The Light Through the Leaves(128)

Keith was home already. His supervisors had sent him home early, when it was still safe enough to drive. Raven liked Keith. He was one of the kindest people she’d ever met. But she didn’t want to talk to him. She couldn’t talk to anyone. She just wanted quiet.

She would go to the tree. Not the giant mother tree that was down in the bottomland. She would have no protection from the rain there. She would go to her second favorite tree, the one Ellis had talked about the day River and Jasper arrived. The oak that was partly hollow but still very much alive.

Raven walked down the hill to the tree. It was barely visible from the master bedroom window. She had to get inside before Keith saw her. She stood on the roots and climbed into the trunk’s hole. She sat on the soft earthy floor of the little room. Ellis said the tree had put up four kinds of walls to protect itself from the spreading damage. Raven liked that, sitting in a tiny one-room cabin that the tree had made inside itself.

A gust of wind whined through the oak’s hollow. But she stayed dry. She leaned against the tree wall. When she curled her body inward, her thighs pushed uncomfortably against her belly.

Because it was bigger.

She didn’t want to think about it. She closed her eyes. She kept her attention on the outside drum of rain, whooshing treetops, creaking limbs, the moan of wind when it hit the hollow trunk just right.

“Raven!”

She opened her eyes. She had fallen asleep. Ellis was peering into the cavity doorway. She looked upset.

“How did you know I was in here?”

“Max,” Ellis said loudly over the wind.

“How did she know?”

Ellis handed a wet piece of paper down to her. It was from the little notebooks Ellis and Maxine used to say things they couldn’t translate into gestures.

The first line said, Do you know where Raven is?

Maxine answered, She’s not in the house?

No. And not in the barn house. I’m worried.

Look inside the hollow oak.

What???

Look there, Maxine wrote. You need to talk to her. Really TALK to her.

Raven crumpled the note and let it fall.

“What did she mean?” Ellis asked. “Is something wrong?”

Is something wrong? Her whole life had been a giant wrong.

“Please talk to me,” Ellis said. “You can tell me.”

Raven wiped her hands down her face.

“Why are you crying, sweetheart?” Ellis said. “Please tell me.”

She would have to tell her. And better now when no one else was there to hear.

“My mother—Audrey . . .”

Ellis looked surprised that she’d called her by her first name. She’d never done that before.

“She tricked me,” Raven said. “She lied to me.”

Ellis had nothing to say. Because of course Audrey had lied. Everyone knew that. Even Raven had come to understand Mama had told her lies. But she used to think they were necessary lies. Good lies.

She sat up higher inside the tree. “Do you know what I used to believe?”

Ellis leaned into the tree to listen over the wind and rain.

“I believed my father was the spirit of a raven. She told me I was a miracle made by an earth spirit that embodied all ravens that had ever lived on Earth. He created me with her spirit. I actually believed I was only half-human.”

Ellis was trying not to cry.

“No one knows my real name,” Raven said. “It isn’t Raven Lind.”

“What is your name?” Ellis asked.

“Daughter of Raven. I didn’t have a human last name because I was the child of an earth spirit. My mother mostly called me Daughter.”

“Why don’t you come out and we’ll talk in the barn? River is having lunch with Keith and Max in the house.”

Raven heard her, but the words didn’t register. “Do you know what else she told me? She said a person who’s half-human can’t make a baby. Have you ever heard of reproductive isolation, when two unlike species can’t make offspring?”

“Yes,” Ellis said.

“It was all a trick,” Raven said. “She wanted another baby. She kept telling me to have sex with boys I met at school.”

Tears dripped down Ellis’s cheeks.

“She said my father the raven would want me to enjoy the act of sex. She said I didn’t have to worry about making a baby. She kept me locked up all those years, but suddenly she let me go out with boys anytime I wanted.”

Raven picked up the crumpled paper and opened it. “Maxine knew. I’m such an idiot.”

“What are you saying?” Ellis asked.

“Do you know what happened when we were in the nursery a little while ago?”

“What?”

“I felt a baby move inside me. A baby. There’s a baby inside me.”

The despicable crime was right there for her to see, reflected in Ellis’s horrified reaction.

A sob burst out of Raven. Out of her very soul. And another. She could hardly talk through the crying. “It isn’t mine. It’s hers. It’s Audrey Lind’s baby. She worked on getting that baby since I was a little girl. I grew up too fast. She always said that. And she kept saying she wanted another baby. I have this horrible person’s baby inside me!”

Raven covered her face and cried against the tree. She smelled so good. A Mother Tree. The kind of tree you could ask for things. Or so she had been taught.