And yet, here we were. And there we went.
Elliot’s warm hand came to rest on my thigh right above my knee. “Deep breaths, baby.”
I nodded, but taking a deep breath wasn’t physically possible. Short and shallow was the best I could do.
“Is it because it’s where your mother was killed, or because it’s where you grew up?” he asked me, his voice soft.
“Where I grew up,” I told him.
Even if my mother had loved me—and Noah—enough to want to leave us something, I still resented her for not having taken us and run. For letting my father do what he did. The clinical, abstract part of my brain that understood domestic violence all too well knew that it wasn’t fair of me to place any blame at her feet. That when you’re in that situation it seems impossible to do anything but put your head down and try to survive.
I know, because I’d been there. Because I’d done that.
Because, at one point, Noah and I had chosen death rather than continue to endure the life we were being forced to live.
But then we had broken free. It had taken Noah contracting Arcanavirus to do it, but when they’d taken him away in the ambulance, that had been enough for me.
I wasn’t ready to forgive my mother for it not being enough for her. I felt guilty about it, but I still wasn’t ready.
I also wasn’t ready to revisit the house where so much of what had made my life a waking nightmare had happened. But I was clearly about to, whether I was ready or not.
I drew in a long breath, letting it out again and hating the fact that it shook.
“Tell me what I can do to help,” Elliot said softly.
“I—don’t know if there is anything. Just… Just be there.”
He squeezed my thigh. “I can do that.”
I wasn’t really doing any better by the time I directed Elliot to turn down the gravel track that led to the Community, its houses well-spaced and nestled into the Appalachian forest.
I hated that it was beautiful—the sunlight filtering through the trees, the glimpses down the side of the mountain. I wanted it to be dark, creepy, ugly. I wanted the outside to match the feelings that roiled through my gut.
But the world doesn’t work the way things do in movies, where the bad guy’s remote cabin was dilapidated and falling apart, the branches of the trees gnarled and stripped of leaves. The woods around us were full of birds and squirrels and sunlight, the houses well-kept, even if they were mostly wooden and rustic, gardens tended.
Elliot said nothing, but I could see the slight surprise on his face.
The Community didn’t look like the sort of place that tortured people. That pushed people into an ultra-conservative evangelical religion that gave no quarter when it came to adherence to what they believed was the one true faith.
“There,” I pointed to a set of gravel tracks that served as the driveway to the house where I’d been raised, a strip of grass, green but trimmed, running between them, dotted here and there with white flecks of clover and a bright yellow splotch of dandelion.
If we’d kept driving, we would have entered the main Community settlement, where the open park with the big open field that the kids used for soccer and football and the bigger central buildings—the Church and the oddly-shaped schoolhouse that had been expanded to make room for more pupils as the Community had grown—stood. I knew that if Noahand I had stayed that long, we’d have attended the school until our eighteenth birthday, when it was no longer required by law. There was no graduation in the Community, and only those who were called—or directed by the Elders—to work outside of it ever got a GED, despite having ‘formal’ schooling. I knew from personal experience that what they’d covered in our classes didn’t meet state standards, especially for subjects like science, history, or literature, because at fifteen, Noah and I had a lot of catching up to do.
Elliot drove down the side track, following the nearly three-quarter-mile drive past the alpaca farm that belonged—or used to belong, anyway—to the Hills, then around a curve and up, to where it spread into an open area of gravel spread between the barn, the shed, and the house with its sloping roof and Southern-style long front porch that ran the length of the building.
I saw Elliot draw in a breath as though he were about to say something, but then he didn’t, keeping whatever thoughts he’d had to himself. Part of me wondered why—the rest was too anxious to be able to process anything.
There was a car parked by the house—a sleek, black Mercedes. As Elliot pulled in beside it, the driver’s side door opened, and Humbolt emerged, sans suit jacket. Given the fact that it was almost ninety-five up here in the mountains, I didn’t blame him for ditching the extra layer, and I could see the darker places on his shirt where sweat stained the fabric.
Mine would look about the same in another ten minutes.
Elliot opened his door, then looked at me. Probably because I hadn’t even reached to open mine.
“Do you want me to go talk to him?” he asked.
I shook my head, steeling myself, then grabbed the handle and half threw myself out to make sure I actually went. My shoes crunched on the gravel, and I squinted against the sun beforepulling my sunglasses down off the top of my head to cover my eyes.
I stared up at the house, which seemed so much smaller than I remembered it. Not that it had ever felt like a particularly large house—it had three bedrooms, the last added on in the back while Noah and I were very little because it apparently wasn’t appropriate for us to share a bedroom once we were out of the toddler stage of life.
