Banished (5 page)

He didn’t need to finish. I didn’t know what his home life was like, but it was safe to assume it had certain things in common with mine.

I changed the subject, and we talked about classes and teachers. I was surprised to learn that he was considering trying to get into AP American History. He’d be the first Morrie I’d ever heard of to get into an Advanced Placement class. He asked me what I liked to do after school, and I told him about Chub, and Sawyer listened and nodded and even laughed when I told him the way Chub followed Rascal around the yard, like he thought he was part dog.

“Hey,” he said when my house came into view. “I just want to say I’m really sorry about, you know, Milla and what she said. She don’t mean anything by it.”

I doubted that was true—whatever Milla thought about me, it seemed like she felt it strongly. I tried to think of a way to ask about her, and the Morries in general, without offending Sawyer. The way he’d agreed to walk with me so readily, the way he looked at me at school when he didn’t think I’d notice—I was pretty sure he had a crush on me, and it felt good. I’d never been wanted by a boy before, and I didn’t want to mess it up by making him uncomfortable.

“I … always wondered why Milla and I were never friends,” I said carefully. I was trying to figure out what to say next when a car pulled up behind us and gunned its engine. We scrambled off the shoulder into the weedy edge of the woods.

When I turned around to look, I saw that it wasn’t a car at all but a battered old green Ford pickup. The driver rolled the window down and hung out an arm.

It was Rattler Sikes.

Cold fear shot through my body as Rattler leaned out the window and looked straight at me, but when he spoke, it was directed at Sawyer.

“Git on in the truck, boy,” he said, and I could see that his teeth were surprisingly white and straight. His eyes were a brown so dark they were almost black, flinty and sparking some strong emotion. Maybe curiosity. Maybe rage.

“I don’t—she asked me to—” Sawyer started, his gaze darting between me and Rattler.

“I didn’t ask you a question, did I, boy,” Rattler said. His tone stayed even, but there was a threat in it, a shadow of violence that reached into me and curled around my heart.

“No,” Sawyer mumbled, his chin lowered.

“Ain’t gonna tell you agin.”

Sawyer glanced at me—he didn’t meet my eyes, just gave me a quick view of his face, which was cast in misery and, it seemed to me, apology. He trudged around to the passenger side and got in. Inside the cab, he stared straight ahead.

Rattler continued to watch me. As uncomfortable as it was to be the focus of his attention, I didn’t look away. There was something in the way he looked at me, something that kept me from running.

Rattler’s voice lowered even further, a raw whisper. “You take care, hear, Hailey girl.”

The truck pulled away slowly, the tires crunching gravel and spitting up loose rocks and dead leaves. Rattler’s eyes tracked me, and just when it seemed like he would run off the road, he smacked the side of the cab with the flat of his hand and turned the wheel back straight on the road. He sped up and I smelled the exhaust from the hanging, corroded tailpipe.

I walked toward the house, and Rascal came bounding across the yard, ears flying, happy to see me—but Rattler’s voice stayed in my head. So low, I thought again, that most people wouldn’t even be able to hear it.

But
I
could hear. I could hear him just fine.

C
HAPTER
5

S
HE ALMOST DIDN
’
T STOP
outside of town, but at the last second she took the exit that led past the Show-Me Trading Post before heading out to State Road 9
.

She’d left first thing in the morning after the longest night of her life, lying in the dark and replaying that horrible scene over and over, the things she had learned about her boyfriend—and the one surprise he’d saved for last
.

So much would have been different, if she had only known. It didn’t help anything to think about what might have been, but deep in the night, when the silence was most profound and the dark reached all the way into her soul, it was hard to resist
.

Today she would start to put things right
.

The Show-Me Trading Post was even more run-down than she remembered, a ramshackle cinder-block building with gaudy displays in dirty windows, hardly the place to buy someone a gift
.
But she was worried that the girl, who would never have heard about
her
either, might be skittish. Maybe a small token, a gesture to show that she wanted to help, could smooth things over for their first meeting
.

There was nothing on the shelves that felt right, though. She considered a cardboard stand displaying fruit-flavored lip gloss, a cheap-looking bead bracelet kit, a rack of fashion magazines, before settling on a generic MP3 player with earbuds. She could buy the girl something nicer later—once they were together, once she had proved that her intentions were good
.

As she slipped the player off its hook on a Peg-Board rack near the back of the store, the door jangled and two men walked in, caps pulled low
.

She shrank back, slipping into the shadow of a tall refrigerator that held soft drinks and beer. She had seen those men before, at the lab. They sometimes came to meet with her boyfriend in private. They didn’t look like scientists—not with their generic-looking dark jackets that did not entirely conceal the holsters underneath. Their visits were brief, and afterward her boyfriend usually grew distant for a day or two, saying little, staying in his office late and monitoring the high-res displays in his office that were tilted so that only he could see them
.

One of the men talked to the cashier, showing her something small and flat. The cashier, a brassy-haired woman with glasses on a chain around her neck, answered in a voice loud enough to hear in the back of the store
.

“
No, don’t b’lieve so,” she said indifferently
.

More murmuring as the man gestured insistently while his
companion glanced around. She edged back into the corner between the refrigerator and the wall and flattened her body into the small space so that she couldn’t be seen from the front of the store
.

“
No, never,” the cashier repeated. “But then again, I ain’t from town. I live twenty miles down to Casey, so I wouldn’t probably know her, now would I.
”

The man tucked the photo away—because that was what it had to be, wasn’t it, a photo of the girl—and slid a bill onto the countertop glass, then flipped a card on top of the money
.

“
Call if you remember anything later,” he said in a louder voice. Her heart pounded as she watched the two men turn and make their way out of the store
.

So, he hadn’t waited, then. He might have believed the story she gave him last night, her terrified attempt to convince him that finding out about the girl meant nothing more to her than good news for the research. He might have believed her lies, but it hadn’t stopped him from sending the men down to Gypsum. Clearly he was determined to move forward immediately
.

She had to stop him. But she couldn’t just go bursting into the house and demand that the girl leave with her—not when there was no telling what the old lady had told her
.

No—first she had to build trust
.

She looked at the cheap trinket in her hand and slowly slid it back on the hook
.

A gift wouldn’t help. Bribery wouldn’t help. Neither would demanding or threatening or pleading or begging
.

She poured a cup of stale coffee with shaking hands. She paid
the cashier, who barely looked at her as she counted out the change, then stood in the parking lot drinking the bitter liquid before she got back into her car and drove the once-familiar streets to the house where she had grown up, a place she had hoped never to see again
.

She had a near-impossible task ahead of her. And the only weapon she had was the truth
.

C
HAPTER
6

A
FTER
R
ATTLER DROVE AWAY
, I stood outside for a minute and waited for my heartbeat to slow down to normal before I went into the house. I said hello to Gram, and she grunted in my direction.
Judge Judy
was blaring from the television. Chub was on his stomach, scribbling with a fat crayon in a coloring book. When he saw me, he jumped up and ran over and threw his arms around my legs like he did every day, hollering, “Hayee!”

I usually loved that moment. It was the best thing in my day, getting home and making sure that Chub was safe and knowing that there was one person in my life who was always happy to see me.

Today, though, it was hard for me to return his hug without letting him see how shook up I was. I got Chub a snack and drank a glass of milk, and then I settled in with my homework, though it was almost impossible to concentrate. I kept thinking about the men in the car, and Milla and Sawyer, and Rattler. Afternoon faded into evening and I fixed dinner and gave Chub his bath. I toweled him off and dressed him in his pajamas, but it was a little early for him to go to sleep. I knew I ought to read to him, but I was still feeling upset and distracted, so I did something to help me calm down: I visited the words.

I’d found them a few years ago, carved with care into the wall of the closet in the bedroom I shared with Chub. You couldn’t see them unless you actually went inside the closet, and since Gram used to keep it jammed full of junk, I didn’t find them until I got old enough to organize the closet myself. I had taken everything out and was washing the walls one Saturday when I found the words, near the bottom of the wall, carved into the old wood paneling.

CLOVER PRAIRIE

Those two words sparked something inside me, almost like recognition. I wondered what they meant—I imagined a field full of clover, swaying gently in the breeze, the sun shining brightly.

But even as I pictured the scene, I knew it wasn’t right. I traced the words with my finger; someone had taken care, maybe using a penknife or a sharp screwdriver, going over the blocky letters until they were grooved deeply into the wood. I wasn’t the first person to trace them, I could tell. The edges were smooth, without splinters or rough edges.

I returned to the words almost every week. Something happened when I touched them, some small peace entered me, calming my anxiety and my fears.

I let my fingertips drift down the wall until they rested on the baseboard. But something wasn’t right. The piece of baseboard, extending only two feet or so along the left wall of the closet, was loose. It separated slightly from the wall, wobbling under my fingers.

I tried to shove it back, feeling for the nail that had popped out, thinking I’d get a hammer and fix it.

But there was no loose nail. Instead, the bottom came away from the wall, and I realized that it wasn’t nailed at all, only kept in place by the tension between the other walls.

In fact, this board wasn’t mitered like the others. I tugged at it, and it came away in my hands. As I felt along the edge, I realized I’d come upon a hiding place: the paneling had been cut away in the middle, making a little hidey-hole about a foot long and a few inches deep. How had I never noticed this before?

I reached cautiously inside the hole and touched something, and the strange sensation of familiarity got stronger. I knelt down and shined the flashlight into the tiny space. With my cheek pressed to the floor I could see that there was a bundle wrapped in cloth, and papers rolled and tied with a ribbon. I took everything out and spread it on the floor in the room, where the light was better. Chub had crawled up on my bed and was turning the pages of his favorite board book, humming and running his fingers over the pictures; he could entertain himself that way for hours.

I picked up a tarnished metal frame containing a picture of a young, smiling, black-haired woman. It was one of those photos from a long time ago, when they first started printing pictures in color. The colors were all too bright: the yellow of her shirt, the red of her lips. Her hair was done in an old-fashioned style, curled close to her face, but her skin was smooth and unlined and her eyes sparkled as though she had just heard something funny.

I turned the frame over and there was handwriting on the back:
Mary 1968
. She didn’t look like anyone I had ever met, but at the same time she was somehow … familiar. I set the frame down and unfolded a piece of fabric that had gone yellow with age.

Inside, a rectangle of white lace had been carefully rolled around a necklace. Hanging from a silver chain was a multi-faceted red stone surrounded by fancy silver scrollwork. It was beautiful and it looked very old.

The rolled pages were delicate, made of a yellowed paper that felt rough to the touch, and covered with rows of flour-ishy writing. The handwriting was faded, and it looked like it had been written with a brush or a fountain pen. I couldn’t read all the words—there were women’s names and dates on one side, and on the other side were a few lines of writing in some language that wasn’t English.

I studied the names. They started with Lucy Hester Tarbell and the year 1868. I read through the names: Sarah Beatrice Tarbell, Rita Joan Tarbell, Helen Davis Tarbell.… When I got to the end I sucked in my breath at the final name: Alice Eugenie Tarbell, 1961.

I stared at Gram’s name until I realized what was wrong: if these were birth dates, it meant that she was … forty-nine years old. But that was impossible. Gram was bent and arthritic and had trouble breathing and getting out of a chair. True, she’d never told me her age, but I’d always assumed she was eighty or something, as old as I could imagine.

Could the date be something else? A marriage date, maybe, or … I racked my brain for possibilities. Maybe something religious? Gram never went to church, never even mentioned God. But I had learned in school that families sometimes recorded names, births and deaths and marriages, things like that, in a family Bible—could I have stumbled on pages torn from
my
family Bible?

I turned the pages over and tried to read the lines of writing.

Tá mé mol seo draíocht
Na anam an corp cara ár comhoibrí

I had barely read the first two lines when I found that my lips moved with ease, that I was pronouncing the unfamiliar words as though I’d been speaking them all my life, line after line. It felt extraordinarily good, and right, and I didn’t stop. My eyes clouded over, but I kept chanting, my voice tapering off to a whisper. When the words ran out I blinked a few times to clear my vision and saw that I had recited the entire paragraph or poem or whatever it was that had been written with such care on these pages.

I
could
have stopped—it wasn’t like I’d been possessed or anything like that—but the words were there inside me, and reading just the first few brought the rest to my conscious mind. I found myself wanting—
needing
—to speak them aloud. I scanned the page a second time and marveled at the beauty of the words, and at the way I’d been able to make the strange sounds and the accent that went with them.

And then I realized I had heard the words once before.

When I had touched Milla in the gym.

When my vision had gone dark, when the sounds of the gym had faded away and left me completely focused on the rushing feeling and Milla’s wounded body under my fingertips, my mind hadn’t been completely silent. There had been a whisper of a voice saying these same words, or perhaps it had been my own voice, I couldn’t be sure, only knew that they had unfurled like a ribbon fluttering in a breeze, there and then gone.

I ran my fingertips over the words as though touching them would answer my questions, would somehow reveal what I was supposed to do. Because I felt certain that I had been chosen for something and that Milla was part of it, and all the Morries, and Gram and Rattler Sikes and Dun and even Chub. All of it fit together in some way that I didn’t yet understand, and the thought was frightening but compelling.

I picked up the necklace and held it in the lamplight. Deep red flashes danced into the corners of the room as though the stone had an energy that splintered into pieces when the light touched it.

Chub noticed the sparkling stone and dropped his book on the bed, clapping his hands.

“Preeee!” he said, laughing—it almost sounded like “pretty.”

I slipped the necklace on, fastening the silver clasp with care, and then I sat next to Chub on the bed and let him look at it. He touched the stone gently and murmured and crawled into my lap, and I held him tight and rocked him.

I loved to sing to Chub, everything from songs from cartoons to my favorites from the radio. Today, I just hummed, a sad, wandering melody that came into my head. Chub sighed and leaned into me, and the humming turned to words, the words from the verse. If Chub found them strange, he didn’t let on. I sang, and we rocked, and when the need to replay the verses over and over finally faded, he had fallen asleep in my arms.

I carried him to his crib and tucked him under his blanket. I slipped the pendant under my shirt so Gram wouldn’t see it, and rolled the scrap of lace carefully and put it in the back of my T-shirt drawer along with the frame and the pages. When I left the room, Chub had a fistful of soft cotton blanket pressed to his chin, smiling in his sleep.