Chapter VI

TIME AS I'D KNOWN ITceased to exist. We measured the days by the sun inching across the sky. The nights by the changing moon. The hours by David. He liked "his girls" to be on a schedule. We bathed in the creek every morning and spread peach lotion from a glittery bottle onto our limbs. We were allowed to use the bathroom three times a day. David did not let us cut our hair. He made us keep our nails nice with a file. He told us to smile, to say thank you, to be happy. Joyful. Content. He had rescued us from a world that did not want us. Weren't we lucky girls? Wasn't he a lucky man?

"It's my turn with David soon," I said to Hope. We were on our knees, scrubbing the dog kennels. I wiped my brow with my forearm. Even in the shade the heat was stifling. Every fourth night, David visited me. He liked for me to say certain words while I softly scratched his back. Whispers into the night. No, I would never leave him. Yes, I would always stay. I learned to go away in my head. We all had our ways of coping. Hope would refuse to eat or would throw up her food. Charity would scream in the middle of the night and keep us awake. "I need more seeds."

"We're running out," Hope said, bending and using a bristle brush on the side of a metal kennel. "We won't last the rest of the summer."

I hung my head and touched my stomach, thinking about a baby in there. Hope said another girl, before me, got pregnant, but the baby got stuck and they didn't make it. I inhaled and stared at the grounds. At the silo where David kept his guns locked up. At the garden we'd planted a few months ago. Not much had come up. A few thin carrots. Heads of lettuce that some creature immediately ate. A patch of strawberries consumed by a swarm of bugs. David fancied himself an outdoorsman. The truth was he was a terrible survivalist. We ran out of food often. Nobody knew how to start a fire without a lighter. And all the shelters leaked when it rained. Michael came and went. Sometimes we wouldn't see him for a few days, and I wondered if he had another life. A job. A wife and kids somewhere whom he kissed goodbye, lunch box in hand before going off to work, to torture us. He'd bring back canned food and gasoline for the generator, and once, a deer carcass. David said he'd shot the animal with a bow and arrow.

"We could try growing them," I offered. One of the dogs lay with her pups under a maple tree. She'd had the litter a few weeks ago. She'd nipped at David once, and I thought he might shoot her. But he'd smiled. She's just doing her job, he said. Mothers are supposed to protect their young.

Hope mopped at her brow. She refused to stop wearing the University of Washington Volleyball sweatshirt, even though we had other clothes. It was soaked in the armpits, but it kept her skin safe from the sun, from cooking like an egg yolk in a hot pan. "Too dangerous."

I dumped a bucket of water from the creek on my kennel. "We can make it look like they're growing wild."

"Too risky—"

I stopped. "Just listen—"

"No." She moved down to the next kennel. Minutes ticked by. "How would we do it?" she asked quietly.

I hurried to answer. "We can make it look like they're growing wild," I repeated. "If we work together, we can plant them, and then we'll have seeds for the whole winter."

"Yeah." Hope stilled, head down. "Yeah, okay. Let's try."

I nodded gravely. So did Hope. By the end of the day, we'd finished the kennels, and we had a plan.

The next day, Charity and I gathered kindling, and we scoped out places where we could scatter the seeds. A meadow. At the base of a copse of trees. Farther down the creek, seeds could be folded in among the rocks, where the water would trickle and drench the roots.

The day after, we set to secretly planting. One of us keeping a lookout while the other loosened the soil to place one of the precious seeds in the ground.

Then we waited. We checked them as often as we could. Nothing grew near the copse of trees. Or the meadow. But one day… one day, Charity returned from washing at the creek, a grin twitching at the corners of her mouth. "They're growing there," she'd whispered in an excited rush. That night, we all shared secret smiles during dinner. It was easy. Almost effortless. Like stepping from a cliff into a free fall.

Near the end of summer, there were full blooms.

As soon as one sprouted its lacy head, we plucked it up and harvested the seeds. By the time the trees had changed colors and lost their leaves, we had enough seeds for the winter and to save for planting again. We built a big fire that night to ward off the cold.

Charity rubbed her arms and leaned into the fire. "I'd do anything for some of that generator heat." David slept on the other side of the compound, in a room that overlooked everything. I could see it from my prison at night. He and Serendipity had electricity up there. A heater and television. David liked Western movies. Cowboys and Indians, that type of thing. There'd be popping sounds, horses neighing against the black of the night, mingled with our weeping.

"I'd give anything for some real food," I volleyed back. Across the way, David and Serendipity ate separately. Sometimes Michael brought food from a deli. Serendipity would serve David, hovering over him. Making sure his plate was full, a napkin within reach. That night, I salivated, watching the two of them share it. Teeth ripping into cold chicken. Nibbling on macaroni salad. Lips greasy from a buttery, flaky roll.

Charity stirred her gray porridge. Keeping her gaze downcast, she whispered, "We did it." She smiled into her food. "We actually did it."

A thrill stabbed at my chest.

Hope grinned, tucking her chin into her shoulder. "I made us something. To celebrate." She pulled up the sleeve of her shirt where there were little pieces of rope braided and tied around her wrist. She untied two and handed one to each of us. "Friendship bracelets."

Friendship. The word looped around my throat, and I blinked away fresh tears. I hadn't had many friends back in Coldwell.

"I used to have like fifty of them stacked up to my elbow," Hope said as we tied them around our wrists. Warmth crept into her voice. "My sister and I made them for each other."

"I had a sister, too," I offered solemnly. "She was pregnant." Sam had probably had the baby by then. I wondered if my family still thought of me. Or if I'd been forgotten. It was easy to think that I had been. I was so far removed from the world. David had said I was a mistake. Don't you think if your parents wanted you, they'd have found you by now? he'd said one night.

"I'm an only child," Charity said. "But I always wanted a sibling."

Hope sat in the middle of us, and she put her hands down on the log, palms up. "Sisters," she said, wiggling her fingers. Charity and I placed our hands in hers. We held on for a moment. Fingers intertwined, thinking we might survive if we had each other. We didn't stay like that for long, though. We couldn't. David and Serendipity didn't like it when we acted too close. One of them would swoop in to separate us. So, we released each other, but the sensation stayed like a warm blanket had been draped over us.

That's how it started. For ten whole minutes, we shared our old lives. Charity's dad was a musician, her mom a cocktail waitress, but they couldn't look after her, so she'd been in foster care for a long time. Because she was tall and athletic, people thought she should play basketball or run track. "But I wanted to dance," she said. She'd watch tutorials online and practice steps, twirling in a shared room at her group home. Sometimes she'd watch reaction videos. She liked the one where a guy heard Bruce Springsteen for the first time and he cried. Or the cop who rapped while patrolling the highway. Hope and I had seen him, too. It was good to remember the girl I was. I'm not sure what girl I am now.

Hope lived with her grandmother, a house cleaner. "I hated my grandma because we were poor. Like, why agree to take us in if you can't afford us?" she said. And on it went. The day's events had made us feel brave, made us cling to our pasts with both hands, made us forget the bone-deep sadness. We waded into dark waters with triumph in our eyes. And finally, we whispered our real names to one another, the words standing like monuments between us.

Gabrielle.

Elizabeth.

Hannah.

"If someone always remembers your name, speaks it out loud, you're never really gone. That's the real afterlife," Gabby said. Then we said all the things we'd do when we were free. Hug our families. Eat whatever we wanted. Travel. We would cast our nets wide, pulling up friends, lovers, maybe even children. All that we would have had in a lifetime if only given the chance again. Does that sound like a bad country song? What we crooned by the fire, wrung out from the lungs of small birds trapped in long-abandoned mines.

Gabrielle. Hannah. Elizabeth. When I'm alone, I still repeat our names sometimes. I thought it was dangerous to trust them. But I was wrong.

They never should have trusted me.