Banished

ticket to Dublin. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” I said, and explained about the folder I’d found in Gram’s room.

Hailey frowned. “So Alice really meant to go. She used to talk about it, sometimes… only, I can’t imagine it would have made a difference. I don’t know how it could change anything just to go back to the village.”

“If it did, then all the Morries-”

“-could be fixed?” Prairie said gently. “It doesn’t work that way, Hailey. The changes in the Banished, they’re deep in the foundations of who they are now. They are afraid of each other. Of what they’ve become. The men… they’ve lost their, their moral compass, I guess you’d say. A lot of them are addicts. They don’t want to work, they don’t take care of their families.”

“But not all of them,” I said, thinking of Sawyer.

“Oh, definitely not. There are still Banished men who are born with all the determination and idealism of the ones who first settled here. But in general… well, I guess that’s how it got to be called Trashtown. You know, I saw a picture once, that Mary had. It was almost a hundred years old and you wouldn’t even know it was Trashtown. Little houses all fixed up, flower beds, happy families, everyone dressed up and smiling.”

I thought about the Morries at school, their patched and dirty clothes, the sickly, malnourished way they looked. I thought of Milla, the combination of fury and fear she wore on her face.

“I don’t understand why they hate me so much now. The Morries.”

“It’s fear, Hailey. They think that after Alice was born… damaged… that the gift was turned into a curse. They don’t believe you truly have the power to heal, just like they never believed Clover or I could. They’re afraid that if you try to heal someone you’ll end up cursing them instead.”

“You never healed anyone when you lived here?”

“Alice wouldn’t let us. She made us go to school in Tipton so we wouldn’t be around the Morries. Mary taught us in secret. Alice always said she’d beat us if she ever caught us healing.”

“Why?”

“I think because she never got over being damaged. She tried to heal, you know, when she was young. Mary told me. And she couldn’t bear the thought that her daughters could do something she couldn’t.”

“And so you just… didn’t?” I tried to imagine resisting the urge, now that I knew what I could do.

“I… took care of people sometimes, but usually I didn’t even tell them. You know-a friend with a strawberry birthmark. Another one with bruises from when her stepfather beat her.”

We rode in silence for a while, each lost in our own thoughts. “Did you ever know your dad?”

“No, and Alice never told me who he was. I never even knew if Clover had the same father.”

I couldn’t imagine Gram young. Couldn’t imagine a man falling in love with her, wanting a child with her. “What about your grandfather?”

“No. He died young, not long after Alice was born, and Mary never talked about him. All Alice ever told me about him was that he was mixed blood.”

“Was he?”

“Yes. There weren’t very many purebloods left even a generation ago, and Mary’s husband was part Cherokee and part German.”

“How can you be sure about that?”

Prairie gave me a quick, sad smile before returning her attention to the road. “I studied genetics, when I finally went to college. And then I worked in a lab. By the time Bryce hired me, I’d traced my origins pretty thoroughly.”

“You can tell all that? Just from blood?”

“You’d be surprised. The tests are a little complex, but you can track your heredity with considerable accuracy.”

I thought for a moment. “Could you… test me? I mean, could you figure out what my dad was?”

“Not the way you’re thinking, Hailey. Unless you were doing full-on DNA testing and looking for genetic paternity or something like that. And besides, if you’re wondering about the healing, it doesn’t matter. Alice was wrong. As long as a Healer’s partner is part Banished, she will pass on the gift, nine times out of ten.”

“You can tell that from your testing?” I demanded, surprised.

“No. That, I learned from Mary. It’s not exactly scientific, but I have no reason to doubt it’s true. Mary told me that some Healers are more powerful than others, depending on the blood of their fathers. And other factors too, some of which I doubt we’ll ever understand. Like Alice. I don’t know why the gift was corrupted in her. I… sometimes I can almost feel pity for her, for the way she was born, with the powers stunted along with her body. But then…”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. I guessed we both had our memories, of Gram’s meanness, her cruelty. Yes, it was possible to feel compassion for her… until you remembered who she was.

“So Gram wanted to make sure you married one of the Banished,” I guessed. “So your children didn’t end up like her.”

“That’s right,” Prairie said. “But it went further than that. Alice started to feel that she was responsible for ensuring that the Tarbell line continued. She used to say that when I graduated from high school, she’d choose one of the purebloods for me.”

“And when you left-”

“There was only Clover. And I’ve always wondered…”

It took only a moment for me to figure it out. “You think Gram… chose someone for my mom. Once she realized you weren’t coming back.”

“Yes,” Prairie said softly. “I think she didn’t want to wait until Clover graduated. And I think she-Clover-didn’t have any choice in the matter, that he-whoever he was-he must have…”

As Prairie struggled to find the right words, I realized why her pain showed through whenever she talked about Clover. About my mother. Gram had sacrificed her, had handed her off to one of the Morries-someone like the cruel-eyed, shadow-fleeting boys I knew from the halls of Gypsum High-so that she could be impregnated by a pureblood. So that her child would carry on the Tarbell legacy and be a true Healer.

Horror washed over me, closing my throat so it was difficult to breathe. I was the child of a violation of someone even younger than me. When I thought of my mother, alone, having lost the one person who cared about her, who could protect her, my heart fractured.

“Did she die in childbirth?” I asked. I had to know.

“Oh, Hailey.” Prairie took a deep breath. “No. Clover killed herself.”

“She…”

But I couldn’t speak. I had always thought of my mother as a stranger, until I met Prairie. Gram had said she was mentally disabled and I had believed her, and somehow that made my mother less real to me. I felt like I had been born of nothing, in a way, like I had just appeared one day in the house I grew up in.

“You were a few weeks old when she died,” Prairie continued quietly. “Bryce’s investigators found the records at the county office, and he told me a few days ago. I was… devastated, thinking about how frightened Clover must have been.”

“How did she… you know?”

“She hanged herself, Hailey. In the bedroom closet. Bryce found the police reports.”

My closet. No wonder I had been drawn to that tiny space; no wonder I’d found the secret hiding place. It was her presence I’d felt there, her sadness. “But… why…”

“I think she felt like she was out of options. She was too ashamed to tell me she was pregnant. And I think she knew that if she had told me, I would have come back. I think she was protecting me, in her own way.”

“But what about…” I swallowed the lump in my throat. What about me? I was thinking. Didn’t she care about me? Didn’t she want to make sure her baby was all right?

“You must never think that your mother didn’t love you,” Prairie said fiercely. “Clover loved you with all her heart. But she knew that Alice would have taken you from her, like she tried to take everything. Alice saw you as the future of the Tarbells, and that was all she cared about. A last chance for her to get it right. A last chance to purify the bloodline.”

You are the future, Hailey.

“And she wouldn’t have allowed anything to interfere with that. I am sure that she would have put Clover out