Chapter Two Shea
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.”
“Kit,” says Poppy pithily, “is the picture of health.”
As if to punctuate her point, the possum goes suddenly limp in her arms. It looks halfway dead, its tongue lolling, its legs jutting stiffly skyward.
“You’ve scared him.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
The silence that widens between them feels like a chasm. In it echoes thoughts of Camellia—a half dozen secrets Shea can’t bring herself to say. Poppy is the first to breach the gulf.
“He’s home, isn’t he?”
Shea doesn’t need clarification—she knows Poppy means Asher. Her lollipop clicks against the backs of her teeth. “He is.”
“I knew it. I saw his bike outside on my walk home from school.”
Asher Thorley had gotten that dirt bike the summer he turned sixteen.
Against his mother’s wishes, he’d hauled it home from the junkyard and then spent the next twelve months slowly fixing it up in his garage.
Shea had seen him there every day after school—an oiled rag slung over one shoulder as he nursed the heap of rust back to life.
She’d wave at him from the road and keep going, his promise thrumming between her ears: I won’t let you die here.
She hadn’t realized how quickly things would change once he left.
On the stairs, Poppy rises to her feet. “We should go by the house tomorrow after school. We’ll tell him everything we know.”
Her insistence startles Shea. “And what is it we know, exactly?”
“That Ellie didn’t leave on her own,” says Poppy, indignant. “She wouldn’t have. You know she wouldn’t have. Something lured her. She could be at Mercy Ridge.”
Thoughts of Lys pop back into her head, unbidden.
She pictures the crumbling grandeur of Mercy Ridge, the fires in the hearth and the chatter in the rooms and the cold, mercurial boy at the helm of it all.
A veritable prince, holding court in the shadow of the mountain.
Camellia isn’t at Mercy Ridge and Shea knows it, but she can’t tell Poppy that.
“Maybe she got sick of Little Hill,” Shea says instead. The truth sits on the tip of her tongue: We fought. She ran. And now she’s gone.
“We’re all sick of Little Hill,” says Poppy. “That doesn’t mean you just wake up one day and leave without warning. Without even saying goodbye.”
And suddenly, they’re both thinking of Shea’s father. How he did exactly that.
“Shea, I’m sorry,” says Poppy, backpedaling. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“I should get inside.” The taste of cherry sours in her throat. “My mom will be expecting me for dinner.”
Over Poppy’s shoulder, the house is dark. There’s no hint of movement behind the curtains. Shea hopes Poppy doesn’t notice. She hopes she doesn’t see the way her stories never quite make sense. The way the lies are piling up.
The way she hasn’t invited her inside in months.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Poppy adds as Shea edges past. “I wasn’t thinking. But Shea, we have to go talk to Asher. Tomorrow. He deserves to know whatever we know.”
Shea pauses on the threshold. She feels as though guilt might split her apart.
“We don’t know anything,” she says coldly, and pulls the door shut.
Alone, she breathes in deep. The foyer is empty.
The air smells wet—there’s a leak in the kitchen she hasn’t gotten around to patching.
On the stairs, several balusters have popped loose.
The wallpaper has been gashed open in places.
It ribbons down the wall in thin, floral ravels, a stark reminder of the violent secrets she keeps.
Some days, she thinks she is entirely composed of secrets.
They live within her, chewing at her bones like beetles.
One day soon, there will be nothing of her left.
She gives herself thirty seconds to feel sorry for herself.
Thirty seconds, and then she shrugs out of her blazer and heads for the basement.
A dark shape darts out from underfoot the moment she takes her first step.
She yelps, leaping to the side to avoid stepping on Hemlock, the old tortoiseshell her father found under the porch nine long winters ago.
Her mother’s cat, through and through. A pair of yellow eyes peer sulkily out at her from beneath the hall tree. At her feet curls a small, dead mouse.
“Good thinking,” Shea tells the cat, pushing up her sleeves. With only the smallest amount of disgust, she leans down and pinches the mouse by the tail. It dangles in front of her as she walks, its little body curling on itself. Still warm. Still fresh.
Just the way she likes it.
It takes Shea nearly a minute to unlock the basement door. She’s installed extra security in the past few months. A rusted padlock. A thick barrel bolt. A sliding steel chain. Prying it open, she’s met with a cool, ubiquitous dark. The stairs are steep, wood worn smooth.
“Mom?” If her voice has an echo, she doesn’t hear it. “Mom, I’m coming down.”
In the quiet, there comes a sound. The pull of chains dragging over concrete. The shift of something waking. Holding the mouse at arm’s reach, Shea descends.
The basement is mostly empty. They never used it for much.
A boiler sits in one corner, valves rusted.
In the other, a set of empty industrial shelves has been anchored to the wall.
There—in front of the shelves—sits her mother.
Silvered beneath a fall of moonlight, she is white-haired and emaciated, her wrists cuffed in a set of chains Shea found in her father’s workshop.
When she lifts her head to watch Shea approach, there’s nothing in her eyes.
“I brought dinner.” Her voice has an echo.
Gingerly, she holds up the mouse by the tail.
It spins between them in a slow pivot. On the floor, her mother’s head quirks ever so slightly to the side.
She’s scenting blood, Shea knows, but she likes to think her mother recognizes her voice. It’s a little lie she tells herself.