True Places(84)
Suzanne nodded, and Iris was grateful not to have to say more.
They returned to the car, drove to Buchanan, the nearest town, and checked into a hotel made from a railcar. After they’d been outdoors most of the day, the low-ceilinged room felt too small. Iris waited at a picnic table on the lawn behind the railcar while Suzanne went across the street to get dinner.
Suzanne unwrapped the sandwiches, handed Iris hers, and checked her cell phone. “I can’t get reception.”
“Who were you going to call?”
“No one.” Suzanne put the phone in her pocket as if she could tuck her whole family away in there. It seemed like she could, at least for now. “Are you disappointed about today?”
“Not really.”
“Don’t you want to find your house?”
Iris stopped chewing, the bread suddenly dry in her mouth. She took a sip from her water bottle. “I don’t know. It was your idea to look for it.”
“And you don’t want to?”
“I don’t think I ever spent a lot of time thinking about wanting things I can’t have. If I ever did before, I’ve stopped now.”
“But we might find it.”
“I don’t want my house. I left it, remember? I left it and never went back. I left it empty.”
Suzanne put a hand on Iris’s arm. “We don’t have to search anymore, Iris, not if you don’t want to.”
Iris shrugged. “I don’t know what I want right now.”
Suzanne nodded and went back to eating.
In the yard next door, two boys kicked a ball back and forth, the bigger one yelling at the smaller one to stop using his hands to steady the ball. On a wire above their heads, a mockingbird eyed them for a few moments before launching into song, repeating each call several times: cardinal, wren, titmouse, jay, bluebird, red-tailed hawk, and back to the cardinal, but a different song. Iris wondered whether, if the mockingbird learned too many other songs, it might forget what sort of bird it was.
That night, Iris lay awake long after Suzanne had fallen asleep in the other bed. The hotel was quiet compared with Charlottesville. Even the mockingbird had found a roost and gone quiet. Iris pictured the drawing she’d made of the strands of water around the cabin and tried to conjure up different places in the drawing. The cabin porch with the oak bench; the clearing straight out front; the little bend in the stream where she washed her face in the mornings, took a drink; the patch of sang on the north side of Turkey Hill—what she and Ash called it anyway. Each place she thought of, she dwelled on, concentrating, focusing. She reached into the dark edges of each memory, seeing if she might rake another detail into the light. What was beside the bench? How many steps could she take in that clearing? Were there brambles at the edge? Did Ash sink a fishhook into his shin at that spot in the stream or farther up?
The questions kept coming, and the images spun and swirled like dried leaves kicked up by a stiff autumn wind. Where were the faces, her family? She searched her memory, riffling through the scenes, catching only glimpses of what she wanted most to see: the flash of bare feet disappearing ahead of her into the brush, a head with long brown hair turning away, a figure appearing in the doorway of the cabin and dissolving into the shadows. She pursued the running child, the woman beside her, the person in the doorway, but they all had retreated and disappeared.
Iris pulled the cold, scratchy bedcover up to her chin. The unnatural sound it made and the greenish-yellow light leaking in from around the curtains reminded her of where she was, of where she was not. And doubt crept up over the end of the bed and settled alongside her legs, heavy and wet. Iris feared that these memories, frail as they were, were not memories at all but inventions, wishes for what she used to have and nightmares of what she had lost. What did she know, really know, to be true? Where was everyone?
Maybe this was why she wasn’t sure about finding the cabin. Maybe it was like the detective said: there wasn’t much to go on and nothing to confirm what she thought was true. She hadn’t told anyone about Ash, who had been more real to her than any oak bench on a porch in a clearing somewhere in the woods. Iris hadn’t wanted to look too closely at why she kept Ash a secret. She just wanted to keep him that way. Maybe there was no bench, no porch, no cabin. Maybe Mama hadn’t fallen down a hole. Maybe Iris was truly lost, far more lost than she ever could have imagined, living inside a vanished world of her own making.
Maybe the real secret was she had invented everything. Maybe there was no Ash. Maybe there never had been.
CHAPTER 37
The dirt road kept with the river for a long time before heading toward the rising sun blinking through the trees. Iris shielded her eyes with her hand. They hadn’t passed a house for about a mile, but someone had to live out here. There wouldn’t be a road otherwise.
Suzanne drained her coffee and placed it in the holder between the seats. “Should be soon.” She searched the left side of the road, maybe hoping for a turnout.
They crossed a narrow wooden bridge and bounced out of a deep rut on the far side. The road swept right. The woods had been hugging the roadside, but now they fell away, revealing a large field, flat and empty. At the far end were a two-story brick house, a dilapidated barn, and a couple of smaller buildings, all shaded by huge walnuts and maples. Beside the barn stood a tower, almost as high as the house, with thin legs and a wheel on top.