by Jen Blood
“I know that Isaac believes Zion is meant to stay here.”
“And you do not.”
More hesitation. Isaac starts to intercede, but seems to sense that he is not part of this. He remains silent.
“I believe that sometimes we are too close to a situation to see the Lord’s true plan.”
“Isaac would have me leave and Zion stay; you would banish us both. Yours is the Lord’s true plan, then?”
“In this instance, I think it best that you remain with your child.” He looks at Isaac. His gaze appears completely open, beneficence shining in his eyes. “I believe that Isaac and the church need time to mend any bridges that may have been damaged in the past month.”
“Since I arrived,” she says. She takes a step toward him. He does not back away, but she can tell that he wants to.
“Yes,” he says.
“But you do not believe you’ve done any damage since your arrival on this island.”
Adam’s eyes flicker from hers to Isaac’s and then back again. Rebecca sees the confusion on the Reverend’s face, but manages to keep her expression impassive.
“I told you—”
“Yes, you did,” she interrupts. “You told me that you had it under control. But Matt spoke with some of the men still looking for you—some of the men who have believed you dead for years now.”
His expression is one of pure terror.
“He didn’t—”
“They were naturally pleased to find that you had survived when so many others had not.”
Adam stands perfectly still, his only sign of life the rapid rise and fall of his chest. “They know I’m here?”
“Matt hasn’t given them a location. Yet. But you understand that it’s likely only a matter of time.”
He wheels away from her and turns on Isaac. “Do you see? Do you see what she is—what she’s done? This place is supposed to be a refuge, a healing place. I gave up my daughter to keep everyone safe, but Rebecca isn’t willing to give up anything. Anyone. And you can’t see what they are doing to you. To our church.”
She is tempted to strike him, but the damage her revelation has done is infinitely more satisfying. Before he can explain himself any further, Adam turns and walks swiftly from the greenhouse and back down the path. Isaac turns back to her in confusion. She smiles at him.
“I’ll need to pray before making my decision about Zion. You understand, of course.” She smiles demurely and walks away, leaving Isaac alone to think about the wisdom of his request.
Chapter Thirty
“Why is she making me go?”
I sit beneath a tree on a part of the island that has always been mine—a glade of evergreens only my father knows about. He won’t look at me.
“It’s for the best, Erin. You’re getting older now—this isn’t a good place for you to grow up.”
“Why not?” I’m crying—something I almost never do. Dad says I’m like my mother that way. Katherine never cries when people are watching, he told me years ago. I want to be like that—to inspire the awe and sadness that my mother inspired.
Now, I wish I had never heard of her. I wish my mother did not exist.
“Please don’t make me go.”
He still can’t look me in the eye. He stares at the ground and he is crying and my mother—the woman I wish never existed—is a monster.
When I got back inside the hospital, Diggs was at the snack machine talking to a tall, thin woman in scrubs. I didn’t even know if Juarez had followed me or simply vanished back into the night. I didn’t really care.
“How is she?” I asked.
They both turned toward me.
“Still in surgery,” the woman said. She extended her hand. “I’m Maya Pearce. It’s nice to finally meet you, Erin.”
She had bright blue eyes and short, curly gray hair and an air about her that was both striking and surprisingly unassuming. Her smile seemed genuine, though I wasn’t exactly in a position to judge, having never laid eyes on her before.
I shook her hand. “Did they tell you anymore?”
“She’s stable. No internal bleeding, no evidence of sexual assault.” I appreciated her even tone, the fact that she wasn’t falling apart and clearly didn’t expect me to, either. No wonder Kat liked her. “The surgery shouldn’t take long. Once they’re done, we’ll just have to wait for her to wake up to find out the extent of the damage.”
I nodded. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Well, of course not,” she said, like I’d said something funny. “You’re in shock. But you still need to eat. I saw some soup in the doctor’s lounge—you can have that.”
I started to protest.
“Just humor me, all right? A few bites, then I’ll find you an empty room and you can rest your head until Kat’s out of surgery.”
It seemed pointless to argue. She left for her soup quest, and Diggs led me back to the waiting room.
“She seems nice,” I said.
“She is. Keeps Kat in line, which is almost impossible—as you well know. I think you two will hit it off.”
The TV in the waiting room had been turned off. I sank into a chair and gazed at the floor. Diggs sat on one side of me, Juarez—who hadn’t vanished into the night after all—on the other. In other circumstances, it might have been awkward; as it was, I barely noticed either of them.
My first night in Littlehope, my mother makes grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. I’ve only ever had homemade bread that the women of the church made by hand. This is processed and too sweet and it sticks to the roof of my mouth.
She has already told me I don’t need to call her Mom. Dad calls her Katherine, but she says everyone else calls her Kat. She eats too fast and barely speaks to me, and through the entire meal she reads a magazine filled with body parts and skeletons, even though Dad always said it was rude to read at the dinner table.
I eat my cheese sandwich without speaking, already devising a plan to run away at nightfall. I will steal her boat, though I know stealing is wrong. I don’t know how to get back to the island, but I don’t care.
I’ll find my way.
Kat came out of surgery at three-thirty that morning. Maya assured me that she wouldn’t wake for hours, but by all accounts the surgery had gone well. Now, it was just a waiting game. She’d either wake up and be fine, or she would not.
Diggs told Juarez to drive me home. He took his jacket off, draped it over my shoulders, held onto the lapels and pulled me close.
“Get some sleep?”
I nodded.
“I won’t be long. I just want to drop by the paper, make sure they didn’t burn the place down while I was gone.”
“It’s okay—you should get some sleep too, though.”
I thought of the night before. Imagined Diggs coming through his front door to find Juarez and me in the throes of…whatever, in his spare bedroom. My eyes watered. I pulled away and nodded toward the exit.
“Don’t stay long. We’ll see you later.”
In my first two weeks with Kat, I run away seven times. Sometimes, I only make it to the front door; others, I make it all the way out to the harbor. The seventh time, I’m in the process of starting her boat when I see her coming over the hill. She drives an old yellow car, and she drives it fast. She races down the hill, stops in the parking lot, and gets out while I’m still trying to get the motor running.
My heart is hammering and the night is dark and my mother is getting closer. The boat won’t start.
Instead of pulling me out as I expect, Kat hops into the boat when she reaches me. She pushes me away from the motor, hard enough that I fall. My head hits the side of the boat with a sharp crack that sounds loud in the stillness. I lay there for a minute staring up at the stars, too stunned to get up.
When I finally stand, Kat has started the engine. It is nearly midnight, but she unties the boat and
points it toward Payson Isle. My head throbs and my throat is dry and I am almost positive that Kat is crying as she steers us out of the harbor in search of my father.
Juarez and I didn’t talk on the way home. He put in a GLEE soundtrack that he wisely shut off before anyone got hurt, and I stared out the window. The road was flooded in places; we hydroplaned once or twice before he regained control, but I barely noticed. The ride was over faster than I’d expected, and when we got to Diggs’ place I was out of the car before Jack had a chance to put it in park.
I slogged through the mud to the front door. Einstein greeted me like we’d been apart for months, his paws on my stomach, body and tail wriggling. I roughed his ears and snapped on his leash.
“I can do that,” Juarez said. I noticed that he’d taken my mother’s purse and was keeping it—and her gun—a safe distance from me.
I shook my head, but I didn’t say anything as I let Stein lead me back out into the darkness.
“I can’t keep her—she hates me.”
We are in the Payson greenhouse, where the night smells like soil and tomatoes and flowers in full bloom. My father is in his pajamas—or pajama pants and a t-shirt, the same thing he always wears to bed. He looks tired and sad.
My mother just looks angry.
“She doesn’t hate you.”
“I do,” I say. My head is bleeding from my fall in the boat, and I mean the words more than I ever thought possible. “Don’t make me go back there.”
He kneels beside me and holds me close. “Your mother needs you,” he whispers in my ear. “You can’t stay with me anymore, no matter how much I wish you could.”
I cling to him with all my strength, my arms tight around his neck until he disentangles himself. He forces me an arm’s length away. His eyes are wet when he looks at me, but he does not cry.
“I don’t want you to come back here. I’ll come visit you in Littlehope when I can—but I can’t take care of you anymore, Erin.”
He stands. I wrap my arms around his waist and refuse to let go.
“Get her out of here,” he says to my mother. “Don’t let her come back. Get as far away from me as you can get.”
Kat has to pull me away from him, kicking and screaming, my breath coming too fast as panic closes my throat. I scratch her and keep crying until she puts me back in the boat. I don’t speak to her again for a week.
I sat down under a spruce tree behind Diggs’ house. The ground was drenched, but I barely noticed. How had I forgotten that night? Kat was telling the truth: my father sent me away, she hadn’t taken me.
Einstein lapped anxiously at tears I hadn’t even realized were falling. I pulled him into my lap, and the flood gates opened.
I cried for the father I’d lost and the mother I’d rejected; for the friends who died on the island and my failed marriage and the baby I’d buried and the children I would never have. Juarez came out at some point and crouched beside me, obviously not sure if I’d had some kind of psychotic break.
“You should come inside, Erin.”
I shook my head, but my voice was gone. He stayed and watched me helplessly for another minute or two before he stood and returned to the house.
Why had my father needed me off the island? What did he think he couldn’t keep me safe from?
“It’s yours, Erin. It means that you belong with us.”
Isaac hands me my angel. The paint is still wet, and he’s made her with red hair like mine. We’re in the meeting room—just Isaac, Daddy, and me. I sit in Isaac’s lap and stare into my angel’s blue eyes. I’m four years old. Isaac smells like lemonade—we had some for lunch, and it’s sweet on his breath. Sometimes, he comes into our Sunday School class and tells stories or plays his guitar. He likes to sing foolish songs that he and Daddy make up together.
“You can trust Isaac,” Daddy tells me one day. “You can’t trust everybody in the world, there are fakers and fools out there, but Isaac will always take care of us.”
I saw the headlights when Diggs came down the road. I was shivering and numb and waterlogged and more than a little nauseous. I was still sitting under the spruce tree behind Diggs’ house. Einstein was shivering in my lap, both of us soaked to the bone.
My father had trusted Isaac. That’s why I hadn’t been afraid of him—not because he wasn’t a man to fear, but because my father wasn’t afraid. He didn’t send me off the island to keep me safe from the Paysons; I was sure of that now. I thought of that night again—the night Kat took me out to the island and begged my father to take me back.
“Get her as far away from me as you can.”
Why?
“Erin.”
I looked up to find Diggs standing above me. I was still crying—now that I’d started, I wasn’t sure I would ever stop. He crouched beside me and gently pried Einstein out of my arms.
“Kat’s all right,” he said.
I cried harder. “I know,” I managed to hiccup in between sobs.
“You’re exhausted, Sol—you just need to sleep.”
I nodded and kept crying, but I didn’t move. Diggs pushed a sopping, tangled mess of hair away from my eyes. Then, he pulled me into his arms like an overgrown, overwrought child, and carried me inside.
All the reasons I was there, all the stories I knew and all the questions I had, got twisted in my head as the living and the dead chased one another in an endless, indecipherable spiral. I cried into Diggs’ neck as he brought me inside. Poor Juarez stood awkwardly at the door looking like he’d rather be just about anywhere else on the planet.
“I started the bath,” he said. “Is there anything else I can do?”
Diggs shook his head. “I’ve got it.”
He carried me back to my room with my arms around his neck and my tears dampening his already-damp collar. He set me on the bed like I might shatter more than I already had.
“I’m okay,” I said. I sniffled. At least the tears had finally stopped. My teeth chattered and my fingers were frozen. Diggs smiled a little.
“I know, Sol,” he said. “You’re fine. Jack got a bath started for you—you need to get warmed up.”
I tried to undress myself but it turns out twelve hours in freezing rain is hell on your finer motor skills. Diggs pushed my hands away and rolled his clear blue eyes.
“I’ve got it. It’s not like I haven’t seen you before, you know.”
He gently peeled my clothes off, wet layer by wet layer. If I hadn’t been dangerously close to both catatonia and hypothermia, it might have been a little sexy. As it was, Diggs kept his eyes respectfully lowered until I was shivering and nude on the edge of my bed, then handed me my bathrobe and helped me into the tub.
He sat outside the bathroom doorway with the door open and waited silently while I soaked in the warm bath. I’d almost fallen asleep when he handed me a towel and insisted I get out.
“You’re getting pushy in your old age, Diggs,” I said. I was going for the old, tough-as-nails Solomon, but the words came out sounding broken.
“What can I say—you bring out the alpha in me, kid.”
I put on two layers of dry pajamas and a pair of thick socks and I still couldn’t stop shivering. Diggs closed the shades against the first glimmer of dawn while I got under the blankets. He kissed my forehead and pulled the blankets up to my chin, but I held onto his arm when he started to leave.
“Stay,” I said.
I expected him to argue, or hit me with more of that incontrovertible Diggs logic. Instead, he went around to the other side of the bed, took off his shoes, and climbed in beside me. He pulled me into his arms without hesitation, and we lay there wrapped up in one another until everything slowed to the safe, peaceful rhythm of Diggs’ heartbeat.
I slept.
Chapter Thirty-One
It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon when I woke the next day, alone in my bed. I tamed my hair into a reasonable facsimile of a ponytail, washed my face, and got dressed. When I emerged from my
bedroom I found Diggs reading the paper at the kitchen table, Einstein’s muzzle resting on his thigh. Stein rolled his eyes in my general direction and his tail thumped idly once or twice, but otherwise he remained fixated on the cream cheese bagel in Diggs’ hand.
“Why aren’t you at work?” I asked.
“Took the day off,” he said casually, like this was a regular thing rather than the first time this millennium.
I made a face when he pushed the other half of his bagel toward me, but tore off a piece all the same.
“Kat’s awake,” he said. “No neurological damage, no internal bleeding, no permanent…anything. She’ll need physical therapy and it’ll be a while before she can operate again, though.”
“What’s she saying about the attack?” I asked immediately. It occurred to me too late that a better person would probably be more concerned about other things.
Diggs looked at me. I thought of crying into his neck last night, his arms around me. I’d done all manner of ungodly things with him over the years, but I’d never felt more naked.
“She says she doesn’t remember,” he said.
“What do you mean—none of it? She doesn’t remember who attacked her?”
“Maya said it’s not uncommon—traumatic amnesia. She may get the memory back in time, she may not.”
I didn’t say anything. The sun was bright outside, most of the puddles already dried up. She didn’t remember. Bullshit. Katherine Everett remembered everything: every surgery she’d ever done, every fight we’d ever had, every patient she’d ever seen. Details that had blurred for me years ago were always fresh in her mind. Once again, all the answers I needed were wrapped up in my mother’s tightly clenched fist, and she refused to give an inch.
“What about Jack?” I finally asked.
“He’s back out there looking for Matt. No luck so far.”
I sat down beside him.
“You look better,” he said.
