by Sarah Jude
Rook was holding Veil’s reins when he joined me. “You’re not really here, are you?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Most of the time, you seem far away. I don’t know if it’s ’cause you always watch people or you’re thinkin’. Sometimes it’s like watching a ghost haunt the same place the same way day after day. You hold back, and it makes me wonder if you’re ever really in the moment.”
I lived a guarded life. There was trust in the shadows.
“I don’t know how to be me right now,” I admitted. “Heather always pushes me when I pull back.”
Rook’s hand rested on the sway in my back. I pressed my body against his—legs to legs, his front to mine, arms wrapping around me. His forehead touched mine, and his glasses slipped down his nose so my eyelashes blinked against the lenses. “Sometimes when you hold back, what you hang on to winds up hurting you.”
I closed my eyes, shivered while Rook’s fingers traveled to my hips. I didn’t want to hold back with him. I wanted to know what it was to sweep away all fetters restraining me. The scruff on his chin scratched my forehead. Warm air swirled above us while cool water misted my ankles and, higher up, beneath my skirt.
All of it was real. Right then. That second.
I circled my arms around him hard, because the harder I hugged, the looser the knot in my throat grew. How could I like how he held me when half of me was hollow?
“Rook?” I choked on his name.
“What?”
“I don’t want this to stop. This moment.”
He scrunched my skirt at my hips. The urge to cry out—in sorrow, in confusion, in craving him—ballooned in my chest. It came out instead as a gasp when he lowered his face into the curve of my neck. As if awaiting my cue, he didn’t kiss me, and I didn’t know if I wanted him to or if I wanted something else.
I missed Heather.
I missed the way things were before.
Don’t stop.
I listened to Rook’s breathing, the trickle of water washing the river stones. I listened to the creak of the mill’s wheel as it turned.
Down in the river’s valley, we became entangled and reclined on a piece of limestone. I brought my mouth to his. His tongue flicked mine, his hands on my back and then lower. I traced along his shoulders, the muscles from working fields, and yet there was softness to him. That softness didn’t stay the longer we kissed. He pulled back and looked around.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Making sure we’re alone,” he said.
“And what would you do if someone saw us?”
He smiled. “Pretend I was saving you from drowning.”
“I’d like it if you gave me mouth-to-mouth.”
His laugh was hushed but cut short because I seized him, knocking his glasses askew as I kissed him. I didn’t care how wet or messy it became. I didn’t care if our teeth knocked together. I wanted him to take everything that hurt, to lick it from me, and replace it with something else. I paused over the buttons of his gray shirt, popping each one open, one by one, until I came to the lowest button. He inhaled.
“If you don’t want to do this, it’s okay.”
But I did. My intention held firm. “I want this, Rook.”
He lost the shirt I’d unbuttoned and spread it out on the rock as a makeshift blanket. I lay back and invited him to climb on top of me. My fingers ran along his arms to his shoulders damp with sweat, and his mouth wandered from my lips to my neck. His trousers hardened against my skirt, enough to take away my breath. It brought out a curiosity in me, and when I reached down to unbutton his pants and touch him there, he moved against my hand for more.
I wanted him. He wanted me.
That way.
His lips dressed my neck with gentle kisses until he came to the collar of my dress, and it was a new kind of thrill as he eased the top off my shoulder to kiss me there, too. I could lie under the sun for hours with him kissing me like that, just enough pressure, lips so warm that I shivered when the air cooled where he’d been.
I understood why Heather wouldn’t tell me who she was with in the stable.
Sharing it ruined the delicacy of the two of you.
Rook’s fingers slid up the inside of my thigh, higher yet. I held my breath, shuddering because he scared me. And amazed me. How I’d known him my entire life but never in this way. I could never go back to knowing him before this.
I slipped down the top of my dress so it draped at my waist, pulling back my hair for him to see everything. Though I liked my shape, I wondered what Rook thought of it. I also liked his smile, his dimpled cheeks, especially as he looked at my body. Heather’s necklace of found things slid between my breasts. His hands moved across the soft part of my abdomen before inching upward.
I studied him kissing my tummy. It’d make a good drawing, him pushing up my skirt, his lips treading along my thighs. I tipped back my head, feeling all the ways he kissed me, listening. So much sound, so much shifting around inside me. His mouth stayed gentle as I lowered my head against his shirt covering the rock. With white sunlight in my eyes, I rode higher with each kiss.
The elation cracked my heart.
Yet I smothered sobs, covering my grimaced mouth. I had to hide it from him, not because I didn’t like what he did—I did, I wanted it—but rather the void in me ripped open, fresh and endless.
I reached down to touch his hair, my voice crackling to whisper, “Stop.”
Rook raised up from my skirt. He stared at me with spooked eyes, pants hanging open. “Ivy? Are you okay?”
He hoisted me up to sitting and lifted my dress’s top to cover me again. Then I must’ve seemed too prickly to touch. Nothing would help me except to cry, and Rook gave me that. He buttoned up his pants, slid into his shirt, and focused on the water spinning past us.
After a bit, he said, “Anytime you say no, I’ll listen. If it’s too fast, I’ll back off. I’m . . . sorry.”
My eyes stung, hot, grainy, and liquid.
“It’s n-n-not you,” I croaked. “Why? Why right now? Why does everything lead me b-back to feeling so lost and ruined?”
Worry, sadness, anger, everything wailed from my throat. My face was hot, my hair tangled, and I hated how the wind dried the tears pooling beneath my eyes.
Rook’s thumb brushed my cheek. “Let’s get you outta here.”
Too tired to move, I shut my eyes, but that only made all the sounds louder.
Pulse pounding. Rook shushing me. A crow squawked three times.
I breathed. More noise. The rustle of my skirt falling back over my legs. Water traveling over pebbles. Tree frogs peeping in the woods.
The mill was silent.
“It’s not turning,” I said.
“The mill?” Rook asked. “Maybe the water’s too low.”
“No, I heard it when we came here.”
I wiped my face and shook off everything surging out of me, locked it back in my cells. The wooden wheel had halted. The top of the wheel pitched back and forth as if trying to turn, but something was caught on the bottom.
I hopped from one rock on the shoal to next, lifting my skirt out of the water, and Rook jumped behind me until we reached the opposite shore. Together, we trekked along the bank where the absent water left a scooped-out hollow plagued by roots and algae-covered rocks. Too dark with shadow and thick with mud, something had wedged itself beneath the wheel. I remained on the shore as he wound his long legs around the wheel’s scaffolding, slopping through the water until he was higher than knee-deep.
“You see anything?” I asked.
He bent over, shielding his glasses from the sun. “I’m not sure. There’s something stuck in the mud, I think.”
I glanced back to the horses, still drinking and oblivious. My tongue slicked over my lips before I gave up and followed Rook out into the water. Cold welled around my legs, and my skirt became heavier before billowing around me like a giant lily pad. I pushed it behind me to stop i
t from becoming hooked on the wheel.
“Be careful,” I reminded Rook. “If the wheel spins while you’re messing with it, you’ll get crushed.”
With a nod, he hung on to the scaffold, and I could see now where he poked at a mass bobbing beneath the wheel with the driftwood. He slipped his glasses into his pocket and with a splash, disappeared into the water. I glanced up at the riverbank, the steep cove, and counted. One, two, three, four . . .
My arms wrapped around my chest. My teeth chattered. Veil neighed, the worried bellow horses give when something unsettles them. A leaf swam by on the river’s surface.
If he became snagged on something. If his lungs ran out of air. If he was swept downstream by the current.
If, if, if.
I slapped at the water, whipping around, looking for any sign of him. He’d been underwater for too long.
“Rook?”
All was hushed. I was wading closer to the wheel when hands grasped my wrists.
I yelped at the same time Rook broke through the river’s surface. He sputtered on the water and choked, panicking.
“There you are!” I cried. “What happened?”
He spun me away from Denial Mill, holding the sides of my head so I couldn’t peek. Rivulets of water streamed down from my temples to my cheeks where he held me. Each breath was ragged, a fight not to scream.
“Don’t look. Ivy, whatever you do, don’t look!”
“What’s wrong?” I demanded. He coughed up more water and tried rushing me to the shore, but I dug my heels into the silty river bottom. “Rook, c’mon! What is it?”
“Go!” he finally managed. “Take Whimsy, and get my pops! Go now!”
“W-what’d you see? You’re scarin’ me!”
“Ivy, no!”
The cold water around me met a growing cold inside me, beginning in my gut and spreading down my veins. I peeled away from Rook and waded a half circle back to the water wheel.
“Please don’t,” he begged, and again sloshed with me through the water. “You don’t wanna see that.”
But I had to see. I had to know.
I eased through the water until what appeared to be wavy, reddish-brown marsh grass floated on the surface. My bones hard and muscles harder, I slipped my fingers between the grasses, except it wasn’t grass. It was wet hair. Wet curls. Soggy and discolored from sitting in the water for days. Hair clinging to my skin. Her May Day skirt wrapped around one of the wheel’s paddles. Down beneath the water, I felt her. The eyes open and fringed by lashes, the straight nose, and hard pearls of her teeth. Her lips were gone. All of her beneath the water, out of sight.
The mill wheel groaned. Heather’s body loosened and submerged further, yet I was stuck in the middle of the spinning water wheel. Rook shouted, but I couldn’t understand him. One arm fished through the wheel’s scaffold, then a leg. I held my wet skirt close against me to keep it from snarling on the wheel. Almost free.
Chapter Thirteen
Terra’s fingers were all black and chewed up, and no one was all that sure if the vultures got her or if it was that damn Birch Markle. The devil had that boy crouchin’ over her dead body and lickin’ the girl’s blood off his knife.
Ice water flooded my nose, my mouth. My hair clouded around my head and over my face. Giving in to the lull of the current seemed much easier than propelling myself to the surface. The water flowed around me until my soaked hair and skirt no longer weighed me down—rather, I became weightless.
It was fitting in a way. To lose Heather, find her, and then lose myself.
I could stay with her.
My fingers stretched, and I turned my head. Eyes opening to take in the murky river water. There was grit and mud and grass, but there was also Heather’s fish-white face and constellations of freckles. Her dead head creaked on its neck, swiveling to face me, lipless mouth forming words. Since she had no breath, no bubbles escaped as she spoke.
Find it.
“Find what?”
Her eyes were open, the green gone from them. Her teeth clacked in blue-black gums.
Find it, Ivy.
My fingers bumped against hers. They felt like stumpy logs of clay, and shreds of her skin flaked against mine.
I took hold anyway. Cousins. Almost sisters.
Together again.
“Help! Somebody, help me!”
The voice. It sounded like Rook, but not. He was molasses and black earth, and this voice was jagged, full of rocks and twigs.
My cheek chilled as wind licked off water droplets. A hand cupped my head while an arm wrapped behind my knees. “Ivy, wake up. Please, God, no. I love you. Wake up . . . Somebody fucking help me! ”
No. Don’t take me away.
I liked it in the water. In the dark. With Heather.
Cattails rustled while a horse gave an impatient stomp. My back pressed against the shore. The underwater weightlessness vanished. My arms, my legs, all my body was heavy, so much that if the shore wished to open and swallow me, it could. My mind was loosely aware of buzzing.
“I gotta see my daughter!”
A hand stroked the hair drying across my forehead. A trail of sludge wound down from my lips around my jaw and neck to pool behind my ear. My eyelids crusted with sediment. Somehow, I wiped my face enough to blink.
Sun so blinding. I flinched.
“Thank God,” Rook said, and sat beside me. I suspected he’d been crying. I tried to speak, but a clot of river water forced up my throat to spill from my mouth. Rook hoisted me up and smacked my back to dislodge more. As the coughs settled, I rubbed my nose to blot the water reeking of dirt from my face.
Horses. Denial Mill. I recalled going there with Rook and wading in the river because the water wheel had stopped turning. Some hillmen were examining the wheel with Flint and Jasper Denial. Near the top of the riverside, my father rushed up to Sheriff, his cheeks whitened. “Jay, they said Ivy’s down here. Is she—”
“We had a bad scare, but my boy got her breathin’ again. Promise kept, Timothy. I wish I’d done better.”
Papa’s shoulders drooped. “Done better?”
I looked away from the men, from Rook, and on the shore lay Heather. Not screaming, not crying out, I crawled over to the gray girl in the red ruffled skirt. The ruffles were tinged dingy brown, like her curls. Dark water beaded in her nostrils. Two silver coins covered her eyes. I knelt over her, my hands in my lap, then on her forearm.
“Ivy?” Papa asked from behind me.
Heather’s mouth was too open, too wide without her lips. Such a ghastly smile without any blood or color, so I ripped off my sleeve and placed it over her face. Her shirt was stained with dark smears of blood. She was stiff, so waxy, and chilled.
There was nothing of her magic and light. She was a muted husk of what was once radiant. I squeezed my eyes, burying my face against Heather’s shoulder. Tears stung my skin as they slipped down my cheeks. My chest and throat distended with a horrible pain. The finality of sorrow. Its wail shoved out of me to echo above the river, and I held her closer. All the softness went out of her.
Heather was murdered.
But I’d I returned from nearly dead. To find out who did this to her.
Chapter Fourteen
Oh, folks ran after Birch. Jackdaw Meriweather, his boy Jay, all them with their hounds and rifles took off after him into the woods. Thing is, Birch always liked the woods. He knew them. He was the woods.
My mother’s feet formed twin shadows beneath my doorway. I recognized their shape, the thickness molding her calves. Sturdy legs held up my world that had been obliterated two days prior.
Mamie’s blanket snuggled around my shoulders, and no matter the heat outside, I couldn’t warm up. “Death-touched,” Mamie would’ve said.
When I was small, a boy from the Glen called Jet Winslow became death-touched. He was riding his bicycle near the highway when a dairy truck collided with him. The damage to his head was bad enough his hair from then on came in white w
here it should’ve been brown. Jet’s folks called Mamie to pray over him with Pastor Galloway. Doctoring with iodine and bandages did their part, but Mamie had charms and herbs and a handful of tonics. She laid snakes on him so his cold blood went into the serpent, but that boy never got warm again.
Later, he suffocated in a silo of livestock feed, but that was an accident.
In my room, I waited for Heather’s fingers to rap the window. Dead Heather or living Heather, I’d take either. My pencil shaded her neck, her thin lips and the freckle on her nose, her reckless hair and willowy frame. I sketched for hours. Days. Until my eyes were bleary. Until my paper was blotted with tears.
If only I could wish her back. Even if she were so angry she slapped me, I’d do it. Just to have her.
Each night, I blew out the candle at my bedside, smelling beeswax and smoke drift to the ceiling to raise with it my prayer that the next morning Heather’d stumble down the dirt path and laugh.
She wasn’t coming back.
“Bonita? ” Mama called through the door.
I crossed the room, still dressed in the blanket and nightdress. In my mirror’s face, my skin was ashen, gray, as if someone had spilled water on me and sopped away half my color. Mama waited with a cup of steaming root tea. Mamie had written down the recipe—Sleep-Away-Sorrow. Mama brought the tea to me around the clock to numb my mind and stop the nightmares. If she missed a dose, my screams shook the windows.
“Rook’s here,” Mama said, passing me the cup.
I sipped. The tea was cold. It turned cold the second the mug entered my grip.
Mama followed me to the bed. “See him, Ivy.”
I swallowed the rest of the tea in loud gulps. The herbs laid their dumbing potion over me. Mama chose a cornflower-blue dress with lacing up the front, then eased Mamie’s blanket off my shoulders, untied my nightdress, and fluffed the blue dress over my head. She said nothing about the two necklaces I wore, Rook’s acorn token and Heather’s chain of found things.
