Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

  Marsden tucked away the cash and her gloves and got to her feet. She was brushing off her hands and knees when the sound of a branch snapping nearby made her freeze. Her eyes went everywhere and nowhere, and her breath caught in her ribs like a fork clanging off teeth.

  She saw Hadley coming over the dusk-dimmed rise, shouting at her to empty her pockets.

  She saw Nina telling her that she belonged to her now, that she would always work for her, in whatever way Nina decided best.

  She saw her mother, crying to never leave her alone, that their debt was Marsden’s, too.

  And then she saw Wynn, her black hair as messy as ever, her face full of fear as she slowly approached, and she knew her sister was the one who was real.

  Wynn’s gaze darted to the body, and through the gloom she paled, came to a stop. “I . . . the store was closed, there was a sign—”

  Marsden darted forward and spun Wynn around by her frail shoulders. “You should have waited for me by the fence.” She heard the fury in her voice, the fear, and tried to soften. And failed, because most of that fury was for herself. “Let’s go.”

  They marched in silence, her mind racing, her eyes threatening to fill. Here she was, determined to keep her sister safe from who they were, what the town had determined them to be. But how to run from your own shadow? Your own name?

  “Mars?” Wynn was working ginger leaves between her palms—crushed, their scent was strong enough to make Marsden’s nose tingle.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can we go see Dad’s grave?”

  • • •

  Their mother had had him buried on the west side of the covert, where the trees were thinner and sparser, their canopy less protective. As such, the one that marked his grave was about as expected, its branches wispy, almost fragile in the gray light.

  Marsden wished Shine had chosen a more mature tree to watch over the man she’d met and fallen in love with when they’d both still been kids—one sturdier, more remarkable. She wondered again if it had been a final dig at him, his being buried in the covert. How it wasn’t because it was family land, or because he’d died by suicide—and suicide and the covert went hand in hand—but because it was Shine’s way to finally corral her useless, restless husband.

  Wynn let her crushed ginger leaves fall to the ground and plucked clover blossoms from a nearby patch. She tucked them beneath a small rock at the base of the wimpy tree. After a long moment of silence: “I don’t hear him like Grandma would have. Do you think it’s because I never met him?”

  Like their grandmother, Grant Eldridge was a stranger to Marsden’s sister, too, having walked into the Indigo six months before Wynn was born. Shine had always told Wynn this was a blessing—memories could also be curses.

  “Well, I have definitely met him, and I don’t hear him, either.” Marsden shifted on her feet. “Why are we here again?”

  “It’s Daddy—we should visit when we can.”

  “We do. But now it’s getting dark.”

  Wynn decorated the rock with more blossoms. Her hand and arm glowed a ghostly gray against the murk of the forest. “Do you think Mom could hear them again, if she only tried?”

  “You know she won’t. And it’s been too long since she’s heard anything, not since she was a kid.” Or so Shine claimed. Her mother had gotten good at talking without actually saying much at all. It came with her job, Marsden knew. Like a final polish that, over time, became hard to remove. “Grandma told me once that the ability’s just like any living creature—it needs air, or it dies.”

  Her sister was watching her. “Do you ever still try to hear the dead?”

  Marsden’s face stiffened with embarrassment, heat along her ears, and she was glad for the thin dark so she could hide.

  She did try, but she didn’t think she could ever admit to Wynn her reasons. That she sometimes sat in the covert in front of a body, eyes shut tight against the quiet and the trees and the ginger, trying to extract from all of it the voices of the dead. Telling her how they came to be there, who they’d once been. Because she thought if those she stole from could be bothered to talk to her, then it couldn’t be long before the voice she heard next was that of her father. Explaining to her why he did what he did. Assuring her he didn’t leave because of her. That he hadn’t hated life because of her.

  Always, though, she heard nothing. From anyone.

  “The dead are dead, Wynn,” she said quietly now. “They came here to find some kind of peace. And I think, sometimes, we might be wrong in demanding they still be here, just for us.”

  Her sister poked in a final blossom and stepped back. “I still wish I’d known him, even for just a bit.”

  “Me, too.”

  “But you did know him, Mars.”

  Had she, though?

  She’d been eight when they found him drowned in the shallows of the Indigo. No explanation, no note left anywhere. It’d been classified an accident.

  Marsden couldn’t remember him well enough to still hate him for it. Memories of him were like cards in a deck, slowly shuffled away as time passed, moments of her childhood falling through some metaphorical hole in the pocket that was her brain. He’d spun in and out of her and Shine’s lives like a shifty alley cat, unsure if it lived indoors or out, if he belonged to them, or no one, or just himself.

  She recalled him once playing tea party with her, patient enough to sip pretend tea and eat pretend sandwiches. His aftershave had smelled of the outdoors, had made her think of cool, gray flannel and winter mornings. He liked loud movies and songs heavy with guitar. His hair had been Crayola chestnut brown, his eyes a tint lighter than midnight black. He’d been tall. His laugh had come from somewhere deep.

  Of that last day, though, she remembered him and Shine arguing explosively. His one retort that had stuck—ravaged, with a desperation so bleak her own chest went hollow with it—about being trapped. I never wanted this life! He’d looked right at Marsden as the words had ground from him. She remembered the sound of the flimsy screen door slapping back against the house as he slammed his way out, and how the smell of that evening’s terrible spring storm had rushed inward seconds later.

  “A squirrel!”

  Marsden squinted, saw a fat black shape rustle free from a nearby bush and run toward the last of the sun.

  Wynn clambered off after it, clucking her tongue as she made her way toward the entrance. “I’ll meet you at the fence, okay?” she called over her shoulder. Her voice was muffled from the density of the trees, what had proven thick enough to swallow up the sounds of gunshots.

  “Don’t head off anywhere else,” Marsden called back.

  “I won’t!”

  She followed in her sister’s wake, the scent of ginger freshened again from their steps. She wasn’t exactly reluctant to go, but sometimes it was being out in the open that made her feel trapped. Dread packed itself into the corners of her heart and filled her head with the most miserable of thoughts.

  The boardinghouse, where Nina’s girls—including her own mother—wore clothes and makeup as colorful as candy, so they appeared just as delectable.

  The town, bleached pale from the summer sun.

  The future, laid out for her as surely as though it were already set in stone.

  three.

  The next morning.

  Dawn was still edging over into day—the sky from navy to lavender to the shade of robins’ eggs, the air from cool to an inferno—when Marsden crept back into the kitchen from checking the covert. She yawned as she tossed off her shoes, a cloud of ginger wafting from her bare arms and hair. It’d already been proven that she couldn’t hide the covert from Wynn forever, but Marsden was never going to accept it. That would be like choosing to sink into the quicksand that was the whole town.

  When it wasn’t summer, her job meant helping cook dinners, to be served in the common dining room, for the boardinghouse staff and its guests every weekend. When it was summer, she worked every day and had to coo
k and serve breakfasts, too. The one thing that never changed during the year was the johns who stayed overnight. Unlike official guests, it was an unspoken rule that they never saw the inside of the dining room. Neither were they served food in the bedrooms with Nina’s girls. Instead, they slunk out of the boardinghouse through a side entrance while breakfast was served to everyone else.

  Marsden never felt bad that the johns had to leave the boardinghouse hungry. They hadn’t come for the food anyway.

  She was stirring eggs and milk and laying down sausages on the grill when footsteps sounded overhead. They were stealthy, secretive, and Marsden steeled herself. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to make breakfast with some of the girls Nina employed right there in the kitchen with her, tired of listening to the snoring of the johns still taking up space in their beds.

  It was never easy when they tried making conversation with her. Usually, all she could think about were the secrets she held and the way her hands still recalled the feel of cold, stiff limbs as she tucked away stolen cash. She’d gotten used to being lonely, she supposed; the town had long ago painted her with certain brushes and into too many inescapable corners. Letting Nina’s girls get close was a waste of time, and dangerous—for her, for Wynn.

  It was the main reason why Marsden minded them being in her space. But loneliness lingered, an echo that seemed without end—which meant she also didn’t mind.

  They descended the stairs and swarmed into the kitchen like butterflies—if the insects came in pairs, wore flimsy silk robes, and smelled more of perfume and old makeup instead of the outdoors.

  Peaches puffed on a cigarette as she leaned over Marsden’s shoulder to watch her cook. “Why do you even bother?” The other girl’s voice was husky from smoke. Marsden heard the pointed sneer in it, the clear impatience. “Cooking, I mean.”

  Early twenties, curves like the women had in one of those old-fashioned paintings and which Peaches wielded like weapons. Wild auburn curls, skin like porcelain. Her hazel eyes were always hungry, her smiles slow and wide—johns loved her, and she knew it. Originally a college student from North Dakota—or maybe it was South, Marsden could never remember—she decided one day she was tired of classrooms and dropped out of college. Meandering across the country in the name of alternate education had somehow ended up with her in Glory.

  Of all of Nina’s girls, Peaches was the one most comfortable in her skin. Marsden sometimes liked her but usually feared her—and always she wondered what it would be like to have even a bit of that confidence. Would it have already led her from Glory, or would she simply already be working for Nina?

  “It’s my job,” she finally said. And she was good at it. Glory’s best bed-and-breakfast—simply named The Boardinghouse—prided itself on its breakfasts and dinners, and guests always rated them as one of the best parts of their stay.

  “Just give it back to Dany,” Peaches said.

  Marsden would never. Couldn’t. “I like it.”

  “Slaving away over a stove—over eggs—when your face alone is enough to save you from this?” Peaches laughed, shaking her head. Her messy updo bobbed along. “Just how much is Nina paying you, anyway?”

  So little it felt like she would be saving up forever to get herself and Wynn out of town. Especially since Nina made her own deductions: a cut for how much it cost for Shine and her daughters to live there, a bit toward the debt they still owed her for paying off the loans Grant Eldridge had died with. The two women had once been friends in high school, and Nina had offered Shine a job when no one else in town would. But Nina was, more than anything else, a businessperson.

  Marsden had been fourteen the first time a john had asked about her. It was then that Nina had begun to eye her like property instead of the pseudo daughter Marsden had convinced herself she was.

  That was when she wormed her way into the kitchen as staff, convincing Nina to be satisfied with owning her in that way, at least. The town’s businesses had already decided she was off-limits; hiring her themselves would mean risking Nina’s wrath as one of Glory’s wealthiest, most ruthless businesspeople. Nina, with her rose-tipped thumbs jabbed in pies all over the place.

  Fourteen was also when Marsden began skimming in earnest, with the goal of escape in mind.

  “The eggs are going to taste like your cigarette smoke,” Marsden said to Peaches, continuing to stir so she wouldn’t have to look at her. “You can be the one to tell Nina that when the guests complain.”

  “Always so worried.” Peaches blew out a thick stream of smoke. She took the spatula and poked at the sausages. “It’s going to age you if you’re not careful.”

  “Oh, leave her alone, Peaches.” Lucy leaned in from Marsden’s other side, peering closely at the eggs through her large tortoiseshell glasses. They were the same ones Nina had detested until she realized they held an appeal of their own. “Marsden covering the kitchen just leaves Dany more time for the rest of the house.”

  Despite being a couple, Lucy couldn’t have been more different from Peaches, a subtle carnation to a heady orchid. She had long, blond Alice in Wonderland hair, complete with hairband; along with the glasses, there was a sense of innocence about her that kept johns coming back. A runaway, Lucy had hitched her way north from Florida five years ago. She had arrived at Glory with sad eyes and a quiet voice she rarely used. Both gave away nothing about why she’d run in the first place. She wasn’t so quiet anymore, and her eyes weren’t so sad, but Wynn had once whispered to Marsden that she didn’t agree. Lucy just hides the sadness better. And we’ve forgotten to look.

  Peaches rolled sausages with the spatula’s edge and smirked. “I guess Marsden is the better cook.”

  “Don’t ever tell Dany that, you’d break her heart.” Lucy took a wooden spoon from the drawer and began to stir the eggs, yawning behind a hand.

  “And risk having to do my own laundry? Never.” Peaches squinted against smoke. “Hey, aren’t these sausages done?”

  Marsden felt hemmed in by how closely the girls stood around her, the easy way they spoke to each other. “Give them another couple minutes.”

  “You got a timer going?”

  “I don’t use one—cook enough of anything, you just know.”

  Life as a kid with her parents in their old duplex had been little more than a string of broken images—her father placing money on the kitchen table before leaving again; her mother screaming into the phone about late bills and not having enough, then smiling with empty eyes as she tucked Marsden into bed. By contrast, she remembered her grandmother’s visits like entire shows.

  She’d been the one to teach Marsden all about food.

  And those times Shine was out of the house, Star had been the one to cook what Shine had declared too strange, too Chinese.

  Your mother, always wanting to pretend you two look the same as everyone else in this town, Star would mutter over setting chicken to steam as she stir-fried. Pretending her grandfather didn’t go on to marry a Chinese woman, that I didn’t go on to marry a Chinese man. Don’t be ashamed of looking different, Marsden. Don’t be afraid of hearing what others might not.

  Her grandmother’s dying led to two things:

  First, Shine decided that the covert—and the family ability to hear the dead—would no longer be subjects she was interested in talking about. Second, Shine became a housekeeper for Nina in exchange for room and board, a job that lasted until Wynn’s birth six months later. When she took on another kind of work, as soon as she was able to.

  Peaches gave the sausages another jab with the spatula. “I can’t wait until my guy finally leaves. Older than Methuselah, swear to God. And he wanted to play teacher, because he found out this place used to be a boarding school.”

  The school had gone up after the state bought half an acre of land from Marsden’s great-grandfather. Nina’s family then bought it in turn, keeping bits of the original structure intact as they converted the school into the boardinghouse-slash-brothel it was
today—pine-framed windows, gray velvet flocked wallpaper, navy tiled floors. The heart of the covert remained untouched, a swath of forest west of the place.

  Lucy moved to Peaches’s other side and kissed her. “Well, my guy smells.”

  They both laughed against each other’s mouths, and Marsden, her face on fire, turned down the grill’s heat so it only warmed.

  How did that work, anyway? To love someone knowing that, at times, they were someone else’s? To touch them knowing it would soon be someone else’s turn? She wondered if such questions ever crossed their minds anymore, or if they just didn’t let them because they were too hard to answer.

  Down in the staff wing, a radio began to play. A song from that week’s Top 40.

  Marsden was sure Wynn had set it. Her sister had discovered that most of Nina’s girls listened to the radio as they got ready in the morning. Which meant she would, too.

  Peaches and Lucy danced their way back upstairs, and Marsden found herself moving in a rush now, struggling to finish before Nina stormed into the kitchen, demanding to know why breakfast wasn’t in the dining room yet.

  It left Marsden annoyed, being in a hurry. She should have known better than to let Peaches and Lucy distract her. It would never be worth it to risk Nina cutting her pay.

  four.

  “Mars, can you make waffles for the squirrels again?”

  Wynn was sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal, her usual place for meals when Nina wanted Wynn to stay quiet and out of the way. From the dining room just off to the side, there came the clanging of cutlery, the low chatter of guests as they ate the breakfast Marsden had just finished bringing out.

  “Not today, since I’ve already made breakfast.” Marsden scrubbed at the grill. “See, I’m cleaning now. You’re going to have to make friends with the wild fur balls some other way.”

  “They don’t like cereal.”

  “There might be leftover eggs coming back from the dining room, if you want to wait.”