West of Wicked (The Great and Terrible Land #1)

Chapter One. Dorothy

ONE

Dorothy

I arrived at the Kansas farmhouse in a summer storm.

They say the wind was so violent, it made her hair go sideways.

I don’t know who she was, only that I clung to her, sobbing. There was blood on her face, they say. Speckled across her hollow cheeks.

“Please,” she said to the couple standing in the doorway. “Take her.”

She tried to hand me over, but I fought her, fingers clawing at the fabric of her jacket.

“I want to go home!”

I remember saying the words. Sometimes I wake up screaming them.

If I lie real still, if I close my eyes, if I strain my memory, I can see her.

She’s shouting at me, but there is no sound, only movement. Hair whipping around my face. Dark sky rolling above.

There is the sharpness of her desperation and the taste of ash on my tongue.

Cyclone season always bears desperation.

And carnage.

Aunt Em and Uncle Henry had never planned to have children, but how could two good people turn away a sobbing child?

“She’ll come back for you,” Em said as she wiped the dirt from my face after the storm broke. “Don’t you worry.”

The next week, Henry built me a bed from the barn wreckage. He let me hammer in some nails, let me try the handsaw.

“You sure you’ve never built a bed before?” he asked me, hands on his hips as he supervised.

“I’m sure,” I told him, because I didn’t even know what a hammer was until then.

“Well, fine work.” With his face hidden by the shadow of his brimmed hat, I didn’t know he’d been lying. I didn’t know for many years after that he’d rebuilt the bed that night just to make sure it was solid and sturdy. So it would last.

Now, as an adult, I can see it for what it was—distraction. Letting me hammer in some nails and saw at some wood helped free up the worry gnawing at my insides.

She wasn’t coming back. No one was coming back for me.

Henry knew better than most how to drive away grief and suffering. He was a man always in motion, running from a broken heart.

He’d found himself back on the Kansas prairie after his father died, then his mother, then two brothers back-to-back in the war. He was the youngest of his family. He was never supposed to inherit the family farm.

He got it anyway.

If the work helped distract him, then Aunt Em helped heal Henry.

Before the farm, before losing his family, Uncle Henry traveled around the country. A busker, with a guitar at his hip, a harmonica strapped around his neck, and a drum at his foot, he made money with his music.

He’d arrived in New York City chasing something. Maybe a place to belong. He liked to joke that he was Goldilocks and each town he visited a bed. “None of them fit,” he’d say. “One too loud. Another too big. Some came close, but maybe they were too cold or too hot or too mushy.”

When I was a girl, I loved anything that even remotely smelled of fairy tales and Henry could twist anything into a story.

“The Big Apple felt just right,” he’d go on. “And playing music for the tourists was honest work. Work I liked. Most days, I could thump at my drum, strum at my guitar, close my eyes, and travel to another world. But not that day. That day I found her.”

As the story goes, Aunt Em had just arrived in the city from the South. She had dreams of studying art at one of the universities. To earn money, she would paint colorful caricatures for the tourists.

But not that day.

That day she painted the handsome busker.

And when the sun began to set, Henry offered to buy her painting with all the money he had collected in his hat.

She said she’d take a cup of coffee instead and he could have the painting.

It now hangs on a nail by the kitchen table.

There is so much color in the painting. So much life.

It’s a spark of beauty in an otherwise vast, gray Kansas prairie.

But Uncle Henry doesn’t play anymore and Aunt Em doesn’t paint, and sometimes I wonder if they ever feel like they’re starving for what they’ve given up.

Farm life isn’t easy. We all know it. Wake up before the sun. Always on the go because a dozen or more animals count on you to feed and water them. Crops that must be harvested before they rot. Eggs to be collected. Backbreaking work until your body aches.

But why does it seem like all the spark has been drained out of Em and Henry? And did they see it coming?

I think that terrifies me most of all, the thought of waking up one morning, empty, everything I had leeched from my bones and absorbed by the unforgiving earth.

Backbreaking work aside, I am grateful for Aunt Em. I am grateful for Uncle Henry. And I am especially grateful for Toto. Even when he’s being a pain in the ass.

“Drop the rabbit, Toto.” The rabbit twitches in his jaws. It’s almost as big as Toto but that’s never stopped him. I’ve never met a terrier with such a thirst for blood.

Toto widens his stance, ready to bolt. The rabbit senses the ground beneath him and kicks out with his back legs. Finding no escape, he kicks harder, flinging dirt.

“Don’t you dare—” I say, but Toto very much would dare.

He darts off, carting the rabbit with him, the poor thing squealing in his jaws.

“Toto!” I shout.

“That dog is a menace.” Uncle Henry comes up behind me in the yard carrying a pail of eggs he’s collected from the barn. His pale Irish skin is pink from his work. He hasn’t gotten to the point in the season where his skin has given up and allowed itself to tan in the sun.

I am pale like him, but freckled, and somehow immune to the sun. I am always the shade of pale cream.

Turning to him, I squint against the sharp slant of morning light. “Suppose you’re right. At least he leaves the chickens alone.”

Uncle Henry snorts a laugh, but it quickly turns into a grimace. He sets the pail down and rubs at the small of his back. He won’t go to the doctor. Never enough money for that.

“Here, let me.” I swoop in and take charge of the eggs.

“I’m not an old man,” he says.

“Oh?” I raise my brows.

He frowns, but there’s a hint of a smile hidden beneath his mustache. “Well, old but capable.”

“Of course.”

“I can handle it,” he argues.

“I know you can. So can I.” I head for the house and Henry begrudgingly follows behind.

Inside, Aunt Em has all the windows open, creating a crosswind in the house. The curtains billow up, then rest, only to be caught again.

I think there is nothing I love more than a warm summer breeze.

Aunt Em is standing at the worktable, her dark hands dusted in flour. She kneads at a lump of dough, but her movements are slow; there’s a tremor in her hands, a slight pinch of frustration between her brows.

I set the pail down by the sink and join Em at the table.

“Let me help with that.” I dip my hands into the canister of flour.

I sense her frowning at me. Henry and Em are nearing seventy, though looking at Em, you wouldn’t guess it.

There’s wisdom in her eyes, but barely a wrinkle on her face.

Still, age is catching up to both her and Henry.

They’ve never known a day in their lives when they didn’t work hard and fend for themselves.

Getting help, let alone asking for it, is a foreign concept they do not like.

“It’s all right,” she protests. “I like kneading dough.”

“I like it too,” I argue, which isn’t true.

I’ve been helping Em in the kitchen now for the better part of twenty years, but I have yet to acquire the passion for bread baking.

It’s literally the most basic skill one needs to survive on the farm, and I do enjoy eating bread, but the hours required to make it?

The precision? The margin for error? No, thank you. I’d rather muck out the barn stalls.

With a knowing smile, Em turns away from me and joins Henry at the sink. Together, they examine the egg haul. There were fewer today than yesterday, and yesterday fewer than the day before. It isn’t time to worry … yet.

Though I don’t love making bread, it is easy to get lost in the labor of it and as my hands move, my mind strays to a fantasy life where nothing is hard and everything is awash in color like Aunt Em’s painting.

It may be out there somewhere, but it won’t be for me. The farm needs me. Em and Henry need me. Who will tend to the animals when Henry can’t lift the feed bags? Who will haul the onions and potatoes into the dry cellar when Em can’t make it down the ladder?

I can’t leave them. I can’t leave the farm. And thinking about it makes my chest ache.

Henry unloads the eggs into the wire basket that hangs in the corner. Em checks the simmering pot of stew on the stove.

Outside, the chickens squawk at one another. In the distance, a dog bays.

“Dorothy,” Em says. “Could you make room for the pot? It’s about time for the dumplings—”

I have no time to respond.

There’s a loud crash, then a splash of searing heat on my legs.

I hiss in pain and lurch away as the stew spreads across the kitchen floor.

“Em!” Henry rushes over to her. Her hands are shaking, but there’s a flash of irritation on her face.

“It’s okay.” I dip down with one of our kitchen towels and start mopping up the mess. “I’ll take care of it.”

“All of it’s wasted.”

“We can make more,” Henry tells her.

“That was the last of the chicken, Henry. We can’t make more.”

I swipe at the mess on the floor, but it’s useless now. My towel is soaked and there’s still at least a half pot of broth to sop up.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Em says as Henry pulls her into his chest.

I watch from my spot on the floor as Henry murmurs to Em and she nods into him, keeping her resolve.

They’ve always known what the other needs without either of them having to ask for it.

When the grief washes over Henry, Em is there taking his hand.

When Em has a bad day, Henry is there making her smile.

And often I am here, just on the outside looking in.

I’ve always felt welcomed by them, but in the back of my mind, there’s a voice that will never quite fade. One that says, At any moment, all of this could disappear.

When I started having panic attacks just after I turned thirteen, I began seeing a therapist who told me I had commitment issues. “You’re capable of love,” she said to me. “You just have to open yourself up to it.”

“I do love,” I argued.

“Do you?” she asked and then tilted her head, narrowed her eyes, regarded me with a look of introspection that made me squirm on the sofa.

Later, when I told Em about the conversation, she listened to me rant about how wrong the therapist was and then she said, You’ve protected your heart. No one can blame you. But if you’re ever ready to open up, you know Henry and I will be there.

I spent the next two days angry at my therapist and Em. I knew how to love. I did love Em and Henry.

But it took me several more months of therapy and soul-searching to realize they were both right.

I may have loved Em and Henry, but deep down, I was terrified of letting them love me back.

I had a life and a family before the farmhouse, and both were gone.

Who was to say this wouldn’t be torn away too?

Em and Henry hadn’t chosen me. Like the farmhouse, they had never wanted children. But they got one anyway.

And now I’m determined to pay them back, no matter what it takes. I can help take care of them just like they took care of me, even if I keep them at arm’s length.

I grab a fresh towel and clean up the rest of the spilled stew.