“I’ve told you not to go in this water!” Ellis said.
“No you didn’t. You said Quercus isn’t allowed.”
“I told you I train all my dogs not to go in there because of alligators. Come out of there now!”
“You said alligators like to eat dogs.”
“They eat people sometimes, too.”
Raven treaded water and kept staring.
“Please come out. Dusk is when alligators become active.”
Raven breaststroked toward her and stood where the water became shallow. She was wearing only a bra and panties. Ellis was startled by how bony she was. She’d already been slim when she arrived, and she’d lost more weight than Ellis had realized.
Raven’s feet stuck in the deep mud. She sank to her calves. Another step and she sank almost to her knee.
“That’s another danger of these wetlands. You can get stuck in the mud, even sink too deep to get out.”
Ellis waded in, sinking to her calves. She grasped her daughter’s hand and tried to pull. But she lost her grip on Raven’s slippery hand, and the momentum made her fall backward into the rank marsh water.
Raven laughed.
“Very funny,” Ellis said.
Raven laughed harder as Ellis struggled to rise out of the muck.
“I should have left you in there for the alligators.”
Raven dragged her feet out of the mire and pulled Ellis’s hand. When she heaved, her feet were too stuck to provide any leverage. She fell into the marsh next to Ellis, and they slumped into the putrid muck, laughing.
“How the hell did you get in here in the first place?” Ellis asked.
“When I felt myself sinking in the mud, I stretched out my body and swam to the deep water.”
Ellis gave up trying to stand and crawled in a very undignified way out of the marsh. Raven did the same. They laughed at how ridiculous they were.
The mosquitoes were having a merry time, too. And the sun was setting. Ellis hadn’t brought a flashlight.
“We’d better get back,” she said.
Raven put on the T-shirt but didn’t try to pull the pants up her wet legs. She slipped on her socks, seeming unperturbed by the mosquitoes hovering around her bare legs.
“You are a very good boy to stay out of the water,” Ellis said to Quercus. She rubbed the big dome of his head, smearing it with mud. “Now we have to train Raven.”
“I don’t think I’ll go in there again.”
“Please don’t.”
Raven balanced on one foot and slid the other into her boot. “But where can you swim around here? I like water when it’s hot like this.”
“I know. I miss that, too. But there isn’t anywhere to swim on this land.”
There was still enough light to walk home. They’d gone a short distance when Raven shouted, “No! Quercus, no!”
She desperately tried to haul the dog away from something. Ellis looked down at an intricate arrangement of leaves and rocks. In the middle was a raccoon skull.
“What is that?” Ellis asked.
“Nothing.”
Quercus wanted the skull.
“No!” Raven screamed.
“Quercus, sit!” Ellis said in her sternest voice.
He sat. Keith had shown her how to do that.
“Come!” Ellis said, beckoning the dog away from the skull.
Raven calmed as they left behind the nothing she had made. The arrangement of natural objects had looked eerily ritualized. Like some kind of offering. Ellis remembered Raven’s strange talk of her kidnapping, as if she saw it as a divine event. Obviously, that was Audrey Lind’s influence.
“Did you go to church when you lived in Washington?” Ellis asked as they walked.
“Why do people ask that?” she said.
“Who else asked?”
“Gram Bauhammer.”
Of course she had. Ellis had never met anyone pushier about her beliefs than Mary Carol.
“I didn’t go to church,” Raven said.
“Did you practice any particular faith?”
After a pause, she said, “No.”
Ellis sensed tension in her. She wondered why.
Quercus barked and bounded up the hill. He continued barking. Someone was there. It had to be Keith. The gate had been closed.
She told herself not to get excited, but her drubbing heart wouldn’t listen. A month and a half ago, the day after Raven arrived, Keith had returned to collect his belongings. He’d told Ellis she needed time alone with her daughter. He’d refused to say more.
Now he was back. He must have calmed down enough to talk.
But what if he was there to say goodbye? Forever?
Ellis stopped walking. Two men were in her driveway petting Quercus. She couldn’t see them well in the twilight, but whoever they were, they had climbed the fence to get in.
Ellis grabbed Raven’s arm and pulled her backward. “Don’t go up there!” she whispered.
“Why? Who is it?”
“It might be reporters.”
Raven stared at the men.
“Last week, Sondra warned me that some reporters wanted to talk to you.”
“Why is that so bad?”
She truly didn’t know. She’d had no access to phones or computers. Her abductor had kept her away from the internet to make sure she never found out who she was. The girl had no idea of the mess the media could make of her life.
“Stay here,” Ellis said. “You don’t even have pants on.”
“So what?”
“Just stay here.”
Ellis climbed the walkway stairs Max had built to negotiate the slope. The two men turned around when they heard her footfalls. They were young, in their early twenties.
Ellis stopped walking. They stared back at her. “Mom?” Jasper said.
Mom. He’d called her that. After all these years.
She and the boys stood just yards apart. They were twenty now. Both looked a lot like Jonah, Jasper especially.
It all came rushing back. Those women she’d been, the bewildered college student taking final exams with pregnancy nausea; the new wife—Jonah rubbing his hands on her belly as he spoke to his sons inside; the woman screaming in the delivery room; the mother rocking, bandaging, promising there was no such thing as monsters; the addict who walked away from her little boys—her last words to them a terrible lie of maternal love that lasts forever and ever. They all came back at once, all those women crashing together within her.
It was different from when Viola had come back. The
