CHAPTER 10 - Rosie

I go inside my cottage , close the door, and rest my back against it so I can sigh. Then I fan myself with my hand. A stupid habit that I wish I hadn't picked up, but up until Amon, it's never been a literal gesture.

But boy, does that man ever make me hot.

Courtin'. In costumes! And he put an ad in my little paper—desperately seeking me. Everyone in Disciple is gonna see it this weekend. People in Bishop too. Though most of them don't know Amon, so it's not as big a deal.

The really fun part about all this—aside from the costumes, of course, and the inevitable removing of said costumes, of course, of course—is that I get to write him back in the Busybody .

I push off the door, walk over to the chaise, and start unhooking my corset, trying to think about how I would like to handle that. In the olden days, I guess they would've posted a letter and put in an ad. But that's no fun for the paper. Readers want a correspondence. They want to watch the relationship develop. They want a wedding announcement, they want a baby announcement, they want updates. Like the kind some people send at Christmas time to relatives who live far away. I've never sent one of those, but I get one in the mail every year because Clover's family always sends them out. Even back when they still lived in Disciple and everybody knew their business, they sent out one of those updates.

And people would roll their eyes like the Bradleys thought their family life was so damn fascinating it needed to be spelled out in detail at the end of every year.

But the fact is, the Bradleys are fascinating. Back then, they were the richest people in town and they owned that big old mansion. Well, they still do own it, but it's been undergoin' renovations for years now and the Bradleys moved away from Disciple right after Clover left for college.

She was the popular girl in school and she had horses. And all those woods to ride in. Everyone wanted to be Clover's best friend because they wanted an invite to go horseback riding in the woods. Lowyn was Clover's best friend. She got all the horse perks.

But anyway, the point is, her family was interesting so people didn't mind reading that newsletter every year. I still look forward to it.

I take off both of my skirts so I'm just left wearing my drawers and camisole as I think about how I might plot out my literary romance with Amon Parrish, which will run side by side with the literal one, because a girl only gets the full-on swoony courtship treatment once in her life and?—

My thoughts are interrupted by a sudden flash of memory.

I pause in the middle of the room, squinting my eyes, trying to bring that memory into focus. The park. The forest. The waterfall. And that tree stump.

It's not true. This isn't the first time I've been properly courted. The first time was?—

I gasp right out loud, then turn, my eyes searching for the letters, even though I know they're not here. I gave two of them to Amon so he could have them forensically tested and the third is still at my house.

I sit down on the chaise, suddenly light-headed.

The maze turned out to be a picture of a cross.

A cross .

How the hell did I not immediately make this connection? I mean, it was his last name! It's what I named my son! And not only that, he was my first love and the only other time in my life that I was given the full-on swoony courtship treatment.

Erol.

He's… back?

I stand up, whirl around, wishing for those letters so I can look at them. Why did I give them to Amon? Why?

Then I realize that I haven't checked the mailbox here at the cottage. I rush outside, not even caring that I'm only wearing eighteenth-century undergarments, and practically skid to a stop at the mailbox. I close my eyes, take a breath, and then open it.

There is one letter.

I take it out and stare at the front of the envelope. My name is handwritten in a well-practiced all-caps style above my little Goosebeak Alley address.

I look around, realize the backyard ladies—and a few tourists—are all staring at me, then wave and smile and run back inside.

My body is all hot and my face all flushed, so I sit down on the chaise to give myself a moment. Because I am jumping to some pretty big conclusions here. I mean, more than likely it's a stalker. Erol's been gone for twelve years now. Why on earth would he suddenly come back? And if he was intent on coming back, why all these stupid worksheet letters written in code?

No. It's not him. It's a stalker. And I should not even open this letter. I should just hand it over to Amon and…

I let out a breath and with it goes my fortitude. A moment later, I've got a fingertip under the seal and I'm poppin' it open.

I hold my breath as I unfold the paper, then let it out in a rush. "What the fuck is this?" I'm confused as I look at the letters. They don't say anything and it's not a puzzle like the rest. It's just… letters. But they are paired up in a weird way. ZC. RN. ZC. LS. HW. AS. JK. UC. EC.

What does this mean?

I flip the paper over, hoping there's something on the other side, but there's not. It's just blank. Then I just sit and stare at them, trying to figure it out. Do I rearrange all the letters until they spell something? How do I figure it out?

Well, despite where I'm currently sitting, I do live in the modern age. So I pull out my phone and type the letters in just as they appear on the paper.

I get nothing, of course. My fingertip taps out a pattern on my chin as I think. There has to be a way to understand the message, or why send it? Furthermore, I know it is a hidden message because the three prior worksheets made it very clear.

I add the word ‘code' to the end of my string of letter pairs, but again, the search pulls up things that don't make any sense to me. It's a lot of computer stuff. I study them for several minutes anyway, thinking maybe I'm just too simple to understand the results.

But no. I decide this search is not helpful.

What other way could I phrase it? Then a lightbulb goes off—they're not codes . Not really. Because these things actually have a proper name. They're called ciphers .

I type that in with the keywords ‘double letters', and bingo! The third result down says, ‘Key for the Digraph Cipher.'

When I click the link it's a decoder! I quickly type in my letter pairs and hit the decode button.

Meet me. You know where .

Ho-lee shit. It's real. It's a code and it's from him! Erol! After twelve years, he's finally gotten in touch with me. He sent the worksheets to like… prime me, or something. To make me think about codes and puzzles so that when he sent the message, I wouldn't just dismiss it and toss it in the trash, but try and figure it out.

You know where .

And I do know where.

I quickly strip off the rest of my clothes and start pulling on my jeans. I don't even hang up my dress, I just leave it all on the floor, grab my purse, and leave, my keys already jingling in my hand as I power-walk to my car.

Five minutes later I'm zooming down the loop towards the main highway. Once I get there, I turn left and start heading down into the valley. I pass the turn-off to Revenant and just keep going, all the way down the river to Fayetteville. It's not a big place in the grand scheme of things—less than three thousand people call this area home—but compared to the Trinity towns, it's downright big city.

Even though I have claimed to have dated many a man from Fayetteville over the years, I actually haven't. It's just a hookup location because it's got a couple of motel choices.

But before it was that, it was something special because it was where Erol and I would go. I would take the bus home from school, but instead of getting off in Disciple, I'd ride it down to Revenant. Erol would be waiting for me at the highway loop intersection and we'd drive down into Fayetteville and hike a trail up to a little waterfall that wasn't on any of the maps. It wasn't a river waterfall, just a creek. But it was pretty and always changing. The water might be a soothing trickle down the rocks one day, then gushing over like a dam broke the next.

There wasn't a picnic table, but there was a collection of stumps that we used to sit on. Of course, we did other things there too. It's entirely possible that Cross was conceived in that very clearing.

When I arrive at the trailhead, I park my car, get out, and start up the main trail, searching for the smaller one that will lead me to our spot. I have to backtrack a few times, it's been so long since I've been up here, but about a half hour later, I find it.

Erol was my first. And if he hadn't gone missing, he might've been my only.

I scan the clearing, taking it all in, memories flooding back like it was yesterday instead of twelve years ago. And that's when I see it. A plastic baggie sticking out from underneath a rock, which is on the very stump I used to sit on when we were up here together.

I approach slowly, looking around. Like maybe he's watching.

How long ago did he place it here?

How long has this message been waiting for me?

I just stare at it for a few moments, unsure if I'm ready. Then I feel a little stupid because it might just be a piece of trash. So I walk over, shove the rock off the stump, and pick up the baggie.

The moment I do this, I ache. Because it's the same kind of envelope that I've been getting all week at my jobs. It's got my name on it—just Rosie, no Harlow—and it's the same stylized, all-caps handwriting.

I want to open this envelope so bad, but I can't bring myself to do it. What if it's not another puzzle but an actual letter? One that comes with an explanation?

I'm not ready for this moment. I'm not ready to hear what he has to say. His… excuse . All these years I've pictured him dead. That was the only reason I could imagine that would make him stay away. After all our plans. After all those declarations of love. After him knocking me up at age fifteen.

And he's not dead?

He just… walked away?

My legs go soft so I sit down on the stump, just staring off into the clearing. Picturing that last time we were together. Erol already knew I was pregnant. It had been a couple of weeks since the stick turned blue.

The night he found out I was pregnant we didn't come all the way up here. We were eating hamburgers in his car in the Revenant diner parking lot. I ate two, plus a strawberry milkshake. It's really weird how you can remember stupid details like that a dozen years later. After we were done eating, I told Erol my big news and at first, he was stunned. Speechless. But he didn't avoid eye contact and he didn't deny being the father or insinuate that I had been sleeping around. He handled it like a gentleman. Like it was a duty. The way I imagine a teenage boy from Bishop might.

I was relieved. And things were just fine. We kept our regular schedule. Me taking the bus down to Revenant after school, him meeting me there and picking me up.

That last time we came up here, he was excited. He was making plans for our future.

Then his birthday came. We had made plans, but not definitive ones because even though it was his birthday and not mine, he was planning a surprise for me. He was gonna pick up his beaver traps that morning and call me when he got back.

But he never did. He was just… gone. No note, no phone call, nothing.

I had never been to his house, just like he had never been to mine. I didn't know his people, he didn't know my people. So when he disappeared, I didn't have anyone to question. I did look up his family in Fayetteville, but there was no one in the phone book, or 411, or online who had the last name Cross in the entire town.

The next six months were agony for me. Not just the whole ‘telling my parents' thing or going to high school with a rapidly growing baby bump. I mean, all that was bad, but it was the emotional turmoil that nearly did me in and make me give up.

Give up. As in give Cross up for adoption.

God, that would've been a mistake. I love my son. He's my everything. My life would be incomplete without him. Luckily, my family rallied behind me when Jim Bob Baptist came over to ‘talk about Rosie's future in Disciple' and my daddy, plus every one of my brothers, stood up and my daddy said, "No. Rosie is staying right here and you best get over it."

I had people. I know I was lucky. Of course, my mama cried and my daddy was mad. But it was a short thing. Didn't even last a month, I'd say.

And after Cross came, they forgot I was a child and just treated me like any other adult family member. Their parenting of me was over. It was too early, but I see why they did it this way. I was in charge of this tiny human's life and they wanted me to know that, while they would be there to help, they were not gonna let me out of that responsibility.

There was no way I could go back to school. Everyone in my family works full-time. Most families in Disciple do their Revival duty part-time because they work other jobs, and everyone in my family has two jobs too, even if the second one is mostly just a hobby. But we're in charge of the tent. And after all the modern-miracle scaffolding went up several years back, it turned into more than a full-time job.

Of course, everyone could've shuffled their days around to watch Cross and create time for me to go to school, but it wasn't their responsibility to do that. So I never asked.

Besides, I liked being home with baby Cross in those early years. It was good. I didn't have to pay rent, or work an outside job, or worry about babysitters. And anyway, I passed the GED test right after I turned seventeen and so I am technically not a high-school dropout.

But once I turned eighteen everything changed. No one warned me, but I saw it coming. Cross was about two and a half at this point and my older brother, Pate, had just married Chalice Guffie, the niece of Geraldine from the Revenant diner, and she was staying at home at the time because she was pregnant. So Cross spent his days with her and I got a job at the Revenant diner.

The other jobs just came gradually as more and more of Cross's time was spent away from home doing things. Lowyn hired me at McBooms and that's been a regular thing for a long time now. But there were others here and there before I started the Busybody . Waitressing at the Bishop Inn. I was a parts girl for the Sardis Mechanic Shop on Third and Maple. I washed dishes for April Laver in the bakery for a couple years.

But none of this was about money. I actually have plenty of money. I mean, my childhood profit share added up to about thirty thousand dollars by time I turned eighteen and could cash out. And even though I'm not a business owner or a town partner, so I don't get the big contracts like other members of my family, I have way more money than I need.

I don't work the jobs for money.

I work them so I don't have to think about the man who wrote this letter and how he ruined me. Not by getting me pregnant—I do not regret my son. Not one bit. But his abandonment nearly did me in.

Even if I did mostly think he was dead, I never really believed it. I always held out hope that he'd come back. It was this hope that killed me. Inside. Erol Cross ruined my heart. He tore it out, ripped it to pieces, and then stomped on it for good measure.

All this time I've been holding the baggie with the envelope inside, so now I look down at it. Do I put it back? Or open it?

It would be stupid not to look at it because then it would just be this mystery that would linger in my head like the smell of something rotten in the back of the fridge. Is it a puzzle? Is it a letter? What's inside the fuckin' envelope?

And I don't need that lingering in my heart and head for years to come, so I open the baggie, take out the letter, and slip my fingertip under the seal. I hold my breath until I pull the paper out and see that it's on lined paper and it's not a puzzle, it's words.

Then this breath comes out in a rush and my hand shakes as I tug on the folded edges, open it up, and read…

Dear Rosie,

I hope you are well. I have seen you from afar and you are as beautiful as ever. I've seen our son, too, and he's better than perfect. I'm sorry for the way I left. It wasn't my fault and if you just give me thirty minutes, I will explain everything that's happened to me since that day I disappeared.

I'll be at the Fayetteville Burger Boy from eight to ten p.m. on June twenty-sixth. Please come. Please give me a chance to explain. I have never stopped loving you or dreaming of the day when I could see you again and meet our boy.

Forever yours,

Erol

I pause after reading the last few words, stunned. Then I scoff. Yours forever? Never stopped loving you? Dreaming of the day?

My hand starts fishing through my huge purse almost of its own accord and then the next thing I know, I've got a pen and a notepad and I'm jotting down a reply.

Dear Erol,

You can go to hell for all I care. I will most certainly not be meeting you anywhere and this boy of mine is not yours, has never been yours, and never will be yours. Stop stalking me, stop sending me creepy letters, and just go on your way and forget you ever met me. There is no room for you in my life.

Never yours,

Rosie

I rip the page out of the little notebook, stick it back inside the baggie, and put the rock back on top.

Then I walk out of the woods and leave my past behind for good.