“And I know you’ve been getting along okay so far adjusting for what you don’t have anymore.” Tess stared me down in that way that always caught me and made me quiet. It was a stare that told me she noticed me bumping into things on my left side, how much I had to move my head now to see what I used to see without thinking, the way I registered some things as closer and some things as farther than they really were.
But also that it wasn’t all she saw of me.
“You’re green enough at it, though, that the minute you lose your focus—” Tess eyed the counter where I’d spilled the carton. “One day you’ll do it all without thinking, but right now you still have to think about it. Except you’re not thinking. You can’t get used to everything all at once, but you can do one thing right now. So go talk to her.”
“I don’t want to talk to her.”
“You’re the worst liar in the whole world.” She took off the Remington’s barrel and ran the rod through. “As bad as your grandfather.”
“She wouldn’t want to see me anyway.”
“I thought you didn’t want to see her.”
“I don’t,” I said. “But if I did.”
She shoved a brush into the barrel to break up the powder residue. “Get out of here.”
I stood against the counter.
“I mean it,” she said. “Get out of my kitchen.”
“This isn’t your kitchen.”
“Then get out of Lynn’s kitchen.” She shook the bottle of cleaning oil at me. “Go on. Out.”
I sulked toward the door. Grandma Tess was always right, and always smug about it, and I didn’t know which was more irritating. But I still could rage out of there like this was the worst idea she’d ever had, because it probably was.
The woods between the back of the Ashby farm and the del Cisnes’ house still looked covered in a rain of feathers and petals and hoarfrost. The light winked off the ice, casting little splinters of sun over the trees.
In daylight, I carved my route even more carefully than at night. Liam, no doubt, was still looking for me. If my father saw me, if he and my uncle caught me and dragged me back, they’d make me into the kind of Holt I was always supposed to be.
I knew how to be careful. Careful had gotten me records Liam didn’t know about. Careful led me on paths that followed creeks and edged the pond. Careful guided me through the woods in a way that kept me far from my family’s property, far from the roads, far from the side of the Ashby farm where people came to buy apples.
They weren’t taking me. Not yet.
These were the thoughts that went off inside my brain right as I felt the impact on my left temple.
PAGE
I stayed on the far side of the orchard.
My grandmother’s house sat on the corner diagonal from my mother and father’s. They’d been built that way to keep a better eye on the land, watching for crows or the water in the ditches rising too high.
It was something that made me feel both strange and lucky, how I was sleeping in my grandmother’s house and my family had no idea. The orchard spread wide enough to let me hide.
But if I went deeper in, if I slipped into the dappled shadows, sometimes I could see my mother or my father without them seeing me.
I watched my father inspecting a tree, checking the leaves for blight, testing the weight of the fruit in his hands.
The inside of me clenched with the memory of him and my mother and me in the kitchen each fall. After the trees were free from the weight of their fruit, after we’d sent the Frequin Rouge and Muscadet de Dieppe off to the cider house up the road, we made pies and jarred sauce and apple butter for all the Ashby cousins who’d come in for picking season. My father would never use the metal turn-handle peeler my mother mounted on the kitchen counter. He peeled each apple with a few flicks of his wrists, leaving a single, spiraling peel.
“They miss you, you know,” Grandma Lynn said.
I’d had the sense of her there, the slight perfume of lemons on her clothes. But I hadn’t registered her next to me until she spoke.
“It was too hard for them,” I said.
“It was pretty hard on you, too. It’s okay to say that.”
I watched my mother come out to meet my father, setting a hand on his shoulder. Them standing next to each other always made the red of my father’s hair look brighter and the gray-blond of my mother’s paler.
For so long, all I’d had was the brittle worry that they didn’t know what to do with me. I was something so unknown to them that they just stayed still. They feared saying the wrong thing to me so much that they didn’t say anything.
But there was more. It waited in some quiet, forgotten place, a back pocket of my heart.
My mother teaching me all the apple varieties, by color and taste, by the smell of the blossoms, by the weight of the fruit.
My father showing me how to graft a tree, guiding my small hands as I made my first back-cut on a scion branch.
The two of them letting me pick out my own clothes from the time I first went to school. They let me get jeans and shirts exactly like Barclay’s. They let me wear the same kind of plaid button-ups my older cousins wore when they came for the harvest. If we were going to church on Christmas Eve, they told me to put on good pants and a collared shirt.
They had always done that, even if later they would feel as though they did not know me. Even if realizing I was something other than a tomboy froze them still.
“Page,” my grandmother said. “I know all parents probably seem the same age to you, but they are young.” She watched my father twist a perfect apple off its branch and hand it to my mother. “They had you so young. They started out scared and they still are.”
Even from this distance, the apple looked round and perfect as red blown glass. My mother took it with a smile as sad and worn out as my father’s. They both looked duller than the last time I’d seen them, like a key collecting a coat of tarnish.
“You know, just because they don’t understand you doesn’t mean they don’t want to,” my grandmother said. “And just because they don’t understand now doesn’t mean they never will.”
ROJA
The shine on the trees struck me first as rain. Even from the window, the trunks gleamed.
But something in the way they caught the falling light pulled me closer to the glass.
The water on the trees dulled the gold instead of reflecting it. It darkened the sun’s light instead of refracting it.
That strangeness drew me outside.
The closer I got to the birch trees, the more my steps slowed. The resolving color of the trunks choked the breath out of me.
It wasn’t rain.
I knew the contours of these trees, the strips of bark peeling away from the trunk to show the ash-dark layer underneath.
But under those peels of lighter bark the wood wasn’t gray-brown.
It shone wet, and bright.
I knew better than to touch it. I already knew what it was. And still my hand reached out, and came back trembling. Red stained the pads of my fingers, the same sheen as pomegranate seeds.
Blood was drifting up from under the birchbark.
I shuddered as though the trees were my own body, my blood under the wood instead of resin, my hair the same as their leaves. The knots in their trunks like the hard points of scars.
Blood seeped into my fingerprints. The fear in my throat wavered too much to become a scream.
Birch wood. Meadow of birch trees. Thanks to the inscriptions in Tess’s family Bible, and how trusting she was of me looking through her books, I knew what Barclay’s name meant.
And I knew that, right now, Tess was the first person to call.
I dialed Lynn Ashby’s house.
Tess picked up.
“Which one of you am I talking to?” she asked.
“It’s Roja,” I said. “Can I talk to Barclay?”
“He’s not with you?”
My lips froze parte
d, the air in the living room growing hot on my tongue.
I hung up, my hand leaving red streaks on everything I touched.
Grabbing the shotgun felt laughable. What could I do, fire at the air until it told me where he was? With every needle of light, the trees reminded me how small I was against their venom and magic. The woods stole boys and gave them back only when they wanted to. The leaves shadowed the swans on their thrones of mirrored water.
A wooden-barreled Winchester wouldn’t be any more help than my mother’s tamal steamer.
But it was all I could think of, so I brought it with me, trying to remember the path Yearling had taken between our house and the Ashby orchard.
YEARLING
When I woke up everything was red. The trees. The air. All of it wore a red wash, dark as cranberries. It stained the sky and clouds. And underneath it was the searing brightness of the overcast sky, with its glare like wet silver.
I tried to get up, but pain held my forehead. It shot from my temple through the left side.
Every time I moved, he got me again. And with each blow to my head or my stomach I felt like something was both getting into me and breaking at the same time, the shards skittering out to every part of me.
At first, I tried to find the rhythm of our old fights. I tried to wrench out of Liam’s grip, hit him back hard enough to stun him still.
I couldn’t.
Then I wished for the woods and all its shadows to take me again.
They didn’t.
He grabbed me like he wanted to know if I was some ghost of myself or if I was my own real body. He beat me down into the shadows like he could will me out of being.
When he took me by my shirt collar, it brought us close enough for me to see the scars even the best doctors had left behind. A thin slash below his nose. Another on his jawline.
In those small marks, I found the story of what had happened. What I had done. I could tell, even if no one else looking at him ever could. Every mark left behind was a reason to let my cousin work out his rage on me now.
So I let him.
I let him because of what I had done to him that day. I let him because he was bigger than me, and I wasn’t fast anymore.
I tried to keep my eyes open, so he’d have to look at me. But my brain felt too heavy, spinning down, trying to find the moment everything had shifted, the one thing that had made Liam who he was now.
By the time it stopped, the blame didn’t matter. Liam was who he was. So was I. And, slowly, we had become less cousins and more things for each other to hit.
He stood over me, his voice sounding both distant and like it was coming from inside my own head.
You’re lying, I know you have everything. Right before he got me on the left side.
What did you think you were doing? Then, a second later, him driving me into the ground.
You sure as hell better tell me the truth this time. And then a blow against my shirt.
My ribs felt like the crumbling wood of a going-out fire. Brittle as embers.
I had been wrong. I had hidden from Liam because I thought he wanted to pick up a fight we’d left half finished. Or, I thought he wanted to kill me because of the things I knew. And maybe both of these were true. But as he threw his fists into me, as the pain dragged me down, I understood.
The rage fueling his hands wasn’t over how I’d left him with a busted jaw and a broken nose. It wasn’t even about the papers I’d saved, proof of what my father and uncle and their partners wanted no one to know.
The force behind my cousin’s knuckles was about not only what I had tried to take from him, but from both of us.
I had broken open our family’s secrets like an oak nut. I had worn at the shell every time I got into a file cabinet or a desk drawer. And with every crack, I had proven myself worthless as a Holt. Worse than that. A traitor.
How Liam stayed on me now, how he wouldn’t let me go, maybe even this was mine. Maybe I’d made him into this the day I hid papers in the back of an old dresser. I had lied to my cousin, and with every lie, he became more someone I had to lie to.
I tried to grab him, to make him look at me. But even this close, my hands missed his shoulders, misjudging the distance and depth. The mistake seemed to fuel him, his fists coming heavier.
My vision pulled in and darkened, like the world was folding up and closing in on itself. I looked for the hard light between trees, but there was nothing except my cousin and this rage I had left in him, a firework I’d lit and then run away from.
“Liam,” I said, the blood in my mouth thickening the name. I was still under here, under how everything hurt, the wash of red over the world.
But saying his name just made it worse. His next strike was harder, like he was trying to stop me from saying it again.
The hard, echoing sound of a shotgun broke the air.
How loud it was felt like another blow, rattling my brain. It came slow through the red haze, so that when Liam dropped me I wondered if the noise had been my body hitting the ground.
“My father taught me to shoot.” I couldn’t see Roja, but I had learned her voice as well as I’d learned her laugh and the smell of her hair.
I opened my mouth to tell her to leave me here. It didn’t matter anymore. Page had all my proof, and would figure out what to do with it. Roja could let me go. Everything worth saving I’d handed to Page in a paper envelope.
But I couldn’t lift my voice out of its wet whisper.
“I learned on the crows eating our back garden,” Roja said, speaking to the space above me, to Liam. “They were a lot smaller and a lot faster than you. So if you feel like testing me, go ahead.”
It startled him off. His steps trembled the ground.
Roja dropped the Winchester and put her hands on me, but I was no more solid than the birch leaves. I was made out of paper and lost blood.
“Don’t.” I heard the word, the breaking in my voice, and realized I’d spoken it.
It was the only word I had in me. Don’t.
She set my arm over her shoulder, gripped my hand, wrapped her other arm around my waist. Her hold both softened the pain in my body and turned it into something flickering and alive.
“Get up with me, okay?” she said.
“I can’t see them,” I said. The only way I could think of to tell her not to bother was to tell her I wasn’t even good for finding the stars anymore.
“Get up,” she said, harder now.
“Parallax,” I said, almost hearing Tess’s voice over mine. “I can’t even tell how far away they are anymore.”
It didn’t make sense. I knew it didn’t. But I was in that space where everything I was about to say made sense until the moment I said it.
“Get up.” Now Roja wasn’t asking. Her hands were all force and insistence. She pulled me to standing. She held me up, making me walk with her.
I tried to pull myself out of the feeling that there were pieces of me left on the forest floor, on the backs of my cousin’s knuckles, in the aspen-scented air that took me once but would not take me back.
I had gotten lost so many places. I was a boy who could neither reclaim my bear-body nor live in this one. What there was of me felt too heavy to carry but too insignificant to have its own gravity. Roja might look away for a second, and turn back to find I’d vanished from under her hands.
ROJA
I had done this. I’d given weight to Liam’s certainty that he’d seen his cousin in the woods, and he’d gone after him. I had been the one to believe him, the witch who knew the woods better than anyone.
I left Tess Holt’s Winchester. I didn’t have enough hands to get both her gun and her grandson home at the same time. So I buried it under the leaves, and I held on to Yearling hard enough to make him go with me, his blood patterning my shirt.
He was out by the time I got him back to my mother and father’s house. His body reacted when I moved him, his muscle memory helping me. But I talked to him, said his
name—both of them—and he said nothing back.
“What happened?” Blanca asked when I pulled him through the door. A gasp thinned her words.
I was out of breath from holding him up, so I took a second too long to answer.
“I’m calling Tess,” Blanca said.
“No,” I said, the word sharp enough to halt her.
Tess couldn’t see him like this. She’d have him in the car to a doctor before Blanca hung up the phone. And it would get back to the Holts, and to Liam.
The thought of when I’d have to tell Tess bore into me. I’d failed her and Olive and Page and everyone who cared about him. Yearling had gotten me through a night when my own body was wringing the will out of me, and I couldn’t even keep him safe.
Worse than not keeping him safe. If I hadn’t called him, Liam wouldn’t have gone after him. I had pulled Yearling so deep into this it had almost gotten him killed.
The guilt was fingernails pressing into the back of my neck. Tonight I would dream of my primas clawing at my hair, setting my hands against the red-stained birch trunks, telling me this was what happened when wicked girls tried to survive.
I set Yearling down on the sofa where he’d slept. “Call Page.”
“What?” Blanca asked. “Why?”
I took Yearling’s arm off my shoulder, easing it down so it didn’t fall.
“Call Page.” I said the words slower, heavier this time.
Blanca’s eyes flashed toward the kitchen, as though Sofía and Isabel or our mother might be in there watching her. “Roja.”
“I need him to meet you in the woods so I know you’re not alone,” I said.
“Why am I going into the woods?” Blanca asked.
“Go get Tess’s gun,” I said. “I had to leave it there. It’s about a quarter of a mile away from the pond. Near the alder trees. You can find them, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Good.” I cut her off. “Now do it. Call Page, get him to meet you. Ask him to bring birdshot if Tess has it.”
Blanca & Roja Page 19
