Jackie had given her.
When she woke, the room was gray with twilight. The house was dark except for the glow of one lamp in the living room.
Ellis wasn’t inside. Raven looked out the front windows and saw her sitting in one of the rocking chairs, staring out at the trees. Quercus was sprawled at her feet. Beyond the trees, the sky was pink, red, and orange.
Ellis didn’t say anything when Raven sat in the chair next to her. Raven liked that Ellis knew how to be quiet. Like Mama. And Jackie.
The sky turned lavender, then a sad and indescribable color that ended the day.
“That man who was here . . . ,” Raven said.
“His name is Keith Gephardt.”
“Will he come back?”
After a few seconds, Ellis said, “I don’t know.”
Because of Raven, he had left. And because Raven had once belonged to Ellis, she was far from Jackie. They were even.
As all traces of daylight vanished, lamp glow emanating through the windows took over.
“The mosquitoes are getting bad,” Ellis said. “We’d better go inside.”
She turned on a porch light as they went into the house. For Keith probably.
“I made dinner,” Ellis said. “It’s warm on the stove.”
Raven followed her into the kitchen.
Though Raven hadn’t asked for food, Ellis dished out two plates and set them on the table. It was some kind of casserole with greens and a bean salad.
“I’m vegan,” Ellis said. “I hope that’s okay for you.”
“A friend of mine is vegan,” Raven said. She sat down and ate, thinking about Jackie. He would be happy she was in a vegan house.
Raven had little appetite, but she ate most of the food and told Ellis it was good. She helped wash and dry the dishes. Ellis had a dishwasher but washed the few dishes by hand. That was what Mama usually did, too.
After the last dish was put away, Ellis leaned against a counter and faced Raven. “So . . . I have a problem we need to talk about,” she said.
“What problem?”
“Your name.”
Raven prepared for battle.
Ellis looked into her eyes. “I know. It’s the only name you’ve known. But I can’t call you that.”
“Why not? I call you Ellis.”
“The day you were abducted . . .” Ellis paused and looked out the dark window for a few seconds. Maybe to stop herself from crying. She looked at Raven. “When something traumatic happens, you remember all these weird little details. And those details become bad associations—forever, as it turns out in my case. And one of the bad associations I have from that day is a raven. There was one calling over and over when I left you in the forest.”
A shock seemed to zing all over Raven’s body.
“I almost felt like . . . this will sound crazy, but later I felt like the raven had distracted me with all that noise. I blamed it a little bit for what happened.” After a pause, she said, “I guess it was some kind of self-preservation. I was sick with guilt, and I needed to put some of the blame on someone or something other than myself.”
Mama had told the truth about a raven giving a baby to her! The raven spirit had known Ellis and Jonah weren’t the right parents for the baby they called Viola. It had distracted Ellis and given her to Mama. Raven wanted to cry with relief.
“I still hate the sound of ravens,” Ellis said. “But I don’t have to hear them now. Ravens don’t live in Florida.”
Too bad. Raven would miss them. Especially now that she knew a raven spirit truly had given her to Mama. Mama had thought the baby was born of the spirit world, but of course she would think that when a raven called and showed her a baby all alone in the forest. Raven could still think of the raven spirit as her father.
“Do you understand the problem?” Ellis asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you think of a solution?”
“You mean call me something else?”
“You could let me call you Viola. If you knew Quercus is the oak genus, maybe you know that Viola is the genus of—”
“Violets. I knew that since I was a little girl. My mother and I picked violets to eat every spring.”
Ellis recoiled a little when she said my mother. “Then maybe she’d like the idea that you’re named for the genus of that flower.”
“She might have liked that, but she would want me to keep the name she gave me.”
Ellis’s gaze hardened. “She had no right to rename another person’s baby.”
“I wasn’t yours anymore when she named me. I was hers. I was given to her.”
“What do you mean given? She stole you from me!”
“Not stole. You left me all alone, and she found me. She dreamed of having a baby for a long time. And there I was. That was no accident. There must have been a reason.”
“How dare you say that!” Ellis shouted. “Do you have any idea how much pain this woman you call Mother has caused me and my family? You have to deal with the reality that you were abducted. What she did was wrong. She’d still be in jail now if they’d caught her.”
“But she wasn’t caught. Why was that?”
Ellis trembled. “What, you think some divine intervention helped her escape with you?”
“I think there must have been a reason.”
“What reason?”
Raven couldn’t say she believed earth spirits had helped her. That was a forbidden topic.
“Did she tell you why she named you Raven?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
Everyone now knew Raven hadn’t been born of Audrey Lind’s body. She could tell Ellis the truth. “She told me she heard a raven calling to her in a forest. When she went to see what it wanted, there I was, a baby girl with raven eyes and hair—exactly what she wanted. She named me for the raven that brought us together.”
“Oh my god,” Ellis whispered. “You’ve known all along she didn’t give birth to you? You never told anyone?”
“What did it matter that I didn’t come from her body? I was born to be with her.”
“You were born to be with me!” Ellis shouted. “And with your father and brothers!”
“No, I met them. And that horrible grandmother. I was never meant to be with them. Or in that ugly house. My spirit would have gotten sick and maybe died if I lived with them. I think that’s why you left, too.”
Ellis stared at her openmouthed.
“If you like a pretty place like this, that house and those people were killing your spirit. You weren’t meant to be there either. But I’m sorry I had to be taken away from you for you to see that.”
Ellis held on to the counter and slid down to the floor. Raven must have hit on the truth.
“Are you for real? Am I imagining this?” Ellis said.
Raven smiled for the first time in many days. “I’m real.” She sat on the wood planks next to Ellis. She took her hand in both of hers. “I never meant to make you sad. I didn’t want to come here either. But I’m glad I got to meet the person who gave birth to me.”
“I can’t do this,” Ellis said. “You have to go live with your father.”
“I told you. I can’t live there.”
“Then go back to Washington.”
“Can you make them let me?”
“No. I have no say in that.”
Raven looked down at their entwined hands. Raven’s skin was a little lighter tan than hers. “Can I please live here for a while? Maybe you could just call me R instead of Raven.”
“It’s about so much more than your name. It’s just . . . you need more than I can give you.”
“I don’t need anything. Please let me stay here if I can’t go home.”
Tears dripped out of Ellis’s eyes. “I mean it. I can’t be here for you.”
“That’s okay,” Raven said. “I’m used to that.”
4
ELLIS
Over ninety degrees as the sun was setting. On June first. She would have to water the pots that didn’t get irrigation again. When she walked over to the nursery, she saw Max. She’d just finished watering.
Max made two familiar gestures, a flying motion and a signal that indicated a question. The flying sign was her way of saying Raven. She wanted to know where Raven was. Usually she helped water with a second hose.
Ellis gestured that she didn’t know. Max nodded as she coiled the hose. Ellis knew her well enough to see she was disappointed. Max and Raven had been drawn to each other almost from the moment they met. Max didn’t usually go for buddy stuff, but she was more aware of Raven when she was in her presence than she was of anyone, even Ellis.
Ellis continued the conversation with signs she and Max had perfected over the years. She told her she’d finished the bookkeeping and everything looked good. She said Tom would be coming for another load of plants in three days and asked how the remodeling of her house was going.
Max said the work was going well and told Ellis to say hello to Raven.
When Ellis returned to the house, Raven wasn’t there. She was as independent as Ellis had been when she wandered the Wild Wood behind the trailer park. But Ellis was a little worried; she hadn’t seen Raven since breakfast.
She called Quercus. He leaped up, tail wagging, immediately sensing they were going for a walk. They went east. The land gently sloped from the house on the wooded hill, through old pastures, a wet meadow and bottomland forest, and finally to a marsh at the far end of the property. The marsh had increased in size and depth from heavy rains. When they arrived at the water’s edge, Quercus trotted to something white and sniffed it.
Raven’s T-shirt, and underneath it her hiking pants and shoes.
Ellis stared out at the silent marsh water. Had she drowned herself? The abyss, the moment she had discovered her baby was taken, was swallowing her whole again. Why had they trusted her with the girl? Had Ellis not proven she couldn’t be a mother?
A splash.
“Raven?” Ellis called out.
Insects thrummed. Distant cranes cried.
“Raven! Are you there?” she shouted.
Raven rose out of the deeper water and looked at Ellis.
“I’ve told you not to go in this water!” Ellis said.
“No you didn’t. You said Quercus isn’t allowed.”
“I told you I train all my dogs not to go in there because of alligators. Come out of there now!”
“You said alligators like to eat dogs.”
“They eat people sometimes, too.”
Raven treaded water and kept staring.
“Please come out. Dusk is when alligators become active.”
Raven breaststroked toward her and stood where the water became shallow. She was wearing only a bra and panties. Ellis was startled by how bony she was. She’d already been slim when she arrived, and she’d lost more weight than Ellis had realized.
Raven’s feet stuck in the deep mud. She sank to her calves. Another step and she sank almost to her knee.
“That’s another danger of these wetlands. You can get stuck in the mud, even sink too deep to get out.”
Ellis waded in, sinking to her calves. She grasped her daughter’s hand and tried to pull. But she lost her grip on Raven’s slippery hand, and the momentum made her fall backward into the rank marsh water.
Raven laughed.
“Very funny,” Ellis said.
Raven laughed harder as Ellis struggled to rise out of the muck.
“I should have left you in there for the alligators.”
Raven dragged her feet out of the mire and pulled Ellis’s hand. When she heaved, her feet were too stuck to provide any leverage. She fell into the marsh next to Ellis, and they slumped into the putrid muck, laughing.
“How the hell did you get in here in the first place?” Ellis asked.
“When I felt myself sinking in the mud, I stretched out my body and swam to the deep water.”
Ellis gave up trying to stand and crawled in a very undignified way out of the marsh. Raven did the same. They laughed at how ridiculous they were.
The mosquitoes were having a merry time, too. And the sun was setting. Ellis hadn’t brought a flashlight.
“We’d better get back,” she said.
Raven put on the T-shirt but didn’t try to pull the pants up her wet legs. She slipped on her socks, seeming unperturbed by the mosquitoes hovering around her bare legs.
“You are a very good boy to stay out of the water,” Ellis said to Quercus. She rubbed the big dome of his head, smearing it with mud. “Now we have to train Raven.”
“I don’t think I’ll go in there again.”
“Please don’t.”
Raven balanced on one foot and slid the other into her boot. “But where can you swim around here? I like water when it’s hot like this.”
“I know. I miss that, too. But there isn’t anywhere to swim on this land.”
There was still enough light to walk home. They’d gone a short distance when Raven shouted, “No! Quercus, no!”
She desperately tried to haul the dog away from something. Ellis looked down at an intricate arrangement of leaves and rocks. In the middle was a raccoon skull.
“What is that?” Ellis asked.
“Nothing.”
Quercus wanted the skull.
“No!” Raven screamed.
“Quercus, sit!” Ellis said in her sternest voice.
He sat. Keith had shown her how to do that.
“Come!” Ellis said, beckoning the dog away from the skull.
Raven calmed as they left behind the nothing she had made. The arrangement of natural objects had looked eerily ritualized. Like some kind of offering. Ellis remembered Raven’s strange talk of her kidnapping, as if she saw it as a divine event. Obviously, that was Audrey Lind’s influence.
“Did you go to church when you lived in Washington?” Ellis asked as they walked.
“Why do people ask that?” she said.
“Who else asked?”
“Gram Bauhammer.”
Of course she had. Ellis had never met anyone pushier about her beliefs than Mary Carol.
“I didn’t go to church,” Raven said.
“Did you practice any particular faith?”
After a pause, she said, “No.”
Ellis sensed tension in her. She wondered why.
Quercus barked and bounded up the hill. He continued barking. Someone was there. It had to be Keith. The gate had been closed.
She told herself not to get excited, but her drubbing heart wouldn’t listen. A month and a half ago, the day after Raven arrived, Keith had returned to collect his belongings. He’d told Ellis she needed time alone with her daughter. He’d refused to say more.
Now he was back. He must have calmed down enough to talk.
But what if he was there to say goodbye? Forever?
Ellis stopped walking. Two men were in her driveway petting Quercus. She couldn’t see them well in the twilight, but whoever they were, they had climbed the fence to get in.
Ellis grabbed Raven’s arm and pulled her backward. “Don’t go up there!” she whispered.
“Why? Who is it?”
“It might be reporters.”
Raven stared at the men.
“Last week, Sondra warned me that some reporters wanted to talk to you.”
“Why is that so bad?”
She truly didn’t know. She’d had no access to phones or computers. Her abductor had kept her away from the internet to make sure she never found out who she was. The girl had no idea of the mess the media could make of her life.
“Stay here,” Ellis said. “You don’t even have pants on.”
“So what?”
“Just stay here.”
Ellis climbed the walkway stairs Max had built to negotiate the slope. The two men turned around when they heard her footfalls. They were young, in their early twenties.
Ellis stopped walking. They stared back at her. “Mom?” Jasper said.
Mom. He’d called her that. After all these years.
She and the boys stood just yards apart. They were twenty now. Both looked a lot like Jonah, Jasper especially.
It all came rushing back. Those women she’d been, the bewildered college student taking final exams with pregnancy nausea; the new wife—Jonah rubbing his hands on her belly as he spoke to his sons inside; the woman screaming in the delivery room; the mother rocking, bandaging, promising there was no such thing as monsters; the addict who walked away from her little boys—her last words to them a terrible lie of maternal love that lasts forever and ever. They all came back at once, all those women crashing together within her.
It was different from when Viola had come back. The shock of seeing her daughter without warning had mercifully deadened her senses. As had Keith leaving. What little she’d felt through the numbness mostly had to do with the abduction. This felt so much worse, maybe because her boys hadn’t been stolen as Viola had. Ellis had done the stealing. She had robbed herself of her boys.
And taken their mother from them. Why were they here, looking at her with the same ache she’d seen in their eyes the day she left?
She had to calm down. Find out why they’d come. Maybe Jonah had sent them with a message.
“Does Jonah know you’re here?” she asked.
She berated herself. Those shouldn’t have been her first words.
“No,” Jasper said.
“Where does he think you are?”
“The Outer Banks,” he said. “Last week I started summer break from college.”
Raven came to Ellis’s side. She was a sight, wet and muddy, her filthy T-shirt not covering her underpants. Her long legs looked gangly with nothing but her socks and big hiking boots. Ellis realized her own muddy appearance must look bizarre to her sons, and that wasn’t how she wanted them to see her. Their last impressions had been bad enough.
The Light Through the Leaves Page 31