Sophie Littlefield - Banished

“Did you talk to him?”

“Did I… what?”

“While you were cleaning up his injuries? I mean, maybe he was scared. I know how that can be. You must have wanted to make him comfortable.”

She knew .

Somehow she knew that I’d healed Rascal, that something I’d done to him after the accident had fixed him, just like I’d fixed Milla during gym. I felt my face go hot. It was like she could read my mind.

“I don’t think I said anything special,” I answered her carefully, “while I was taking care of him.”

Prairie nodded. “All right. Well, I’m glad he’s… better.”

“Yeah, it, um. I mean, he has that limp, you probably noticed. But that’s all.”

The waitress came along with our salads. We thanked her and just as I was about to pick up my fork, Prairie took a deep breath.

“I have some things to tell you, Hailey,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to do it now, when we’ve only just met, but I think it’s necessary.”

Bad news, then; she was about to tell me what she really wanted from me. But, honestly, how much worse could my life get?

“Whatever,” I said.

“Now I wish I’d ordered a drink,” Prairie said, smiling a little. “A really strong one. Okay, where to start? How about this-Alice isn’t as old as you think she is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think she’s turning fifty this year,” Prairie said. “Let’s see, I’ll be thirty-one, and she was nineteen when she had me, so, yes, she’s still forty-nine, barely.”

I thought of the old pages, the names and dates written there. Alice Eugenie Tarbell, 1961 . But Gram was old-she had the wrinkled face, the thin gray hair, the bent fingers that elderly people have. And she was weak. She could barely get up and down the stairs to the basement. She couldn’t do chores, which was why it was always me who mopped and swept and washed the windows and shoveled snow and carried the laundry and the groceries.

And she was sickly. She caught colds constantly, lying in her bed for days at a time, getting up only when her customers came calling. I found her hair in clumps in the shower drain, and her nails were yellowed and cracked. If she bumped into the furniture, she’d have purple and yellow bruises. Every time she lit up a cigarette, she hacked and coughed as though her lungs were about to fall out.

“That’s impossible,” I finally said.

Prairie sipped at her water. “I wish you could have known your great-grandmother. My grandmother Mary, Alice’s mother.”

I thought of the photo in the cheap frame, the woman’s bright red lips and sparkling eyes. My great-grandmother-I could barely imagine it.

“She died when I was ten,” Prairie continued, “but she was beautiful and strong and fun and smart… so smart. Most of the women in our family are.”

“What happened to Gram, then?”

“Well, here’s part of what I need to tell you, Hailey. Tarbell women-all your ancestors-are incredibly healthy and strong. It’s-well, it’s our birthright, I guess you might say. In our blood. Tell me, I bet you hardly ever get sick, right?”

“Uh… not much.”

“And you’re strong-stronger than the other kids. And more coordinated, right?”

I just shrugged.

“Well, like I said, it’s in our genes. Except that every so often, maybe every five or six generations, there is an aberration.”

“A what?”

“Someone born who doesn’t fit the genetic pattern. Like Alice. Where the rest of the Tarbell women have phenomenal genes, Alice has been in poor health her entire life. She’s aging much too quickly, her tissues are decaying. I don’t imagine she’ll live to see her fifty-fifth birthday.”

I thought of Milla and what she’d said about the necklaces, about how they were cursed. How do you think your grandmother got the way she is?

I didn’t say it, but if it was true, and Gram had been cursed, I wasn’t sorry. Gram could die tomorrow for all I cared. I did the addition in my head-I’d be twenty. Twenty, and free of Gram-my heart lightened at the thought.

An idea came to me, a missing piece of the puzzle of my life that maybe Prairie could supply. “Did you and my mom have the same dad? Do you know who he is?”

Prairie shook her head. I’d wondered, sometimes, looking at Gram with her withered skin and bent body, if she had ever been young, if a man had ever loved her. It didn’t seem possible.

“Alice never talked about that part of her life.”

“What about my dad?” I asked. “Like maybe my mom had a boyfriend or something?”

Prairie gave me a look that was so full of sadness I almost wished I hadn’t asked. “Clover was my younger sister. When I left Gypsum, she was only fourteen. She was already pregnant with you. I never knew.”

Fourteen . I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I knew it was possible-they talked about it in Health enough.

“She would be… twenty-nine,” I said. Barely old enough to be a mother of a kid , much less someone my age.

“Yes… Clover, your mom, she was very shy. She didn’t really have many friends at school. And nothing like a boyfriend.”

So she was like me, then. I knew what it was like not to have friends. “But maybe Gram knows something.”

Prairie pressed her lips together for a moment as though trying to figure out what to say next. “ If she knows, I’m afraid she’ll never tell.”

“Why not?”

“I know how hard it is to live with Alice,” Prairie said gently. “I… remember. She doesn’t have the power that she wishes she had, and the way she is… it’s left her angry and bitter. Maybe even unable to love anyone. I think it was hard on your mother, harder than it was on me. Clover was sensitive, and sometimes I think it bothered her more when Alice was mean to me than when she did something to her. I just… steeled myself, I guess. I decided a long time ago I wouldn’t let her hurt me, and for the most part it worked.”

I knew what she meant, though I didn’t say it. You told yourself her words were nothing. When she refused to talk to you, you reminded yourself that you didn’t care. You shut off the part of your heart that wanted a mother, a grandmother, and you made it through by remembering every day that she couldn’t hurt you if you didn’t let her, if you didn’t make the mistake of caring too much.

My mother hadn’t been able to do that.

“Whose child is Chub?” Prairie asked.

I felt my face get hot. “We got him from one of Gram’s customers. He’s Gram’s foster child.”

“For the state money,” Prairie said thoughtfully. “Right?”

I nodded, surprised that she figured it out so quick. “Yes, but I think she also wanted him to be like… a project. Something she could fix. He has, um, problems? I mean, he’s slow. He’s really great and all, but he isn’t really developing as fast as he should be.”

I felt disloyal saying it. I waited for Prairie to say something mean about him, to make some careless criticism, and I was ready to hate her if she said the wrong thing. But she just nodded, her eyes sad. “He seems like a sweet boy. You take very good care of him. That must be hard.”

“ No. ” The word came out harsher than I intended. “I mean, I don’t mind. It’s not hard, it’s fun.”

I didn’t tell her how Gram had acted different for a while, after she applied with the state. I didn’t want to admit that I’d been dumb enough to hope things had really changed during that brief time when Gram kept the house clean and cooked real meals and didn’t do any business out of the cellar. That I had almost believed she could change Chub.

“Do you know his real name?” Prairie asked gently.