Banished (7 page)

C
HAPTER
9

W
HEN
I
GOT HOME
, there was a car parked in the yard.

It wasn’t the dark-windowed Lexus or Rattler Sikes’s truck. It was a beat-up brown Volvo, and I knew from experience that was a whole other kind of bad news. A car like this—well maintained even if it was old, boring but socially responsible—screamed social worker.

The Department of Social Services, Family Support Division, sent people out to check on us from time to time. In theory they were supposed to visit every month. In truth I never knew when to expect them, so I could never prepare for their visits.

I bolted across the yard, ignoring Rascal, who was sitting on the porch. I let myself in the front door and hurried to the kitchen. It was worse than I feared: Gram hadn’t bothered to do anything with Chub, and he was sitting on the floor wearing only a diaper that looked like it was about to burst, crusty bits of lunch on his cheeks. When he saw me he jumped to his feet and came running, throwing his strong little arms around my legs and pushing his face into my thigh, saying, “Hayee, Hayee,” in his happy voice.

Gram hadn’t bothered to ask the social worker if she’d like some tea or coffee. She had her cigarettes in front of her, and judging by the butts in the ashtray, she hadn’t stopped smoking since our visitor arrived.

Last time one of the social workers came, she made a big deal out of Gram’s smoking. I thought it would be a bigger issue that we still didn’t have smoke detectors, and the porch stairs were still just a nail or two away from collapsing; that Chub was still barely speaking and wouldn’t use a toilet, and Gram was still refusing to let him go to preschool.

It was time for damage control.

“Hello,” I said loudly, pulling Chub’s arms away from my legs. “I’m Hailey Tarbell.”

The woman seemed to tense at the sound of my voice. She had shiny dark brown hair that came to little below her shoulders—no one I’d seen before, but that wasn’t unusual. They came and went from this job all the time.

She pushed her chair back and stood up and turned toward me and started to speak. Then she stopped and we both just stared at each other.

The face looking back at me—it was my own.

I don’t mean her face was a mirror image of mine. But she looked like me if I was older and had money for nice clothes and makeup and a good haircut.

She had eyes like mine—more gold than brown, tilted up at the corners. Her eyebrows were high and arched like mine, though I’d bet she paid good money to get hers done in a salon.

She had my mouth, thin top lip and full bottom lip. She had the high, sharp cheekbones and the wide forehead I have.

My aunt—this had to be the aunt I never knew I had!

After staring at me for a few seconds, she did something that surprised me even more—she turned back around and smacked her hand down on the table so hard Gram’s ashtray jumped, spilling ashes and butts. It had to hurt her hand, but she curled it up into a fist. For a moment I thought she was going to hit Gram, but instead she just squeezed her fist so hard her skin turned white. I realized I had stopped breathing the same instant that she put both her hands flat on the table and leaned down until her face was inches away from Gram’s and said in a low and threatening voice:

“If you ever lie to me again, Alice, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

Then she turned back to me and all of the anger drained from her expression, leaving her looking sad and tired.

“My name’s Elizabeth Blackwell.”

Gram tipped her head back and laughed, an awful hacking laugh that showed her long yellow teeth. We both stared at Gram. Finally she ended on a skidding series of gasping coughs and wiped at her eyes with her hands.

“Now who’s lyin’,” Gram said.

The visitor blinked once, hard. Then she took a deep breath like she was trying to get her courage up to jump off the cliffs over Boone Lake.

“Okay,” she said in a voice so soft I knew it was meant just for me. “I’m not—who I said. My name’s Prairie, and I’m your aunt.”

My throat went dry.
Prairie
.

Clover
.

“What was my mom’s name?” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

“What?”

“My
mother
. Your
sister
. What was her name?”

“Clover,” my aunt said. “Didn’t Alice ever tell you that?”

Suddenly my head felt both tight and dizzy. The words on the wall, the way they felt under my fingertips, the invisible pull they had on me … It was my mother’s name there. I wondered if she had carved the letters herself. The dizziness escalated into something more, like my whole self had lost its moorings and gone drifting away. “I’m going to get some air.”

I went out the back screen door. For some reason, when I heard her following me, I wasn’t surprised.

She stayed a couple of steps behind me while I walked toward the woods, away from the road where Rascal and I had walked together just yesterday. A short path met up with the crisscrossed web of trails through the woods that connected the farms out past the creek to Trashtown in one direction and Gypsum in the other. I went straight and in a few minutes I was at the creek. It was nearly dry—we’d had little rain or snow over the winter—and there was a flat rock half submerged in the lazy flowing water. I’d come here to sit on the rock a hundred times, thinking and tossing pebbles into the water. I went there now, dangling my feet over the edge.

“Do you mind if I sit too?” Prairie asked.

I shrugged—
It’s a free country
. She settled next to me and picked up a long, skinny twig that had blown into a crevice in the rock. Holding it loosely in her hand, she traced designs in the air. For a while neither of us said anything. Dozens of questions went through my mind. I kept thinking of the names carved into the wall.

“If you’re my aunt, where have you been all this time?” I blurted out. It wasn’t what I meant to say, and all of a sudden tears blurred my eyes and threatened to spill down my cheeks. I wiped my sleeve hard across my face.

“Oh, Hailey,” Prairie said, and her voice wavered. “I … had reasons for leaving when I did. I didn’t know about you. I meant to come back for your mom, but by the time I could, she … well, she died. I never even knew she was pregnant.”

“But you … you left my mom here alone with Gram. And then she killed herself.” I didn’t bother to keep the accusation out of my voice, even though I wasn’t sure I believed what Milla had said.

“I know.” Prairie’s voice got softer. “That’s something I have to live with every day of my life.”

I considered telling her that I’d never leave Chub with Gram.
Never
.

“Didn’t anyone come looking for you?” I asked instead.

“Gram didn’t report me missing,” Prairie said. If she was bitter, she covered it well. “I was never officially a runaway. And the police had better things to do than search for me.”

“But—why didn’t you come back, you know, later? After I was born?”

I heard the crack in my voice and I hated it, hated that Prairie heard it too.

“I didn’t know, Hailey. Alice said your mom—” She hesitated and I saw that she bit her lip the very same way I did, catching the right side of the bottom lip between her teeth. “She never let me know about you.”

Why should I care? My mother was nothing to me. I had no memories of her. As far as I was concerned, I’d never had a mother at all.

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” I muttered. “Chub’s my family now. We’re fine, we don’t need anyone else.”

Prairie nodded, more to herself than to me, I thought.

“I see you found your mom’s hiding spot,” Prairie said gently.

“Her … what?”

Prairie put her hands to the back of her neck and twisted the clasp of a thin silver chain. As she closed her fingers on the pendant, I knew what I would see.

“It’s just like yours,” she said. “When I saw it on you … well, your mom never took it off. Neither of us did. Mary—our grandmother—she gave them to us. They’re very old. She said they would protect us.”

She handed the pendant to me, still warm from her skin. I had noticed that the stone in the necklace I wore absorbed my heat and held it, almost like it carried energy. The necklace in my hand was identical to the one around my neck, right down to the twisting, curling scrollwork that held the stone in place, the looping bale through which the chain ran.

I handed the necklace to Prairie. It would have been nice to believe there was magic in the necklaces, but I wasn’t counting on it. “I guess we should go back,” I said.

We didn’t talk, but the silence felt all right. When we got to the house, Gram was still sitting in her kitchen chair. She gave us a calculating smile and blew smoke in our direction. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

“I’m taking Hailey out to dinner,” Prairie said. “We’ll be a while.”

This was news to me. Chub, who had been playing with his plastic magnet letters on the fridge, came over and pushed his face into my legs again. For just a second I was embarrassed for Prairie to see that Chub wasn’t like other kids.

Gram stared at Prairie with her eyes narrowed down to slits. Prairie stared back. I found myself hoping Gram would blink first.

“Fine,” Gram finally said. I could tell she was thinking hard. She had that look a lot. No matter what else you could say about her, she wasn’t stupid. I couldn’t tell you how many of her customers came to our house thinking they could put one over on her. She’d give them that look and sure enough they’d leave a lot more of their cash on the table than they had planned. If they didn’t like it, she’d tell them to take their business somewhere else, which they hardly ever did. I thought of the money and the ticket again, and wondered what she was up to.

“Don’t wait up” was all Prairie said as she took her keys out of her purse.

“We need to bring Chub,” I said. I wanted to find out what Prairie was really doing here, but I felt bad about leaving Chub tonight. I could tell he was upset, the way he’d hugged me so hard.

“Chub’s not going anywhere,” Gram said. “I think he’s catching something. I don’t want him taking a chill outside.”

I knew she was lying, but I also knew he’d be all right for an hour or two.

I followed Prairie out to her car. We didn’t talk. She drove straight to Nolan’s, taking the shortcut back behind the Napa Auto Parts, and I was surprised she’d picked the only fancy restaurant in town.

I was afraid the hostess wouldn’t seat us, since I was wearing jeans. But Prairie gave her a smile and said, “We’ll need some privacy, please. Would you find us a table that’s a little bit out of the way?”

The hostess put us in a nice booth along the far wall, away from the waitress station and the kitchen. She kept sneaking looks at Prairie, and now that I had gotten over the surprise of how much our faces looked alike, I could see why Prairie drew attention.

I was tall and skinny, but Prairie was tall and elegant. Thin, but with nice hips and breasts, and her brown hair was shiny and hung exactly right, smooth and straight and curving under just a little where it went past her shoulders. Her jacket, plain and cut low enough in the front to show a little bit of her silky top underneath, fit her so perfectly it pretty much said money with a capital
M
. I guess the hostess was thinking the same thing. There were very few rich families in Gypsum; almost everyone was just trying to get by.

I was going to order the chicken sandwich. I read all the prices on the menu and added up in my head what dinner would cost. Part of me wanted to order the most expensive thing just to see what Prairie would do, to see if there was a limit to her concern for me, or maybe to see if I could get her to crack and show me who she really was. Like if under this nice exterior she was just waiting to tell me what she really wanted, and it would be something bad.

But when the waitress came around to take the order, Prairie said, “The filet mignon sounds really good, doesn’t it, Hailey?” It was twenty-three dollars, but I hadn’t had a steak in as long as I could remember and I just said yes, it did.

When the waitress walked away, neither of us said anything for a minute. Prairie fiddled with her knife, spinning it back and forth.

“Tell me about your dog,” she finally said. “If you don’t mind.”

That caught me off guard. Rascal wasn’t something I felt like talking about. “There’s nothing to tell.”

“It’s just that I can tell he’s … that something happened to him.” Her face went soft, and her eyes were sad. “Where did you get him?”

“Um … Gram got him from a guy she knew.”

“Alice traded him for drugs.” Prairie’s expression didn’t change.

“Yeah.” I shrugged like it was no big deal. “Probably.”

“Hailey … I saw the scar. What’s left of it, anyway. On his stomach.”

I blinked. This morning the scar had almost disappeared. You had to push the fur to the side to see the faint pink line.

I wanted to ask Prairie how she knew, but I didn’t want her to think I cared too much. Caring about things made you vulnerable. “He got hit by the Hostess truck a few days ago.”

“Was he badly hurt?”

“He …” I swallowed, remembering the way Rascal looked. But I didn’t want to tell her what I had done, didn’t want to have to try to explain how he’d healed so well in one night. “No, just a little cut.”

Prairie watched me carefully. “I bet you must have given him good care, Hailey. What did you do?”

Her voice was so kind that I had to look away. I swallowed hard and took a little sip of my ice water. “I, um, I just cleaned it with antiseptic and, you know, kept him inside.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Did I … what?”

“While you were cleaning up his injuries? I mean, maybe he was scared. I know how that can be. You must have wanted to make him comfortable.”

She
knew
.

Somehow she knew that I’d healed Rascal, that something I’d done to him after the accident had fixed him, just like I’d fixed Milla during gym. I felt my face go hot. It was like she could read my mind.