Before We Were Yours(68)

“It’s all right,” Silas whispers. He strokes my hair while I cry, his fingers tangling in the mess. “I’m gonna get you out. I’m gonna come tonight and cut through one of the bars…over there under the holly berries where the brush is good and thick. Can you come out here tonight? Can you sneak off?”

I hiccup and sniff and nod. If James could get down to the kitchen to steal food, I can get to the kitchen too. If I can get to the kitchen, I can get to the churchyard.

Silas studies the fence. “You gimme a little while. A couple hours after it’s full dark to slip in here and cut that bar. Then you come. The less time they’ve got to miss you, the better.”

We make the plan, and then he tells me he better go before anybody sees him. It’s all I can do to let loose of him and crawl out from under the vines and walk away.

It’s only a few more hours, I tell myself. Just the rest of the day, then supper and one more bath, and I’ll be home. Back home on the Arcadia.

But when I start across the yard, I see Stevie looking for me, and I think, What about him?

Danny Boy comes out to rough Stevie up at the churchyard gate.

“You leave him be.” I close the space between us and stand over Danny Boy. I think I got taller while I was in the basement. Thinner for sure. The fist I wave in Danny Boy’s face looks so bony it could be sticking up out of a grave.

“I ain’t gonna fight ya. Ya stink too much.” Danny Boy swallows hard. Maybe he figures, if I made it for weeks downstairs, I’m too tough to tangle with. Maybe he’s afraid, if he gets in a wrangle, they’ll do the same thing to him.

He doesn’t give me or Stevie any trouble all the rest of the day.

When we line up to go in for the evening, I take the front spot for Stevie and me. Danny Boy doesn’t like it, but he hasn’t got the guts to stop me. He settles for making fun of my hair and how I smell. “Heard they’re bringin’ your stupid little sister back tomorrow,” he says behind my back when we go in. “Heard them people don’t want her after all, ’cause she’s too dumb not to wet the bed.”

It’s probably just more of his lies, but a little hope sparks fires anyway. I don’t stamp it out. Instead, I give it tinder and breathe on it real soft. After supper, I get up my guts to ask one of the workers if it’s true that Fern’s coming back. She tells me it is. In the whole time she’s been gone, Fern hasn’t stopped carrying on and asking for me and wetting herself.

“It looks like bullheadedness runs in the family,” the worker says. “Shame. She may never find a home now.”

I try not to look happy about it, but I am. Once Fern’s back, we can both get away, but I’ll need to make Silas wait another day. Tonight, I’ll sneak outside and tell him.

I just have to figure out how to do it without the workers catching me. They might be watching me close since it’s my first time to stay upstairs. But it’s not the workers I’m most worried about; it’s Riggs. He must know where I’ll be sleeping tonight too.

And he knows there’s no lock on the door.





CHAPTER 17


Avery

If you have to kill time, Edisto Island isn’t a bad place to do it.

The breeze off the water sifts through the screens and teases the hem of the simple wrap dress I’ve slipped on after whiling away the day. I forgot to grab my cellphone charger before leaving home. Now the battery is at half-mast, and there’s not a compatible charger available anywhere on the island. Rather than answering email or scouring the Internet for anything pertaining to last night’s revelations, I’ve been forced to entertain myself the old-fashioned way.

Kayaking the ACE Basin was worth a second barely lukewarm shower and getting a pair of shorts permanently stained by the blackish mix of mildew and pluff mud from the seat of the rental kayak. I feel as if I’ve rediscovered my childhood self.

The paddle trip brought back long-lost memories of a sixth-grade excursion to Edisto with my dad. I’d been working on a science-fair project about the black-water ecosystems in the Lowcountry. Being the driven little perfectionist that I was, I’d wanted to collect my own samples and take my own photographs rather than just pulling things from books. My dad had obliged. Our overnight visit here yielded one of our few exclusive father-daughter moments that wasn’t tied to a horse show or a press op. The memory is still golden, even all these years later.

I also remember that it was Elliot who helped me put together the massive backdrop for my exhibit. We’d salvaged the parts from a closet full of old campaign materials, then painted over the signs and argued at length over how to make the huge pieces of cardboard stand up on their own. Neither of us was very handy with tools.

I don’t know why you didn’t just buy something, he’d complained after our second epic failure. By then, it was late at night and we were still in my father’s horse barn, up to our elbows in paint smears and poorly nailed lumber.

Because I want to put it in my paper that the exhibit was built from recycled materials. I want to be able to say I made it myself.

I don’t see what the difference is….

The rest of the argument has been, quite fortunately, lost to the sands of time. I do remember that it got loud enough for Dad’s stable manager to venture in with a set of heavy wooden standards used for horse jumps. He added a big box of zip ties and some duct tape. Elliot and I took it from there.