Near the Bone(30)

She crept up to the front window and peered out, making certain they were gone. The clearing was empty except for their footprints.

The tracks were everywhere, and Mattie felt a flare of panic. What if there wasn’t enough snow, or it didn’t start falling soon enough? A few lazy flakes were drifting down but those flakes were hardly enough to fill the footprints that crisscrossed the clearing and wrapped around behind the cabin.

Mattie went to the back window and checked that the two strangers weren’t behind the cabin, either. There was no sign of them. She wondered if they’d gone back the way they came, or if they’d taken a different route. She wouldn’t know unless she followed their tracks, and she didn’t want to follow their tracks. She didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

I don’t, she thought, but it was like she was trying to convince herself. Part of her wondered why she hadn’t gone with them. It would have been the easiest way to free herself of the hell of this cabin.

You know why. Because you can take any risk to yourself, but it’s not fair to place it on other people.

No, her original plan was still the best one—to get better, to heal so that she could sneak out under cover of night and disappear before William ever realized what had happened. She should forget about C.P. and Griffin. She’d tried to warn them, tried to save them. Maybe they would survive the creature’s fury. There wasn’t much she could do about it.

Why does Griffin keep saying he knows me?

Mattie wondered if she’d known him Before. But even if she had . . . she’d been a small child when she came to live with William on the mountain. Griffin never would have recognized her after all these years, and it wasn’t realistic for her to try to dredge up some potential memory of a boy from her very spotty memory.

Did I know you?

There were no boys in her thoughts, no memory of any other child except Heather.

She realized she was standing at the back window, woolgathering. The snow had begun to fall in earnest. It was like that on the mountain. There was no snow and then suddenly there was more snow than you could imagine.

Mattie remembered standing at the front window with Heather, their hands and noses pressed against the glass, wondering if there was enough snow for school to be called off.

“Snow day,” Mattie murmured.

Sometimes it was just a few flakes, not enough to hold up the bus. Sometimes the weatherman would predict snow for the morning that wouldn’t arrive in time to disrupt the school day. The girls would rush to their bedroom windows in hopes of seeing a proper blizzard outside, and instead there would be bare sidewalk and bright sun, no hint of snow anywhere. Then they would drag themselves downstairs, heels slamming against the wooden stairs, their bodies seemingly made of dripping rubber and their voices to match.

“Whhhhyyyy do we have to go to school today?”

And their mother would tell them that it was hard luck but that was the way it was. Mattie knew their mother would tell them this but she couldn’t hear it, not the same way she heard her own voice or Heather’s.

Why can’t I remember my own mother?

A thick fall of snow was coming down. Mattie saw it filling in the marks made by the creature and the telltale footprints of the strangers who’d violated William’s mountaintop sanctuary. She realized just how lucky the two strangers had been that William hadn’t been home when they arrived. William would have chased them off with the rifle instead of pretending not to be at home.

You’re still more of a mouse than a falcon, you know.

She ignored that voice, the one that sounded like Samantha. Samantha had never been scared, not really, so it was easy for her to be fearless. Samantha had never lost a part of herself in a deep well.

“But I’m trying,” Mattie whispered, turning away from the window. “I am trying.”

She made tea and cut off a slice of bread. She was half-tempted to sneak a little butter, just a scraping, but William was sure to have noted the precise shape and amount of butter left in the dish.

One day she would be away from him and she would eat all the food she wanted, eat until her stomach was stretched tight and she felt like she could hardly walk.

And I’ll have . . .

Her thoughts ground to a halt there, because she didn’t know what she would have. The only food she could think of was the food that she and William ate—stews made from animals hunted in the woods, or fish fried in the cast iron pan, or vegetables she took out of her garden. The only things that they ate that weren’t made by their own hands were butter and eggs and milk, which William collected from town. He said that chickens were too much trouble to raise and would attract too much attention.

Mattie had never questioned this, the same way she’d never questioned anything that William said, but she realized now that it was true. Chickens made noise—roosters especially—and might attract the attention of anyone wandering nearby who’d ignored the private property signs that C.P. and Griffin had mentioned.

If I manage to get away from here alive (and this was not a certain concept, not at all, when she stopped to think about how many things could go wrong it was enough to paralyze her), I’m never eating venison or rabbit or fried fish again. I’ll eat all the foods that people eat in the other places.

She still couldn’t imagine what those foods might be, though. The only food she remembered was ice cream.