The Thread That Binds the Bones (3 page)

“They probably talk about you, though.”

“Not where I can hear. The ones who do talk to me seem to think I’m going to leave at any minute. It’s like they don’t want to get involved with me because I’m only temporary, I wonder if they’ll feel that way after I’ve been here ten years.”

“Do you want to stay?” she asked, amazed.

—Almost home, the whisper said underneath.

Tom blinked at the woman’s reflection, wondering which voice to speak to. At last he said, “I want to be here now. I feel as if something’s about to happen.” Hearing his own words, he realized that yes, that was the feeling he had had since he walked down the off-ramp from the highway. A feeling that slept, until she opened the door to the bar and stood there framed in light.

“Something
is
about to happen,” she said. “My brother Michael is getting married.” She hugged herself.

He could only think of soap opera reasons why she should be upset about her brother’s getting married. He shifted subjects. “Your family lives out in Chapel Hollow?”

“Yes, for ages and ages.”

A creek wandered around a low hill and passed under the road via a culvert. Its passage across the country was marked by a meandering line of willows, silver-gray and dusty after the summer’s dry.

He said, “What do they do out there? Ranch? Farm?”

“Not really,” she said. In the mirror he watched a slow smile surface. Her eyes caught and contained golden light. “No, that’s not true. They do both; not commercially, just to supply the family.”

“What do they do? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

“You definitely shouldn’t ask.” But she was still smiling. Suddenly she leaned forward, grasping the back of the front seat. “No one from outside is allowed to ask! I am so tired of rales.”

—I am so tired of rules, said the whisper.

“Does that mean you want to talk about it?” Tom asked.

She leaned over the back of the seat and looked at him, smiling, her head very close to his. “I’m glad you didn’t grow up around here. If you had you would never talk to me
this way. You would never have taken me as a fare, if I gave you a choice about it. What did Mr. Forester say about me?”

Sage and cedar and muted amber; the scent was coming from her. He felt hungry for her. “He said your last name was Bolte.”

“So it is. Laura Bolte.” She held out a hand to him.

“Tom Renfield,” he said. He couldn’t shake hands without twisting around and maybe losing control of Bessie, who tended to veer to the right given an ounce of opportunity. He touched Laura’s fingers.

“Pleased—you don’t know how pleased—to meet you, Mr. Tom Renfield. Oh, I love Outside.”

“Why?”

“Because I get to create myself from scratch. If you had gone to school with me ... if you had grown up in this town ... if your parents knew my parents and your grandparents knew my grandparents, you would have so many ideas about me there wouldn’t be room for the real me. In fact, that’s been my biggest challenge—rooting out what everybody’s told me about who I am and how I should act, and trying to find out who I really am.”

“I came to Arcadia to ditch an identity,” said Tom.

“You’re—a Russian spy. An ex-con? A mysterious shy comic-strip writer escaping a rabid public? Naw. A country-western singer.”

“None of those,” he said. He realized he was easing up on the gas pedal to prolong the time he spent with her. He glanced at her, those tan, lucent eyes so close to his, and saw a dimple in her cheek. So she felt stamped by history and heredity; he wondered if all of her family had her attractiveness. Being near her made him feel as if stars were melting in his chest. “You’re the only fare I’ve taken to this wedding. Are any of the rest of your family com-ing?”

“Very few of us ever leave,” she said, and there was a chill in her voice.

“Who’s going to perform the ceremony?”

“My great-uncle Jezra. They’re flying him in.”

“Your folks have an airstrip?” There was a crop-dusting airstrip a couple miles from town, but he hadn’t heard of another aside from the Arcadia Airport.

“You might say that,” she said.

He slowed to turn right on Lost Kettle Road. The hills rose steeply around them. The road wandered along an old stream bed. Columnar basalt cliffs reared up to the right, their black blocky faces like ancient architecture unburied by earthquakes. “In spring,” said Laura, her voice soft, “a cloud of swallows haunts that cliff. I love those birds.”

“I lived in a house that had swallows under the eaves once,” Tom said. “I loved them too. I found little blue bits of eggshell on the ground, like pieces of sky.”

She looked at him, and this look felt different from her earlier ones. Just then the car hit a pothole in the patched asphalt road, and she grabbed his arm to steady herself. The warmth of her hand came through his yellow wind-breaker.

—Who are you? asked the whisper.

“Stop the car,” Laura said, low and urgent.

He pulled over at a wide place in the road, where the weedy verge dipped down to a ditch, then climbed beyond under a scraggled and rusting barbed-wire fence.

“You can let me out here,” she said, releasing his arm and sitting back. She clutched her coat and hat and climbed out of the car.

He refused to get out. “We’re miles from anyplace, Miss Bolte,” he said.

“I’d like my suitcase. If you don’t give it to me, I won’t pay you.”

“Please get back in the car. I don’t want your suitcase.”

“Tom, give me my suitcase,” she said, in a concentrated version of her own voice. The whisper double-tracked her, almost speaking aloud.

He jumped out of the car, marched around to the trunk, opened it, and got out her suitcase. As she took it from him, he woke up and realized what was going on. “Hey!” he said, closing his fingers over the shoulder strap before she relieved him of the suitcase. “What’d you do to me?”

“Goodbye, Tom Renfield.” She tapped his hand and his fingers opened. Shouldering her suitcase, she strode off down Lost Kettle Road. “Go on back to Arcadia,” she said over her shoulder.

“I’m not a puppet. And I want my fare.”

“Go away!” she said in a harsh voice, the whisper expanding it. He started to walk away, then caught himself. Something warm was working inside him, amazed and amused by the fact that Laura could speak a command and he involuntarily responded to it.

—Funny! said a new whisper. It was a voice he recognized: Hannah, the little girl ghost he had welcomed inside him so long ago and lost.—About time we ran into something like this!

Puzzled and delighted, Tom went back to the cab. The engine caught on the third try. He drove after Laura, raising a thin pall of dust in his wake.

“I’ll follow you all the way there. I’ll get you all dusty. You might as well ride,” he said to her profile as she walked. She smiled a little, then looked away.

“Go back,” she said in a normal voice.

“No.”

“No one naysays the Boltes,” she said, and there was the strength of a thousand repetitions in her voice, and a touch of fear.

“Why won’t you let me drive you?”

She got her wallet from her coat pocket and pulled out forty dollars. “Here’s your fare. Now leave. I’ll make it home from here okay.”

“Six more miles, in those thin slippers? What’s really the matter, Laura?”

She glanced at him as she walked. After a moment, she said, “I don’t want you to get hurt. Everything my family touches gets hurt, and I don’t want that to happen to you, Tom, I like you.”

He drove beside her, at her walking pace, for another quarter mile. Then he said, “I want to go to this party. Nobody in Arcadia ever seems to celebrate anything.”

“Go away,” she said, and a tear trickled down her cheek.

“No.”

She stopped walking and he braked, letting the engine idle. She stared at him; her lips tightened in a grim line. Then she went around the car and climbed into the front seat, putting her suitcase on the floor. She wiped a tear off her face and stared at him. “You heard me. You understand, most of my family have a stronger command voice than I do. If you take me all the way to the house, where the heart of our power lies, you endanger yourself. People in my family don’t bring home strangers; they bring home slaves. If you come home with me, that’s what you can expect to be, Tom. These are the things I’m not supposed to talk to outsiders about. I have a lot of relatives, and they’ll be at the Hollow, and they’ll be feeling tense—marriage is a very serious business in our family. They’ll probably welcome a chance to torture somebody new. Whatever Mr. Forester told you about us is probably true.”

“He didn’t say much,” said Tom. He flexed his hands on the steering wheel and looked at Laura. If what she said was true, why was her whisper giving him promises of Home? She wore a face of despair and resignation.

—Truth? his Hannah part whispered.

—Danger, said Laura’s whisper.—Come on!

—Why?

—I need you.

Laura frowned. “What is it?” she said.

“Huh?”

“Why are you making faces?”

“Just talking to you underneath.”

“What?” She gripped his arm. “Who are you?” she whispered.

“Me,” he said. “Tom.” Tom who moved seventeen times between the ages of nine and thirty, he didn’t say, either underneath or aloud, Shadow-Tom. Nowhere Tom/Everywhere Tom. Tom who could find his feet in any situation.

“How can you talk underneath?” said Laura. “Are you one of us?”

“What do you mean?”

“How can you talk to me underneath, anyway?” she said in a dazed voice. “I can’t talk underneath.”

“I noticed you don’t seem too connected to what you’re saying,” he said, and grinned.

—She believes she has no voice, said the whisper.—Tom. We’re scared of going home. Please come. Please.

“Oh, please,” said Laura in an annoyed voice. Then her eyes widened. “I get it. This is a trick.” She leaned against the seat back, her shoulders sagging. “A trick. You’re a cousin I’ve never met. You’re going to betray me to the
Arkhos
for talking about forbidden things to strangers, and they’ll cut the thread that binds the bone and cast me out unfamilied.”

“Laura, I’m not a member of your family. I don’t think I’ve even met any of them. I won’t repeat what you say to me to anyone.”

She reached out and flicked a thumb and two fingers in front of his face in a complicated gesture. For a second a tiny blue flame danced in the air. “Truth,” she murmured, “as you understand it. What could you be, then? I don’t trust surfaces. You are too perfect to be real.”

“What?” he said, staring at her.

“You are my dream: an Outsider, tall, dark, handsome, friendly. Gifted. And you speak of swallows’ eggshells, and look at me with appreciation. Can someone as perfect as you exist? I doubt it. Therefore—I get it—lifeskin. Michael has animated a log and placed it where I would stumble over it and desire it, and when I kiss you, you’ll turn back to wood and he’ll laugh.”

“I don’t think so,” said Tom, turning the engine off.

They sat in the resulting silence. Crickets chirped from the dried grass beside the road. Tom held out his hand. Laura reached toward him. Her hand hovered, trembling, above his a moment, and in her eyes he saw doubts rise up and fade. She put her hand in his.

Though they waited a moment, he did not turn to wood. He felt the warmth in her palm and fingers. Her thumb stroked his knuckles. She smelled of sage and cedar. He waited, eyes half-closed, a long time, then tugged her closer. She slid down the seat to him, leaning into his embrace as he put his arm around her, her sandy eyes looking up into his, flushing golden. “Are you real?” she whispered, but her other voice whispered.—I know you’re real. I want you.

Of all the whispers that he yet had heard, that one was the most charged, colored with all the shades of longing. He looked at her kindling eyes and knew he had never met anyone else he wanted so much to connect with, even though he didn’t know her at all. He leaned down just as she tilted her face up, and they kissed.

Crickets cocooned them in sound; the cab’s window was open, and the merest breath of breeze touched them, as if blowing into the autumn air from a next-door spring. The warmth in them grew. Her hands crept up to grip his head.

After a little while she relaxed her grip and he lifted his head. She sighed and snuggled against him, her hands sliding down to clasp his windbreaker. She opened sleepy eyes a moment later, and peered up at him, her smile spreading wide. She touched his cheek. “Still warm, still flesh,” she said.

“Not everything exists just for your benefit.”

“I learned that, Outside. It was a hard lesson, but I felt so much better. It’s just that—when I get this close to home, every pebble on the road, every weed, every gnat could be a part of someone’s plan, and most of my family’s plans hurt somebody.”

“Why not reverse it? Bring a pebble of your own.” Tom touched his chest.

“No, Tom.” She took his hand and kissed the palm. “Whatever—whoever you are, I want you safe.”

The faintest sound of gravel grating on gravel, and then the car joggled and tilted. Tom reached out and grabbed the steering wheel. “Bessie?” he asked.

The landscape outside—low cliffs to their right, willows walking beside the stream to their left—dipped, and the seats pressed up on them, then relaxed. They were flying, car and all.

Chapter 3

Soundlessly, the car lifted higher than the treetops and cliffs, then cut straight across country, skimming over the stream as it wandered, over the road as it followed the stream, and over the flatlands, where brown and black cattle grazed on tough scrub and dried grass. Chill air whispered in through the open window. Ahead of them, the horizon was much too far away; a butte thrust up from the gently rolling hills.

Tom gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, everything in him stilled to a stop while he waited to understand what was happening. A prickling pain flickered behind his eyes.

They were flying. Flying.

He accepted it, and relaxed. The pain in his head intensified from pin pricks to ice picks.

“Damn,” said Laura. “You see? Not even near the house, and someone’s found us, probably Michael. It’s too late for me to send you home, Tom, but I tried.”