36
NOW
Thunder crashes around the house as I turn off the shower. I spent the morning thinking and digging in my garden, ripping out dead things, planting new flowers that will welcome the fall. Digging, digging, digging—roots and bulbs and bones and memories. The water has stripped the dirt from my skin, soil running in dark rivers down my legs, and now I finally feel clean in a way that reaches far beneath the surface.
I step out of the shower, ignoring my towel, and walk dripping into my bedroom, leaving a trail of footprints. The world rages outside my windows, the late-summer storm magnificent in its violence. Whistling wind and drumming rain move together in perfect synchrony, like a cataclysmic orchestra. Coastal Louisiana: a beautiful, otherworldly place; a land of deadly weather.
I lean over my quilted bedspread and reach for the long white dressing gown draped over my reading chair, the one Everett loves to make fun of. Fit for a Victorian maiden, he says, or else a Victorian ghost.
My room is small and muggy, half the shower’s fault and half its perch on the second floor, where it collects the rising heat. The only relief I get comes from the wide bay windows that overlook the forest, the part the postman refuses to approach.
I slip on my gown and twist the hand cranks, opening the windows. Wind and rain whip inside, twisting the drapes. Outside, the tall trees shake fiercely, branches like arms clawing at the sky. I plant myself in the center of the windows and close my eyes, letting the wind lift my hair.
Four years ago, when I was still living in my parents’ house, I came back from a shower and found Everett waiting in my bedroom. It started raining through the window, and then he asked me to leave with him. I refused, a decision that changed our relationship forever. A decision to keep my precious secret intact.
And now here I am again: in the rain, at the window, facing a pivotal decision. The past is resurging, breaking into the present, creating a second chance.
What will I do with it?
I lift my arms slowly, in supplication. The rain beats against my face, mixing cold with warm shower water. I open my eyes to the steel-gray sky. Clouds swirl confrontationally, as if challenging me to say out loud the truths I’ve spent all day digging up and piecing together in my garden.
Six years of friendship. Moments I’ve played back so many times. All the digs Ever used to make about what some people in this town got away with, how there should be justice. The anger he carried that I thought was just teenage rebelliousness—who could blame him? His burning hatred of town leadership. His questions on our canoe trip when we were twenty-one, probing Herman’s oddness—the way I can see now, in retrospect, he’d danced around what he really wanted to know. How that day at the gulf when we were eighteen, he seemed to understand something I didn’t about Fred. He’s always known everyone’s secrets, their sins. He even knew Renard’s darkness before I did.
So many bad men dying in a row.All those men in the photograph, with their tattoos for protection—is this what they were afraid of?
Rough winds bang the windows.Say it.
I take a deep breath. Thunder explodes, shaking the house.
Is the person I know best actually a stranger?
I clench my fists.
A damned, cunning creature?
Reach deeper, the storm howls.Retrieve the key, unlock the last door.
And if he is, doesn’t that make him exactly like…
Me?
The true Ruth. Buried in the corner of my garden, far beneath the blooming showpieces, a place I try never to unearth.
But now—wet hair streaming down my back, lightning cracking above the trees, the truth about Everett pressing—I make myself remember.
37
JULY, NINETEEN YEARS OLD
A knock sounded at the door. I sat straight up in bed. My parents were at an overnight church retreat, leaving me alone in the house, and it was far too late for visitors. Too late for me to even be awake with work in the morning, but I was lost in the pages ofFrankenstein, amazed Mary Shelley had finished it, as the book’s foreword claimed, “at the tender age of nineteen.” (How strange to call it a tender age, as if we nineteen-year-old girls were soft and good to eat.)
The knock came again, feebler this time. My heart skipped as I crept out of bed, trying to imagine who it could be and what they could want in the dead of night. The moon barely shone through my window; the only sound was the chirp of crickets. Was it a parishioner looking for my father? Or someone—something—more sinister…
I pictured the beautiful, cruel face of the Low Man, come to claim my blood after all these years. But the Low Man crawled in through windows. Surely, he wouldn’t knock…
I tiptoed downstairs, feeling like I was walking to my doom. Cracked the door with a timid “Hello?”—then threw it open.
Everett sank to his knees on the ground. His face was so bloody I could barely make out his eyes.
