‘I didn’t understand how I was outside when I’d been inside.’
‘I could see that. It was all too much new stuff. You thought maybe everyone was an enemy. How could you know different? So I grabbed your feet—’ Riley reaches down and grabs his socked toes. Oliver squeals with delight.
‘Yes, that’s the noise you made! Just like that. Then I tried to eat your head …’ she snarls and gnashes her teeth on his dark hair. ‘And you just laughed and laughed.’ They are both giggling now, it’s so stupid. ‘Mom woke up, she was mad, but we were just laughing.’
‘We were laughing and laughing,’ he says, drowsy. She strokes his head, slowly, slowly, until his breath follows suit, and he sleeps. Despite it all he trusts her. He doesn’t know any better.
It didn’t really happen like that. Babies that little don’t laugh. But he loves the story and it’s become part of their history.
Riley doesn’t sleep much. She keeps her arms free, one hand on the gun. Every now and again she thinks she hears soft breath, asthough a large muzzle is pressed to the crack under the door. But either it goes away or it was just the wind.
What really happened is that Riley sat in that hospital room next to Mom, who was passed out, and she watched Oliver as he lay in his crib. He stared around, barely able to see with his little dark-blue new eyes, barely able to wave his little hands and feet, unable to move his little perfect head. She was seven. People don’t think kids that young can feel things so deeply, but that’s not true. Something woke in her, painful like a tear in the world. Maybe that’s always how love is, Riley doesn’t know. She only loves Oliver.
Riley touched the little baby’s hand, his silken head.I’ll never leave you, she told him.I’ll always be here.
Dawn brings a freezing mist. They climbed pretty high overnight and are now at over six thousand feet. She watches Oliver’s still face – his closed lids, long lashes soft and dark on round cheeks. She hopes he’ll be ok. His breath seems to come a little short in his sleep. They are both hungry and tired and everything seems less and less real the higher they go.
She strokes the locket where it sits under her shirt. Her skin doesn’t warm it, somehow. It rests there like a cold secret on her chest.
There was only ever one photo of her father in the house, and Riley has never seen it. It’s around her neck right now. The clasp has been broken ever since she can remember. Mom wore it all the time anyway. Sometimes she would stop while she was doing the dishes or in the supermarket or on the phone, and she would just hold it in her fist, like it was warm or gave her strength. After she went to hospital the last time Riley sat with it a while on the front step, tried to slide her nail into it, pry it open. She couldn’t. Riley thought about hitting it with a hammer to open it but she didn’t want to dothat either. She didn’t give it to the funeral home, like Mom asked in the note. Riley pretended she couldn’t find it. She put it under her mattress. Cousin took it on one of his bedroom searches. But now Riley has taken it back.
Maybe it’s a picture of a model or a dog or a rainbow or something. Maybe there’s nothing in it at all. She may never know. Riley has never seen the inside of the locket, just as she has never met her father.
They come to a stand of lilacs at around noon. Oliver is slowing, his breathing laboured. It troubles Riley. The hoarse sound, in and out. The sight of his thin legs makes her want to cry.
Riley catches the sweet mineral lick on the air. The lilacs send their perfume ahead of them. There’s a buzzing in the air like machinery or a headache. A pool of purple against the green. It’s a lilac tree in full bloom, clinging to the rocky side of the peak. Clouds of gnats and flies move over it. On the purple blooms butterflies open and close slow drunk wings.
Riley looks around. It can’t be right, there is no trail here. But she takes a deep breath anyway and pushes into the lilac. The scent is overwhelming, almost stinging her nostrils. Behind, she hears Oliver sneeze.
On the other side she comes out coughing. At first she doesn’t see it, it’s so narrow and faint among the new green growth. A deer trail which cuts directly up into the mountains, into the wild.
‘Ok,’ Riley says. ‘Ok. Lilac is the door.’
‘I want to go home,’ Oliver says.
‘That place we came from – Cousin’s place – it’s not your home,’ she says. ‘You and me, we’re each other’s home.’
His mouth crumples and he pushes past her. The set of his jaw as he struggles away up the narrow trail – it makes her heart catch. He looks so small. Riley jogs to catch up.
‘Let’s carry on talking about how you were born. Do you remember the story Mom told?’
Oliver shakes his head, silent. But she sees his shoulders unhunch a little.
‘Ok,’ Riley says. ‘I’ll remind you. Once upon a time, there was a woman who wanted a baby so much, it filled her every moment and thought. She wanted a little boy with green eyes like this.’ Riley circles Oliver’s eyes with a gentle finger. ‘She imagined him so clearly. A little boy with green eyes who loved to be tickled.’
She tickles his ribs and Oliver screams.
‘She wished for him so hard, every morning as she walked in her garden, waiting for the roses to open.’ Riley tickles harder, harder. ‘The most beautiful rose of all was a blood-red bud, right in the centre. The woman was crying one morning, when the blood-red rose opened and in the centre was a little boy, a perfect little boy with eyes as green as the grass beneath her feet.’ Riley pokes him in the stomach and Oliver screams with delight. He takes her hand.
‘Mom and your dad were so happy to have you,’ Riley says. Oliver’s dad was a bartender in Ault. He even sent Mom money for child support before he died. Oliver’s dad was an ok guy.
Oliver swings on her hand. ‘What about your dad, Riley?’
‘I don’t have one. I was hatched from an egg like a chicken.’
‘No,’ he says, delighted. ‘You weren’t!’
‘Swear to god. Mom was just about to make me into an omelette for breakfast, when tap tap tap, the egg cracked open and out I came.’
