Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(58)

This is what happened last night, when Claire finally asked whether she had a cousin. “The children’s books,” she said. “I keep looking at them on the bookshelf.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table and Miriam was sawing her knife through her round steak. Blood pooled around it. “Had.”

“What?”

“Had a cousin.” She brought her fork to her mouth and then changed her mind and set down her silverware. “You had a cousin. I had a daughter.”

Claire didn’t need to ask what happened. Miriam told her, in a flood of words, as if Claire had taken a knife to a seam in her throat that had been holding all this back. Her name was Meg. She was seven, nearly eight. Curly brown hair like her father. Smart as hell. Could name all the capitals and recite the alphabet backward. Her father was building fertilizer bombs. He planned to enter six floats in Fourth of July parades across the state, detonating them at once, ripping apart all the clowns shooting water guns and ladies tossing their batons and children racing for candy. “Instead he ripped his own child apart. We don’t know what happened, not exactly. We know the bomb went off. That’s what we know, and I suppose that’s all there is to know. This was in an open-air shed with a tin roof. She was snooping or playing one moment, dead the next. I remember running and looking into the sky and thinking it was full of bats. But it was tin, smoking pieces of tin, twisting their way to the ground.” She is not crying. She has dried herself out with all her crying. She grips the knife on her plate with such strength that her knuckles go white.

“Your parents were right. They were right to step away when they had you. I realized that too late.”



Miriam has told Claire, over and over, not to leave the cabin without her, not to let her guard down for a second. But Claire is tired of the paranoia. She has been here more than a month, and during this time, despite Miriam’s constantly fingering a weapon, peering out the window, nothing has happened, no shadow has slipped from the forest to their doorstep. Especially in weather like this, the air a blinding whirl of flakes, what danger could possibly present itself?

She needs to escape, antidote the day’s drag of hours. Her wrist aches in the cold. She wears boots that shush through the snow. A hooded sweatshirt beneath the old Carhartt jacket that her aunt wanted to burn but Claire wanted to keep for sentimental reasons. “It’s like a graduation tassel or something.” Paper crackles against her hand and she withdraws from the pocket a torn slip with Patrick’s name and phone number scrawled across it. She smiles and feels a snowflake catch against her lip and melt.

He was muscular and taller than her by a few inches and had bright green eyes that would alternately stare hard at her and then turn shyly away. His hair was a dark brown and cut short, and she could tell it would have a little curl to it if he grew it out. The other day, when he came for her, she could smell him—she could smell everything, the residual effects of transforming—and he smelled good, even when a little sweaty, like black dirt. She liked how still he was, only moving when he had to. And the way he talked, slow and careful with his words, making sure each one mattered.

It was a relief to talk to someone her age, to anyone besides Miriam.

And so she drank up everything he told her. She asked where he was from and he said California and she said to tell her about it and he did, talking about his father’s hobby farm. How he spent his childhood collecting eggs from beneath hens and ducking under barbed-wire fences and firing slingshots at jackrabbits and cutting the tails off lizards to keep in a glass jar and swiping grasshoppers from the air to toss in a spider’s web. He told her about Big Sur. He told her about driving Highway 1 on the back of his father’s Indian motorcycle. He told her about the fog breathing off the ocean. The clang of buoys and the barking conversation of sea lions. He told her about San Francisco, fishing off the wharfs, jumping onto the back of a moving trolley.

“Sounds like you miss it.”

“Yeah.” He did, but less so than before. He said he had been through so much, and when he looks back, that life seemed to belong to someone else.

“I know the feeling,” she said, the feeling that she wasn’t the only one holding back, who could have said more. She felt a tug then. Like those stories her father used to tell around the fireplace, the ones about ghosts that grabbed you around the neck when you were sleeping, by your ankle when you were swimming, and never let go. He had her.



Now her boots whisper through the calf-deep snow. The windward sides of the ponderosas are clotted with white, making the exposed bark startlingly red. Branches slant downward, weighed and frosted with snow. She walks among the white, huddled shapes of the underbrush—and then runs a few steps, just for the thrill of it.

Yesterday, with the temperature plummeting, she heard, way off in the woods, what she at first mistook for gunfire. Echoing cracks. “Don’t worry,” Miriam said. “It’s just the trees.” Freezing and splitting in half. One explodes next to her now, an old pine that breaches, its two halves ripping away from each other with a splintery rasp. She cries out in terror and then covers her mouth with her hand, muffling the laugh that follows.

She pauses next to a mound of snow, what must be a boulder frosted over. The wind rises and she sees the shape of it in the scarves of snow that blow all around her. The chatter of her thoughts quiets and she realizes the only sound is the wind and the only color, white. The mound trembles. She notices a red strain of moss—what looks so much like hair but can’t be—curling out of all that white.