Banished

I don’t know how long I sat there, but when Prairie slipped back into the barn and said my name softly, I jumped.

“Let’s go,” she said, her voice full of urgency. I lifted Chub and followed her to the front of the barn, where a gravel drive led to the road. A car idled there, exhaust billowing up white against the first pink streaks of dawn. I was surprised to see the car waiting, but Prairie did things. She got what we needed. I didn’t know exactly how, but at the moment, it didn’t matter.

“Is this the Ellises’ car?” I asked.

She frowned, her eyebrows pinching together. “Yes… yes, it is. I’m sorry we have to take it, Hailey. We won’t damage it, and they’ll get it back. But…”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. We needed the car. We needed to get away. Even if I didn’t understand exactly what we were escaping from, I understood that.

When I opened the door, Rascal jumped into the car and lay down on the floor, and I got Chub settled under the seat belt. I was getting good at strapping him in, but as Prairie drove slowly down the gravel drive toward the main road she shook her head and said, “We have got to get that boy a car seat.”

I sank down low in the passenger seat and watched the farmhouse as we rolled by. The Ellises had a carport, so it would have been easy enough for Prairie to take the car-except she would have had to unlock it and start it, unless she knew how to hot-wire it.

And if that was what she did, I didn’t want to know. Not quite yet, anyway. I wanted to think of her as someone who worried about Chub having a car seat. Because if she was thinking about Chub, he would be that much safer. As far as I knew, I was the only person who had ever cared about him, and I knew he was a hard kid to fall for. He was behind in so many ways. But Prairie cared about him, and as we pulled out onto the main road and picked up speed, I was grateful.

I was so tired, riding in the Ellises’ Buick. You wouldn’t think a person who’d been chased and shot at, who had watched people die, would be able to lie down and sleep, but that was what I wanted more than anything. Just to sleep.

Prairie didn’t look so good. Her mouth was pulled down in a thinking frown and her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly.

“We should make it in about seven hours,” she said. “Six and a half if we really push it hard.”

“Where are we going?”

Prairie was silent for so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, but eventually she gave me a smile that looked like it took a lot of effort.

“Home.”

CHAPTER 14

WHEN I WOKE UP, the sun was streaming through the Buick’s windows, and I had to go to the bathroom.

“We’re in Illinois, coming up on Springfield. There’s a Walmart in twenty miles or so,” Prairie said. “We need to pick up a few things. Can you wait that long?”

“Um… okay.” I was hungry, too, but decided not to mention it. Somehow, it didn’t seem like something I should admit to. After a night like we’d had, who thinks of food?

I did. Which made me wonder. On the one hand, I felt like I should feel worse. Like maybe in shock from the horror of it all, or something. I kept waiting for the guilt to sneak up on me, but it just didn’t happen. I even felt a tiny sense of anticipation. Despite everything that had happened, we were going somewhere new.

I’d never left Missouri before. I’d only been out of Gypsum a few times, on school field trips to Hannibal and St. Joseph, to see Mark Twain’s childhood home and the Pony Express Museum. But I’d never been to a city.

My stomach growled again. To cover the sound, I asked Prairie something that had been bothering me.

“How could you not have known my mom was pregnant?”

Prairie’s jaw tensed and she didn’t look at me. She hadn’t slept at all, and it showed in the faint lines under her eyes and around her mouth.

“When I left Gypsum, I moved to Chicago. I wrote to Clover almost every day,” she finally said. “I knew there would be trouble if Alice ever found out that Clover knew where I was, so I told her to make up a story that we’d had a really bad fight and that we swore we’d never speak to each other again.”

“Why would Gram care?”

“She had… plans for me. Just like I think she did for you.”

Her words filled me with dread. “What do you mean?”

“You have to think about who Alice was, when she was younger. She tried to be a Healer for a long time before she gave up. Mary told me that Alice was devastated when she finally had to accept that she didn’t have the gift. She never got over her failure, and to cope with it she turned all her misery into blame.”

“Blame? But who could she blame for that?”

“Alice decided that the reason she was damaged was that the Tarbells had mixed their blood with outsiders. That they’d married and bore children outside the families, and that had corrupted the lineage.”

“What do you mean, the families? What families?”

“Our ancestors all emigrated here together. The Morries, the Tarbells, we’re all descended from the same village in Ireland.”

“We’re Irish?”

“Yes.” Prairie smiled, but it didn’t reach her troubled eyes. “Our ancestors lived in the same village for centuries. When they came here, they started over. New names, new skills, new homes, but the plan was always that they would stay together. They were known as the Banished, and they-”

“Wait.” I cut her off. What had Milla said-Ain’t any of us Banished got any say in things. “Why were they called that?”

“No one remembers anymore. I mean, there were all these stories. When your mom and I were little, Mary would tell us bedtime stories about faeries and blessings and curses.”

“You don’t believe in them.”

“I…” Prairie hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “It’s not that I don’t believe. The blessings were real, even if I can’t explain them, even if they don’t fit neatly with what science tells us. The Banished are united by some… powerful things. Mary always told me that we Tarbells were meant to serve the Banished, to heal them when they needed us. But that wasn’t the whole story. The rest of the women had a responsibility to keep the village, the people, together after they left Ireland. That’s why we can sense each other, why we are drawn to each other.”

At last, an explanation for the way I felt when I was around the Morries, even if it sounded crazy. A part of me was relieved that I hadn’t imagined it. That it might be real, even if it was something out of a fable. “What else?”

“Well, when they left Ireland the men were all given the gift of visions. They could see into the future, or see things that were happening elsewhere. It was meant to protect them from enemies, disasters, even things like storms that could damage the crops.”

“The Morries have visions?” I thought of the boys at school, their shadowed faces angry, stubborn, bleak. All but Sawyer’s.

“Not much anymore. That gift, that power, is mostly gone.”

“What happened to it?”

Prairie sighed. “A few generations ago, everything started to fall apart. I guess it came from marrying outside the Banished, it weakened the gift. Mary said she remembered the first broken Healer, when she was a little girl: a Tarbell daughter born like Alice, sick and weak and mean. But she didn’t grow to adulthood. Mary said the strongest Healers were pure Banished. I think it broke her heart when one of her own daughters was… damaged. And Alice could never accept it. I think she always believed that if she could just go back to the source of the gift, she could somehow heal herself.”

Go back to the source… to Ireland? My pulse quickened as I thought of the airplane