by Sonja Yoerg
“Valentino?” Brynn’s mother examined the dress, taking in the embroidery, the crystals, the detailing. The cords in her neck were sticking out and her eyes were hard, dark marbles. “For a high school prom? Mother, are you out of your mind?”
“It was what Brynn wanted. Her heart was set on it.”
“Her heart? Are you serious, Mother? What did that dress cost? A couple thousand?”
Brynn shot a look at Grammy, hoping she wouldn’t actually say and send Brynn’s mother off the deep end. Grammy, true to form, just raised an eyebrow that said Discussing price is crass.
“What is wrong with all of you?” her mother shouted, waving her arms like a crazy person. “What the hell is wrong? It’s like you’re all infected with the same disease!”
Her father stood, looking like he was going to grab hold of her mother, then thought better of it. “Suzanne, Brynn didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” He turned to Brynn. “Tell her.”
“It’s true, Mom. I told Iris it was a game.”
Grammy straightened the watch on her wrist. “And it’s just a dress.”
Her mother stared at Grammy as if she didn’t know her. She held her arms rigidly at her sides and tilted forward at the waist, like she was about to be shot out of a cannon. A cold feeling entered Brynn and she hugged herself.
Her mother lowered her voice, speaking from the soles of her feet. She nodded again and again. “Just a dress. Just a couple thousand dollars. Just a little game.” She sat heavily on the couch and clutched her head with both hands. “Just a dress. Just our whole damn life.”
Iris sat on the closed toilet lid upstairs in Suzanne’s mother’s bathroom, feeling a little sick. Brynn shook liquid from a small bottle onto a white circle of fuzzy cloth. She told Iris to close her eyes and cleaned off the black makeup.
When Brynn stopped wiping, Iris opened her eyes. “Suzanne was really upset.”
“Did you notice how everyone else thought it was funny?”
Iris nodded even though Reid hadn’t laughed either.
“My mother just gets upset about silly things. It was fun, right?” She picked up a brush. “You want me to do it?”
“Sure.” Iris didn’t know why she agreed. She liked doing things herself. But something about being with Brynn made it easy to go along, like walking downhill instead of climbing up. Brynn made you want to be with her even if you weren’t sure you liked where she was going.
Brynn came around to brush the back of Iris’s hair. She did it gently. “That’s why we’re not telling my mother about the photos. She doesn’t understand.”
“Why not?”
Brynn let out an enormous sigh. “Because she’s forgotten how to have fun, the kind of fun that young people have.” She paused with her hand on the back of Iris’s neck. It felt nice. “But just because she’s forgotten doesn’t mean we can’t have fun, right?”
“What sort of fun do you mean?”
Brynn peeked over Iris’s shoulder and looked at her reflection. “Well, on prom night, when my friends come to take photos? You can wear one of my dresses and we’ll do your makeup and hair.” She gathered Iris’s hair and twisted it into a bundle at the back of her head. “You could be really pretty, you know.”
Iris’s cheeks went red.
Brynn leaned close. Iris could feel her breath on her cheek. “It’s exciting, isn’t it? The idea of fun ? A little secret fun ?”
Iris’s cheeks were really hot now. Brynn was right. It was exciting.
Reid drove them home. Suzanne was amazed he didn’t utter a single word of protest when Whit asked him. The ride home was silent—and sobering. Suzanne berated herself for having had too much to drink but suspected she would’ve reacted strongly to Brynn’s stunt even if she had been stone-cold sober.
When they got home, the kids absconded to their rooms. Tomorrow was a school day, and they undoubtedly sensed the evening was not quite finished for their parents and were only too glad to get away.
Suzanne went to the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of water.
Whit appeared, took off his jacket, and ran a hand through his hair. “You okay?”
“You mean aside from Brynn’s humiliation of Iris?”
“Was Iris humiliated? I didn’t see it.”
Suzanne shook her head in dismay. “She’s not socially sophisticated enough to know she was being made fun of, but that doesn’t make it right.”
“Okay, fair point. Or you could look at it another way: no harm, no foul.”
“Really, Whit? That’s the way we are raising our kids?”
He paced in front of the counter with his hands in his pockets. Suzanne knew he hated generalized discussions of parenting strategy. He preferred to solve problems on a case-by-case basis. Or pretend they didn’t exist.
He stopped and shrugged. “Look. Brynn was being playful. Iris wasn’t mad at her afterward, not even after you flipped out. They were all chummy. So what really went wrong?”
Suzanne held on to the edge of the counter. “Whit, I can’t believe you don’t get this.”
“I do get it. I just disagree with you.”
“A Valentino dress for prom is fine, is it?”
“Why not? Who’s going to know how much it cost? And even if they do, it’s not as if everyone doesn’t know your folks have the money.”
“I can’t believe I have to walk you through how wrong it is. The dress and so much else.”
“You don’t, Suzanne. I know the argument. I hear it all the time from Reid. I just don’t buy it.” He stared at her, letting his dismissal sink in. “Anyway, the dress isn’t the issue. The issue—your issue—is that your mother went shopping with Brynn. And maybe it’s also that Iris is choosing to hang out with Brynn.”
Instead of you. His words were cotton wool stuffed into her mouth, suffocating her. She spoke from the white-hot ball of anger in her stomach. “Jealousy. That’s your take on my reaction, despite what I’ve just said.”
He lifted his hands in defense. “Hey, it’s pretty normal, Suzanne.” His tone softened. “Teens break away. It hurts.”
Suzanne turned from him, praying he would not utter another word.
Breaking away.
Or driving off. The wheel in her hands, and the road before her.
She could picture it winding, empty, endless.
The whine of the tires, the breeze from the open window.
The faint scent of hyacinths.
CHAPTER 25
Whit beckoned Iris to follow him to the car. She hesitated in the doorway, waiting for Suzanne’s blessing.
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Suzanne said.
Whit sighed. “I’m trying to help here. You could use a break, a nap. I know you didn’t sleep well.” Because you were furious with me. Whit acknowledged he was escaping more talk about last night’s debacle at her parents’ house and focusing instead on making what amends he could. He’d promised to talk to Brynn after her swim meet, and now he was offering to spend a little quality time with Iris—and Suzanne was balking.
Whit and Suzanne waited for Iris to respond. She seemed bored by the discussion, as if it had nothing to do with her. Maybe she was right.
“Iris.” Suzanne placed her hand on the girl’s arm. “Are you sure you’re okay to go?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
“Okay, then!” Whit bounded down the porch steps.
Iris followed, catching up with him in a few quick steps. Suzanne remained in the doorway, worry pinching her forehead.
“Take a long bath, Suzanne,” Whit called out as he opened the car door. “Read a book. Watch Fixer Upper .”
Suzanne waved. “Don’t do anything too exciting!”
Whit smiled ruefully and shook his head. That admonishment had never been delivered in earnest before Iris. As he started the car, he thought about the irony in fretting about a girl who had lived by herself in the woods, with absolutely jack, for three long years.
He watched Iris buckle herself in. “Ready to rock?”
“Rock?”
“Yup. It means to go, in an especially cool way.”
“Yes.”
She sounded as if she only half knew what he meant but wasn’t interested enough to explore further. Whit could only imagine how confusing everything was to her, but it bothered him that she didn’t seem to be trying that hard to assimilate. That’s what he would be doing. He had joked about Iris being like a foreign exchange student, but in fact the phrase captured his view of her situation succinctly. Iris had no choice but to live in the real world, and the sooner she adjusted to it, the better for her and everyone around her. It wasn’t easy, but living in your own bubble—in her case, a bubble of unspoiled nature—wasn’t feasible.
Whit and Iris drove in silence out of the city limits of Charlottesville toward Hampstead Farms, passing a string of car dealerships, big-box stores, and strip malls in the process of becoming upscale shopping centers. Just when the urban development seemed to be thinning, it cropped up again. Charlottesville was expanding rapidly, meeting the demand an upscale university town with an extremely livable climate would always have. Some people saw the constant construction and infiltration of open space as a scourge in need of curbing, but Whit knew growth meant strength. The city planners were keeping hold of the reins and ensuring there was plenty of green space. People might not want to live in a forest, but they definitely wanted their views to consist of more nature than concrete.
He pulled off the main road onto a private gravel drive. Fields dotted with the first wildflowers stretched for acres on both sides, rolling gently toward the woods in the far distance. They approached a brick farmhouse. Even at a distance the weedy landscaping and cracking paint on the trim were obvious.
“That’s Hampstead House. The farm has three hundred acres, with these open fields making up about a third of it.” Whit pulled into a parking area beside the house where four men gathered around a truck and an SUV—the surveyors plus Gillings, a money guy who was doing his due diligence. “I’ve got to talk to these fellows for a few minutes; then I’ll show you around.”
“Okay.”
If Iris were one of his kids, he wouldn’t have given a thought to what she would do while she waited. Her phone would already be out. With Iris, he wasn’t sure he ought to let her wander the farm on her own. Suzanne would flip out if she knew, and he couldn’t risk Iris going on walkabout, not with Gillings there. “You okay just waiting here?”
“Yes.”
The surveyors needed only a nod from Whit to begin work. Gillings, on the other hand, didn’t seem eager to return to his office anytime soon. Whit extricated himself from the conversation as soon as he could without seeming rude and returned to Iris. She was staring out the windshield.
He opened her door. “Let me show you what I’m doing here, okay?”
They bypassed the house, behind which the surveyors had set up a transit, and followed a worn path that hugged the fence line. Whit explained the plan for this tract of land: six clusters of large, stately homes on three to five acres apiece, separated by open field, some of which would be turned into community facilities: pools, tennis courts, meeting centers, recreation facilities. He indicated the placement of the homes, twenty-four in all.
“That’s Phase One. Hopefully we break ground this summer. Phase Two is harder to see because it’s going to involve leveling some of this.” He swept his hand to indicate the dense forest in front of them. “We’ll leave a good portion of it. People like to have trees around them.”
Iris had been walking quickly, as she always did, but now she slowed. “If they like trees, why are you getting rid of them?”
“Because they like new houses more.”
“Where are the people living now?”
“In other houses.”
“Why don’t they stay there?”
“Some just want a newer house, but most want a bigger one.”
“Are these houses going to be bigger than yours?”
Whit laughed. “Yes, a lot bigger.”
Iris shook her head. “I really don’t understand.” She pointed at the old house. “What about that one?”
“The farmer used to live there. He farmed all this land. But he couldn’t make money anymore doing that, so he sold it to us.”
“So people with houses already could have bigger ones.”
“Yup.”
“What about the food?”
“The food?”
“If the farm doesn’t grow anything anymore, where will that food come from?”
Whit paused. He knew the answer, or at least thought he did. The food came from bigger farms farther away, in the Midwest, in California, and in other countries, like Brazil. He ran through an explanation in his head that included cutting down the Amazon rain forest to grow beef cattle that could easily be grown on the land under his feet, and decided not to go down that road. Real estate was his wheelhouse, not food politics, so he went in a different direction.
“Farming has become more efficient, so we don’t need as much land as we used to.” He wasn’t sure that was true, but it was plausible.
From the look on Iris’s face, she wasn’t buying it. Not the particular argument about the disappearance of small farms, but the larger argument, the one they had been making to her since she first walked into their home. This world is better than the one you left. You were missing out. Whit firmly believed the argument was correct, but he got bogged down in justifying the particulars in making the case to Iris. Perhaps this was why she wasn’t absorbing and accepting her new culture as readily as she might have. She would see the advantages eventually, get used to the rest, and learn to ignore the contradictions and compromises like everyone else.
Whit regarded Iris. Those big purple-blue eyes full of innocence and wisdom confused him. He was a man who did what he had to do to get where he wanted to go. She was a girl wishing only to stay in one place.
He checked his watch. “Let’s keep walking.”
She nodded, and they headed off across the field.
In the two months since Suzanne had carried Iris out of the woods, Iris had changed her mind about many things. Not everything her parents had led her to believe was true, not completely. She admitted she liked having enough to eat every day and appreciated the luxury of indoor plumbing, especially hot running water. She liked clean clothing and a warm bed, and felt guilty about it. In her head, the voices of her parents were becoming quieter, muted by the new reality in which Iris found herself. Honestly, she couldn’t see what was so wrong with it. Maybe being soft wasn’t bad by itself—conveniences weren’t evil—but only because the price of those conveniences was invisible, or hidden, or just not that interesting to most people.
Much of what Iris saw around her—the houses, the cars, the clothes, the thousands of kinds of foods in the supermarket—went far beyond basic convenience and comfort and left her bewildered. She wanted to know how it was justified, how the price exacted on the natural world was reckoned against the extra comfort gained, but didn’t know how to ask. And if she did, as she had just done with Whit, she didn’t seem to get anywhere. The deeper she explored the new world into which she had been plunged, the more she felt her parents were right and the more she wished she could retreat into the woods and never emerge again, even if it meant no more hot showers.
“Breaking ground,” Whit had called it, with pride in his voice. He was proud and he was eager, but in his eagerness Iris thought he was skipping over a lot. She’d heard him talk to Suzanne about money, and his voice had an insistent quality when he did, like the buzzing of a bee deep inside a flower, gloating in the abundance. How much money Whit required was something Iris could not even guess at. She might ask him one day, when she understood more, if she was around.
Iris lifted her eyes from the shin-high grass around her to the tall trees beyond, now in full leaf, shimmering in the breeze. The tulip trees were covered w
ith yellow and orange blossoms the size of teacups held open to the sky. Birds darted from branch to branch, eager in their preparations for new life. The air smelled tangy and Iris felt the urge to run. The muscles in her legs were bound tight with unused energy, but she knew if she took off, Whit would follow her. Suzanne would find out and be upset again. It might be worth it. Whit and Suzanne’s lack of understanding of her was not her fault. In those woods she might find a moment of freedom, a small quiet space away from the terrible calculations of what people would destroy for something that, as far as she could tell, did not necessarily make them happier. In those woods she might breathe easily and deeply, and remember who she was.
In those woods she might find Ash.
Whit interrupted her thoughts. “Iris, if you could, would you really go back into the woods? Would you really do that?” He had read her mind. Or maybe it was a question he’d been carrying for a while.
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. The wind had ruffled his hair and the sun had brought color to his cheeks. He had a friendly, pleasant way about him when he stopped pushing so hard. Iris felt sorry for him then, for everything he believed he needed to chase from here to there, as if the world were laid out before him flat, with a finish line at the end and prizes for the first to cross it. Whit didn’t seem that soft to her. He was stretched out thin and brittle. He and Suzanne both.
“Yes, I would go back. But what I guess I’d like to know is, why wouldn’t you?”
He smiled. “I don’t think I’d last very long.”
“You wouldn’t have to be alone. You could have help, other people. I did, for most of the time.”
Whit studied her a moment, then pointed behind them to the old house where they’d left the car. “We should get going.”
They cut across the field, the breeze now at their backs. A pair of meadowlarks swooped past, dipping into the grass and out again with stuttering wing beats.
By summer this ground would be broken, and Whit would have more money.
What would happen to her?
That night Iris couldn’t sleep. She tried to empty her mind, but images and sensations kept pushing back in: Brynn sprawled on the bed in her underwear, the silkiness of the fur coat, Suzanne’s face, horrified and impossibly sad, Brynn’s touch and her promises, Whit’s grasping for money, for more and more, the innocent land marked for destruction. Iris’s room was quiet, but her thoughts roiled like the bottom of a waterfall.
