“When do you get off work tonight?”
“Five.”
“Would you practice then?”
“Quit pushing, Willow,” Evan said.
“I want to know what Nick knows.”
“The sooner you find skilliau, the sooner the Keyes will want to go home, and then we’ll have to figure out a lot of things I don’t want to deal with, like whether you leave and I stay, or what,” he said.
“This isn’t about you, Evan.”
“Everything’s connected.”
I glanced at my watch again. We had five minutes to get back. We could make it if we ran. “I’ll meet you after work, Willow. Come to the store,” I said. I ran through bushes up to my path, rustling and crackling, and Evan came after me, making no noise at all.
Mariah was talking with one of those sandy-haired men she favored. She was smiling an awful lot. It wasn’t until the man turned to look at us that I realized it was Rory.
“Evan,” he said, and his voice was silky and warm. “We need to talk.”
“We do?” Evan’s face was blank again, and his voice sounded blank.
“Please,” said Rory. He glanced at me. “Alone.”
“Whatever you want to talk to me about concerns Nick,” Evan said.
I felt a chill. I didn’t have protection anymore, and these people had already done things to me without permission. I didn’t want them noticing me. I looked at Evan. His face was perfectly still. But there was a hum to him, a silent hum, and its tune was fear. Maybe I’d better stick by him.
“What? How can that be?”
“Nick has given me shelter and salt privilege, and has offered me a—a living.”
“A living? How can you live, away from us?”
“I don’t know, but I’m willing to try it.”
Rory studied me for a moment. He nodded. “What difference does it make? He has a silence on him. Come outside.”
“Excuse me. I have to go to work now,” I said, glancing at Mariah.
She waved her hand in a shooing motion at us. “I’ll stay a little longer.” She smiled at Rory.
We went outside and sat on the storefront bench by the newspaper vending machine, Evan in the middle between me and Rory.
Tug-of-war?
“Evan,” said Rory. He stared across the road toward Mabel’s. After a long moment’s silence edged by, he looked at Evan. “We love you. We need you. You are precious to us. It hurts us that you distance yourself from us. I recognize that we have made mistakes in how we treated you; we’re not used to dealing with one who starts out so far from us, who keeps such a distance, who doesn’t value the same things we value. Come back to us and let us start over. Maybe we can learn a different way to care for you.”
Evan leaned back and turned toward Rory, so I couldn’t see his face. The fear hum was still coming from him, growing stronger. “Thank you,” he said. “Thanks, but I’d rather stay here.”
“This is your last word, even though it may mean cutting the thread that binds the bones?”
“Can you do that? I thought only my parents could make that decision.”
“They gave your care over to us.”
Evan shook his head. “There was no real hearing about that. I know they were doing what they thought was right, but I am old enough to decide my next steps, and no one asked me.”
“You never demonstrated competence.”
“What?” He sounded shocked.
“Opportunities have been offered you, and always you took a choice that led you away from what was right,” Rory said. “Lately you have actively chosen toward the wrong. Using fetch bond weighs against you…We can understand and forgive everything, though. Return to us. Let us work with you.”
Evan stared toward the forest, his face a mask. “Thanks, but no thanks,” he said after a moment.
Rory rose. He looked at us. “We love you. We need you.” He walked away.
Evan spent the rest of the afternoon focusing on work so hard that we ran out of things to do. I showed him all the inventory we had in various storage spaces, finding some stuff in the rafters I had forgotten we ever had. We did the Sunday afternoon cleaning when there weren’t any customers, a job I usually reserved for after the store was closed. Evan had a way of chasing dust that worked better than anything I had ever tried. Some of the dust we used to have was positively historic, but it was all gone now. Evan’s method had to do with the transformative powers of fire, he told me, but he didn’t explain it.
Pop dropped in in the middle of the afternoon and seemed to have trouble believing how clean and nice everything looked. He swallowed several times. “You should have no trouble finding other work if you want it,” Pop told Evan at last.
Evan thanked Pop without smiling. He had lost his easy air, and his intensity made me uncomfortable.
“What’s the matter?” I asked Evan when we sat down near the end of the shift. Pop had gone back to the motel, and Granddad was snoozing in his chair.
Evan shook his head. “It’s not over. Nothing’s settled. They know they’re right.” After a minute he looked me in the eye. “They might be right, for anybody else. I don’t know.”
I thought about Mom telling me her family wanted to chop off parts of her. “There must be a—this isn’t…” I thumped the counter with my fist. I hadn’t even known I was planning to talk about the Keyes, but my tongue wouldn’t work anyway.
Evan smiled half a smile, then tightened his lips. “At least I know now that I can work.”
Willow never showed up after we closed the store. I wondered what that meant.
9
Dirt
At supper that night Pop asked Evan if he had learned all about the store, and Evan said he had learned a lot, but figured there was more I could show him that we hadn’t had to deal with today. Pop asked Evan if he wanted to come up to the motel in the morning and see how it should be run. Evan said yes, thank you.
After supper cleanup, we watched television and went to bed early. Evan was distant and distracted. I figured I better get used to this side of him, too; things were going to be more complicated than I had thought.
It was close to midnight when Evan whimpered. I hit the light switch in time to see him snap upright. My thumb throbbed where I had sliced it open the night before. I stared at Evan as he jerked to his feet, his arms bent at the elbows, his hands rigid. He whined. I saw a wolf head on his shoulders for a second. He blinked and it faded.
“What?” I said. My whole hand throbbed, pain moving outward from the cut in my thumb, streaking up my arm.
“Have to…go,” he said. His legs moved like rusty mechanical things, walking him to the window, while his upper body stayed stiff and still. He fell out the window. I jumped up and ran to look. His fall was slower than gravity would account for. He thumped down softly, on his feet, and walked jerkily off toward my path to Lacey’s.
I dressed fast and ran downstairs and outside. I caught up with Evan not very far into the woods, tugged on his bent arm. It was as stiff as stove wood. He kept walking. “What?” I said. “What?”
“Go back,” he said.
“No!”
“Guess they love me too much to let me go. They laid pullers and compulsions on me. This is going to be bad. Go back before they start on you.”
“But isn’t this”—I coughed—“what they told you not to do to me?” Even saying “they” was an effort. “They say walk and you walk?” I coughed again.
“But this is for my own good,” he said. His legs scissored. His arms stayed stiff and bent, hands forward, like the arms of a mannequin pretending to catch a basketball. I had to push myself to keep up with him. “For the good of the family, too, whatever they think that is. They think they need to straighten out my priorities. Work, wife, babies. They won’t kill me. They won’t even really hurt me, except in the spirit. There’s nothing you can do except get hurt. Do me a big favor. Let me go. Go away, Nick. Go home.” He strode on past me
without looking back.
I ran into the forest. It was different in the dark. Underbrush clung to me, bracken tripped me, and dewberry and blackberry canes scratched at me. The trees seemed too close together. Everything was damp with dew. The smell of pine resin was strong, and so was the odor of vanilla leaf and the rank green of the damp plants I broke through. I fought upslope for a while, then sat down on mossy, plant-heavy earth, surrounded on all sides by short spiky plants, shapes and scents telling me they were white everlasting, goatsbeard, fireweed, thistles, with elderberry branches pressing against my back. My throat felt thick and hot and sore, and my arm ached and throbbed as though on fire. I buried my hand in the damp moss and felt a little better.
Presently I calmed. How could I help Evan? Sneaking up on cabin five, I might be more of a liability than an asset. And he had told me not to, anyway.
Without his fetchkva, I didn’t have to obey Evan, though.
I contemplated Pop, I wished he could do something. He had been bossing me around for years. But he couldn’t even see these guys if they didn’t want him to, and if my voice, not even trained, worked on him, probably the Keyes could order him around with impunity.
I thought about Willow and Lauren. I figured if there was anything they could do on Evan’s behalf they would have already done it. Or maybe they were working on something now. I couldn’t think of any way to get in touch with them that didn’t involve sneaking up on Lacey five.
I thought about Megan. I imagined knocking on the door of Lacey cabin nine, waking her up, and asking her to come with me to Lacey five and help Evan. Suppose she said yes. What could she bring? She could do CPR, and she had a pretty elastic mind when confronted with the unbelievable. That was cool, but it was hardly offensive capability. Probably it had been smart of her to bow out of all this before it got any weirder than what she had already witnessed.
There had to be something I could do to help. I wished I could think of it. I wondered if a gun would do any good. Somehow I doubted it, even though I knew where Pop kept the shotgun and some shells. The Keyes would probably make me shoot myself.
Tired and discouraged and cold, I got to my feet and headed toward Lacey five. Whatever happened to me, at least I would know that I had tried to help. I could gather information, if nothing else. I had always thought information could save me.
Just ahead of the final crook in the path, I dropped to my hands and knees. The pine-needle-carpeted dirt was cool against my palms, but not cold. I crept a little way and collapsed, feeling strange, as if the ground was pulling me harder than it usually did. I pushed up again, wondering if this meant something, trying to work it out in my head, coming up empty. I kept crawling, wishing my second sight or whatever it was was something handier, like night vision. I put my hand on a twig and winced as it snapped.
Slowly and carefully, I made it around the side of cabin five to where I could see in through the French doors into the living room.
They were all gathered around the table the way they had been that afternoon when Evan introduced me to them. They all wore dark colors this time instead of their fake tourist clothes.
Evan sat hugging himself across from the fireplace and staring up at Uncle Bennet, who held something tight in his left hand and gestured with his right. Faintly through, the half-open French doors I could hear him: he would speak a phrase, gesture, touch Evan’s forehead. Each time he touched Evan’s forehead, my cut thumb throbbed in sympathy. Evan would blink each time, and each time he opened his eyes afterward, they looked a little duller, their golden dimming to brown.
At first, Willow cried “no” every time Uncle Bennet spoke. Then Elissa went and stood behind her and put hands on her shoulders and whispered into her ear, and Willow settled into unnatural stillness.
I thought about rushing the doors. I thought about how useless it had been Saturday afternoon by the pool when I tried to interrupt Bennet while he was locking Evan into human form.
Bennet kissed Evan’s forehead, patted him. Evan closed his eyes and did not open them.
Hot fury bloomed in my chest. I stood up…and ran back into the forest. This was the worst thing I had ever seen: it was like watching a car wreck from a distance, seeing people destroyed before my eyes, and not being able to do anything about it. In my years as a watcher I had never seen anything else I so much wanted to step into and change, anything else I had felt so completely incapable of fixing. I might as well jump in the lake now and not come up.
They wanted rocks? I would get rocks. I would throw them. Maybe that would mess things up. I ran upslope off my path to a place where a tumble of jagged rocks lay, grabbed some, hugged them to my chest, and tried to run back down to the cabin.
But the plants wouldn’t let me through, and the rocks grew heavier and heavier while I held them. I kept pushing downslope and the plants kept walling up in front of me, until I ended up heading deeper into the woods, following whatever path the plants left open to me. At last I put the rocks down and just stumbled whatever direction was open.
Presently I realized I knew where I was going, and I walked faster. I came to the clearing and climbed little rocks up onto Father Boulder. Treetops oceaned in the night above me, and the stars looked small in the dark sky. I felt far away from everything that mattered to me, but I was too tired to fight the forest anymore. I wished I knew how to send my mind out and do something with it, the way the Keyes could do things long distance like unbind me from Evan and pull him back into their web. Willow had promised to teach me things, and Mom had offered to teach me things, but I hadn’t had time yet to learn. Now even the forest was fighting me.
Maybe if I got some rest and waited for daylight, I could figure something out I could hardly imagine falling asleep, though, I felt so angry and helpless. My mind raged ’round and ’round in circles, pushing at facts, not finding any give: the Keyes were stronger than I was and they could do what they pleased; I had no weapons and no armor.
I lay on the rough sandy skin of Father Boulder. At first I was really cold against this huge cool stone, but presently I started feeling warmer. Gradually my mind slowed and settled. The fire in my arm eased. I felt like I was sinking into a warm, gritty soup. I curled up and fell asleep.
In the dream it was night, and I was sitting neck deep in sulfur-smelling warm mud, talking to a looming dark shape that looked like a big unpopped bubble floating on the mud’s surface. “Do you know what you want?” asked the bubble. Its voice was almost too low to hear and had a sandy, gritty quality to it. I couldn’t figure out where the voice came from: nothing on the bubble’s surface changed. Then again, everything was dark and I couldn’t see well.
“What I want?” I said.
“Do you know what you want? That is always the question.”
I had the feeling I had been hearing this question for a long time—years, maybe. At least as long as I had lived at Sauterelle Lake. The answer changed. When I was younger the answer might have been something like a package of Twinkies, a ride on a horse, a new bike. I could remember hearing the question, casting out a net into the blackness in my mind, and finally fixing on something or other. Often enough when I narrowed down the focus and said what I wanted out loud, the bubble would give me a feeling like a smile and say it couldn’t give me that. For a couple years, what I had wanted was Mom. When I had said that, always hoping that the bubble had the power to give me what I wanted, it would answer me with sad silence, a communion of sorrow. The mud would hold me as though hugging me, and I found some comfort in that.
Did I know what I wanted? Even when I did know, the bubble hadn’t given it to me. Maybe it was waiting for me to want the right thing.
I had the feeling that lately I had been answering the question with, “I don’t know.”
“Do you know what you want?” asked the bubble.
I closed my eyes and thought. And then I knew. Peering at the bubble, I said, “I want to rescue Evan. I want to get his snow crystal away from tho
se people so they’ll have to stop hurting him. I want him to be able to do what he wants. I want Willow to be able to do what she wants too, even if she wants to stay with them.” I thought about Willow and Evan’s dead little brother, and how the mystery of it had warped both of them so that they had to be sent away from home. I couldn’t want for that never to have happened, because if it hadn’t, I would never have met them. And anyway, I had the feeling that the bubble couldn’t do a really big want like that, either. It hadn’t been able to bring Mom back, and their little brother was a lot farther away than Mom had been. “That’s what I want,” I said.
“Ahhhhhhhh,” said the bubble. It sounded deeply satisfied. The mud grew a fraction warmer.
“Can you help me? I don’t know who else to ask.”
“I can help you. You have to decide how much you want this, though.”
“How much?” I couldn’t think of a single other thing I wanted inside the moment of the dream. “I want it a lot.”
“If I help you, everything will change.”
“Will Evan still be Evan? Will he be able to go back to being a wolf? Will Willow be able to say what she wants, do what she wants?”
“Yes.”
“Will they be free from the Keyes?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I want.”
We sat silent together with the mud between us.
“To accomplish what you want,” said the dark bubble eventually, “you have to act, too. Watching is no longer enough.”
“That’s okay. I want to act. I can’t stand not being able to do anything about this.”
“Evan will not change, and Willow will not change, but you will change.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask anything else about this. I had been prepared to turn into a poodle or a chihuahua for no other reason than the amusement of someone else. This was much more important. “Will it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“What do I change into?”
“My son.”
The Silent Strength of Stones Page 21
