True Places(60)

She approached a large road and crouched behind a concrete barrier until the few cars had disappeared. She crossed the road and two smaller ones, the smell of trees, a great stand of trees ahead, pulling her along, reeling her in. Near the house, the streetlights had been close together. Now, wherever she was, there were hardly any. Iris broke into a run, letting her feet find their own rhythm. Running into the night, into the slipstream of the moon.

She climbed over a wooden rail fence and found herself in the woods. The moon struggled to reach the ground here, and she picked her way carefully.

“Ash? You here?”

She moved deeper into the woods. The trees knit a solid blanket above her. In her own woods, in her home, she’d be out on a warm, soft, moonlit night like this and just lie down and go to sleep. She wanted to do that so badly, she could feel the earth pulling at her, gravity times a thousand. She yawned.

“Ash,” she said, impatient now. “Why don’t you just come here? I’m tired.”

She listened, not with her ears, but with her heart, the way she always had. The leaf-thick ground and the rough trunks gave up nothing. These woods were strangely empty. At home she would’ve felt the company of animals curled in their lairs, birds hunched on their roosts with beaks tucked under their wings. She would’ve expected a pair of yellow eyes to appear: a raccoon or a skunk. Not here. She thought maybe she’d lost her knowledge, and the forest was hiding from her.

Even Ash. Where was he? She’d been away too long, she guessed. Her chest tightened.

“Ash! Stop fooling around!”

Her voice surprised her, too fierce for the night.

Iris walked slowly, touching her fingertips to the low bushes and the slick young saplings as she passed.

A sour smell, a bad smell, made her pause. In the dark, she swiveled to her right. Something was there. Not Ash, she was dead sure about that. Her pulse sped up and she told herself not to be a fool. Probably a deer, lying down. Maybe it was hurt and afraid. It was that sort of smell.

Iris tensed, ready to run. She reached into her pocket, pulled out the knife.

“Looking for someone, girlie?” A man’s voice, grating, like stone against stone, maybe thirty feet away. Rustling, then a soft sound, a blanket being thrown off. “Don’t know anyone named Ash, but I’ll bet I’m as good.”

Footfalls. He was coming toward her.

Iris sprang away, darting between the trees, a shadow in the shadows, twigs snapping under her feet. She reached the fence, vaulted over, and paused, willing the thunder of her heart to die down so she could hear.

Nothing. Only the hum of a car driving along the road a good distance behind her.

She turned and ran, out into the reassuring moonlight and into the darkness again.

She should not have come. Ash was lost to her.

Her heart sank, weakening her knees. She choked back her tears and kept on because she didn’t know what else to do.

She found her way to the university and to the right street, bathed in yellow light, and to the house. She stood before it, the windows dark upstairs and down. Here was home.

And yet she was lost.





CHAPTER 26

Suzanne retrieved two plates from the cupboard and placed them on the counter along with forks and knives. Behind her, Mia was unpacking the lunch she had brought for the two of them. Mia had called last night to announce she was coming over today. “I need to escape the office, plus I haven’t seen you in forever.” Suzanne hid her surprise; Mia rarely abandoned her law office for any reason short of catastrophe. Work was her escape. Suzanne could only surmise that Whit had said something to Malcolm, who had assigned Mia the task of finding out what the hell was wrong with Suzanne. Did her outburst at her parents’ house really warrant this?

Mia piled kale-and-radicchio salad onto the plates and balanced a rectangle of focaccia on each. She stepped back so Suzanne could see. “Enough for you?”

“Plenty, thanks.”

“Should I save some for Iris?”

“She ate already.”

“And you got rid of her how?”

Suzanne sighed. “It’s not hard these days. She retreats to her room whenever Brynn’s not around.”

Mia gave her a long look.

Suzanne wanted out from under it. “So where shall we sit?”

Mia first surveyed the kitchen counter, covered with papers, a laptop, and several botany texts and other books for Iris, then the breakfast table, where Suzanne had dumped the tower of mail she had brought in from the foyer but had not yet sorted through. Mia picked up the plates. “How about the dining room?”

Suzanne nodded and led the way. “As long as you don’t expect me to break out the crystal.” She pulled placemats and cloth napkins from the sideboard. See? I can still be civilized, even without advance notice.

Mia returned to the kitchen, filled two glasses with water, and sat across from Suzanne. “I’ll dispense with the small talk. Whit’s worried about you. And given what he told Malcolm, so am I.”

“You’re staging an intervention.”

Mia frowned. “I’m worried about my best friend, so I’m having lunch with her.”

A sarcasm-free statement from Mia was so rare, Suzanne began to worry, too. What had Whit said? That she’d overreacted to a playful stunt of Brynn’s? She became annoyed at the thought of the whispering behind her back, not that Whit hadn’t expressed his concerns directly as well. “Not the woman I married,” she recalled him saying that night. It had stung but she couldn’t argue. The woman he had married was dutiful to a fault, and docile. Whit and she had stated dating when Suzanne was living at home because she couldn’t hold down a job. Her anxiety was debilitating and she had trouble focusing. Antianxiety meds smoothed over the cracks, but the cracks were still there. Suzanne felt she might have a panic attack, collapse, at any moment. Whit calmed her, got her away from her parents, but now it occurred to her she might have simply traded one cage for another.