She’s grateful when the bell jingles and two more students slip inside the store. Silas barks something incomprehensible from somewhere out of sight.Two at a time, most likely.
“I’ll see you around,” says Shea.
Asher’s gaze turns unreadable. “Parker, wait—”
She doesn’t. She escapes out into the cold before the door can drift shut. Before her guilt can consume her. Off in the distance, the vast goliath of Mercy Mountain rises out from above the shadowed tree line. The town of Little Hill is gray and cold, but the mountain’s craggy face is awash in brilliant gold. The gilded peak feels like a lit beacon, beckoning her back.
A reminder that she belongs to the Gravewood.
To the boy who lives at the heart of it.
It’s the deal she struck. It’s the reason Camellia is gone. It’s the damage she did, the path she chose, and she can never tell Asher any of it. She can never tell him that she had no choice, that she was out of options—that there’d been no more deliveries in months, and she badly needed hearing aid batteries to keep the quiet at bay.
In seven months, she’ll be done with high school. Everyone in her graduating class at Hornbeam will go off and find their place. They’ll further their studies. They’ll join the watch. They’ll settle down. They’ll make something meaningful of themselves, keep the wheels of Little Hill slowly turning.
Not her. Shea Parker is a liability. A sunk cost. Aburden.
Poor Ivy, she once overheard Marla Brer say to Silas.She’ll be stuck caring for that one all her life.
In the end, the trees didn’t need to offer up promises to lure Shea into the Gravewood—she’d gone in all on her own.
Asher won’t understand. Just like Camellia hadn’t understood.Theirparents still live at home, unscathed by the Rot, their pantry full. Their people haven’t left. Their bodies haven’t betrayed them. They don’tneed. They’re not desperate. Not like her.
She can feel Asher watching her all the way to the end of the road. The weight of his stare is unbearable. She breaks into a run the moment she turns the corner out of sight, where the cluttered main street gives way to farmland, the roads to crumbling stone walls and flattened cattle paths. The air is heavy and wet. The cows lift their heads to watch her pass.
Though nothing is chasing her, she doesn’t stop running until she reaches home.
When Shea was young, she and her parents spoke with their hands. In the mornings, she’d grudgingly don her hearing aids and trundle the two-mile walk to Hornbeam. She’d spend the next eight hours wading through the stream of inscrutable schoolyard noises and indecipherable classroom cross talk—speaking out of turn, or else not speaking enough.
She’d race back home with her head ringing, her molars ground to dust, and find immediate reprieve waiting there to greet her. She’d cross the threshold and drop her hearing aids onto the hall tree, let the tension rush out of her as the quiet rushed in.
It was like having a secret language. At first, her parents created their own signs—a cupped hand for milk, pinched fingers for food. As she grew older and her language evolved, her father found a battered old American Sign Language dictionary stuffed into the back shelves of the Little Hill library. He brought it home with him, rolled up in his coat.
Calhoun Parker was always like that.
If his family needed something, he got it.
She remembers her father with dark, twinkling eyes. A smile that shone, even when the rest of him began to waste away. He’d lie propped in the living room recliner, a blanket in his lap, his body thin as a matchstick. With hands calloused from years of hard labor, he’d tell Shea stories about Highbush. Her grandmother’s cooking. Her grandfather’s love of carpentry. The little beach on Rattlesnake Island where he used to row with her uncles—spend the endless summers fishing for walleye and white bass.
He’d been away when the Rot came to Highbush—stationed on a watchtower out in western New York, where the Gravewood bled down from the Adirondacks. He’d come home on leave to find the entire town empty, as if all of Highbush had blinked out of existence overnight. The plates his mother had set out for dinner were still on the table. A basketball lay punctured in the grass. The car in the driveway sat askew. Doors open, key in the ignition.
Sometimes, after he’d gone, Shea wondered if her father had given any thought to that day when he left. If he’d cared, even a little, that his only daughter would come home from school to the exact same reality: an empty house, a mug of tea cooling on the kitchen counter.
She wonders if he knew he was taking the very last leftovers of her language with him when he went. That she’d have no one to talk to once he left. That without him around, she’d spend the next several years watching the pantry empty. Watching her batteries dwindle. Watching her mother disappear.
She wonders if he knew she’d grow to loathe coming home.
•••
Poppy Zahar is seated on the front porch when Shea arrives. Even in the twilight, Poppy is impossible to miss. Out of uniform, she’s dressed in her usual array of colors, from the mulberry-and-green stripe of her sweater to the lumpy fleece of her bucket hat, beneath which a brown, heart-shaped face and a slim, straight nose peek out. Her cargo pants are just a little too short, and a pair of boldly patterned socks stick out from the cuffed ends. She looks wildly incongruous against the dilapidated face of the Parkers’ lonely Victorian.
There’s a possum in her arms. It’s a significant improvement from the previous week, when she took to carrying around an injured milk snake. At least this one has fur. It looks vaguely distressed and more than a little bit mangy, and it bares its teeth at Shea as she approaches, fitting on her hearing aids. There’s a beep, and sound wheezes into her head in a dizzying rush.
“Are you sure that’s not rabid?” she asks, ripping into her lollipop.
Poppy’s expression is scandalized. “Possums don’t carry rabies.”
“Oh, okay.” The taste of cherry chases away the dry-cotton feel of her mouth. “It’s just that it looks a little bit like roadkill.”
