SATURDAY
PAIGE
“Can you get Hannah at the airport? Her plane gets in at seven. Delta 424 from Paris. You can take your mother’s car.”
“Sure, Daddy,” I said, but even in the Mercedes I hated driving along all those hairpin turns, and the airport was almost two hours away. Momma would never have let me drive from the mountains near Asheville to the Charlotte airport—the only one where Hannah could get a flight from France on such short notice—in the dark. I’d gotten my license the year before and had only done the trip twice and never at night. But when Daddy looked at me with his deep, dark, and now vacant eyes from where he sat, glued to the chair by Momma’s hospital bed, I could only agree.
“I think I’ll stop by home first and get a shower,” I said. I needed a warm blast of water and another cup of chai to wake me up enough for the drive. Daddy simply nodded as I kissed him on the forehead. I glanced at Momma, lying motionless, attached to life by a tangle of wires. Daddy didn’t look up as I slipped out the door.
Our neighborhood was perched on a vast green plateau on Bearmeadow Mountain, the huge log-cabin-like homes separated by sprawling yards with lush green grass and towering trees. The colorful city of Asheville was about thirty minutes away, in a valley surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains on every side. Once a boring small town, Asheville had recreated itself into a cool, artsy village. That was in the eighties before I was born, but I’d heard Momma tell the story of how the downtown area was dying but not quite dead. With the battle cry Love Asheville, Don’t Level It!, a local businessman had led the fight against bulldozing eleven acres of the downtown to build a mall. That campaign preserved Asheville’s historic buildings, which provided a launch space for new small businesses into the 1990s. It also brought an influx of artists. But I think Momma was creating her stories before Asheville became the hip place for the arts community.
Milton, our golden retriever, greeted me at the front door. I bent down and buried my face in his fur. “Hey, buddy.” He wagged his tail, anticipating a walk. “I’m in a rush right now, but Mrs. Swanson promised to take you out in a little while.”
I showered quickly, threw on a pair of jeans and a sweat shirt, filled a travel mug with chai, and left Milton pouting by the front door.
The surgeon’s words haunted me during the long drive to the airport. I tried to distract myself first by watching the palette of colors surrounding me—pale yellow and burnt orange, with an occasional burst of scarlet—as I zigzagged down the mountain road. Then I pictured my big sister in France doing her junior year abroad, lucky thing. Except that now Momma had gotten shot, and Hannah was flying home on a bright autumn day in October when she was supposed to be touring Cézanne’s art studio in the outskirts of this really cool town called Aix-en-Provence.
———
Our father was French. The first time he stepped on American soil was in 1978 when he came to the States for college—on a soccer scholarship. Even after we were born, he still spoke English with the slightest trace of an accent, which to us sounded very romantic. For all of our growing up years, Momma and Hannah and I spent a month each summer in France at my grandparents’ beach apartment in a tourist town called La Grande Motte—literally “the big mole hill.” There was nothing old and charming about La Grande Motte. The town was developed in the late 1960s by an architect—he transformed a long stretch of beach on the Languedoc coastline of France into a tourist destination. Once, according to my French grandmother, the sun-drenched beaches were nothing but a desert of sand dunes and lagoons. After the architect finished, La Grande Motte was a fancy holiday resort. The architecture was supposedly inspired by the Inca pyramids in Mexico and the nearby Pic Saint-Loup—the highest peak in that region of France. But Hannah and I thought that from far away it looked like a bunch of gigantic Lego buildings, geometrically stacked beside the Mediterranean.
The French either loved or hated the unique town, but for my family, there was no debate. This was a little taste of paradise—ten kilometers of the best beach in France, much better than the rocks of Nice. And if we got tired of the Legos, there was lots of old, old France just around the corner in Montpellier and Aigues-Mortes and the Pont du Gard. The architect had planned the town in such a way that every apartment had a beach view. Ours was magnificent.
We always spent the month of June there. French children didn’t get out of school until late June or even early July, so we had a much more private experience before the mad rush of tourists in July and August. Most French got five weeks of vacation a year, and many chose to spend four of those weeks at some beach—the whole month of July or August. The French even had a name for these tourists: Juillettistes (who vacationed in July) and Aoûtiens (those who vacationed in August).
Well, I guess we were Juinistes—at least Momma and Hannah and me—taking our vacation in June. At first Daddy could only take a week off from work, but as he climbed the insurance ladder, he eventually spent two and even three weeks with us—idyllic weeks where we rode bikes and Camargue ponies and sailed and built amazing sand castles that mirrored the Lego buildings around us.
My best friend, Drake, came a couple of times too.
And we spoke in broken French with our grandparents.
So when Hannah had the possibility of studying in France she leapt at it, choosing Aix-en-Provence, about two hours from La Grande Motte, and enrolling in an art class in Cezanne’s territory outside of Aix. Momma had planned to head to La Grande Motte in November to do a little touring with her, and then Daddy and I were going to join them for Christmas.
I wanted to go to France for my studies, too, and then I wanted to be a writer like Momma. Except I wanted to write crime fiction set in late nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century England, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. Maybe even with a little history about Louis Pasteur included—we’d just seen a pretty interesting documentary about how he’d invented the vaccine against rabies. I wanted to write novels and live in a cobblestoned village like Aix-en-Provence and buy baguettes from the boulangerie every day like Hannah did.
I turned on the radio, and it was of course on Momma’s favorite station. Christian music. Well, that was okay, but I flipped the dial.
———
Hannah, in the words of one friend “the world’s sexiest co-ed,” looked anything but when she finally stepped through the sliding doors at the international baggage claim. She was completely undone, a total mess—and I’d never describe anything about Hannah as messy. Her thick blond hair was pulled off her neck in a clip, but strands dangled every which way, and she had no makeup, nothing on her face except dark rings under her eyes. She wore a bright blue T-shirt with Van Gogh’s Starry Night printed on it and skinny jeans and her bulky green backpack.
We grabbed each other and stood there while other passengers whisked past us, pulling their shiny carry-ons. I held on to Hannah tightly, feeling desperate and relieved at the same time.
“Let me take the backpack,” I said, and without waiting for her answer I hoisted it off her shoulders and onto mine, and we headed for the parking garage.
“How is she?” Hannah asked, and I could tell she dreaded my answer.
“Still in the coma. No change—at least that we can see.” I said it matter-of-factly and then burst into tears.
We stepped to one side of the concourse to let the stream of travelers going to and from their gates pass us by, both of us wiping our faces with the backs of our hands.
Finally Hannah asked, “Do they think she’ll come out of the coma? Do they know if . . . well, you know, if her brain function is normal?”
I looked sideways at my big sister, still swiping a stubborn tear. “Has Momma’s brain function ever been normal?”
Hannah just stared at me for a second, and then she burst out laughing, and so did I.
“Sorry. I know that was awful, but if I didn’t say it, I’d say something else a lot more awful.”
“Like what?”
“Like they keep calling it an assassination attempt—which is, you’ve got to admit, too weird.” I gnawed on my upper lip.
“It’s unthinkable.”
“And Daddy almost acts like he’s in a coma himself—he can’t make a decision and just sits by Momma’s bed, begging her to wake up. It’s pitiful.” I glanced at my sister and almost added, You know . . . like before.
We stepped through the sliding doors and into the muggy Charlotte Indian summer where the sky had turned black. Hannah raised her face up to the clouds and took a deep breath. “Good ole North Carolina!”
When we reached the car, I mashed the button to unlock the door.
“Thanks for coming, Paige. I can’t believe Daddy let you drive all this way alone. Especially at night.”
“It’s like I said. He’s not himself.”
“Of course not.”
“He just sits there, staring into space. Like he’s in shock.”
“He is. We all are.”
“So I’m the one answering the phone and letting all the ladies in the church know about it, and the police said to put it on Facebook, and we’re inundated with messages, and I don’t know when the last time I closed my eyes was. . . .” Even as I said it, I suppressed a yawn.
Hannah grabbed me again. “It’s horrible, and you’ve been amazing, but you need sleep.” She brushed the back of her hand across my face, the way Momma would do, then tucked a wisp of hair out of my eyes and yawned.
“I’ll doze in the car, and then you can drop me off at the hospital, and Daddy and I will take the night watch.”
I put her pack in the backseat and said, “Thanks.”
She nodded off within ten minutes of leaving the airport, while I clutched the steering wheel and stared into the black night and wished this were just a larger-than-life nightmare.
———
“And Momma received two handwritten letters—I’m pretty sure they were from the same person—and they were, you know, threatening. Really creepy, kind of.” I was crawling along the interstate at fifty miles per hour in the rain, grateful that Hannah had woken up.
“When was this?”
“Oh, at least two or three weeks ago.”
“Did you show them to her?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately.”
“And?”
“Just what you’d expect. She got a bit scared, and then she felt all guilty and kept second-guessing her story. And I kept telling her that the letters were probably from a white supremacist freak who had a grandfather in the KKK, and she should chill.”
“And?”
“Well, you know how those things affect her. I wish I hadn’t shown her.”
“Yeah. I remember once when I had your job”—she flashed a smile—“Mom got a really nasty letter from this person who was barely literate. Mad about Momma using a degrading epithet in her dialogue. But it was totally justifiable; I mean, Momma was showing that the character who said it was a first-class jerk. But I’ll bet she spent a week fretting over how to respond. I shouldn’t have ever shown it to her. One out of hundreds of fan letters is mean, and she can’t get it out of her head.”
“Exactly. That’s what happened with these letters. She got totally obsessed. I finally convinced her just to ignore the weirdo.”
“Do you still have the letters?”
“Of course.”
“Then you need to show them to the police.”
“Hey, I’m the detective. Who says they get to snoop around?” But I gave Hannah’s shoulder a squeeze. “Boy, I’m glad you’re here. I know it sucks to leave France, but it’s all so unreal. And so scary. Hannie, I’m afraid she’s going to die.”
JOSEPHINE
1968, April . . . How could all the grown-ups be laughing and joking and wearing their fancy clothes as if nothing had happened? As if the world hadn’t gotten a whole lot darker in just a week.
“I’m sorry about Mr. King, Terence,” Josephine said, sipping her ginger ale and staring out at the crowd of happy people.
“Thank you for sayin’ it, angel.” He wore his tux as usual, and served up the wine and champagne and mixed drinks with a “Here you go, ma’am” and a smile. But Josephine saw sadness behind his eyes. “It’s an awful thing—to be motivated by hate.”
The dark brown whiskey bottles and the elegant bottles filled with Daddy’s favorite wines from France stared back at her, but in her head Josephine still saw the images from TV—a mass of people walking behind a mule-drawn wagon singing a song about freedom.
“These people are sorry, too, Terence,” she said. “They don’t show it right now, but they care.”
Terence bent down to her height and rested his big hands on her shoulders, hands that trimmed hedges and filled glasses with sparkling wine. “Miss Josy, you listen to me, and you listen good. There’s a whole lot of evil in this world. And you got a heart that feels it more than others. But don’t you go tryin’ to carry it—you give it to the good Lord, you hear me? Can’t be carryin’ it on your mighty thin shoulders. The Lord, now He’s got big shoulders. You tell Him about it, and then you go on out and drink your ginger ale. Ain’t up to you to fix the world’s problems.”
Josephine nodded, head down, and blinked back a few tears. “But how can I help, Terence? What can I do?”
———
1968, December . . . The party lasted way past her bedtime, but Mommy and Daddy didn’t come to get her. Josephine didn’t mind much, with the house all lit up with candles and the Christmas tree sparkling with the perfect silver balls and the twinkling white lights and the music playing Mr. Bing Crosby. Everybody liked hearing Mr. Bing Crosby at Christmastime. She liked Mr. Andy Williams even better, and when his voice came from the record player, she smiled.
She yawned and found her way to the den where Terence—dressed in his black tux but with a bright green vest—was serving drink after drink after drink. She crawled under the little gate and sat in a folding chair beside him.
“They’re all going to be drunk, Terence. They’re all going to have wrecks on the way home. I just know it.”
“Now, Miss Josy, don’t you be worrying none about them folks. Ain’t it about time for you to go on up to bed?”
“Kit hasn’t come to get me yet, and I can’t find Mommy.”
“Well, I’m sure she’s here somewhere. You want me to take you to your momma, Miss Josy?”
She followed Terence through the big den into the living room and through the dining room to the little den. Across the room crowded with fancy people, Josephine could see Kit standing beside her mother. Kit was two years older than Josephine. She wore a bright blue satin dress, and her thick golden hair was pulled back in a bow. Josephine looked down at her yellow dress—she’d picked out the wrong one, she could tell by Mommy’s expression when she first came downstairs.
“There you go, Miss Josy,” Terence whispered, letting go of her hand and turning back through the house.
Josephine eased her way in between the adults, who smiled down at her. She’d almost reached her mother when the lady standing next to Kit said, “Your Kit is the most stunningly beautiful child I have ever seen.” She drew Kit close. “You are just gorgeous, sweetheart.”
Mommy caught sight of Josephine. She gave a pasted-on smile and motioned to her to come over. “Thank you, Janie. And you’ve met Josephine before, haven’t you?”
The woman nodded. “Oh yes, of course.” But she didn’t say anything about Josephine being pretty. No one ever did except for Terence.
Mommy came to the rescue. “Our precious JoJo is so talented. She writes poems and stories and is just the sweetest, most thoughtful little girl in the world.”
Josephine squished herself up against Mommy’s silky dress.
“I don’t think mischief ever crosses her mind. Now Kit, she’s another story. . . .”
The women laughed.
HENRY
The first part of the drive sure was pretty, along I-40, that big ole highway that curved around just about as much as a mountain road, with the leaves all starting to show their fall colors. But then, just like that, when I left the highway for the little back roads to home, the sky turned dark and rain started pelting the windshield.
I had the radio on, and the announcer said the hit man had been an expert, which meant training, probably military. They’d even pinpointed the type of weapon.
Yeah, I’d been in the military all right, but that’s not where I learned to shoot. No, that was all Pa.
I never had the guts to say “no, thank you” to my pa, and especially not when he had a gun on him. That meant target practice, every day after school, in the back woods.
“You got the eye. Got the control. When you git a little older you’ll be a fine sharpshooter, son. I guarantee.”
What he meant, but didn’t say, was when I reached my fifteenth birthday I’d be old enough to go out with him on his “private missions.” I didn’t like thinking about it, but I didn’t argue with Pa. And by then my ma wasn’t around anymore to stand up for me. When she took sick and died, that was it. Pa pulled me out of school after eighth grade.
I switched the radio to country and tried to think of something else, but my head kept throbbing to the beat of the windshield wipers, my mind all foggy, seeing Miz Bourdillon walking and then turning and the bullet hitting her at just the wrong angle. And I kept thinking about her books that I’d seen in the store, and I got a notion to get one of those books and read it.
One thing about being off the meds, I’d get an idea in my mind and it wouldn’t go away, no matter what. I made it to our little public library right before closing time. I pulled a newspaper over my head like a makeshift umbrella to keep the rain from drenching me. Libby wouldn’t like me coming home all wet.
“Hello, Henry. How are you doing?” The librarian, Mabel Garrison, looked up from the computer and over her reading glasses just like she’d been doing ever since I was a kid. She hadn’t changed one bit in almost twenty years, tall, thin, dressed in a dark suit, hair streaked with gray, eyes bright and looking plenty smart.
“Not bad. Doin’ all right. Forgot my umbrella.”
“And your boy?”
“He’s managing. We’re hoping for a surgery soon.”
“Well, we’re praying for you at church. Every Wednesday night.”
“I sure do appreciate that, Miz Garrison.” That’s what I said out loud, but inside I hated it that everybody at that church had to know my family’s business.
I made my way to the stacks, winding through the nonfiction to the fiction, alphabetical by author. A big gap opened between Borderly and Bowers. Guess I wasn’t the only person with a sudden interest in Miz Bourdillon’s books. But there was one left, and I plucked it off the shelf like I’d found gold and took it back to the checkout.
“I’m surprised you still found one,” Miz Garrison said. “Everybody’s come in wanting the latest.” She lowered her voice. “They’re saying because it raised issues about white supremacy it might have, well . . . you know. Might have caused the assassination attempt.”
I kept my face blank.
“But I’ve read it, and it’s good. Her books are all good. Clean. Inspiring. A little mystery, a little religion, a little history. Not fluffy at all, but there’s usually a love story. This one’s about reconstruction after the Civil War, and I tell you I didn’t know half of the truth. Pretty complicated and shady.” She shook her head. “But nothing to get yourself killed over, mind you!”
Then she got a funny look on her face. “Nothing unless you were a black man living in the Deep South in the late nineteenth century and involved in politics.” She let out a sigh, took my library card, and flashed it under the lighted screen.
I nodded as if I understood, wanting to hurry her along but not wanting it to show.
“But the one you’ve chosen is her first novel, I believe. One of my favorites. I’m sure you’ll like it.” She handed my card back to me along with the book.
“Well, I don’t exactly aim to read it. It’s for my wife—ya know, she saw it on the news and all. . . . She’s never read one, so I said I’d go on down to the library and pick one up.”
“Well, there you go, Henry. You tell Libby hello from us—and we’re praying about Jase.”
“Yes’m.”
———
“Thank goodness you’re home.” Libby greeted me with a frown. “I’ve been pacing the floor like a maniac.” She felt in my pocket for my cell phone. “Don’t you know how to use this thing? You could have called.”
“Sorry, honey. Battery died.”
“Same as always. You’re not in junior high, you know. It’s called being responsible.”
“I got your text yesterday. How is he?”
“Stable. They let me take him back home. He’s in bed.”
“Lemme go see him.”
She caught my arm. “Don’t. You’ll worry him looking like you do. Go get yourself a shower and shave.”
No man in his right mind wanted his boy to be afraid of him. That was what I told myself over and over again. But in truth I handled my boy just like Pa handled me. I didn’t know any other way.
———
“Hey, Papa,” Jase said, and my heart softened. If only I could force my face to soften too.
“Hey, Jase.”
He looked wrung out—pale as the moon, rasping to breathe, bony arms reaching toward me. Pretzel arms, twig arms. One snap and they’d break.
“You hangin’ in there, buddy?”
“Your momma taking good care of you?”
“Like always, Papa.”
“Well then.” I reached over and mussed his chestnut mop of hair.
“Glad you’re back, Papa.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
I turned to leave, and he added, “Did Momma tell you what the doctor said?” I tried not to hear the hint of dread in his voice, the expectation of bad news.
“Yes, she did, son. We’ll be getting you into surgery in no time at all.”
In our bedroom Libby wrapped her arms around me and nuzzled into my bare chest. “You look like you’ve had a bad day.”
I knew what was coming next.
“You been taking your meds, babe?”
I grunted yes, but truth was I’d stopped ten days earlier when the prescription ran out. Had to—I wasn’t any good with a gun when on the meds.
“I’m just worried about you is all.”
I pushed her away, and I caught the fear in her eyes. Why’d the two people I loved most on the planet get that crazy, scared look so often?
“You got enough worries with Jase. Don’t spend your time frettin’ over me, girl.”
“Henry, I am worried about you. You know what the doctor said. Going cold turkey had bad side effects the last time.”
“You don’t believe me, do you, Libby? Just like always.”
I didn’t mean to shove her as hard as I did. She stumbled backward and fell against the bed. Now she looked at me like a panicked doe before the kill.
“Libs, I’m sorry. Don’t be nagging me about the meds. About anything. I told you I’d earn some extra money, and I aim to do it.”
She wrapped her arms around herself like she was cold, and I almost went to hold her, to show her everything was fine. But I didn’t.
The first time I roughed Libby up a little, she made me go see a doctor. Psychiatrist. I got a diagnosis all right. A fancy title: post-traumatic stress disorder. Well, yeah. Any fool could tell you that, after the way I was raised and watching my pa get shot and then with everything that happened when I was in the war. The doc and the meds helped me calm down, took away a bit of the anger and, thankfully, the nightmares. Horrible nightmares where I relived all those really traumatic things again and again and again.
Now the nightmares were back, and I knew I needed to start up the meds again. But I couldn’t, not until I’d finished my job.
PAIGE
As she’d promised, Hannah stayed with Daddy at the hospital. They sent me home to sleep. Which I did not do. Milton practically attacked me at the door, his oversized paws on my sweat shirt and his wet tongue on my face.
“Chill,” I reprimanded and let him out to pee. Poor dog—he knew something was wrong. He’d sat by Momma’s office all yesterday afternoon and started doing this weird howling in the night. Fat chance I’d get any sleep at all.
The reporter on the late news, her name was Lucy Brant, after assuring the world that Momma was stabilized, started reciting all the stats of how many people come out of comas after a day, a week, a month, or even years. Then she told this confounding story of a man who’d been in a coma for over twenty years and everyone thought he was just a vegetable and then they figured out he’d been able to understand everything all along and now he communicated with a computer.
Great. Just great. And so comforting.
Milton pawed the door to get back in; then he lapped up his bowl of water and settled beside me on the floor. Now Lucy was informing me, with the stupidest smile on her face, that some people were put into an induced coma after a bad head injury, to give the brain a rest.
Momma’s brain sure needed a rest, I thought. Even before some wacko blasted a chunk out of it. Momma just had way too much imagination.
Evidently, once those patients woke up, they told stories of crazy nightmarish hallucinations. The drug-induced comas literally took them on a bad trip.
But Momma’s coma came from the injury itself, and people who woke up from that kind of coma, according to Lucy, said things like, “I knew everything that people were saying. I wanted to respond, but I couldn’t. I had dreams but I also was lucid at times, and I felt great comfort, knowing my loved ones were there.”
So I spent half the night researching comas on the internet and texting with Hannah, and I vowed that one of us would be sitting beside Momma for just as long as she decided to stay asleep.
HENRY
I couldn’t sleep. At two in the morning, I crawled out of bed, grabbed a can of beer from the fridge, and settled into the La-Z-Boy in the den. I popped the can open and started reading.
“What are you doing out there at this hour, babe?” Libby called from our bedroom. She came to me and perched herself in my lap. She hadn’t bothered to put a robe over her see-through nightie.
“Just reading a novel by that lady who got shot.”
“Why do you want to read a book by her?” She rubbed her eyes, ran her hands through her hair—I liked it when she did that, the way she combed it back with her fingers and then gathered it into a thick ponytail. The lamplight gleamed on it, showing the red highlights. Libby gave a yawn, then smiled. At least the fear was gone from her eyes.
She took the book from me and turned it over, looking at the lady’s photo on the back cover. Same photo they’d been flashing on the news for the past day and a half. Miz Bourdillon wearing a light green sweater. She wasn’t looking at the camera, but staring at something in the distance, a half smile on her face.
“She looks nice,” Libby said. “Honest, you know? She looks real.” She handed the book back to me. “Poor lady. They say if she does wake up, she’ll be a vegetable. She won’t be writing any more books.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, don’t stay up too long.”
“I won’t.”
But I needed to do something to keep my mind from racing. That happened when I went off the meds, and then I made mistakes. Was that why I’d missed my shot? No, it wasn’t my fault. The lady moved—no way I could’ve predicted it. But I could predict one thing—we had to have the rest of that money soon. Before the surgery. Didn’t we?
And what if my contact decided that I’d screwed up too bad, and he leaked my name to the press? Would he do that? He said I’d get the rest of the cash four days after the job was completed, just to make sure I didn’t “leave any loose ends,” as he put it. But now, a very long loose end named Josephine Bourdillon had unraveled my plans.
Just die, lady. Just die.
It wasn’t like I offed people every day. This was supposed to be my first and last time. Pa always said, “You gotta do what you gotta do, son, to keep bread on the table.” I was doing my best.
Libby went on back to bed, and I sank deeper into the chair and kept reading. Got swept up in it pretty fast, like I used to in school. The main character in the story was a down-and-outer. Ha! I could relate.
I didn’t go back to bed until almost dawn. By then the voices had calmed, and I’d figured out the next step. Either the lady would pass away or, if not, I’d keep watch from afar. At some point when all the commotion died down, I’d hear from my contact what to do. Or maybe I’d just have one of my own brilliant ideas. Those came a lot more often when I was off my meds.
JOSEPHINE
1969 . . . She put up the bridle and saddle and hurried to feed the horses, thrusting her hands into the thick, sticky molasses and oats. It smelled so sweet that more than once she’d been tempted to try it. The horses nickered as she filled their troughs. But she wanted to hurry, hurry! Before the stories collided and she could not separate them again. Three stories, four, all cantering through her head, galloping, the hoofbeats, a thousand hoofbeats resounding on the dusty path.
She tossed the hay into Scallywag’s stall, then Velvet’s and Freddy’s. She hurried to fill their water buckets. A rat scurried across the barn floor, and she stifled a scream. Josephine didn’t mind the mice, the cute pale gray creatures that skittered across the hayloft. But the rats, big, bloated, deep gray with their shining eyes and their fleshy tails. . . . She shivered whenever she even thought of them.
But even a rat couldn’t scare away the stories. Josephine rushed up the stairs to her room and dug out the spiral notebook and found her pencil. Oh, where was the sharpener? She opened the drawer and rummaged through it. There! The stories, the stories, the stories.
Her nine-year-old scrawl was illegible to anyone but herself. Tomorrow she’d correct it. Tomorrow she’d add the illustrations and the adjectives. But right now she just needed to scratch out the stories quickly, quickly, while they bumped and crowded in her imagination.
She loved riding the horses, she loved talking to Kit as they lay sprawled on their beds at night. But her happiest moments were these, with the spiral notebook sitting on her desk and her imagination spilling out onto the blank page until it filled up with life.
———
She woke up in the dark to loud, awful curse words coming up from below, and it was her father’s voice yelling them! But in such a strange, deep way. And Mommy was shrieking. She had never heard her mother’s voice so high and loud. She tiptoed out of bed to the stairway and stared down through the bannister.
“I know all about her, Dick! How dare you come home in the middle of the night drunk and smelling of her.”
More cursing. Then, “Let go of me! Right now, Dick!” Her father was shaking her mother hard.
Josephine didn’t mean to cry out.
Both of her parents turned startled eyes up to her. She ran back to her room, threw the covers over her head, and sobbed into her pillow. “Please, God, don’t let Daddy hurt Mommy. Please, God. Please.” She waited in the dark for Mommy to come and explain it all. She waited and waited and waited, but no one came.
The next morning at breakfast, her mother still had curlers in her hair, and all around her left eye was dark and bruised. But no one said one word about what Josephine had seen the night before.