What Lies in the Woods(25)

Before you could plant a seedling, she would tell me, you had to harden it. It was used to the indoors, a consistent temperature and moisture and light. Little by little each day you had to set the seedlings outside, sheltered, first for only an hour, then two, slowly introducing them to wind and rain and sun and cold.

She’d said raising kids was a bit like that. You had to harden them, before they were ready to go out safely into the world. If you put them out too soon, all at once, the shock of it would wither them. They would never grow to full bloom.

Kimiko was in the garden now. She was on her knees with a sun hat on, using a little folding knife to deadhead the flowers in the beds at the edges of the garden. Her hair was gray and frizzy and her face lined with delicate wrinkles. The sight of her eased the panic in my chest. If something had happened, she wouldn’t be out here, calmly working.

The crunch of my footsteps on the gravel alerted her to my approach, and she looked up with eyes widened in surprise. “Naomi?” she said. “What are you doing in town?”

She could be a bit direct like that, but I’d never minded. “I’m here to see Liv,” I said, hands in my jacket pockets to hide their shaking. “She should be expecting me. More or less.”

“Oh. I see.” She frowned, then stood and waved at me to follow her inside.

There were nearly as many plants inside the Barnes house as outside. Kimiko preferred the garden, but her husband had never met a houseplant he didn’t love or a flower pot he didn’t want to fill. The house had an exuberant chaos to it—crowded, but nothing like my dad’s. Everything had its place here.

“I’m sorry to surprise you,” I said as I slipped off my shoes.

“No, don’t be sorry,” she said. She sounded distracted as she closed the door behind me. She cleaned her pruning knife carefully before folding it shut and setting it on the counter. “Can I make you some coffee while you wait?”

“Wait?” I echoed.

Kimiko wrapped her cardigan around her. “Liv is out. But if she’s expecting you I’m sure she’ll be back soon.”

My breath caught in my throat. “Where is she?” I asked.

“Don’t worry. She does this. She likes to go out to the woods to think,” she said. There was a weariness in her that I had never seen before. “She was gone until very late last night. She must have left again before I woke up.” She caught my look of fear and patted my arm. “She likes to wander. Especially lately. She leaves at all hours. She always comes back. She probably forgot you were meeting.”

“It wasn’t exactly planned,” I admitted. “I just need to talk to her.” Fear skittered over my skin. “Kimiko … has Liv been taking her meds?” I asked cautiously.

“Yes,” Kimiko said firmly. “She’s been doing well, Naomi. Very well. Distracted, the last few days.”

“Because of Stahl,” I said.

She didn’t answer, but waved me farther into the house. After the initial hit of the entryway, I was relieved to find that the renovations had rendered the house a stranger to me, no longer the witch’s cottage dripping with enchanted plants. The cat sleeping on the back of the couch was orange, not the raggedy black one of my youth.

But the painting on the wall—that I knew. Marcus had painted it. It showed the three of us, sitting on the garden bench with our heads together conspiratorially. He’d given it to Liv for her eleventh birthday, early that summer. He’d painted the faint, barely discernible form of a unicorn in the woods behind us, a dragon winding lazily through the sky.

At eleven, it had been harder to hold on to the magic. We were too aware of how childish and silly the whole thing was. I think all of us sensed that this was the last summer of our fantasy kingdom.

Maybe that was why when Cassidy started the Goddess Game, we’d all thrown ourselves into it so completely. Our last chance to believe. It was different—more sophisticated, in a way. Cassidy had been reading obsessively about Greek myths and had assigned us the “best” goddesses. Hera was a scold and Aphrodite boring, she declared. So I would be Artemis, Liv obviously Athena, and Cassidy would be Hecate, who was the goddess of witchcraft and thus extremely cool. We had begun tentatively, not sure what the rules were, how deep in our pretending we were allowed to go.

Persephone had changed all of that.

“What is it you wanted to talk to Liv about?” Kimiko asked. The edge to her voice suggested that she was more concerned about her daughter than she was letting on.

“Nothing,” I said, and flushed. “Sorry, reflex.”

“You don’t like people getting into your business,” she noted. “Me neither. I was always glad Liv wasn’t the one with the scars or the one who was good at testifying. The reporters forgot about us pretty fast.”

Anyone else would have danced around the subject. “She wanted to talk to me and Cass about something from when we were kids. I don’t think I should tell you more than that without her permission,” I said.

“Is it about Stahl?” she asked.

“Sort of.” It was less an evasion than an inability to answer. It had everything to do with Stahl and nothing.

“When she got the call from that guy at Corrections, she started crying,” Kimiko said. Her arms were folded, and she looked out the window as if watching for Liv to come up the driveway. “She got excited. I don’t mean happy, I mean in a state of excited agitation.”