Stay there for now, ’kay, hon?
He storms up to his Smith Corona and lets his fingers fly. Metal hammers clank down on paper. Fifteen minutes later he crumples a half-filled page and tosses it over his shoulder. It bounces off the trash can rim.
He rolls in another sheet.
Dear Nelle, I—
Should he ask if she’s okay, if she needs help? If Quill is hurting her?
He feels like he’s overstepping his boundaries as a stranger, but a bigger part of him can’t ignore the uneasiness in his gut. The feeling of slime coating his skin that three showers haven’t scrubbed away. Whatever is happening in that cabin at 23 Blackwood Road isn’t good, that’s all he knows.
And he needs to make sure Nelle’s okay.
Something she said to him on the Fourth keeps coming back, echoing in his mind.
I get to be happy right now.Did her happiness end when she returned home? Chills spread like ivy up the back of James’s neck. He slides his typewriter into position, ready to start yet another first line.
Dear Nelle . . .
An out-of-breath panther paces Nelle’s room, muttering to the floor, strands of black hair falling over his forehead. Her thin white rug slides crooked under his shoes, but he doesn’t straighten it.
“I ask you to follow simple rules, andstillyou disappoint me.”
Nelle checks the clock on the wall, a gift for her eighth birthday. Before, she used the stars to track time in this cage of a room. Since she got the clock, she has been tallying off the days on the baseboard under her bed using a hairpin. Almost five thousand little white marks now.
Father pokes her chest, hard, and she flinches, the quilt curling under her fingers.
“I’m the reason you have a beating heart under there, and breathing lungs, that youfucking exist. Icreatedyou.” His words slice at her until she can feel the tendons of her love for him snapping. Only took twenty-one years, one too many tastes of freedom, and James Finch to get her to this point.
Up close, the liquor on his hot breath twists her stomach.
He growls and resumes his pacing. “All that work. Every day I slave over your life, writing for you. Don’t you know what would happen if it weren’t for me, Nellie? Don’t you know?”
Nelle says, “I would be stuck here. I wouldn’t be able to move. Or go anywhere. Or eat. I would be immobile.” The words are a lifeless recitation.
“And you would rot,” he says. “You would emaciate and rot until you were so weak you wouldn’t be able to open your fucking mouth. I need you, my sweet girl, but you need me more. Without me, what would you be?”
Without him, she would be happy.
“I’m sorry.” She uses the floor to hide her lying eyes. All she sees is his black crocodile loafers as he paces, back and forth, creak after creak. “I won’t talk to him again.”
His shoes stop—creak—pointed at her.
“Oh, Nellie, look at me.” He touches the delicate skin under her chin, a hint of emotion in how he cradles her jaw. So rare for him. Maybe it is compassion. Or sympathy. Or maybe just a trick of the light. “I’m not trying to scare you, Nellie. I just want to keep you safe. That’s all.”
“I know.” She waits for him to leave. When he doesn’t, she decides to ask a question that has been trapped inside her for years. Best to test Father’s limits right after he has thrown a tantrum, when he still feels sorry.
“Do you think I could try writing?” At his quick alarm, she adds, “Not withmyink—I know the consequences—but with a normal pen. I’ve been rereadingLittle Women, and Jo is ... and I thought maybe ... I want to write my own stories.”
Father drops her chin, wordless. His silence scares her most.
“I don’t need much. Just pen and paper.” She twists a stray thread in the quilt. Even as a grown woman, he can make her shrink into a child.
“You know I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Nellie.” He is gentler then she has ever heard him, swaddling her with his voice. “I can get you more paint if you’re running low.”
Empty canvases sit stacked against the wall, covered in dust. She hasn’t painted in years. Father always kept strict rules on the subject matter of her art. She could only paint a bowl of fruit or the willow in the front yard so many times before she spiraled into insanity. When she was thirteen, she dared to paint without a reference, and Father retaliated by rampaging and shredding the canvas. She had painted a giant, naked woman squished into a tiny cage, legs and nose poking through the iron bars. He fed each scrap of canvas to the fire. Made her watch it burn.
She forces a smile. “I’ve got paint.”
