by Lauren Wolk
As Rachel headed for the hollow, she thought only good thoughts, put Joe and Harry Gallagher out of her mind and with them, unknowing, the lesson Harry had taught her: that seduction can come with fangs.
On the way through the town, Rachel bought a dozen hot rolls from Angela, a slab of honey ham from the grocery store, and a bottle of homemade grape juice and a quart basket of tomatoes from a farm truck parked at the side of the road. She packed the food into her basket and lugged it across a wide field and down into Caspar’s Hollow, taking turns with her arms, watching for the copperheads that liked to nap on bits of hot slate.
As she came through the trees at the bottom of the hill, Rachel looked up smiling. She took another step, still smiling. Her eyes saw that something was wrong, but her feet kept moving. Her lips kept smiling. Her heart kept beating. There, on the left, across a small field of clover, was the old barn where the black kittens were always born. There, to the right, was the flower garden that grew to a luscious tangle, seeded itself unaided, offered itself to the honeybees and the birds. The house where Ross had always lived should have been there too. It should have been near the garden. But it was not.
Rachel dropped the basket and ran. She tripped in the clover and raced on again, screaming for Ross. Where his house had been she could now see, amazingly strange, the peak of the roof with its old, mossy tiles poking up through the soil, the top edge of an attic window, unbroken, the brick of a chimney rising up out of the ground as if it offered passage to the center of the hot, revolving world.
Rachel was brought up, panting, by the sight. The bit of roof, the chimney, that was all. The soil was gray all around where the house had been. Rachel took a step onto the strange ground, and her foot disappeared, she began to sink, quickly, her other foot bracing against the lip of firmer ground, her arms flapping in the air, hands wild, mouth working. She threw herself backward, scrabbled at the sparse grass, rolled away from the big grave where Ross Caspar was now buried, turned toward the hills, and ran.
She ran past the basket where she’d dropped it, ran up the path through the woods; ran until her lungs were seared. Then she ran some more, her mouth full of paste and heat, her bare legs scratched, sweating, stuck all over with seeds.
At the top of the hill, in the field of tall grass, Rachel lay down, choking on hot phlegm and the memory of Ross’s rooftop. There was, here, no stink or commotion. The birds around her were content among the seeded stalks of grass. But Rachel was badly afraid. She spread her body out in all directions like someone caught on thin ice. She gripped the ground with her fingernails and dug in her toes. And then, remembering the sight of that chimney rising up out of the corrupted earth, she scrambled to her feet and fled.
Book
Three
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
—ROBERT FROST, from Reluctance
Chapter 32
Joe stood at the door to his sister’s apartment and wondered how he had gotten there. The long trip west, which had felt endless, now collapsed into a single, ponderous moment. Despite having traveled the world, he was bewildered to be in a place thousands of miles from where he had been that morning. His senses told him that it ought to be dark by now, but with the change in time zones and the length of summer days, it was still light in Northern California. Night would already have fallen in Belle Haven. He would call Rachel as soon as he could. He didn’t want to wait too long and risk waking her. Then Holly opened the door.
“My God,” was all she said at first. She said it as she looked at him standing there. She said it again as they grabbed each other and he lifted her off her feet. She said it as she led him inside and closed the door.
“I don’t think I believed you were really alive until now,” she said, taking his face in her hands and looking at his eyes as if to be sure they matched her own.
“Quit saying everything I’m thinking,” he said, taking her hands in his. “Even if that’s what twins are supposed to do.” He’d never called her his twin before, and she knew it. It was the first clue to the changes in him.
They stood looking at each other for a long moment. After two years of mourning each other, they were easily silenced by the shock of meeting face-to-face.
“Are you hungry?” she finally said.
Which seemed to awaken Joe. He blinked. Took a deep breath. “As a horse.” He looked around him suddenly. “But I think I’d better get my bag before someone walks off with it.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Holly waited while he went back out for his bag. “I’m a bundle of nerves, Kit. This is all so strange. He said you were dead.”
“He said you were, too,” Joe said, putting his bag by the door. The “he” hung in the air between them. “You called me Kit, didn’t you?” He massaged his temples. “No one’s called me Kit for two years. Except Mrs. Corrigan, last night. Was that only last night? Jesus, Holly. I feel like my head’s about to explode.”
“Mine too.” She rolled her eyes. “This is getting ridiculous. Last time I saw you we had nothing good in common. Now I feel like I’m looking in a mirror.” She touched the ruined side of her face when she said this.
“Me too.”
Which made Holly grin. “So what do you want to eat? There’s a great little Thai place on the corner. Or I can make us a pizza. Or … what? You name it.”
Joe suddenly found himself thinking about Belle Haven. A town that lived on corn-fed beef and homegrown crops, plenty of bread and butter, whole milk, and fruit pies. The lure of Thai food, so spicy it cracked lips, was incredibly strong. He felt disloyal. He felt hungrier than he had in years.
“Thai,” he said. “That would be perfect.”
And it was only after they were out the door and down the street that he remembered he hadn’t called Rachel after all.
Somehow being in the restaurant together made it easier for them to discuss what their father had done. The place was crowded and noisy, the air so full of pepper it stung their eyes. Holly had been there enough times to know what to order, to set things in motion as soon as they were seated, which meant that for every awful thing they discussed that night, there was a chance to say, “Good God, that’s hot,” or “Water just makes it worse.”
Still, it was hard to say out loud that their father had hurt them as badly as he knew how. It was hard to say that, having done such a thing, he had never made any attempt to right the wrong. Had never sought forgiveness. Had never even tried to find out what had become of his children.
And it was hard, as well, to acknowledge that they had accepted their father’s lies without question, had never tried to find out for sure what had become of each other.
Joe, who had accepted nearly everything his father had ever told him, was nonetheless horrified that he had not questioned the news of Holly’s death. And Holly, who had for years known that her father was a cruel and dishonest man, was astonished that she had taken him at his word. True, by the time he had called with the news of her brother’s death, she had spent weeks building a new life and trying her best to forget the one she’d left behind. True, too, that the sound of her father’s voice alone had so shocked her that the words he had fired down the telephone line had shattered, one by one, against her skull until she felt as if she had been caught in an explosion. In defense, she had retreated, shut down, sealed off her past and refused to look back at it for a long time. She now confessed to her brother that she had been too afraid, in those days, to dwell on his death or on anything else their father had last said to her. Even now, she could not easily speak of such things.
Yet as she unburdened her heart, Holly felt herself lighten. Her sorrow over her brother’s death had lasted all this time, even if it had lessened somewhat, but as she sat across from him she felt the last of it dissip
ate. She had not accepted the blame that her father had tried to inflict on her, the shame of participating in her brother’s death, but she had still been scarred. Now, as her scars peeled away, she felt well and strong where they had been. The fury she had felt since learning—that very morning—of her father’s lies was coupled with an equal measure of joy over having her brother back.
But he, who had known the same sorrow and shame, the same fury and joy, reacted differently as he sat with Holly and tried to articulate what they had suffered at their father’s hands.
As he told Holly about the night he had called their father and learned of her death, he remembered what kind of person he had been back then. He remembered what had made him leave home in the first place, the long and terrible story Holly had told him in the gazebo that morning, how their father had tried to rape her, the threat he had been to her for years. Joe remembered how he had doubted Holly, had even accused her of lying. He remembered defending his father, but he could not remember why.
As he told Holly about Ian, Angela, and Rusty, described the fire that was growing beneath Belle Haven and what the town had come to mean to him, he found himself wondering whether he had outgrown his deep-seated proclivity for looking the other way. And as he spoke about Rachel, he realized that he had always forgiven her habit of denying what she feared because he had for so long done the same.
“I wonder if I do that because it makes me feel better about my own faults,” he said absently, the food on his plate forgotten. He put his hands in his lap. Looked at his sister. “I thought I’d come a long way since I left home,” he said, “but now I feel like I’m right where I started.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Holly said, reaching across the table to touch her brother’s cheek. “I am a thousand times happier than I was back then, and that’s mostly because you helped me leave. Ultimately, you did believe what I told you. Even though I heaped on you in one morning what I’d spent years getting used to. None of what we’ve been through was easy, Kit. But what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”
“You keep calling me Kit. I feel like I’m splitting down the middle.”
The look in his eyes frightened Holly. He was so obviously confused that she wanted to get him home quickly, send him off to bed. They had said too much, too soon.
“Let’s go home,” she said. “Everything will seem better in the morning.”
But it didn’t.
For the next three weeks Joe said very little. He appeared not to listen to what was said around him or even to him. Holly’s friends, after meeting him for the first time, avoided her eyes, for they sensed that her brother was not quite whole.
Holly suspected that her brother was simply trying to make sense of their father’s senseless lie. To do that, he would have to understand his father. And to do that, he would have to take a long and honest look at the kind of person he had been before leaving home, for it was in those days that he had been most like his father, had seemed content with following in his footsteps regardless of where they led. He had taken such a look immediately after leaving home, but since then he had put as much distance as possible between himself and the person he had been, which meant that he had tried not to look back, or at least not too closely.
Now, as he peered beneath his own scars, Joe saw his father and himself very clearly. Perhaps time had provided this clarity. Time and therefore some objectivity. Or perhaps living in Belle Haven had given him a different perspective so that, like a tourist abroad, he saw things the natives missed. What he saw did not surprise him, for he’d caught enough glimpses before. But it did frighten him, for he now admitted to himself that no matter how much he had changed, no matter how hard he had tried to better himself, he was still capable of repeating his worst mistakes.
He had once accepted things as they were, had done nothing to improve them, and had not been the only one to suffer the consequences. And he was doing it again in Belle Haven. The difference was that, under his father’s roof, he had been able to claim some ignorance, to hide somewhat behind his youth, to beg the excuse that it was natural—perhaps even commendable—for a boy to be loyal to his father. What excuse did he have now for looking the other way while the fire made its way closer? For taking part in a conspiracy—if only because he did so little to dispute it—that seemed sure to hurt those he loved? He still felt that he was a better man now than he had once been. But this only made his collaboration seem worse.
Holly watched her brother as he spent endless hours on her small balcony, looking out over San Francisco. She imagined that he was still straining, quietly, desperately, against his father’s stubborn grip. Even after all this time. Even after everything that had happened. And she was right.
But she remembered the night he had arrived on her doorstep, how much he seemed to have changed since they had last seen each other. And she was convinced that her brother’s silence was a good thing, a sign that he no longer took things lightly. She knew, because she had spent years doing so, that it was better to face difficulties than to look away. After what he had been through, he was giving himself a chance to heal before going forward. Time to sort himself out. And again, she was right.
Three weeks after he’d arrived on her doorstep, he startled Holly by singing “Moon River” in his morning shower, by shaving carefully, by sitting the wrong way in a kitchen chair, so that his chin rested on its back, and declaring that he was famished. Over a feast of eggs and pumpkin bread, he told her that he wanted to go home.
“What are you talking about?” she cried, angry and alarmed. “You promised me you wouldn’t go anywhere near him again.”
“Oh, no,” he said, reaching one arm over the back of the chair. “No. Not there,” he said. “I want to go back to Belle Haven, Holly. As soon as I can.”
She sat down, shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.” She looked straight at him and frowned. “Don’t you want to hang around a bit longer?”
“I’m okay now,” he said to the uncertainty in her eyes. “Honest, Holly. Even better than okay.” He smiled at her in a way she’d never seen before. He looked happy. “And besides,” he said, “I have something important to do.”
It took Joe two weeks to reach Belle Haven, for he stopped along the way to spend a great deal of his inheritance. It made him feel good to shed his wealth, for it was not really his. He had not earned it. Or if he had, it was by doing things he wished he could undo, following his father without question. Like the Jaguar he’d traded away, the money was tainted by its source, but he hoped that what he had bought with it would lead him entirely beyond the borders of his father’s shadow.
It was only when he saw through Rachel’s eyes what he’d done that he wondered whether he’d someday rue its price.
Joe arrived back in Belle Haven at the end of August. He had been gone for more than a month and was thinner than when he’d left. Paler. He moved a bit more slowly, as if his thoughts were sucking the blood up from his legs.
As the Greyhound bus pulled away from Frank’s Gas ’n’ Go, loud and stinking, Joe waited impatiently for the air to clear and the sounds of the night to return.
It was only about ten o’clock, but there was no one around. He had decided, on the bus, to walk up to Rachel’s house and surprise her, collect Pal, maybe stop and say hello to Angela and Dolly and Rusty on the way, see who might be sitting out on their porches, enjoying the cool night air and the white of the stars. But as he picked up his bag and turned to go, he saw, leaning up against the back of the busstop bench, the bicycle that Rachel had lent him so long ago. He had left it at the Schooner.
He looked at the bike, looked down Maple Street toward the creek and Rachel’s hill beyond it. He did not want to ride all the way to his hot Schooner, his bag making the trip a chore. Out there, so close to Ian’s empty house, he knew he would not be able to sleep. But something told him to go anyway. Something told him the bike had been left here so that he would.
When he reached Ian’s lane and turned in, Joe was surprised to see light shining through the front windows of Ian’s house and the shape of a car parked by the door. As far as he knew, Ian had died with neither heirs nor will. He and Rachel had taken on the dreadful task of going through Ian’s house after his death, emptying his fridge, looking through his papers, watering his plants. Perhaps, Joe thought, some distant relatives had been found.
He turned down the bumpy lane that led through the woods to the Schooner, struggling to steer with one hand. Then up ahead there was the Schooner, waiting for him, and he was glad to be home.
There was a note wedged into the crack around his door. He carried it inside, put down his suitcase, switched on a light, and sat down to read it.
The Land you’re parked on has been sold,
Joe. If you need more than twenty-four hours
to leave, we can talk about it. Come see
me when you get back. I’m living in the
Spalding house.
—Mendelson
P.S. I’ll let you know what’s owing on the electric.
Joe threw the note away and opened his windows wide. Someone—Rachel, he presumed—had come around to close them to an inch or so and had also taken from his cupboards things that might have rotted, emptied out his small fridge, opened its door, unplugged it. He undressed and lay down on his stale bed. Through the nearest window he could see a piece of blackened sky.