Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(19)

Instead she looks around for help. The mother and her children are already gone, the girls skipping down a distant sidewalk, which leaves the old woman sitting ten yards away, staring off into nothing, rocking back and forth as though lost in the rhythm of a prayer.

“Excuse me,” Claire says. The woman makes no response, so she yells this time, “Excuse me!”

The woman goes still and glances in Claire’s direction. She could be fifty or could be seventy—it is hard to tell. Her hair is dishwater gray and cut choppily around her ears, her skin deeply wrinkled from too much sun. Claire says, “I need some help. Can you help me?”

The woman nods and mutters something under her breath, then rises with some difficulty and totters like a vulture over to where Claire sits. An unwashed smell comes off her. Her eyes appear filmed completely over with cataracts. And her smile, if that’s what it is, has holes in it from her missing teeth. “Need help,” she says, her voice like a rusty hinge. “I can help. What help do you need? Tell me. Tell me.”

“What’s your name?”

The woman says her name is Strawhacker, Ms. Strawhacker, and Claire addresses her as such and explains what to do, how to slowly spin the duct tape around the splint, beginning at her elbow, moving forward to her wrist, finally knotting it between her thumb and forefinger.

“Why not a doctor?” The woman, Strawhacker, touches Claire’s knee. “A doctor is what you need, dear. A good cast. Not sticks and tape.”

“That’s not an option,” she says in a dead voice that quiets the woman, makes her peer around and lick her lips and finally say all right, all right. How she can see, Claire doesn’t know, the cataracts like puddles of old milk. Her knuckles are swollen, but she moves nimbly enough, uncurling the tape, around and around Claire’s arm, making a mummy of her. “Like this?” the woman says, speaking to herself. “Yes. Yes. Good.” Claire tells her to do it again, and then again, three times over, until her arm feels properly armored.

When they are finished, Claire pulls her sleeve down, so that the only visible part of the makeshift cast is a silvery mitten with a bit of white padding peeking out from beneath.

“There now,” Strawhacker says. “Not bad.”

Claire thanks her and expects Strawhacker to leave, to return to her picnic table and resume her rocking trance, but she does not. She remains seated on the bench, staring at Claire with her milky eyes, smiling softly. Then she reaches out a hand and lays it on hers, a hand as dry as paper. At first Claire thinks she means to shake, to wish her well. Instead she says, “Your fortune?”

“Excuse me?”

“I can tell it. I tell fortunes. With cards, tea leaves, palms. Would you like that? For me to read your fortune? Something to pass the time.”

“I guess.”

“Yes, because everyone likes to hear their fortune. Everyone does.” She begins to run a fingernail along Claire’s palm, tracking the lines. “But once your future is spoken, you cannot stop it from happening.”

Then no, Claire decides, wrenching away her hand and tucking it into her armpit as though scalded. She’d rather not. Thank you.

It’s easier not to think about the future—it’s easier to think of her palm as blank. The future is an ambush. The future is pain and absence. She has decided she can only bear to look a mile down the road, to think in terms of minutes instead of years. What am I going to eat, where am I going to sleep, how am I going to escape the rain? That’s the only future she’s interested in right now.

The woman leans closer, her hair a nest around her shriveled face. “Will you at least tell me your sign, then?”

“Aries.”

Her face bunches up in a smile and she pats Claire on the thigh and stands wobbling upright. “That’s good,” she says. “This will be a good month for Aries. Your planet is in a good place.”

Then it strikes Claire, the answer. She prays fiercely that she is right. The lines on her palm like the lines in the sky. The lines of a constellation. She hurries the letter out of her jacket pocket and unfolds it, smooths out its wrinkles with her palm. Her mind is like a spider weaving together the dots on the page with gossamer threads, uniting them as constellations. Yes. She doesn’t know why she didn’t recognize them before. Probably because she was out of her head with pain and fear and grief and exhaustion, but also because the constellations appear so out of context on lined paper, black instead of bright, small instead of far-flung in the night.

She rips a pen out of its packaging and begins to connect the dots, sketch out their designs. Grus. Octans, Taurus. What they mean, she doesn’t know. But at least a trapdoor has opened in the sky and she was lucky enough to fall through it.

In her excitement, Claire has forgotten about the old woman, who hobbles closer and gestures with her crooked hand. “What are you drawing, dear?”

“My future,” Claire says.





Chapter 7



WALT PULLS ASIDE the curtain and cups his hands around his eyes and leans into the dark window. Something has spooked the cattle. His hearing isn’t what it used to be, he’ll admit, which means they must be making quite the ruckus if he can make out their mewling and bawling over the television. His breath fogs the window and he swipes a hand through it, smearing his vision of the night. He cannot see anything, not from here, but beyond the barn and the corrals, dust rises like smoke through the blue cone of light thrown by the sodium-vapor lamp. He imagines he can feel a tremor in the air, hooves thudding in the pasture.