Overhead, a red-tailed hawk circled with outstretched wings in the bright blue sky. He cried out for his mate, a beautiful and haunting sound, and I found my eyes tearing up because of it. All around me, rolling fields of golden wheat smelled sweet and crisp and teased of a childhood long gone.
Fleur, Laurence, and I used to wander that same road on summer days past—careless days, aimless days—with our arms linked together. A blond-brunette-blond row of heads. Our fathers fought overseas in the war—in different regiments, due to the color of my father’s skin—and our mamas hired workers to help with the farms. We grew crops for starving families thousands of miles away in Europe, and the government paid us kindly for our patriotism.
When we children were even younger, we’d play hide-and-seek in the middle of the woods. We’d also pretend we were characters in a fairy-tale forest, and I always got to play Snow White, on account of my hair color being only a few shades shy of “black as ebony.” Both Fleur and Laurence would lean over and kiss my cheeks as I lay on the grass beneath the boughs of fir trees singing in the wind, and they’d try to see who could rouse me from my sleep of death. One time Laurence surprised me by kissing me on the lips, and when my eyes burst open, he grinned and said, “I won! I woke her in the fastest time of all.”
After that day, he kissed my lips a few more times, always while playing amid the trees in our kingdom of pretend.
Until he outgrew such games.
Until he moved on to girls as white as snow.
I SNUCK INTO THE WOODS A BACK WAY, A HALF MILE or so north of Fleur’s family’s property. Goose pimples washed over my skin from the sprawling shadows of sky-high firs, despite the July heat cooking the rest of the world outside the forest. An entire choir of birds chattered in the web of branches surrounding me; a woodpecker jackhammered one of the trunks to my right. A squirrel scampered across moss-covered boughs, rattling leaves overhead, giving me a start.
For breakfast I grazed on wild blackberries, and then I washed my face in the creek and made a quick detour to the stretch of the forest behind my house to check on my pistol, which I still needed to sneak back into my house. The weapon remained concealed inside the oilcloth beneath the leaf pile, untouched, loaded, minus the bullet that had whistled past Joe’s ear. I left it there for the time being and trekked back into the heart of the woods, careful to keep my footsteps silent. The creek babbled and bubbled below the rocks that I crossed with my arms outstretched, and loose soil from the embankment made my climb to the clearing feel like stepping up a ladder I had to carve with my own two feet. At the top of the slope, the little white shed came into sight. I knelt down in the tall stalks of horsetail grasses and listened for anyone following me.
“Just a couple more nights,” said a voice up ahead.
I lifted my chin.
Laurence stepped out the front door of Joe’s makeshift house with a red-and-white-checked napkin balled in his hand. His blond hair shone as brightly as fool’s gold in the streaks of sunlight slicing through the trees. “I can’t keep sneaking you food out here,” he said, and he crammed the napkin into a back trouser pocket. “You’re going to get me killed if anyone finds you here.”
Joe exited the shed behind him and grabbed up a stick as long as one of his legs. “I don’t plan to be here much longer.”
“Another day at most,” Laurence warned.
“Sure.” Joe leaned over and picked up a pinecone, which he rolled around in his left hand.
Laurence shifted my way and scanned the woods, his blue eyes squinting into the sun. I ducked farther down in the grasses.
“You’re lucky I’m a goddamned saint in this community, Joe,” he said. “No one thinks to look for you back here, because I’m a pillar of respectability.”
“Is that right?” asked Joe with a laugh.
“I’m dead serious. You’re going to need to go soon. Real soon.”
“Jesus Christ”—Joe tossed the pinecone into the air and whacked it with the stick, sending it whizzing over my head—“stop saying that, Laurie. I’ll go as soon as I’m able. I’ve just got some business to finish.”
“What business?”
“Never you mind. It’s private.”
Laurence’s mouth tightened. He scanned the woods again, and the hardness of his face made him nearly unrecognizable to me. His chin jutted outward at an odd angle. Without another word, he marched into the thicket of firs, away from Joe and the shed.
I held my breath and stayed low to the ground. A black-and-yellow-striped honeybee landed on a knuckle of my right hand, and its little brown stinger bobbed up and down. I stilled my muscles and willed the thing away by blinking at it.