Chapter 14

June 27, 1997 · Gone One Day

LUCE BALANCED ON ONE LEG, her foot tucked into her thigh like a crane, staring out the living room window at the driveway. Empty. Dead grass wilted in the asphalt's cracks. Gloria would be one of those women who left trails of breadcrumbs for clues, who outsmarted her torturer—if only Luce could take the first step toward finding her. Forehead pressed against the cool glass, she just needed to think.

"Earth to Luce," Roo said. "You said you'd help." He'd pulled an armload of Gloria's dresses from her closet and dumped them on the rug.

The hours continued to click by. The angry man not calling. Gloria not returning. Luce winding in and out of moments of pure panic that she then talked herself out of, reciting Tamsen Nightingale's incantation or thinking about all the other people of the community looking for her mother, Una and Boog and Juan and Gramms and Nancy and more.

"This is it," Roo said to himself, holding a dress up. It was brown, long, with ties for the straps and repeating batik patterns. Without speaking, they wadded up discarded pieces of clothes from the corner pile and stuffed them inside the dress.

"So what's next?" Luce asked.

"They keep the body at home for a few weeks, sometimes even months. They let the corpse like, rot."

"Gross." She took their mother's favorite red scarf, sheen and long and fringed, and tied it around the bottom of the dress, cinching it closed. It looked like blood trailing off the body.

An hour earlier, sitting around Gem's bed, telling her not to be worried, they'd picked their way through the enchilada casserole Nancy had dropped off. Between bites, Luce checked on Gem's fluids and food, her mind still churning from her conversation with Juan, trying to make a plan for what would come next. Roo was dramatically recounting a National Geographic article he'd read, but Luce had stopped listening because—were those bruises on Gem's face? A sickly green, like pictures she'd seen of a tornado sky, spreading across her neck? It didn't make any sense—nobody would have hurt Gem. Luce leaned in closer to her—musty breath, crusts of sleep flecking her eyelashes—and then Roo had announced, loudly, that he knew how to talk to their mother. He was pointing to the dirty, crinkled National Geographic. And he'd torn out of Gem's room.

"Double-knot the scarf so her guts don't fall out," Roo said, tightening it again. Though it was early evening, the house's air felt stagnant and hot, no windows open in the living room, most of them throughout the house painted shut. Luce fanned her face with her hand, everything stagnant, nothing moving, and glanced out to the driveway again. A fly buzzed past her ear, and she looked around, sure she'd find the mass somewhere, but there were none. Roo reached up and laced his fingers through her other hand. "Goose," he said, tugging her hand. "The people in the magazine wait until the moon and stars are right to bury the body."

They looked at their mother's dress, now stuffed full. "Are you sure it's not too weird to do this without an actual body?" Luce said. "I mean, she's not dead, so it doesn't really make sense."

"It doesn't matter," Roo said, hopping from foot to foot. "It's a way to talk to her spirit. As long as the mummy is here with us, she will hear us." Luce arched her eyebrows, skeptical. "If it's true in Indonesia," Roo said, "why wouldn't it be true here? We need to find a way to talk to her. Because what if she's hurt?" His voice was muffled, but she could see his thin eyebrows scrunched up in worry. "What if she's scared?"

Luce set down the skirt she was folding. "Is she ever scared?"

He didn't answer, hid his mouth behind his arm.

"Hey," she said, pinching his freckled elbow. "Is she?" she asked, and did not let his face see her own mind ripping through all the terror of what could be.

"We should call the cops."

"Roo," Luce said, straightening. "That's so extreme. We don't need the cops. She's dealing with this guy somewhere else, but she's very capable of handling whatever is going on. She wouldn't be stupid enough to leave the Red Grove with him."

"I know."

"Do you know?" she asked. He nodded.

But should they call the cops? She'd been wondering too. Cops had special tools. They could find her car, maybe. Send out her description to diners and gas stations in the county. But every time she allowed herself to follow this path, what came next was all wrong—big, sweaty uniformed men on the doorstep, eyeing them all weird, scribbling notes that they weren't allowed to read, and deciding—she'd read enough sad stories in the news—that because they were both minors, Luce would be sent to some seemingly cookie-cutter family that really had a serial killer for a dad, and Roo would be sent to a different one, probably with a pedophile uncle, and Gem, well that was the part that kept her from even entertaining it as a real possibility. The cops would think they were sending Gem somewhere safer, to some low-income state-funded hospital full of people smashing their heads into the wall and yelling about Russian conspiracies, where they'd strap her to a bed in a windowless room. And she'd survive there one, maybe two days. No one would believe what had been plain to see for all those who had watched Gem stabilize, even improve, once she'd arrived in the Red Grove. She was alive because she was plugged in to something here.

And now her scared brother's brain was firing in all directions at once, calling the cops, building a mummy. "Maybe this isn't a good idea—" Luce started, but Roo cut her off.

"Please," he said. There was a pinch of real sadness around his eyes.

"It feels weird," Luce said.

"We don't even know what she does in there," he said, widening his eyes toward the office. "So who cares? First we gotta make this fake rotting corpse. That's the first step. And then we have to feed it and stuff, and give it offerings." Roo crouched down to the open magazine, scanning the article. "Like milk. And flowers. Fruit. Whiskey."

"And then supposedly we'll be able to talk to her and find out what's going on?"

"Exactamundo," he said.

It was a bad idea. Breaking into the office was a breach of trust, but this—messing with stuff Gloria held sacred—this was serious. But Luce hadn't seen Roo this excited or hopeful since Gloria left, and she wanted to prolong it. "Stuff these," she said, handing Roo two long socks and a roll of toilet paper.

"I know some mamas go buy milk and never come home," Roo said, unspooling a wad and reaching down to the bottom of the fabric. "But ours wouldn't." Of course she would, Luce didn't say.

"I want to talk to her," Roo said.

"I know." She ran her thumb along his knuckles. He was just a little kid. The phone rang then. Roo sprinted into the kitchen, but Luce yelled at him not to pick up. She took a deep breath. Heart thumping.

It was Una. Asking whether their mother was home. Whether they'd heard from the calling man. Una had tried calling the phone company to ask for the man's phone number, she said, but they could not give out private information.

Goddamn, Luce should have thought of that right away. If she had been thinking straight when they returned from seeing the lions, she could have used *69 and called the man back. But so many calls had come in and gone out since then—it was too late.

Una continued: the only way the phone company would give them the information was if there was an associated police report number. Also, and here Una's voice shifted a little bit higher, an indication, Luce knew, of something stressing her out, and for a moment Luce wished she was at Heartwood to rub Una's shoulders. Una said she'd been hearing talk. She paused a moment. "There are people who want to call in outside authorities. I'm sure they're saying it to you. But you know what they're like, my girl. I love you, and will respect your choices, but do you want to get them involved? Or should we focus our efforts here, within the Red Grove, with those we trust?"

Luce didn't hesitate. "Let's keep it with us," she said, knowing she was saying the right thing. Because focusing the efforts of her own people was the missing piece.

"I think you're right," Una said. "We'll find her, together." Luce heard the sound of pots and pans in the background, clanging. "Your wild mother. You know the other possibility that I've been thinking about? That maybe she's off on a beautiful adventure somewhere. I can picture it, actually—can't you? It's like she's on the back of a motorcycle somewhere, driving down a jungle road, and there are parrots in the trees all around—can't you picture her doing something like that?"

Luce didn't answer. I haven't been an easy daughter, she thought, too quiet, too dark, too many of the things her mother didn't like, she could admit that. She was the kind of daughter a mother could decide to leave for jungle parrots.

What she wanted was to ask Una about the list of names she found, hers included, and find out if Juan's hunch was right—but something cautioned her. Maybe it wasn't something she was supposed to see, it was in her mother's office, after all, and her mother and Una had a lot of issues. She didn't want Una thinking she was on her mother's side. She kept her mouth shut.

"You know sometimes we have to let people do what they need to do to become their full selves," Una said. "No woman is just who she is as a mother."

"Uh-huh," Luce said. It was true, she knew it was, but—would she really have left again, after all these years? If it were only Luce here, sure. But not leaving Roo behind, not without Gem.

"Tell me if you change your mind. If you are going to do anything else."

"I will."

"I'm planning a gathering so that we can get organized. Your mama is not alone. And, Luce—" And here Una paused a moment, cleared her throat. "I don't want you taking all the blame. Your note, the way you handled the man when he came to make peace—it's not all your fault. It was a mistake, yes, well a few mistakes, but you cannot take this all on. Okay? Good. See you soon, honey."

The line went dead. Luce was surprised to find her arm trembling. Una thought it was all her fault.

"Mama!" Roo yelled from the living room. Luce dropped the phone, hardly breathing, and raced into the living room. There was only Roo.

"There she is," he sang, looking down. He was on the couch, skinny legs folded into two triangles, and there, balanced on his lap, was a cantaloupe. He was leaning over it, a tube of their mother's lipstick in his hand. He pressed it to the skin of the melon.

"You shit," she said. "You can't say that. I thought she was here."

He looked up, surprised. "She is here," he said. "I heard her."

"Stop it, Roo, that's—"

"She's almost here, I mean," he said, nodding back down toward the melon. "I heard her voice, really quiet and far away, but it was her. She said, knock knock—"

"Stop it." A fucking knock-knock joke. Deep breath, Luce. She felt an itch on her neck, a fly, but no—nothing there. She would not tell him about the flies, the list, about her conversation with Una—how it was her fault. She would do what she needed to do to be in charge. Steady.

"Can you bring her to the office?" Roo asked, nodding to the mummy's body. The house flushed warm. Luce scooped up the mummy and carried her past the woven fabric from Guatemala pinned on the wall, past the cluster of melted-down candles and their frozen wax lakes on top of the piano, past a cup sitting on top of the coffee table that, with a jolt, made her stop.

"Is this your cup?" Luce asked.

"No," he said, an eyeliner cap between his teeth.

It was a small mug, faded, with painted rabbits playing games at a picnic, chipped on the bottom of the handle. Inside was an inch of coffee, the milk having gathered in a strange gray pool. The edge of this cup, its lip, had held her mother's lip so recently. A day ago, maybe two. And might there still be her spit on its edge, the feel of her dry kiss on their foreheads when they were sick. But more than that, Luce thought she could almost see her body making an indent in the couch, behind the cup. Was there a weight there? Of course not. A ghost was just grief taking form.

There is no such thing as coincidence, Gloria often said. Coincidence is communication. It always means something. Luce forced her eyes away from the indentation.

The office door creaked open as she approached. A little cold air from inside traveled up Luce's neck, made her shiver. She shook it off and stepped across the office threshold for the second time in two days. She set the headless mummy in Gloria's velvet chair. On one side was the phone plugged into nothing, on the other, the table full of silent, stilled equipment. In front of the mummy she placed the rabbit-painted cup with coffee, swirls of old milk.

Roo shuffled in, gazing down at the melon cradled in his arms. It was lumpy, a little overripe and soft, with a greenish hue beneath the scales of the skin. On the melon's face were two shakily drawn almond eyes, the left bigger than the right, with dense black irises drawn in eyeliner. There was a nose drawn like an upside-down 7, and two pencil-line eyebrows that arched into surprise. Her mouth was drawn in lipstick, a smile with two notches leading up from the top center lip. Their mother's mummy face was pocked with the crosshatched dried worms of cantaloupe rind. It was ugly. Monstrous. Luce glanced at Roo, expecting him to be laughing, but he was doe-eyed, grinning at the melon head with a look he'd give their mom when he was littler, wearing his top hat and magician's suit as she taught him how to escape from Siberian handcuffs, as she sewed him a mermaid tail, his wet eyes glowing up at her, a fawning jack-o'-lantern.

"I didn't even know I could draw," he said, his voice almost a whisper. "But she's perfect." Luce looked at the melon. The features were lopsided, out of proportion. Just the outlines of what they really were. "I can't believe it came out like that," he said.

"Like what, exactly?" she said slowly. She waited for him to bust up laughing, all of this a big joke.

"Just—it's her."

Luce looked back again at the melon, blurred her eyes, and for one smeared second the melon shifted, tightened—Roo was right—it looked exactly like their mom. It was their mom. Her pointed cheekbones, her mossy, twinkling eyes, her mouth grimacing in pain—Luce blinked, and the melon was back with its disfigured face. A trick of the eye, surely, desire made physical. She blinked at the mummy again, willing it to change, but it didn't.

They propped the melon-head mummy up tall on Gloria's chair. The head was heavy, so to keep it on top of the mummy, they punched down the neck of the dress to make a kind of nest on which the melon head could balance. "We have to do an opening-of-the-mouth ceremony," Roo said. "To get her spirit in here. To talk to us."

"She's not a real mummy, Roo."

"Do you want this to work?"

He was looking at Luce with the wide-eyed exasperation she'd seen so many times. "Fine," she said. Moose pushed the unlatched door open with his head and then walked in, tongue lolling.

"Perfecto," Roo said, grabbing Moose around the belly and hoisting him up so his arms and legs stuck straight out. "A priest is supposed to be wearing a jackal-headed mask, but I'll hold Moose here instead. You're the priest, Moosey."

Moose licked his maw, yawned. "This is ridiculous," Luce said.

"Take something important and touch it to her mouth. Hurry. He's heavy."

Luce hesitated—it was one thing to help her brother make this little effigy, but now they were in the territory of ceremony, and even though nothing would happen from this little game, it still felt like walking up to the lip of a ledge they should not visit.

"Please, Goose. Please. You have to run the tip along her lips," he said.

Fine. She would keep playing his game while she formulated her own plan. She remembered the carved bone she'd found and grabbed it from her room, held it to the crudely drawn mouth.

"It will make her senses return, if they're lost," Roo said. "So she can hear and see and speak." Moose squirmed in Roo's arms, arcing his body to one side and then the other. Luce moved swiftly, rubbing the bone along the melon's lips, feeling ridiculous, sure that this would not open a portal into some world they hadn't tapped, yet for a moment, ridiculously, impossibly hopeful that it would. She imagined it: the flesh parting, the orange of the cantaloupe's insides visible as the rubbery lips split to whisper the secret about where she'd gone, how she'd be right back, how much she missed them.

Luce brought the bone away from the melon. They held perfectly still, staring at the face. Holding their breath. Luce's heart was all thrum. She thought of sleepovers when she was young, up late in the darkened bathrooms with the other girls, all of them holding hands and chanting into the mirror Bloody Tamsen, Bloody Tamsen—how much she did, and did not, want the ghost to appear. She slid her hand into Roo's—hot, sticky.

The house held its breath. Maybe it wouldn't happen all at once, maybe it was already happening right under their eyes, the kind of gradual atom-by-atom change, like that of a girl learning to survive in the world, becoming a woman without knowing when she became one.

They waited. And then Luce let out a little laugh. "It's a cantaloupe," she said.

Roo released his breath into a big sigh, slumping his head to the side in the most dramatic performance of disappointment.

"Roo, it wasn't going to actually—"

But then there was a loud pounding on the front door. The boom echoed into the house, bounced off wood and spiderwebs, and cracked open the silence they'd been stalled inside. Moose barked and ran out of the office.

"Oh my god," Roo said, his face an exploding galaxy. "It's her."

"No it's not," Luce said, though her voice was unsteady.

Roo ran out the office door, Luce calling after him to wait, because whoever was at the door was not a person who should be here. Because what if they had just messed with something they shouldn't have, what if they'd summoned something? Nobody should be there. Nobody who would knock.

Roo had already opened the front door when Luce got there. He was staring out at the deck. There stood a woman in a sweat-stained baseball cap and tracksuit. She smiled, raised a hand as if waving from a train, then coughed. Her eyes shifted between the two of them, uncomfortable.

"Gloria?" the woman said into their open front door.

The mummy's face, which was her mother's face, the flies, the carved bone, the list of names, the trees—all the layers of the unexplained were unmoving bricks inside her. Luce wasn't getting anywhere with what she'd been doing, and so she tried something entirely new.

"Come inside," Luce said. "I'm Gloria."

Tamsen wanted to growl and yowl and tell the mountain lion the story of her life and tell the mountain lion that she was simply trying to help and tell the mountain lion that she, too, was wounded, was doing her best, which was a best that wasn't good enough when the time came, that she, too, had let die those she was supposed to protect.

The lion roared. Tamsen raised her arms above her head, high, and started walking away from the baby, her eyes to the ground. She growled. She would make herself into a beast, enormous and frightening, too huge for the lion to charge.

A few steps, and the lion did not pounce. Was it possible that she'd escape without being killed? She kept her arms wide and her eyes down, though she could see the mother's ears pressed against her head. One more step, and she was almost far enough to have a bush and then a tree between her and the mother, one more step. The lion charged.

Tamsen closed her eyes and cringed and, suddenly back in the moment of finding her sisters in the snow, welcomed the bite.

The lion pinned Tamsen to the earth, teeth sinking into her arm. Painexploded through her and the iron-dirt stench of old blood and musk and the heat of this giant animal's body on hers. The pounding of Tamsen's heart like an anvil smashing her bones. Her blood on the lion's mouth. The eyes of the mountain lion two suns burning holes through her.

Tamsen waited for the teeth to plunge into her face, her neck. But something else pierced her instead—a force urging her to survive. She screamed. It was loud and deep and full-throated, and at the same moment, she gathered all her strength. She could feel the bone she'd been carving sticking out of her bag, and she grabbed it with her one free hand, pressed her palms against the lion's body, straightened her elbows and pushed, and the tip of the bone pressed into the lion's chest. It wasn't much, not compared with the lion's size, but it was enough to startle the lion. Tamsen pressed harder, pressed with every ounce of her sisters, and it did not pierce the lion but shifted her weight enough to let go of Tamsen's arm.

Tamsen scrambled out from beneath, her arm wet with blood that ran in dark drips down the carved bone. The lion would pounce again, and that would be it, the end; there was no way of letting the lion know how tenderly she'd imagined caring for her baby, there was no way to convince a wild thing that you wanted to neither harm nor tame it. Meet wildness with wildness, Tamsen knew, shifting onto her toes, and as the lion lunged again, Tamsen moved out of the way, screaming her own mad, wild roar, swiping toward the lion with the bone in her hand. She held her arms wide and kept on with her sound, a desperate animal unbound within her, a woman in danger.

The lion's ears pressed back against her skull, but she did not pounce. Tamsen grabbed a branch from the ground and rose, bringing her body to its full height. This startled the lion, who stepped back, surprised at her size. Tamsen brought the branch up above her head, holding it in two hands, making herself into a beast, keeping on with her wild cry, not the low-pitched man growl her father had taught her, but a high, cackly scream not unlike the mountain lion's own scream, a woman's sound. She kept on, the sound pouring from her throat, backing farther and fartheraway from the lion, farther down the hill, far enough that she could not see the panting, bloody-mouthed animal, and then, she ran.

And ran.

And made it to her cabin, blockaded the door, and fainted.

The bite on her arm festered. In the days that followed, she strayed from her cabin as little as possible, cleaning and then wrapping her wound. It ached and throbbed, swelled hot. The wound was sick, and it was making her sick. A fever rendered what she saw impossible to tell apart from what she imagined. Day passed into night and then day. She would not make it long.

On the third day, Tamsen, radiating pain, needed medicine and nourishment, and she stumbled from her shelter to the small garden with the very few plants she'd been able to sprout. She knew nothing about medicine, though, and wandered around the edges, hoping a plant would speak to her in some way or offer itself as a suggestion of healing, as so many plants did. But nothing came to her, nothing moved her, and she was soon too weak. She made it back to her shelter, knowing, like a spear in her ribs, that she would not survive. That her husband would come bursting in and she would be able to raise no defense.

There came a rasp at the door. Her breath left. She did not move. A pounding on the wood. Tamsen tried to hide her injured arm beneath a shawl for fear of appearing weak, but even her healthy arm shook with fever. Standing outside would be her husband, of course it would, or if not him then the mountain lion, and out of the mountain lion's bloody mouth would swim her sisters.

She peered out through a crack and was surprised to see a woman standing outside, all by herself. She was older than Tamsen by ten or fifteen years, her face creased with sun, her neck hunched forward, with a small hump at the top of her back even though it was clear she was trying to stand up very straight.

Passing gold miners would sometimes stop to talk to her, but theywere always men, and she told them her husband or brothers would soon be back, that she had nothing there for them. Some of those men had sniffed her out, though, and despite her wishes, news spread. It wasn't long before someone else heard about Tamsen's homesteading in the valley.

"I heard you have a place here without a husband," the woman said as Tamsen cracked open the door. Usually this statement was hurled with contempt or menace.

"What do you want?" Tamsen asked. She was calculating how long it would take to reach the bone tucked into the back of her skirt, how much strength she had left. The room began to blur.

"My husband died," the woman said. She shifted the small bag she was carrying from one shoulder to the other. "His father is trying to claim me." She paused then, and Tamsen waited for her to go on, but she didn't. Tamsen squinted at the woman, her body growing faint around the edges—was she doubling? "I can sew. And cook," the woman said. Tamsen began closing the door on the stranger, afraid of whatever scheme she was trying to pull over, afraid of the ache from her blindingly hot arm and what it was doing to her vision, but the stranger put her foot out and the door did not shut.

"I know you're hurt," the woman said, quickly. "I watched you in your garden. I know you need help."

Tamsen tried to force the door closed—her weakness exposed—but the woman kept talking more quickly. "Here," she said, thrusting a handful of herbs toward Tamsen. The stalks became two and then four, the green went black, and then everything did.

Tamsen woke. Margaret was beside her, her fine-haired sister, humming a tune while she scraped the fat off the inside of a hide. Tamsen's arm was wrapped in cloth, and beneath that, she could feel the heat releasing from the wound, something on her skin cooling the fire. She closed her eyes again, that warm, good feeling, wondering what her sister would do with the fur, trade it or add it to the pelt she was sewing together. She drifted away again.

When she woke, it was not Margaret beside her, but someone else. The stranger, here inside her cabin. She sat up quickly, woozy, and the stranger approached slowly.

"I've put a poultice of garlic and echinacea on your wound," she said. "The infection was deep. I can't guarantee that the herbs will work, but it's a lot better chance than what you had going." The woman held a small bowl in which she was mashing something green and brown. Tamsen opened her mouth, but didn't know what to say, still feeling like she wanted to run, knowing she couldn't. Maybe this woman was poisoning her—but for what good? She didn't have anything here worth taking, and if the woman really wanted to hurt her, it would have made more sense to do it while Tamsen was out cold.

"What do you want?" Tamsen asked the stranger. Her voice was a thin, weak croak.

"Just to stay," the woman said. "How did you come to be here?"

"My sisters," Tamsen started to say, but she was too weak, the throb in her arm returning like the summer crickets when she was young, pulsing out in the night fields, washing over her body until whatever else was in there became less and less.

The woman set the bowl on the ground and nodded, knelt beside Tamsen. "My name is Ines," she said. "My husband's father owns a silver mine. I cannot bear children, and so my husband's father has decided that he will send me down to the camps at the mine, for the workers to do with as they please. Because I cannot have children, he believes no mark will be left on me. Do you understand?"

The pain cooled in Tamsen's arm once again, as if the heat were pulled out by the story this stranger was telling her. "Yes," she said, understanding, even inside the throb and shiver, that she was not the only woman who needed refuge.