The Stillwater Girls(3)
I wink to lighten my sentiment.
Brant smiles, lips closed as he chews, but his eyes crinkle at the corners, squinting as he loses himself in thought. Having been with this man the better part of my entire adult life, I can almost surmise what he’s thinking.
Will you be okay at home alone with the child while I travel?
Will you miss seeing the world with me?
Do you fully understand everything you’re giving up to do this?
What if we can’t bond with the child?
What if the child has issues we’re not equipped to handle?
If he were to ask me these things, as he has in the past, I’d give him the same, unchanged answer: he needs to leave the worrying to me.
There isn’t a single scenario I haven’t spent hours hashing out in my mind whenever I’m struck by a sleepless night—which lately has been far too often since Brant holes himself up in his studio until the wee hours of the morning, finishing his latest commissioned project for Vanity Fair.
My husband turns his attention to his dinner, drawing into his introverted shell all over again, and I think about the thing I’ve been trying not to think about since the moment I came across it in his sock drawer.
We need a tourniquet, and we need one now because I’m losing him.
CHAPTER 3
WREN
I would do anything to know simplicity the way Sage does.
My stomach won’t stop rumbling, my head won’t stop pounding, and Sage won’t stop singing.
I’m two seconds from snapping at the only person I have any control over until I force the thought away and make my way to the small window in the kitchen. I gaze past a checkered curtain toward the forest, as I’ve done many times before. The tiniest piece of me hopes Mama and Evie will emerge out of thin air, running for the house with exhausted smiles on their faces, home from their perilous journey at last.
Every night as I lie in bed, I picture the two of them coming home, and I wake with dried tears on my pillows. I’ve never been much for mollycoddling like Sage is, but lately my patience is worn thin by the end of the evening.
It isn’t the only thing wearing thin these days, though.
My hope.
My body.
Our supplies.
This life.
Everything’s just . . . dwindling into nothing.
Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left.
The thought of wasting away, freezing and starving to death with my naive little sister, makes my stomach twist in knots, but the thought of leaving the homestead and going beyond the forest sends my heart slamming to the ground.
We’re not allowed to go past the forest, and even if we did venture that way, we wouldn’t know where to go. We’d likely get picked off by some hungry coyote.
If I’m going to die, I’d rather die here, beside the sooty fireplace that’s kept us warm and cooked our meals and hosted hundreds upon hundreds of Mama’s beloved story hours. I’d rather die with my tattered books and sketch pads and the collection of dolls I’ve sewn my younger sisters over the years. I’d rather die wrapped in one of Mama’s old dresses and breathing in the scent of her lavender goat’s-milk soap than lying in an earthen bed, covered in snapped twigs and broken leaves.
“Sage. Enough.” My voice cutting through the cabin startles her into silence. Maybe I should let her sing, maybe it fills her with what little joy she can find, but it’s nightfall now, and the sooner we can go to bed, the sooner we get a break from this never-ending day, and the sooner we won’t have to feel so hungry, so tired, so alone.
Heading to the door, I secure the latch and draw the curtains on the little window, as we always do at sundown.
“Bad things happen at night,” Mama always warned us. “People feel emboldened to do the kinds of things they’d never be caught dead doing in the light of day.”
She never did say what those things were. I didn’t want to know—but I could only imagine.
“The world’s an evil place, my darlings,” she would say as she brushed the hair off our foreheads and kissed our chubby, soap-scented cheeks at night. “You’re safe here. With me. I’ll never let anything happen to you.”
The fireplace crackles, and a quiet Sage rocks in a chair, the baby doll tucked tight under one arm as she leans down to study a puzzle piece in the dim firelight.
I change behind the wardrobe door in the corner of the room, my dress crumpling to the floor. Pulling one of Mama’s old nightdresses over my head, I tug it down my bony hips until the lace hem tickles the tops of my feet. Sweeping my hands beneath my thick hair, I tie it low at the nape of my neck before heading to the basin to wash up.
An old canning jar filled with toothbrushes rests beside the day’s water, and I pluck mine—a garish shade of neon green. It’s always been funny to me that everything around us is white or cream or brown or gray—beautifully dull—but these are wonderfully bright, like the box of waxy colored sticks Mama got for Evie on her fifth birthday.
The Man—the one Mama meets every few months to get our supplies—picked them up for her. She didn’t say where he got them, but she did say there are shops and places that sell these sorts of things, just like there are places that sell the feed we give our chickens and goats and the fabric and thread we use to make our clothes.
I once asked Mama if she could take me to a shop someday so I could pick out a new dress pattern or some kind of fabric that wasn’t covered in tiny flowers, but her eyes began to water, and she answered by telling me to peel the dinner potatoes and humming “Simple Gifts” under her breath.