“Get up,” he barks.
I try. I can’t. I fall to my knees. And then I fall further still.
“What’s going on?” he says. The suspicion in his voice slices my hope away.
“I’m pregnant,” I blurt.
“What?” He lets himself plop onto the ground next to me. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. That has to be it. I’ve had morning sickness all day but I didn’t want to tell you until I knew for sure. Now I know for sure. I never throw up.”
His face is the brightest thing in this night, competing with the stars. He reaches out, reverently lays a flat palm on my wounded belly. “And I know it’s mine, because no other man ever had you.”
Keep him talking. Keep him excited. Keep him digesting.
His speech is so pressured it tilts and leans, heads for the cliff. “God wants me to people his army. He knows I am a good provider.” He grips my chin, makes me hold his stare. “I’m ready for this. I told Max I was nineteen so I wouldn’t creep her out, but I’m almost twenty-three.” Extra time to hone your madness. Of course.
“What name will you choose for him?” I say.
He nods. “I’ll call him Isaiah. ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’”
“That’s beautiful.” That’s insane.
He’s got a lantern in one hand, my elbow in another. “Let’s go.”
“Wait,” I start. I need to keep him talking, need to keep him hosting the toxins. “Do you think you could baptize me?”
His eyes are eerily bright in the lantern’s flickery light. “There’s a crick a couple miles south of here. If there’s been enough rain, there’s a deep spot where I can lay you down.”
Oh, that’s your specialty. Taking living girls and giving them to the water.
“And the baby,” I say, “he’ll need baptizing.”
“Isaiah.”
“Isaiah,” I parrot.
He must like that. He creeps a hand into my shirt, cups my shoulder with a hot palm.
“Can we just sleep now?” I ask.
“Later.”
“But—”
“You don’t want to be with me?” He holds the lantern up to my face as if to locate a lie.
All roads end up at the same place for this damaged creature. Devouring us, one way or another.
He moves his hand to my upper arm. He grips tighter, sending his fingers in for a twist until they feel like five arrows in my flesh. “C’mon,” he grunts. “Lesss go.”
He drags me down the path like a misbehaving balloon.
Please, I bargain with no one, please don’t make me go into that cabin. Not again.
“Get inside,” he says, shoving me into his cabin.
My leg muscles have been swapped with crumbling clay. I can barely lift my feet.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asks, poking my spine with the lantern.
“Just tired. Pregnancy does that to women.”
“Not so soon it doesn’t.”
Oh, so now he gets a clue about biology?
He sets the lantern down next to a cot he must’ve dragged in here since the last time. The sleeping bag where Linnea lost a piece of her is rolled out on top of it.
He points to the sleeping bag, bloodied from what he did to me before. “Get in.”
I sit, slowly, my head a bucket of bees. My body’s lurchy and unco-operative, but I’m past caring about that. I just have to see him incapacitated. Get the keys, get Max. Just a little longer.
He’s frowning at me. “You look like shit.”
Yeah, dying does that to a person.
“Not worse than the rabbit.” I laugh ruefully.
He smirks. I bought myself another quarter of an hour.
“I don’t think I’m gonna be able to take my shirt off,” I say. The blood has dried and caused the fabric to stick to it, and if I rip it off, I’m sure the bleeding will start up again. It throbs like starlight. “I think we should leave it alone for now.” Leave this body alone for now.
“You’re healing. God won’t let you die.”
Without explanation, he turns and steps outside. What’s he doing? I don’t have to wait long to figure it out. I hear his piss hit the dirt, leaf litter, the bark of a tree. Like he’s playing.
“Miss me?” He stumbles on the stairs, has to catch himself on the doorframe. “My little mama.” He collapses onto the sleeping bag, and then onto me.
My face is in the crook of his neck, my nose mashed against his pulse. He pets my hair. Tells me I done good.
I want to scream and never stop screaming. I want the scream to turn to blade and cut out his heart.
The petting slows, and then it stops, and then his breathing goes deep and rhythmic.
“Hey,” I whisper. “Chris?”
Nothing. Nothing but his breath.
You’re still breathing, motherfucker. I haven’t succeeded yet.
Ignoring the ache spreading across my chest and stomach like branches of a sun-greedy tree, I ever-so-slowly wriggle out from under him. He moves sloppily to redistribute his weight, says something unintelligible, but doesn’t wake. I unhook the keys from his belt loop, careful to grip them all against my palm so they don’t jingle. I tiptoe outside. Out where I can breathe.
I have the keys. I want to cry. My legs are rubbery mushroom stalks, but I can’t give in now. I’m nothing if I don’t have Max. Almost there.
I’m walking the narrow dirt path toward the caf where my sister sleeps when a giant snake, black as an eel and glossy as satin, darts out of the monkey grass.
“Ah!” I fall back, topple right onto my ass, the breath sliced clean out of me. The keys fly out of my hand. Don’t lose those keys. The snake is gone. I can still see the keys in the moonlight. Until they turn into glittery scorpions and beetle off and then they’re gone too.
It must’ve been too much mushroom. Say it fast, ten times: too much mushroom; too mush muchroom; moo tush roommuch. A laugh burbles up from inside me but then the laugh bubble bursts before I can cup it in my palms.
My vision is blurry, chipped, fading in and out, like I’m wearing the world’s worst pair of glasses. My mouth is filled with burrs or sand or roofing nails. Too mush muchroom to throw up completely. Or else thrown up too late.
I’m cold. I’m wet laundry clinging to a clothesline under a gray sky. I’m a pincushion shot through with wriggling needles. I’m a girl who once was.
There’s something I have to do. Something … something … what? The something is an itch I can’t reach. I spy, with my little eye, something shiny on the ground near me. Something I’m supposed to do something with. Something. Someone?
I’m sitting on the ground, a tree trunk holding me up. I don’t remember getting from up there to down here. I try heaving myself up onto my knees. The giant hand of gravity—hairy-knuckled and crowded with sinister rings—keeps pushing me back.
It’s better to be down here anyway. Where was I trying to go? How silly to think that dragging a body—that sack of dust and water—from one place to another means getting somewhere.
I creak my neck to peer above me. Ah. My eyes work better up there. I’m not afraid anymore. There’s the blue-black sky, the sharp stars spilled against the dark fabric. The tree trunk liquefies and lets me go. I fall flat to the ground. The back of my head lands on a pinecone. Something with legs crawls onto my leg, hugs it. Do snakes have legs?
I let myself melt into the ground so that it is all me and I am all it. Outside/inside the same. I am filled with dirt and sky and pinecones. I’m just fragments of atoms, wildly dancing and jittering.
The moon has slipped out of the dark sky and wants a way back up. Up past the pine tree. Up past the cold stars. Up past the horizon’s shelf.
Thinking about the long journey the moon has ahead of her exhausts me. I wish I could tell her to just stay put.
This is what giving up feels like, a lonely star says to me. Enjoy it.
And except for the pain in my stomach—from a sharp-edged star I swallowed once, trying to break free and add its light to the sky again—I do. I open my mouth to let the glow radiate through me.
41
MAXINE
Straddling her body, I press down on her chest. Again. My hands are slabs of meat, stupid and clumsy. Why didn’t I pay attention during mandatory first aid in swim class every summer growing up? Why was I so sure I’d never need to restart anyone’s heart?
With Ursa Major looking over one shoulder, and a great horned owl looking over the other, I try to coax a life back.
One, two, three palm presses to the sternum, and then I move to her face, tilt her chin up, pinch her nostrils shut, and blow two breaths into her mouth.
I ignore the broken glass under my shins. When I found her here, in this pile of leaf litter, I dropped to my knees and set the lantern down so quickly it fell over and a panel shattered. But the wick still burns, loaning me its stingy gleam while I repeat the process all over again.
Her ribs feel so fragile. I’m afraid I’ll break them.
Still no breath but mine.
How many cycles? I’ve lost count. The only thing I’m counting are the chest compressions and the breaths I loan her.
“Harper.” I’m crying, sobbing, choking. “Harper. I know it’s you in there. I was stupid to deny it. I’m sorry.”
I push down on her chest harder, desperate to feel her heart’s echo under my palms. I press harder and harder, not worried about her ribs anymore. Ribs can heal.
I can’t lose you again.
I have no choice but to keep trying.
Finally, finally, when I move to her side to lend her my breath, there’s a breath that meets mine. Just a small huff, but it’s warm and round and all hers.
I would start to cry, but I’m already crying.
My sister! You came back to me.
She opens her eyes, rolls to her side, throws up.
I never would have thought I’d be so happy to have vomit practically land in my lap.
“Harper!” I cry. “We’re gonna get out of here!”
On her back again, she wipes the corner of her mouth with her knuckles. I lay my forehead on her chest and a final flood of tears and sobs escapes me. “Harper, everything’s going to be okay now. Just rest.”
“Who are you?” she rasps. “And who’s Harper?”
LINNEA
Three years later
Skimming along a current of air, a bee staggers into the shop through the propped-open door. I don’t bother swatting it away. I even stop following it with my eyes. Should I need it, my EpiPen is in my bag behind the front counter.
Working in a dessert food truck for two years forced me to make my peace with bees. The secret, I learned, is to stop fighting them. Give them all the sugar they want outside the trailer and they won’t go after the sweetness in your mixing bowl.
Tess, my seventeen-year-old apprentice, walks in, glossy auburn ponytail swinging. It still feels surreal to say that, my apprentice, like I’m a sorcerer or a blacksmith.
“What’s bakin’?” she asks with a sunny smile. Her standard greeting. She and her mom moved to Austin from Philly before the holidays and she’s Texafyin’ her speech somethin’ fierce. She’s Nicola’s niece, but that’s not why I agreed to tie her to my apron strings for a few months.
Despite getting my GED and getting a letter of recommendation from Nicola that made me bawl my eyes out (especially the part where she talked about my “quiet strength and unwavering perseverance”), I didn’t get into pastry school in Chicago three years ago.
I was devastated. Like huddled under an old ratty afghan without brushing my teeth or washing my face for days devastated. I’d been dreaming of it for so long. Had pinned my identity onto it. Didn’t know who I was without it.
On day four of my pity party, Nicola blew into my living room with a proposal. She smelled of cilantro. I probably smelled of unwashed socks.
Nicola asked that I commit to running a dessert trailer she was eyeing for at least nine months, ’til it was time to reapply to the pastry school. And if school was still my burning desire, then she’d pay for my application. If I wanted to keep baking in Austin, though, she’d be my silent partner, let me develop my own brand, give me complete creative control, and work out an agreement that I pay her back with a share of the profits over ten years.
Mom worried about my long hours. Yes, I pushed myself harder than ever before, but for those five godforsaken campground days where absolutely no one from my life knew where I was, I’d been through something my body remembered, even if my brain hadn’t. So I decided surviving that meant I was stronger than I gave myself credit for.
Plus I loved the work. Loved the fact that my busiest time was from 11:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. All those happy drunk people, draped all over each other and shimmering in the dark, all that messy enthusiasm when they’d take their first bite of Bailey’s hot bread pudding or hazelnut flan and shout, “Holy shit, this is good!”
Nine months later, Nicola had to remind me application time had rolled around. Since I couldn’t even imagine myself in a classroom at that point, I didn’t bother applying.
Six months ago Nicola convinced me I was ready for this brick-and-mortar shop. And although I miss the dusty trailer park, the camaraderie with the other truck people, the sodium lights of the lot processing our faces like photo negatives, I know I’m where I belong. At least for now.
A middle-aged suit comes in and asks for my best-selling macaron. It’s the lemon lavender, but he ends up taking the three dozen I have left, in all flavors.
The customer feeds his card to the chip reader. “I’m going to be the hero in the office tomorrow morning.”
“I bet,” I say. “Macarons are much sexier than bagels.”
“I like bagels,” Tess says. I smirk as I nest the pastel beauties in their clear clamshell case.
He laughs. I hand him the bag.
“Don’t you have a tip jar?” he asks.
“Nope, I’m the owner.”
His eyebrows shoot up. I get that a lot. I look younger than almost twenty-one, but even if I looked my age, that’s young to run a shop off South Congress Street in Austin.
“Good for you!” he says. He gives me a backhanded wave as he walks out. “Take care, Harper.”
I don’t bother to correct him. I get that a lot too. People assume if there’s an apostrophe-S in your business name, it’s gotta be named after you.
I turn to Tess. “Nix the phone, please. Apprenticeship is starting.”
“Okay, but your phone has been blowing up. You might want to check it first.”
Three texts. I wouldn’t call that “blowing up,” but my heart quickens when I see who they’re from. Daniel.
Howdy.
Just wanted to say you’re on my mind.
I’m glad we reconnected.
After the campground, I retreated from everyone but Mom for a while. And from everything but baking. My body bounced back far more quickly than my mind. Which was weird because I couldn’t remember any of the campground except being jolted awake in it.
But not only had I changed, like at a cellular level, someone had died there. Someone who I was assured was a killer, but still … someone lost his life. When it was clear my memory was a blank, Maxine told me about it. We were in the hospital then. Washed. Fed. Our wounds disinfected, stitched, and bandaged. But we were broken just the same.
“I had no choice,” she’d said. She told me he had a weapon—the slash on my belly was proof of that—and we couldn’t have ever overpowered him, and he’d never have let us go, and she knew about mushrooms and got him to eat some poisonous ones without him knowing.
Something about the way she told me, though, the way she looked anywhere but into my eyes as she quickly recounted events, made me wonder. Of course, I didn’t know her well enough to know what she looked like when she wasn’t lying, but I’ll always wonder.
/> Daniel was kind to me back then, and patient, and he tried, but I had to keep pushing him away. Coming back from that blacked-out nightmare was no recipe for a new romance. He went off to the Peace Corps a few months later.
Over the last three years I’ve had a smattering of dead-end first dates and a grand total of three sort-of boyfriends, none worth talking about. Mostly, I’ve been content to pour myself into my cake batters and pie fillings.
But Daniel got back last month and surprised me at the door of my apartment with a plate of disastrous-looking cupcakes, a ribboned can of wasp spray, and a hopeful grin. Mom had given him my address when he showed up at the house, and she hadn’t even given me a heads-up. The fink.
We’ve been on two dates so far and we’ve got a third one planned for Friday night. I can’t think with Tess by my elbow, so I write Me too and send it.
I close the shop door since Tess and I are headed to the kitchen and need to hear customers come in.
“More cakes?” she asks, rolling up her sleeves. The stainless steel counter, the pride of my little kitchen, gleams quietly.
“Not just any cake. A wedding cake.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t start off any differently.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” I pull out eighteen eggs and nine sticks of butter from the fridge. “Haven’t you ever heard that a chef’s mood gets baked into her food and affects the eaters?”
She rolls her eyes, blows the bangs off her forehead with a jutted lip. “That’s not real.”
“What if it is, though? Do you really want to be responsible for an unhappy bride?”
I can see her gears spinning. She grabs the pad and pen I put out for her and writes something.
“So we need to be in a good mood when we bake?” she asks.
“Not only that. We need to remember what we’re baking it for. Think good thoughts.”
She looks at me like she can’t believe I’m only three years older and not three decades.
Can I remember what I was like at seventeen? Do I want to? I see my watery reflection in the shiny stand of the cake mixer. My eyes are distorted, like I’m swimming up from something. I wonder if I’d be more like Tess if I had been born with a healthy heart.
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