Chapter 3
James stops his razor mid-stroke, cutting a pale rectangle through charcoal stubble. His cheeks are hollow. Eyes sunken. Jaw sharp. Most of his diet consists of fast food and cases of coffee, so his problem could be a lack of nutrition, but he doesn’t have the motivation to fix it.
He has wasted every night of the summer hunched over his typewriter, clanking out articles for Nancy.
Attempted a couple of novels, too, but he has yet to breach a second chapter, and the stress induced by those scrapped dreams demands more coffee.
Or whiskey. His traditional Southern parents don’t approve of alcohol in the house, so he keeps a liter stuffed under the mattress.
His routine is simple. Wake up, go to work, go home, write, read, shower, sleep, then resist the urge to pound his head into the mirror as the cycle of what he will do tomorrow haunts him.
Instead of harming himself, he finishes shaving, wipes his face, towels off, and steps back from the glass.
Cold tile underfoot, he takes a deep breath.
Come autumn, he will be back to textbooks.
That’s it, he thinks. After work, I’m seeing Nelle.
That promise draws him to his dresser to find an outfit. Her address tickles the back of his mind, but he is not sure how he knows it. He has never had any friends who lived on Blackwood.
On his way to work, he stops at the gas station, buys two coffees, and pockets some creamer packets. When he started bringing Nancy the French vanilla she liked, she started being a lot nicer to him.
Inside the office on Lincoln’s square, the smell of ink, paper, and old coffee grounds hits James’s nose.
He ducks through the foyer’s cloud of dust—the building is a converted Civil War–era home—and into the back room.
Nancy is at her desk, rapid-fire typing on her dinosaur of a computer.
Over her glasses, she burns holes into his head until she notices the extra coffee in his hand.
James sets the packets of creamer on her desk, followed by his finished article. After his encounter with Nelle the night before, he was struck with creativity and cranked out the remaining eight hundred words as easily as exhaling.
“Done early?” Nancy raises her brows. “Can’t wait to read it.”
“I think you’ll like it,” James says. “It’s my most inspired piece.”
“Don’t lose your inspiration.” She leans back to open a filing cabinet and hands him a stapled packet. “Here’s your next piece. I want it Thursday.”
James drops into his desk chair, plugs in his laptop, flips through the packet, and starts researching the new auditorium under construction at Lincoln High School.
Nelle can’t take another bite. She stares at her half-eaten oatmeal, the two remaining blueberries like Father’s eyes, snake scales rubbing bare skin. She hates him the most when he sits across from her, puts his cold fingertips on her hand, and says, “Now, again.”
She always loses her appetite after he cuts her. After he funnels her blood into the vials he keeps lined up in his study. Ready to dip his pens into.
Nelle shivers, thinking of the gashes in her palm knitting themselves back together, skin lacing skin.
But how can someone like me feel pain? Why does she ache for the outside world, full of rapists and murderers?
Father warned her endlessly about the dangers of the world, but he never prepared her for its beauty.
For fireworks. For corn dogs. For people.
Laughter. Mindless, meaningless, beautiful chatter.
Birds communicate for fun. People, too. Nelle wants nothing more than to be a part of their flock.
But in order to leave, she would have to write for herself, and that is the one rule Father’s drilled into her skull harder than any other. If she tries to write for herself, she will die.
Her rendezvous with James was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She had approached Father on a calm day and asked if he would take her to the festivities. He used to speak fondly of attending town gatherings with his wife and daughter.
His first daughter. Eleanor.
Father hates going into town now, so she expected him to say no. To admonish her for suggesting such a careless idea. But he said yes, he’d write for her to go until ten. By herself.
Nelle didn’t ask why he wouldn’t be chaperoning her and didn’t want to poke the beast, so she waited until the Fourth before bringing it up again.
“You’ll feel the pull to come back a quarter before ten,” he explained before she left. Then his voice dropped lower. Colder. “Do I need to go over your rules?”
She hadn’t heard them since her first trip to the library three months ago, but she knew them like they’d been branded onto her.
Don’t look at anyone. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t say anything.
So of course she broke all three at the first chance.
Nelle’s fist curls under the table, silver spoon digging into her raw scar.
Father shuffles in the room behind her—the room he calls his study, the room full of bookshelves that hold the tales of her life—his pen scratching out what she will do tomorrow.
When she was eleven, she caught a glimpse of one transcription: Tomorrow, on the sixteenth day of May, Nelle will wake up at eight o’clock and make oatmeal.
She will eat, then return to her room until three, when she will come out to play cards.
The memory makes her shudder. She always knew her actions were predetermined, but seeing it written altered her perception of reality.
Her life is meaningless. Governed by Father.
He buys her the books and brushes and paint he approves of.
He decides when they go to the library for the first time.
He picks out her meals, her movements, where she goes, even what she does.
As far as she knows, if he wrote that she stabs herself in the throat, she would have no choice but to obey.
She wouldn’t die, though. Again and again, he has told her there are only two ways for her to die: if every last scrap of writing in her blood is destroyed, and if she writes with her own ink.
Maybe she should try it. Open her veins over a palette, mix the ink with paint, create a canvas of blood. Death doesn’t seem too harsh a consequence. Some days even preferable to the torture she endures with her self-proclaimed father.
Yet she is still too scared of death to try to write.
At breakfast this morning, Father called her a burden. She has grown a second skin to fend off his insults, but this one stung. The Fourth of July was her first taste of freedom, of not being chained to his will, and now she craves more.
Since she was a child, Nelle has watched the horses in the neighbor’s field, through the trees beyond her bedroom window. They gallop together, necks thrashing, manes luminous under the moon and sun. They are muscular, passionate creatures. They’re wild, despite the fact that they’re trapped, too.
If I’m a burden, why not release me?
But he won’t. He can’t. As her creator, he alone can write her instructions, and deep down, she knows that she needs him. His pen, her ink, and the shelves of leather-bound journals in his study. She hates that she needs him.
But without him, she would not exist.
The sun is hot when James gets off work. He climbs into his old truck, a hand-me-down from his grandma, and starts the cranky engine, wheels munching asphalt as he pulls off the square.
He takes a right down curvy River Road, where tree branches hang low and scatter shadows over the street, and then a left onto Blackwood. Mailboxes whiz by. It’s a dead end, and the last metal mailbox has Quill 23 printed on its side in tall white letters.
He rolls down the window, braking.
That’s why he recognized the address. Old Wallace, the walking skeleton who rarely leaves his home.
In middle school, James and his friends would ride their bicycles here to throw pebbles at his windows. The curtains were always drawn, but they were terrified of a gaunt, pale face popping up behind one of the pollen-dusted panes. It never happened.
In retrospect, James shouldn’t have been scared. Old was unfair for a man probably in his late thirties. And a man who had been through so much.
One unfortunate night twenty-two years ago, a faulty wire caught fire at 23 Blackwood Road. Within minutes, both stories were engulfed. Rumor spread quick. By the end of the night, everyone heard that the fire had taken two lives. Wallace Quill’s wife and daughter were never seen again.
Then he rebuilt an exact replica of his historic home, painting it the same forest green.
Afterward, he mostly disappeared. No one saw him at festivals or in the bookstore.
Only at Tim’s Market, every other Tuesday for groceries, though he moved like a ghost and never spoke.
Rumors circulated that, along with his wife and baby, the smoke from the house fire had killed his vocal cords.
Did James mishear Nelle yesterday? No, without a doubt she said 23 Blackwood Road. Maybe Wallace moved. Or died. Then again, he isn’t that old, and surely word would have traveled through town if he had left.
Guess I’ll find out. James pulls into the gravel driveway.
A green colonial home peeks through the pine trees, camouflaged by the forest. Chopped wood sits stacked outside, half covered by a red tarp. A porch wraps the house, topped with a tin roof that reflects the sun, and a brick chimney. The only car is a 2004 Jeep beneath a droopy willow.
James swats through clouds of gnats and climbs the porch steps. The dead light by the front door is spotted with moths. His heart pounds, blood thrumming like static in his ears. All day, he has imagined this moment. What he will say. How she will respond.
Taking a deep breath to cool his wildfire nerves, James raises his fist and knocks.
Nelle forgets her unfinished oatmeal and the cut across her palm. She squints to make out the silhouette beyond the door, but the window is fogged glass, and all she can see is a dark head of hair. In her two decades, they have never had a visitor. Her throat tightens.
“Who’s that?” Father calls from his office.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t see.”
Then it clicks. Dark hair, broad shoulders, the only person she has ever given her address to. The boy she talked to on the square. The boy she hasn’t stopped thinking about since. James.
Father locks his study door behind him and grumbles across the kitchen, past the table, to the front door—
“Wait,” Nelle blurts.
She wishes more than ever to go where she wants to go.
When she wants to go. Right now, she would go lock herself in her room for a week.
Because when Father opens that door, when he sees James on the other side and learns that Nelle not only spent hours with a boy, but that she gave him their address . . .
She shudders, glued to her seat.
Father’s ice-cold eyes narrow in suspicion.
The door screeches open, and James’s smile drops on the other side.
Old Wallace Quill’s black hair is combed behind his ears, his beard untrimmed, his irises dark like chunks of coal. Behind him, Nelle sits at the kitchen table, unnaturally pale, holding a spoon.
“Who are you?” Wallace Quill demands.
James extends his hand. Up close, Quill has a disturbing stare, though nothing else about him seems exceptionally off. But this is not the playful, intelligent Nelle he had the pleasure of being enchanted by last night.
“Hi, sir,” James says. “Nice to meet you. I’m James. I met Nelle the other night at the square.”
Wallace doesn’t take James’s hand. He swivels slowly to Nelle. She is trembling—silent, meek, forcing herself not to meet his stare—like a skeleton hung in the wind.
“You met her when?” he asks.
James isn’t sure if Quill’s grin is meant to be inviting or terrifying. “Yesterday at the square. At the fireworks show. Sir.”
“Thanks for stopping by, but my daughter is busy with homework right now. Maybe another time.”
“Oh, okay,” James says. He waves to her as the door eases shut in his face. “See you later! And nice to meet you, uh, Mr. Wallace.”
“Call me Quill.” Quill grins again, that unnerving show of teeth, as the door clicks shut, leaving James with the dead moths, snared catching a pretty light.
Maybe Quill’s not so bad. Odd, but not evil. Just a poor reputation with the neighborhood kids, the “wicked old man” back in the woods. Standoffish vibe. Tragic backstory. Lives alone, or so they all thought.
James tries to ignore the eerie rustling pines as he drives away from 23 Blackwood Road. Then he remembers Quill’s words: Homework? Nelle didn’t mention college.
Wait. Daughter?