I want to scream, run off and hide where I will never be found when I realize what he’s telling me, but I nod again the way he wants me to. And when I do, it’s not the cooling rain that has finally come, but his warm tears that I feel falling into my hair when he presses his lips to the top of my head and rewards me with the words I’ve been longing to hear, “I love you, my little Gemini.”
Chapter Twenty
The earth has tilted off its axis.
Struggling back to the fort through the downpour, I’m shaking so bad that I can barely get a grip on the splintering steps that lead up the tree. I throw open the hatch with a bang and crawl towards where I left her. Sweeping my hands across the floor, feeling for my sister, I get a handful of Ivory instead. “Woody!” It’s not until the lightning flashes again that I see she’s not sleeping. She’s kneeling in front of the Saint Jude coffee can altar, her head bowed to her chest, her lips silently moving.
The rain pelting the tin overhang is not loud enough to drown out Papa’s words. All those interrogation sessions. The root cellar. The way I protected her from him. Woody’s been listening to me going on and on about finding our mother. I feel so betrayed when I think of all the times I told her, “We’ll do this… we’ll question this person… don’t you worry, I’ll find her. I won’t let you down.”
I strip off my soaking shirt and throw it as hard as I can. It lands on her praying back with a plop. “You’re gonna make your knees bleed and I don’t know where the bandages are and even if I did I… Get up. Get up!” When Ivory barks, I kick at him. “Papa caught me in the woods. He thought I was you. He told me that you saw something happen to Mama the night… he told me… he was sorry it had to end the way it did. That Mama’s life was… over.” I yank her up by the hair and shove her across the fort. “Is that true? Talk to me! What did you see?” When Woody looks blank faced and close mouthed at me, I rip those sunglasses off her eyes and pry her mouth open with my fingers and shout down her throat, “I hate you, you stupid mute. Do you hear me? I hate you! I hate Mama! You… her… you’re nothing but deceiving, disgustin’-”
My sister draws back and slaps me across the face.
The sound of the storm and my weeping and Ivory’s whimpering are all I can hear until she takes me into her arms. We drop to the floor, curl into each other as if we are still safe inside our mother. I cry out the unspeakable, give voice to the fear that’s been crouching in the corners of my mind. “She’s… she’s not run off. She’s not ever comin’ back. No matter how hard I look. No matter how hard you pray. Mama’s… dead.”
“Hushacat,” my twin whispers under the thunder. “Hushacat.”
Or that could be nothing more than the wind whistling in the dark.
Even after I had thumbed my nose at hope, I admit, I kept it in my heart. I felt it not perching, but fluttering inside me like a bird trying to get air beneath a broken wing. Hope made me think that Mama’d come home to us, even though I suspected she wouldn’t. But then I believed she would, but after… I don’t know. I’ve always thought of my heart beating steady, but I see now that it doesn’t. It dashes up and down and all around, searching desperately for what it craves, it never gives up. Until it flies headlong into a brick wall.
Seemed like Woody and I stayed nested together like that for two days, maybe more. We wailed on each other’s chests until there was nothing left inside us to shed. All this time I was believing… trying… I imagined our reunion, every detail. How I’d kiss Mama’s satiny cheeks until my lips got swollen. Rub her earlobes between my fingers, envisioning a velvet party dress. Beg her to sing, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”
It’s so hard to accept that she’s gone and never coming back. Like how her garden would feel if the sun never rose again.
His Honor came to the bottom of the fort tree one of those sorrow-ridden nights. He didn’t call up, “I love you as much as the stars and the sky.” All he said was, “Remember your promise, Jane Woodrow. You may leave Lilyfield now, girls.”
That’s when I realized why he’d been keeping Woody and me in solitary confinement. He wasn’t worried that his twins would disappear the same way his wife did. He didn’t want us to go running around town telling folks what we saw the night our mother disappeared. What Woody saw anyway.
I begged my sister to “please, please, tell me. I can’t stand not knowin’. Your suitcase drawing shows that Mama was going to leave, but… then what happened? Did she fall down the well the same way Mars did? Or get a heart attack? She was looking very pale under those carnival lights. I saw another person back there that night besides Papa, did you?” But no matter how much I begged or how hard I tried to convince her to share her secret with me, she stayed resolutely mute.
E. J. must’ve gotten worried out of his mind when Woody and I didn’t show up in the morning to start our search for Mama the way we’d planned, because he came to the fort as well.
He didn’t call up, “Ollie… ollie… got room for one more?” like he always does. He stood beneath the branches and sang, “Love me tender, love me true” in a reedy voice and then he climbed up the fort steps, poked the hatch open just wide enough to slide in a basket of fresh-picked blackberries.
Lou came, too. Instead of squawking from the porch like she usually does, she called up meekly from below, “I got flapjacks and bacon for ya in the cottage. Extra syrup. You gotta eat.”
I didn’t understand why she was being so out-of-character nice until I remembered that after Papa told me about Mama’s being dead and he disappeared into the rain, I saw Lou still plastered up against the shed, spying on me the same way I’d been spying on her with Uncle Blackie. She must’ve followed me back to the fort, listened to my ranting at Woody, then run back and told Mr. Cole because he came, too.
Our caretaker asked, “You two all right?”
I don’t know why, but I yelled back at him, “Right as rain,” which made me sound a lot braver than I was feeling.
Mr. Cole must’ve went and fetched Beezy because some time later I heard her froggy voice scolding Lou from below, “Don’t you dare go up there. They don’t need you throwin’ no bones or chantin’ conjurations. Leave those girls be. They’s in mourning.” She gentled her voice when she called up to Woody and me, “Ya got to keep your strength up. Here come some fritters in the Bucket Express. When you’re ready to talk, Shen, I’ll be waitin’ to listen.”