Wilder Girls(46)

   It’s only a moment, though. A prick in the cloth. We went inside, to one long room, the whole of the house right there at our feet. And the food smelled good, better than the dining room food, and there were photos of Reese on the wall. Reese learning to swim. Reese halfway up a tree, grinning down at the camera. I couldn’t take my eyes off her the whole night. It was like she made sense, finally, in her father’s house, with mismatched furniture and the back door thrown open.

“I hope the place looks okay,” he said to us when Reese took the plates to the kitchen. “We don’t have much company over.”

“It looks great,” I said, and I meant it. I never missed my house much, but that night I did.

Afterward, Byatt and I waited at the end of the driveway while Reese said goodbye. She was leaning in, saying something I couldn’t hear, and then Mr. Harker laughed and laid his palm against her forehead.

Byatt looked away, but I didn’t. I watched Reese smile, watched her roll her eyes. “Still fits,” I heard him say.

My own father, tour after tour, day after day of being gone. We never knew each other like that.

Sky streaked rose, stars faint and new. We were quiet the whole ride home.



* * *



—

   I have that day fresh in my mind, the image of her house so clear. Pale green siding and white trim, windows only just installed. New shingles on the roof—repairs after that year’s hurricane.

We crossed the road a while back, to the north side of the island, and I can tell we’re getting closer to the shore. Under our feet the ground is damp and full of give, and I can just catch a whiff of salt in the air. I adjust the shotgun where it’s balanced on my shoulder, flex my fingers to work the feeling back into them, and we keep going.

As the trees start to thin out, the light builds, moon gilding everything silver. Still no sign of Welch. We pick our way through the pines as they turn slender and leaning, until there’s a break in the tree line, and the shore opens in front of us, a wide plain of reeds. Out past the end of them I can see something skimming low across the water.

“Is that—”

“The dock,” Reese finishes. “Yeah.”

No boat moored there, and nobody on the horizon. For now, I think we’re the only ones here. Surely we’d have heard something if we weren’t, or seen some sort of light. After all, Welch has nobody to hide from, and neither does whoever she’s meeting.

It’s easier to follow the tree line than to fight through the brush, so we walk the edge of it, cattails snagging on our clothes. I’m thinking, still, of that first day, of the house as I remember it; that’s why I don’t understand when Reese stops, why I stumble into her. We aren’t there yet.

   But I look again, and we are. Moonlight bouncing off the water, a haze of sea spray as the waves crash in that settles on my skin in a fine, freezing mist and steals the breath from me. And there’s the house, or what’s left of it, twisting up out of the reeds.

The porch, listing to one side like it’s taken a punch. Floorboards cracked, a hole yawning, lichen crawling up the walls. Siding covered in moss and trailing ivy. And in the middle, out of the heart, roof splintering around it, a paper birch, growing on its own. Trunk broad and splitting, branches reaching high.

I glance at Reese. Her whole face open and bright, a softness to it that I almost remember from the first days I ever knew her. “It’s beautiful,” I try. And I mean it, I do. “I’ve never seen a birch that big.”

But then, everything grows faster after the Tox. And everything falls apart faster, too, the Harker house practically in pieces after a year and a half alone out here. I wish I were surprised. I wish any of this were still strange to me.

Reese doesn’t say anything. I don’t think she’s blinked since we saw the house. I tuck the shotgun under my arm and nudge her elbow with mine.

“Do you think they’re here?” I whisper. “I don’t see any light.” Not to mention there are so many gaps in the wall that I can practically see straight through the house to the other side.

   She still doesn’t answer me. Just stares at what’s left of her house. I’m wondering if maybe it was a mistake to bring her, if this is too much for one girl to take, when she breaks for the porch.

“Wait,” I hiss, but it’s no use. I hurry after her, adjust my grip on the shotgun. Only one shell left, and only my knife for backup. I have to be smart.

Termites have gotten to the house. Their trails run labyrinthine across the doorframe, so deep it would’ve collapsed by now if it weren’t for the way the birch has hooked one of its limbs underneath. Reese is already inside, so I duck through after her, part of the frame crumbling to dust under my hand.

Above me the birch splits and blooms, throwing down bouquets of silver light. Most of the roof is gone, slabs of it probably lost to the storms we get come spring. Instead, the branches soar like rafters, and roots weave through the floorboards, and I keep thinking of the cathedral I went to in Naples, on vacation with my dad during his leave. How the whole place felt like it was lifting me off my feet.

A voice, suddenly, and a flashlight beam comes lancing through the shattered walls, splashes across the ground. Welch is here.

Fear breaking over me like a sweat, the shotgun slipping in my numb grip, and I grab Reese’s arm, drag her out the back of the house. We stumble, trampling a patch of Raxter Irises under our feet. Ahead of us, a thin strip of beach, and the dock off to the right. Welch is meeting someone, and they could come from anywhere. We could be caught any second, thrown onto our knees and shot.