“It’s River,” Jasper said. “That’s what he does.”
“Yeah, it’s what I do,” River said. “And guess who taught me, Mom?”
“I never behaved like you do!”
“But you did a great job of tearing the family apart.”
Ellis looked away from him, stared at the dark front windows.
Raven saw what she wanted. She wanted to be out there in the woods. She looked like a trapped animal. Raven knew how she felt. She supposed Ellis would leave the house.
But Ellis turned back to River. “Okay, let’s talk about it. Is that what you want?”
“Yeah, let’s talk about it,” River mocked.
“What do you want to know?”
“You know what! Why did you leave two little kids who were already traumatized by their baby sister’s abduction?”
His voice, the look in his eyes. And in Ellis’s and Jasper’s eyes. Raven saw some of what Mama had done to them. She felt even sicker than she had in the kitchen. She sank onto the couch.
“I was . . . I thought I was doing you more damage by staying,” Ellis said. “At first your father had to make me take the pills. For the depression and guilt. Every second I was awake, I blamed myself for leaving my baby in the woods. What I’d done was broadcast on the news. All my friends and neighbors knew. Your grandmother never let me forget. Your father was angry with me . . .”
She wiped her fingers under her eyes. “Within a few weeks, I started drinking because the pills weren’t enough. Then I added the pain medications they’d given me for my back. I couldn’t stop. The more I took, the more I needed. I thought I was going to be like my mother. I thought I would be an addict for the rest of my life—and there was no way I’d put you through what I went through when I was little.”
“I didn’t know your mother was an addict,” Jasper said.
Ellis was astonished Mary Carol and Jonah II hadn’t told them. Possibly Jonah had finally drawn a line with them.
“What did she use?” River asked.
“Anything, but she got really bad when she started using heroin.”
“Whoa,” River said.
“What was your father like?” Jasper asked.
“I never knew who he was, and my mother refused to tell me.”
“No stepdad or anything?”
“For a while, there was a man. Zane Waycott. He was like my dad. He was a chef at some of the same restaurants where my mother worked. He and I were really close—at least I thought we were. Then one day he just disappeared.”
“Sounds familiar,” River said.
“He didn’t even say goodbye,” Ellis said.
“If you think that day you said goodbye somehow helped, it didn’t,” River said. “It actually traumatized me pretty bad.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I regretted leaving you,” Ellis said.
“Then why didn’t you come back?”
“So many reasons. The divorce, Irene—”
“Irene only stuck around for about three months,” River said.
“It was a lot more than her and the divorce. Even after I got off the drugs and booze, I was sick with guilt about losing the baby. And by then, I’d been away for a long time. I was afraid coming back into your lives would hurt more than help.”
“You could have come back,” River said.
“Maybe. But something happened . . .”
“What?” Jasper asked.
Ellis looked too fragile to stand. She sat on the couch next to Raven.
“I was . . . attacked by two men in a campground. They stabbed me in the side.”
“Holy shit,” River whispered.
Tears dripped down her cheeks. “I almost let myself die from an infection. At first, I didn’t go to a hospital. I thought maybe I deserved to die. But I was scared, too. I was afraid you and your father would find out.”
“Why would that matter?” Jasper asked.
“I don’t know! I was screwed up! Do you see why I left you? Even when I wasn’t on drugs, I made bad decisions. I could barely keep myself alive, let alone take care of two little children. I loved you boys too much to come anywhere near you. To keep myself from wanting you, I made myself relive the day I left Viola in the woods. Over and over. It was like an actual circle of Hell.”
It always came back to that. To the day Mama found the baby with raven hair and eyes. Her dream daughter. Her miracle.
Jasper had tears in his eyes. River stared forcefully at Raven. As if to say, Do you see what that crazy lady who took you did to us?
Ellis continued her story. “I had bad anxiety after the assault. For a while, I couldn’t drive. I was having panic attacks.”
Like Jackie after his father died.
“That was how I ended up in Gainesville,” she said. “A friend from college lived there. I stayed with her for two years. She was the one who encouraged me to get into plant nursery work.”
“And by then, no way were you coming back,” River said.
“That’s right,” she said. “I felt better. I thought I was healing, and I supposed you two were. To come back to you then, to dredge it all up again, might have been a disaster for all of us. Or so I told myself.”
She clasped her hands and looked down at them. “But it wasn’t like you said before—as if my children were files on a computer I’d deleted.”
“You thought about us?” Jasper asked.
She stared at her knotted hands. “Trees can do this amazing thing called Compartmentalization of Decay. When they get an injury, the cells around the wound change and put up a wall that contains the process of decay. Around that wall, a different kind of change in the cells forms another wall. Then a third wall. And a fourth.”
She looked at Jasper and River. “Down the hill, there’s a huge live oak that has a big hollow in its trunk, but the tree is thriving. The protective walls allowed the growth of wood to
