A customer walked up, an old guy with a cane, and Gabby hurried over to help him, addressing him by name like she did practically everyone who came in the door. Janessa’s story made me nervous. What would Carl think if he knew what had happened between me and Crete? I hadn’t slept with his brother; I’d had a lapse of judgment that thankfully hadn’t gone very far, and I’d straightened it out with Crete afterward the best I could. And Carl and I hadn’t been involved at the time. But I was well aware of how bad it could look and how Crete could spin it if he wanted to, especially since he was already pissed at me. Work didn’t distract me from my worries, though thoughts of the previous night kept seeping in. I’d been with plenty of other guys—boys from school, foster brothers’ friends, a cook from IHOP in the walk-in freezer—and never once had I thought it was serious. With Carl, I wasn’t so sure. With him, in the ruins of the old house, nothing around us for miles but trees and stars and wind, I felt something I’d never felt before.
“Do you want to go out after work?” Gabby asked as we sponged the counters. “Figured you might be lonely since loverboy’s gone.”
“I’m kind of tired,” I said. “Crete’s probably coming to pick me up anyway.”
“I can give you a ride,” she said. “I have to pass that way to get to the tavern. And maybe on the way, I can convince you to come with me.” She pinched my arm playfully. “Lemme call Crete for you, tell him you got a new chauffeur.”
Gabby’s hatchback was a mess, discarded lottery tickets and empty pop cans littering the seats and floor. She told me more about herself as she drove. I’d thought she was fresh out of high school, like me, but she was twenty-two, and in all those years, she had never spent a night away from Henbane. She had a little camper at an RV park by the river where fishermen stayed, and she got to live there for free in exchange for managing the place.
“Tomorrow night,” Gabby said, popping a cassette into the stereo, “I’m going to a party at Old Scratch, if you wanna come. It’s this creepy old cave out in the woods.”
“A party in a cave?”
“C’mon, they don’t have cave parties in Iowa?”
“Um, not that I know of.”
“Old Scratch isn’t pretty like Bridal Cave or Meramec, those tourist ones with the little trains you ride through. You go in too far, there’s bat shit two feet deep. Passages every which way. People get lost in there every once in a while, fall down a hole and can’t get out. A guy from the conservation department drowned in there a long while back. But there’s a big open room right inside called the auditorium. Cool place for a party.”
“Sounds like fun,” I lied. It sounded scary. The sun was down by the time Gabby dropped me off at the garage, and I went straight to bed. I dreamed of a cave, a big dark mouth swallowing me up, and someone pounding on the wall of the cave, trying to get me out. The pounding went on until I was no longer dreaming; the sound was real, someone knocking at the door. When I stumbled across the room, half-awake, to see who was there, the door wouldn’t open. I switched on the lamp, and that was when I saw the window had been boarded shut.
CHAPTER 11
LUCY
It was a long ride to Daniel’s, east along Ridge Road, which curved and dipped like a roller coaster. The handful of houses in Crenshaw Ridge were spliced into the hillside with sloping shale yards. The bare planks of his mother’s house blended into the surrounding trees. A narrow porch spanned the width of the house, with firewood stacked to the eaves on either side. Near the front door sat two rocking chairs, each occupied by dozing cats.
Daniel’s mother was waiting for us in the kitchen, a crooked room that had been tacked onto the back of the house. The wall behind the kitchen table was lined with shelves, and on the shelves sat a hundred or so old canning jars filled with seeds, dried herbs, wild mushrooms, feathers, moss, roots, tree bark, and plenty of things I couldn’t distinguish through the glass. Mrs. Cole came forward and took my hand in hers, a soft smile on her face. Her dark hair was streaked with gray, and her bangs were uneven, as if she’d cut them herself.
“Glad to meet you,” she said. “I’m Sarah. Go on and sit. I made sassafras tea.” I could smell the roots boiling in a kettle on the stove, a sweet, earthy smell like root beer. Sarah smacked an ice tray on the counter to loosen the cubes and parceled them into three mugs, then spooned in sugar and poured the tea. She sat down across from me and Daniel.
“I’ve got everything ready for Mrs. Stoddard,” Sarah said, stirring her tea with a tarnished spoon. “I wrote the directions down, just be sure and follow ’em right close.”
“Okay,” I said.
She nodded and sipped her tea. “Daniel, fetch a box, would you, from the shed? Get this all packed up for Lucy?” She waited until he left the room and we were alone. “I was right about you,” she said, her gaze moving over my hair, my eyes, my hands. “I told your mama, and lucky for you, she listened.”
“You knew her?”
“Yep. That’s why I made Daniel bring you here today, wanted to see you in the flesh. Make sure. But I knew then, when you were a speck in the womb, and I knew when my boy started talking about you. I can sense things.”
I wasn’t following. “Were you and Lila friends? I’m sorry, I just never heard my dad mention you.”
“No. She came to me, looking for help, like people do. Friend of hers brought her. She was pregnant and thinking it over.”
Thinking it over? My dad had always told me how much my mother wanted a baby, wanted me. But then, what else could he have said?
Sarah’s hands gripped mine. “Don’t be pained, child,” she said. “She had a bad feeling, wasn’t sure who the daddy was. I told her you were good, I could feel it through the skin.”
“She’s not talking you to death, is she?” Daniel grinned at me, striding into the room and setting down the box. “Mom, I told you not to scare her off.”
Sarah released my hands, laughing softly, and I sank back into my chair, stunned. “Just girl talk,” she said. “I didn’t get much of that, raising boys.”
Different scenarios ticked through my mind on the way home. I knew my mom and dad were married when they had me, but I didn’t know the actual date—it had never seemed strange to me that there was no mention of their anniversary, no marking of the day. An anniversary was hardly something to celebrate alone. I’d spent my life believing the fairy tale that had been woven for me: love at first sight, whirlwind romance, elopement, me. I wasn’t bothered to learn it might have happened in a different order, that she might have been pregnant when they got married. But I’d never entertained the notions that my mother had been with someone else—or that Carl wasn’t my father. If she’d been with another man in the narrow margin between arriving in Henbane and meeting my dad, I’d never heard about it. Even in the ridiculous stories of her enthralling various men, no one ever claimed she’d cared for anyone but Carl Dane.
Maybe Sarah had made the whole thing up. That was the problem with secondhand accounts. You could believe them or not, but you could never be sure they were true. It didn’t seem possible that I could belong to someone else. I looked like my mother, but I had Dane features, too. My height. The slight dent in my chin. The second toe a little longer than the first. Things I had to admit might not stand up to questioning.
When Daniel dropped me off, I asked if his mother had ever mentioned mine. “Not until I told her I was working with you. She said Lila Dane was the most beautiful woman to ever set foot in Ozark County. That beauty could be a curse.” He smiled apologetically. “She didn’t say anything to upset you, did she? She just kind of rambles sometimes. Doesn’t mean anything by it.”
If she hadn’t told my mother’s story to Daniel, she might not have told anyone. But she had mentioned a friend bringing Lila to the house. Aside from my father and Birdie, Gabby was my mother’s only friend.
When I got home, I pulled out the box Gabby had given me. I’d been saving it for the last few days, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I opened it. At the top of the box was a dress with an empire waist and a pleated skirt. A maternity dress. I had worn it with her. I recognized the next dress, the green sheath she wore in the photograph that sat atop our TV. In the picture, she stood with my father’s arm around her, a lily in her hair. Ray Walker had taken the picture with Dad’s camera. It was their wedding day. I wondered if I’d been with her that day, too, and whether she knew it. She was happy in that picture, it radiated out from the frame. I pulled off my T-shirt and slipped the dress over my head, the soft, musty fabric floating over my body. Then I let down my hair and draped it over my shoulder the way Mom’s hair fell in the picture. The image in the mirror was uncanny, and for a moment I tried to imagine myself as her. A young bride with a child on the way, her mind filled with paint colors and garden plots and nursery furniture.
Beneath the clothing were some papers. I found a little notebook with sketches of plants and their descriptions. On the back cover were pencil outlines of two hands, one inside the other. I touched the larger one. My mother’s, I thought. The small one had to be mine. I pressed my hand to the notebook, trying to make it fit, but it eclipsed the other hands entirely, my fingers long enough to curl around the edges.
A door slammed downstairs and Dad called my name. I walked to the top of the stairs and looked down to where he stood gripping the banister. He stared with bewilderment that prickled into anger. “Where’d you get that?”
The dress. I held the fabric away from my body to distance myself, feeling guilty, sick to my stomach, as though I’d done something unforgivable. “Gabby,” I said softly.
He turned wordlessly and left me there on the stairs. Back in my room, I lay on the bed, surrounded by my mother’s things, and let tears seep down into my hair. Dad rarely spoke of her anymore, keeping all his memories to himself. It wasn’t fair to me. My image of her was warped and incomplete, relying on what others told me. Especially Gabby. She’d always kept up the fairy tale, indulging me, her guilt at being here in my mother’s absence still raw beneath the surface. I knew her stories well, but I was ready for her to tell me more. I wanted everything, good and bad. I needed all of Gabby’s pieces of my mother to make her whole and real.
Gabby was asleep in the lawn chair with her feet up and her head tilted back. She twitched as a fly buzzed around her face. “Gabby,” I said, shaking her foot, “I need to talk to you.” She moved her head from side to side as though disagreeing with something in her dream. “Gabby,” I said, louder, and she opened her eyes and lurched backward in her chair.
“Jesus!” she said, sucking in breath.
“Sorry,” I said, brushing lint off the dress. Lila’s dress. “Didn’t mean to scare you. It fits, sort of. Maybe a little short. She was shorter than me, though, right? My mother?”
Gabby nodded and pulled a cigarette out of the pack on her lap. Her hands trembled as she lit it. “Yeah, few inches, maybe.” She cleared her throat and took a deep drag.
I leaned against the railing. The wind chimes clinked halfheartedly. “I was out in Crenshaw Ridge today, and Sarah Cole told me she knew my mother. That a friend brought her in for an abortion.”
Gabby’s face flushed. We were quiet, smoke dulling the air between us.
“It wasn’t like that,” Gabby murmured finally, flicking ash.
I squatted down next to her. “I need to know what happened, Gabby. I’m not a kid anymore. I’m almost as old as she was when she had me.”
Gabby snorted. “Hardly. What she went through, growing up, it ages you. She was nineteen going on a hundred.”
“Then tell me,” I begged. “Tell me everything. All I have of her is what I’m told. You don’t think that’s hard?”
“She didn’t want an abortion,” Gabby said. “Not really. She was worried something was wrong with the baby … with you. Had a bad feeling. I took her to Sarah because she sees things, knows things. I knew she’d tell your mom everything was fine. And if she didn’t, well, Sarah’s known to be right about those things. She’s the one who told Ray Walker’s wife their baby wouldn’t make it.”
“Sarah told me Mom wasn’t sure of the father. My father.”
Gabby paused. “It’s plain as day who your father is.”
“Why’d she think it was somebody else?”
Gabby rubbed her eyes with her palms. “Maybe Sarah heard wrong, because your mom never said anything of the sort to me. Though I guess that’s not the kind of thing you go around telling people. In the time I knew her, she only ever talked about your daddy.”
“Do you think it could’ve happened before she came here?”
She tapped another cigarette out of the pack but didn’t light it. “Timing-wise, I guess it’s possible. But I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter, so you might as well leave it be.”
“She kept a secret that big from Dad.”
“Oh, no. Don’t you go getting high and mighty. We all got secrets. I bet you got some yourself. Some you keep from your dad, for his own good.” She eyed me sharply. “She had her secrets, all right, but they were part of her past. Once she married your dad, it was like her life started over. Things were good for a while there, just think on that.”
Neither of us spoke, ruminating on the fact that the good hadn’t lasted, that something had changed at the end. I’d asked Gabby a thousand times why she thought my mother left; I believed now that she hadn’t been lying when she claimed not to know the real reason. She and my mother had been friends, but they hadn’t shared everything. Gabby was right that we all had secrets, secrets that would hurt other people or expose us in ways we didn’t want to be exposed. I couldn’t fault my mother for that.