Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Then another set of arms locks around us, squeezing us even tighter together—Neil. He’s got the infectious joy of a golden retriever, clearly so happy to have everyone together again that he can’t contain himself.
“Gentle!” his mom shouts when Ellis feigns a groan, and then they let me go and both of them are belly laughing, reflections of one another.
“Glad you’re back, Ellis,” I say, but he won’t let me off that easily. He slings his arm around me as we walk up the porch steps.
“You been taking care of my family?” he asks.
A memory from last night flashes through my head—his daughter’s hair tangled in my hands, her lips warm on mine—and I have to bite back a smirk before I answer, “Of course.”
We all turn at the sound of another car pulling into the driveway, parking behind the van. A delivery truck.
A man in a brown uniform jumps out and jogs over to Ellis with a clipboard.
“I went to your house first, Mr. Bowman,” he says, “but Dave Perkins said you were staying here for a while.”
Ellis signs the clipboard and passes it back to him. “Thanks, Ronnie. What do you have for me?”
Ronnie proceeds to unload twenty massive boxes that he can hardly fit his arms around. Neil helps him, and they carry them to the porch. Ellis pulls out a pocketknife to slice one open, and we all peer inside.
The box is filled to the brim with more black boxes, and printed in shiny silver foil on the tops, it says By Example.
The candles for the ceremony. With everything going on, I’d managed to completely forget that filming for Ellis’s show starts in two days.
Chapter 40
THE NEXT MORNING, ELLIS comes to breakfast smiling. He kisses his wife, helps set the table, and trades sections of the paper with Pastor Holland. If it weren’t for the dark circles under his eyes, it might have been easier to forget his frantic wandering through the woods a few nights ago. The fear in his voice as he called Mom’s name. I wonder how he slept last night. If he jumped at every sound, wondering if Mom would climb through the guest room window and finish the job the bees couldn’t.
Neil and Jill talk with him animatedly about preparations for the ceremony, everything from food to sound equipment to the construction of the stage that will be right in front of Harriet’s Oak, where he’ll make his speech. Until Ellis interrupts to ask, “You all right, Mellie?”
She’s looks up from her plate, which she hasn’t taken a single bite from. “Just tired,” she says.
She has trouble holding eye contact with him. Like it hurts her. I told her not to worry anymore, but I knew that she wouldn’t be able to let go of her theory about the boy who emailed her having something to do with all the bad things that have happened.
And she’s not too far from the truth.
Ellis frowns at her for a few seconds, then nods. “Hopefully the police will let us back into the house soon,” he says. “You’ll feel better when you can sleep in your own bed.”
When he finishes the cheese and bacon omelet that Neil made for him, he announces he’s going for a walk to get some air. But he waits until he gets to the door, his hand on the knob, before he pauses, turns back to us, and says, “Mason, why don’t you join me?”
He planned for Pastor Holland to come with him all along. His voice is too light, and he tilts his head too far to the side. His lies are usually so seamless—this is a slipup that proves that Mom is getting to him. But I think I’m the only one who notices.
My heart leaps in my chest, and I hope I do a better job of masking my thoughts than Ellis does.
This is it. The plan worked. He’s finally going to confess the truth to Pastor Holland. All we had to do was send him to the brink of death.
Pastor Holland grabs his cane, then picks up his jacket, looks confused for a second, and puts it back down, probably remembering that it’s ninety degrees out. He hasn’t been quite right since our conversation in Mom’s room.
He follows Ellis out and pulls the door closed behind him. It takes every ounce of control in me to wait a full minute before I stand up from the table and announce, “The orange juice has pulp.”
Jill blinks. “Yes?”
“I don’t like pulp.”
“Well, I suppose I could—”
“I’ll get it.”
I hurry out the door before Neil or Melody can offer to come with me.
Ellis and Pastor Holland haven’t gotten far by the time I step outside, but I can’t get close enough to hear what they’re saying without drawing their attention. From ten yards back, it looks like they’re just passing small talk back and forth. Pastor Holland points out things in town and shakes his head, while Ellis nods along.
The sun is already a pulsing, vengeful thing, probing light and heat into every shadow, laying Jasper Hollow bare. A sun that makes liars sweat more than usual—Ellis rubs it away from his forehead with the back of his arm, and I can already feel my shirt sticking to my shoulders. But it’s not my turn to confess.
It’s only a ten-minute walk from the house to the Circle. They find an empty bench under Harriet’s Oak. I have to take a wide arc around them so they won’t see me. The bench faces away from the tree, so I press my back against the trunk to listen.
Then Ellis asks Pastor Holland with an inflected casualness, “When’s the last time you heard from Nina?”
Pastor Holland doesn’t answer. Not for a long time. So long, I’m about to peek around the tree to make sure they haven’t gotten up and walked away.
“Why?” he finally asks.
“I just wonder about her sometimes. Don’t you?”
I can’t help myself—I peer around the tree. I can see the side of Pastor Holland’s face. He stares at Ellis like he knows there’s more to this. He waits for Ellis to get around to what he brought him out here to say but looks uncertain about whether or not he really wants him to get there.
“What was it?” Ellis says. “Fourteen years ago now? Fifteen?”
Pastor Holland grunts.
Ellis’s voice comes out strange when he starts his next question. He has to stop himself, cough, and try again. “What would you say to her?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you saw her again.”
It’s the same question I asked him in her room the other night.
“Why would I see her again?”
“I’m not saying you would. It’s just a hypothetical, that’s all. I just wonder.”
Pastor Holland heaves a deep breath, in and out. “Maybe you should think more on what is instead of wondering about what’s not.”
“Humor me.”
“I’d call the police.”
My back goes rigid against the oak. I dig my fingers into the bark.
Ellis fumbles for a response. “On your own daughter?”
“Yes, on my own daughter,” Pastor Holland snaps, like he would have yelled it if he weren’t worried about drawing attention. “After what she did, I don’t see how I could do anything else.”
Ellis furrows his brows. “It was a long time ago, though. She was only seventeen.”
“You’re talking like she got caught drinking or skipping school.”
“Look, I know—”
“She’s dead, for all we know. Long dead. Doesn’t make any difference to me whether she is or not.”
Even Ellis flinches at that.
This wasn’t how he talked to me last night. His face wasn’t closed off like a brick wall. His voice didn’t have that edge. So either he was acting for me, or he’s acting for Ellis.
He can’t mean it. A father couldn’t mean that. No one could look at Mom in the face—at her blue-black eyes that see everything—and turn her away.
But he had. Both of them had.
There’s a long pause that stretches for a minute or two, nothing but leaves rustling and birds chirping. I wait for Ellis to go on.
Tell him she didn’t do i
t. Tell him it was you. I clench my fists, itching to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze the words out of him. Save yourself. Save your family. Please. I’m not above hurting him, and I’m not above begging him—whatever will make him speak.
“You’re finished with her then?” Ellis asks finally. “Nothing will change that? Even if—”
“I told you, I’m not interested in hypotheticals,” Pastor Holland says.
“Well. All right, then.”
The way he says it, it’s like that’s the end of it. Like he’s hoping Mom is listening, hoping she’ll see that no matter what Ellis tells him, her father will never change his mind about her. That there’s no point in a confession.
My hands pulse, wanting to do something. Wanting to tear Ellis Bowman apart and put him back together the right way, but I wonder if all the pieces are even there. Men like him look so much like everybody else, but there’s something vital missing, deep down. Something that’s supposed to tell them that the rest of us weren’t put on this earth to be their collateral damage.
I think about rounding the tree, blowing my cover, telling Ellis what I really think of him—anything to release the pressure of rage boiling under my skin. Then Pastor Holland says, “The last I heard of her was about seven years ago. A call from the police.”
“The police?” Ellis whispers.
“Mm-hmm. From Virginia. They were asking me if I knew anything about where they could find her.”
“What for?”
“Said she kidnapped a little girl.”
I breathe out slowly. But then I can’t seem to remember how to breathe back in.
“Though I expect she isn’t so little anymore. A teenager by now. If she’s alive.”
Air. I can’t get air.
“They made me speak to her dad. His name is Jonah. From father to father, he said. If you know anything about where I can find my baby girl, please tell me.”
I’m choking on nothing. My airway constricts, like I’m breathing through a straw.
My father looked for me?
“Told me he was dating Nina for a while, but he broke it off, and then she just lost it. Stole the girl in the dead of night, and he hasn’t seen either of them since.”
“Horrible,” Ellis mutters.
I stagger a few steps from the tree, even though I know I’m supposed to stay hidden, but my feet won’t do what I tell them to. I reel to one side and then the other, throwing out my hands for balance.
Kidnapped.
Pastor Holland pauses for a long moment before he says, “How much do you know about Ph—”
“Phoenix?” Ellis says.
He’s spotted me. I hear him jog up behind me, over to where I’ve staggered to my hands and knees. I’m coughing hard, trying to remember how to use my lungs.
His hand is on my back, his face close to mine. “I think you’re having a panic attack,” he says.
“Orange juice,” I say between gasps. “I just wanted—orange juice.”
He rubs his big palm between my shoulder blades. “Deep breaths, Phoenix. Just breathe.” But his hand on me just makes the panic pound harder against my chest. I try to crawl away from him, but he grips my shoulders.
I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can’t—
I lock eyes with a woman sitting on a bench a few yards away. Her black hair tucked into a knit cap. Her blue-black eyes frozen wide. She’s usually so good at controlling them, never giving anything away. But now, they tell me everything I need to know.
I remember that night, when blood ran down her chin from her busted lip, bright red against pale white. I thought my father hit her. That’s what she wanted me to think so I’d go without a fight.
But she did it to herself.
My father never wanted us to leave.
He wanted her to leave.
And she took me with her.
Her face wavers in my vision, Ellis’s concerned voice falls away, and I drown in the cool, black depths behind my eyelids.
Nina Holland turned her back on Jasper Hollow all those years ago, when it turned its back on her. Even though it felt like closing the door on her own heart. Even though it went against every instinct in her.
Her father had been planting the seeds all her life. He taught her that a place can matter to you just as much as a person. That Jasper Hollow was where she grew up, surrounded by the beauty and the wildness of God’s creation. She would grow old under the watchful gaze of Clara, Pearl, and Mattie—the mountains that were larger-than-life, larger than any of her little pains. She would be buried in the same cemetery as the mother who died before she knew her but whose photograph had smiled on her benevolently from the mantelpiece since she was a baby.
Those seeds had flowered by the time they were pulled out to their roots and tossed into the wind.
She left Jasper Hollow because it was the only way to keep surviving. But as soon as she did, she wasn’t certain she wanted to survive anymore. Her life became a blur of movement. Going forward for the sake of going forward, because it was all she could think to do.
Finding a job was a challenge because she couldn’t share her real name. She was afraid she’d be recognized and dragged to jail. Arrested for being a baby-killer. Maybe torn apart in a cell by women desperate to see their own children again. She took under-the-table work from an untrustworthy man with a barrel chest and bad breath and a mean streak, cleaning tables and floors and dishes at a seedy bar. He didn’t pay her enough to find her own place to live, so she sometimes huddled in the corners of shelters or shared cramped apartments with other girls who couldn’t reveal their real names either.
Sometimes there were customers who would tell her that they liked her hair. Her hair had been Ellis’s favorite thing about her. She always made sure to keep it washed, would choose shampoo over food if she had to, because as long as it shined and looked soft, she could often find a man willing to take her home, who would tuck her into his arms and distract her from the dark gathering at the corners of her mind. She let them do what they liked to her, as long as they let her sleep over when they were done.
They never kept her around for long, even the kind ones. She didn’t blame them. She was too hollowed out, too silent and insubstantial and blank for anyone to fall in love with.
There was a bald man one feverish night who kept buying drinks and giving them to her, and she threw back all of them because she liked how they numbed her. He told her he was a tattoo artist, and he thought she was so beautiful that it would be his honor to give her one for free. She knew it wouldn’t actually be free, that he would demand something from her afterward, but she didn’t care. She did the phoenix sketch for him on a napkin, to be his guide. I want to start all over, she’d told him. I want to burn down to ash and come back as something new.
Just a few weeks later, she met Jonah. He had soft, brown eyes and an easy smile, and he owned a landscaping company. And maybe he could see how run-down she was, how lost. Whatever the reason, he asked her while she cleared the dishes from his table, “Would you be interested in coming to work for me?”
She learned how to use a lawn mower. She tended dying trees, planted flowers, weeded flower beds, and lugged heavy bags of mulch in the summer heat. It was hard work. But he paid her well, and he was never mean, and he helped her find her own little apartment where the landlord didn’t ask too many questions.
He waited a full year to ask her on a date. Five months more to bring her to his house.
She didn’t love him. She didn’t have it in her to love him. But she faked it well enough because anything was better than being alone with the memories that clawed at her insides.
And then she walked into his kitchen for the first time, and she saw his little girl sitting at the table. Her eyes were deep brown, like his. Her hair a tangle of curls. Her gaze quick and sharp.
Nina didn’t know what it was. Maybe because the girl was around the same age as her son would have been. Maybe because the girl rem
inded her of herself, when she used to sit at her own father’s table, legs too short for her feet to brush the tiled floor. Maybe it was all out of her hands, beyond anything logical—one soul calling to another. Either way, she felt a sudden, tiny pulse in a heart she’d thought long dead. She smiled, and the girl smiled back.
From that day on, Jonah’s daughter was her little shadow. She always wanted to be near her, always had her hand bunched in Nina’s shirt like she was afraid that if she let go, Nina would disappear in a cloud of smoke. She was in awe of Nina’s drawings, of the way she dressed and braided her hair. She always wanted to be in Nina’s lap, transfixed as she traced the lines of the phoenix tattoo on her forearm with her little fingers.
When the girl looked at her, Nina didn’t feel like a failure or a killer or a whore, or any of the other cruel names her father gave her the day he threw her out of Ellis’s house.
She took a special delight in all the times Jonah opened his arms to his daughter and the girl ran to Nina instead. She felt a deep, euphoric joy that she didn’t even know she was capable of anymore the first time the girl called her Mom.
-
Of course, it couldn’t last. Nina had learned that nothing good could last.
Jonah told her she was an empty cup. That he had tried for three years to reach her, but there was nothing inside her—or if there was, he couldn’t find it. Couldn’t find her. He said he kept her around so long because he knew that his daughter loved her. That Nina loved her, too. He said he’d done everything he could to fix her, but there was nothing else to be done—she needed to work out her problems on her own.
It wasn’t unexpected. They’d been fighting about so many small things lately, as insignificant as who would pick up the groceries. She was numb to the whole conversation until he said that she couldn’t see his little girl anymore.
“You can’t take her,” Nina had said. “She’s mine.”
She couldn’t leave behind the first bit of light that she’d been given since she’d been thrust into the pitch dark of the world.
The Hollow Inside Page 25
