“Wait!” Her voice is still all kinds of wrong, thin and hoarse. “Thank you. For saving me.”
There’s a shush of skirts and Agnes’s face appears above her. “Hush, baby.” Her voice is warm and low and bossy as hell, just like when they were girls.
“I didn’t think you’d come. Now that you know about Daddy.”
“It’s true, then.” Agnes sounds neither surprised nor especially upset. Just tired.
Juniper swallows and gasps a little with the pain of it. “It’s true.”
“Oh, June.” Bella kneels on her other side, her face long and sharp beside Agnes’s. “Why? After all those years.”
“He got sick. He was always getting sick after the fire—weak lungs, the doctor said. This time was worse. He spent weeks laid up in bed, coughing up blood and slime.” Juniper remembers sleeping on the floor by his bed so she could tend to him in the night, listening to the wet rattle of his breath. “The doctor said there was nothing he could do. He had a lawyer come draw up a will and gave Daddy a brown bottle for the pain. Whatever it was made him . . .” Strange. Feeble. Not himself. He looked at her sometimes with his eyes all wet and shining and called her by her mother’s-name. Once when she was setting his dinner tray on his lap he’d touched her wrist in a way that made her stomach twist sickly. That night she slept outside, letting the cold wind scour her clean.
Her sisters’ faces are grave and silent above her. Juniper closes her eyes. “One day near the end he started carrying on about sin and regret and how he was sorry I wasn’t born a son. He said at least Dan would do right by the farm. And that’s when I knew he’d taken it from me, all of it.” Even now, the ghost of that rage is enough to choke her. That land belonged to her, by birthright and blood.
Bella begins, softly, “So that’s why.”
“No.” Juniper swallows again, feels the pucker and rip of the wound in her throat. “I wanted to, but I didn’t. Till he started apologizing for . . . other things. The cellar. The two of you leaving. Our mother.” Her voice wobbles on the last word. Juniper doesn’t know why; she’s never even met the woman, never known her as anything but a curl of hair in Mama Mags’s locket, the reason her sisters wore black on her birthday. “He said he—that he—”
Juniper had understood then that her daddy—her flesh and blood, her enemy, her only-thing-left—was a murderer. And then, as the snake’s teeth bit into her palm, she understood that she and her daddy had one thing in common.
A warm hand slides into hers. Bella starts to speak but Juniper cuts her off. “Did you know? The two of you?”
Above her Juniper feels her sisters look at one another and then away. “Not really,” Bella says just as Agnes says, “Yes.”
There’s a brief pause before Agnes amends, “When her pains started, Mama told me to go ring the bell, but Daddy caught my wrist . . .” Juniper hears the bitter guilt in her voice. “I don’t know if he meant for it to happen. But he knew how hard her births had been before.”
“You should have told me,” Juniper says, but she doesn’t know if she means it. What would it have been like to grow up knowing that? Is this the reason her sisters were always a little less wild than she was, a little more frightened?
“You should have toldus,” Bella answers, a little waspishly. “Before you were dragged off to prison.”
“I thought if you knew what I did, what I am, you might . . .”Hate me, leave me, turn around and never come back.
“But surely you didn’t think it would surprise us. After what we saw.” At Bella’s words, Juniper feels that unseen something swimming up from the deeps of wherever it lives inside her. She wants to look away from it, to send it back down where it belongs, but she’s tired and hurting and cracked wide with confession. It looms closer.
Agnes is shaking her head. “She doesn’t remember, Bell.”
Juniper doesn’t want to ask. She asks. “What don’t I remember?”
Agnes meets her eyes, gray to gray. “The day in the barn. When Daddy found out—what he found out.” Her eyes flick to Bella, bitter cold, then back to Juniper. “We were trapped against the wall. He was coming closer. And then there you were, standing between us, scrawny and fierce. You told him to leave us alone, or else, and he laughed at you. So . . .” Agnes trails away, but Juniper remembers.
Juniper remembers: the arc of her spine as she looked up at her father.
Juniper remembers: the snake teeth waiting always in her pocket, ever since Mama Mags folded her fingers around them and told her to keep them secret and safe, just in case.
Juniper remembers: something snapping inside her. Her patience, her tolerance, her last straw.
May sticks and stones break your bones and serpents stop your heart. She didn’t have her cedar staff back then. But she had a tobacco-stake from the barn floor, crusted with dirt and chickenshit, and she had the words.
And she had the will. Almost.
At the very last second, as she watched her daddy writhing on the barn floor, a snake the color of dust wrapped around his ankle, her will had wavered. Maybe she didn’t hate him quite enough; maybe she just didn’t want to hate herself.
Afterward, when she was alone except for the wet crackle of her daddy’s breathing, she sent the memory of that snake down into the deepest oceans of herself, where she couldn’t see it, because her sisters were gone and she couldn’t stand to know it was her own fault.
Juniper feels tears trickling down her temples, burrowing in her hair. Her daddy had been different after the fire: slower, more cautious, less likely to raise a hand in anger. She thought it was gratitude, maybe, for all the putrid hours she spent changing his bandages and spoon-feeding him. But he was kind to her for the same reason a man is kind to a mad dog: for fear of her teeth.
Turns out he wasn’t quite scared enough.
