The plum tree was now no more than a moldering, leafless stick poking out of the ground to infect the other trees around it. Their leaves had turned brown and curled at the ends. The apples and peaches were speckled with rotting spots and ant bites.
She couldn’t let it ruin everything.
Despite its brittle appearance, the tree put up a fight. The bark ate into her hands as she tried to rip it from the ground. She leveraged her weight and nearly sat on the ground as she yanked. Something cracked, and a small fissure opened down the center of the wood. Rachel didn’t let go. Even when a thin trail of blood dribbled down her wrists.
“Whoa. Hey, what’re you doing?” a voice yelled from somewhere to her right.
She didn’t answer. If she stopped now, the tree—with all its disease and destruction—would win. The roots shredded as it pulled free from the earth. The soil underneath was black and slimy with fermenting juice. The stagnant air engulfed her, and bile pumped into her mouth, coating her throat.
“Hey,” the voice said again, closer. She knew this voice.
She went to say something, then turned and vomited at her brother’s feet.
* * *
When she looked up a moment later, he was still there. Michael. Blinking, she met his eyes. Eyes that were a reflection of hers. His face was broad with a strong jaw like she remembered their dad’s being.
Before she could wrap her mind around how Michael was in Catch’s backyard, his hands were on her arms, holding her up. He stepped them both a few feet to the side. “Are you okay?” he asked. In his deep Southern voice, she heard traces of the boy she remembered.
“I’m sorry,” she said, crying hard enough to be embarrassed but not being able to stop. “I am so, so sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. If I could take it back I would. God, I would undo it in a heartbeat if I could.”
“Relax. It’s not a big deal. If I’d been the one to pull the tree out and find that shit, I probably would’ve puked too.”
He wasn’t making any sense. She took a steadying breath and asked, “Do you know who I am?”
“Yeah. You’re Rachel.” He slid his hands down her arms to inspect her bleeding palms. “These look pretty deep. We should get you cleaned up. C’mon. My brother’s got a first aid kit on the deck.” He walked toward Ashe’s house, pulling her along by the wrists.
“You’re…” Rachel trailed off.
“Scott Riley,” he said.
The name rolled off his tongue like he’d been saying it all his life. Which, of course, he nearly had.
The pressure built in her head until all she could hear was a shrill ringing that kept time with her racing heart. Unable to look at him, she focused on the dirt and blood that caked her hands. A new rush of bile made her throat clench. She swallowed every few seconds to keep from throwing up again.
“I need to sit,” she said. Her weak voice matched the shaky feeling in her knees.
He lowered her onto the top step of the deck. Holding her hands off to the side so the blood dripped onto the deck instead of her shorts, he said, “Can you hold them here for a minute? I just need to run inside and get the stuff. You okay until I get back?”
Rachel nodded, which made her vision blur. For a second, she saw the four-year-old boy with shaggy hair and unconditional trust. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“I’m just gonna grab some water real quick and the kit. Don’t pass out on me now.”
He came back after a minute, though it could have been ten, she wasn’t sure. His footsteps pounded on the wood beneath her, the vibrations pulsing in her wounds. She bit her lip to keep from crying again when he crouched in front of her. His face—so familiar, yet so different—hovered inches from hers.
“How’re you doing? Still with me?” Scott asked.
“Yeah,” she whispered.
He poured cool water on her hands. Her cuts stung as he rubbed gently with a soft cloth to clean them. She tried not to flinch.
“So, what did the tree do?”
“It was killing the others,” Rachel said, her voice a little stronger than a moment before.
“Next time, maybe you should use an ax or some shears. Your hands are pretty cut up.”
“I’m fine,” she said, hoping it sounded like the truth.
Scott laid a dry towel across her hands and prepared the gauze. He squirted ointment on the bandage and rubbed it in with a Q-tip. His hands were gentle when he wrapped the gauze around one hand, then the other.
A snippet of a memory fought to the surface. She could see his small, careful hands doctoring the front paw of his stuffed dog, Rufus. His eyes had been calm, focused, just as they were now.
He set her hands in her lap, rubbing a thumb over her right wrist. It was such an Ashe move it stole her breath. “Feel any better?” Scott asked.
“Yeah. You were always good at that,” Rachel said.
“Good at what?” His eyebrow quirked up in confusion.
“Nothing. I think I must be a little out of it. Sorry.”
“Want me to walk you back?” Scott asked.
Rachel leaned her head against the scratchy wood beam of the stair railing. “Is it okay if I just sit out here for a little bit?”
“Sure. I’m supposed to go meet Ashe soon, but I can hang around for a few minutes if you want.” He stood and dumped the water from cleaning up her hands over the railing into the grass.
“No, go. You’ve done more than enough.”
His phone buzzed and he answered it after a quick glance at Rachel. “Hey, bro. I’m about to head out. Had a little mishap with Rachel, but she’s gonna be okay.”
She looked up, startled at the mention of her name. Scott smiled at her.
“She’s okay.… All right. See you in a few,” he said. He sat on the step beside her. His legs stretched two steps below hers. “He’s on his way home.”
Oh, no. How am I supposed to keep Catch’s cancer a secret from him? How am I supposed to tell him that his brother is also my brother?
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Her thoughts continued to race, amplifying her dizziness. Rachel closed her eyes against the sharp glare of the sun as her hands continued to throb.
“Ashe seems really happy,” Scott finally said.
“Does he?” she asked without opening her eyes.
“Yeah. Everything with Lola messed him up pretty bad. But he seems better since you’ve been around.”
“What do I have to do with anything?”
“He likes you. You reminded him that not everyone has to suck.”
Rachel smiled at that and raised her head to look at him. But she moved too fast, and black spots covered half his face as her consciousness ebbed. Terrified he would disappear again, she wrapped her fingers around his forearm. He was solid beneath her grip. His sincere, concerned expression was so familiar that she wanted to cry again.
“You okay, Rachel?” Scott asked.
She shook her head. “If you knew more about me, you wouldn’t feel that way. Neither would Ashe. I’ve done things that hurt people I loved and no matter how I tried I couldn’t make it right.”
He contemplated this for a moment, sitting beside her quietly, before finally asking, “Did you do them on purpose?”
“No, but the results were the same.”
A door slammed, followed by quick footsteps on gravel. Ashe appeared around the corner of the house. His dark sunglasses shielded his eyes, but she could tell he was scrutinizing her to see what was wrong. He nodded to his brother, a silent message to move. He sat next to her and waited until his brother had gone inside to ask if she was okay.
Rachel couldn’t look at him. “Yes,” she answered.
“What happened?”
“Tore out the plum tree.”
“With your bare hands?”
“Yes.”
“Let me look.” He picked up her hands and set them in his lap. He kept his touch light as he lifted one side of the gauze to examine the damage. “Why?”
/>
“It needed to come out,” she said.
“Why didn’t you ask me to do it?”
She tugged her hands away, but he closed his fingers around her wrists, keeping her in place. “Contrary to how it might seem, I am capable of doing things on my own. Go see for yourself. The tree’s not there anymore.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. And I’m glad Scott was here to fix you up. If you’d gone back into Catch’s looking like you must’ve looked, you’d have given her a heart attack.”
A heart attack might have been better than what Catch is dealing with.
The thought sent a sharp pain through her chest. She sucked in a breath and Ashe put an arm around her.
“Ashe—” Her throat tightened, and for a moment, she forgot about the pain in her hands as words crammed in her mouth vying to get out first. “I have to go,” she said.
If she let one confession escape, there was nothing left in her to keep all of the others in.
32
Locked in her room, Rachel put on her headphones and cranked up the volume on her iPod. The deep bass line pumped through her, making her body vibrate. Lying on the bed, she stared at the ceiling fan. The blades thrashed around in a frantic circle.
She’d always thought finding Michael, apologizing for what she’d done to him, would erase the guilt. Instead it dredged up more memories. And she was too worn out to fight them off. The angry bass and frantic guitar did nothing to drown out an argument she hadn’t thought of in years.
Michael had been gone for two months, and Rachel had refused to believe what her parents said. That she’d made him up, that maybe her insistence was more than a little girl’s overactive imagination—that maybe she was ill.
On the night they agreed to commit her to the hospital for a month, she’d lain curled up in the hallway with a hand pressed to the cool wall where Michael’s door had once been.
“I can’t live like this anymore, Roger,” her mom had shouted. She didn’t seem to care if Rachel overheard.
“Calm down, Cynthia. Let’s talk about this,” her dad had said, Rachel straining to hear him.
“I’ve tried that. You don’t listen. We have to do something. She’s not getting any better, and frankly, neither are we.”
The springs creaked on the bed when her father had sat—her mom was too light for it to ever notice her weight. “We can help her, but we both have to believe she can get better.”
“You say that like I’m not trying!” Her mom’s voice had risen an octave, verging on hysteria.
Rachel had turned away from the wall. The carpet had pressed a pattern to her left cheek. She’d run her fingers over the hills and valleys on her skin. A strip of pale light slithered under the door.
“No, I’m not. I know you’re trying. I am too. We’ve just got to agree on what’s best for her,” her dad had said.
“But why does that have to be what you want? It kills me to see her like that. But what’s worse, she believes in it so hard that sometimes she makes me second-guess myself and I almost start to believe Michael was real. Whatever is wrong with her, we need to get her some help.”
“You really think locking her up for a month is what she needs?” he had said, his voice booming under the door.
“I want her to get well and that’s not something we can do. The doctors can. I have an appointment for us to go talk with them on Tuesday and for them to evaluate Rachel.”
Rachel shot up from her bed in Catch’s house and clamped her hands to her ears. Even through the blaring music, the memory of her parents’ voices refused to cease. Make it stop, she begged. Please make it stop.
She had been right all along.
Maybe if they had believed her, they could’ve gotten him back sooner. Maybe her mom wouldn’t have become so depressed and distraught that she saw killing herself as the only solution. Maybe her dad wouldn’t have left them to deal with their unanswered questions and guilt on their own.
The cardboard boxes she’d used to pack up her things, stacked by the stairs, caught her eye. She dug through the top box, tossing aside journals and pictures and sci-fi books that reminded her of Michael. Her hand closed over the cool plastic pill bottle, the gauze on her hands making her movements stiff. She shook out two pills and tossed them back with no water. The pills burned for a few seconds as they began to dissolve in her throat. She let saliva build up and swallowed hard to wash the bitter taste away.
Her knees dug into the floor but she didn’t move. She concentrated on the silence seeping through the floorboards and cracks around the door, let it wash over her like the warm rain had the day before. Steadier, Rachel recapped the bottle and stuffed it back in the box. She shuffled to the bed and curled up on top of the covers, wishing for dreamless sleep.
* * *
Rachel woke up sweaty and a little hazy. Her hair was tangled around her head like a noose. Coughing, she unwound it and rolled so her head hung over the side of the bed. She had the vague sense that she needed to throw up.
She lay there until the floor stopped rolling beneath her, then she sat up and blinked against the bright light shining in the window. The sun was halfway down the sky already. Standing, she braced a hand on the wall as her vision darkened. When it cleared, she walked to the steps and unearthed the bottle from the box for a second time.
She headed downstairs with the bottle gripped in her gauze-wrapped fist.
The kitchen was empty, but two pies sat on the counter. She listened for sounds from Catch’s room. After a few seconds of silence, she opened the bottle and dumped the contents down the drain. She turned on the water and let it run fast and hot.
She slid open the cabinet below the sink and rooted through the garbage, burying the bottle somewhere in the middle.
“I was beginning to worry about you,” Catch said from behind her, making her jump.
“Oh, really?” Rachel said, letting the remnants of her anger heat her words. “Because earlier I could’ve sworn you didn’t give a damn about anyone.”
“Don’t get smart with me, missy. And let me see your hands. Scott said you’d done something to them, but no one would tell me how bad it is. Give ’em here.”
Rachel extended her hands. It was difficult to stay mad at someone who was trying to take care of her. “You no longer have to worry about the plum tree.”
“Is that why my backyard smells like rotten damn fruit?”
“I was mad. And it was sitting back there mocking all of us. Spreading its poison to the rest of the trees, ruining what good was left. I had to stop it, so I ripped it out.”
“And ripped your hands to shreds in the process?”
“Yes.”
Tsking, Catch opened a cabinet and pulled out a round tin from Everley’s shop. “Put this on twice a day. Should help with the pain and keep it from getting infected.”
“Thanks.” Rachel peeled off the gauze and rubbed the ointment on her palms. She sighed at the cool sensation that spread from her hands into her wrists. It smelled like lemons and honey. She caught the box of food service gloves Catch tossed her in the crook of her arm.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was Ashe’s brother?” Rachel asked.
“You weren’t ready. If I’d told you yesterday who he was, you would’ve gone over there and told him that nothing about his life is real. Not his parents, not his brother, not even his name. How do you think either of you would’ve handled that?”
“But he doesn’t even remember me.”
“I know,” Catch said. She crimped the foil tighter around one of the pies, as if she needed something to keep her hands and mind occupied. “With their bastard of a father dragging the family name through the proverbial mud right now, Ashe needs him. And he needs Ashe. I hope you see that.”
Rachel nodded and put on a pair of the gloves. “I’m not heartless.”
“Of course you’re not. If you weren’t the type of girl who would help people get what was rightfully theirs even after they tr
ied to run you out of town, you wouldn’t be living in my house. You’re a good girl, Rachel. I know you’ll do what’s right with my boys too.”
“I won’t say anything about Scott yet.” She looked back at Catch until she was sure she had her attention. “But this doesn’t mean that I’ve forgiven you for not telling anyone about being sick.”
“Guess it’s a good thing you won’t be the one waiting at the Pearly Gates, deciding whether or not to let me in, then, huh?”
“If it were up to me, you wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon.”
* * *
Rachel sat cross-legged in the center of her bed. Through the window she could see the black spot where she’d torn the plum tree from the ground. The earth was still dark, decaying. But the other trees had come back with vigor. Their fruit was vibrant with color. She could smell their sweet scent through the open window.
She still had no clue what to do about her brother, but there was one thing she could fix. At least she hoped she could. Of all the wishes she’d encountered since coming to Nowhere, this one was the most important. It wouldn’t go wrong. She wouldn’t let it.
Remembering what Catch had said about her ability only working right when she fully believed in herself, she released the last dregs of doubt, and, closing her eyes, whispered, “I wish Catch didn’t have cancer.” She repeated the phrase over and over until the words ran together so they sounded like a foreign language. IwishCatchdidn’thavecancer.
A wish materialized in the air. She pinched it between her forefinger and thumb, the words shimmering in black ink as the light hit the crisp, white paper.
This wish would go right. She could feel it.
She closed her eyes, forcing her body to relax, and let the room melt away first, then the sounds of the birds outside, so the only thought in her mind was the wish.
IwishCatchdidn’thavecancer.
The air blew in through the window, hot and sticky. A bead of sweat rolled down her neck and was absorbed by her bra. She kept her hands locked together in her lap, the paper pressed between them. The deeper cuts were still raw despite the salve Catch had given her. Ignoring the sharp pain that shot through her palms, she clamped them tighter together and refocused her attention.
The Secret Ingredient of Wishes Page 24