Banished

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