Martha didn’t seem surprised that her father was privy toall the host of monsters that we sheltered in Pryor. “You should break out ofhere,” she said.
“I break out, and I can guarantee you’ll be in by this timetomorrow.”
“How do you figure?”
“Your daddy told me himself.”
Silence for a minute, while she absorbed that. “So why letme go free?”
“You’re the better hunter.”
When I said that, she nodded. We were thinking the samething. If Martha stayed out and I stayed in, maybe the demons wouldn’t get somany free suppers. Or the undertaker wouldn’t have a full house of slaughteredmothers. We might stop finding our dogs’ desiccated bodies in our yards. And Icould say for sure there wouldn’t be another girl dead in the river.
We sat without speaking for a while. She exhaled through hermouth and eased back against the wall. I would never have told her, but shelooked the spitting image of Emmalyn then. Yellow hair curling at the ends fromsweat and rain. Face tilted upwards, letting stubbornness run down the slope ofher nose like raindrops. The Blanchard sisters spent their whole lives tryingto die for each other.
“You know,” Martha said, “you’re still giving up, lockingyourself in here. Sure as if you’d let the purewater man feed you to a demon.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “I knew what I was doing.”
“So what?”
“You should know.” I looked at her, saw how she washollow-eyed and shivering and gripping her demon tooth necklace withwhite-knuckled fingers. Martha clung hard to something that night, and I’llalways believe it was the will to go on living when she had nothing leftbesides the hateful town that her little sister died defending. “It’s asacrifice. Someone’s gotta get burnt. I’m pure and willing. Let it be me.”
Russula’s Wake
They hadn’t beennaming the barn cats, now that Ainsley and Devon were old enough to know thedifference between taking care of and caring for something. In the afternoons,when the school bus doors opened to release them, the children hurried throughall the feeding and mucking and cracking and cutting, then closed up the barnand left the animal world to manage itself until morning. By then, the tablewould be set for dinner: cheap mauve plates for the two older children, blueporcelain for Jane and the baby.
For herself and little Rosemarie, Jane made roasts andcasseroles, sometimes quiche. But the older children followed Paley familyrules, and the substance of their meal was always the same. While theynourished, Rosemarie would pick at her food until getting up the courage to askafter the barn cats: had they been good, had the new kittens been born yet, wasthere still any milk in the dish she’d left? Ainsley and Devon would smirk,they would giggle; sometimes, if they thought Jane wasn’t listening, they wouldwhisper false stories of dead cats hung from rafters. From across the kitchen,scrubbing pots and pans, Jane would let herself glance only momentarily at thefaces that Ainsley and Devon hid from their teachers and schoolmates. Later,tucking them into bed, she would have to avert her eyes. When her lips brushedtheir foreheads, she would try not to flinch.
She always said goodnight to Rosemarie last. Mothers did nothave favorites, certainly Jane did not have a favorite, but Rosemarie wouldn’tstill be Rosemarie by the end of the year, and that made her precious. A Paleywoman would doubtless have said that Rosemarie was thin-skinned, fragile to afault, but Jane was not a Paley by birth and she had always secretly felt thatRosemarie was not really a Paley either. Ainsley and Devon, on the other hand,were Paleys, true Paleys, and Jane was afraid that in the end maybe therewasn’t much difference between a cruel child and a Paley child.
◊
The less Ainsley and Devon cared for the animals, the moredesperately Rosemarie loved them. In the mornings, while the older childrencollected their belongings and hurried out to the waiting school bus, Rosemariestood solemnly at the window facing the barn, her chin propped on her hands, afield guide to edible mushrooms splayed open on the windowsill in front of her.When the bus doors closed, she climbed down from her perch and slipped into herrubber boots and waited for Jane to open the barn. Jane could not remember whenexactly she had begun allowing this, only that it had been a while ago and yetshe still felt a sort of secondhand embarrassment at seeing Rosemarie on thefloor with the feral cats that lived in the hayloft. Rosemarie didn’t know yet,not to get attached. But that was only because Jane had neglected to tell her.
When the letter came from the school in March, Jane knew shehad waited too long. The interval of time between the now and the thenhad shrunk down almost to nothing. The day the letter arrived, she stood withthe mailbox hanging open like a black unhungry mouth, and looked at the letter,and looked at her daughter, who was kneeling in the mud with one of the cats.Russula was a saggy-bellied calico with a missing eye, who had been named, forreasons apparent only to Rosemarie, after a rare red mushroom that grew only indeep seclusion. She was the most hideous of all the barn cats, and Rosemarieloved her more than anything else.
“Someone sent you a letter,” Rosemarie observed, seeing Janelook into the mailbox.
“Yes,” Jane said.
She was afraid Rosemarie would ask who or why. They receivedmail so rarely. But Rosemarie only frowned, screwing up the corners of hermouth, and asked, “Could we send letters?”
“If we wanted to,” Jane said. “Who would you write to?”
“I don’t know,” Rosemarie admitted, as if the possibility ofan addressee had only now occurred to her. She looked at Russula, seeming tohope the cat might provide inspiration. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t livehere.”
Jane knelt and slowly trailed her fingers down Russula’sspine—not because petting the cat’s matted fur remotely appealed to her, but soshe would have some reason to stay beside Rosemarie, to leave the letter in theopen mailbox, to suspend the moment into a year. “Is that all right with you?”she said. “That you don’t know anyone. Are
