Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

  Because Dany had reminded Marsden about Jude’s father, hadn’t she, after the news of Rigby Ambrose had spread throughout Glory? How Leo Ambrose had moved his young family out West after he lost his job due to his drinking. How his wife died of cancer not long after. How his drinking spun even more out of control and his sons met his fists. All of it, leaking throughout the town like bad gas, borne on whispers and sly glances and the kind of boredom so deep it almost welcomed danger.

  A clumsily bandaged wrist as Jude walked around outside during recess.

  A split lip as he entered the classroom.

  Then, one spring weekend in the public library. Marsden had been seven and Jude eight. His bronze-hued cheek had been red and puffed, his eyes wet and streaming, as she watched him run between towers of books toward an older boy. His flight had been desperate and terrorized, full of fear. She’d felt all of that crash into her own heart, so that it hurt for him, too, this schoolmate she only knew by name.

  She’d been in the next aisle, browsing the cookbooks—Star had promised to bake cookies with her the next time she visited, Marsden’s choice of recipe—when the pounding of sneakered feet came from behind the racks of books at her side. She heard muffled crying, comforting murmurs.

  She’d walked to the end of the aisle and peeked over.

  There was Jude, crying into the shoulder of an older boy. He seemed huge by comparison, this other boy, his shoulders and hands and feet all oversize—only his soft cheeks and long, messy limbs gave away how young he was still. Marsden saw how his skin was the exact same shade as Jude’s, all ambers and sweet molasses. They had the same eyes, too, full of glints and hidden hues that only peeked out depending. Her own eyes were like that, not wanting to give things away.

  That older boy would have been Rigby, she knew now. Doing his best to protect his little brother from their father, even if Jude’s swollen cheek told her Rigby had been too slow that day. And seeing Rigby’s expression, the tears in his own eyes as he struggled to convince Jude he would be fine, she saw how he hated himself for it.

  She knew that feeling now, too, didn’t she? How each time she failed Wynn, it ate at her like a strange hunger, the kind that no food could fix? How it made her realize all over again that she was not good enough to make up for all the bad, not strong enough to save anything?

  If she ever heard Rigby in the covert, she’d tell him she understood all of it. How lonely it was to save someone. How his leaving had left Jude hollow, but that his brother was still here, and alive, and so he hadn’t failed at all.

  And, maybe, then she’d ask something of him.

  If he knew of her father. If somewhere in the covert, Grant Eldridge still had a voice.

  Then Jude was grabbing her hand, jolting her back to the present and the covert, stopping her from walking any farther.

  “The squirrel’s right at our feet.” His face was amused, wanting to laugh. And his voice was still husky, but no longer scraped or painful sounding, just full of valleys and low, soft slopes. He dropped her hand. “Hidden in the grass.”

  The ghost of his touch lingered like the long, measured stroke of a sure brush on paper. Marsden ignored the sensation and ripped up the rest of her half of the piece of toast, dropping the pieces onto the ground near where they stood.

  Jude started to do the same. “Captivity for toast. Seems fair enough to me.”

  It didn’t escape her, the way it was both strange yet completely normal to be standing there with him, just outside the place where his brother had shot himself weeks ago. In that moment, more than anything, she wanted to ask him if it really had been his dad who used to hurt him. If he was still being hurt. If that was why he always looked ready to hurt someone back.

  “So you live at the boardinghouse with your family?” He tossed the last of his toast into the grass. “And work there as a cook? Your mom’s a housekeeper there, right?”

  Marsden’s mind raced, trying to decipher if he was being sarcastic in pretending to not know. If unspoken facts were simply lies to him, or stories, or rumors.

  “Who told you we lived there?” she finally managed.

  “That girl who found me here outside the covert. I’m guessing she’s your sister?”

  She nodded. “Her name’s Wynn.” Who was now going to be served eggs every day for breakfast for the rest of the summer—for the rest of the entire year.

  “I asked her where I could find you, so she told me you were still at home. Then she pointed to the boardinghouse.”

  Surprise wiped away all further thoughts of punishment for Wynn. She realized now that he never did say why he came to be there, waiting outside her woods as though he were guarding it. Or spying. “You were actually looking for me?”

  A second of hesitation, then Jude pulled out the book he’d tucked into his shorts pocket. He unrolled it, showing her the front.

  Putting Together the Perfect Time Capsule. The cover was worn and scratched up. He handed it to her, his expression uncertain again, vulnerable. “Open it, please.”

  Marsden did, even though she was lost. Why was he showing her a kids’ book?

  The pages inside were laminated, protection from sticky and careless fingers. Someone had written on them, the handwriting that of a child’s. There were lists and arrows and charts.

  She flipped more pages and dried blooms whirled free.

  Leaves, palm-size, in the shape of a heart.

  The familiar scent of wild ginger filled her nose as the leaves danced around them to land at their feet. It was the covert, leaving traces of itself on their skin, in the breaths they breathed.

  She should have instantly thought of death, of sad, lonely things. And she did. But standing there with Jude, some of her thoughts also stayed with him—with the book he’d brought for her—so that she was curious, confused.

  The grim expression had crept back into his eyes. It was now laced with a painful kind of hope, and she braced herself for anything and everything.

  “Rigby had a time capsule, and it’s buried somewhere in the covert,” he said. “I need to find it. I need to dig it up.”

  eight.

  Marsden turned from him so fast, her hair spun out in a wild arc, as though to cut away his request. Her heart skated in circles in her chest, pounding.

  She had to get away.

  Jude’s hand shot out and grasped at her arm. There was desperation in his grip, a panic of his own that nearly touched hers. She barely had time to consider that: the puzzle of why he’d be feeling something close to scared when he was only supposed to be mourning his beloved big brother. When he said her name, it sounded raw.

  “Marsden. Please. Just hear me out for a second.”

  “No.” Fury was the only thing that could contain her fear. “You’ve lost your mind to ask me that. And you need to leave.” Each word had to be a hammer blow to his hopes, no matter how cruel each might be. She stared down at his hand, still on her arm, and grimaced. Let go.

  Jude did, quickly, as though her skin had burned him. He flushed, and for a second, she was ashamed for making him feel he’d done something wrong when, between the two of them, she was the only guilty one.

  “Don’t you understand why I need to do this?” His voice was a rasp. “It’s my brother I’m talking about here. My brother. I need answers, and—” He stopped, his mouth snapping shut, his expression torn.

  “Digging up the covert won’t bring him back.” Guiltily, she thought of Rigby’s note. How it fell from the thin wad of folded-up bills when she was back in her bedroom, creased by her fingers as she shoved it away, hiding it.

  “Look, it’s not going to be me digging up the covert like I’m laying out the works for some new building,” he said. “It’s me looking for something he left behind.”

  “By digging up the covert.”

  “For a time capsule. Nothing like excavating, I swear. Rig would have done it as a little kid. We’re talking about something the size of a shoebox, or one of th
ose Kraft mayo jars. Small like that.”

  Something inside her wanted to give—she needed to fight it. How would she keep skimming? How could she not want to get her and Wynn out as soon as possible? “The smaller it is, the harder it would be to find. It would mean more digging.”

  “He left notes.” He opened the book and pointed to a scrawl on one of the pages. Now that she knew whose writing it was, she couldn’t see how she’d missed seeing it the first time around. It’d changed a lot since he was a kid, but Marsden saw hints of future Rigby’s handwriting: the fat, gaping Os, the overly tall and loping Ts. “He wrote down right here that he was going to use a cookie tin, a metal one. And his old metal detector from when he was a kid is still in the shed. It’s going to be easy.”

  She shook her head. Jude was reaching, nearly painfully, and his acute need for his brother to not be dead was warping reality. She knew how that was—didn’t she still do the same with her own father?

  “You don’t know for sure that he ended up using that,” she said. “He might have changed his mind.”

  “Maybe. And maybe he didn’t.”

  “You’re basing all of this on a book you happened to find in his room. On notes he could have written down for any reason.” Marsden needed him to realize on his own just how far-fetched his assumptions were, to walk away on his own—she didn’t need the guilt of having to say no on top of what she already carried. He’d apologize for disturbing her, tell her to have a good summer, that he might or might not see her in the halls at school, and then he’d leave.

  Except he wasn’t interested in playing along.

  “If you’d known Rig,” he pressed, “you’d know he never did anything half-assed. He was weird that way, okay? He spent one whole spring break doing nothing but watch Kurosawa films. Last summer was dead male author reading—nothing but books by guys like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wells. Two years ago, he studied disco as hard as he’d ever studied for any school subject. Disco. Its rise and fall in the seventies. I had to listen to the Shindiggs for weeks.”

  “I don’t mind the Shindiggs,” she said mildly. Dany still had a soft spot for Burn Out. Whenever she played it from her room, the sound would come drifting down the staff wing—she was pretty sure Wynn knew the entire soundtrack by heart.

  “Okay, but—” A smile flickered on his lips, then he grew serious again. He scrubbed at his thick hair, thinking. Rigby was etched in his eyes, a ghost lingering on. “Well, anyway, that was Rig, always looking for something to disappear into. Because the reality of home really sucked.”

  His misery was so plaintive, the ache of it lay in her own throat. Again, she heard the echoes of people whispering about his father’s drinking. Dany had told her Leo had seemed to get better a few years ago, had apparently stopped hitting Rigby and Jude, but who really knew the truth, outside of the family? Outside of Jude, with his perpetually hard eyes; of Rigby, who was dead; of Leo, who would never have reason to talk about any of it?

  “And then the dried leaves inside the book,” he went on, “the ginger. You know that stuff only grows freely here in the covert. Nowhere else in town.”

  “Because of the shade inside.”

  He nodded. “The rest of Glory just burns.”

  She saw how he’d connected the dots—a book about capsules, containing physical evidence of only one possible location.

  “Where would you even start, Jude? The covert is bigger than it looks.”

  “What, maybe the size of a basketball court?”

  Marsden shut her eyes. Shine had papers with the actual measurements, but he wasn’t really asking about numbers. He just wanted her to agree.

  In her head, she walked through the space, measuring the distance between the trees, how far the smell of wild ginger traveled with her, the way the sun fell through branches and leaves and bounced off the ground. She sensed death in the echo of her footsteps, in the call of the animals as they skittered through the forest alongside her, but she wasn’t all scared. She knew the covert, just as it knew her, and she could either fight that terrible connection or accept it for what it was.

  Last summer, in the middle of a heat wave so intense the air was on fire, Marsden had lain awake one night, unable to sleep. She’d thought of the river and decided to sneak out, suddenly wanting more than anything to slip into its cool waters. It was past midnight, and the sound of cars along the highway was a distant, insignificant whoosh in her ears. The gravel beneath her bare feet had hurt; she smelled mud and silt and dampened rock in the air. Beneath the moonless sky, the surface of the river was an unbroken ribbon of darkness, its bottom on the other side of the earth. And in the instant before she hit the water, it’d been like leaping into a crevasse with no end, dooming her to fall nonstop. But then she’d splashed through, the terror fled as though it’d never been, and the relief of being cool was visceral, whole. She could have swam forever that night. Could have kept diving, again and again.

  The covert was like that for her. The same way it embraced her even as it screamed a warning. The same way a fever had to climb in order to break.

  “Try two basketball courts.” She opened her eyes. “And people die in there. To go and start hacking through—”

  “You make it sound as bad as if I were going in as a skimmer.” Jude’s eyes glinted. “I’m not an asshole.”

  It was true she already sensed he would be respectful. Nothing like Red and Coop and other skimmers. It was the place where Rigby died. Where parts of his brother were still soaked into the ground of the covert, were still coursing through the tissues of its plants and trees.

  “My father is buried in there,” Marsden said quietly.

  He stilled. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry. Though I should have realized because—” His voice broke off. “Because it’s family property.”

  “Because it was suicide, you mean.”

  “The papers said it was an accident.”

  “I know what the papers said.” She crossed her arms in front of herself, like they could act as armor.

  He twisted the book in his hands. “Look, I know this tin won’t bring Rig back. But whatever made him do it, it’s like a piece of him that’s gone missing, and I want it back. Even if it’s just Hot Wheels or hockey cards or marbles—they’re still his, right? I always thought I knew him so well, but now I think there are parts of him he kept from me. And however it might end up, maybe I’m meant to try to find them.”

  “Or maybe not.”

  “Or maybe not.”

  Marsden gave in before she even knew she’d stopped fighting. Because she saw herself, and the need for answers, in his eyes. And if she was deluded enough to think they could come in the form of dead people’s voices, then having them be buried in old cookie tins waiting to be dug up wasn’t any stranger.

  And that tin . . . It was a direct connection to Rigby.

  If she found it, she might be able to hear him, talk to him, just as Star could, what people in Glory had gone to her for. Marsden could tell him what she wished she’d known to tell him all those years ago as she watched him cry over having failed: that he hadn’t failed at saving Jude. Then maybe she would know, somehow, that she wasn’t going to fail in saving Wynn. And maybe once she heard Rigby, she could finally hear her father.

  “You’d be here every day?” She still had her arms wrapped around herself.

  “I’ll stay out of your face when you’re in there checking for bodies, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Checking for bodies?” Her skin was cold, and panic rose in her throat. What exactly had she given away?

  “Yeah, so you can call Hadley and report them.”

  She exhaled. “Right.” Then she realized why the image of him simply waiting outside of the covert had been so striking—because no one ever waited. “Can I ask why you didn’t just walk into the covert on your own? The signs have never stopped anyone from going in. You could have started digging without me even knowing about it.”
>
  “I admit I thought of it. But then if I got caught, you’d be too pissed to hear me out for a second chance.” He gave a small smile. She found her eyes falling to his mouth, circling back to his eyes, liking his face more and more. “And like I said, I’m not an asshole.”

  “I would have been too busy kicking you out to believe you.”

  Jude laughed, then glanced back at the covert. “You know, all that wild ginger in there—I never would have guessed it hadn’t always been that way.”

  “How did you know that?” Outside of family, she didn’t think the covert having changed was talked about much. It appeared on the town’s timeline as stealthily as summer’s heat snuck in each year—slowly, then so unrelenting it didn’t seem possible to have ever been banked.

  “I work part-time at Evergreen, the garden center downtown. Roadie—the owner, my boss—he pretty much watched Rig and me grow up since our mom took the two of us to his shop so often. She had a thing for filling up the house with flowers. Rig said living in Glory made her hungry for them.”

  Marsden liked that. Being hungry for flowers instead of things like answers, or escape, or a parent’s love.

  “Roadie used to drive along the highway right here as a teen—his nickname, right?—chasing down the squirrels. The smell gave it away, he said, because there never used to be a trace of ginger.”

  She nodded slowly, still feeling strange talking about the covert to anyone other than Wynn. She tried to imagine Jude at work, surrounded by flowers and delicate blooms, and couldn’t. “He’s right. It never used to grow in the covert. I don’t know when it started.”

  “Anyway, finding those leaves in Rig’s book . . . I had to come here.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you.” She kept her eyes on his to gauge his reaction. If he even suspected she was a skimmer, she would tell him to leave and never come back. “The mornings here are mine, alone. And once the sun’s gone down, the place is off limits—you wouldn’t be able to see anything without flashlights, anyway, and if my mom or her boss saw you moving around in there, they’d be upset. But you can have the afternoons and evenings, if you still want them. And I’ll have to be in there with you. I can’t leave you alone in the covert.”