“I kilt her, Minnow. I kilt her and she’s dead because of me.”
This time, I covered his mouth with my mouth, and it worked. He gasped like he’d had an epiphany. He looked at me with his mouth open, his eyes open. In that moment, the tension broke. We both felt it, the rush of it leaving us, and no longer was there tentativeness. There was immediacy and hunger. He reached over and kissed me hard, a first clumsy kiss, a first step in a different direction. And I understood what had been holding us back. We were no longer children with children’s bodies and children’s thoughts. We wanted more from each other.
Undaunted now, I touched his wet cheeks with my fingertips, brushed them with the back of my hand. His hands tumbled beneath my bonnet and into the dense braided hair, fell to the thick parts of my waist, squeezing me there over the walls of my dress.
For years, we had stood on opposite sides of a divide, calling across because we could never jump the distance. This was the moment we discovered that, if we both shifted our weight forward, if we abandoned our fear of the drop below, not looking down, we could touch the tips of our fingers together. And though it wasn’t much, in that moment, it was enough. We stepped headlong into a new place where we knew there was something other than good daughters and sons inside us. Because for the first time, somebody bothered to tell me why they were in pain. Everybody around me was in pain, I realize now, but none of them ever poured it out of themselves into another person.
Jude taught me what love was: to be willing to hold on to another person’s pain. That’s it.
Chapter 38
After every reading class, I stay behind in Miss Bailey’s classroom. This is normally her lunch period, but she says she doesn’t mind giving it up to help me with my reading. We’ve moved up to real books, slim ones with illustrations, and mostly she just sits in her rocking chair, chewing a sandwich and listening to me fight my way through a story, which for the past week has been about a pig named Wilbur who becomes friends with a spider.
I put down the book, suddenly exhausted.
“What is it?” Miss Bailey asks.
“They used to tell us in my—in my church,” I say, remembering how she doesn’t want to know anything about our pasts. “They told us that if an animal ever talked, that was a sign it was infected by the Devil.”
Miss Bailey uncrosses her legs and sits up straighter. “Really?”
“Every morning, after I woke up, I had to walk behind my house to the barn and look each goat in the eye and ask them ‘Are you the Devil upon this Earth?’ And if they didn’t reply, I could milk them and know that drinking their milk wouldn’t give the Devil a foothold in our minds.”
She considers this. “Do you suppose Wilbur’s possessed by the Devil?”
I look at her face to see if she’s making fun of me, but she looks serious.
“No,” I say.
“Me neither,” she says. “You know, when I was little, my dad told me that if I misbehaved, he’d send me to live with a witch who ate children.”
“Really?”
She nods. “I was so afraid of the witch. Feelings are magnified when you’re that young, I think, and the fear can stay with you for a long time. I eventually grew out of the fear but even now when I read something with a witch, my mind always traces back to that story. Isn’t that weird?”
“How’d you grow out of it?” I ask. “The fear.”
She takes a long moment to answer. “I read lots and lots of books about witches.”
? ? ?
The next day, when the bell rings for rec time, I pace downstairs to the jail library.
I roam around the stacks for a while before Ms. Fitzgerald, the twiggy librarian with a mess of caramel curls, asks me if I need anything.
“Can I check out a book?” I ask.
“That’s what this place is here for,” Ms. Fitzgerald says. “What book?”
I tell her I’m not sure, but I describe the type of thing I’m looking for, the words I’ve practiced in my head since my session with Miss Bailey.
“Yes, I can probably find you something,” she says. I walk behind her around the shelves as she pulls out copies of the Koran and the Book of Mormon and the Bible. She takes me to the science-fiction section and scans the rows before pulling down a few more books, frayed paperbacks, then to the poetry section, and finally into the dusty nonfiction corner that looks like it never gets used.
“There’s more than one place to find answers,” Ms. Fitzgerald says, unloading the stack into my outstretched arms.
She lets me check them out even though I have more than the permitted three titles in my stack, and I sit at a large wooden library table, sliding my stump over the pages, trying to sound out the difficult words. On one of the very, very thin pages, I read something that stands out.