by Bryce Gibson
“Turn here,” I said and pointed to my right.
Lisa turned the steering wheel and guided the truck onto a narrow, unlined road that was surrounded by wide hay fields and dark woods. “The driveway is up here on the left.”
A rusty chain was blocking the path. The truck’s headlights lit the long dirt drive that stretched and twisted its way through the trees on the other side. I got out of the truck, unclasped the chain, and let it fall to the ground.
After I was back in my seat, Lisa drove forward. The truck jostled back and forth when the tires hit the ruts in the packed red dirt. We went around a dense spot of oaks, and then the house came into view.
The yard was overgrown with tall grass and weeds. The months of abandonment and neglect had already taken their toll. The task of pressure washing the walls had been on Morris’s to do list, but it never got accomplished. Now, the white asbestos shingles had a gray-green layer of mildew and grime. The rusted tin roof held a thick layer of leaves and pine straw. The front door was standing open, and the inside of the house was pitch black.
“This is kind of giving me the creeps,” I said.
“Do you want me to turn around? Because...I can.”
I shook my head. “Press on,” I told her.
It had been three months since I’d been at the house, but a yellow police tape was still wrapped around the property. CRIME SCENE—DO NOT CROSS.
“Blake, I think we need to go. They obviously don’t want us here...”
“Wait.” I opened my door.
“What are you doing?”
“I won’t be gone long.” I grabbed the flashlight from the seat between us and jumped out of the truck. I ducked underneath the yellow tape and shined the flashlight around the property. I made my way up the concrete steps and was facing the open door. I hesitated and shined the flashlight in. The light was barely enough to cut a slim path through the darkness. Finally, I stepped inside.
The room that I was in held reminders of Davey’s death. I tore my mind away from those things and back to the reason that I was there—Mom’s memory box. It was in Morris’s bedroom.
I continued through the den and noticed empty beer bottles scattered around the floor. Somebody had been coming into the house, probably local delinquents looking for a place to party.
The hallway was a long, cavernous space that had a series of doors on both sides—the kitchen, my room, a bathroom, and finally, at the end, Morris’s bedroom.
I paused at the threshold of my old room and shined the flashlight in. Most of my things were gone. The bed was stripped. The last time that I had been there I was getting dressed to go to a party.
Eventually, I turned away and began walking further down the hall. The door to Morris’s room was shut. I twisted the old doorknob and pushed the door inward. The inside of the room was a place that I had been only a few times, even when Mom had been alive, and even now, I felt like I was intruding on adult business. In the corner, Morris’s work clothes were thrown over the back of the chair. The bed was made. I walked to the far end of the room and opened the closet. His clothes still hung in a neat row. What I was looking for was on the top shelf.
It was a slim, metal box that had a lock on the front. I slid the box off the shelf, tucked it under my arm, and was about to bolt from the room when the flashlight beam caught something else. Near the back wall of the closet, in the spot where the box had been, I saw a shimmer of purple. It was a fancy perfume bottle.
I picked up the bottle and pressed the spray pump. The scent was one that I recognized immediately. It was Summer Rose, the favorite of Davey’s mother, Janice Steep. Smelling the flowery scent, I felt like she was there. What I was seeing added a new piece to the puzzle of that night.
I left the house with the memory box held tight under my arm and the perfume bottle in my hand.
chapter eighteen
I CALLED MISS STEEP as soon as I got home from school that Tuesday. She answered her phone after the first ring.
I could hear the TV in the background, and I imagined her standing in the living room with the cord from her old, rotary phone stretched through the doorway that led to the kitchen.
“I was just calling to see if you’d want to go to dinner. There’s something I want to talk about.”
“Blake, of course. I would love to see you. Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine,” I told her. “See you tonight?”
It was dusk when she pulled up to the front of the house in her nice, jet-black sedan. Several bats were flittering around the sky over the driveway.
As soon as I opened the car’s door, I could smell the perfume. The radio was turned to a jazzy classical station. Even after everything that had happened the past several months, Miss Steep had kept her movie-star looks and demeanor.
I got in the car, and she drove us to the diner on the square. With my suggestion, we sat in the back corner where there were no other customers in earshot.
The waitress brought us our drinks and said that she’d be back for our order. I could tell that Miss Steep was looking at my black eye.
“Do you still wonder why Morris did it?” I asked her after the waitress had wandered off.
Miss Steep looked up from where she had been contemplating what she would order from the menu. “All the time,” she assured me. “But I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.”
From there, I cut right to the chase. “Why was your perfume at the house?”
Miss Steep’s mouth dropped open and, for a moment, she was speechless. She looked confused. “Blake, I don’t...”
Before she had a chance to finish, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a folded paper towel. With my hand hovering an inch or so above the tabletop, I flipped the paper towel open and let the perfume bottle roll onto the surface.
Miss Steep made a small but audible gasp of disbelief at what she was seeing. Her right hand shot to her mouth.
“It was in Morris’s closet.” I told her. “Next to some of Mom’s stuff.”
She carefully gathered her words before speaking. “Morris and I...we...I felt bad for him, Blake. He was all alone. I never told anyone about us because...,” her eyes darted around the restaurant to make sure nobody was hearing, “after Davey died, I knew that, if people found out that your stepdad and I had been together, they would try to link what he did to that convoluted mess from mine and your momma’s past. The last thing I wanted was for people to start digging all of that up. To me, that is water under the bridge. So... under the circumstances, I thought keeping the affair secret would be the best thing to do.”
I was lost. This was the first time that I had ever heard the things that Miss Steep was bringing up. She knew Mom? And what exactly was this “convoluted mess” that she was talking about? “Under what circumstances?” I asked her.
Miss Steep lowered her hand from her mouth. Now, more than anything else, she looked surprised at the direction our conversation had turned. “You don’t know, do you?”
I didn’t answer her. Instead, I crossed my arms, flung myself back in the booth, and waited on an explanation.
“Blake, I thought you would have known by now.” She leaned forward and propped her elbows on the edge of the table. Her voice lowered to a near whisper. “Your momma... you still don’t know why she left your daddy the way she did?”
No. I didn’t. All I knew was that, when I was five years old, Dad and Mom got divorced. There had never been an explanation given to me.
Like I’ve said before, I don’t remember much about the days when the three of us had been a family. The things that I can recall are just brief images—a baby goat, a white picket fence, the vibrantly green tops of carrots in the ground, and a woman in a red cape tending a garden under the full moon.
After the divorce, Mom and I moved to Ridge Spring, and Dad went off to Georgia.
When I was seven, Mom remarried.
She died five years later.
“Your momma...,
” Miss Steep started again. “She took you and ran. It was to protect you,” she said.
To protect me? Now I was prepared to hear the worst—I was ready to be told that Dad had done something horrible to her, or to me, or to the both of us, and I was now living with the bad guy. I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat. “To protect me from what?” I braced myself for the answer. Was I ready for this?
“There were arranged marriages.” The statement from Miss Steep was blunt. “Your parents were part of a community that set up marriages when the kids were very little, and your momma wanted to get you away from all of that. It was risky, but she did it to save you.”
I must have looked at her with an expression that was one of all kinds of crazy because she returned my stare with one that was equally full of genuine sorrow. “Mom and Dad...,” I said, “how long were they involved? Were they... part of those arrangements?”
Miss Steep nodded her head. “They’re marriage was arranged, yes,” she stated matter-of-factly.
Until then, I had believed that, despite their later differences in life, Mom and Dad had loved each other at some point in time when I had been a kid. But now Miss Steep was saying that they were forced to marry one another. Love had nothing to do with it. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “You’re wrong. They loved each other.”
“The community had a person that they called The Sower. It was The Sower’s responsibility to announce who would be paired together. On a full moon night, The Sower would plant carrot seeds in the garden. When the carrots sprouted, the green tops would spell out the names...”
As she was talking, I recalled something from the house where I’d lived with Mom and Dad. There had been a framed photo of a garden plot that hung on the wall in the hallway. In the picture, their names—James and Lisa—were spelled out in carrot tops that were shooting up from the dark soil. Was what Miss Steep telling me actually true?
The hazy image that I have from the full moon night, when I’d been peeking around the picket fence and watching the woman in the red cloak, now made sense to me. The woman was The Sower. She had been planting seeds.
All of this I was hearing was crazy. It was too much to take in. I stood from the booth. I had to get out of there.
“Blake, wait.” Miss Steep reached up and touched her hand on mine. “Sit back down. There’s a few more things that we need to talk about.”
From where I was standing next to the table, I asked, “Like how you know about all of this?”
“I was part of it too, and I ran away not long after your mother.”
With the knowledge that she had known my parents, even lived in the same community as them, my mind went back to that full moon night when I had been a kid watching The Sower in the garden from behind the picket fence. There had been someone else with me. It was a boy with hair so blonde it was nearly white. Davey. Until then, I’d thought that the day that Davey and his mother walked into the pool store had been the first time we’d ever met. Now, the realization that all of our pasts were tangled together was a punch to the gut. “I’m ready to go home,” I said.
“Blake, we’re not through talking yet.”
“I said I want to go home. You can take me, or I can walk.” I started to turn and make my way to the exit.
Relenting, Miss Steep reached to her purse. “I...just let me pay and we’ll be out of here.” She craned her neck to look around. “Waitress?” She waved the ticket in the air.
The waitress hustled over and took the ticket and debit card from Miss Steep. “We decided against dinner,” she said. “He’s... not feeling well.”
“I’ll be outside,” I said and left Miss Steep alone in the restaurant.
The ride home was awkward, to say the least. We both sat in silence. Miss Steep had turned the radio all the way down to nothing. It was as if she was waiting on me, or her, to break the horrible silence that hung between us.
Finally, we pulled up to my house.
“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL me about Mom?”
Dad was sitting in his favorite recliner. In front of him, the TV was blaring some kind of obnoxiously loud action flick.
“What are you talking about?” He started to sit up, and I could tell that he had been sleeping.
“Mom, Dad. Miss Steep said that when y’all were younger you were both part of some kind of weird community that dictated who you would marry.”
With the remote, he set the TV’s volume to mute. “Why did she tell you that?”
“It doesn’t matter why. What matters is that I get an explanation.”
“Blake, I don’t know how...”
“Tell me, Dad.” My voice cracked.
He let the recliner’s footrest down. It was a harsh, grating sound. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in the palms of his hands. After a heavy sigh, he looked up at me again.
“Both of us grew up in that world. The community leader, The Caretaker, was the one that decided who we would marry. The Caretaker passed the names along to The Sower, and The Sower would...”
I nodded my head. I had heard all of this before, and I finished Dad’s story for him. “She would plant carrot seeds, and when they sprouted it would spell the names of those who had been paired together. Miss Steep already told me, but what was the point of it?”
“It was supposed to be a self-sufficient community. We were living off the grid. We had our own law and order. We grew all of our own food. Everything was there for us. Even now, parts of it sound great, and I can see how somebody could fall for it. But the truth was that The Caretaker controlled everything. We gave our lives to him, and, in return, he decided how the course of our lives would go, who got what, and so forth. Your mom and I... we wanted to get out of it, and we decided that the best thing to do would be for her to split.”
“So you never loved her?”
“Blake, it wasn’t a matter of whether I loved her or not. The two of us getting married was what was going to be. We loved you, don’t you see that? The only way for you to have a normal life was to get you away from it.”
“Where was it? The community?”
“It was here,” Dad said.
And my heart sank.
chapter nineteen
THE NEXT DAY, AFTER a night of fitful sleep, I got up early and walked through the hop yard alone.
The dirt road that cut through the acres of vines had become so dry that every step I took kicked up enough dust that it must have looked like I was leaving a thick trail of smoke behind.
After emerging from the field, I made my way to the spot where the original Williston Hunt Club once stood. I went to the center of the grassy area and sat down. I looked at my surroundings and imagined the old picket fence that used to run around the property. I closed my eyes, breathed in deep, and could have sworn that the musky scent of goat was drifting along the air.
How had I been so naïve that I hadn’t realized I had been sent back to the place where I had come from? The same place that served such pleasant images from my past was also the place of lies and hidden things; things that only become clear by the light of the full moon.
With my right hand, I punched at the ground. I grasped the tall weeds in my fist and yanked. With my fingers bent into something that resembled claws, I dug down deep into the dirt.
From out of nowhere, a shadow spread over me. It was kind of like the effect of the sun disappearing behind a cloud, but this was different. I knew that somebody was standing there. When I looked up, Tristan Clark was staring back at me. He was wearing a plain blue t-shirt and jeans. I realized that he must have been on the way to his morning classes at Tech. It was obvious that Tristan worked out. If he had come to the clearing for the purpose of kicking my scrawny ass he wouldn’t have a problem. I must have jumped or flinched when I saw him because he laughed. “I didn’t mean to scare you there, Blake.”
“I wasn’t expecting anybody to be out here,” I told him as I took deep, lumbering breat
hs. My eyes darted to the opposite edge of the field where his old truck was parked. How had I not heard him drive up? I got up from where I had been sitting and stepped back, stumbling over my own two feet. “What are you doing out here anyway?” I realized that I had a clump of grass in my hand, and I tossed it to the ground. I hoped that Tristan didn’t think I was throwing it at him.
“Looking for you,” he said. “I just want you to know that I think what Cade did was stupid as shit,” he told me. “You seem like a pretty nice guy, and I don’t want to stand on the sidelines and do nothing.” Tristan reached into his front jeans pocket. When his hand came out, he was holding his phone. He took a step toward me, and I stepped backward, away from him. “I’m not going to hurt you, bud,” he assured me.
I stayed where I was, and Tristan continued to move forward until he was standing just inches away. He was so close that, when he talked, I could smell the spearmint chewing gum on his breath. “I want you to understand something. You don’t need to be getting involved with Lisa Tanner,” he said.
“Lisa’s none of your business,” I shot back. Besides, it was too late for not getting involved.
“She’s not,” Tristan agreed with what I said. “But she’s also far from the perfect little angel you think she is.” He held the phone so that both of us could see the screen, and I knew right away what I was looking at. It was a green-tinted image from a hunting camera, but I didn’t recognize the location. With his fingers, Tristan zoomed in closer. A shirtless boy and girl were on the tailgate of a truck. The girl was straddling the boy’s lap, facing him, and his right arm was wrapped around her back. His fingers were on the clasp of her bra. There were two things that I immediately recognized about the image—the girl’s pigtails and the decals on the back of the truck. I was looking at Lisa and Cade.
I tore my eyes away from what I was seeing. I was disgusted. “That’s...,” I started, but couldn’t think of the rest of what I wanted to say.
