It’s time to think, which would normally call for focaccia. But there’s a new bite to the air, like fall is really settling around them now. Leaves hang in bright reds and golds, the shades of ripening apples, and Autumn can almost feel the trees taking the last long gasp before frost, their veins tightening, sap dribbling down into the safe vaults of the roots. She feels in herself the same need: the need to shelter and brace for a long, heavy, oncoming snow. She needs to ponder with baking, but this time, it just has to be pumpkin bread.
Lou’s words whisper in her mind as her electric mixer whirs. I hardly ever see any kids around here now. The image of those strange offerings he has collected over the years. Wyn and Neel’s faces.
Autumn closes her eyes, bracing her palms on the familiar steel counter. She tries, briefly, to conjure Dad, a whiff of his Irish spring soap, the steadiness of his hands. Or Mom’s easy-like-a-Sunday-morning voice, her noodling on the banjo she loved but couldn’t really play. Even as an adult, she can’t totally shake the childish notion that Dad and Mom would know what to do, any more than she can shake the burn of resentment for the fact that they aren’t here now, when she needs them. Maybe they would be able to explain why this place where Autumn grew up feels so different. So changed.
Maybe she’ll go see Lou again, without Sasha this time. There are things she must say, and saying them in front of Sasha still feels impossible. But maybe she can try with Lou. They can talk over a slice of this pumpkin bread. It’ll taste great with his bourbon. There is so much more she needs to say, and more she needs to ask.
By now, the children’s basket of food—assuming they even went back for it—will be wearing thin. They’ll be all out of sausage rolls. Autumn considers sneaking back to the tracks to try to find them again, but there’s the distinct possibility that if she goes, she’ll find the wrong end of Neel’s shotgun instead. We have to make a plan, Sasha had said. We have to go prepared. It sounded very adult, very mature for Sasha, who usually liked to play fast and loose with life. Or at least pretend she did.
So far, their ideas are pretty scant.
Autumn leaves the front door open, for the breeze. It’s quiet today, unlike when Sasha manned the front and the town filled her doors. Down the street, empty stalls wait to be filled with pecans and goods. A banner swings from between two streetlights. But the air feels dead, no cars at the meters, not a single neighbor walking their dog.
Then comes a sudden gust of wind from the west, as if someone has switched on a box fan. The door flies in and knocks against one of her display shelves. There’s a sound of scuttling, a thunk as one of her bags of premade brownie mix hits the floor. Noisy rummaging. Autumn is frozen, listening to this bizarre, invisible burglary. There is a moment of quiet, as if the intruder has gone.
And then:
“Otto?” calls a tremulous, familiar voice, the best approximation of her name he can manage. He’s only heard it once.
Her heart on a kite string, Autumn doesn’t bother dusting the flour off her hands, leaves her batter half-whipped and pushes through the double doors. “Wyn?”
“Here.” He pokes his head around the counter, hair and face dusty from the road. Her basket is by the door, much the worse for wear. “Neel—Neel’s actually nice,” he explains, peeping at her. It looks like his knees are scraped, maybe from tripping somewhere along the long walk into town.
Autumn kneels down. If he were another child, one with a kinder life, she’d wrap him up in her arms, she’d wipe dirt off his face and clean his cuts. Only even a gentle touch could scare him. He hasn’t had a gentle life.
“I believe you,” she says. “I think he was scared. I’m glad to see you again.”
The one amber eye she can see watches her for a moment. Then Wyn sniffs several times. Curiously, he wanders from his hiding place past her toward the kitchen. He still has no shoes on, which means he walked miles on bare feet to reach her. He even returned her basket.
Autumn picks up the basket and follows him. “Hungry?” she asks, and he’s nodding furiously before the word is even out of her mouth. So she sets him up at the table and makes him enough oatmeal for a family of four. She puts in cardamom and cinnamon, maple syrup, chopped apples, and, of course, toasted pecans from Lil. Wyn looks curious when she sets the large bowl in front of him but doesn’t wait to ask questions about what it is. He gobbles it down, probably burning his tongue on the first piping hot spoonful.
That’s when she realizes how much he actually trusts her.
“I’m making pumpkin bread today. I bet you’ll like it,” she tells him, when he’s chasing individual oats at the bottom of his bowl. This feels like holding a baby bird, trying not to startle it into flight. “You want to help?”
But he is already clambering up onto a chair to peer down into the various bowls. “I will…help,” he decides, looking very serious.
“Good. It’s been a while since I had a helper.” She brings over a little whisk for him. Up on the chair, she can see the grit and blood caked on his knees more clearly. “You whisk what’s in the bowl together, and I’ll—can I fix up your knees for you?”
Wyn glances down at his legs, then shrugs. He’s much more interested in his new project. He prods the eggs and sugars in the bowl a few times with the whisk. Autumn digs out the first aid kit she keeps near the cash register, then dabs Neosporin gently on the scrapes. Wyn flinches at little, but doesn’t complain. “Like this?” he asks, gouging at the eggs.
Autumn sticks a colorful Band-Aid on each knee, then straightens up. “Good,” she says. “Now just give it a big stir! Stir, stir, stir! You can go fast.” She holds the bowl for him as Wyn whisks enthusiastically. “We add that to this bowl of spices and flour, and then it’ll be batter.”
Wyn is a quick learner. “I sneaked away,” he tells her, as he scrapes determinedly for every last drop of mixture. “Neel was hunting.”
“Now we mix all that together.” She gives him a wooden spoon. “I’d love to meet Neel again when he’s not feeling so scared. You said he’s nice to you?” God, it was hard to know how to ask a child things in the right way. She’s a baker, not Mister Rogers.
Wyn nods hard, his mane of overgrown hair tickling the shoulders of his dirty T-shirt. “He takes care of… We look after each other.”
“My friend Sasha, who you met, is like that for me.” If only Sasha were here, actually. It’s easier to improv with a scene partner. She leans on the counter, chin propped in her hands. “You know what, Wyn?”
He is busy with combining the gloppy orange batter. “Huh?”
“Plain pumpkin bread isn’t enough now that you’re here.” She grins at him. “I think this calls for chocolate chips.”
“Chocolate?” He matches her grin with a gappy one of his own.
Autumn scavenges through the pantry for her chocolate supply and goes for the massive dark chocolate chunks. “You told me you and Neel had other friends?” she asks over her shoulder.
“Uhh—yeah.” Wyn mashes gamely at his batter, which is really coming together. “Trees.”
She sets the enormous bag of chocolate on the counter, and he cackles at the sight. “Other kids, though. Didn’t you have other friends that…went away?” she asks, frowning. There’s no point in asking about any adults; it’s obvious there are no parents in the picture.
“There were,” Wyn says, reaching for the bag of chocolate, so far he nearly topples from his perch. She hands him a chocolate chunk.
“Ready?” she asks, picking up the chocolate to dump into his batter. He lifts the spoon out to make space, watching eagerly as more than enough chunks of chocolate pile onto the batter. Then he sets to work mixing again. This kid is a natural.
He pokes the chocolate in until she quickly shows him how to fold it. “Now, though, um—now it’s just me and Neel and trees and nobody else,” he finishes.
She stares at her hands as she says, “What about the hungry man?”
Wyn’s spoon clatters to the ground, and when her head whips up, his face is the gray-white of unfired clay.
“Wyn?” Autumn’s stomach knots at the look on his face. She shouldn’t have said it. She wants to reel the words back in, replace them with warm spices and melting chocolate. But it won’t be long before Wyn wants to return to the woods, and she has to know. “Is he what happened to your other friends?”
But he’s petrified, and when he does finally try to answer, it’s only in the chittering language of the forest.
“It’s okay, it’s going to be okay.” Slowly, she gets him a new spoon. “Let’s put our batter in the baking tin. Ready?”
By the time their pumpkin bread is in the oven and Autumn has sat Wyn down with a cup of warm milk, he seems a little more himself. She sits down with him, the scent of cozy fall slowly filling the room. “Wyn,” she says gently. “Do you think Neel might ever want to come here too? Maybe…” she hesitates. “Come to stay in town?”
“Umm…” Wyn’s face scrunches up. He can only shrug, swinging his feet under the table.
“I really think you should stay here with me until we figure some things out,” she tries again. The thought of sending him back there, with traps under the kudzu, missing children, and some man is intolerable.
Immediately something in Wyn’s face hardens, his eyes sharp. “I gotta—I gotta go back,” he insists. “Neel.”
“Right,” Autumn agrees hurriedly. What the hell can she do? She gets up, maybe a little too fast. “Let me go call my friend, and she can drive us out there in her truck, okay? Then you won’t have to walk so far again.” He’s watching her closely as she goes into the front to make the call.
For once in her life, Sasha actually answers the phone. “Hello?”
“You’re home?” Autumn gasps, relief filling her.
“Just got back.” Sasha is smiling; she can hear it in her voice. “What’s going on, Pip?”
Autumn drops her voice. “Wyn is here. He came to the bakery.”
“Holy shit. Shit, shit, shit,” Sasha whispers too, pointlessly. “What do we do? I’ll come over. Should I—call somebody? Lou? Town hall? Social services?”
“Just get over here as soon as you can,” Autumn hisses, craning her neck to see into the kitchen. “I can’t let him go back out there. There’s something bad in those woods. We have to—” She’s cut off as the oven timer starts to sing. “Oh, hell. Just come.” She hangs up on Sasha and scurries back to Wyn, back to the steaming pumpkin chocolate chip bread they’ve made together—
But the kitchen is empty, the back door letting in a chill wind. Her oven sounds the alarm, and the little boy is nowhere to be seen.
Sasha makes it over to the bakery in time for a steaming slice of pumpkin bread, the chocolate chips oozing. Autumn is very quiet, inconsolable, but distant; the grief isn’t even on the surface, but somewhere deep within, inaccessible and hidden from view. Ever since Neel pointed that shotgun, since they went to see Lou, a door has been creaking closed within her, and Wyn’s return to the wild clicked the latch. Though Autumn asked her to come, by the time Sasha arrives, she is definitely an intruder.
“I should have known he would run,” Autumn says. “I swear, ever since I came back…” But she cuts herself off, casts Sasha an uncertain look, and changes the subject. “May as well have some cake.”
It’s as she is driving home from the bakery, after making Autumn a cup of tea and giving her a long, not-quite-returned hug, that something connects in her brain.
Autumn is hiding something from her.
If she’s being truly honest with herself—since no one else is being honest with Sasha—Autumn has been hiding something since she came back.
So maybe Sasha can’t use Autumn as the emotional security blanket protecting her from the ongoing conflict with Lil anymore. Sasha is on her own, a small boat in the dark river only she can cross.
Which is how Sasha ends up awake and in the kitchen at five in the morning, brewing the damn coffee and heating her favorite eye on the stovetop. She’d considered slipping on her work boots and heading out into the orchard to do Lil’s chores for her, but somehow she senses that that would be an invasion rather than a help. Autumn isn’t the only one who keeps secrets from her. So she’s doing what she can. She chops this and that from the refrigerator, as if in a dream, a low blue light beginning to glow on the horizon’s edge out the window. Her skillet is just heating as she hears Lil’s perplexed step on the stairs.
Lil appears in short order, denim jeans and an olive-green sweater hanging off her haphazardly like she’s heard the commotion and dashed into clothes, like she thinks it’s some unexpected company downstairs.
For a moment, her eyes consume the entire scene: the diced peppers and onions on the cutting board, the egg carton. Sasha and her heating pan. Lil’s gaze can shred you down to bits. So Sasha one-handedly cracks eggs instead of looking at her.
“What’s this?” Lil asks, cautiously hovering in the door.
“Tortilla de huevos,” Sasha says, nodding at the steaming coffeepot. That should pull Lil into the kitchen. Her own hands are full as she combines things in the big mixing bowl, beating plenty of air in. She gets the onions and peppers sizzling in the skillet, measuring out flour for her mixture and whipping it frothy.
Lil’s face softens, butter in sunlight. “Wow. That takes me back.”
It’s one of Sasha’s go-to bachelor recipes. She hasn’t made it since New York, but it always reminds her of their harebrained twinscape down to Central Florida. Twenty hours on the bus playing gin rummy, then a midnight wander through the unfamiliar city, squinting from streetlamp to streetlamp at the waterlogged address in the letter from the bureau, which Sasha had stumbled upon looking for stamps at the beginning of that summer. They were only seventeen, but they’d scribbled a note for Mom, We’ll be back in a week or two, and just gone. One of the few times Lil had gone that far from the orchard. During those long hours on the bus, Lil, offhand, had said it barely counted as leaving home if she was with Sasha.
They headed down through swampy Florida and found the address in the letter. The man they met was their father, and he had been surprised to see them, when he opened the door to two girls who could only be sisters, who could only have come from their mother. But he wasn’t their dad in the way Autumn had a dad, who could pick her up from school and teach her how to ride a bike, and who Autumn ran to with all her problems, her joys, her tears. That was a kind of paternal relationship Sasha and Lil never quite grasped.
What they had instead was Luis, the cheerful, laid-back man who Mom had loved once, in a faraway dream. He had never seen the town or walked in the orchard. He was Puerto Rican, and Mom had met him on the island, when she went out looking for herself far from home. From the way his eyes filled with tears as he gaped at them in his doorway, it was clear that he’d really loved her, probably fought to keep her, maybe wanted much more than the month or so she’d been able to offer. Because the orchard had pulled her back.
Luis now owned a successful pharmacy in Kissimmee, and they spent more than a week with him in his neat stucco house. That was where Sasha had learned about tortilla de huevos.
Lil dips her fingers into the skillet, snags a pepper, pops it in her mouth. “You got the hang of this better than I ever did.”
Sasha soaked up that time with Luis like a parched plant. She saw so much of herself in him, in his easygoing, puckish energy, his determined lightheartedness, his creativity. Maybe because she felt differently about the orchard—and yeah, about Mom—than Lil did, she’d craved those lessons from Luis just a little bit more desperately. Now, she sautés with one hand and mixes her eggs with the other. “I thought it might be a nice start to your day,” is all she says.
“It is,” she says, eventually. “Thank you.” And she moves around the counter, taking a seat at the table. “Did you ever reach out to him again? I don’t think I have, since Mom.”
The skillet sizzles pleasurably when Sasha adds the eggs. “Every once in a while.” In her third year at SCAD, she’d sent him a card when he married the pretty, fun girlfriend they’d met on the trip down there. When her photographs were up at the gallery in Queens, she’d sent him an invitation to the opening on a whim, and he’d called her to thank her and let her know that his wife was going to have a baby soon, so he wouldn’t be able to make the trip. That telephone call had meant more to her than she’d wanted to admit, especially with Mom gone. And, more than that, the soothing knowledge that she had blood out there in the world beyond this town.
Sasha watches her tortilla. “I was harsh the other day. I’m—sorry.” She was sorry, it was true, but more for the simple fact that they couldn’t see eye to eye on so many things. She wasn’t strictly sorry about the true things she’d said. But the clash of their truths, each deeply held, was terrible.
After a moment, she hears Lil moving. Her feet padding across the floor. Then Sasha feels her nudge up against the counter. Lil watches the tortilla with her. “Me too. I never want to fight. Not with you.”
“Well, we are twins,” Sasha points out, grinning at her. “Weekly fights are probably appropriate. But—no more dead air.” As the flourish on the end of this sentence, Sasha hefts the skillet and gives it a mighty toss. It does not really make sense to flip tortilla de huevos, more a substantial egg pie than your average diner-style omelet, but she’s always been one for flair.
Lil applauds her successful pan flip. “Hey, I never forgot. End of the day, you’re stuck with me. It’s you. And me.” She moves to help clear up what hasn’t been used, filling the eggy bowl where the raw stuff had been with soap and water. “I saw Autumn’s place is back open. Is she here to stay?”
Sasha serves up slabs of the steaming tortilla, carrying them to their kitchen table. She hesitates. “Autumn is…something is up with her.” As briefly as she can, in their shorthand, she catches Lil up on the children from the abandoned orchards and their talk with Lou. The toothy trap out in the woods. The train tracks. She watches Lil’s eyes fill alternatively with horror and indignation as her gears work. Lil, the fixer, grappling for a solution and failing to find one.
“I’ve never known there to be secrets between you and Autumn,” Lil says finally. “I mean, it’s Autumn. And you.”
“She’s holding something back.” It’s so early in the morning, Sasha’s stomach isn’t sure what to think of her breakfast now that she’s made it. She spears a bite. “I think maybe she’s always held things back from me.” Something Lil and Autumn probably have in common, but for the sake of making up, Sasha keeps this thought to herself.
“I guess she never really said why she came back.” When her plate is empty, Lil doesn’t brush Sasha off, doesn’t dash for the work. Instead, she sets her fork down and leans back, resting her head against the wall, nursing a second cup of coffee. The earth feels steadier under their feet when they are aligned. When her eyes meet Sasha’s, they’re open and readable. “She’ll tell you eventually. Maybe she needs some time, but she always comes back to you.”
Sasha shrugs, lip twisting. She grabs their plates and lays them in the sink. The sun is up now, shy and rosy over the tree line. In the mudroom off the kitchen, their work boots sit side by side, Lil’s a good deal more worn.
Sasha steps into hers. “Let me help you out with the harvest this morning,” she offers, trying to make light. “I feel like we have a lot to catch up on.”
At the sight of Sasha in her work boots, Lil’s whole face glows. She stands hurriedly, for once, the last to be ready to face the day. “Oh, do we ever.”