on the street before she let her raise you.”
I could barely absorb the full horror of what Prairie was saying. I thought of all the times Gram whispered and laughed with Dun Acey, the way he looked at me with his hungry eyes. I wondered if he was the one Gram had chosen for me, the man who would father my child, the pureblood Banished who would ensure that my baby was a Healer.
I thought I would throw up. I made a strangled sound in my throat and Prairie looked at me in alarm.
“Hailey, are you all right? The exit’s coming up in a minute-can you make it?”
“I think so,” I said, swallowing hard. “Just… tell me the rest. All of it. How did you find out my mom was dead? What did you do?”
“When she stopped answering my letters, I got worried. I had saved a little money by then, so I took a bus back to Gypsum to get her. But when I got to the house… she wasn’t there, and Alice told me she had killed herself. I was just going to leave; all I could think to do was get out of there, out of the house, away from Alice. But she stopped me. She told me that she could make people think
“The one you told her to make up? When you wrote to her?”
“Yes. And she said I’d better not let any of the authorities find out I was in town, or they’d take me in for questioning or worse. Now I understand she was just trying to make sure that I never came back. Because if I ever found out about you, I might fight for you. And she was not about to lose you.”
That was the final piece of the puzzle. Now I had the whole story of why I’d grown up without a mother. She hadn’t abandoned me on purpose.
And if Prairie had come for me long ago, I wouldn’t have Chub. I looked over the seat at him, rosy-cheeked in sleep, his mouth a sweet little O.
Until Chub, I had grown up with no love at all. But he had given me a reason to keep going, to keep trying.
Prairie had saved me last night, I thought as we reached the exit. But maybe Chub had saved me first.
We coasted off the highway, almost directly into an enormous parking lot. I was starving, and I knew Chub would be too the minute he woke up.
“We’re going to eat here?”
“I’m afraid so. There’s a McDonald’s in the Walmart. I’ll pick up what we need while you take Chub and get breakfast for the two of you.”
“What about you?”
Prairie smiled, unexpectedly and genuinely. “If you would get me a sausage and egg biscuit, I would be very grateful. I haven’t had one of those in ages. Oh, and some hash browns, maybe. And an orange juice. And a giant coffee, all right?”
She pressed some money into my hands and I closed my fingers over it. “How do you like your coffee?”
“Black’s fine. Listen, Hailey, you’ve got some bruising. It might be better if you…” She reached out and pushed my hair across my forehead, arranging it so that it hung over the side of my face.
Prairie had taken off her jacket. At least there was no blood on her silk top. She’d combed her hair and put on lipstick, but she still looked like she’d been up all night.
“I need to walk Rascal,” I said, leaning over to check on him. He was lying on the floor of the car, head resting on his paws.
“Okay, I’ll get Chub ready.”
By the time I had taken Rascal for a quick trip to a grassy median, Prairie had Chub out of the car. He was pointing to the giant store and making excited noises. I opened the car door and Rascal jumped obediently into the backseat.
As we walked through the huge parking lot, I decided two things: first, today was the day I was going to start drinking coffee. And second, I too would drink it black. Cream and sugar were things that could slow a person down.
By now, back in Gypsum, the Ellises would have realized their car was missing, wouldn’t they? They would have gone out to get the paper, or let the cat in, and if they glanced over to the carport… although it
A quarter mile away, if the cops hadn’t already been called to the scene, Old Man Burnett was waking up to discover a giant hole in his barn and a car crashed in his creek. Not to mention Prairie’s car, that old brown Volvo, abandoned behind the barn.
I wondered how long it would take for someone to stumble on the carnage at our house. Gram was well known to a few people in Gypsum and the surrounding county, but they weren’t the kind to call the authorities. It would probably be someone else-someone selling aluminum siding or checking the water meter-who would end up making that awful discovery.
Inside the store, an old man with a bright blue vest shoved a shopping cart toward us. “Welcome to Walmart,” he said.
“Thanks, I… we’re just going to, uh, have breakfast,” I said, certain he would see how nervous I was and know something was wrong. But as Prairie slipped into the crowd of shoppers, he turned away from me and pushed the cart at the people who came through the door after us.
I saw a sign for the restrooms and dragged Chub toward them. Inside, there was one of those changing stations that pull down from the wall. I wondered if it would hold Chub, who weighed forty-two pounds now, according to Gram’s old peeling scale.
“In here,” I said, pulling him toward the largest stall. There were two other women at the sinks, one washing her hands, one putting on lipstick. I hoped they would just assume that Chub was using the toilet himself.
I realized I didn’t have any diapers or wipes with me. How I was going to clean him? He was bound to be soaked. I grabbed a handful of paper towels and wet them at the sink before we went into the stall.
Chub said something I didn’t understand and tugged impatiently at his elastic waistband. I helped him out of his damp diaper and then, to my amazement, he clambered up on the toilet.
A dozen times at home I had put him on the toilet, promising to read him stories or get him a cookie, anything I could think of to get him used to the idea of using it-and he always scrambled right back down and ran away.
But now he had done it on his own. He finished up, climbed back down and pulled up his pants.
I helped him wash his hands at the sink-he loved the foaming soap dispenser-and as we were drying our hands, a short woman with frizzy red hair turned to me and said, “Oh, he’s sure a sweetheart. Is he your little brother?” and before I even really thought about it, I said, “Yes, ma’am.”
She gave us a big smile and as we followed her out of the restroom I thought, Well, why not? There wasn’t anyone who was going to argue. We could be related, both of us with pale freckled skin. And later, if he grew up looking totally different, if we were in the habit of thinking of each other that way-maybe it wouldn’t matter.
Maybe we had a chance to be normal after all.
At McDonald’s I ordered myself the same thing Prairie had asked for, and hotcakes and sausage for Chub. We ate quickly, and I tried not to look around at the other customers. I figured if I didn’t look at them, they wouldn’t look at me.
When Prairie wheeled up with her shopping cart full of bags, I was feeling better. We made our way back to the car, and she handed me a large box.
“Here’s a car seat,” she said. “See if you can get it figured out while I put the rest of this stuff in the trunk.”
It ended up taking both of us to set the seat up, Prairie reading from the instruction book and me fiddling around with the straps and the seat belt. Rascal didn’t seem at all interested in the process, barely looking up as we worked. Chub patted the plastic sides of the new seat with a thoughtful look on his face. I crawled back into the front seat. Prairie stuffed the instructions and the packaging back in the box and tossed it in the backseat. Then she pulled a plastic bag out of her purse.
“I thought…,” she said, and then hesitated. She reached in the bag and took out a small blue stuffed giraffe with glossy yarn forming a loopy mane down its long neck. The legs were loose and floppy, and it had a sweet face, with long eyelashes embroidered above little button eyes. She handed it to Chub, who held it close to his nose, turning it this way and that.
“Raff,” he said. “Prairie. Raff… giraffe.”
He really was talking. How was this happening? Was it because of me? Could I be healing him somehow,
