swarthy and imposing. He was crouched over her bed like a monster of some kind. Big. Heavy. Smelly. Oddly so. Like gasoline or something.
“I won’t harm you,” he whispered. “Promise, no matter what, you won’t say a word.”
Hannah wanted his cold, fat fingers off her mouth. The smell from his hands was so overpowering she could barely breathe. She stared hard into his eyes; her own were awash with fear. They begged Marcus Wheaton to ease up, which is what he did.
“Listen to me carefully. Your mother is leaving tonight. She’s going away. Far away. She’s never coming back.” He parceled his words in tiny batches as though he was acutely aware that the girl under her bedcovers would have a difficult time assimilating all that was going on around her.
Indeed, Hannah was paralyzed. She said nothing. She managed a nod of understanding. No words. Just the nod.
“I’m going with her,” he went on. “You aren’t. None of you are.” Wheaton’s good eye glistened with tears. Was he crying? “This is hard. This is nothing you should ever have to hear, but your mother wants no part of any of you. She’s not happy here and she’s going away. I’m afraid this…is…is forever.”
Hannah didn’t believe him. “I want my mother,” she said, holding her voice to a whisper.
“I know, but it isn’t what she wants.”
“But I’m her daughter.”
He shook his head.
“She’s not made to be a mother. You know that. She doesn’t have it in her. Never has. She doesn’t even look at you like she even knows you.”
“She is my mother and she loves me.”
“Hannah, you know that she really cares for nobody.”
She hesitated. The unspoken had to be said.
“But you? Is that what you’re saying? She only cares about you?”
“No. She probably doesn’t want me, either. But I am damned to love her until she tosses me aside. You’re too young to understand that sometimes things are bigger, stronger than what you know to be right.”
“I don’t want her to leave us.”
“Hannah, you don’t want her to stay. Trust me. You don’t.”
“You don’t know how I feel. Where are my brothers?”
He shook his head. “Set that aside for now. Just for a moment. This is my chance to do something for you. I don’t want anything to happen to you, Hannah. Bad things have been happening around here. I’m getting you out of here.”
“What bad things?”
“You know what I’m talking about. You know about your mother. You’ve seen it for yourself. Remember the big jar?”
Hannah’s eyes widened in the kind of full-out terror that comes with the realization that the mother who had rocked her as a baby, who had held her as a baby to her breast, was not really a mother. Not the mommy type. Hannah thought of the jar of bloody teeth she’d found when searching for ribbons above the wreath-fabricating bench. She thought the vessel held rusted screws or bolts. But it was lighter. She unscrewed the top and tilted the contents. It was a cache of blood-dried teeth her mother had put away like some grotesque souvenir.
Her mother asked her about it, after she noticed it had been disturbed.
“What were you doing in my things? I’ve asked you children to be mindful of what’s mine and what’s yours. My things are not toys—not to be played with. Don’t you ever listen?”
“I wasn’t playing with anything,” Hannah had said. “I mean, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Claire shoved the jar in her face.
“This is what I’m talking about, and don’t tell me again that you haven’t seen this before.”
“But I haven’t.” Lying was a necessity, and Hannah knew it. “What is it?”
Claire studied her daughter’s face, but Hannah stayed cool, almost remote. The idea that her mother was some alien force was setting in, slowly, but it was coming.
“I almost believe you,” Claire had said. Her eyes were ice. “But believing a practiced liar is a dangerous game.”
“I’m not a liar.”
“Don’t make me laugh and don’t make me mad. I’ve caught you before.”
“I’m not lying. I don’t know anything. Maybe someone else moved it?”
After she had said those words, Hannah would have done anything to retrieve them, reeling them in like a bed sheet knotted out a window for escape.
Claire smiled. She had caught the flutter of fear. It propelled her to push.
“Maybe Didi got into this. Like I’ve said a million times, she’s always straightening things where we don’t need it.”
“I didn’t see her here.”
Hannah wasn’t convincing, and she didn’t really try to be. Later, she wished she’d been more careful in what she said and how she acted. She never saw Didi again after that day.
“Just what is that in that jar anyway?” Hannah hesitated. “Looks disgusting…like bloody teeth.”
Claire laughed and spun the jar top and peered inside. “You watch too much TV. Just the bric-a-brac of buttons and sequins and pushpins… and some red paint.”
But the odor was acrid and unmistakable. Hannah knew the smell of blood. She’d been there when her mother snapped the heads of chickens who no longer laid enough to justify the sack of scratch. She did it with a kind of flourish that indicated more enjoyment than resignation that the heads had to come off to kill the birds. She didn’t even use a hatchet or a knife, but did it with her bare hands.
“Hands are easy to wash, and they don’t rust,” she said.
Hannah also knew the color of drying blood. It was a sienna tone on the edges, drying to a deep mahogany. What her mother had insisted was red paint could pass for the hue of blood.
Early the next morning the sky was indigo with stars popping from the darkness in a spray that looked like one of those fiber-optic bouquets that old ladies adore. Hannah Griffin was on the road, sans free pastry, by 4:15 a.m.
Just past the state line most of the conifers that had swathed the area had been reduced to a pillow fringe, as though one couldn’t see beyond it to the stump-barnacled field of fireweed and blackberries. Alders, the first tree to arrive on the scene of deforestation, filled in like harried brush strokes where they could. Nothing about the landscape was particularly pretty, though Hannah had to admit the cool colors of green and blue were certainly pleasant on the eye, a change from the dusty palette of Santa Louisa County. She thought of Christmas trees and the evil, wicked snow that had ruined her life… and sent her to that place.
Chapter Ten
Eastern Oregon is nothing like the wet side—the western side—of the state. The mountains that divide Oregon into two distinct regions act as a barrier from the marine rainfall that keeps Portland and points south and west lush throughout most of the year. The eastern side is vast and dry—a landscape of craggy basalt formations and glacial moraines. Only through the lenses of a pair of sunglasses is it cool and green. But when irrigated, the soil produces the world’s sweetest and most succulent fruits. Fruit stands clustered the roadside now and then, though most seemed abandoned or hopelessly unkempt. Where the ranch land crawled from one end of the horizon to the other was a dried basin, a crusty residue of earth and tumbleweeds.
