Chapter 30

June 30, 1997

"HERE'S WHAT WILL HAPPEN," Luce said, standing on Heartwood's deck. Una was seated in front of her. Morning sun dulled by the wash of fog. Heartwood's deck was dark with damp.

Luce hadn't known where to go, but in the end, there was only one place she could think of. They'd gone home. Roo had slept on Gem's floor, one arm flung over Moose, both of them snoring gently while Luce sat up beside him. She did not want the runaway horse of her heart to slow, she would not loosen her grip on the bone. Everything was different, but still, looking up, she wondered how it was that the moonlight on the ceiling cast the same pearl blue light it always had. She wondered about that, but choked back her mind when it wandered too far, letting the sharp edges of the carved bone in her palm bring her back. There was not much time until morning, when she'd need a plan.

Juan had slept on the couch. She'd told him she wasn't ready to talk yet, but she would be, soon. First, in the morning, she needed to see Una.

"You will leave," Luce said to Una. A woodpecker nearby, hammering in search of breakfast. Una spun a necklace bead as she sometimes did in meditation, but Luce would not be distracted. "Anyone else who was involved in this will leave. Anyone who knew. You'll make up some reason why you are leaving." Streaks of sunbeams through the fog, and Luce could not pause, couldn't go soft, forcing a hardness inside like the giant trees.

"I don't care what reason you give," Luce said, "but it'll have nothing to do with the integrity of the Red Grove. You'll go far away with Boog and the others, and you'll never come back for any reason. If you do this, and do it now, I won't send you to prison. Because you know that if you get sent to prison, and the truth about your secret comes out, nobody will believe it was an accident. I don't think I do. And this whole place will be ruined."

"You wouldn't do that to everyone here," Una said, letting the gemstones of her eyes sparkle, reaching a hand, tentatively, to squeeze Luce's hand. "These are your people."

Luce pulled her hand away. "Try me."

Una's face flashed surprise but quickly shifted. Pulled together in what looked to Luce as a kind of genuine despair. Her shoulders sank, neck softened. "Okay," she said, low and soft. Luce didn't believe her. Some kind of trick. But Una said it again. "Okay. You're right." She said she would take the necessary people with her. Those who knew. Those who were willing to carry the terrible burden of this secret for the greater good, those who—but Luce cut her off.

"Shut up," Luce said. "My mom—" but her voice broke and she couldn't say anything else and so clenched her jaw, bore down with her teeth.

Una took a breath, and then, her fingers clasping together, said she had lived as part of the Red Grove's ecosystem for so long that she wouldn't know how to live anywhere outside of this matrix.

Luce nodded; she didn't doubt that Una believed this.

"Everything I've done has been for the Red Grove. Keeping this from you was a terrible mistake, but surely you can find some softness, sweetheart. You can forgive me?"

"No," Luce said, and did not want to cry, did not realize it was happening until it was too late. Standing in front of her was the person she'd loved as a mother. Who she'd poured herself into, turning away from her own mother. It was too much, to bear that truth.

She wiped at her eyes, imagined a closet filled with severed heads.

"No, never."

Luce walked the trail to the new redwood shoots. She passed the redwood wounds she knew so well. Smooth and black inside, cobwebbed. Past the redwoods, the sword fern, over the burrows of unseen things.

Luce had the documents, Una knew that. Luce had the documents, and the fact was she would decide what was best, what to do with them.

And then there was also the fact of her mother's body.

It was sometime deep in the middle of the night, and Luce had a fever. She was eight. Just after Gloria moved back in with Gem and Luce. Drums in Luce's brain, some subterranean world the fever kept her swirling around inside. She had woken around dawn, fever broken, light trickling into the window, feeling the first tether to the earth she'd felt in days. A flicker of movement caught her eye. On the floor, beside her bed, was Gem, in the place she always lay when Luce was very sick. A pillow beneath her head, small blanket across her body. She rolled over, and that's when Luce saw her belly. Huge, pressing beneath the blanket.

It wasn't Gem lying there, watching over her. It was her mother. Hugely pregnant, on the ground, worried for her. Such a surprising, specific, warm washed over her when she saw who was there. The fact of her body.

Luce stood at the redwood saplings. A billow of wind blew the tiny trees so that they all bowed together, almost toward her.

A sound came from deep in her body. A howl.

She held Tamsen Nightingale's carved bone in her hand, the bone of one of her sisters. It was not heavy. She held it in her open palms, and it stretched from thumb to thumb. The bone and the mummy and the locket and the flies and the clicks, her constellation of aid. Her version of a gift. Not her mother's gift, not Roo's, but her own. The Red Grove had unburied it for her.

What she wanted was to swallow the dirt beneath her feet. One gulp of the earth covering her mother, and this woman who let go of her on a train but then grabbed her again would be inside her, this woman who left but then came back, she came back, she had not chosen to leave.

She put a fistful on her tongue. Iron. Bark. Roses.

How do you say goodbye to your mother?

She swallowed it down. There was nothing to do but swallow it down.

There was a photo of her mother onstage, tap dancing, jazz-fingered, lunging to the left, grinning like a slice of melon, a halo of giant felt flower petals surrounding her face. Always so, so bright, Gloria.

Luce might not ever know the whole story. The true story, the full story, of exactly what her mother had been trying to do. She may never know how things had gone so catastrophically wrong. There was one thing that felt simple and clear, and the truth of it cracked her in half. Gloria had done it for Luce.

Their foreheads skin to skin. The smell of roses. You're mine, her mother had said.

I did not understand it yet, Luce thought. She knew it, could say it now. Fingers rubbing the leftover dirt across her palm.

And you are mine.

Luce took one long breath. As she did, she heard the clicks, felt the shadow of a thing behind her, creeping closer. She held still, afraid to move. The shadow climbed her body as it approached, goose bumps on her legs, her stomach. The cold spreading across her neck. It was right there, right behind her. She knew that in place of a head, it would have a cow's skull. It smelled like sour grass, like plant matter decomposing, like warm dirt recycling leaves. Luce did not turn around. Every muscle was tensed, but she knew not to run. The creature was right behind her, two heads taller than she was. It was bending closer, she could smell it. She could feel the cold on her skin growing deeper as it leaned into her body.

Black shadows climbed the ground as it raised its arms. Still, she would not move, fixed to this place on earth like her mother was, like the bones of Tamsen's sisters, like Ines. The women of the Red Grove whose fates were echoes, all under the dirt.

The soft clicks carried on, closer together, more urgent, and then the arms came down upon Luce's shoulders. Gently, the hands, fingers long as forks, inched themselves across her shoulder blades, her sternum, walking like emaciated animals. She was being pulled closer to the body behind her. The bone still clutched in her fist, Luce did not resist. All those years ago, the fear she felt out on the deck alone at night with the elegant woman, the cow-skull head, felt a great distance away. Her back was against the creature. The arms were wrapped all the way around her, the clicks a crescendo coming through the air above and below and on all sides, and it felt so clear. This was an embrace.

Gem. She had the strongest sensation of Gem, and the decomposing plant smell shifted to pine and sweat and peppermint soap, Gem's smells, and her tenderness. She thought about what her mother had told her again and again, that she wouldn't be able to know, or sometimes recognize, the gifts in her life, and was the cow-skull woman one? Had she always been afraid of the wrong thing?

She clutched the bone and heard the world come back, crows shrieking farther up in the hills, the low hum of crickets in the dry fields. The fact of this body behind her, holding on.

"You can live here," she said to the cow-skull woman, to the clicks, the flies. "Please stay."

How do you say goodbye to your mother? You don't.