True Places(78)
“Yes.”
“I’m just guessing about why you couldn’t stay after that. It wasn’t your place anymore.” Suzanne spread her hands, helpless. “That’s how I feel, too.”
“And I’m the stranger that showed up?”
“In a way.” She shifted in the seat, lining up her thoughts. “I’ll bet that cabin wasn’t home after your mother wasn’t there anymore.”
Iris hadn’t realized it, but it was true. She dropped her gaze to her lap, remembering the emptiness of the cabin, the hollow space, too quiet, too still. Iris had been waiting for a reason to leave the cabin behind, even knowing how hard it would be to survive without its shelter. When the strangers had shown up—two men with backpacks—Iris stayed hidden until they’d left, then collected her belongings and fled. In escaping the contained emptiness of the cabin into the vast emptiness of the wilderness, Iris threw off the last tether to the parents who had created her. She was reborn without love or grace, and did what she could to survive only because she could not do otherwise. She was purely animal. Suzanne might have understood why Iris had left her home, but she could not possibly understand what Iris had become afterward. Sitting in the Navigator, Iris herself was so altered from the wild, solitary girl she had been that she feared losing the thread of her essential self yet again. How many times could she be reborn?
Suzanne spoke, her voice thick. She was crying. “Sometimes it takes a stranger to show you what should be obvious, how far you’ve drifted from who you want to be, from what’s right for you, your true place.”
Iris tried to swallow but her throat was pinched tight. She peered into the woods and was stunned to discover she didn’t ache to leap from the car, run up the stone steps, and fling herself into the world of green waiting there for her. Only the possibility of finding Ash again made her yearn to leave the car. Only that. Knowing she had, without intention, become connected to some part of this noisy, crazy, busy, unnatural place frightened her.
Suzanne wiped her eyes and took Iris’s hand. “Let’s walk for a bit, okay?”
They followed the curve of the railroad tracks, dappled here and there by light breaking from between the clouds. From the top of a young tulip poplar, a Carolina wren lifted its beak to the sky and released its song, a cascade of liquid trills. A pair of squirrels gave chase across the tracks and scrambled up the trunk of a black oak, disappearing into its boughs. Iris smelled water ahead, and in a few moments the crowd of trees parted to reveal a hill marked by a series of moss-covered limestone ledges over which water trickled, glistening. Iris noticed a cluster of bloodred flowers tucked beside a fallen log. She knelt to inspect them. Each plant bore three heart-shaped leaves above which three red elongated petals were evenly arranged. Three olive sepals, edged in red, poked out of the spaces between the petals.
Suzanne knelt beside Iris and fingered one of the delicate petals. “Red trillium.”
Iris nodded. “Wake-robin. I like the pink ones, too.”
“What pink ones?”
“They’re like this, but the leaves are narrower, like a finger, and the flower is pale pink, almost white.”
Suzanne seemed shocked. “Do you remember where you saw them?”
Iris stood and brushed off her knees, confused about why Suzanne would care about this particular flower. “Sure. Only one place, but they’d come up every year.”
Suzanne’s sadness was gone, replaced with a sense of energy in her limbs and an eager spark in her eyes. “Was it near your house?”
“Pretty near.”
Suzanne walked a few steps off, then came back again. She was intent, like a robin cocking its head, tense, listening for what was belowground. “I think I know where we need to go.”
“You want to go to the cabin?”
“Yes.”
Annoyance rose inside her. She’d been over this with the police more than once. “I don’t know where it is. I can’t just walk off into these woods and find my way back there!”
“Maybe you don’t know exactly where it is, Iris,” Suzanne said, pointing at the flower at their feet, “but I think you know enough.”
Iris didn’t know what Suzanne meant and didn’t want to ask. She wanted to see her house again more than anything but also feared it. If Ash was anywhere, if she could ever find him again, he’d be there. If he wasn’t, she wouldn’t have a thing left in this world that belonged to her.
Iris turned in a circle, scanning the rocks, the water, the trees, ferns, and flowers, fixing the spot in her mind. It was her portal, through which she had exited her beloved woods. Was it a one-way door, like the narrow chute of a cave, or could she truly go back?
CHAPTER 34
Suzanne and Iris retraced their path along the railroad tracks, returned to the car, and rejoined the parkway, heading south again. A half hour later Suzanne turned right, descending from the parkway via Route 60 through the desolate city of Buena Vista into larger, more affluent Lexington. Home to two colleges, Lexington offered an array of choices for lodging and, Suzanne hoped, resources beyond the internet she might need to find a remote cabin. Although Iris might have been more comfortable in a bed-and-breakfast on the outskirts, Suzanne selected a hotel in the center of town for anonymity. She didn’t want to have to explain their trip or make excuses for Iris’s manners to a well-meaning but overly friendly host.