I noticed that he’d put up his wedding picture on his antique desk. My dad wasn’t giving anything away about his true feelings regarding my mom leaving with my brother. So I looked for hints where I could.
I put my palms on the polished wood and leaned in closer.
My dad in a brown suit, looking big-eyed, deer-in-headlights. But my mom was wearing her wide, beautiful smile, the one that made her eyes go soft and twinkly.
And if sometimes I thought her smile in that picture looked genuine, but a bit strained, well, I was probably just reading into it.
“So you were talking to the oldest Bell girl yesterday,” Dad said, not looking at me, his eyes on the green leather book in his hands.
“Yeah.”
“I like her,” he added.
But what he meant was, I like her better than Poppy.
My dad knew what Poppy was the moment she first walked through our door. He would have put her on the List of Forbiddens if he could have. Eli Hunt respected maturity like he respected privacy. He let us, both me and Alabama, make our own rules after we turned sixteen. For better or worse, I was in charge of my own life now.
THERE WAS A big thunderstorm a few years ago, it knocked down trees and houses and flooded the Blue Twist River, and everyone was super into it, it was exciting, destruction is exciting, no matter what they say. I went down to the river just to watch it rising, and to see what had been picked up in its stormy path, patio furniture, toys, dead animals.
I found Leaf standing on the bank, leaning against a tree, inches from the muddy swirling rapids, doing the same fucking thing.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, after we’d been there in the pelting rain for a while and had both just watched a red wooden door go floating past, and then a blue bike, and then a pair of black boots, tied together by the shoelaces, and then a little fox, on its back, its dead paws on its belly.
I went to the hayloft a lot after Leaf left on the bus. Sometimes the Bell brats were in there but when they weren’t I climbed the ladder and sat in the sun, hay, quiet.
And now Midnight was living by them, right across the street. I suppose he thought he was moving up in the world, and getting away from me, yeah, as if it would be that easy, as if, as if, why is everyone around me so undeniably dumb? I want to like people, I do, actually, but they’re all just so dumb.
I’d already felt Midnight edging away from me before he moved out to that dumpy farmhouse. And then I found him talking to Feral on the steps and he was just so into her, into the red hair and freckles and weirdness, I felt sick just thinking about it.
Well, if Midnight wanted to be with Wink and her fairy tales and her hayloft and unicorn underwear and overalls, then I’d show him who she was. I’d really, really show him.
MIDNIGHT FOUND ME as I was coaxing little blue eggs out from underneath one of the pretty white Silkies. I brought him inside to the kitchen and made poached yellow-eyes on toast for him and the Orphans. You need a big boiling pot to make poached yellow-eyes, which I like because using a big boiling pot makes me feel like I’m a witchie.
Mim was in her reading room, so I made coffee too. She didn’t like me to drink coffee. She said it would give me dark dreams. I didn’t give any of it to the Orphans, just me and Midnight, sipping from the same blue cup, fresh cream and brown sugar.
The Hero stood closer to me, after the hayloft. And he looked at me different too.
I told him the names of the Orphans, and we picked strawberries from the garden. I showed him how to squish his bare toes in the black dirt. We ate the berries ripe and juicy and hot from the sun, like Laura and Lizzie at the Goblin Market, For your sake I have braved the glen, and had to do with goblin merchant men. Eat me, drink me, love me. Hero, Wolf, make much of me. With clasping arms and cautioning lips, with tingling cheeks and fingertips, cooing all together.
THE DAY SO far:
Gathering eggs, breakfast, playing hide-and-seek, weeding the big square garden between the house and the barn, playing fetch with the dogs, Mim making Caprese salad for lunch with golden olive oil and fresh-picked basil and tomatoes, us all eating it standing at the kitchen table, me drawing up a treasure map for the Orphans, us all following it to the back pasture, digging holes with rusty shovels, looking for treasure.