Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

“Squirrels don’t like eggs.”

  “You don’t like eggs.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “It’s food.” Marsden began to wipe at cold grease. “Of course they’ll like it.”

  “I think they’re vegetarian.”

  “Eggs aren’t meat.”

  “But they come from chickens.”

  Marsden turned the stove back on and dropped a slice of bread onto the grill. The cold grease started to melt around it. “Toast will have to do, all right?”

  “Can we check for more berries this morning? In the covert? We didn’t pick enough yesterday to make strudels.”

  Marsden pushed the bread along the grease. It was going to be a long summer if Wynn wanted to go to the covert every chance she got. “Wouldn’t you rather hang out with your friends? Where’s Caitlyn today? Or Ella? I can try to bike you over later to meet them if you want.” Both girls were her sister’s best friends, and during the school year, they often played at one another’s houses. More accurately, Wynn played at theirs, since neither of the girls were allowed near the covert.

  “Caitlyn and her family are camping somewhere,” Wynn said, “and Ella’s cat is sick. She has to bring it to the vet.”

  Marsden bit back a sigh. “I think the berries need to ripen a bit more. Besides, the covert isn’t going anywhere—and there are other places to play.”

  “Nothing that’s like a whole forest to myself. I saw a whole family of mice in there the other day. And it’s the only place where the trees and plants aren’t all dried up from the sun.”

  “You know what happens in there.”

  “No one comes during the day.” Wynn spooned Lucky Charms into her mouth. “And it’s part of the family, so we’re supposed to take care of it. How can you be scared of family?”

  Marsden nearly smiled at how many ways she could pick apart the last of Wynn’s words. “It’s not family,” she said instead. “It’s just land—that’s all.”

  “Grandma wouldn’t have said that. The covert is a part of us. Or we’re a part of it—like it’s in our blood.”

  Kirby and his crimes popped into Marsden’s head. The covert would be forever stained with what he’d done, its soil and trees and air sown from it. More than one person in town believed some of that raging madness still flowed through his descendants.

  Her sister picked out marshmallows from her bowl with her fingers. Watching her, Marsden saw the resemblance to their mother, though it was nothing compared to how she herself resembled Shine. While Wynn’s hair and skin and eyes were all a shade softer than Marsden’s—a kitty cat at the side of a lioness, Dany had once said about the two of them—they’d both inherited their mother’s jawline, the broad sweep of her cheekbones, the slope of her nose, and her thick black hair. But the shape of Wynn’s eyes, the slightly clefted chin, her paler skin must have been from their father.

  “Don’t you ever wonder if it’s us making the dead talk or them thinking we should hear?” Wynn asked. “Because of our ability?”

  Marsden flipped the grilling bread. “We’ve never heard anyone.”

  “We might one day. So don’t you wonder?”

  “People aren’t parts of places,” she tried again. “And I only go to the covert for a good reason.”

  “Death,” her sister whispered, the suddenly ominous tone in her voice lifting up goose bumps on Marsden’s arms. “So you can call Hadley as soon as possible if you see someone.”

  “Exactly. So finish eating, will you, runt? You know Nina will want you outside while guests check out or head for town.”

  “It’s hot outside. And if I hide in here long enough, I’ll get to see the others before they’re busy for the day.”

  The others. Wynn meant their mother and Nina’s girls.

  “You’ll see everyone enough later.”

  Wynn shook her head. “Not enough if we’re leaving soon like you want. Can’t we stay here longer?”

  Marsden glanced over, dismayed. Her sister’s hair was a crown of midnight cowlicks. Just a slip of an undersized girl who loved the covert despite its horrors, who had no clue what her mother did for work most nights.

  She wasn’t ready to lose this Wynn yet. She wanted her to remain unchanged for as long as possible, young and blind and trusting. Not like her, dealt, at eight, a dead father, a forest full of death and tainted riches, a mother’s desperate decision. Then that one overly tall guest, his gaze crawling—Is Shine’s girl available yet?

  “Glory’s small,” she said. “Just because we won’t be living in the boardinghouse doesn’t mean you still won’t see everyone in town.” Of course if they left town altogether, they wouldn’t see them (which Marsden wasn’t sure she was really sorry about), and it was what she was still secretly planning. She’d brought up the idea with Wynn once but her sister had only shaken her head and refused to consider it. So Marsden had retreated and Wynn believed what she wanted to believe. When the time came to finally leave, Marsden would tell her the truth.

  “I like living in the boardinghouse, though.” Wynn stirred her cereal milk—turned chunky and blue—with her finger. “There’s Mom, and Dany, and the girls. Even Nina isn’t always so bad—she said Peaches and Lucy can show me how to do my hair and makeup. So I can look as nice as I want, whenever I like.”

  Marsden stabbed and gouged at the toast, something bitter on the back of her tongue. Nina had known exactly what she was doing, saying that to Wynn. “Seriously, you don’t need to do any of that.”

  “But I want—”

  “You don’t! And if you think Nina’s that nice, you’re just being stupid.”

  Wynn’s mouth trembled, and tears sprang to her eyes. Her finger went stock-still in her bowl of milk.

  Marsden could have kicked herself. Had she ever called Wynn stupid before, in a way that sounded like she meant it?

  “Hey now, what’s all this?” Dany swept into the kitchen, maternal and capable, a cozy blanket of a woman. Even her voice was comforting, big and warm enough that it seemed to wrap around you as she spoke. After Marsden, she was the person Wynn sought out in the boardinghouse—never Shine.

  “Just blue cereal for breakfast, sweetie?” she said to Wynn, giving Marsden a sideways look. “I’d be upset, too. How about I go grab you some of the food from the dining room?”

  “It’s eggs on the menu today,” Marsden said quietly, turning off the grill. “She doesn’t like them.”

  “Ah. Well, let me go check what else there might be.” Dany ruffled Wynn’s uncombed hair and swept away, her expression expectant as she looked back at Marsden. Don’t forget which of you is the big sister.

  “Sorry, Wynn,” Marsden said as soon as they were alone. “You know I didn’t mean it.”

  Her sister began to stir her blue milk again and Marsden was stiff with guilt, unsure of how to fix things.

  Then Dany was back, bearing nothing but a stack of dirty plates. “Too late, as everything’s been eaten. But Wynn, I have an idea for us this morning—go around back to the outer shed and get the old manual ice-cream maker? Jack is bringing by a delivery of fresh rhubarb from the store. Be careful, though—one of the attachments doesn’t stay on so great. Meanwhile, your sister and I will start cleaning up from breakfast.”

  Not needing to hear any more beyond the words ice and cream, Wynn was up like a shot and out the door without a single look back.

  “You two all right now?” Dany poured coffee from the pot on the counter. “You don’t often snap at Wynn like that.”

  Marsden began to scrub at the grill, working around the toast still on it. “Nina needs to stop putting ideas in her head about needing to dress up—she’s eight. And Peaches and Lucy—” She felt nearly betrayed at how oblivious they seemed to be to her problems. But what did they owe Marsden when none of them were really friends? When Nina was the one whose roof they slept under? “They need to remember she’s just a kid. And not like them.”

  “They’re simply being nice, that’s a
ll.”

  She could argue with Dany all morning, but she knew the woman would never say a bad word about Nina. Same way she could never turn on her or Wynn or any of the girls. Her loyalty to the house was unshakeable. It was what made her so lovable. But it also made her no help at all.

  “Nina wasn’t just being nice when she promoted my mom from housekeeper to whore,” she muttered as she scrubbed. “What’s an old friend’s reputation when it comes to her business bringing in money, right?”

  “Hush, Marsden.” Dany’s voice was low as she began to fill the sink. “She helped your mother when no one else in Glory would, when no job offers came despite the promises. And then Grant’s loans . . . Listen, she was not a child when she agreed. She knew she’d make good money.”

  “She could have just said no to Nina. She could have left. She—” Marsden bit off the rest of whatever she was going to say. They would have been words she’d already said dozens of times before, and they still wouldn’t change what her mother ended up doing.

  And Shine had left. Once. Or started to. Marsden had been ten and Wynn just a baby. Shine had gathered them one winter morning and they had taken the bus to the bus depot. Then they had sat on one of the benches inside for hours, waiting. Marsden had asked her mother over and over again where they were going, and her mother had simply sat there, staring up at the ticket board, her face pale and her hands clenched around her purse in her lap.

  They had brought almost nothing with them, since all they really had was clothing anyway. Tucked into her carrier, Wynn had slept nearly the whole time. Marsden remembered how her excitement had slowly disappeared, the bus depot around her emptying of people and then filling back up and then emptying again. When she got hungry, Shine gave her five dollars for candy bars from the little kiosk by the ticket booth. By the time the sky was starting to go dark, she was no longer asking about where they were going but instead when were they going home. Eventually, Shine gathered up Marsden and Wynn and they took the bus back to the boardinghouse.

  Nina had been cold to Shine for a few days, but then everything went back to the way it had been. Her mother wouldn’t talk about it when Marsden asked, and soon enough, Marsden was no longer asking about it at all. Bits of that day still came back to her at times, but they seemed almost unreal, as if the whole thing had happened to someone else. A different ten-year-old girl with a sleeping baby sister and a mother who forgot how to speak, one who was heading out to a different city for real.

  Dany slid dishes into the sink, her expression carefully patient. “Skill-less, with two little girls to take care of, and saddled with a bloodline and a skin color the people in this town were afraid of. Yes, she could have tried leaving again, but as bad as it was for her here, she came back because at least she knew Glory. Better the devil she knew than the one she didn’t, was her thinking. Now, I’m going to go finish clearing, if you want to start washing.”

  “Sure.” Guilt deflated Marsden’s anger, and she watched Dany stride away. She picked up the cooled toast and tucked it into the front pocket of her shirt. The covert should still be empty from her check that morning, and she knew Wynn would want to feed the squirrels.

  Then her mother walked into the kitchen, and Marsden braced herself.

  five.

  She had always been told they looked alike, and it was fact. Both of them had olive skin that darkened to a gold by the end of the summer, the shades rooted in their Chinese blood. And while Marsden’s straight black hair was usually down to her waist because she was often too lazy to get it cut, her mother always kept hers nearly as long because she said it made her look younger. No matter how much certain men might want me for the shape of my eyes, it’s youth that keeps them around.

  Marsden’s eyes were the same shape, too, but she liked that hers were even darker. So deep a brown they never altered, whatever the light—unreadable, hidden, a warning for others to not bother. Her being a skimmer would remain a secret, as long as she stayed careful.

  Shine unhooked a coffee mug from the tree on the counter and filled it. Dressed casually because it was day, her makeup faint in the morning sun, she appeared too young to have a teenage daughter. Marsden had been unplanned, her parents both sixteen when she’d been born. As much as her coming along had derailed whatever plans they might have had, it had also forced them to stay together when maybe they wouldn’t have, until it all ended with the river. That had been worse.

  “Did I just see you hide toast in your pocket?” Shine asked.

  Marsden wondered if her mother had overheard any of her conversation with Dany. “I’m supposed to go feed a squirrel.”

  “No pets.” Her mother’s reply was instant and automatic. “Nina’s rules.”

  “Not in the house, Mom. Out in the covert.”

  “Shine, not Mom.” Her mother took a long sip of coffee and stared out through the window at the ever-muddy Indigo. “Not Mom, not Mother, and, Lord”—a shudder, as though her coffee had suddenly turned repulsive—“never Ma.”

  “Sorry.” Marsden still remembered when she’d been allowed. Those words sometimes felt foreign on her tongue, and sometimes completely natural—she missed saying them, as much as she resented them for what they stood for. Wynn, though, rarely needed reminding. “Shine.”

  “I really wish you would stop going out to the covert so much.” Her mother set her mug down, lit up a cigarette, and looked at her daughter. “You go there every day. You even let Wynn go with you sometimes, letting her see God knows what. The girls tell me you do.”

  The girls. Aside from Peaches and Lucy, the bulk of Nina’s prostitutes—including Shine Eldridge—were starting to slide into what Marsden had once heard johns call “well-done” territory. The light switches in the bedrooms having dimmers was no happy accident. Suddenly, the sun flowing in was more revealing than kind, and Shine’s face, beneath the careful makeup, showed the truth with each line.

  Her mother did not know she skimmed. She did not know why Marsden would have any reason to make more money than she already did working in the kitchen. She might decide she didn’t know about skimmers at all, if she really did choose to ignore talk of the covert.

  She also didn’t know that even as Marsden was on the lookout for bodies, her daughter strived to hear the dead. The sight of blood-splattered, heart-shaped leaves was easier to live with, it turned out, than the memory of a father saying he regretted her.

  “I go there because it’s quiet, Mom—Shine. That’s all.”

  “Do you know how unhealthy that is? Enjoying being in a place where people go to kill themselves?” Her mother blew out smoke, more anxious than angry. “Please, Marsden.”

  Guilt—familiar, hateful, Shine’s most effective weapon against her—began to grind its way home, and Marsden sighed. She knew her mother had once actually mothered, that she would be better off simply forgetting most of that time. But Shine continued to try despite everything, and it only made it harder. Because crumbs still went toward hunger, still forced off starvation, even if that kind of mercy wasn’t necessarily kind.

  “I don’t enjoy it,” she said. “I could never. But I have to find them.”

  “Let the place be,” her mother pleaded. “Whatever happens in there is Hadley’s problem, not yours. You should be spending more time with your girlfriends, ones from school.”

  She could not tell her mother that most girls talked about her, not with her. It’d been that way for nearly as long as she could remember. By the time they moved into the boardinghouse, Marsden had already been struggling to keep the few friends she had, each of them deciding hanging out with her would be dooming her own reputation at school. She recalled them the way she did favorite toys she once played with, before they broke and she could no longer play with them. Jessica, who liked Barbies, Jillian, who preferred Hot Wheels. Mattea, who had a tree house.

  Marsden stopped fighting their withdrawal after a while. How do you fight fact? Her family did own the creepiest place in Gl
ory, after all, had made it that way in the first place. What if whatever evil was in their blood could spread? She was the descendant of a madman, the protector of cursed land. She was one of the “Orientals” in town. Her mother becoming one of Nina’s girls—simply one more of Glory’s not-so-secrets—was, she supposed, the icing on a very ugly cake.

  “It’s summer,” she said now. “People do stuff.”

  “Fine. I mean when it’s not summer.”

  “So ask me in the fall.”

  “Don’t be glib. It’s not an appealing trait.”

  Marsden’s hand squeezed the piece of toast in her pocket. Compulsively, like a muscle cramp. “To johns? Then oh well.”

  Shine drew hard enough on her cigarette that it shook in her fingers. Her unending need for security filled her eyes, turning her expression both childlike and calculating. Marsden’s father had put that look there, Marsden knew, had taught his wife to fear being left alone as she dealt with his recklessness and inability to be responsible. His leaving had pushed her toward Nina and the boardinghouse, too. For that, she saw how her mother could be unforgiving. Just as she saw how it made her mother need too much protection to ever be able to protect anyone else.

  “Those johns are what keep us fed, Marsden.” Ash fluttered to the ground from Shine’s trembling cigarette. Her voice trembled along with it. “But soon I’ll be too old for them. You know Nina knows this. And Nina . . . she’s asked me to come talk to you. She says it’s time you stop hiding in this kitchen.”

  Marsden’s skin went icy, chilled with the revulsion of a touch she could already imagine. She’d known, but it was another thing hearing Shine say it out loud. “I won’t.”

  “I know you don’t want to, but we owe Nina. She’s a business-person when it comes to this, not a friend. She covered those loans of your father’s that we’re still paying her back for.”

  “Then go back to housekeeping. I’ll get another job somewhere else, on top of cooking here.”

  Shine tried to smile then, of all things, and it was even shakier than her fingers around the cigarette. Her eyes simmered with panic. They said she was trapped and that she knew she was trapping Marsden along with her.