She wouldn’t push him. And she would try not to be hurt by his avoidance. He’d taken her in when she had no other place to go, after all, and she was grateful. So she would talk to other people in town about her mother, find out more from them. Maybe she could find other members of Sassafras. Maybe she’d even see Win Coffey again and ask him about the relationship his uncle had had with her mother. He’d said next time he saw her he’d tell her about their history.
She liked that thought. Seeing Win again.
They ate in silence. Afterward, Grandpa Vance again checked the clothes dryer, as if something might have appeared during dinner. But again he found nothing, so he went to his room. Emily went upstairs and finished sweeping, then she sat on the balcony and waited for the lights.
And so ended her second full day in Mullaby.
LATER THAT evening, when Vance ducked out of his room to check the dryer one last time before bed, he paused to look up the staircase. He didn’t hear any more shuffling. No more scraping of a broom. Emily had settled in for the night.
It was a peculiar thing, he thought, having someone in the house again. He’d almost forgotten what it was like. Emily made the air different, vibrating, as if there were music close by but he couldn’t quite hear it. He was surprised by how much fuller he felt with her near, and he didn’t know how to handle it. Being needed was a lot like being tall-it was never really an issue until other people were around.
Vance had towered over all the other kids in kindergarten. That was his first memory of truly understanding how tall he was. Up until then, while he was certainly big for his age, he was still the shortest member of his own normal-sized family. Some kids in school teased him at first, but there a came a point when they realized that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to pick a fight with someone who could knock them over with only the wind he caused by walking past them.
His family was gone now. Vance was the only one left of the Shelbys, and he had inherited the existing fortune. He knew he wasn’t supposed to have it all. It wasn’t supposed to all come down to him-the Shelby legacy, the Shelby name. There were supposed to be brothers and sisters who would do great things. There were supposed to be normal kids in his family. For a while there were. But his older sister, for whom the wallpaper in her room was always pink candy swirls, drowned in Piney Woods Lake when she was eleven. And then there was his younger brother, who died from a fall out of the tree house in the front yard when he was six. His parents tried for more children after that, but to no avail. They were stuck with Vance. Vance, who was so tall his feet reached the bottom of the lake, so he could never drown, and his arms reached all the way to the limbs in the trees, so he never had to climb and fall.
His parents died when he was in his twenties. He thought he saw disappointment in their faces when they passed away. Their legacy, it was all going to the giant. What was Vance going to do with it? they probably thought. He’d never get married. Who would want him?
He was thirty-two and living alone, rarely venturing outside, when he met Lily. She was related to the Sullivans down the street and, while attending State, came to visit them one weekend. If she’d been a color, she would have been bright green. If she’d been a scent, she would have been new paper. She was happy and intelligent and afraid of nothing. The Sullivan boys, who had taken to throwing balls into Vance’s yard and daring each other to fetch them and risk getting eaten by the Giant of Mullaby, had shared this story with their cousin. Lily was appalled. She took them by their ears and forced them into the yard and up the front porch steps, determined to get them to apologize. When Vance came to the door, Lily was so stunned that she let go of the boys. They instantly ran away. A few hours later, when Lily hadn’t returned home, they cried to their mother that the Giant of Mullaby had eaten her. When their mother went to investigate, she found Lily and Vance sitting on the front porch steps, drinking iced tea and laughing. She’d paused, then backed away. Something wonderful was happening and she could see it right away. No one had ever made Vance laugh like that.
Vance and Lily married after Lily graduated, and Lily taught second grade at Mullaby Elementary until she became pregnant with Dulcie. Those were halcyon days. Lily didn’t let him stay in the house. She insisted they go grocery shopping together, go to the movie theater, attend Little League games. People had always been curious about him, but that was only because he used to hide. Once he left the house, he came to realize that Mullaby easily accepted him. He was, in a town full of strange things, just another oddity. Vance was so grateful for this revelation that he helped fund playgrounds and war memorials and scholarships.
He almost died himself when Lily passed away. Dulcie was twelve when it happened. It was like snow had settled over their world, turning everything cold and silent. It was only Vance’s memory of Lily’s bright greenness, of her joy and intelligence, of her strong faith in everything, but especially in him, that made him survive. How Dulcie got through it, he had no idea. And that was one of his biggest shames.
Vance thought a person could only bear going through that once in a lifetime.
Then he learned that his daughter had died.
When Dulcie’s friend Merry called and told him that Dulcie had been in a car accident, Vance couldn’t even speak. He hung up the phone and crawled upstairs to Dulcie’s old room, but then he couldn’t get back down, so he stayed up there a week, the wallpaper in her bedroom turning gray and wet, like storm clouds. He wanted to die. What reason was there to go on? Everything that had tethered him to this world was now gone.
When Julia next door finally got to him, he hadn’t eaten in so long he couldn’t walk. He spent a week in the hospital, where his legs dangled off the end of the bed and it took three sheets to cover him.
After he got home from the hospital, there were several phone messages left by Merry. Dulcie had a daughter, she said. And she needed a place to live. Merry couldn’t keep her because she was moving back to her home in Canada. She’d hired a private detective to try to find any close relatives on both Emily’s mother’s and father’s sides. And Vance was it.
He’d always taken a passive stance in life. He knew that. His height made him shy. His parents had left him a fortune. His wife had found
He hadn’t done a very good job of taking care of Emily so far. Dulcie hadn’t told Emily anything about Mullaby, about what had happened, so Vance was terrified of saying something Dulcie wouldn’t want her daughter to know. When Dulcie left, she’d sworn him to secrecy.
He walked to the kitchen in the darkness. But instead of going into the laundry room to check the dryer, he went directly to the back door and opened it. Sure enough, like Emily said, there was a light in the woods in the backyard, not moving, as if watching the house.
Vance stepped onto the porch, making himself seen. The light immediately disappeared. He heard a gasp, then footsteps on the balcony above. He stepped off the low kitchen porch and looked up.
Emily was standing there, staring out into the woods.
She didn’t see him, so he quietly moved away.
He’d made this mistake once.
He wasn’t going to again.
Chapter 7
