SHE WOKE TO find the pink room bathed in pale light.
Rolling onto her back, Kris stretched her arms and legs to each corner of the bed and felt the comforting tingle as her muscles pulled taut and then relaxed. She had slept hard but well. She had no idea what time it was, but she knew it was morning. She was ready to take on the new day. She was—
Confusion rippled through her as she realized she was taking up the entire bed.
She sat up, blinking away the last remnants of sleep as she glanced around.
The bedroom door was wide open.
She was alone.
“Sadie?” she called out.
Her voice was swallowed by the empty house.
Kris tossed back the covers and swung her feet off the bed. Her naked toes touched the cool wood floor and the board—like so many other boards in the old house—creaked under the weight.
She waited, listening for any sign of movement.
There was none.
She called again—
“Sadie …”
—even though she knew there would be no answer.
The invisible arms of sleep tried to pull her back toward the bed as she shuffled to the doorway. She wandered out of the bedroom and through the entryway at the mouth of the hall.
A cool breeze curled around Kris’s ankles, gently rubbing against the bottoms of her cotton pj’s like an invisible cat. The French doors were wide open again. Sadie was on the back deck, staring out.
The lake was gone.
Even as her mind tried to make sense of what she was seeing, something drew her forward, a command that did not seem to come from her brain. Yet her legs obeyed, the involuntary action moving her across the room, to the open doorway.
She stepped over the threshold and onto the deck. Tiny splinters of wood bit at the bottoms of her bare feet.
You’re dreaming, her timid voice insisted.
But she knew this was not true. She was awake. What she was seeing was real.
The lake had disappeared in the night, replaced by a layer of drifting cloud. Or else the lake was still where it should be and the house itself had moved, had somehow lifted into the sky and was now resting precariously on a foundation of mist thirty thousand feet above the earth.
She stepped up behind Sadie. Her daughter did not seem to sense her presence. Sadie was lost in thought, staring out at the thick fog that swirled over the spot where the lake should be. She was still dressed in her pajamas. Her hair was matted on one side, giving her head a misshapen look as if some blunt impact had caved it in.
Like she’s been in a car crash. Like the mushy side of Jonah’s skull—
Kris stopped the thought cold, refusing to let it go further.
“Sweetie?” she asked. “What are you doing out here?”
Sadie’s body flinched, the sound of her mother’s voice startling her. She glanced back over her shoulder, the hair cutting down across her face so that only one green eye glimmered amid the red tangles.
“We’re floating,” she said. She raised a single finger and pointed out toward the lake.
Realization washed over Kris, the strangeness of waking alone and wandering through the dreamlike rooms fading away as her mind began to make sense of what they were seeing.
“It’s the mist, remember? It was just starting last night, but now … now it’s covering the whole lake.”
Sadie gave a small nod, although Kris doubted she fully understood what had happened.
For a few minutes, Kris stood at her daughter’s side, staring out at the thick white fog drifting over the lake’s surface and listening to the breeze slip through the treetops. From within that earthbound cloud, a single bullfrog called out in its deep, throaty voice, mourning the end of the night. Then it fell silent.
They said nothing as they watched the sun rise higher behind a thin veil of morning clouds. Already the temperature had risen a good five degrees since Kris first stepped out onto the deck. The fog was beginning to burn off, bare patches revealing the rippling waters of the lake. The dark head of a turtle peered up from the shallows, then ducked down, out of sight, sending a ring expanding in all directions.
Kris placed a hand lightly against Sadie’s back.
“You hungry?”
Sadie shrugged unenthusiastically.
Well, we’re up, Kris thought. Our first official morning here. So what now?
Her gaze drifted away from the lake, up the bluff to the stone path that led to the deck. Just before the back steps, there was the faintest hint of a part in the weeds. Her eyes followed this across the yard, past the overgrown garden and the rickety swing set, toward the edge of the forest.
And just like that, she remembered.
“Go get dressed,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
They stepped down from the back of the deck and onto the trail of flat stones that would have taken them over the edge of the slope and down to the dock. But halfway along the path, Kris abandoned the stones altogether, directing Sadie into that barely recognizable break in the billowing tallgrass. The budding tops of knee-high bluestem brushed against their legs as they cut a trail between the old garden and the swing set.
Kris glanced over at the rectangle of railroad ties to her left and the mountain of weeds that called it home.
Hey, Mom, she thought as she gave a little nod to the girl following closely behind her. This is your granddaughter. This is Sadie.
They left the garden and swing set behind them. The weeds and tallgrass gave way to an uneven length of brown earth that crumbled beneath their feet. The beginning of the forest was only a few yards away. The breeze rustled the leaves around them. To Kris, it sounded like overlapping voices whispering. It was too low to make out the words, yet she understood it, in her heart, in her soul. It was a spell, an incantation, and if they allowed it to be cast on them, everything—the lake house, the town, Black Ridge, Jonah—all of it would be gone. They would belong to the forest.
Kris stopped and pressed the knuckle of a bent finger against her lips as she scanned the trees.
“I think … it’s somewhere around …”
“What?” Sadie asked. The sun was a quarter of the way into the cloud-littered blue sky. Tiny beads of sweat dotted her forehead.
There.
Kris reached into a tangle of kudzu and low-hanging branches at the edge of the forest and swept it back as though she were parting a green velvet curtain. Before them, like magic, was a tunnel of Osage trees, their long, skinny branches bending to the ground like the lowered heads of petrified swans.
Sadie gasped, and the sound made Kris smile.
“Let’s go,” she said as she led her daughter into the woods.
It was all coming back to her.
Passing through the tunnel of trees was like stepping back in time. Kris emerged on the other side with the scent of honeysuckle in her nose and the sound of rustling branches in her ears. She was ten years old again, walking the same path she had wandered down that bittersweet summer when love and darkness became one.
Twigs snapped under their shoes as Sadie followed her deeper into the forest. There was no discernable trail, but Kris remembered the landmarks from her youth: the massive, moss-covered boulder that used to paint her palms green as she scrambled to its top; the ring of saplings that had once been a circle of children listening to Miss Krissy, their teacher, during story time, now a crowded cluster of towering sycamore trees; the sloping hillside dotted with wild berry bushes where she once fed a friendly box turtle; the deep ravine where a patch of earth had slid free, her secret tunnel through the forest. Just as one natural marker fell behind them, another would appear. Many had changed in size over the thirty years since Krissy walked the woods—some larger from decades of growth, others chiseled away by wind and rain—but she recognized them all.
Finally. She was home.
The descent of the ravine carried them down into a twisting chasm of sandstone. It was much cooler there. What sun was able to penetrate the canopy of leaves was blocked by twenty-foot rock walls. They passed through shadow, the chasm narrowing until the overlapping armor plates of sandstone were within arm’s reach.
“I remember …” Kris began before she even knew what she was going to say. “I remember pretending this little canyon was alive and …” The words trailed off as she glanced at the ground, looking for something. She bent down and picked up a fallen branch from one of the trees above. She tested it, gripping it at either end and bending it slightly. The wood creaked but the stick did not snap.
“What’s that for?” Sadie asked. Her soft, sweet voice bounced about the chasm.
“I’ll show you,” Kris said, holding the stick in one hand and taking Sadie’s hand with the other. “Careful.”
The dirt floor of the chasm became rockier until stones the size of watermelons began jutting up from the earth. Their edges were jagged and rose to points like sharks teeth. At the same time, the space between the sandstone walls grew tighter. It nearly brushed their shoulders as they passed.
Kris helped Sadie maneuver between the sharp stones. When she reached the canyon’s narrowest point, Kris told Sadie, “Stay there,” and she lifted the stick horizontally above her head. The sides of the stick screeched as Kris wedged it between the rock walls. Flakes of sandstone dusted the air.
She gave the stick a little tug. It held.
Kris turned back to Sadie, and the confusion on her daughter’s face amused her. “That’s so the rocks can’t eat us.”
Sadie frowned and glanced away, not allowing herself to fully believe what her mother had just said. But there was something tugging at her expression, a desire to give in, to go with it, to be an eight-year-old kid. Without raising her head, she looked up, her eyes finding the stick Kris had left between the canyon walls.
“Can I do one?”
Kris nodded. Together, they searched among the stones until they found another stick of appropriate length. Sadie stepped into the narrowing chasm and, just as her mother had done before her, raised her stick into the air.
Kris waited patiently as she watched her daughter work the branch into place.
Stepping back, Sadie admired her work. The stick was crooked and much lower than the one Kris had placed. There was a good chance it wouldn’t stay put for more than a few minutes. But seeing the two branches together—one tall and secure, the other short and delicate—filled Kris with a sensation that she could only describe as a “glow,” a light she knew was growing stronger within her every hour they were there.
“It’s perfect,” she said.
About fifty yards past the narrowest section of the canyon, the sandstone walls began to descend until they slid beneath the surface of the forest floor. With little warning, the woods expanded infinitely around them in all directions, and Kris and Sadie found themselves at the center of a grove of towering oak trees. High above them, sunlight filtered in through the thick canopy of rippling leaves. Morning glory bloomed along stretches of ivy that twisted through the wild grass and around rough, sturdy tree trunks. A swallowtail butterfly fluttered from flower to flower, its yellow and black markings brilliant against the blue of the morning glories like a drop of sunshine dancing through the air.
The ground cover was thick. Green, leafy fronds created a soft padding that occasionally snagged the toes of their shoes or tugged at the loops of Kris’s shoelaces. Kris let her hands lift at her sides so that the tips of her fingers grazed the serrated edges of leaves sprouting up from low plants. She breathed in the morning air through her nose. Her nostrils filled with the scent of earth still wet with dew. She imagined she could hear the narrow shafts of sunlight vibrating like harp strings as she moved through them.
Her right hand knocked the top of a dogwood shrub, and hundreds of unseen leafhoppers hiding within erupted into a green mist around her. The miniscule insects clung to her clothes, leaping about in a frenzy. Kris laughed, both out of surprise and giddiness, as the leafhoppers went bounding wildly away into the open air, disappearing into the moss-colored shadows below.
“So?” Kris asked. “What do you think?”
Sadie did not reply. She moved silently through the army of oaks that stood at motionless attention.
Kris followed. Around her, the huge tree trunks groaned softly, like grumbling old men, as the wind tossed their bushy, outstretched arms.
The flap of wings shot overhead. Kris glanced up just as a large black shape glided beneath the swaying branches. It swooped up into what must have been the largest, oldest oak tree in the entire forest. Unlike the others, with their perfectly bulbous crowns, this oak’s branches spun wildly off in all directions. It was as if a thousand years ago, a tentacled beast had exploded from the depths of the earth and become petrified at the first contact with open air.
From the fat, malformed ledge where a branch connected to the trunk like a deformed shoulder, the black shape danced excitedly from foot to foot. It clacked its obsidian beak and shrieked in a voice that cut to the bone.
A blackbird.
It hopped a few inches farther down the branch and into a shaft of sunlight. The tightly packed feathers around its neck glistened with a deep purple hue that stretched like an executioner’s hood over the top of its head. It stared down at her with a single glowing golden eye pricked at the center with a black pupil. Even from that distance, she could see that its other eye was pinched shut.
It cried again, tilting its purple head to get a better look at something below.
Kris followed its gaze, down to the base of the treelike beast, down to where something pink and fleshy was being devoured by its trunk. A smiling, freckled face peered out from within the shadows of its open maw.
Sadie was standing in a large hollow that cut deeply into the pulpy flesh of the gargantuan oak. The cavity was as deep and wide as the trunk itself, large enough for Sadie to easily stand inside it.
The doorway, Kris thought, and the words plucked a string far in the dim recesses of her mind.
“Mommy, look,” Sadie called. Her voice reverberated inside the tree.
Kris trudged through the foliage toward the unruly oak.
“Come in with me,” Sadie said.
Kris touched the rough hide at the edge of the hole. “I don’t know if I’ll fit.”
Sadie said nothing, but she scooted over to one side of the hollow to show that there was plenty of room.
“Okay.”
Taking a breath of warm, summer air, Kris slipped into the oak’s gaping mouth.
The hollow was much larger than Kris had assumed. She barely brushed shoulders with her daughter as they stood side by side.
“What was this place, Mommy?” Sadie asked.
A doorway, Kris thought again. A doorway to …
And then that single note vibrating from that distant memory became a chord that rose, louder and louder, until it enveloped her, like the sustained blast of a pipe organ in the sanctuary of a church.
Her eyes scanned the dark chamber within the tree.
“This tree …” she said. “I remember playing in here. I …”
She heard the words escape her lips, but she was not entirely convinced she had spoken them.
“I thought … I thought I had to guard this place.”
Sadie cocked her head, confused. “Why?”
“Because it’s a doorway. That’s what I used to believe. It’s a doorway.” She turned to face the back wall of the hollow. The memory was controlling her now. She was ten years old and standing inside a tree that reached all the way up to heaven. It was the first tree to ever sprout from the earth. Before humans, before dinosaurs, before that first slimy beast pulled itself by its flippers onto solid ground, this tree had twisted like a green finger from the dirt. Its roots reached too deeply, their tips had slipped into other places—other worlds—and that’s when its trunk had yawned open for someone, a ten-year-old girl named Krissy perhaps, to step inside and become the temporary owner of its power.
“If you close your eyes and think of a place,” Kris explained to her daughter, “the back of the tree will open and when you step through, you’ll be in that place.”
“Any place?”
Kris reached out and touched the craggy back wall of the tree. She gave a small, embarrassed laugh.
“Well, I mean, that’s what I used to pretend.”
She watched as Sadie mimicked her action, hesitantly reaching out to trace the folds in the tree’s husk.
“Do you want to try it?” Kris asked.
Sadie thought for a moment, and then her eyes narrowed as if she felt a sudden sharp pain. She shook her head, letting her hand drop down to her side.
“All right,” Kris said. “Another time, maybe.”
The Wishing Tree, as Sadie began to call it, marked the far edge of the oak grove. Another hundred feet and the forest opened up to a sea of wildflowers. Their tops blew in the wind, undulating waves of yellow and red.
Just as it had done to the mist on the lake, the blinding sun had burned off most of the clouds in the sky, although the coolness of early morning had not entirely been chased away.
Around them, the tops of flowers buzzed with honeybees, legs fat with powdery yellow pollen. They hovered around, their stingers quivering excitedly as they investigated each bloom.
Sadie tightened her grip on Kris’s hand.
“Don’t worry,” Kris assured her. “They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.”
Sadie nodded. She made sure to keep hold of her mother’s fingers, but her grip loosened ever so slightly as they cut a path through the wildflowers.
Just like the area behind the lake house, the land began to slope down as they neared the clear, lapping water of the shore. The overgrown vegetation thinned, and the dry ground transitioned to wet clay and water-smoothed stones. Kris held Sadie’s hand as they stepped from rock to rock to keep the black mud from smudging their shoes. They stopped at the edge of the water and stood in silence. Lost Lake was before them, its crystalline surface sparking in the midmorning sun.
Without a word, Sadie raised a hand and pointed a single slender finger out toward the center of the lake.
Kris looked. At first she saw only the skeletal branches of submerged trees reaching up in jagged black lines from below the surface. But … there was something beyond this.
The tiled peak of a rooftop.
“A house,” Kris said aloud, the words unlocking yet another door in her memory.
Sadie’s brow furrowed. “In the lake?”
Kris swept a hand from one side of the lake to the other. “My daddy, he told me. He said a long time ago, this used to be a river. A few people lived out here, along the banks. But when the lake was made, the houses got flooded.”
“Their houses?” Such a possibility was unimaginable to the little girl. “Why didn’t they move?”
“Well, it happened fast. The lake sort of made itself. The water came out of the ground and the river turned into this, into a lake, the way it is now. That right there …” She pointed to the rooftop sprouting from the water like a wooden iceberg. “That’s one of the houses. There are a lot more down there. A general store, too, I think. It’s what they called Lower Basin Road. It’s all under the water.”
Kris watched as Sadie poked her head forward, her eyes narrowing to see those other phantom homes beneath the lake’s surface. Kris knelt down so that she was cheek to cheek with her daughter, their gaze at the same level, staring out at the roof that stood like a monument to the lost community.
“We used to pretend that was a mermaid’s house,” Kris said softly.
“Who?”
“Me, when I was little.”
“No. Mommy. You said, ‘we.’”
Kris cocked and lowered her head, as if she were attempting to reel back her words. “I guess … I guess I meant …”
What had she meant? She was always alone when her parents brought her to the lake house. There were other kids in town—swimming at the beach, having a cone at the ice cream shop, playing at the park, or eating pulled-pork sandwiches at the Pig Stand—but Kris had never been in Pacington long enough to become friends with them. The lake house was family time.
And yet she could not shake the feeling that there had been someone playing alongside her. Two voices, intertwined.
For a split second, a memory streaked through her mind like a shooting star: she was a little girl, peering down into the surface of the lake as small waves tore at her reflection.
“Mommy?” Sadie was looking up at her, concerned.
Kris pinched her eyes shut, trying to force open a door that refused to budge. Finally, she sighed. “I don’t know, honey. I think I just misspoke. That’s all.”
There was no response. Only the soft lapping of water on the shore and the tossing of nearby branches.
Kris opened her eyes.
Sadie was leaning over the edge of the lake, staring down at her reflection. The wind picked up and sent a shiver across the water’s surface. Sadie’s reflection rippled until everything that made her “her” was obscured—the bright green eyes that sparkled with creativity and wonder, the curly red hair that framed her delicate, freckled skin.
Kris looked into the water, and a faceless girl stared back.
Across the street from the north end of Jefferson Park was the Pig Stand. There was no indoor seating at this establishment, so it was only open from the first of April to the first of November. But during those times, the Pig Stand became the nucleus of activity for those not out on the lake or swimming just off the man-made beach on Jefferson Park’s southern tip. By the time it opened at noon, the savory aroma of smoked meat beckoned those in the park and the edge of downtown like an invisible finger to the small square shack where the owner, Ricky Redfern, waited at the open window with a smile, his sandyblond hair pulled back into a ponytail, ready to take orders.
Kris remembered the line to the Pig Stand could stretch past the six wooden picnic tables on the front porch, all the way out to the curb. So it was a bit of a surprise when she pulled the Jeep into a parallel spot directly in front of the Stand and saw only a small cluster of people on the porch. Within five minutes, Kris and Sadie were stepping up to the window marked “Place Yer Order Here” and telling an eternally cheerful Ricky Redfern, his ponytail now gray and threadbare, what they would like for lunch: a hamburger with ketchup for Sadie, the house special pulled-pork sandwich for Kris, and a basket of curly fries to share. Another ten minutes, and they were seated at a picnic table at the edge of the deck and looking across Center Street at Jefferson Park while they ate their food.
One taste of the sweet, smoky sandwich dripping in barbecue sauce with a sharp vinegary bite, and Kris was struck by a ravenous hunger. She hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before. Even then, after their long drive from Colorado and a day spent cleaning, she hadn’t been particularly hungry. Her taste buds exploded like the tops of poppies in bright summer sunshine.
She was down to her last bite when she noticed Sadie picking halfheartedly at the basket of fries. There were two nibbles taken out of the edge of her hamburger; otherwise it had gone untouched.
Kris wiped her sauce-smeared lips with a much-too-thin paper napkin and asked, “Not hungry?”
Sadie shrugged, her eyes on the mound of curlicue fries piled high atop a square of greasy waxed paper in a metal basket.
Back to this, Kris thought. The shrug. Always the shrug ever since …
The incident, Timid Kris proposed in her squeaky, annoyingly helpful voice.
Shadow Kris chuckled, the sound echoing from the depths. Incident? Is that really what you’re calling it now? Do I need to remind you about his teeth? They were above his lips. His teeth were above his lips.
Kris clenched her jaw and tried to force the door closed on that voice. Yet it would not be silenced.
He shouldn’t have even been in that car. He should have been home. In bed. With you.
From nearby came a playful mixture of laughter and feigned terror.
Kris glanced to the park across the street.
A little boy, no older than five or six, was racing wildly in a lopsided figure eight while his father, a stout, balding man in his mid-thirties, gave chase. Just as the father would reach the boy, he would fall back so that his swipes barely brushed the child’s back. Each time, the boy gave a giddy scream and cut sharply to the side, around the top loop of the figure eight, and the pattern began again. Seated nearby on a red-and-black checkered blanket, under the shade of a drooping cottonwood tree, was a woman with short brown hair and contentment in her eyes. Kris assumed this was the boy’s mother. Above her, the branches swayed in the breeze, white tufts of cotton pulled free to drift lazily away into the sunny summer afternoon.
Just as the little boy shrieked, Kris looked back to Sadie and noticed a nearly imperceptible flinch. It was subtle, but it was there. There was no confusing it for anything else. It was a painful reaction to the sound of the little boy’s joy as he pretended to fear the advance of his loving father.
Kris set down the last bite of her sandwich, then picked up a Wet-Nap package from atop a stack of paper napkins and tore it open. She wiped the sticky barbecue sauce from her fingers and under her nails, then balled it up and tossed the moistened towelette onto the table. “If you’re done, we can go.”
Sadie nodded and set her hamburger down on the brown paper in which it had been wrapped. Kris watched as her daughter mimicked her previous routine, tearing open her own Wet-Nap and thoroughly scrubbing every little finger from nail to knuckle, even though she had barely touched her food. When she was finished, she squeezed the towelette into a ball, just as her mother had done.
As they carried their trash toward the large trash can at the edge of the porch, Ricky Redfern thrust a hand out of the open window and shook it wildly in an exaggerated wave. “Y’all come back!” he called out. His smile was so big, Kris swore she could see his back molars.
She waved back politely and quickly dumped their trays into a metal trash barrel. She hoped Ricky hadn’t seen Sadie’s uneaten burger. If he did, he showed no sign of it. Ricky rested both hands on the inside counter and leaned forward to grin out the window at the Pig Stand’s nonexistent patrons.
She waited for the click of Sadie’s seat belt, and then Kris put her hand on the gearshift, about to slide it into Drive, when she happened to glance over at the right-side mirror.
A man was walking up beside the Jeep. His large frame was tightly bound in a tan County Sheriff’s uniform. Above his right breast pocket was a brass name tag engraved with black letters: “Deputy B. Montgomery.” Behind him, parked parallel to the curb just like Kris, was his cruiser, a white Dodge Charger with a gold stripe down the side and the word “Sheriff” floating in black block letters over this.
Kris’s grip tightened on the oversized plastic knob on top of the gearshift.
It’s nothing, she told herself. He’s just going to grab some lunch. He’ll walk right by in a second.
But then Shadow Kris purred awake in the darkness. You know what cops bring. Bad news. Terrible news that shatters your world.
She sat frozen behind the wheel as Deputy Montgomery reached the side window. He glanced down at something on the lower front half of the Jeep, then stopped and turned to peer in through her window. His eyes were shielded by the stereotypical aviator sunglasses that begged him to be cliché, but his chin, jaw, and lips were covered in a thick black beard. His cheeks were pocked with acne scars.
He motioned for Kris to roll down her window.
Kris thought, Shit, although she had no real reason to be concerned. She fumbled for the automatic window button on the armrest, found it, and pushed it. Across from her, the passenger-side window slid smoothly down.
“Ma’am,” Deputy Montgomery said, his voice as rough as a burlap sack full of rocks.
Kris could sense Sadie’s unease from the back seat: Mommy is in trouble, Mommy did something wrong; even Mommy makes mistakes.
That’s right, Kris thought. Even mommies and daddies make mistakes.
And then the thought was gone as the face of Deputy Montgomery filled her view.
“Morning,” Kris said, then shook her head, realizing. “I mean, afternoon.”
“Afternoon,” he replied. Behind that thick overgrown bramble patch of beard, his lips remained perfectly straight in a tight, emotionless line.
Kris tried to muster up a friendly smile. “Something wrong?”
Deputy Montgomery craned his neck, looking into the back seat. “Hello there,” he offered in a much softer tone.
Sadie sank back as if she were trying to slip down into the crack between the back of her booster and the seat.
Deputy Montgomery glanced from Sadie to Kris, and for one brief moment, he seemed completely confused, as if the sight of them together had thrown him off. Then he recovered and tapped the window frame with large calloused fingers.
“Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble,” he assured her in his gravelly Kris Kristofferson voice. “I just noticed the donut there on your vehicle. You been traveling long on that?”
The memory came flooding back to her: the tire blowing somewhere in Central Kansas; digging the spare out from under stacks of boxes and bags; gritting her teeth as she forced the lug nuts loose.
She let out a sharp sigh.
“Right. The donut. No, not too long. We had a blowout on the way to town.”
Deputy Montgomery gave a low, “Uh-huh,” then took another quick look down at the spare tire.
Kris shifted uncomfortably, as if fearing what she had just told him wasn’t the truth, even though she knew it was.
“You staying here in town?” he asked finally.
Kris nodded a bit too enthusiastically.
“Yes. For the summer. We live in Colorado. But actually I’m from this area. Blantonville, originally.”
Deputy Montgomery gave an ambiguous, “Hmm.”
Once again, Kris found herself rambling to fill the air. “We’re staying on River Road. The last house before you hit the park.”
Deputy Montgomery raised a finger into the air, pointing to something only he could see. “River’s End?”
“Yeah. That’s it. Forgot people around here call it that. It belonged to my father. The lake house. River’s End. I used to come here in the summer when I was a kid.”
“Not as many summer folk as there used to be,” he said. He cleared his throat as if saying this out loud had been a mistake. He rapped his fingers on the window frame once more. “You shouldn’t put too many miles on that donut. You’ll want to get a new tire on as soon as possible.” He took a step back, up onto the sidewalk, and motioned back toward downtown. “There’s a place just down the road, on Sycamore. The Auto Barn. Guarantee they can hook you up.”
“Thank you,” Kris replied. “I’ll take care of it. Promise.”
Deputy Montgomery scratched a dirty fingernail into his overgrown beard. Kris could not see his eyes through the mirrored lenses, but she felt as though he were taking an extra moment to glance at Sadie in the back seat. Then he nodded, offered an obligatory, “You have a good day,” and marched across the Pig Stand patio to where Ricky waited in the order window.
They decided to get ice cream, even though it was breaking the rules. Back in their old life, Kris rarely suggested getting dessert after lunch. Dessert was a dinner thing, and not an after-every-dinner thing. But this wasn’t their old life. This was something else. And this something else called for ice cream after lunch—after every single lunch, if that’s what it took to find flickers of joy.
She had already parked in an angled spot, both of them standing on the sidewalk as she pressed the key fob to lock the doors, when she realized that the ice cream shop was still half a block up.
“It’s okay. We’ll walk,” she told Sadie.
From where she stood, Kris could see the shop’s painted sign—in the shape of a bowl heaped high with a melting mound of vanilla—swinging slowly back and forth beneath a blue awning. Its all-too-clever name adorned the side of the bowl in crude calligraphy meant to look elegant: Dairy Godmother.
She remembered this place.
The ice cream shop.
A treat on a summer day.
A treat for after.
After what?
After a visit to the talking doctor.
Kris came to a sudden stop.
Slowly, she turned to her right, to where a doorway trimmed in stained redwood, so deep that it was almost a shade of purple, led up a steep flight of stairs to a business on the second floor. A bronze placard was mounted on the brick wall next to the doorway: “Clear Water Counseling—Alice Baker, Psy.D.”
You’ve been here.
She saw herself, or a wisp of herself, like a figure made from dissipating smoke. She was holding her father’s hand. He was telling her that this was a good thing. This would help.
Little Krissy stopped on the first step just inside the doorway. Daddy sensed her apprehension. He did not want to force her. He wanted her to feel comfortable.
Kris watched as Daddy knelt beside her younger self so that they were eye to eye, just as she did with Sadie when she wanted the child to feel like there was no hierarchy at play. His sandy-brown hair was thinning at the crown. The sunlight caught the pale patches of scalp beneath. Kris knew what Daddy was saying.
This was a place where they told her she could talk about anything.
She could share her secrets.
She could tell them about—
“Mommy?”
Sadie was standing at the edge of the curb. She pointed impatiently to the other side of the street, to the next block where that Dairy Godmother sign called to them like an oasis in the desert.
“I’m coming,” Kris said, yet she did not move. Not yet.
You can tell her anything.
“Mom-my …”
“Okay, okay.”
Kris hurried over to her daughter and took her hand. Even as they crossed the street, she could still see that doorway in her mind, its edges rimmed in deep red.
Kris got a single scoop of butter pecan, Sadie a double scoop of chocolate fudge and cookie dough. They sat at the counter, paper-wrapped cones clasped in their hands, while the bell over the door dinged each time a new customer entered. Kris watched as Sadie crouched over her scoop and took a few small licks as if giving herself permission to enjoy the taste.
Even inside the store it was warm, the heat radiating off the large sunlit windows that lined the front wall. Every now and then, a puff of cool air would blow over from the refrigerated cases of ice cream.
Kris felt her uneasiness fade away with each lick of ice cream. Gone was the happy couple spending a carefree day at the park with their son. Gone was Deputy B. Montgomery knocking on her car window. Gone was the red-rimmed doorway leading up to the talking doctor’s office. This place—the ice cream shop—was, by its very nature, a place to escape troubles.
We came here, Kris realized. Mommy and Daddy and me. We sat at this very counter and we ate ice cream and Mommy made a joke about Daddy’s tummy and Daddy said it wasn’t ice cream he was worried about, it was beer, and we all laughed because we were happy. Because I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was really happening. But they did. They …
She pinched her eyes shut and pushed away the thought.
Not here. Not in the ice cream shop.
She looked over at Sadie. Unlike her disinterested nibbles of burger at the Pig Stand, Sadie was eagerly lapping at the top mound of chocolate fudge. If this was her lunch, then so be it.
“Good?” Kris asked.
Sadie nodded between licks. A line of cookie dough cream coursed over her knuckles. A second later, the same thing was happening to Kris, white streams of butter pecan slipping from the glistening ball atop the cone like floodwaters over a dam.
“Hurry!” Kris cried. “Lick! Lick! We can’t let the ice cream win!”
They tried to eat quickly, but the ice cream melted quicker, running down the sides of the cones and between their fingers. By the time they were done, both Kris and Sadie were a mess, their hands smudged with sticky cream, Sadie’s mouth covered in brown chocolate from her lips all the way to the middle of both cheeks.
Kris wet a napkin on her tongue and threatened to wipe Sadie’s face with it, an act that had always elicited a frightened giggle from the girl. Now it barely got a smile, but the hint was there, tugging as always at the edge of her lips. The hint would do, Kris decided. The hint meant the possibility of smiles down the road.
She took the wet, mushy paper that had been wrapped around Sadie’s cone and nodded toward a hallway at the back of the store. “Why don’t you go wash up?”
With the brown smudges beginning to dry on her fair skin, Sadie slipped off her stool and trotted away down the hall. A moment later came the click of a bathroom door opening and closing.
Kris stayed at the counter, nibbling at the last of her sugar cone.
“She’s a beautiful girl.”
Behind the counter was a young woman of nineteen or twenty. She wore chunky black glasses with lenses so thick, her eyes looked like blue pails lowered to the bottoms of deep, dark wells. Her plump cheeks were marred by clusters of pimples, not nearly as bad as the kid at the supermarket, but her greasy flesh still begged for a good, soapy scrubbing. Pulled down to the top of her eyeglass frames was a tan cap embroidered with the business’s name in the same amateurish script as the sign out front.
The name of every store in this town is a ridiculous pun, Kris thought, and then she scolded herself. It was supposed to be cute. It was supposed to hearken back to a simpler, less cynical time. A happier time.
When everything was swept under the rug.
“Are you visiting or …” The young woman let her words drift into the warm air as if there were no second option.
This was not the same person who had waited on them when they arrived, Kris realized. That had been a rail-thin girl of high-school age with her hair pulled into a sloppy side ponytail and bangs cut an inch too high on her forehead.
“Visiting,” Kris said, trying to hide her confusion. “For the summer.”
The young woman did not reply. For a few moments, Kris sat in silence while the young woman rinsed the ice cream from used metal scoopers, the hot water from the faucet billowing steam around her face.
“You know, you ought to keep an eye on a little girl like that in this town.” The young woman was facing Kris. She held a scooper in her hand, seemingly forgotten. Milky white water dripped from its tip.
“What?”
The woman cocked her head, those tiny, faraway eyes staring off in the direction of the restrooms.
“She’s been in there a long time,” the woman said.
Invisible fingers traced the back of Kris’s neck. She began to get up from her stool, the toes of her shoes just touching the ground, when down the hall one of the restroom doors opened and Sadie reappeared. She obediently crossed the empty store, the skin around her mouth red from being wiped clean with a rough paper towel.
“Better?” she asked, lifting her face to show off her clean skin.
Kris nodded. “Much.” She stood and tightly gripped Sadie’s hand. “Ready to go?”
Sadie pushed the front door open, the bell giving a pleasant ding, thanking them for their visit.
Over her shoulder, Kris called back, “Have a nice day.”
Behind the counter, the young woman smiled, but to Kris, it looked more like a grimace, as if she were trying to ignore a pain eating away at her gut.
The words continued to ring in Kris’s head as they stepped into the sunlight:
In this town.
She was just trying to be helpful, the timid voice scolded.
Kris couldn’t recall exactly when she realized she thought in different voices. One day her thoughts had simply taken on distinct tones. They sounded like different versions of her. There was the timid voice that pestered her, lecturing her in its passive-aggressive tone. This voice always tried to see the bright side. It was the one she had listened to for much of her life, the one that had told her everything was fine with Jonah, that his late nights and foul attitude meant he was working hard, nothing more. This voice made her feel like a child. She hated it most.
And then there was the dark voice, the shadow voice that echoed from a great distance. It was the voice behind the door. This one made her skin prickle and the muscles in her neck and shoulders tingle. This voice spoke the truth, even when she didn’t want to hear it. Especially when she didn’t want to hear it. It said things like He doesn’t love you anymore, and Your daughter hates you, and Your mommy is turning into a monster.
Kris did not hate this voice. She feared it. She feared it most when she didn’t understand it, when it seemed to know more than she did. This voice was more like her than the other voice. Sarcastic. Sometimes profane. Full of attitude.
She’s not trying to be helpful, this voice said now. That asshole is trying to scare you.
“Can we go back to the house now?” Sadie asked. She had already started down the sidewalk, toward where the Jeep was parked across the next street.
This town, Kris heard the young woman in the thick glasses say again.
She hurried to catch up to her daughter.