The Hollow Inside

by Brooke Lauren Davis

  The bartender comes over to ask if we’d like refills on our drinks, which are still almost full. People grumble over the bar he abandoned while he gets lost somewhere in the blue-black of her eyes. We both washed our hair in a gas station bathroom sink yesterday with shampoo I snatched off a grocery store shelf, but he doesn’t need to know that.

  Everything down to the food in our stomachs, we took from somebody else—little bits of other lives stolen and sewn together to make us who we are. And I know that’s the real reason Mom looks so happy. Because tomorrow, everything changes. Tomorrow, we start making a life of our very own.

  Because we have a plan.

  A plan for a new beginning, a plan to stanch old wounds, a plan to soothe the pain that the fortune-teller said is trying to rot my mother’s bones.

  A plan to set things right.

  The bartender tries to ask her where she’s from, but Mom turns her back on him and raises her glass to me.

  “To tomorrow,” she says.

  “Tomorrow.”

  Her laugh is a hopeful magic, and her arms are tight when she wraps them around my neck.

  Chapter 3

  MOM ISN’T MY REAL mother.

  I knew my birth mother, but not for very long—she ran off when I was two, though she left traces of herself behind in my own face. I have her high cheekbones and dimpled chin. The scattering of freckles across the bridge of my nose mirrors the photos I’ve seen of her. I mostly take after my father, with his brown curls and dark eyes. But he said the way I was always a little flushed at the cheeks was all me—like I was born angry, and had always been angry, and always would be angry.

  My father’s name was Jonah, and he was a big man who smelled like cut grass and summer breezes—he owned a landscaping company in Virginia. He told me all the time that I was tall as a sapling and quick as a water strider. He said he’d bet all his money that I’d play basketball for Virginia Tech, and he practiced with me on the lowered hoop in the driveway every afternoon, until I was six years old.

  Until one day my father came into the kitchen after school, towing a woman behind him by the hand. He told me her name was Nina.

  Nina’s face was completely blank, like she was on autopilot, just moving where she was expected to move and saying what she was expected to say. Like she’d been that way for a long time.

  But the moment she spotted me sitting at the kitchen table, her face sparked with a sudden smile. Like I was a pleasant surprise—like an A on a spelling test you didn’t study for, or a gift for no reason, or the first ice cream truck of the summer.

  And when someone looks at you that way, it’s impossible not to smile back.

  Nina started sleeping in my dad’s room and making breakfast for me every morning. He worked long days in the summer and collapsed into bed whenever he finally got home, so I spent most of my time with her. I played basketball in the driveway while she sat in a lawn chair and drew pictures of me.

  I loved them so much I hung them all over my room. I remember one of me wearing a queen’s crown and another of me spinning a basketball on the tip of my finger (which I practiced doing for hours a day with no success). My favorite one, I kept next to my bed—the one where she gave me a pair of beautiful, flaming wings. Just like the ones on the bird tattooed on her forearm.

  Nina let me watch movies my dad said I wasn’t allowed to see, let me rest my head in her lap while she stroked my hair, and covered my eyes when I got scared. And I pretended to be scared more often than I was, because I liked the feel of her warm skin on my face and the way she cradled me close and whispered, “I’ll hurt anyone who tries to hurt you, you hear me?”

  I remember asking her once if she knew where my real mother went, and she smiled and said, “I’m right here.”

  “But I didn’t come out of your stomach.”

  “No. You sprouted in the woods like a wildflower, and I picked you and took you home.”

  I was old enough by then to know that wasn’t how things worked, but I liked the way the story sounded. I dreamed it so many times that it became more real than the wisp of smoke where my birth mother had been.

  It was the mother-daughter tea party that my Girl Scout troop put on that clinched it for me. All the daughters were bundled up in pink dresses with puffed-up skirts, looking just like the pastries on the tiered trays at the center of the tables. But Nina and I showed up in matching black dresses she’d bought for us, with elegant bows tied at the waist.

  The other girls were clearly unimpressed, but I ignored them. I hardly spoke to them at all. Nina and I spent the entire party focused solely on each other, giggling behind our hands at our own little jokes that no one else was allowed in on. The woman I’d brought was the most beautiful, the funniest, the most interesting one there. What else did I need?

  It was us against everyone else.

  From that day on, I didn’t tell people she was my father’s girlfriend. She was just Mom.

  After she had lived with us for three years, it was easy to believe that she had always been there. She took me to school and picked me up, helped me with my homework, taught me card games, how to ride a bike, and how to skip rocks.

  Dad was a sleep-deprived shadow that slipped into my room late at night to sing me to sleep, only to slip back out and wake me up a few minutes later with the sound of his yelling through the walls. Mom didn’t yell back. Her replies were a muffled whisper that never lost its calm or its nerve.

  Until the night I woke to her shaking me, just a few days after my ninth birthday, and her voice shattered into a million quaking pieces. “We need to go,” she said, fingers digging into my narrow shoulders. “Now.”

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t want us anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He wants us to leave. He’s going to—” Her eyes snapped to the door, like she’d heard something. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I won’t let him hurt you.”

  She pulled me out of the bed and toward the door, but I pulled back. “Why would he—”

  Then she switched on the light, and I saw the blood dripping down her chin—stark red against the glow of her pale skin. The kind of shock you never forget. “Please, sweetheart. Please.”

  I started to cry, but she held her hand over my mouth and snuck me through the kitchen and into the garage. We climbed into the big, white van with his company logo plastered on the side, weed whackers and push mowers rattling when she started the engine.

  When the kitchen door banged open, and his huge shadow lurched toward us, I screamed.

  Mom screeched the van in reverse, and I closed my eyes and latched my hands to my ears when we crashed through the garage door, metal roaring around us and trying to grind us to a stop, but she jammed the pedal to the floor until we shot free.

  We careened down the street, and I looked back in time to see my father run out of the house and down the driveway. He was barefoot, sprinting toward us, screaming something.

  Then the van rounded the corner, and I never saw him again.

  -

  We didn’t stop to rest until we were two states away from him. Mom parked at the edge of a Walmart lot, then leaned the driver’s seat all the way back and cradled me on her lap, my wet cheek pressed against her strong heartbeat. I started at every noise, certain he’d found us. That streak of red blood dripping down Mom’s face flashed in my mind every time I tried to close my eyes. But she wrapped me up in her steady arms, tighter and tighter, until nothing in the world could tear me away. “I’ll keep you safe,” she promised. She pressed a kiss to the crown of my head, whispering against my hair, “You’re my girl now.”

  Chapter 4

  I’M HALF ASLEEP AND more than a little drunk when we drive into Jasper Hollow, Ohio. It’s one o’clock in the morning. I’m sprawled on the mattress watching the tree-covered hills through the windows, the moon hanging low and casting a blue, haunting light that tumbles down the slopes.


  Jasper Hollow is a small town in southeastern Ohio, smack in the middle of Hocking County. Even though I’ve never been here, I know that it pools in the bowl between three mountains, named for the three daughters of the founder, Will Jasper, in 1851—Mattie to the east, Pearl to the north, and Clara to the west. And that there used to be a heated debate that raged between the townspeople and everybody else about whether they’re actually mountains or just really big hills.

  I know because Mom told me. And she knows because she lived at the base of Clara Mountain until she was sixteen years old.

  I climb up into the passenger seat just as we clatter over an old covered bridge, the only way in or out of town. The car goes dark inside the tunnel. But just before we come out on the other end, we jolt to a stop.

  Mom’s hands are bone-white on the wheel. I pry one free and hold it. Her fingers are cold and still in mine, but I hold them. I don’t say a word or even look at her face. I just roll down the window and let the warm, heady smell of the woods fill up my chest.

  My mother never feels anything halfway. She’s either plunged in the deepest depths of the ocean or flying up, up, up into the stars. It’s not hard to tell which one she’s feeling now, a few feet from being in her hometown again for the first time in fourteen years. She can’t make herself drive forward just yet.

  It takes her a few minutes to come back to herself, but finally, her hand tightens on mine, and she laughs, a little unnervingly. Then the van lurches forward.

  The road is one long curve around the base of a mountain that rises until it disappears into the black sky. There are little pinpricks of light that could be houses or could be stars.

  Mom turns off the road suddenly, into a gap in the trees that she must have known was there. The van jolts over thick roots so hard that I grip the edges of my seat. Branches crack like warning shots. The coins from the busted piggy bank rattle and roll in the back.

  Then the ground levels out, and the trees open up into nothing, and I’m so sure we’re about to hurtle over a cliff that I grab Mom’s arm. She laughs quietly before she cuts the engine and climbs out.

  I blink until the blackness becomes a little less black, and I see a glassy pond and the cabin on the other side. But the cabin is not going to be any good to us, because a tree fell and split it right down the middle. The glass is busted out of the windows, and a door swings and shrieks on one hinge.

  Mom looks it over with her hands on her hips for a while before she crawls in through one of the broken windows, glass crunching under her boots.

  The closer I get to it, the more I start to understand what the fortune-teller said—about getting a bad feeling from certain people or places. She used the word evil. Which felt dramatic at the time, but that’s the only way I know how to describe the sensation that radiates from the cabin. Evil. Or maybe just dread.

  I only lean my head through the window long enough to pick up the smell of mold and a dead animal or two. “No way in hell I’m sleeping in here.”

  She whirls on me. Earlier, at the bar, she looked like magic. But now, in the dark of the cabin, she’s wraithlike. A ghost.

  “You’ll do what I tell you to do,” she snaps.

  I freeze, as still as I would be if I came across a wolf in the woods. I have to be very careful about what I do next. If it’s the wrong thing, her skin will flush red and her voice will lower to a hiss, and she’ll talk about disloyalty. About my secret plans to abandon her like everyone else has.

  I’ve pushed too far before. Sometimes, it takes a few hours for her to forgive me. Other times, days.

  Slowly, I climb into the cabin to stand beside her.

  I watch her shadow for a few tense moments, holding my breath. Then she goes back to searching the cabin, opening drawers and turning over rotted furniture. I’m relieved when she finally tells me to go set up the tent outside.

  Making camp never takes me long anymore. I have a fire going by the time Mom’s footsteps shuffle in the dirt behind me. She grabs a pot from the back of the van and a can of beef stew. Soon the thick broth is bubbling over the fire.

  It smells better than it tastes, but I wolf mine down while it’s hot. Mom sits across from me on the ground; her pretty dress is bunched up around her hip bones, and dirt clings to the lace, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She stares into the depths of her chipped bowl, stirring slowly.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “To be nervous.”

  Her dark eyes flick to my face.

  I don’t know why I said it. If anything, she seems too calm, aside from the incident on the bridge. She can’t feel as blank as she looks—not here. Not in the same place as the person who took everything from her.

  Not the night before we take everything from him.

  “I’m just saying that you’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

  She tilts her head at me. I look down into my bowl and scrape the bottom with my spoon, even though I’ve already scoured every drop.

  “So maybe that feels like a lot of pressure.”

  She pauses. Then asks, “For me, or for you?”

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I smile and shake my head like she’s said something funny before I take my bowl to the pond to rinse it.

  But when I crouch by the water, I set the bowl aside and plunge both of my hands in up to the elbows. I splash my face until all I know is the clarity of coldness, dripping down my cheeks and into my shirt.

  Mom kneels down beside me and rinses her bowl, then takes mine and does the same. Without looking at me, she says, “I wouldn’t send you if I didn’t think you could do it.”

  I don’t answer. But I can’t stop myself from thinking, What happens if I can’t?

  I keep my mouth shut because I don’t think I want to know the answer. The best one I could expect would be that she’d forgive me.

  The worst—­

  Well. I won’t think about that.

  -

  I climb into the tent and curl up inside a quilt so soft and cool, I sigh when I feel it close around me. I don’t remember where we took this one from, but I bet they were sad to lose it. I would be.

  We need it more than they do. The justifications didn’t use to come so easily to me. I used to linger over things like that for days—that the quilt might have been made by somebody’s favorite grandmother. That there’s a little girl somewhere who has nightmares when she sleeps without it. Or maybe a woman who liked to press it close to her face because it smelled like her dead husband.

  But Mom told me that other people don’t dwell on things that way. They usually don’t give the hurt they might be causing others a second thought. It was a quilt nobody had touched in years, she’d probably tell me, if I said something. They forgot they even had it.

  And if Mom says it’s okay, then it’s okay.

  I listen for her now. I can hear the leaves shuffle under her feet as she paces from one end of the clearing to the other. Then the night goes quiet, and I wonder if she’s inside the cabin again.

  I try to put myself in her head, in this place.

  I’ve heard the story of how her life fell apart so many times. And you can’t tell it without this cabin.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep when Mom finally crawls into the tent. My eyes open blearily, and I lift the edge of the quilt for her.

  I feel her hair first, tickling my face as she settles in. I stacked three blankets between us and the bottom of the tent, but no matter how many I use, the ground will always be hard under our backs. Even after seven years on the road, I remember what it was like to sleep in a real bed well enough to miss it.

  But once she finally stops fidgeting, she curls her head against my neck, and I don’t mind the ground so much.

  I press my face to the soft crown of her hair and let my eyes close again, all my nerves about tomorrow dissolving in the soft rhythm of her breath. Because she said she wouldn’t send me if I couldn’t do it.

  And if Mom says it�
�ll work, then it’ll work.

  Chapter 5

  I SLEEP MORE THAN ten hours. I can’t remember the last time I did that. Living outside means always being ready to fight off whoever’s trying to steal your stuff while you’re asleep, and usually just a subtle shift in light is enough to wake me.

  Maybe it’s being in Jasper Hollow. From the moment we got here, there’s been a layer of calm settled over everything. It feels safe. But I know better. It’s like how right before people freeze to death, they start to feel warm and sleepy—if I let myself be lulled by the promise of peaceful rest, the cold will stutter my heart to a stop.

  Metaphorically, anyway. It’s got to be close to a hundred degrees inside this goddamn tent.

  I crawl out and blink several times. In the thick of the woods, summer is everywhere—in the honey light and the branches heavy with lush, green leaves and the insect wings zipping past my ears. The humidity is a solid thing, a blanket that could smother someone to death.

  Mom is already dressed in a gray cotton dress, her arms folded over her chest while she stares out over the pond. She turns to me when I emerge from the tent, and before I can ask her what she’s thinking, she says, “Time for a bath.”

  The pond doesn’t know it’s summer yet, and it’s ten degrees below frigid. My teeth chatter hard enough to rattle my brain while Mom kneels on the muddy bank behind me and rubs shampoo into my hair. She uses a harsh brush on my back and arms, scrubbing my skin raw. I told her I could do it myself, but she has a clear idea of how things have to go today, and she wants to control as much of it as she can.

  I snatch my towel from the low branch I hung it on and wrap myself up tight as Mom starts to pick through the tangled mess of my hair with a comb.

  “This is a pretty spot, in the daylight,” I say.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “It doesn’t look like anyone’s been up here in a long time.”

  Silence.

  “Are you—”

  But then she gives a sharp tug on a tangle, and I clamp my mouth shut.