The Hollow Kind E-Book

Andy Davidson

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 597

Beschreibung

From the author of The Boatman's Daughter, a gripping, achingly atmospheric tale about the horrors that lurk in the dark corners of family history. And a young woman striving to break free of that tragic past. Nellie Gardner is looking for a way out of an abusive marriage when she learns that her long-lost grandfather, August Redfern, has willed her his turpentine estate. She throws everything she can think of in a bag and flees to Georgia with her eleven-year-old son, Max, in tow. It turns out that the "estate" is a decrepit farmhouse on a thousand acres of old pine forest, but Nellie is thrilled about the chance for a fresh start for her and Max, and a chance for the happy home she never had. So it takes her a while to notice the strange scratching in the walls, the faint whispering at night, how the forest is eerily quiet. But Max sees what his mother can't: They're no safer here than they had been in South Carolina. In fact, things might even be worse. There's something wrong with Redfern Hill. Something lurks beneath the soil, ancient and hungry, with the power to corrupt hearts and destroy souls. It is the true legacy of Redfern Hill: a kingdom of grief and death, to which Nellie's own blood has granted her the key. From the author of The Boatman's Daughter, The Hollow Kind is a jaw-dropping novel about legacy and the horrors that hide in the dark corners of family history. Andy Davidson's gorgeous, Gothic fable tracing the spectacular fall of the Redfern family will haunt you long after you turn the final page.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

1988 September 7

I

1989 June 30

1917 November 2

1989 July 1

1917 December 24

II

1989 July 2

1918 September 16

1989 July 3

1918 October 27

1989 July 4

Summer 1975 First Interlude

Day One

Day Two

III

1989 July 5

1923 May 4

1989 July 6

1923 August 10

1989 July 7

1923 August 12

Summer 1975 Second Interlude

Day Three

Day Four

IV

1989 July 8

1932 October 3

1989 July 9

1932 October 15

V

1932 October 15, Still

1989 July 9, Still

Acknowledgments

A Note About The Author

Also by Andy Davidson and available from Titan Books

The Boatman’s Daughter

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The Hollow Kind

Print edition ISBN: 9781803362755

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803362762

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: February 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

The Hollow Kind: A Novel by Andy Davidson

Copyright © 2023 by Andy Davidson

Published by arrangement with MBD, an imprint ofFarrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. All rights reserved.

Andy Davidson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Crystal

Tell me a story of things hoped for, things dreamed.I will convince you, it is a story of horrors.

James GreenThe Nameless Traveler1939

1988

SEPTEMBER 7

SOMEHOW, HE LIVES. FIFTY-SIX YEARS AFTER THE EXPLOSION, what should have been the end of his story. The fight has all run out of him and his mind is gone, each step slow and hitching up the long gravel drive from motor home to house, a plastic gallon jug in hand, clear liquid sloshing inside. Leather boots laced tight over a pair of threadbare chinos. The old crescent ax dangles from his belt, its moon-shaped blade honed sharp again, though he can barely lift it, let alone swing it. Up the board steps, onto the farmhouse porch, where the door has long been nailed shut with old planks from the barn. With the tip of the ax, he struggles each board loose. When at last the heavy door swings inward, the house almost seems to give out a sigh. A moldy death rattle.

Inside, Redfern stops at the rotary phone on the hall table, hooks out 9–1–1 with a gnarled finger. To the dispatcher, he says, “It’s the goddamn Hindenburg out at Redfern Hill. Whole place is going up. Best send a truck.” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just drops the receiver in the cradle and walks to the map room at the end of the foyer, where he works his way into the junk, years upon years of garbage and forgotten things, the crinkled, rolled maps he once drew. Above his old oak desk, the twin crosscut saws bare their rusted teeth. A long time ago, they felled the trees that framed this house. He stands in the center of the room and takes it in, one last time. No sentiment, just weariness. He will not be sorry to see it burn.

He looks down at the jug in his trembling hand. No gloves today. No gloves ever again. The scars and the mottled, waxlike fingers are a remembrance of the one brave act he ever committed. Today, please God, he will be brave again. He will not fail. He thumbs the plastic cap from the jug, and the oily, piney smell of turpentine fills the room.

Beneath the floorboards, in the darkness of the root cellar, a faint, sickly light begins to stir.

He upturns the jug of turpentine over his head, the liquid spilling over his thin white pate, his ears, washing into his eyes. He cries out, his throat a rusty hinge, and fumbles a single kitchen match from his shirt pocket and, with clumsy fingers, strikes it on his thumbnail.

Below him, the light brightens, glitters like the sea, shot through with sun.

Nigh a century you’ve been here, old friend, old enemy, old god upon your throne of dirt and blood. Your voice, the wind in the pines to me. Are you weak from all these lean years of hunger, ill fed on possums and rats, snakes and toads? Will you beg me now, when you speak my name? Oh, if I had more time, I’d starve you right out of the goddamned earth—

The match flares between Redfern’s fingers, as out of the heaps of old furniture and twisted-up paper and columns of musty books, it rises, a dark blur coalescing into blue gingham and brown curls, those eyes like glowing sapphires, smell of pine and loam. It speaks: “Papa.”

A voice that breaks loose a lifetime of guilt and shame, like shards of glass in his chest.

“Have you come to hurt me, Papa?”

“You are not my child!” he cries, but still, the match flame wavers, as Redfern’s legs begin to tremble.

Creak of wood as the thing before him soughs and sighs, reaches out with a small, pale hand.

The match gutters.

The hand wavers just beyond his grizzled cheek and he feels the warmth of it.

A hungry heat.

He drops to his knees and in an instant its hands are no longer hands, its face something slick and wet. It’s unraveling, reknitting itself, little brown shoots that creep and grow, thin as monofilament. Licking tenderly at what few patches of his old man’s skin aren’t wet with turpentine, searching for a chink, a weak spot. Its blue eyes fusing into one, as Redfern opens his mouth to curse it, one last time, but suddenly, he has no air, no breath with which to scream, because his throat is full of plunging, eager tongues.

He fumbles at the ax, works it free of his belt, but it only clatters to the floor, one more piece of him gone, now, here in this room, where all charts and fortunes have led. Choking, he’s choking, he cannot breathe, he—

A light flares, blue and big as the sea. Filling the room as Redfern’s skull explodes with the sound of crashing waves and the high-pitched scream of gulls, and time becomes a collapsing star, a folded map. A tide washing in, washing out. He convulses. Feels a snarling in his chest cavity, searching out the seat of his regret—

(it was not supposed to end this way it was always going to end this way)

—where shoots with nodes, nodes with tendrils, tendrils with teeth that chew and chew and chew expand, bloom, and there is darkness now, at the edges of his sight. He closes his eyes, seeks out a memory. A girl of sixteen wearing an old cotton shirt and jeans, traipsing after him in a man’s boots through dense woods and wire grass to that dark and rotten place that is the source of all his family’s suffering. She is his granddaughter, sad and lonely and strong, and his final thought is her name.

Nellie.

Its teeth find the center of him.

From hell’s heart, to his own: no great distance, in the end.

I

1989

JUNE 30

NELLIE GARDNER STIFFENS IN THE LAWYER’S PLUSH CHAIR and thinks: Condescending prick.

Meadows rears back a behind a massive cherry desk, hands clasped at the base of his neck. He wears a gold watch and a short-sleeved pink polo and a pair of pleated khakis. Boat shoes, no socks. He smiles at her from a round, red face, knowing the answer to his question, which only makes his having asked it all the more infuriating.

“No,” she says, plucking at a torn thread on the knee of her jeans. “My husband won’t be joining us.”

“Just you and the boy then.”

In the waiting room, through the open door, Max—mop of brown hair, big hazel eyes, red Batman T-shirt—sits by a picture window, a Reader’s Digest from the coffee table open in his lap: “I Survived a Great White Shark Attack.” Behind him, through the window, the town square is empty and the sun falls in golden sheets over the courthouse steps.

Nellie crosses her leg over her knee. “Just us,” she says. Picking at the rubber heel of her high-top sneaker—

(Idjits fidget.)

Wade, always in her head.

She moves her hand to her lap, anchors it to the other. Doesn’t even think about it.

“How old is your son?”

“Eleven.”

“That’s just the best age, isn’t it?” The lawyer reaches a framed picture from his desk, hands it to her. “I’ve got two.”

Nellie pretends to be interested: Meadows in full camouflage with a scoped hunting rifle, hunkered in a pickup bed over a big buck, two boys seated on the tailgate, round apple cheeks thumb-smeared with blood, the deer’s head sprung between them.

The lawyer’s eyes, like two black ticks, crawl over her. He sees a girl—women are always girls to men like Meadows, Nellie thinks—long limbed and hollow eyed, peroxided hair going dark at the roots. Sleeve of a denim jacket riding up to flash the beginnings of a long white scar above her left wrist. She hands the picture back, smiling.

“One thousand thirty-three acres,” he says. “Be a chunk of change if you were to sell.” He rummages in a drawer for a Starlight mint. Doesn’t offer her one. The peppermint clicks and clacks in his mouth. “To be frank, Mrs. Gardner, the house needs work. Your grandfather hadn’t lived in it for over twenty years.”

“He was still on the property, though?”

“That’s right. The Winnebago. Conditions there, well, they weren’t much better.”

“I remember.”

“It so happens”—Meadows tears a piece of paper from a pad on his desk—“there is a highly motivated party who would like to make you an offer, whether you plan to sell or not.” He scratches out some numbers in pencil on a paper, then passes the note to her.

Nellie stares at it, poker-faced. She counts the zeros twice. Calmly, she pushes the offer away and speaks slowly, carefully, keeping the tremor from her voice: “I know it’s strange, Mr. Meadows, but for some reason, my grandfather wanted me to have Redfern Hill. I don’t think—”

“Have you considered property taxes? Won’t be cheap, that much acreage. There’s also the issue of land management. Forests like that require a certain vigilance to maintain their value. As for the house itself, the wiring’s ancient. I know the coal furnace was replaced with butane about thirty years back, but I can’t speak to the plumbing. And there is no air-conditioning, not even a window unit. Summer in Georgia? Just the money you’ll have to sink into the place to make it livable, you’ll burn through the cash he left you”—Meadows snaps his fingers—“like that.”

Max looks up over the Reader’s Digest.

“Fifty thousand dollars may seem like a fortune, but it really isn’t.”

Nellie swallows, face flushing red.

“Even your grandfather was scraping by, Mrs. Gardner. Living on peanut butter and saltine crackers. What you didn’t inherit, he sold off piecemeal, five, ten acres here, twenty acres there.”

“To your highly motivated party?”

Meadows smiles thinly, and the smile does not reach his eyes. He breathes deeply, folds his hands together over his blotter. “Corporations, mostly. I don’t know how much you know, but Mr. Redfern was not . . . well, a popular man here in Empire. Historically. I don’t mean to be indelicate, but a lot of bad blood got spilled early in his career, between landowners like your grandfather and certain folks around here who, let’s just say, didn’t think the terms of their agreements were fair.”

Meadows takes up his pen. He crosses out the old offer, writes a new one in its place. This time, he doesn’t bother to pass the paper back, just holds it up so she can read it. “That’s more than fair, ma’am. That’s generous.”

She drops her leg from her knee and sits forward in her chair. “You have keys for me.”

Meadows moves the peppermint around in his mouth, breathes heavily for a space of ten, fifteen seconds.

She waits him out.

He smacks the slip of paper with his middle finger. Crumples it, throws it in the trash. From a desk drawer he passes her a brown manila envelope, REDFERN KEYS printed in black Sharpie across the seal.

“There are no copies?”

He smiles thinly, cracks his mint between his molars. Ignores the question. “Should be the house, RV, plus a gate or two on the property. The main gate, you have to jiggle it a little bit.”

She stands.

In the waiting room, Max tosses his Reader’s Digest back onto a pile.

Meadows’s high-backed executive chair creaks as he pushes out of it. “Sorry I can’t drive out with you.” He glances at his watch. “Truth be told, I’m late for supper. But I went out this morning, made sure everything was switched on.”

I bet you did, Nellie thinks. Had a nice long look around, too, didn’t you? On behalf of your interested party. She offers her hand. “Thank you, Mr. Meadows. We’ll manage.”

The lawyer makes no secret of taking in, one last time, the scar that begins crosswise at Nellie’s bangled wrist.

He shakes her hand limply. “Welcome home, Mrs. Gardner.”

*   *   *

The Ranger rattles past a nail salon, a consignment store, a barber’s pole, still and dark. A shuttered movie theater, on its side a sun-faded mural, the town’s history mapped on cracked brick. A lumber mill with a huge whirling saw. So many pine trees. A family is picnicking on the banks, and Max twists in his seat: the father is stern faced and his hands are fists, his belt undone; the mother sits slump shouldered in a dowdy dress. On the blanket before her, like a beetle on its back, a diapered baby, screaming. The mother stares off, across the river, at the whirling blades of the saw.

“‘Mrs. Gardner,’” Nellie says.

They pass an Amoco with broken windows and Nellie points and says she used to buy cigarettes there, after school.

“How old were you?” Max asks.

“Not old enough.”

A cluster of mobile homes drifts past, backyard clotheslines still as death. A boy in a weed-split parking lot bounces a red, white, and blue basketball. Rusting cotton trailers snagged with rotten cotton. Wrecks in driveways, pink and green asbestos siding, little tin awnings. A stand of concrete-block apartments where a woman in a housecoat sits on her porch, shelling peas into a bowl.

Soon, they pass out of Empire into a patchwork of farmland and pine thickets, a world made molten by the dipping sun.

Max wilts into his seat, thinking of home back in South Carolina, how it is not home anymore. He thinks of his stuff in the pickup’s bed, as much as they were able to carry: a suitcase full of clothes, a laundry basket wrapped in a black trash bag and filled with G.I. Joe and Star Wars toys, a plastic Batmobile, a collection of Little Golden Books. Lord of the Rings paperbacks and a dozen cheap movie novelizations he’s read three times over. In a cardboard box, the lid taped with silver duct tape, a stack of spiral-bound Meads dotted with stickers from movies and cartoons. A sketchbook and pencil box. A Swiss Army knife. A Panasonic VCR trailing cables and half a dozen TK 120 tapes labeled in his own small, adult hand. The Karate Kid. Gremlins. Jaws.

All Nellie brought was a duffel bag, stuffed with whatever underwear and jeans and T-shirts she’d managed to grab from her bedroom chest. Before she woke him. Before she took him.

I was kidnapped, Max thinks.

But that’s silly. A mom can’t kidnap her own kid.

Can she?

*   *   *

A galvanized-steel gate bars the road onto the property. They get out of the Ranger to a blue-hour chorus of crickets. No mailbox, only a road sign knocked into the ditch and overgrown with kudzu: REDFERN ROAD. Tractor chain coils around the gate post, secured with a heavy padlock. Beyond the gate, a dirt road curves away into the wooded gloom. Max looks over his shoulder, to where the blacktop stretches east and west, no houses in sight, just a herd of cows lowing in the pasture across the road, white runners of mist creeping out from the trees. The air is warm and light with the scent of bushhogged field grass.

“How far is the house from the road?”

“About a mile,” Nellie says. “Let’s see those keys.”

Max opens the envelope and turns out a blue plastic key fob. A teardrop, stamped GEORGIA LAND & TIMBER, four keys on the ring, three small and one large labeled with Scotch tape and Bic-writ letters small and crooked: house.

“Do the honors,” Nellie says.

Max bends to the lock. Tries one of the smaller keys. Tries another. It slides in, but it won’t turn at all.

“You gotta jiggle it,” Nellie says.

He presses his lips together and, after a second or two, the padlock springs open and the chain rattles free of the fence and drops in a heap in the grass.

Nellie gets into the pickup. Max tugs open the gate, metal scudding over uneven gravel, and when the truck is through, he pulls the gate shut and wraps the chain back around it. He pockets the key and stares ahead, beyond the reach of the Ranger’s headlights, the way veiled in shadow. The pickup’s taillights bathe him in red. He remembers a snatch of song, has to still his hands from stuttering out the rhythm on his thighs: A big dark forest . . . can’t go over it . . . can’t go under it . . .

Nellie thumps her arm on the door, calls back, “Wagons ho!”

He runs to get in.

*   *   *

She drives slowly. For a while, the ruts are deep, Bahia grass between them whispering against the Ranger’s chassis. The road narrows and the trees thicken overhead into a canopy that blacks out an already darkening sky. Yellow POSTED notices are hammered into the pines. Ahead, there’s a turnout on the right, barred by a second chained gate, a NO TRESPASSING sign.

“That’s the road to the old turpentine mill,” Nellie says.

Max shifts in his seat to watch the gate recede as they drive on.

The woods rise up around them, tree roots breaking through high shoulders of red clay. They crest a rise and Nellie takes her foot off the gas. Far ahead, down the hill, the slope bottoms out into a shallow creek bed, and the road, briefly, becomes a wash of pine straw and limbs. She downshifts and they roll to a stop and idle.

“Can we get over that?” Max says.

Nellie does the math. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t. It’s dark, they’re alone. There’s a ratty motel back on the bypass, near the old tire factory. Been there since she was a girl. But she’s not sure they can even afford that. Their cash is almost gone, whatever’s left of a twenty after truck-stop cheeseburgers in Brunswick. In the envelope Meadows gave her, there’s only a bank executive’s business card. No checkbook, not even temporaries. She has no credit cards. All of those are in Wade’s name and Wade’s wallet, back in South Carolina.

“How does a shark stay alive?” she asks the boy.

“It keeps moving.”

She fastens her seat belt. A quick, decisive click.

Max does the same.

Nellie puts one hand on the gearshift, pops the clutch, and stamps on the gas.

They hit the creek bed and the back tires slew and the wheel jerks in Nellie’s hands. Max grabs his seat belt and clings to it, and for a brief, perilous second, Nellie feels the truck slow, spin, begin to claw the earth. Time for a single breath, as the pine limbs hang up beneath the truck and the back goes soft in the wet sand, but then the little Ford chews its way up and out of the creek. Nellie lets off the gas near the top of the hill, struggles to get the shifter out of third. The road rises as she glances down—

“Mom, look out!”

Her head whips up.

Something huge looms in her headlights.

Nellie yanks the wheel, tromps the brake.

The pickup slides. The world pitches. A metal crunch from the right rear fender and a slow-motion blur of trees, and suddenly the truck’s rear axle drops into the ditch and the engine dies and they come to a teeth-rattling halt, facing back the way they came from in a cloud of their own orange wake.

She moves without thought, all instinct. Clicking free of her seat belt, hands roving over Max’s arms, shoulders, the crown of his head. “I’m okay,” he says, pushing her away. “Really, Mom, I’m fine.”

Ahead, the dust settles and they can see the big, dark shape of something crumpled in the road.

“What is it?” the boy breathes.

She fishes a Maglite from beneath the bench seat. “Stay in the car.” The truck’s door gives a dry squall as she steps out, sneakers sinking in a drift of gravel. Overhead, the sky is a peach-gold swath where the night’s first bats are swooping. Whatever she’s hit, it’s huge and hulking in the high beams. Nellie walks slowly toward it, a cold sweat beading her scalp. She clicks on the flashlight and her breath catches in her chest. Its eyes are dark and glassy, its claws long and obsidian-gleaming. Blood in its nostrils, flecks of crimson in the fur of its muzzle.

“Mom?”

Max stands outside the pickup, silhouetted in front of its grille.

“It’s a bear,” she calls back. “A goddamn bear, Jesus Christ.”

The boy comes running.

Nellie catches him. “Whoa, kiddo. Whoa. Stay back.”

“Is it dead?”

“Looks like.”

He inches toward it, bending low. Reaching.

“Max,” she warns, but the boy runs his hand through the thick wiry fur.

“It’s a black bear,” he says, voice hushed.

Back at the truck, she sink-steps into the ditch to check the damage to the fender. The panel is caved, but the tire is good, so they climb back into the cab and Nellie cranks the engine, but when she puts the truck in gear, it only spits gravel. Stuck. She hooks the shifter into neutral and the engine cuts out. She puts her head in her hands, closes her eyes. Kneads the space between them as the silence ticks. From the dark woods, a bright sawing of crickets, followed by the low drumming of frogs in the distant river. It’ll be full dark in ten minutes, and they’ve come half a mile. At least another half to go—

“We can’t just leave him in the road,” Max says.

Nellie kicks out of the truck and snags the boy’s suitcase from the Ranger’s bed. “We’ll have to walk the rest of the way.”

Max slides after her, across the seat, hangs in the door. “But what about the bear?”

“Goddamn it, Max, I can’t do anything about the bear!”

He shrinks back into the cab.

Nellie stares up at the night sky. Swallows it, this anger. It’s not the boy’s to take.

Damn you, Wade Gardner.

She reaches into the cab and takes Max’s hand. He jerks away, crossing his arms to face forward, eyes locked on the distant hump of the broken creature in the truck’s headlights. She reaches again, takes his wrist, firmly, then eases up. “Bring one thing,” she tells him. “The house isn’t far, but we don’t want to haul more than we can carry. We’ll come back tomorrow for the rest.”

Please, God, let there be power up there.

Nellie tilts the seat forward, grabs her duffel, unzips it. She opens the boy’s suitcase and transfers his toothbrush and toothpaste into her bag. Max, meanwhile, climbs into the pickup’s bed and fishes around in his cardboard box, comes up with his sketchbook and pencil box. These, and Nellie’s purse from the seat, go into the duffel, and she zips it all up. Max asks if he can carry the light. She hands it to him. Shouldering her bag, she reaches through the open driver’s door to switch off the Ranger’s headlamps, and there she hesitates, staring at the dead bear in the road.

“Mom? You okay?”

She cuts the lamps, and everything is lost to the night.

Max clicks on the flashlight and they start walking.

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later, they’re breathing heavy, sneakers crunching on the gravel, the road a steady incline. Overhead, stars wink out behind a wall of clouds. An owl sings from the tangled brush, stopping Max in his tracks. He’s heard owls before, but never so loud, so close. He pictures the Great Owl in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, yellow eyes peering out through a mask of cobwebs. That huge, shuffling girth.

“How did your grandfather die?” he asks.

“They said his heart gave out.”

Max thinks of his aunt on his dad’s side. How they’d visited her in the hospital last year in Myrtle Beach, then got ice cream at the Boardwalk. A treat to drive away the memories of that close, dim room, the wires and tubes and needles trailing out of her. Dad’s idea. It hadn’t worked. “Was he in the hospital, like Aunt Violet?”

“No. He died suddenly. At home.”

“In the house?”

“Yeah. But he had a motor home. He was living in that.”

“Why wasn’t he living in the house?”

It takes a few seconds for her to answer: “Maybe it was too big, too lonely.”

“Where is he buried?”

“There’s a family cemetery, somewhere on the property.”

Max glances beyond the flashlight’s path, into the black pines standing against the blue night. Somewhere out there, among these trees, are graves. Dead people. Rotting in boxes.

Nellie, too, goes quiet. Not one of her easy silences, like when Max used to lie on the floor of her studio and color while she painted, and it was raining outside and David Bowie was on the radio. No, this is a different, darker silence. Heavier. A smothering blanket.

He thinks of the spare bedroom in their little blue house in Conway, dozens of Nellie’s paintings propped along the wall, large and small. Covered in dark greens and violent reds and pools of black. Crumbling brick buildings, vacant lots, a city park where she used to take him to play. Empty swings in shafts of sunlight, a trash can on its side, spilling garbage. “It’s not really the park though,” Max had said, about that painting. “The park is a happy place. Isn’t it?”

Her answer had been as mysterious to him as the painting itself: “The places I see, kiddo, are up here.” She’d tapped her head.

“You should try painting happy trees,” he said, “like the man on TV.”

Nellie’s answer was to grab him and make pig noises against his neck, and he’d wriggled away, laughing. But later, he was still thinking about it, how that painting made him never want to go to that park again.

*   *   *

They walk on, rocks rolling beneath their shoes. Thunder, to the west. In the dark, his mother is little more than a shape beside him, a presence without form. “How big is this place, anyway?” he asks, just to hear her voice. To ward off the eerie feeling they’re two balloons untethered and drifting into the night.

“About a thousand acres.”

“A thousand acres,” he says softly. “And it’s all like this?”

“Most of it.”

“You used to come here, when you were a kid?”

“No. I spent some time here, one summer. That’s it.”

“How long?”

“Four days.” A pause. Then: “I ran away from home.”

Max lets this sink in. Once, he’d run away from home himself, but he’d only gotten as far as the grapevine at the grammar school, six blocks away. Mom and Dad were yelling in the living room and there was the sound of glass breaking, so he packed his little blue suitcase with the train conductor on the side, the one that said I’M GOING TO GRANDMA’S HOUSE, and climbed out his bedroom window and through a crack in the board fence and down a narrow dirt alley that spilled him onto Cleveland Street. It was spring and the grapevine was greening, so he slipped in among the shadows and the bees buzzing with their fairy wings and sat on his suitcase and thought about where he was going to go. But he was already hungry and the only place he could think of was the Gay Dolphin at Myrtle Beach, where they sold snow globes he liked to look at. So he doesn’t ask her why she ran away. He only wants to know how old she was, and how far she got.

She tells him she was sixteen.

“Sixteen?”

“If I’m lying, I’m dying.”

“So you spent four days here when you were a teenager, and he left you his house and a thousand acres?”

“It’s a mystery to me, too, kiddo.”

“He must have loved you.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Did you go back home after that?”

“No.”

“How far’d you get, then, before you did?”

A tightness in her voice. “I’m still running, kiddo.”

*   *   *

The road curves sharply, and suddenly, he feels it. Like a dip in temperature before a summer storm. They’re close. Just beyond the bend, the next unseen spill of thorns and briars, the black trees will break—

Ahead, a pair of canted pines blot out the violet sky. They angle over the road as it becomes a long drive between grassy fields, off to the right the shape of a big dilapidated barn. To the left, beneath a huge hardwood, is the long, boxy shape of an old Winnebago, overtaken by the grass. The drive rambles uphill and hooks around like the eye of a sewing needle, and there, silhouetted against the evening sky, where lightning dances, is their destination.

Max stops in his tracks, as if the old house rearing up before them has teeth, claws, is a thing alive. A dragon in the midst of a long slumber. It sees us. A fresh sweat springs out beneath his clothes. Above the roof, bats loose themselves like stones from slings.

Ahead of him, Nellie turns. Calls out to him. “You okay?”

Max’s tongue is dry in his mouth. It’s inexplicable, the dread that freezes him, shrivels his scrotum, makes his legs weak. Doesn’t she feel it?

Pressure in his skull, building—

“Max. Max, are you okay?”

His ears pop, and the whole night goes silent.

Beneath his feet, an unexpected shudder, as if the ground itself were stirring.

He reaches up, touches his nose. A single drop of blood trickles out.

Nellie walks back to him, takes the flashlight, and kneels before him. She shines it between them, so the light spills up, onto both their faces, and he can see she’s scared. Not of the house, but of him. Of his forever bleeding nose. Bleeding since February, anyway. She’s scared of what it means: that it could all be wrong. That she could be wrong. That she hasn’t saved him—or herself—from anything.

Quickly, Nellie tugs her T-shirt up from her waist and wipes the blood from his face. “Tilt your head,” and he does. “It’s just a little nosebleed. Nothing new, right?”

No. Nothing new. He gets them all the time. Ever since that day, outside the garage. With Dad. He tastes blood, spits. Closes his eyes and imagines a bright and sunny place, a beach with broken shells to pick up and sift through. A shore where waves roll in that steady, easy way, where gulls cry and maybe a dog barks, goes splashing into the surf. A place where all pictures painted should be happy—

The bleeding stops. He puts a finger beneath his nose, drops his head.

“Good?” she asks.

He takes a deep and calming breath.

Lightning flashes in the clouds as Nellie Gardner turns and looks up at the house. “Well, this is it, kiddo. We’re here.”

*   *   *

Two mercury-vapor night lamps light the property, one near the drive at the corner of the barn, the other farther up, behind the house. Nellie and Max pass under the first of these, above them a swirling galaxy of bugs and moths. Over Nellie’s left shoulder, the road is bordered by thick johnsongrass, a barbwire fence, and beyond the fence a hayfield that doesn’t look to have been cut in decades.

They walk up the long drive, to the eye of the needle, where Nellie shines the flashlight along the front-porch balustrade, tracing its crooked, rickety line until the porch wraps out of sight. Tall windows gleam darkly. Two huge columns of mortared river rock flank the high brick steps, a riot of leggy azaleas on either side. She plays the beam higher, over the tin roof, to the second-story windows and, above these, a single attic dormer.

Beside her, Max sniffs back a lingering trickle of blood.

She starts up the steps, wide and steep. At the top, Nellie passes the light over a porch ceiling that might have once been haint blue, lets the beam rest in the center pane of the glass transom above the front door. Stretched over the glass, a web of cocooned, desiccated bugs. At the center of the web, a fat brown orb weaver.

“Got those keys?”

The boy doesn’t move. He’s staring up at the spider.

“Max?” she says gently.

Slowly, eyes locked on the transom, he fishes the key fob from his pocket.

She trades him the Maglite and jerks the screen door loose from its swollen frame.

Overhead, the spider retreats to some unseen reach.

The front door is heavy, windowless, the dead bolt stubborn, and Nellie’s heart leaps when the key refuses to turn. If they can’t get in, she’ll have to break a window; otherwise, it’s a long walk back to the Ranger to spend the night in the hot, cramped cab, and oh, wouldn’t that just be the perfect end to a perfect day—

But then the lock clicks and the door swings inward.

Nellie takes back the light and shines it down the long, central hallway, over wide-board walls painted white. A coatrack, empty of coats. Hardwood floors of heart pine, wide cracks between the dark planks, runners of dust like cotton rows in each.

Max stares over his shoulder, back down the narrow, rutted lane that brought them here.

A sudden, oppressive wave of loneliness washes over Nellie. The two of them here, in their little island of light, could be the last two people in the world. Max’s fingers—light and warm—interlace with hers. He’s a sponge, Wade once said. Soaks up everyone’s misery. Hate flares, briefly, in her chest. That old blue flame that never dies. But then she remembers: there are discoveries to be made here, in this house of their own. And those discoveries are theirs, and theirs alone. Wade will have no part in them. Nellie squeezes Max’s hand.

Two deep breaths, and into the house they go.

*   *   *

The foyer opens into a long hall like a throat, cavernous rooms on either side. At the far end, a shadowy kitchen, its windows bright with lightning. Between the two rooms on their left, a narrow set of stairs climbs for the second floor, carpet tacked down over it like a threadbare tongue. The balusters are square and plain, and the light fixtures overhead are hammered out of brass and tin. Doors hang on creaky hinges and the walls look slightly out of true.

Nellie sets her duffel on the floor. Near the molding is an old-fashioned rotary switch. She turns it, and overhead, a pendant flares, a single dead wasp suspended in the frosted globe of the lamp. A spindly antique table stands just inside the door, atop it a green telephone. Nellie picks it up and hears a dial tone. She sets the phone back in its cradle, runs a finger over the tabletop, rolling up a rime of dust.

In the first room to the left of the front door, a dull candelabra lights the ghostly shapes of a sheeted antique sofa, an upright piano. No other tables, no chairs. A rock fireplace dominates the wall opposite the door, above it a hand-hewn mantelpiece. Carved in relief and stained darkly against lighter wood are the jagged, saw-toothed shapes of pine trees.

“This is the parlor,” she says to Max.

They drop their bags by the sofa.

Max goes straight to the mantel, traces a finger along the lines of the carved wood.

Nellie hears a creak, turns, and sees the door across the hall drifting open. Some trick of pressure, gravity, yet she goes to it right away, as if invited. Remembering the colored squares of glass in the tall windows, leaded panes that caught the sun and turned the room into a kaleidoscope of yellows, reds, and greens. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of red cedar line the walls, sheeted over, brimming with books and cobwebs. A tall, crude ladder leans in a corner, no rail or tracks to hook it on, just bits of pine hammered together with square-cut nails. Nellie shines the Maglite around. As with the parlor, there’s not much furniture in Redfern Hill’s library, just an old wingback chair covered in a dirty towel, the arm spitting stuffing, beside it a floor lamp, its antique globe home to a spider. Lightning flickers through a crack in heavy, dark drapery. The windows, colored or clear, are all hidden. Nellie’s light falls on a Victorian writing desk at the east-facing window. A woman’s desk. Euphemia, Nellie thinks. Her grandmother. Long dead before Nellie was born. I stood here that summer. This was her room—

“Mom?” Max, ashen faced, stands in the hallway. “I thought I had to pee. I don’t now.” He points to a door just down from the library, a narrow bathroom.

When Nellie steps inside it, the smell hits her like a hammer. Something foul, something dead. One hand over her mouth, she toggles the light switch.

“It doesn’t work,” Max says. He clutches his spiral-bound sketchbook to his chest like a shield.

Nellie’s flashlight catches a jagged hole in the ceiling of the small room, like the empty socket of a tooth, a tangle of wires hanging down, each wire a curl of shadow. She plays the beam down to the sink, the toilet in the corner. A chain pull with a black iron box mounted high on the wall, two black pipes running down, corrosion at the joints, the toilet itself like some weird toadstool, sprung out of the cracked tile floor. The seat is up.

She gags, one hand over her mouth. “Jesus.”

Inside, a rat spoons the shallow bowl, half-submerged in rust-colored water. Its eyes are empty sockets, its lips drawn back from its teeth. Spindly fibers—mold, hair, guts—trail and corkscrew beneath the bloated tuber of its body.

“Give me a sheet of paper,” she manages, stuffing her face in the crook of her elbow.

Max tears a handful of pages from his sketchbook.

Swallowing her gorge, holding her breath, doubled-up sheets of 60 lb. 400 series in hand, she reaches, slowly, into the bowl. Eyes fixed on a fat gray tail, curling up the porcelain.

*   *   *

At the parlor window, Max draws back the heavy drapes to watch Nellie in the bright, electric day of the lightning, rat in hand, arm thrust away from her, plank straight, as she heads for the barbwire fence. Beyond it the hayfield and the old, forlorn motor home slumped beneath the boughs of a black walnut tree. What was it like to be an old man and live all alone in an old RV? To die alone, too. Would his own dad die alone, now that he and Nellie were gone? Max’s stomach churns, just thinking about it. In the lightning flashes, he sees his mother toss the rat over the barbwire and start back for the house.

A peal of thunder causes the sheeted piano behind him to hum a single, faint note.

It makes him whirl, raises gooseflesh on his arms, until he realizes the phantom note was a trick of the thunder. Like glass shuddering in a window.

Slowly, he crosses the room and tugs the sheet from the piano to the floor.

The casing is black, flawless, gilded with the letters of a German name he can’t pronounce. He runs a hand over yellowed keys and plunks his index finger down far left of middle C. A bass note thrums in the silence of the house.

The front door opens.

He takes his finger away. Listening. There’s a sound, a faint scrabbling in the walls. Brief, then gone. What moves in the innermost parts of a house, Max wonders, the places we never see? Scuttling among wire and web?

From the parlor door, Nellie says, “Let’s check out the other rooms.”

He turns back to the piano, strikes a key an octave lower, but the key is broken, makes only a soft clack. “Sure.”

*   *   *

Moving deeper into the old farmhouse, Nellie remembers. The summer of 1975. Wandering through the house, her grandfather off in the woods, who knew where. Fourteen years later, the place is just as hot and stifling and empty of life, but there’s something else now, something worse: it feels as if each room has been ransacked, pillaged. Stripped?

Devoid. That’s the word she’s looking for. Each room is devoid of . . . something.

In the dining room, for example, down the hall from the bathroom—

(rat-room)

—there is no table and there are no chairs, just four varnished legs in the center of the floor like gnawed bones in an animal’s den.

At the end of the hall is a cased opening into the kitchen, where the hardwood floor gives way to uneven brick. Nellie turns on the overhead light, a whale-oil lamp wired for a single bulb. Here are cabinets missing doors. Iron brackets studding the walls, empty of shelves. An old Frigidaire stands unplugged in a corner, the door cracked open and spilling a litter of dead bugs. The only remaining evidence that once this was someone’s kitchen? A Formica table and two chairs in front of a picture window.

A peal of thunder—getting closer now—rattles the glass.

Like astronauts exploring a derelict spacecraft, they drift on, back into the hallway. On their right, a door so narrow Nellie misses it. Max doesn’t. He pulls the metal latch, and the door swings open on a closet not much wider than the boy’s shoulders. Nellie shines her flashlight into the space. A pantry. Shelves missing here, too. A few ancient cans of Vienna sausages scattered on the floor.

The door to the room behind the stairs—the last of the downstairs rooms they’ve yet to enter—is shut. Nellie’s about to open it when Max asks, “What about that?” and points at the back of the stairs.

A little half door is cut into the boards there, held shut with a simple eye hook and latch.

Nellie stares at the tiny door for a long time. Ghost of a memory: her grandfather’s gloved hand falling on her shoulder as she stood on this very spot, fourteen years ago. Like her feet had grown roots. Staring at the door. Heart pounding. Listening. Listening for what? For a—

(Did you hear it?)

—voice.

“That’s the cellar.” She looks away.

*   *   *

She turns the doorknob of the last downstairs room, half expecting it to be locked. But it swings in with a long creak. Lightning stutters through tall, bare windows, revealing misshapen, unnatural forms. As Nellie fumbles for the rotary switch, a thought skitters through Max’s head: This room will tell the story.

Overhead, a wooden candelabra flares to life.

Nellie gasps.

Max says, “Holy shit.” Then: “Sorry, Mom.”

“It’s okay. You took the words right out of my mouth.”

The room is a labyrinth of junk. Heaps of cardboard boxes stacked three and four high along the walls, packed with screws and rusty nails and electrical cords, lengths of chain and bits of twine, hoops of metal. Scattered across a long, wide table at the center of the room are upended drawers of forks, spoons, knives. The kitchen’s missing wooden shelves and cabinet doors, books from the bookcases in the library, strewn over the table and floor. Crates of dishes, pots, pans. A stack of big band records, a Victorian phonograph, wire egg baskets filled with apothecary bottles. Two rosewood armchairs, broken and gutted. The dining room’s missing table, upended against a window. Beneath the windows: six plastic five-gallon buckets, each filled, inexplicably, with pine cones. A jagged hole in the wall, where the boards have been pried loose, frame wood visible through the gaps, pearled with resin, and tufts of vermiculite insulation.

“Was it like this before?” When Nellie doesn’t answer, Max looks at her, and finally, she shakes her head, eyes fixed on the floor.

She bends over, picks up something from beneath a heap of old magazines.

An ax. Short handled. Its blade curved like a crescent moon.

Along the inner wall, behind a fall of beer cans and trash bags filled with pine straw, is a high, unfinished shelf of cubbyholes, each packed with rolled paper. Max touches the end of a roll, the paper yellowed, brittle. “What are these?”

“Maps. Architectural plans. Drawings.”

“Drawings of what?”

“Forests. The land.”

They forge a path to the wall that abuts the piano room, to an old oak desk heaped with ancient issues of the Empire Courier and The Baxter County Shopper. National Geographic, Life. The Georgia Journal of Land Management. Fixed to the wall above the desk is a framed map, hand drawn on yellowing paper, and above this, two massive crosscut saws. Max has seen similar saws at craft fairs and antique malls, either dull and rusted or painted with barns and cows to look friendly. But these are neither friendly nor dull: both gleam as new as the day they were forged, each a shark’s grin of teeth. Looking at them, he can almost hear the crunch of bone, see the cloud of blood.

Nellie uses the crescent ax to rake the newspapers and magazines off the desk onto the floor. Max dances back as they all come avalanching over the side.

“Mom? What the heck?”

But she’s already turned and is reaching up to lift the big framed map from its nail. It’s heavy, unwieldy. She wobbles it down to the desktop and lays it flat. Bends over it to brush dust and blow it clear. Max sidles up beside her and she drapes an arm over his shoulders. “Your great-grandfather drew this. It’s more than just a map, see?” She points to the house and barn, the hayfield. “See the details?”

Little chickens in back of the barn.

Tiny rocks stippled on the porch columns.

“To the south, the turpentine mill.” She points to inky-black smoke rising from the distillery’s chimney, where it’s nestled in a grove of hickory and sycamore. “You can practically count the bricks in the furnace.”

A cluster of men are rolling barrels up a ramp, and it all reminds Max of the picture books he loved as a child, cross-sections of buildings where little cartoon people live their lives, watching TV and cooking meals and reading books with their feet up. Turn the page and there they are again, in miniature, their stories each but one small part of the story of a whole city, where a few streets over, firefighters are saving kittens from trees and policemen are arresting bank robbers.

“This is Camp Road,” Nellie says. “Along the river.” Here, a mule pulls a cart of steel-hooped casks out of a grove of longleaf pines, where tiny men in overalls are hacking at the trees. “They’re cutting cat faces. They call them that because—”

“Because they look like cats,” Max says, peering closer.

Nellie traces Camp Road with her finger, to a cluster of cabins in a clearing, where there are cook fires and pigs in pens and a girl at a well, her hair drawn back and tied.

“Isn’t it beautiful,” Nellie says.

*   *   *

Heading up the narrow staircase is like passing through a blast furnace. At the top, Max turns another rotary switch, and the walls along the low-ceilinged corridor flare to life, studded with high brass sconces. Nellie tucks the Maglite into the waistband of her jeans and hangs her denim jacket on the newel at the head of the stairs, then pinches her T-shirt beneath her breasts to flap a breeze. Four bedrooms here, two on the left, two on the right—an exact replica of the first-floor footprint. A long master bath at the head of the stairs connects to the master bedroom.

“Mom? I’ve gotta pee. For real this time.”

She finds the light in the bathroom. Mold streaks the walls and there’s mildew in the sink, but nothing dead in the toilet or tub. “All clear,” she tells him, then walks on through to the master bedroom.

A four-poster bed dominates the room, at its foot a wide cedar chest. An oak armoire stands on the inside wall, a dressing table beneath the window. Both are sheeted, cobwebs like bunting across the ceiling. Nellie draws the sheet away from the dressing table, finds only dust rings beneath—shapes of perfume bottles, a mirrored tray, a hairbrush. All missing. Removed. The fireplace mantel is bare of trinkets, and the windows that look out on the yard are shuttered. She opens the armoire. It’s empty, save for half a dozen wire hangers.

On the far wall, an adjoining door opens into a nursery. Two cribs in clear view of the poster bed. A framed child’s prayer hangs over them, embroidered on a square of fabric. “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” A prayer Nellie’s own mother taught her when she was little. A prayer she sometimes still recites, on nights when her mind cannot rest. Wade in bed beside her. If I should die before I wake—

Briefly, she feels a phantom itch from wrist to elbow. Her scar.

In addition to the cribs, she remembers a hutch of folded quilts, a floor scattered with building blocks, a rocking horse made of pine. But now the nursery is as barren as the downstairs dining room—

At the far end of the hallway, the toilet flushes.

Nellie rubs her arm, crosses to the bedroom opposite the nursery.

Immediately, she sees the rag doll on the floor. Hair of yellow yarn in pigtails, black button eyes. She bends to pick it up, brushes the dust from its plaid skirt, holds it to her chest. A room as plain as all the others. Bare board walls and an iron-frame bedstead, its feather mattress sagging. Twin hurricane lamps on a pair of rough-hewn bedside tables, each furred with a decades-old layer of dust.

She walks through an adjoining door into the next room and realizes, suddenly, what bedroom she’s in. She clutches the rag doll to her breast, heart beating so hard she can hear it in her temples. She had the same reaction when she was sixteen—

A deer’s head is mounted above the armoire, a coonskin cap dangling from a horn. Strangely, the narrow bed is made, an afghan folded across its foot. A row of hand-painted metal soldiers stands in a crooked line along the sill of the room’s one window, cowboys and Indians, sailors and doughboys. A pair of boy’s boots—scuffed and worn—are set upright beside an old cedar chest. The laces, she remembers, how thick they were, how stubborn.

“Whose room was this?” Max, from the doorway.

“My dad’s,” she says, trying to imagine the boy who once sat at the little rolltop desk in the corner, where a crooked stack of canvas-backed primers waits to be opened. Hank Redfern, the maudlin drunk, once her son’s age? Impossible, it seems. The room offers no explanations, no insights. She looks down at the doll in her hands. “He had a baby sister. Her name was Agatha. I think it was her room, next door.”

Max crosses to the window, looks out where the porch roof extends, the branches of a huge magnolia tree within reach of the eave. A sudden clap of thunder rattles the glass, and in the lightning that follows Max says, “Hey, what is that out there? It’s huge!”

“You mean the fire tower,” Nellie says.

She flicks the twin latches, raises the sash, and together, they peer up at a latticework of steel even taller than the great magnolia, Max’s eyes gleaming with the light of a boy doing boy geometry, figuring angles and squares and degrees of daring. It’s a light she hasn’t seen in a long time. A light Wade Gardner had all but snuffed—

“When do I get to meet your dad?”

Nellie stiffens a little—she can’t help it—then kisses the top of his head roughly. Wishing, briefly, for a world without the burden of fathers. A world especially made for mothers and sons. “We’ll see.”

They stand together in the storm-cooled breeze, waiting for the rain.

*   *   *

Later.

The lights in the house are off, save a mismatched pair of midcentury lamps Max brought into the parlor and set on the floor. He’d found them in the map room. He’d promised, through a yawn, to find tables, come the morning. Now, he sleeps on the sofa with his head on Nellie’s thigh, and Nellie sits staring at the contents of the manila envelope, emptied onto the hardwood floor: deed to the house and property plus a small stack of papers signed and resigned and notarized, one house key, one RV key, two gate keys, and two business cards, the lawyer’s and one belonging to a VP at First Empire Savings and Loan.

Nellie opens her purse, takes stock of what’s there: a tube of lipstick, a compact, her driver’s license, three emergency tampons, and nine bucks in cash.

First thing in the morning, get the truck out of the ditch.

After that, burn up the last of her cash on coffee, orange juice, and Egg McMuffins. Then the bank.

A plan, but still: she can’t sleep.

Nothing new. It’s been this way for months, every night lying awake in bed as if some terrible tide’s at work in her, drawing her in, drawing her out, a ceaseless, restless stirring. The fear of waking to a new day only to find it’s the same as yesterday. A prisoner in her own skin. That old chestnut. But things are different now, aren’t they? Here, she isn’t a prisoner. It’s no palace, sure, just a farmhouse built when the century was new. But it feels huge, if only because her own world has been so small for so long. How many shitty two-bedroom apartments and rental houses had she and Wade lived in, over the years? Once, when things were good and he still had his job in Savannah, they had a trailer, before South Carolina—

Scritch-scritch-scritch.

The sound comes from inside the wall, near the fireplace.

Scritch-scritch-scritch. Like the twisting of a pencil in a child’s pencil sharpener.

She sighs. Cocks an ear at the air. She could get up, sure. Investigate. Press her ear to the boards. But Max is fast asleep and she’s tired and under no illusions about the number of rodents she’s going to have to deal with in the coming weeks and months. Mice, squirrels, trapped birds. Bats in the chimneys. Suddenly, she feels very small and alone in this old house, in a soft circle of lamplight she and her boy have set down like fire in a cave.

One last scritch, then the sound stops.

She twines her fingers in Max’s hair.

Max’s sketchbook is on the floor, beneath the deed to Redfern Hill. She picks it up and flips through it. The first few pages are animal figures, copied in pencil from a how-to book she gave him a few years back. An elephant charging in a flurry of dust, head and shoulders of a tiger. Childlike, but with an eye for what counts, those places where expression and heart reside. Did she bring his oil pastels? She can’t remember. Back home—

(Back in South Carolina, you mean, because here is home now, Nellie.)

—his art supplies were stored in trunks and boxes and closet bins. She’d grabbed what she could. The last few pages are all He-Men and Beast Men, superheroes flying, leaping, crouching, punching. Muscles and capes, swords and axes, the odd machine gun: aggression channeled from the heart to the fist in service of good. A boy’s fantasy of manhood.

The reality?

Wade Gardner.

What had she told Wade, about her past? Even now, was he lying awake, dredging those long-ago, late-night conversations from the early months of their courtship? Stuff about her mother, her father? Was it enough to find them? She doesn’t think so. Several months back, she’d found Meadows’s letter in a stack of bills less than half an hour before Wade got home from teaching. Just long enough to read it, throw up, read it again, and hide it inside the frame of a painting, a portrait of Max at six or seven. That’s when the sleepless nights began. When suddenly there were possibilities, choices, and with them all the traps and dangers of what could go wrong.

But what if Wade isn’t the problem anymore?

What if running with Max is just the first in a scree of mistakes, soon to become an avalanche that will bury them both?

(And when the dust settles, it’ll be you, Nervous Nellie, his own mother, standing at the edge of the cliff. The one who set it all tumbling down.)

Beneath her breath: “Bullshit.”

Life with Wade Gardner had been its own ten-year rock slide, hadn’t it, culminating in that awful day last February, a week or so after Meadows’s letter came, when she wasn’t home. The day of the Lesson. The day that made up her mind, once and for all, to get the hell out. She remembers how, that week, when Wade was home watching sports or grading papers or pounding out poems on his IBM Selectric, Max had spent hours on the swings in the backyard, nose stuck in some paperback he’d no doubt read ten times before, as if some new conflict could emerge in a story he already knew by heart. His nose and face still bruised and swollen. She thinks of all the things she wants for Max, has hoped he’ll have since the day he was born—

(Really, Nellie? Since the day he was born? Is that what we’re telling ourselves nowadays? Even when that long scar on your arm starts to itch, and you’d like nothing more than to make it a matched set, you’re still singing that tune?)

—but he’s already eleven, and eleven is a fulcrum, when the balance tips, and everything changes.

Just like it changed for her, here in Empire—

(Empire, I never said that name to Wade, did I?)

—when she was sixteen and her mother died and her father lost all hope at the bottom of a bottle. But here, now, in this house, this sanctuary, things will be different. Here—

(Will they?)

—she won’t make the same mistakes.

(Won’t you?)

Here. In her house.

She switches off the lamps, and soon after, sleep does find her, as outside, the storm rumbles on by, without shedding a single drop of rain. And somewhere in the dark of her dreams, she hears that sound again. Steady as the metronome of her own heart.

Scritch-scritch-scritch.