Harrow Lake

by Kat Ellis

  “Your mom’s a ranger and she doesn’t like animals?”

  “Not in the house. You know, before I decided I wanted to be a ranger, I thought about becoming a vet,” Carter continues. “But then I saw how long I’d need to study, and the college tuition fees . . . Hey, what are you doing?”

  I didn’t mean to reach out toward the cage. At least, I don’t think I did. It just felt like I needed to let her out. But that’s ridiculous; she’s not mine to let go. “I was . . . just going to pet her,” I say, not sounding at all sure of myself.

  “Oh. Well, you probably shouldn’t. She’s not exactly tame, and she scares easy. I’m only keeping her until her wing heals.” Carter takes my hand and steers me firmly back toward the stool. “Caw fell out of her nest,” he explains. “If I put her outside before she’s ready, she won’t be able to fly, and something bigger and nastier will eat her.”

  He leaves the room and comes back with a bowl of soapy-smelling liquid and a washcloth. I go to take them from him.

  “You did the worst part. Just let me clean it up for you,” Carter says. I still don’t let go of the cloth. He laughs. “You really aren’t used to letting someone help, are you?”

  “Nobody but Nolan,” I say, but I let go. He gets to work, deftly washing away the blood and dirt from my arm.

  “You two are close, then?” Carter asks.

  I don’t know how to explain my relationship with Nolan, how to frame it in a way Carter or anyone else would understand. A world with just two people can feel vast and tiny all at once.

  “We’re pretty close,” I say.

  “That’s good. I never really got along with my dad,” Carter says.

  I note the past tense. “Is he dead, or just not around?”

  Carter doesn’t look at me. “Dead. It happened at the fairground a few years ago. Dad was in there working late and wild dogs got in, despite the electric fence.”

  “Your dad was killed by dogs?” I picture the painted hounds of the carousel coming to life as though it’s showing on an enormous theater screen: an older version of Carter, stumbling between the metal carcasses of the fairground rides, a pack of foam-mouthed dogs circling him, herding him into a corner, their teeth snapping. Blood everywhere . . .

  “That’s awful,” I say, and I can’t help thinking of Nolan lying in his study. “Were you there when it happened?”

  “Not until after. I found tracks leading into the cave entrance at the back of the lot—” Carter stops abruptly. “Damn, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be saying all this, what with your dad being in the hospital and all.”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  Carter is silent for a long moment, as though waiting for me to change my mind about that. “What about your mom?” he says finally.

  “What about her?” I say.

  “You get along with her?”

  “I haven’t seen her since I was five. I barely know her.”

  Carter nods, like he suspected as much. “Do you think you might get to know her while you’re here?”

  “She isn’t in Harrow Lake,” I say, confused.

  “No, but you can learn a lot about a person from where they’ve been. The things they leave behind.”

  His words cut into me. Lorelei left this town behind, but she left me, too. What does that say about me?

  “I could help you with that,” he continues. “Research your mom, I mean. I volunteer at the museum, going through old records and looking for things to put on display. I bet we could find out some interesting stuff about her.”

  “Why would you do that?” I ask.

  “Volunteer at the museum?”

  “No,” I say. “Why would you help me?”

  Carter shrugs. “To be friendly. Don’t you have friends where you come from?”

  Heat flushes my face. He shouldn’t be asking me personal things like this. God, I shouldn’t be alone with him. “You mean in the modern world, where people live in real houses with electricity and indoor plumbing and—oh, I don’t know, Wi-Fi?”

  My words seem to echo in the silence that follows. Carter stares at me like he’s debating whether to throw me out.

  “Hold still while I finish this,” he says shortly, and focuses on the bloody cut on my arm.

  The silence is awkward now, and it’s my fault.

  I just need to keep you out, I want to tell him. To explain, though I’m not sure it would even make sense out loud: I need my walls. But there’s a tiny rebel part of me that wants Carter to look at me like he did a moment ago, so I start to list the things I could say to make him ask his questions again. None of them are Optimal.

  “I had a friend once,” I try. “It didn’t work out.”

  He’s listening, but still not meeting my eye. “Why not?”

  “She wasn’t real.” I can’t help smiling as his movements stop and he looks up. “Mary Ann was a ventriloquist’s dummy.”

  Carter’s eyebrows shoot up in a way that makes me want to laugh.

  “Nolan gave her to me when I was six. She was a prop from Razorwire Rhapsody,” I say. When Carter looks at me blankly, I add, “The horror movie directed by Nikolai Brev?” There’s not a hint of recognition on his face. “Sylvina Lupa starred in it? Anyway, Nikolai Brev had a wager with Nolan about which of them would win the Saturn Award that year, and of course Nolan won, so he demanded Mary Ann as his prize.” It probably gave Nolan a kick to give her to me, knowing how it would needle Brev thinking of his rival’s daughter playing dollies with a symbol of his best work.

  “That dummy must have been worth a lot of money,” Carter says, and this startles me for a second. I’ve never considered that Mary Ann, as a movie prop, might be valuable. She was just a doll to me. A friend.

  I breeze past his comment. “She didn’t have a name in the movie, so I named her.” I’d chosen the name from the book Lorelei had been reading to me before she walked out. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Mary Ann was just a side character, but I liked the name, so it stuck with me. “Mary Ann was more or less as big as me at the time, with big green eyes and long black lashes, and pouty red lips like she’d been drinking blood. She wore these shiny red Mary Janes I loved, and I insisted Nolan buy me a pair so we would match.” I smile at the memory. “But then he got tired of seeing Mary Ann around the house. I guess it bothered him to watch me playing with her more than it ever bothered Brev. So he packed her away, and that was that.”

  Except it wasn’t. After searching for her (without much hope, seeing as I didn’t dare go through Nolan’s things without his permission), I went to bed and rage-cried until I finally fell asleep. Then I woke up with the surest sense that Mary Ann was there, sitting on my bed and whispering to me in the dark. Something I’d wished for so hard, it came true.

  Mary Ann wasn’t a dummy anymore—she looked and moved like a real girl. A child, like me. Her skin was smooth and lifelike, free of the grooves where hinges allowed her face to move. And that was how I saw her from then on, in the dark and quiet spaces where I knew Nolan wouldn’t find out. Because even then I knew that seeing a girl who wasn’t really there was definitely not Optimal.

  “So . . . she was your imaginary friend?” Carter says.

  “I guess. For, like, a year.” I should feel embarrassed admitting this truth to an almost-stranger, but it actually feels okay. Maybe it’s the calm way Carter takes everything in his stride, or maybe it’s just the little thrill of letting a glimmer of a secret out into the world. I’ve not spoken Mary Ann’s name out loud since Nolan’s warning to quit acting out or there’ll be consequences. There could be consequences now, if Carter decided to use Mary Ann against me. I imagine him being interviewed on TV, calling me all kinds of horrible names and laughing, but that doesn’t gel with the guy who nurses ravens back to health. The guy who is now carefully tending to a cut on a stran
ge girl’s arm, even after she’s been rude to him.

  “Where is she now?” he says.

  “She got left behind during a house move.”

  This is more or less true. I remember sitting in the backseat of Nolan’s car, watching the house grow smaller as we rumbled down the driveway for the last time. Looking back to see Larry, always the last to leave, shoving something into a trash can in the front yard. Not just something—Mary Ann. The dummy version of her, anyway. I hadn’t seen the puppet since Nolan took her from me.

  I couldn’t look away from the pale arm poking out of the trash. Couldn’t unsee her hinged mouth falling open like she was calling for me to wait. Couldn’t pretend it wasn’t my friend that Larry was slamming the trash can lid down on over and over, trying to stomp her into the garbage.

  As the car pulled out onto the road, I saw a final flash of Mary Ann’s face webbed with cracks, a black void where one of her perfect white teeth now hung crooked. Then we turned a corner and she was gone. No matter how hard I wished to see the living-girl version of her in my new home, I never did. Larry had shattered that part of my imagination as surely as he’d smashed Mary Ann’s beautifully carved face in. And he smiled as he did it.

  I think that was when I started to truly, deeply hate him.

  I swallow the stale, sour feeling that fills my mouth.

  “It’s not like I could’ve kept her forever, though,” I murmur.

  “But why not make other friends?” Carter says. “You know . . . ones you can keep?” He makes it sound like the easiest thing in the world.

  “There’s no point.”

  “You don’t see the point in having friends?”

  “Not really. Where would they fit into my life? Nolan likes having me close by, even when he’s working, and we move a lot. I don’t get bored by myself. I have so many books and movies and games and . . . stuff, I could build a fort out of it. A real kick-ass fort.”

  Now Carter laughs. Somehow this inane little slice of me has dissolved the tense atmosphere. Looks like I stumbled onto something Optimal after all.

  “Do you ever write, Lola? Like, stories and stuff?” he says.

  I lock eyes with Caw sitting quietly in her cage on the dresser, and think of Cygnet. “No. Why?”

  “It’s just that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the story you told me at the fairground, about the coyote in girl’s clothes. I guess that makes you a good storyteller.”

  “You liked the coyote story?”

  “I did,” he says. This pleases me way more than it should.

  Why would you care what some boy thinks? Nolan asks accusingly, but I ignore him.

  The gray clouds outside the window have knotted and clumped together, and they open up now as fat raindrops start falling against the glass. It’s like being back inside that cave again, water dripping onto the underground lake in an echoing chatter. Did Lorelei ever hear that, when she ran through those caves as Little Bird? Did it remind her of her precious jitterbugs, too?

  “So what would you normally be doing on a rainy summertime afternoon?” Carter says, tracking my gaze to the window.

  “Normally?” It takes me a second to realize he means back in Manhattan. The truth is that I’m supposed to be in France by now, listening to Nolan stalking around the new apartment and being forced to watch Saw reruns with Larry (any of the bazillion Saw movies, which I loathe and Larry loves because he is a basic middle-aged white guy with an unhealthy yen for gore). “Hanging out with all my friends, of course.”

  “Well, I guess you’ll have to make do with me,” Carter says.

  He doesn’t have to hold my wrist to keep me from squirming away now. I turn my hand so my palm rests flat against the inside of his arm, trying to make the movement seem natural. His skin there is soft. I trace my fingertips over it. Mark invisible lines to match the ones I drew on my own arm.

  It’s only now that I notice he’s gone very, very still. When I lift my gaze to meet his, he lets out a shaky breath. I snatch my hand back. Feel my face turn beet-red. What was I thinking, pawing at this strange boy in his bedroom?

  You obviously weren’t thinking, Nolan snaps. Feeling his presence only makes me flush hotter. I start pulling down my sleeve, focusing hard on it. “Are you done?”

  “Oh . . . uh, yeah, almost,” Carter says. He sounds surprised.

  What would have happened if I’d left my hand there a second longer? Would he have pulled away, or leaned closer? What would I have wanted?

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about that tooth. It probably came from a deer or something. Maybe it fell in the sinkhole the same way you did.”

  I’m sure he’s just spewing words into the awkward space I’ve created, but that doesn’t stop a grinning white face flashing through my mind, coming at me under the water.

  The rain picks up its pace beyond the window, plink-plink-plink, like it’s rapping on my skull. It grows louder, sharper, faster as it drills the warped windowpane, an almost insect-like chatter.

  Tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP . . .

  “Here, let me just finish up. I think you were lucky—this isn’t like any kind of bite I’ve ever seen.” He wraps gauze around my arm. “Your clothes are still soaked. I can lend you some of my sister’s if you want . . .”

  “No.”

  “Oh . . . okay, no problem,” Carter says quickly. “Or, uh, you could wear mine, I guess?”

  “I’ll change when I get back to my grandmother’s.”

  It’s going to be hard enough explaining how I’ve ended up drenched and covered in mud; it would be even harder to come up with a reason why I was wearing a stranger’s clothes.

  “Look, have I done something to upset you?”

  I want to glare at him, but I don’t know why. Carter hasn’t done anything wrong. I just feel weird and twitchy and I want to leave.

  “Lola, I’m not trying to be an ass here, but you know it would be normal to say thank you, right?” he says. “Thank you for offering me your clothes. Thank you for taking care of the cut on my arm. Thank you for jumping into a damn sinkhole after me.”

  “I . . .”

  Nolan believes thank you and sorry are empty words. When I’m grateful, you’ll know about it, he always says. But Carter’s been so nice to me. Maybe Nolan’s wrong about some things.

  “Thank you,” I tell Carter. I try to come up with something Optimal to add to it, to make him smile like he did before, but then I realize he already is. The thank you was enough.

  “Anytime.” He clears his throat, suddenly sheepish. “Give me two seconds and I’ll take you home.”

  Home. Does Nolan think home is an empty word, too? Do I?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Things I know about teeth:

  A human adult has thirty-two teeth (if they haven’t lost any): four canines, eight incisors, eight premolars, and twelve molars.

  I once saw a necklace in a museum made from 200 human teeth. It was next to the skull of a man with incisors the same length as my pinkie finger. *

  Tooth enamel is the hardest material in the human body.

  Deer teeth don’t have metal fillings.

  *This would be an Optimal thing to tell Nolan, but there’s no point because he was there with me at the time. He loved that exhibit. It inspired him to make his seventh blockbuster movie, Rattus, about a young scientist in Germany during the Weimar Republic who became convinced his incisors would grow right through his own skull if he didn’t gnaw on human bones to grind them down.

  * * *

  • • •

  I wait in the living room while Carter changes. Swaying back and forth in an old rocking chair, I think Nolan would appreciate the Norman Bates’ mom vibe I have going on.

  I feel better now. Calm enough to want to kick myself for losing my phone. I�
��ve only had it a couple of days, and now it’s lying at the bottom of an underground pool.

  Damn it.

  The bare floors allow every little sound to travel, so I hear it when a door closes at the back of the house. Carter called out to see if his mom and sister were home when we arrived, and no one answered. But now slow footsteps carry from another room, followed by a clatter. Could it be Cora, home from working at the diner? Or maybe their mom?

  I stop rocking and pad over to the door. The hallway is dim. I hope Carter will appear in his bedroom doorway, but I can hear him moving around in there as he changes. Another door stands ajar farther along, and a woman’s silhouette flits past it before disappearing from view. It’s Ranger Crane.

  I flatten myself behind the doorjamb. Hiding feels necessary. Maybe it’s because of how we met up at the Bone Tree. Or because I’m in her house while her son is getting dressed in another room. Maybe it’s because Carter was so relieved when he thought nobody was home.

  Through a crack in the door I see Ranger Crane searching through the cupboard under the sink. With what sounds like a whispered prayer she holds up a glass bottle—there’s no label on it, but the golden liquid inside it looks like whiskey. Her hands shake as she unscrews the cap. She takes a long drink straight from the bottle, then smacks it down on the counter and shoves it away like it’s about to burst into flames. Her low moan is so desperately sad, I don’t want to be anywhere near it. She’s nothing like the ranger I met out in the woods.

  The floorboards groan under my bare feet as I back away from the door. Ranger Crane doesn’t turn around. I tiptoe back into the living room—except, when I close the door, I realize I’m in the wrong room. Boxes of papers are piled all around me, and a desk sits in the corner. Dust motes dance in the thin sunlight now sluicing through the single low window. This room feels like a tomb. I shouldn’t be in here.