Banished

CHAPTER 6

AFTER RATTLER DROVE AWAY, I stood outside for a minute and waited for my heartbeat to slow down to normal before I went into the house. I said hello to Gram, and she grunted in my direction. Judge Judy was blaring from the television. Chub was on his stomach, scribbling with a fat crayon in a coloring book. When he saw me, he jumped up and ran over and threw his arms around my legs like he did every day, hollering, “Hayee!”

I usually loved that moment. It was the best thing in my day, getting home and making sure that Chub was safe and knowing that there was one person in my life who was always happy to see me.

Today, though, it was hard for me to return his hug without letting him see how shook up I was. I got Chub a snack and drank a glass of milk, and then I settled in with my homework, though it was almost impossible to concentrate. I kept thinking about the men in the car, and Milla and Sawyer, and Rattler. Afternoon faded into evening and I fixed dinner and gave Chub his bath. I toweled him off and dressed him in his pajamas, but it was a little early for him to go to sleep. I knew I ought to read to him, but I was still feeling upset and distracted, so I did something to help me calm down: I visited the words.

I’d found them a few years ago, carved with care into the wall of the closet in the bedroom I shared with Chub. You couldn’t see them unless you actually went inside the closet, and since Gram used to keep it jammed full of junk, I didn’t find them until I got old enough to organize the closet myself. I had taken everything out and was washing the walls one Saturday when I found the words, near the bottom of the wall, carved into the old wood paneling.

CLOVER PRAIRIE

Those two words sparked something inside me, almost like recognition. I wondered what they meant-I imagined a field full of clover, swaying gently in the breeze, the sun shining brightly.

But even as I pictured the scene, I knew it wasn’t right. I traced the words with my finger; someone had taken care, maybe using a penknife or a sharp screwdriver, going over the blocky letters until they were grooved deeply into the wood. I wasn’t the first person to trace them, I could tell. The edges were smooth, without splinters or rough edges.

I returned to the words almost every week. Something happened when I touched them, some small peace entered me, calming my anxiety and my fears.

I let my fingertips drift down the wall until they rested on the baseboard. But something wasn’t right. The piece of baseboard, extending only two feet or so along the left wall of the closet, was loose. It separated slightly from the wall, wobbling under my fingers.

I tried to shove it back, feeling for the nail that had popped out, thinking I’d get a hammer and fix it.

But there was no loose nail. Instead, the bottom came away from the wall, and I realized that it wasn’t nailed at all, only kept in place by the tension between the other walls.

In fact, this board wasn’t mitered like the others. I tugged at it, and it came away in my hands. As I felt along the edge, I realized I’d come upon a hiding place: the paneling had been cut away in the middle, making a little hidey-hole about a foot long and a few inches deep. How had I never noticed this before?

I reached cautiously inside the hole and touched something, and the strange sensation of familiarity got stronger. I knelt down and shined the flashlight into the tiny space. With my cheek pressed to the floor I could see that there was a bundle wrapped in cloth, and papers rolled and tied with a ribbon. I took everything out and spread it on the floor in the room, where the light was better. Chub had crawled up on my bed and was turning the pages of his favorite board book, humming and running his fingers over the pictures; he could entertain himself that way for hours.

I picked up a tarnished metal frame containing a picture of a young, smiling, black-haired woman. It was one of those photos from a long time ago, when they first started printing pictures in color. The colors were all too bright: the yellow of her shirt, the red of her lips. Her hair was done in an old-fashioned style, curled close to her face, but her skin was smooth and unlined and her eyes sparkled as though she had just heard something funny.

I turned the frame over and there was handwriting on the back: Mary 1968. She didn’t look like anyone I had ever met, but at the same time she was somehow… familiar. I set the frame down and unfolded a piece of fabric that had gone yellow with age.

Inside, a rectangle of white lace had been carefully rolled around a necklace. Hanging from a silver chain was a multi-faceted red stone surrounded by fancy silver scrollwork. It was beautiful and it looked very old.

The rolled pages were delicate, made of a yellowed paper that felt rough to the touch, and covered with rows of flour-ishy writing. The handwriting was faded, and it looked like it had been written with a brush or a fountain pen. I couldn’t read all the words-there were women’s names and dates on one side, and on the other side were a few lines of writing in some language that wasn’t English.

I studied the names. They started with Lucy Hester Tarbell and the year 1868. I read through the names: Sarah Beatrice Tarbell, Rita Joan Tarbell, Helen Davis Tarbell… When I got to the end I sucked in my breath at the final name: Alice Eugenie Tarbell, 1961.

I stared at Gram’s name until I realized what was wrong: if these were birth dates, it meant that she was… forty-nine years old. But that was impossible. Gram was bent and arthritic and had trouble breathing and getting out of a chair. True, she’d never told me her age, but I’d always assumed she was eighty or something, as old as I could imagine.

Could the date be something else? A marriage date, maybe, or… I racked my brain for possibilities. Maybe something religious? Gram never went to church, never even mentioned God. But I had learned in school that families sometimes recorded names, births and deaths and marriages, things like that, in a family Bible-could I have stumbled on pages torn from my family Bible?

I turned the pages over and tried to read the lines of writing.

Ta me mol seo draiocht

Na anam an corp cara ar comhoibri

I had barely read the first two lines when I found that my lips moved with ease, that I was pronouncing the unfamiliar words as though I’d been speaking them all my life, line after line. It felt extraordinarily good, and right, and I didn’t stop. My eyes clouded over, but I kept chanting, my voice tapering off to a whisper. When the words ran out I blinked a few times to clear my vision and saw that I had recited the entire paragraph or poem or whatever it was that had been written with such care on these pages.

I could have stopped-it wasn’t like I’d been possessed or anything like that-but the words were there inside me, and reading just the first few brought the rest to my conscious mind. I found myself wanting-needing-to speak them aloud. I scanned the page a second time and marveled at the beauty of the words, and at the way I’d been able to make the strange sounds and the accent that went with them.

And then I realized I had heard the words once before.

When I had touched Milla in the gym.

When my vision had gone dark, when the sounds of the gym had faded away and left me completely focused on the rushing feeling and Milla’s wounded body under my fingertips, my mind hadn’t been completely silent. There had been a whisper of a voice saying these same words, or perhaps it had been my own voice, I couldn’t be sure, only knew that they had unfurled like a ribbon fluttering in a breeze, there and then gone.

I ran my fingertips over the words as though touching them would answer my questions, would somehow reveal what I was supposed to do. Because I felt certain that I had been chosen for something and that Milla was part of it, and all the Morries, and Gram and Rattler Sikes and Dun and even Chub. All of it fit together in some way that I didn’t yet understand, and the thought was frightening but compelling.

I picked up the necklace and held it in the lamplight. Deep red flashes danced into the corners of the room as though the stone had an energy that splintered into pieces when the light touched it.

Chub noticed the sparkling stone and dropped his book on the bed, clapping his hands.

“Preeee!” he said, laughing-it almost sounded like “pretty.”

I slipped the necklace on, fastening the silver clasp with care, and then I sat next to Chub on the bed and let him look at it. He touched the stone gently and murmured and crawled into my lap, and I held him tight and rocked