Rainshadow

Chapter 1

1

T he sprawling, bucolic farm on Anderson Island sat empty, decaying for years before there were whispers of a buyer. Flora tried to ignore them.

The subject was so painful. For almost ten years, Lavender Acres had been her happy place, her respite, her home away from home. What had started as weekly horseback riding lessons when she was eleven became her whole life, days spent cleaning stalls, polishing leather and brass in the tack room, even helping with the lavender harvest, working the roadside stand where Lisa sold bundled sprigs of the fragrant purple flower, infused oils, soaps, and closet sachets.

Flora had come to the farm on a field trip and had loved the horses, loved the charming gardens and the dramatic way the farm ended in a jagged cliffside that tumbled into the sea. More than the other children, she had lingered by their stalls, pressing her hand to their warm, velvet muzzles and whispering to them as they gazed at her with their huge dark eyes. Lisa had watched, then taken her by the hand and invited her into a stall.

“Here,” Lisa had said. “You can sit on her for a minute. She’s a good girl. She’ll let you sit up there all day long.”

The stall had smelled like fresh hay and the warm, earthy scent of the horse. When Lisa helped Flora back down, Flora had the distinct feeling of wanting to cry. The horse, solid and gentle, had soothed the jitter of anxiety she often felt skittering just under the surface of her skin. She wanted more of that calm, connected feeling.

Lisa had invited Flora to come back anytime. Flora couldn’t believe it. No one had ever noticed her before. She was quiet and small for her age, with mouse-colored hair and an unremarkable face, neither ugly nor beautiful. She did fine in school, not well enough to be praised or poorly enough to be in any trouble.

Maureen, Flora’s mother, had insisted she couldn’t afford horseback riding lessons, but agreed to take Flora out to meet with Lisa anyway. Maureen never passed on the opportunity to go to a rich person’s house. They had a car at that time, and drove together up the winding, cheerful driveway, flanked by lavender plants, and met with Lisa in her charming, shabby-chic living room, with its floral fabrics on the sofa, lace on the curtains, and a mason jar of fresh flowers on every surface.

“I would love to give Flora lessons if she can help me out with a few chores,” Lisa explained to Maureen. “I don’t do this for money. I’m retired. I need help more than anything.”

Maureen had looked at Lisa with narrow-eyed scrutiny. Lisa didn’t fit Maureen’s idea of what a rich person should be like, with her frayed barn coat and graying, undyed hair cut short in a bob and tucked neatly behind her ear. Maureen wore long, glittering beaded earrings and a silky, fluttery top in chartreuse. She crossed and uncrossed her long legs in their tight jeans and continuously brushed back her mane of bleached curls. Flora felt a vague embarrassment that she couldn’t explain. She had always thought her mother was beautiful and glamorous, but now, in front of Lisa, she wasn’t so sure. Lisa was exceedingly kind and polite, assuring Maureen once again that if Flora helped on the farm, her lessons would be free.

“Nothing is really for free,” Maureen said to Flora as they walked back to the car. “She’s either going to work you just like one of her horses, or there’s something else she wants from you.”

Two days later, Flora showed up for her first lesson. She was shaking with nerves right up until the moment when she climbed onto the back of the horse, in the covered, heated riding arena, Lisa holding the reins. Once in the saddle, a shimmering, wonderful calm fell upon her. There was something sturdy and solid about being on a horse, something that made the chaos of life, the anxiety of her home life, slip away. Flora picked up the reins and, at Lisa’s direction, pressed her heels into the horse’s flank.

“Good girl,” Lisa said, her voice calm and soothing.

A year later, Flora was able to jump and had begun dressage training. She adopted the uniform she would wear every day, a snug pair of Levi’s, used combat boots, and a plaid flannel shirt worn unbuttoned over a faded black T-shirt. After two years, Flora was giving lessons to beginners, helping little girls into the saddle the same way she had once been helped. Her confidence with the horses grew. She was as familiar a presence to the other equestrians as Lisa or Bob, Lisa’s husband, who loved sailing much more than horseback riding and kept a boat in the Anderson Island marina.

For three years, Flora came to the farm almost every day. She was supposed to take Sundays off, but Lisa had come to understand that staying home was harder for Flora than mucking stalls and hauling bales of hay. Flora would show up, even on her days off, and Lisa would leave her to her endless list of barn chores and garden tasks, never asking why she couldn’t just stay home, never once making her feel like she was being annoying, clingy, or needy.

On those easy Sundays, she would take a horse on a ride throughout the property, along the rocky cliffside over the crashing sea, across the fields around Lavender Acres, into the little wood with the empty stream bed that formed a tiny gully, like a miniature canyon on the forest floor. The horses could barely see it, and she liked hopping over it, then through the copse of trees, like a fairy glen.

When Flora imagined her life, her future, she imagined herself at Lavender Acres. She had a recurring fantasy that Lisa might invite her to come live there as Lisa and Bob got older. She imagined Lisa taking her hand and saying, “Lavender Acres is yours now. You deserve it.”

And then Bob got lung cancer.

The farm had been put up for sale within days, and the horses were sold one by one, often to horse brokers who would sell them to anyone, unconcerned for their welfare. Anything of value, like equipment and machinery, was sold. Lisa was barely there, always flying to Seattle on a seaplane with her sick husband. When she was at the farm, she was distracted, bleary-eyed, and completely overwhelmed.

She looked at Flora like she was a stranger, and for the very first time asked Flora what she was doing there.

“I’m here to help,” Flora said, feeling her heart tighten.

“I’m sorry, Flora,” Lisa said, shaking her head. “There’s nothing left for you to do.”

Flora walked home in the fall drizzle, choking on sobs. She felt like she had lost everything, and when she imagined her little fantasies of one day owning Lavender Acres, she felt a deep, saturating embarrassment. She had been such a fool to imagine she had some ownership of the farm, the horses.

She stumbled home and into her little bunk, where she cried relentlessly.

“You wasted your time there anyway, working for free,” Maureen had said. “Now you can get a real job.”

Flora wasn’t sure Maureen knew anything about real jobs.

Ever since Flora could remember, her mother had worked only sporadically—yoga teacher, tarot card reader, pet sitter, housekeeper. She was always looking for that perfect gig that wouldn’t force her to keep a schedule or have too much responsibility. Maureen insisted that the universe would provide if she only opened her heart to its abundance. The universe’s abundance came, mostly, in the form of government assistance. Despite her apparent belief in the universe’s benevolence, Maureen fretted about money constantly, and would do almost anything for it but get a job.

They lived in a converted school bus, but it wasn’t as bad as many people suspected. Painted a cheerful robin’s-egg blue and outfitted with a cozy kitchen, two bunk rooms, and a wood stove, their rare visitors were always surprised to find just how comfortably Maureen and Flora lived. Her mother had come to the island to live off-grid and built the bus with the help of a man who might have been Flora’s father. Maureen didn’t like talking about that time in her life.

The bus wasn’t that bad, but it could still be a hard place to spend a long day, especially in the winter. Maureen, who could be fun, cruel, frantic, or so depressed she could barely function, was reliably unreliable, so Flora avoided being home as much as possible. Lavender Acres, then, had been vital to her, and she wasn’t sure she would have graduated high school if she hadn’t had a place to go where she could have calm and quiet.

Bob got cancer the same year Flora graduated.

Flora’s only friend had gone off to college in Bellingham. She had moved only two hours away, but it wouldn’t be the same. Flora had known that. She’d had good enough grades to be accepted to college, her adviser had told her that, but her mother hadn’t paid taxes in years, so she didn’t qualify for financial aid.

She didn’t even know how to contact her father. She had asked Maureen to give her his information once, and that had not turned out well.

Maureen’s bright eyes had gone icy cold, and her mouth straightened into a sharp line.

“Am I not enough for you?” Maureen asked her.

Flora flushed with fear and embarrassment.

“I j-j-just… If he’s up-to-date on his taxes maybe?—”

“You don’t have a father,” Maureen said through her teeth.

Flora had repeated all of this to her college adviser, who had sighed and looked out of her office window, as though debating how much to help this helpless girl.

Instead of going to college, Flora got a job. Five miserable days a week she walked from the tiny-house school bus to the small, touristy downtown where she worked as a checkout girl at the island’s only grocery store. She made seven dollars an hour and turned her checks directly over to her mother.

That first winter, out of school, friendless, and stuck on the tiny island, was the darkest time of her life. She worked her mind-numbingly boring job with all the enthusiasm of a halting, charmless robot. She went on long meandering walks, even in the cold and the endless, drizzling rain.

When the weather was really, truly bad she read, working through piles of books that she checked out by the armful, fantasy and romance, carrying them home in a patched JanSport backpack. The only time she was ever relaxed was when she was reading, tucked into a fantasy world. She liked strong heroines, mousy, unremarkable girls who realized they had magical powers or inner strength, and ended up getting everything they wanted in the end.

Flora had lived on Anderson Island her whole life, and had not wanted to leave when she was younger. Once her few friends left and the horse farm shuttered, Flora came to understand what a very small and desolate place it really was.

People came and went on Anderson, people who were charmed by the island in the summer. Artsy, hippie, off-grid types, wannabe farmers, and idealists of all stripes tried to make a home there, but most didn’t stay. Winter was too dark, too gloomy, too rugged. All the people who left had either money or somewhere else to go, and Flora had neither. She had left only a few times, for day trips to Seattle and a few horse shows with Lisa.

In the years after graduation, Flora only managed to save six hundred dollars. She kept it in a coffee can in her bunk, secreted from her mother, who could always find an excuse for why Flora should hand over every last penny she made, citing things like property tax and utilities that she couldn’t dispute. Maureen was so unpredictable that Flora, who otherwise thought of herself as an honest person, could lie to her mother as easily as breathing.

In Seattle, she knew, there was a whole city, with jobs, apartments, thousands of people, restaurants, live music, and bookstores. Flora tried to imagine a life there, but her imagination was limited, since she’d only been there a few times. She listened on a Walkman to bands who were from Washington and still played in Seattle, Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, and imagined going to their shows.

When she once mentioned moving to the city, her mother had scoffed.

“Sure, go there and pay rent to some stranger,” she said. “Work like a little worker bee, throw your money away like a sheep, and see if you’re any happier.”

In May, a boy from her work, (a man, really, but it was hard for Flora to think of someone her own age as an adult), asked if he could give her a ride home after her shift. She had been grateful, at first, not to have to walk home, even though his car was littered with trash and cigarette butts and smelled of mold.

One day, in front of her house, he had leaned over and kissed her before she got out of the car. His mouth tasted like stale cigarettes and something sickly-sweet, like warm, flat Dr Pepper. She had wanted to wretch, but held back, then rushed inside of the school bus. Two days later, in the break room, he had kissed her again as she froze, unsure of what to do or how to respond.

She found Debbie, the manager, and told her what was happening. Debbie groaned at the news. “I’ll talk to Maggie and Ted,” she said. They were the owners of the grocery store and seemed like sweet people.

“Matt is their son,” Debbie said, and Flora winced, even though she had already known this. “He’s got to stop doing this, though. Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

Flora was fired within a week.

The money in the coffee tin was frittered away, so hard won and easily lost.

She told her mother everything that had happened, and her mother only rolled her eyes at Flora’s distress.

“I wish you hadn’t caused problems. You can be so dramatic, Flora. What are we going to do now?”

And then, at the farmers’ market, she heard the news.

“Somebody bought the horse farm.”

She first heard from a woman selling eggs, blue, green, white, and brown, in half-dozen cartons.

“Lavender Acres?”

“Lavender Acres is what Lisa called it,” the egg lady said. “The real name, when it was built by a lumber baron a hundred years ago, was Rainshadow Abbey. Everyone just called it Rainshadow, though, when I was a girl. It was broken down and vacant for a long time before Lisa bought it.”

“Who bought this time?”

“Word is that a corporation bought it, an LLC. It’s something rich people do sometimes. Buy a farm”—at this the egg lady made air-quotes—“and call it a business loss.”

“So nobody knows who bought it?”

“I’m sure somebody knows, but it ain’t me. This is the last market till spring, Flora. Come by my house if you want some eggs over the winter.”

Flora nodded.

“It’s going to be a hard one, cold and dark.”

Flora looked up at the gray sky like winter might be there, waiting to descend.

It was two days later that she saw the horse trailer—gleaming black with red trim. It reminded her of a hearse. She couldn’t see much of the horses inside, but one pair of startling black eyes gazed out at her, glimmering with challenge and threat. She hadn’t been on a horse in almost two years, and the sight gave her a pang of longing so acute that it was like sharp hunger. Twenty-five acres of riding rings, lavender fields, and trails through rolling, windswept hillsides, gone from her life forever.

What are we going to do now?

Her mother’s words echoed in her mind.

A question.

A warning.

It felt, to Flora, like everything was going black.