Prologue
Prologue
S ummer 1966, A Tiny Town in Rural Alabama
F rom an early age, he had lived most of his life outdoors. Somehow, the trees always seemed safe. When his old man felt good, which wasn’t often these days, he took him into the woods and showed him things—how to hunt, how to track, how to be still. The old man liked to say it was his Indian heritage coming through. John had no idea if that was true. One thing he knew about the old man—he lied, a lot.
His mother never embraced the outdoors, but still somehow he equated her with the woods, too. She was a natural sort of person, her hair long and loose, not done up like the other ladies in town. Transported to another locale, she might be called a hippie. She wasn’t, however; she was merely poor. She never wore makeup or fancy clothes, but there was no money for things like that. There was no money for anything. Next year John was thirteen. When he was fourteen, he could get a job, a real one that paid well. For as long as he could remember, it had been his plan to assume the mantle of responsibility, to become the man of the house, picking up the slack for his father who was, more often than not, unavailable these days. If John were being honest, it was better when he wasn’t there. Less tension; less terror.
He was away now on a job, or so he said. The days without him were idyllic, but he was always in the back of their minds. After a couple of days, John and his mother would start to look out the window, toward the road, both wondering if he’d be home soon. And more importantly, wondering which version of him they’d receive. Sometimes he brought gifts, things he picked up on the road—a bag of chips from Idaho, a can of peaches from Georgia. Once when John was little, he’d brought a puppy from California. John stared at the wall, blinking. He didn’t like to think about that dog, about how it met its end.
But then there were times, more times lately, when he came home angry, sullen, accusing John and his mother of all manner of sins. John’s sins were minor—the lawn not mowed properly, the leaves not raked. His mother’s sins—John looked at the wall, trying not to think again. His father accused his mother of terrible things, things John knew were untrue. But it didn’t matter. In those moments nothing mattered but his anger.
They made it through another evening without his father showing up. After supper, he and his mother played cards. She put on a good show of having fun, but more and more her glance turned toward the window, her laughter growing dimmer, smile pulling tighter.
“You could leave him, you know,” John whispered softly.
His mother’s face turned sharply to his, brows slamming down. She gave her head a hard shake.
Emboldened, in a rush to get it all out, he continued. “He shouldn’t hurt you like he does. It’s not right. He could get arrested. We could…we could run away.” He half stood, intending to head toward his room and pack a bag.
His mother grabbed his forearm and pulled him back. “Don’t. Don’t say such things.”
He swallowed hard and yanked his arm free. “Why? Why can’t we go?”
“Because…” her voice broke and she let out a puff of air. “Because I love him.”
He stared at her, one of her eyes droopy from a previous beating, nose permanently crooked, hand clutched to her ribs, sore from the beating he gave before he went away. John felt something within him wither and twist, an anger at her he didn’t realize he felt until that moment. “If you won’t go, I guess you deserve it.”
Her eyes turned stricken, wounded, but he didn’t know how to take the harsh words back. And, if he were being honest, it felt good to say them out loud. How could she be so weak? He would never be that weak, never give in to such a useless emotion as love. Confused, frustrated, empty, he turned and went into his room, crawling between the sheets to try and find solace in sleep.
He had no idea what time it was when he was roughly shaken awake, but outside it was dark.
“Run.”
His mother pulled the blankets off him and yanked hard on his arm.
“What?” he sat up with a gasp.
“Run.” Her voice trembled. She darted a look over her shoulder. “Run into the woods and don’t come back until I come find you.”
“Mama?” he whispered, voice small and afraid, but she was already moving away from him, pulling up his window. She took his arm and dragged him toward it with more strength than he realized she possessed. “No,” he began trying to fight her. “I won’t go without you. I’ll protect you.”
She faced him then, face deathly pale, features set. “You can’t. I love you, Johnny. You make me proud in all the ways. Be a good boy and obey. Run, and don’t come back.” She gave him a shove toward the open window, practically pushing him through.
John didn’t want to go, but some instinct propelled him through. And then he heard him, his father’s voice, full of rage. Louder, more powerful than it had ever been before, as if he had brought back supernatural powers of wrath from his journey. For a stunned second John and his mother faced each other, eyes locked. Go, she mouthed, then put down the window and turned back inside the house.
Sounds came from within, yells, screams, breaking things. Fear took over, and John ran far and fast, his bare feet flying over branches and pinecones. Eventually he paused and bent over, gasping for breath. What now? His panicked brain failed to provide an answer. Should he stay? Go back and try to help? Usually he prided himself on being grownup, on handling every situation so he could function as the de facto man of the family. But right now he felt exactly as he was, a twelve-year-old little boy.
Before he could come to a decision, he heard the rush of feet heading in his direction. Once again instinct took over. If his father found him here, out of bed in the middle of the forest, there was no telling what he might do. Quickly, he scrambled up a tree and crouched into a ball, controlling his breathing, becoming as silent as the night.
Except the night wasn’t silent, and it wasn’t his father who’d pursued him into the woods; it was his mother. She burst into the forest as he had done a few minutes ago, pausing in panicked confusion. Sure she must be looking for him, he unfurled to begin his descent when his father appeared.
His father had always had the almost mythic ability to move in silence, to grow bigger and stronger when angry. He did so now. One moment he and his mother were alone in the woods. The next his father appeared as if from mist, his hand grabbing a fistful of his mother’s hair and giving it a hard wrench. She cried out and fell to her knees, begging, pleading for release, for mercy, for anything.
His father’s hand cracked hard across her face. The sound of splintering bone reverberated through the woods and, before he could realize what he was doing, John began scrambling down from the tree.
He couldn’t see what happened as he climbed down, scraping all the exposed parts of his skin on the tree’s rough bark, but his mother had stopped crying. Her noises were worse, more primal. John had been hunting enough times to know a wounded animal when he heard one.
By the time he reached his parents, it was over. His father sat atop his mother, hands around her slack throat, panting, face purple and drenched as his rage finally began to wane. John must have made a sound of his own—a whimper, a mew—because his father whipped in his direction, gun raised, and pointed at the middle of John’s body.
For an endless moment they regarded each other in silence. John could read the weight of indecision in his father’s face. Should I kill my son? It seemed as if he would and then, at the last second, he turned the gun on himself.
“No,” John yelled, hand outstretched as he took a step forward. But too late. The shot went off and his father slumped, his lifeless form covering the one beneath him.
John sank to his knees in the moist dirt, staring, mouth agape. Later he wouldn’t be able to remember what he felt or thought in those moments or hours after he watched his parents die. And he had no idea why it never occurred to him to leave. Somehow he felt like this was his final duty to them, to stay and keep watch over their bodies. He did it for two days, taking his father’s gun and scaring off all manner of animals that tried to approach. Eventually his body began to fade, and he was glad. How could he live with no parents? He didn’t want to find out. He curled into a little ball, eyes still on his parents, and that was how the officer found him so many hours later, huddled in a mass, unconscious, gun clutched in his fingers.
They took him to the hospital, cleaned him, fed him, interviewed him, and took him to the place he knew he’d end up, the only foster home he knew in town—the Dunbar family. They were like something from a storybook, a family of eccentrics who were set apart by a number of factors, weird even for a small southern town that elevated weird into an art form. They had a passel of children, but no one knew them because they were all homeschooled, a thing unheard of in those days. As if they didn’t have enough kids of their own, they took in troubled kids, too. And now apparently orphans.
John arrived on their doorstep stony and mute, but they welcomed him warmly, bringing him in as they introduced him to their many kids. He would never remember their names, didn’t care to try. What was the point? They were nothing to him.
A baby toddled forward and wrapped herself around his leg. John stared down at her, debating the merits of kicking her away. Her golden blond ringlets were a mass of tangles and she smelled like maple syrup. Grimacing, he looked around for a rescue. Surely someone would see how uncomfortable he was. Someone would peel the kid off his leg.
But they didn’t. The father of the family beamed his approval. “Looks like Juniper’s taken a shine to you.”
Juniper. He might have known the weird family would give their kid a weird name. The little girl in question pried her face off his calf and tipped it to inspect him. “Bear,” she declared, and then she opened her mouth and bit him.