True Places(13)

“A shower? Like rain?”

“Yes, or a bath.” She thought a moment. “Like swimming.”

Iris smiled. “Mama always wanted us to be clean. We washed in the river every single day.” She saw the nurse glance at Iris’s arm. Someone had cleaned a spot around where the needle went in, but the rest of her arm—her whole body—was filthy. Thinking of her mother, she felt ashamed. “I was sick. And hungry. Too hungry to bother—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Nurse Amy fiddled with the tubes and bags and machines, then went into the small room and reached behind a white tarp hanging from a pole. Iris heard water falling. Where did it come from? How did it get up into the tower? She and Ash would divert the stream to irrigate something they were growing, or just for fun, but they never beat gravity.

Iris stood, the floor cold as stone. She felt weak and limp, and wondered if she’d ever get her strength back. Without it she’d have no hope of getting away from here, returning to the mountains.

She pulled off the dress they’d given her.

The nurse turned and saw her. “Oh. I’d have given you privacy.”

“What’s that?”

She smiled. “Never mind. Come on into the rain.”

After Iris was clean, she dried herself with a towel that seemed like it had never been used. Nurse Amy was in the main room, changing the cloth on the bed. Iris put on the fresh dress Nurse Amy had left for her and noticed the rectangle above the sink. Last night when Nurse Amy showed her the small room, she had kept the lights low, the way Iris liked them. Iris had seen movement in the rectangle then, but thought it was some sort of machine. Now she wiped the mist from it with her towel. She twisted her head first one way then the other. She’d seen her reflection before in still pools of water, but never so clearly. She was filled with a drowning sadness because the girl she saw contained her family: her mother’s small, straight nose and heart-shaped face, her father’s eyes and eyebrows, though his irises were summer-sky blue, not leaning toward the color of violets, as he’d always said of hers. She had her father’s square shoulders and straight hickory-brown hair, too. She could see that even though it was wet. Most of all, though, she could see Ash, because he’d borrowed pieces of their parents like she had, in different amounts, but it somehow made them more similar anyway.

Iris put her fingertips to her image.

“Ash? Are you there?”



She’d been in the healing place five days when another man, very tall and fat, came with more questions. He handed her a card that said “Detective DeCelle” and said he wanted to help her. First, he wanted to know where she’d lived. She said she didn’t know, and he puffed out his cheeks.

“Mrs. Blakemore—Suzanne—found you at the Yankee Horse Ridge parking area. How far was that from where you lived?”

“Lived when?”

“With your mother. Before she died.”

“A long way.”

“Did you live in a house with her?”

“Yes.”

“What town was that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know the town? Was it in Virginia?”

“I think so.”

“How about a street or a road?”

“There weren’t any.”

He tapped his pen on his chin. “Did you have electricity or running water?”

“Water ran in the stream.”

“But no electricity?” He swept his hand at the ceiling and the walls, and she guessed he meant the lights and machines.

“No.”

“Okay, so you lived there with your mother after your father left for how long?”

“About three years.”

“Just you and your mother? No one else?”

“Yes.”

“And how long did you stay in the house after your mother died?”

“A year and a bit.”

He made some notes on a small pad. “I’m going to have an artist come in, someone who will draw your mother and father based on what you tell them.”

Iris imagined someone who had never met her parents drawing their faces. She could barely remember Daddy’s face. His hands she remembered clearly, thick fingered and broad as dinner plates. His hands could do anything: hang on to a swinging ax, tie knots in a fishing net, carve chunks of wood into legs for chairs and tables, and pluck her from the ground and into his arms as if she were a flower too pretty to leave behind.

Iris rubbed her nose and pulled the blanket up to her chin.

Detective looked up from his notes. “Why’d you leave the house, Iris?”

“People came.”

“You were all alone, and when people showed up at the house, you took off into the woods.”

“The house was already in the woods.”

“Iris.” He leaned back, the chair complaining under his weight. “Help me understand.”

“Why? Why do I have to explain everything to you?”

“Because you’re a minor. A child. And we have to know what happened—your mother’s death, your father disappearing—and help you find some family.”

“I don’t know them.”

“But they’re still family.” He paused, waiting for her to agree. Iris didn’t see how it mattered. “Don’t you want to help us find your father?”