“So then what?” Aella paused, taking another hit from her pipe. “Where do you live?”
“Out on 2410, with my husband. Creel Hollow Farm.”
“Oh,” Aella said and cocked her head. “He knows you’re here?”
“No.”
“You have children?”
“Not yet,” Quinn tried to keep her voice steady but failed. “No,” she added, “no children.”
“He running around on you?”
“No, he’s a good man.”
“A good man,” Aella chuckled. “All those Creels have their heads in the clouds. If it wasn’t for that farm going from one to the other, they’d be living under a bridge.”
“We might sell the farm and move to one of those new houses, with carpet and a garage.”
“A Creel not living on a farm, I don’t know. What’s he into, your husband?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“His granddaddy ran a rabbit-breeding operation during the Depression. He didn’t have the heart to kill them or eat them, so that venture didn’t turn out well. Nolan’s daddy went off to work in the Ford factory up in Dallas for a while. Then he planted an orchard and took up painting. He painted fruit, mainly. A banana here and there, grapes, but mainly apples. His wife put a match to the barn one day, burning all the paintings. There were hundreds of them. Set fire to herself in the process. At least that’s the story I’ve heard.”
Quinn knew nothing about the Creel family history, but there was an area in the barn, covered in tarps. She had never bothered to look underneath.
“Set fire to herself?” Quinn said, crinkling her forehead. “Never heard that story.”
“Those Creel men, they always come out on top, it seems like.”
“Nolan went to college.”
“Did he now?”
“Yes, he’s a lawyer.”
“Be that as it may, he should have an office downtown then. The Creel name goes a long way in this town. But you never answered my question.”
Quinn cocked her head. “What was the question?”
“What’s he doing now? He’s not breeding rabbits. He’s not painting apples. What’s he doing?”
“Running the farm,” Quinn lied.
“Your time’s up.”
“You never told me what you saw in the cards,” Quinn insisted.
“You didn’t come for a reading is what the reading told me. And that you lie a lot.”
“About what?”
“About what’s in your heart. About why you came here.”
“He’s not doing much of anything. He spends a lot of time in the shed. He won’t tell me what he’s doing in there,” Quinn said, her hands folded in her lap.
Aella laughed, musically, as if she was repeating a melody. “From rabbits to fruit, to some shed. You could just go and look, you know?” She yawned, exposing tiny yellow teeth. And like an arsonist coming back to smell the ashes she said, “You seem very nervous, like you’re hiding something. Are you going to tell me what you want from me?”
“Yes,” Quinn said but didn’t go on.
“I have rosemary for blood pressure, Aloe Vera for digestion, echinacea for infections. Any herb you can imagine. Tell me what ails you.”
Quinn remained silent.
“Q., you have to talk to me. I’ve heard it all before—trust me when I tell you I’ve heard it all before. And some.”
“I need your help,” Quinn said after a slight pause. “I want to have a baby.”
There was a long silence during which Aella smoked while Quinn watched her. There, she had made her declaration, had said it out loud. No going back now.
Finally Aella spoke. “You go to church?”
“Every Sunday.”
“Why don’t you ask your god for a baby? Why come to me?”
“He hasn’t been listening.”
“So your god is all out of answers then?”
“Yes. Yes he is.”
“It’s gonna cost you.”
“I have money. I have lots of money.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Aella chuckled. “It’s gonna cost you in other ways.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Just tell me what I need to do. I’ll do anything for a baby.” Despite her pounding heart Quinn smiled at Aella.
“First of all I need you to understand what you’re asking for.”
“I know what I’m asking for. I want a baby.”
“Here we go already. That’s vague. Very vague. You need to go home and think about this.”
“I know what I want. I don’t care how, all I want is a baby.”
“I know what you want but you don’t know what it takes. Let me see your hands.”
Quinn extended both hands, palms up, toward Aella, who took them in hers, her thumbs rubbing gently over the ridges and lines. Aella leaned forward, some of her hair suddenly static like the spikes of a dandelion. A flow of words emerged from Aella’s mouth, words unknown to Quinn, sharp and high-pitched as if accompanied by clanging cymbals. Then Aella wiped Quinn’s palms with her own.
“How much money do you have?”
Quinn mentioned an amount that would just about deplete the stash in the envelope.
“Do you know the moon phases?”
“I do,” Quinn said, remembering that Nolan had told her about being superstitious when it came to setting fences; how they must be cut during the dry, waning moon to stay straighter, while wooden shingles will lie flat if cut during the dark of the moon.
“Come back on the first night of the full moon. And write down what I’m about to tell you. I need you to bring a few things.”
Quinn scrambled through her purse, pulling out an old gas station receipt, and started writing. The first three things seemed easy enough. When Aella named the fourth, Quinn paused the pen.
“I told you there was a price to pay. And if that troubles you”—Aella pointed at the paper—“I can’t help you. Because that’s only the beginning. Like I said, come back with the money and the items on the list. First day of a new moon. Or don’t come at all.” Quinn watched Aella empty the pipe by thumping it against the willow tree. “Asking for a life to be given isn’t for the faint of heart. A life isn’t free. You make a pact and that’s that.”
Quinn’s fingers moved across the paper, wondering if a lifetime of penance but no deliverance was the worst life she could imagine. The thought of Nolan, the blueprint of the house she wanted to live in—she could almost feel the fluffy carpet beneath her feet, could smell the fresh paint—her longing, and she decided it was all worth it.
“Okay,” Quinn said finally. “If that’s what it takes. I’ll do it.”
Seventeen
AELLA
ALL the Bujny women were born during thunderstorms. There was pressure in the air and a rumbling in the sky as they were pushed from their mothers’ wombs. The Bujnys were crazy, Aella had heard it all her life, but she doubted one could just blame it on the women. They knew how to pick ’em, her grandmother used to say, them as in husbands, and therefore crazy came from both sides of the family.
Aella’s father had killed a man. In cold blood, they said. It started out as nothing, really, an argument, a harsh word here, an even harsher response, just a comment the man made while in a drunken stupor and her daddy didn’t let it go. He wasn’t good at letting go. The judge said he knew what he was doing as opposed to it being some sort of crime of passion, but Aella wasn’t so sure about that. She believed that taking any life demanded passion of some sort, maybe not the raving mad kind of passion in the moment, but her daddy had a kind of passion that can fester and turn into something else altogether, like hot air and cool air meeting and before you know it, there was something dangerous brewing.
“But never mind that story about my daddy,” Aella said when people asked. “That was a long time ago and no one cares about that anymore.”
Her great-grandmother came from Poland and settled in the mountains of Appalachia. Aella asked her often what made her pick those mountains and she said that when you leave the soil and the trees and the mountains of your homeland, you try to find a place to live that reminds you of where you came from. The Germans went to the Midwest, while the Russians went to the Northeast. Neither one of them could quit the snow and the howling winds and long nights and dark days. They would have withered away in Florida or Texas or Louisiana—too much humidity and heat to bear for someone who’s got the tundra and the German forests in their bones. Her grandmother told her of Poland and that it used to be covered in forests, almost ninety percent of it.
Ever since Aella could remember, her mother used to sit by the fire and sing strange songs—Polish, she assumed, but she’d never known her to speak her native language—and she’d measure a leather strip by multiplying the length of her forearm. She’d knot the string and tie objects inside the knots, sometimes feathers, or bones, willow branches, rocks. And she’d sing, her voice growing louder with every knot, and then she’d end up with a long rope and she’d hang it by the fireplace. Sometimes those strings disappeared overnight; sometimes she’d undo one knot per day and then throw it in a nearby creek.
Neither her mother nor her grandmother ever worked a day in their lives the way people think one ought to work, backbreaking labor and such, but they made do. They stared at the bottom of teacups and made salves from plants she wasn’t allowed to touch. Townspeople gave them food, produce, money, or anything they asked for. Those songs and feathers and bones were part of her childhood like other children read Bible stories and people pray the rosary.
All the women in Aella’s family had gifts. Her grandmother was a healer of wounds, making warts and scars disappear in the time it takes an ice cube to melt in the sun.
Her mother was a seer. She knew everything about someone by looking at them; the mailman couldn’t hide his love for another man even though everyone envied his wife and thought him devoted to her. The butcher’s daughter hid her pregnancy but Aella’s mother knew that her cousin was the father. When the dentist told her he wanted to move to Florida, she told him not to travel in the month of August. He didn’t listen and died in an accident.
The most God-fearing people trusted her with her opinion and called upon her in their hours of need. Aella accompanied her as she burned incense beside dead bodies and then opened windows to allow the smoke to escape while draping all mirrors so the ghosts of the dead wouldn’t linger. “The dead sometimes remain and nothing good has ever come from sticking around and some don’t know when to leave, even after they’re dead,” Aella’s mother said. “And without the proper actions, and I’m not talking about a horseshoe hanging upright above the front door, nothing will nudge the spirits along.”
Eventually Aella settled in Aurora. It was never meant to be home, just a place to stay for a while.
One day a woman came along, Q. she called her, for she had an uncommon name that Aella could never recall. She was good with names and faces, never forgot anyone who had come to her for help. Yet Q.’s name eluded her as if there was a part of her she couldn’t grasp, some sort of fracture. Life had broken her, fragmented her in body and mind. There was more than one of her, she made Aella fidget, made her nervous.
She read Q.’s palms then and she understood. The lines in both hands were identical and Aella had never seen such a thing in all her years of people shoving their hands toward her. The left hand showed what a person was born with but the right one told what kind of a person they had become and Q. was all fate.
Nothing lost, nothing gained; it was all set in stone.
Eighteen
DAHLIA
THE day after the fire Bobby and I return to the farmhouse. This time we drive through the line of trees and we park by the front porch, as if we’ve returned home after a day’s work. We approach the cypress tree; it’s the mounds we are interested in.
The tree hasn’t tolerated the drought well and has shed its needles. It sits naked and barren. Behind it, the warped wooden fence has seen better days; the planks nailed loosely to a frame that is just as frail as everything else on the property. I imagine one good kick, maybe just someone leaning against it, and it will probably topple over. What holds it together are dry ivy shoots that made their way through the cracks and gaps in the wood, wrapping themselves around its worn planks like knotted snakes. We stand and consider the mounds, their perfect oval shapes, how deep the cracks in the soil are underneath the grass growing over them.
I tell Bobby the farm is in my mother’s name and his eyes widen. He stews on it for a while.
“This is your mother’s farm? Why didn’t you tell me that last time you dragged me here?”
“I didn’t know then.”
“What’s going on with her anyway? What’s the doctor saying?”
“Physically, she’s fine. It’s just a matter of adjusting her medication. They don’t want her catatonic nor climbing up the walls. At least she can’t start fires while she’s in the hospital.” I sound callous and I feel a tinge of guilt, but then I relax. “She’ll be home in a day or two according to her doctor.”
“Have you asked her about this farm?”
“First chance I get, I’ll bring it up, trust me,” I say.
Bobby scans the surroundings, shaking his head.
“These mounds, Dahlia. They don’t look natural judging by everything else being pretty much flat,” Bobby says. “It’s not recent, that’s for sure. I don’t know what it is.”
I reach for his hand. He holds it as if I’m breakable and even though my hand disappears into his, I know that he’s at ease with the small and fragile things of this world. For a moment I feel like I belong here, always have, as if there’s some long-forgotten connection to him and this place that I’ve denied all these years. Maybe it’s just the land. This farm is a threshold, a forgotten place in time that has some sort of a hold on me. It’s not that I remember it—there’s no recollection of anything, not the structures, not the property—yet is feels as if the farm remembers me, as if the air is buzzing and I can’t escape it regardless of how hard I try. If even for a second I manage to shake off its pull, it finds me again around the next corner, just to remind me it’s been here all along.
“I need you to do something for me,” I say and lean into him. I feel like Eve offering Adam the red apple, seductively stroking its red skin.
“Do something for you?” he repeats and for a split second I think he’s going to kiss me.
I want it as much as he does, yet what I don’t want are complications. I wouldn’t think twice if I planned to leave town in a week or so, if I had a life waiting for me somewhere else—then I’d want to know how it feels to kiss the guy I was friends with, the subtle familiarity paired with the excitement of a spontaneous . . . what? Fling? I know there’s a certain power I have over Bobby, a power I’ve always had, something everybody around us picked up on. I can’t deny that I want to feel his lips on mine.
“Break down the door for me,” I say. “I want to go inside.”
He ponders it, I can tell. I handed him the apple; he wonders what it tastes like. He too wants to know about this place.
“Come tomorrow I have to be out of the house, remember?” Even I hear the sarcasm in my voice. “I can’t play this game anymore, Bobby. I can’t live in another motel. If this is my mother’s farm, we might as well live here. At least for now.”
We are caught up in this moment, this hint of the past and the present, and so Bobby says nothing, doesn’t even take a second to think about it, but turns and makes for the front door, grabs the knob, and pushes the door with this shoulder. Just like before, nothing happens
. He puts all his weight into it. The door shifts—there’s now a visible gap between it and the frame—but the hinges hold tight as if they refuse to give way.
“I don’t want to destroy the whole frame. I have tools in the car. Wait here,” Bobby says and disappears down the porch steps.
I step closer to the door and run my fingers across the frame. There’s a lighter patch where something is missing, like an old knocker. The wood has hairline cracks allowing the post to seep through from the inside outward.
A weariness overcomes me. Entering the farmhouse seems bold and heartless and evokes a kind of unpleasantness that stops me in my tracks. I feel as if I am intruding somehow, disturbing something that didn’t ask to be disturbed. I find myself shivering in the summer heat. I no longer feel giddy with anticipation—the fact that we are about to enter suddenly doesn’t feel right at all.
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this?” I say when Bobby returns from the car with a tire iron in his right hand. My head is buzzing like a beehive and the colors around me are off, covering the world like a lace veil of pastel psychedelic cutwork.
“Okay, Dahlia, what is it going to be?” Bobby sounds almost impatient, as if he’s talking about us and not the door he’s about to break down. “Let’s just do this. Step back,” he says.
Bobby inserts the tire iron between the frame and the lock and wiggles it about. Then he hands it to me and gives the door one more shove. It screeches on its hinges, gives in, and flings wide open. It hits the wall on the inside.
I step over the threshold. Step isn’t the right word; it seems like it’s more a crossing over, as if I’m progressing from one state of being to another, immediately feeling the energy of the house, its abandoned walls and its shrieking floors. The air is hot and stale, and there is something unsettling about it, as if there’s a familiarity that takes me back to a place I no longer remember.
The stagnant air smells of dust and wood, but more than the individual scents that cumulate into a thickness and heaviness, it contains an entire lifetime of scents that have gathered in this small foyer, the place where people come and go, take off and pull on shoes, prepare to step outside or inside, from one place to another. There’s a woolen rug in the middle of the foyer and when I step on it, I can hear a slight crunching sound beneath my feet.
The Good Daughter Page 18