by Megan Hart
Her hands shook, and what had she expected, anyway? To use her nonexistent karate skills to fend off the boogeyman? She backed up a step, out the door, leaving it ajar.
“Ethan! Let’s go!” Five signal bars or not, this place was creepy. “Now!”
“But...”
“Now,” Kendra said the way her mom did when she meant business. “Let’s get out of here.”
At the edge of the clearing she looked back. It might’ve been the shadows or the fact she needed glasses, but what she saw made her shove her brother along faster.
The door to the shack had closed.
TWENTY-NINE
BARE FEET PRESSED the soft grass. Cluck, cluck, clucking chickens scratched and pecked in the yard beyond. Victor, tail spread wide, showed off for her. She would find his feathers in the grass, take them inside. Long and soft and pretty, they would make her a princess.
In the kitchen, Gran offered a plate of bread and jelly and allowed Mari to sit at the table while she talked and talked. Mari didn’t understand what Gran said, her mouth was mushy and mumbly, no teeth and a flapping, slobbery tongue. But Them had come two sleeps ago and so there was food, enough to go around, even with small bits dropped on the floor to satisfy the always begging dogs. After eating, Gran brushed Mari’s hair and washed her face and sent her back outside to play with the new kittens in the barn. That was a good day.
Long, long days of sunshine and freedom. Fresh air that tangled her hair and blushed her cheeks. Running, running, spinning in circles, arms out.
That was her childhood.
There were bad times, too, Mari thinks as she scatters a handful of feed for the chickens Rosie from down the lane is supposed to take care of. She bends to let them peck from her hand. There is one red hen called Sally who will sit on her lap and be petted, if Mari lets her, and after a moment or so, she settles onto the ground. Her clothes will get dirty, but she doesn’t care.
Her childhood was filled with bad times by anyone’s standards. She knows it. Hunger. Fear. Deprivation. Loss.
And yet, back again in the place where she’d been small, Mari only feels content. No carpooling or music lessons or play dates to arrange. No constant blather from the television set. No honking traffic.
Here there is the sound of chuckling water she so longed for. The sigh of breezes in the trees. There is sunshine and the fresh scent of grass and of wildflowers when she goes into the field behind the barn where the weeds have grown high enough to hide her when she crouches.
Here her children don’t spend hours in front of their computers or behind a desk or locked inside the shadows. Now they’ve both gone to wade in the stream, to build a fort from fallen branches. Kendra, who usually clings to her phone like it was going to take her to the prom, left it on the counter this morning. They’ve both gone brown from the sun, lean from activity. Here they are lovely and wild.
When they come down out of the woods, something in their shifting gazes tells her they were not doing what they said they’d been doing, but to ask them would mean she has to confront them about being untruthful. Then there must be punishment and discipline, and right now Mari wants nothing to do with that sort of thing. Instead, she calls to them, her brightest shining stars. Her delight.
She takes their hands and dances with them in the dirt of the farmyard the way she’s done with them all their lives, and even Kendra concedes to dip and sway. Chickens peck and squawk around their feet. The three of them link their fingers. Make a circle.
Never ending.
THIRTY
AT THE KNOCK on the door, Ryan turned off the TV before saying, “Yeah?”
He’d been watching the same two tapes for the past couple hours, fascinated by the change in the little girl from the beginning of her treatment and the final tape, recorded a few days before Mari left the hospital and went to the halfway house where she’d lived for two years before being adopted by his father. He was even more fascinated in the differences between the girl he met at his father’s house, the one who eventually seduced him in front of the living room fireplace, and the one who stood in front of him now with a sandwich and chips on a plate in one hand, a beer in the other.
“Hungry?” Mari asked. “I made you some lunch.”
“Thanks, babe.” He wasn’t hungry. To turn her down would be to earn a puzzled frown, so he took the plate and settled it on the desk. He caught her wrist before she could leave. “Where are the kids?”
“Outside playing.”
He pulled her onto his lap for a nuzzle she seemed glad to give him. “You sure they’ll be okay?”
“I told them to stay close. We can’t keep them locked up, Ryan.”
“No. I know that. Just after what happened...”
Mari hesitated, then said, “Sometimes, bad things happen.”
He knew that, too. “Are you going out today?”
“No. Do you need something?” His wife made like she was going to get up, but Ryan pulled her close again.
“I thought if you were going to the library I’d tag along. Do some stuff online.” There were some secondary research resources he wanted to look into.
“Oh.” She shook her head a little. “I wasn’t planning on it, today. But I do have to get there this week to return books and pay for the one Kendra lost.”
“What do you mean, lost?” Ryan frowned.
Mari kissed him. “Don’t worry about it.”
“She has to be more responsible—”
She kissed him again, silencing him. “I’ll take care of it.”
He was only slightly mollified, but let it go.
“How’s the writing going?”
It was his turn to hesitate. “Still taking notes. Some stuff doesn’t add up. I need to do some research.”
“Oh? Like what?” She didn’t sound interested, and he was sure it was because she wasn’t.
That was a good thing, since Ryan had yet to tell her the subject of his research, his book, was her. It wasn’t a lie, he reminded himself, if she didn’t ask him outright.
He’d always known how special Mari was, but the more he learned, the more he understood. She’d done more than simply survive, she’d done what hardly any other children who’d gone through what she had had been able to do. She’d thrived.
But there were pieces of the puzzle missing. An entire six months’ worth of files were gone, and he thought he knew where they’d be. In storage at his mother’s house. Ryan had no desire to ask her for them. It would open up a vitriolic box of venom, at the very least. But he had to find out everything. Like how they’d figured out Mari could speak with words, and how that had changed how they worked with her. Or who was the forest prince she’d spoken of in a few of the early tapes, using her hands to ask for him and eventually stopping when nobody had given her an answer, probably because that early on they’d been unable to interpret her question.
Ryan could, because he’d worn his eyes to blurriness watching those videos over and over again. His dad and Lois had missed so much in the beginning. Mari’s simple signs hadn’t been able to communicate any kind of complex ideas, yet she’d been very clear about what she wanted. And they’d missed it, time and again, more consumed later with the discovery she’d been able to understand them, and even speak to some degree, all along.
“Oh...need to check a few things, that’s all.” He didn’t want to mention he’d be visiting his mother. “I might have to take a trip sometime soon. Do some more research. Maybe talk to some people.”
“What?” She frowned. “Where? When?”
“Just back to Philly, babe. No big deal.” He kept his voice light. “I’m going to have to go back, anyway, to meet with Saul and Jack about...stuff. I’ll just take an overnight. Maybe,” he added quickly when he saw her face. “I haven’t decided yet.”
Mari bit the inside of her cheek. “Could we all go? The kids would probably like a couple nights in the city. We could go to the museum or something.”
&nb
sp; He laughed. “That would be silly, wouldn’t it? We can take them to the museum anytime. It’s not like we don’t live close enough. Besides, I’ll be working. And...” Ryan sobered. “With our house being rented for the summer, paying for two hotel rooms just isn’t in the budget.”
His wife nodded, looking away. “Okay.”
Ryan reached to pull her close again. “Babe, I promise you. It’s all going to work out just fine. Okay?”
He waited. Now she’d ask him what he was writing about. What he needed to research.
“When do you think you might have to go?” she asked instead.
“Next week. Not before then. Listen, Mari,” Ryan said quietly, needing to know. “Are you all right? With this? Being back here, I mean.”
Her chin lifted. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Just...asking.”
She got off his lap with a smile. “That sandwich is lame. How about I make you some spaghetti and garlic bread. Salad. I can open a bottle of wine, make it fancy. The kids won’t be back for a while.”
It was an invitation he was meant to take, and Ryan took it. He let his wife lead him by the hand upstairs to their bedroom, where they made love in the sticky heat of an early summer afternoon, right out in the bright sunshine the way they’d done before the kids came along and lovemaking had become something to in the dark, behind locked doors. And when they’d finished, he kissed her while she giggled and wiggled away from him, leaving him naked in their bed to go downstairs and finish fixing the lunch he’d eat in just a few minutes.
She hadn’t asked him about what he was doing, and he supposed he should be glad for that. He’d have told her the truth, had she asked. But he’d asked her a question, and she hadn’t given him an answer. It made Ryan realize something important.
In all the years he’d known her, Ryan couldn’t think of one time when his wife had ever lied to him. Yet now he wondered about all the times she hadn’t told him the truth.
THIRTY-ONE
MARI HAS BEEN cooking all day. Homemade corn bread, chili, baked potatoes and toppings. Brownies and cookies for dessert. Blueberry muffins for breakfast tomorrow. She looks at the wealth of this food and knows it’s not enough. It can never be enough.
Despite the banquet, she doesn’t have much of an appetite. All day she’s been trying to absorb herself in work. Cleaning the house that’s already clean, caring for the chickens that peck and scratch in the dirt and cluck around her feet and squat in front of her like she’s the rooster. She has nothing else to do in the house of her childhood, and too many memories fighting to overwhelm her.
Ryan is leaving her.
For a day, he says. Maybe two. But the fact is, he brought her back here, and now he’s going away, and she is afraid of losing everything she holds so close. Terrified of being abandoned. She hasn’t felt this way for years.
No mess. Never. No garbage piled high, no dog poop on the floor. She likes coming back to this room, her room, Mari’s room, they said. Her things. Today after her session with Dr. Calder, someone had taken away her carefully constructed village of blocks.
Her mouth opened. Wide. Wider. Screaming. Fists punching. Feet kicking. The table, overturned. The bed covers, ripped off. By the time she got to digging her nails into her own skin, tearing lines of red up one arm and down the other, Devonn had come through the door.
“Hey! Here now, stop all that!” Devonn was the biggest man she’d ever seen. Always in white. Big brown eyes. Big white teeth. He smelled always of nosetickle...cinnamon, Dr. Calder said. “What’s going on?”
Sobbing, out of breath, disgusted with herself and everything else, Mari kicked at an overturned chair. She tried to tell him about the blocks. How they’d been set up on the floor by the bed, and now they were gone. Not in the box. Not under the bed. Not by the window.
Not. Nowhere. Gone.
She was crouched on the floor with Devonn’s arms around her when Dr. Calder came in. “What’s the matter with her?”
“I don’t know. She started screaming.” Devonn pushed hair off Mari’s face from where it had stuck from the wet of her tears. “She doesn’t seem to be sick.”
“I just saw her twenty minutes ago.” Dr. Calder got on the floor next to her. “Mari. What’s wrong?”
She told him. Or tried to. A low snuffle of loss, a clench and release of fists to show empty palms. She traced a square with one finger in the air, then against the back of his hand, but he didn’t understand.
They hardly ever did.
“Do you feel sick?” Dr. Calder put a hand to her head, but Mari jerked away.
Not sick.
But he didn’t understand her this time, either. She had words for so many things, so much to say, but nothing she did could make them hear her. She’d been quiet too long.
Quiet.
Hide.
They were talking over her head, not listening to her. Not paying attention. They wanted to know what was wrong with her, but they wouldn’t listen. They talked and talked and talked, but she didn’t talk.
“Mine!” Mari stood. Shouted. Her mouth opened. Throat hurt, sore, lips moved. Tongue. “MY BLOCKS GONE!”
Dr. Calder had cupped his face in his hands, telling her what a good girl she was. How proud he was of her. But he was proud of himself, Mari knew that. Because he thought somehow he’d fixed her.
Later, when they discovered she’d been able to talk the whole time, that her choice had been silence instead of speech, there were more tests. More visitors. More being asked to perform for the guests who came with shaking heads, their oohs and aahs...but who most often left without leaving behind any money.
It was the moment everything changed.
By the time Leon took her from the hospital that had been her home since she was eight, she’d learned to read and write, to be unafraid of communicating with spoken words—the limited number of them she knew and had rarely used aloud in her childhood, since Gran discouraged her speaking or making much noise at all—instead of grunts and hand gestures. She could bathe herself, dress herself. She’d grown taller. Filled out. And at thirteen, she was no longer the fascinating case study that had kept so many people interested for so long. Once she was no longer the Pine Grove Pixie, nobody seemed to care.
“This is her?” the woman in the beige dress had said, looking at Leon with perfectly arched brows, a face full of surprise. “I thought she’d be...different.”
“Pleased to meet you.” Mari had offered her hand the way Leon had told her was polite.
But the woman only shook her head. Other people who came did much the same thing. They expected to see some wild, muttering freak, and when they found out Mari had become something else, they went away and didn’t come back.
The money disappeared. Without it, Mari had no place left in the hospital. There was a place for her, of course. They weren’t going to just toss her out on the street. The halfway house was going to be the perfect home for her according to the hospital’s social worker, an enormous woman with a kind face who didn’t know Mari at all.
“They think I’m stupid,” Mari had told Leon.
“No, Mariposa. They just think you need some help, that’s all. And...maybe you do.” He’d patted her shoulder, then her hair, hand resting on top of her head for a long silent moment, before he’d said, “Some of it’s my fault. I thought we were doing good for you. I thought we were helping you.”
Two years in that halfway house, sharing a room with three other girls who’d stolen cars and slept with their mother’s boyfriends and set fires. Two years of working in the kitchen and cleaning the bathrooms so that she’d have some kind of skills to support herself with. She’d watched the other girls come and go, some returning, others disappearing forever.
If Leon hadn’t taken her in and adopted her against what she knew now must’ve been every ethical advisory, Mari would probably still be living in the halfway house or one like it. And if Ryan hadn’t married her, who knew where she
might’ve gone? What she might’ve done without her husband? Her children? It’s almost not worth imagining.
Yet she imagines it.
In her dreams she’s always been wild, but here in this house the desire calls to her even when she’s awake. She wants to scrounge in the dirt with her fingers, sifting for roots or mushrooms. She wants to strip off her clothes and run naked in the rain to wash herself clean. She wants to dip water from the stream to quench her thirst. She wants to run and run and run from the idea of cleaning toilets and paying bills and attending parent-teacher conferences where she never knows what to say because she never went to school the way her children do. She wants to run away from casual conversation at cocktail parties, where people ask what she does, where she grew up, where she came from.
Who she is.
True, she doesn’t long for the filth and cold and constant hunger. She doesn’t want to live on the floor with dogs, hiding away like some terrible, shameful secret. She doesn’t want to return to the life she had as a child, in which nobody spoke to her, acknowledged her. Loved her.
She doesn’t really want to trade this life for that, but even in this house, even with the changes time has made in it and her, she can’t help but think about what she might’ve become had nobody found her, or if Leon hadn’t adopted her. If Ryan hadn’t loved her.
She can’t stop thinking about it, so along with the baking and the cooking and the cleaning, she’s been pacing. The kitchen is the one room she ought to want to avoid, yet she can’t stay out of it. Her hands move in shadow-puppet patterns, signaling her thoughts and emotions to nobody because there’s nobody there to see. Ryan is locked up in his office, the door closed and locked, the kids are outside exploring.