The golden light had washed all their faces and made her mommy look so young, and her eyes were smiley. She remembered that trip because her parents didn’t fight. They were relaxed, building sand castles with her and her brother, sleeping late. They hugged and kissed a lot, which they didn’t always do. She could feel how happy they were. It wasn’t just that they were “trying not to fight.” The energy was not tense or eggshell fragile. It wasn’t that they “had nothing left to say.” When that was the case, the air felt heavy and suffocating. Penny remembered how light and free everything felt on that sunset beach.
When the door opened to her barn room, softly, carefully, it wasn’t Bobo or Poppa. It was Momma. Penny nearly let go of a scream, but instead she sat up quietly and pushed herself as far back on her cot as she could with her leg chained. Which wasn’t that far. Momma stood for a moment, her spindly dark form just a shadow in the doorway. Then she stepped inside.
“No,” said Penny. But the word just stuck in her throat and sounded more like a cough.
Momma knelt down beside Penny. When the old woman looked up, the fading yellow sunlight lit up the details of her face—deep lines, and strong ridges for cheekbones and sunken holes for eyes, which were a strange gray-green.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Momma.
“I don’t want to,” said Penny.
“Hush, now,” said Momma. “You’ve always been such a hardheaded little thing ever since you were a baby.”
She unlocked the chain on Penny’s ankle, and it felt so good to be free from it as it fell to the floor with a clatter.
“That’s better,” said Momma.
She stood and held out her hand. Penny moved back, all the way into the corner.
Bobo could be mean. And Poppa filled her with dread and disgust. But she didn’t fear either of them as much as she did Momma—though Momma had never laid a hand on her.
“Please,” said Penny.
“She’s waiting,” said Momma. “Come now.”
If she didn’t go, Poppa would come and carry her. If he had to do that, any number of bad things might happen afterwards. So Penny slowly, reluctantly got up. She let Momma take her hand, and they walked outside into the semidark and growing cold. Penny still didn’t have any shoes, and her clothes were threadbare. Her ankle was more swollen, more painful than it had ever been. It was an ugly black and blue and didn’t even look like her other leg. Still, she kept up with Momma as she walked past the house, and out through the gate, Penny shivering.
On the dirt road, Momma let Penny’s hand drop and Penny followed obediently behind her. Now? she wondered. Should I try to run now? But how fast could she go with her leg like that? Then, she heard a sound behind them and turned to see that Bobo was following. He stayed back, hiding behind the trees, then running to catch up.
Not yet.
After a while, they turned off the road and onto a path Momma had worn into the brush. Penny’s feet were so calloused and her calves so scarred that she barely even felt the hard ground or the branches whipping around her ankles. But every step sent a rocket of pain up her leg. There was no choice but to ignore it, keep moving.
The trees whispered singsong. Penny started to cry a little; she couldn’t help it. The place where she was going, all that trapped sadness and despair, all that loneliness and helplessness, it leaked into her bones like a chill in the air. Would she ever be warm again, safe and loved? Weak, puppyish whimpers escaped her though she tried to swallow them back.
“Hush, now, little Dreamer,” said Momma. “We’re almost there.”
But it wasn’t true. This walk was endless; maybe it was miles and miles. She had no sense of time or distance; she never had. How long until the cookies are done, Mommy? Penny used to ask. About the time it would take you to watch an episode of Scooby-Doo, her mommy would say. That made a kind of sense. But here, the hours, the days, the minutes, the miles had no beginning and no end.
Bobo trailed behind, a white spot in the dark. His pale hand was a starfish on the bark of a tree; his face a moon around the bend. He wasn’t supposed to come, and he knew it, but Penny was no tattletale.
The moon was climbing high by the time they got where they were going, Penny growing sick from pain and fatigue.
The little church had been recently restored. It stood as white and stoic as the moon among the trees, with its black shutters and bright red door. It was a new thing in a place that was very, very old. The stones, which used to tilt at the heads of graves long overgrown and forgotten, had been righted. Where the names and dates of the departed had been worn away by time and weather, little plaques had been placed beside, naming the dead. Penny didn’t know how she knew this, but she did.
She could see them, all the little girls who had been buried here. Some of them played together, some of them sat and cried. Some of them were babies, and some were teenagers. One of them was on fire, and one of them was always wet, hair in filthy ringlets, skin blue.
Lately, there were three new ones, older, who lingered on the edge of it all, watching, sometimes laughing cruelly. One of those older girls never took her eyes off Penny.
“Where is she?” asked Momma. Her eyes darted around desperately. Penny knew that Momma couldn’t see what she could see. No one ever could.