The black-eyed girl waits for Peter. She hears him fumbling at the edge of the forest, watches him step tentatively past the trees. She cracks her knuckles, relishing each pop of cartilage. She whispers, and her voice echoes through the wood, a low hum that finds all the Blakely women: “Come to me.” They do.
19
I dreamed myself as a very small child, playing in the wood beside Urizon. I was running, and Marlowe was with me. We were chasing something slippery as it twisted between oaks and rocks and poplars, always far ahead of us, always out of sight. I could not make out what it was, but I felt it was a part of me, or, more precisely, that I was a part of it, one of its belongings, a piece it had let go and was now luring home. It whispered to me: Come.
The running was marvelous, air exploding through me in long, lovely bursts, sweet-smelling trees spilling past me. I laughed, and Marlowe barked, and as our shimmering enchantress danced across the trees ahead, I felt myself to be eternal.
And then I tripped upon a thick tree root, a giant’s finger extended in punishment. The clear sky clouded over. I lurched forward and caught myself with the palms of my hands, feeling the forest floor scrape mean across my wrists. I was bleeding. When I looked up, there was Rafe, silent and watching me. With him were Matthew, Ginny from the auto repair shop, Mrs. Blott. Mother Farrow was there, and the solicitor, and the man from the hotel, and little Colette and her sisters. Almost every living person I had ever encountered had planted him or herself in a line like garden flowers and was staring at me, brows bent, disapproving.
And my blood mixed with the earth’s blood, the soil, and that dust-dry soil turned fertile.
I lay there on the forest floor, the heels of my hands, my wrists, speckled with burgundy. I looked at them, held them proffered out together as if waiting to be bound, and the blood crawled slowly down my palms out to my fingers, in teardrops to the ground.
Then, finally, Peter, his hair mussed, his glasses askew. He knelt with me, his back to the watchers, my judges, the crowd. He wrapped my wrists in a cold, clean bandage. Up high, above the trees, from the slight corner of an eye, I saw the shimmering thing glint over branches, turn and take flight across the sky.
I AWOKE IN a small, damp room to the slicing blades of a gray plastic fan, face creaking one way then the other, watching me like a passing driver taking in the thrill of an accident. In one corner sat a simple metal cot. In another an old toilet bowl, missing its cover. My body ached. I was alone. My wrists were bound with cold metal.
As fear increased my heart rate I could feel myself weaken, and I tried to take slow, calming breaths.
“Rafe?” I called. “Peter?”
Nothing.
“Well, then,” I said, trying to hold my voice steady.
I stretched out to examine my body. My stockings were gone. I felt exhausted and sore, angry and throbbing both inside and out. My arms and legs were swirled with various bruises, yellow-green and purple, no longer fresh. At the joint of my right arm was a thick wad of cotton, held to my skin with strips of tape. It smarted when I flexed, and with trepidation I wriggled off the wrap to find the cause: a swollen pink mark upon the vein.
Before I could explore myself further, I heard a noise just outside. I did not have time to try to replace the bandage, but curled back into my corner and resumed my previous position, closing my eyes halfway so I might seem to be asleep but still observe my situation. I’d read novels in which prisoners conned their captors in just such a way, and I racked my thoughts for lessons to remember. All the while I struggled to breathe slowly, to breathe deep.
The sounds that I had heard came from two figures who entered the room dressed toe to finger in white uniforms, wearing goggles and masks that hid all but their foreheads.
“Look, she’s lost her bandage,” said the first. “We’ll have to tie it tighter after this.” How did I know that voice, a drawl both foreign and familiar?
“She’s looking peaky,” said the second. “You think we’ve taken too much blood?”
“She’s breathing, isn’t she? We’re doing fine.”
My stomach dropped. With half-closed eyes, I looked again around the room and found two small windows, recently cleaned, framed very high on one wall. Pink puffs of insulation were tucked into the unfinished ceiling.
One of the men came over, lifting my hand, which, with the cuffs, brought the other up with it.
“A shame.” He sighed. I could feel the bumpy texture of his gloves against my skin.
Suddenly a sharp pain pierced my sore arm, and my eyes flew open. The man had inserted a large needle into the pink juncture at my joint, a needle that led to a long tube, through which my blood was now spiraling, collecting in a glass jar the size of one of Mrs. Blott’s canned blueberry jellies. My heart rate rose, pumping the blood faster, filling the first inch of the jar.
The man with the needle was looking at me through his plastic goggles. His blue eyes met mine. I could not help myself. I screamed.
He was startled, and his confusion gave me time to act. I yanked my arm away, leaving in the needle and its cylinder but detaching the coiled tube.
“Coulton, do something!” He ducked around to catch my flailing arms, squeezing until a fount of blood exploded from the truncated needle. “Hurry!”
“I’m doing it,” said the other man, presumably Coulton, his back to me so that it was impossible to see exactly what it was that he was doing. I flailed and kicked and yelled, doing everything in my power to escape the first man’s grasp.
“Matthew!” I cried. “Peter!”
The man held my arms with viselike hands, twisting at my skin, pressing with cruel fingers. It became harder to fight him; my body, with the blood I’d lost, grew tired.
“Hurry up, would you?” he hissed.
Coulton chuckled, lifted his mask, and I saw he was the man from the hotel. How had I not realized? He was grinning, his dead tooth gleaming, his stubbled cheeks glowing with success, hands planted on his hips as he surveyed his small kingdom, and I suddenly hated myself for my obliviousness. I’d seen this man, not long ago, outside the Holzmeiers’ shop in Coeurs Crossing, finishing a delivery, shaking hands with Rafe. That red logo on his chest, the one I’d overlooked in passing, announced affiliation proudly: BEAUFORT LOGISTICS, in curled red script. That glimpsed handshake . . .
I swallowed hard. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t.
As Coulton readied a syringe filled with clear liquid, to my shame lifting my dress to find my thigh, I gave one last wrench of my body, called out for help one last time.
“Peter!” My throat burned. “Rafe!”
Then the liquid went through me and I felt myself soften, felt sleep fall like a blanket across my mind. I turned my head to shoot a final glare at my audience, and saw the first man remove his mask as well.
He balled his fists into his pockets, his face harsh, his mouth a line. His eyes would not meet mine. He was nodding at Coulton, reconnecting my tube. On his gloves were red starbursts of my blood.
As unconsciousness took me, as my body felt remote and old and nothing, I whispered his name again: “Rafe.”
My Father’s Hand
The black-eyed girl stands at the edge of the forest, watching for Peter’s approach. He has not seen her. He navigates, he thinks, by the angle of the light, though in truth he is wandering blindly, the black-eyed girl guiding him to where the women wait for him, the black-eyed girl preparing to open the wood.
“I told you he would come,” hisses Mary, standing back in the group of seven women who flank their new leader. “A fool, like all the rest of them, deserving of his lot.”