by M Sawyer
“Call me. I want to hear how you’re doing,” Rebecca said when they broke apart. Nolin nodded.
They both climbed into their cars, and Rebecca drove back up the road toward Maxwell.
Nolin didn’t feel like going back to the house yet. Her mind was a carousel of worry, exhaustion, and confusion. The car lurched out of the pockmarked lot and onto the road. Her mind wandered as she rambled aimlessly down the street and around the town.
She wasn’t getting out of this unscathed.
Either she’d stay and let the poison of her mother’s presence work its way through her, or she’d leave and let the guilt eat her from the inside out like maggots. One way or the other, this would be over soon.
Soon, she found herself at the edge of town by the hills where she and Drew had run. Warmth filled her stomach as she passed the sign for the trailhead, tucked into the trees. If she hadn’t known it was there, she never would have noticed the small wooden plaque on the worn fence post. She smiled. The car ambled into the hills.
She was sure she’d been this way before, but the wooded hills and the winding road looked unfamiliar. The woods here were thinner than they were closer to town. She could see far into their depths, lush and green in the late spring. Sprigs of colorful wildflowers bloomed along the edge of the pavement. Trees cast shadows over the road, and she drove through stripes of light and darkness.
The road sloped upward. A yellow sign warned of a sharp turn. The car lurched and made a scraping sound as she downshifted. The car swung around the corner, and Nolin’s hands tightened on the wheel as the force of the turn threw her shoulder into the door. She eased onto the brakes. That sign wasn’t kidding.
For just a second, her eyes flicked downward at the RPM meter on the dashboard. When she glanced up her, heart leapt into her throat.
Melissa was standing in the road.
Nolin slammed on the brakes and jerked the wheel. The car skidded off the road. Gravel crunched beneath the tires, spraying pebbles over the doors. It groaned to a stop only inches from the tree line.
The world was still for a moment. Nolin froze, her mouth open in shock and her heart slamming in her chest. Her limbs burned with adrenaline.
In the rearview mirror, Nolin saw her mother standing in the middle of the road, looking up at the trees with her lips parted slightly and eyes wide. She looked like a child in grown-up’s clothes. Her work shoes dangled from one hand. Nolin’s eyes traveled down her mother’s spindly legs to her bleeding feet.
Melissa glanced over her shoulder at the car and started as if she’d just noticed it. Then, she turned down the road and started walking away.
Nolin snapped out of her daze and threw the car door open.
“Melissa!” she shouted as she climbed out of the car. Her blood boiled.
Melissa didn’t turn. She walked faster, her feet dotting the pavement with spots of blood. “Hey!” Nolin screamed. “What the hell are you doing?”
She jogged to catch up with Melissa, who broke into a run at the last second. Nolin grabbed her shoulder and whirled her around.
“Look at me!” Nolin shouted. “I almost killed you!” Melissa shrank back, then stiffened her jaw. Her icy claw grabbed Nolin’s hand and threw it off her shoulder.
“I’m walking,” she said simply.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Nolin hissed through her teeth. Her limbs shook with anger and ragged adrenaline. She could still hear her heart ripping blood through her veins. “Why, exactly, are you walking? You’re supposed to be at work.”
Melissa looked away again. Her stiff jaw slackened. Nolin thought she saw her chin quiver.
“What?” Nolin spat.
Melissa straightened again and crossed her arms. “I’m on a lunch break.”
“The hell you are!” Nolin snarled. “We’re miles out of town.”
It was surreal. Nolin had never lost her temper at her mother before. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d lost her temper at all. Normally, she would have expected Melissa to fight back, to punish her. Nolin would have been terrified to yell at her. To see her now though, as thin as she was in those plain work clothes, barefoot in the road and at a loss for words, Nolin felt like a monster. She’d never seen Melissa look so vulnerable, not even when she’d been unconscious in a hospital bed.
Nolin sucked in a deep breath and forced herself to calm down. Slowly, the pounding drumbeat of her heart slowed. Her fists unclenched.
Melissa still had her arms folded. She was looking off into the trees, deliberately avoiding Nolin’s gaze.
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Melissa said curtly. “I’m allowed to take a walk. I wonder, though, why are you out here, Nolin? Just a casual drive?”
Nolin pressed a palm to her forehead, summoning all the strength she had to keep from grabbing her mother and shaking the truth from her like a candy bar stuck in a vending machine.
“Don’t give me this shit,” Nolin said, her voice quivering. “Tell me what on earth you’re doing out here, right now.”
Melissa chuckled and adjusted her glasses. Nolin wondered if she’d really lost it this time, casually adjusting her glasses behind her ear as if she weren’t barefoot in the middle of the road with her feet bleeding. “Or what?” she said. “You’ll yell at me? Oh dear, I don’t know how I’ll endure it.”
Nolin bunched her hands into fists again, the muscles in her shoulders tight. “Fine,” she said simply. “I’ll leave your ass out here then. Have fun walking home.” She nodded to Melissa’s bleeding feet.
She turned back to the car, cursing quietly, then something clicked in her mind. She slowly turned back to your mother. Her throat felt dry.
“Did…did you lose your job?”
Melissa glanced at her briefly, her eyes stony, then looked back to the woods.
“You did. You don’t have a job.”
Melissa pretended to examine her cuticles. Nolin sighed wearily and brought her hands to her face. Shit. SHIT.
Melissa still didn’t look at her.
Nolin frantically looked around her feet for something to kick. Her foot swung at a scrap of bark and sent it skittering into the trees. Melissa’s eyes followed it as it spun off the road, only mildly interested.
“Did you get fired?” Nolin demanded.
Melissa nodded.
“Today?”
Melissa’s shoulders dropped slightly. She picked up one bloody foot to kick at a pebble in the road. “A month ago,” she said quietly.
“But…do you have savings? Severance? Anything?” Nolin questioned desperately, though she guessed the answer.
“Nothing.”
Nolin thought of the house, of the unopened envelopes she’d cleared off the table. Unpaid bills, she now realized.
Shit, shit, shit.
Nolin ran her hands into her hair, pulling it back from her face, and looked to the sky. It was smooth, perfect blue, completely cloudless. The trees that lined the road cut a jagged line in the sky on either side of her vision. She breathed in deeply and smelled the woods, letting the aroma fill her. Squeezing her eyes shut, she looked back to her mother.
“Get in the car.”
Melissa kept her jaw tight, but didn’t protest. Arms still crossed tightly over her thin torso, she stepped deliberately to the passenger side of the crooked car, popped the door open, and plopped down into the seat.
Nolin sucked in another breath of forest air, then turned back to the car and climbed in.
Neither of them spoke on the way home. Nolin’s temples throbbed. She drove back to the house in a daze, her mind whirling through possibilities and problems, wondering how much time had been added to her sentence in that house. Somewhere, there was a vague thought of Alaska, cold water, and glaciers she would never see.
Chapter 33
IN A WAY, Melissa felt relieved.
No more leaving the house each day, pretending she had somewhere to go. No more wandering aimlessly while blisters bloomed on he
r feet. Nolin knew she was a failure. Of course, she’d probably known all along.
Melissa perched on the kitchen chair. Nolin knelt at her feet, tending to her bleeding blisters, cleaning them and wrapping them in gauze. Melissa watched her daughter’s face, focused and serene. Nolin’s green eyes narrowed as she carefully wrapped the gauze around Melissa’s toes and tilted her head from side to side to see what she was doing.
Something in Melissa’s heart flickered. A burning tear slipped from her right eye, trickled down her face, off her chin, and landed with a tiny plop on Nolin’s arm. Nolin paused, glanced at the wet spot on her arm, and then continued wrapping without bothering to wipe it off.
“We need to figure out what you’re going to do,” Nolin said hoarsely. “You need a new job, and, honestly, I think you should sell the house and find an apartment or something more affordable.” Her eyes darted upward at Melissa’s face, gauging her reaction. The flickering part of Melissa’s heart jumped when she briefly met her daughter’s gaze.
“I know it’s probably hard to sell the house,” Nolin said quickly. “I know you’ve been here for a long time, but it will be a lot easier for you to support...”
“No, it’s fine,” Melissa sighed. “I want to sell.”
Nolin sat back on her heels and looked up with wide eyes.
“Really?”
Melissa nodded. “I hate this place. I want to leave.”
Nolin’s mouth set in a grim line and her emerald eyes blazed. “Well, all right then.” Then she went back to tending Melissa’s feet.
She was right, Melissa thought. I do need her help. For the first time since Nolin had arrived, Melissa was glad she was there.
***
Nolin walked to the library to clear her head. She took long strides, gravel crunching under her sneakers. Sweat dampened the back of her tee shirt.
Find a realtor. Set an appointment. Go from there. She’d never sold a house before. She was in over her head. They both were.
She couldn’t believe Melissa hadn’t told her she’d lost her job.
Then again, maybe she could. Maybe she just couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed.
The willow tree stood in front of the library to greet her, its vines swaying as though it were underwater, like a giant jellyfish. She reached up to run her fingers through the ends of a vine and feel the smooth leaves against her thumb and forefingers. It felt like greeting an old friend with an almost-forgotten secret handshake.
She expected to see Ms. Savage at her usual perch behind the information desk, but a pale young girl around Nolin’s age sat there instead, her thin lips parted slightly as she typed. As Nolin stepped in, the girl jerked her head in surprise, as if the last thing she expected was for someone to walk into her library.
“Can I help you?” she said nervously.
“Um,” said Nolin, still taken aback that it wasn’t Ms. Savage. “May I use the computer?”
“Oh, sure.” The girl leapt up from the desk. She skittered to the line of computers along the back window, wiggled the mouse of one to bring the screen to life, then typed something.
“There you go,” she said, not looking at Nolin as she retreated to the desk.
Nolin sat in the hard chair and set to work.
Calder realtors, she typed, and then scrolled through pages of names, smiling headshots, reviews, and appointment information until her brain felt numb.
Maybe she should take a quick break.
Her fingers poised over the keyboard. Changeling, they typed the moment the word popped into her mind.
Her mind still couldn’t shake the strange word, couldn’t explain the odd curiosity it awakened in her. Ms. Savage had told her about it, but she wanted to know more. At least to find out why this silly concept intrigued her so much.
She scrolled through the titles that popped on the search page, filtering out the fluff related to movies and TV shows until she found articles related to actual lore. Her eyes whipped back and forth as she scanned; for what, she wasn’t sure.
...ill, disordered, or unusual children were often thought to be the offspring of fairies, trolls or goblins left in the place of the original human child...
Just like Ms. Savage had said.
She clicked on “Means of Identifying a Changeling.” Something in her mind told her to get back to finding realtors, but her unrelenting curiosity drove her further.
Voracious appetites…malicious tempers…dislike of shoes…a greenish tint to the skin…vastly intelligent...
The page was illustrated with sketches of children with twisted, evil-looking faces, pictures of screaming mothers holding monstrous-looking babies. The drawings reminded her of her mother’s illustrations.
Bitterness rose in her throat. The fluttering in her stomach stopped and gave way to a lead weight.
She flipped through article after article, dismissing each as folklore and paranoia. She felt sorry for any child who lived among that superstition and was forced to bear the label of changeling. Goblin.
Stop. You need to find a realtor.
Nolin closed the article and started searching realtors again, her mind slipping into a bland numbness. She propped her elbow on the desk and rested her head in her hand. Her eyes slid closed.
Her bedroom was dark, different. Instead of an empty room coated with dust, there were decorations on the walls. Instead of her bed, Nolin lay in a crib with a mobile hanging above it. Shiny stars and moons turned slowly in a breeze from the open window.
The room smelled of the woods, that unmistakable scent of earth, leaves, and panic, hot and metallic. She kicked her tiny legs and giggled, beating her fists in the air and on the mattress. The crib shook as she wiggled. The stars and moons on the mobile twitched. Something crunched in her hand, and she held up a chubby fist to examine it; a dried leaf, crushed to papery shreds. How strange.
She kicked again and realized one of her feet was bare while the other was stuffed into a little pink shoe with tiny roses on the toe. She squealed with delight and she looked up to the open window.
Something pale and slender was slipping through the window above her crib, and Nolin realized it was a hand and an arm, white as aspen bark. A face followed, wild and shadowed in the darkness, surrounded by dark hair. Nolin squealed again and reached for the face. Her hand closed on a handful of matted hair.
The soft, white hand closed around Nolin’s chubby wrist. The creature brought Nolin’s hand to its lips and kissed it softly.
“Good-bye,” it whispered. A woman’s voice, soft and quiet as the breeze. Then, the creature released Nolin’s arm and slipped out of the window.
Nolin reached farther, her forehead wrinkling as she struggled to understand. Why had she gone?
“Ma,” Nolin babbled. She didn’t know she could make that sound, or what the sound meant, but it seemed like the only thing to say. “Ma,” she said again.
Nolin jerked awake, scanning the room madly. She scrambled out of her chair. The chair fell over with a clatter.
“Are…are you all right, miss?” the girl behind the desk stammered.
Nolin meant to nod, but she just stumbled across the room to the front door, fumbled with the handle, and staggered out into the yard of the library.
She struggled to gather her thoughts. She’d fallen asleep and had a dream...hadn’t she? But it felt so real.
Nolin rubbed her wrist. She could almost feel the creature’s cool touch on her skin, feel the breeze on her face and in her short baby hair, the breeze on her bare feet...
What if it wasn’t a dream, she thought. What if it was a memory?
Head swimming, Nolin broke into a jog down the street toward her house. Her legs pumped faster and faster until she was sprinting. She reached the house in no time and burst through the front door, vaguely acknowledging that Melissa wasn’t downstairs.
Nolin found her backpack resting beside the couch, unzipped it, ripped out the jeans she’d worn a few days ago, and fumbled with
the pocket until she found it.
The faded pink shoe uncoiled in her hand from its bunched-up ball, exactly like the one in her memory. This shoe had a mate in the woods, under the tree she’d visited in her dreams, and once in her waking hours.
Or maybe, she thought, she’d been there even before that.
Nolin remembered two dark eyes, a wild face. She gasped like she’d been punched in the stomach. She’d seen someone in the woods that day, under that tree. She tried to recall the face. The harder she tried to focus on it, the further it drifted from her mind.
The tiny shoe fell from her hand and landed on the floor without a sound.
Changeling.
The word rose in her mind like something dead floating in water. It all made sense. Her mother never let Nolin call her “Mom.” She never showed any attachment or affection at all. As if she knew.
Of course she knew.
No wonder Melissa hated her; her baby was replaced by an awful creature—a changeling.
Changeling.
Nolin mouthed the ugly word.
She looked down at her hands, her arms, and noticed the greenish tone of her skin. She’d noticed before, and it never struck her as odd before now. No human had skin like this. Her sinewy muscles, the green veins in her hands, her constantly tangled hair. Air caught in her lungs, and she choked. Her stomach roiled. She ran to the bathroom down the hall and threw herself across the toilet to retch.
Clambering to her feet in front of the sink, she turned on the faucet and cupped her hands under the flow to wipe her mouth. Her skin burned with fever. She splashed cold water over her scorched face, then stuck her head under the tap, soaking her hair, letting the cold streams run down her neck and into her ears. Without wringing her hair, she tossed her head back. Water ran down her chest and back. Dark spots appeared on her shirt where the water seeped through. She could breathe again, but now she breathed too hard. She was still fiery hot. She crossed her arms over her chest and peeled off her tee shirt. Her muscles rippled with her rattling breaths, her shiny stomach pinching in and out, shoulders tensed up by her ears. The more she watched her reflection, the less human she looked. She looked less like a woman and more like the willow tree in front of the library—her body a hard, toughened thing, rooted down, while her wild hair hung down like vines.