“A pond!” I said, and we both cracked up.
“Hey, Zell!” Jencey hollered. “We need you over here!” Zell gave me a little smile and walked away. As soon as she did, Lilah, Pilar, and Zara came over.
“It’s really cool what you did,” Pilar said. Beside her, Lilah and Zara nodded their agreement.
I shrugged because I didn’t know what else to say. I wasn’t quite ready to talk about what I did, or who I found, or how I came to find her.
“Wanna help us plant the flowers?” they asked.
“Sure,” I said. They handed me a trowel with a yellow handle, just like the one I used at Zell’s house. I looked around me to see Alec and Cutter standing together in the bed of the truck, helping pass out the plants. Lance took a flat of pink geraniums from Alec, then handed them off to Jencey, but made her give him a kiss before he’d let go of them, which made Pilar and Zara giggle. Bryte braided Lilah’s hair so it wouldn’t be in her face. She did such a good job that we all said we wanted her to do ours.
“You’re good at braiding. You should have a little girl someday,” Lilah told her.
Everett and Bryte looked at each other. “Actually,” Bryte said to Lilah, “we think we might adopt one.”
“Cool!” Lilah said, then bounced away to help dig holes for the flowers.
We worked until the sun went down and we couldn’t see to work anymore. When we were done, John ordered pizzas and we all sat on blankets in the front yard to eat, dirty and tired and hungry. I don’t think pizza ever tasted better. Mom came home from work with Gary the Ambulance Guy. She cried when she saw what they’d done for us, and then Gary went to the store and bought beers for the adults and sodas for the kids. Later, Everett disappeared and then came back with boxes of fresh, warm donuts from Krispy Kreme. And though Zell said, “Oh I couldn’t,” she did.
We stayed that way past everybody’s bedtime—even the adults’—but no one made a move to leave. Alec and Cutter fell asleep on the blankets, tired from chasing each other around in the hot sun all day. I sat with Zell on one side and Mom on the other, and I didn’t think about James Doyle or Hannah Sumner or Cutter—quiet and still at the bottom of that pool—even once. We laughed and talked long into the night, and it felt warm, cozy, familiar. To quote that entrance sign, it felt like family, a family I never expected to have.
JENCEY
Jencey motioned for the girls to keep up and made a silly face at them, attempting to lighten the mood. They could be so serious sometimes. She supposed that was her fault, but she was doing what she could to be a different kind of mother.
“Are you sure about this?” Zara asked, her voice quavering slightly.
Jencey smiled. “Yes, I’m sure.” She kept her voice light, wanting to put her daughters at ease. Both of them had heard the story of what had happened to poor Hannah Sumner. Though all the parents attempted to keep the details from the kids, Jencey had seen them gathered at the pool in little clusters, parsing what they knew, creating their own narrative that was, Jencey suspected, probably worse than the actual truth.
Hannah Sumner had escaped. She would never be the same again, but she was alive. She had a future ahead of her that was as bright as she chose to make it. Jencey supposed that was all anyone could ask for in this broken, screwed-up world.
She moved branches and brambles from their path, clearing the way for her girls as they ventured deeper into the woods. Neither girl thought this was the best idea, but Jencey insisted. She’d lured them away from the house with the promise of an adventure. The thing about adventure was, it usually required at least a modicum of danger. They pressed forward and finally found the clearing. She tried to see it through their eyes, to remember what it felt like when she’d found it as a child, how it had felt like hers from the moment she saw it.
Now she would bequeath it to her girls, passing it along as if it were hers to give. They looked at the copse of trees with wide eyes, then back at her, the concern on their faces giving way to excited grins. “It’s a hideaway,” she explained.
“Can we go in?”
“Sure!” she urged, motioning with her hands for them to enter.
For a moment she felt fear creep in, a fist gripping her heart. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to show them this place. Look what she’d done here, after all. She wasn’t sure she wanted either girl holing up here with a boy. And yet, that had come much later. In the early days, it had been only about having a place of her own—a place to escape to, a place to dream. Since it looked like they’d be with her parents for a while longer, the girls could use such a place.
She crawled through the branches after them. Pilar hugged herself and looked around, delight etched on her face. “This is so cool,” she breathed. Zara turned around and around in circles, her arms outstretched and her face tilted toward the little patch of sky. She stopped and staggered around, dizzy from the spinning. She lurched into the waiting arms of Jencey, who planted a kiss on top of her head. Pilar edged closer to the two of them, and they stood together in silence.
“Can we show this place to Lilah and Alec?” Pilar asked, her voice still laced with a breathy excitement. The thought of Lance’s kids made her think of Lance, made her smile. He’d talked her out of Virginia, talked her into seeing what the future held in Sycamore Glen. They were taking it slow, but they were moving forward.
“You can show it to whoever you’d like,” she said. “It’s yours now.”
“I might want to keep it a secret,” Zara said, burying her head in the crook of Jencey’s arm.
“Well, that’s for you girls to discuss.”
“And you think we’ll be safe here?” Pilar, always the responsible eldest, asked.
Jencey thought about how to answer. “I always was.” And as she said it, she realized it was true.
“It’s kind of dark in here,” Zara said, doubt in her voice.
“Let me show you how to fix that.” Jencey grinned and walked over to the border of trees. She looked over her shoulder at the girls as they watched with interest. She beckoned them over and gestured for them to stick their hands into the branches. “OK, now pull,” she instructed. “Pull hard!” Together they tugged the branches apart, pulling wider and harder as, together, they let the light in.
ZELL
As she walked to her car, Zell spotted a single yellow leaf on the drive, a harbinger of summer’s end. School was starting in a few days, but when she’d asked Cailey if she’d gotten her teacher assignment yet, she’d just said, “Ugh, don’t talk about it.”
Cailey still turned up at Zell’s door quite often, making the trek across the neighborhood with Cutter in tow. His gait was still a bit off, and sometimes he had trouble accessing the right words, but other than that, he was doing well. He was healing.
She looked across the street at James’s empty house. It was already starting to show signs of neglect. Some kind soul had found a place for Jesse to live, and of course James would likely never see life outside prison after what he’d done. Someone had graffitied their thoughts about what should become of him across the front door after the press finally went away. John had made noises about going over and painting over it eventually.