She nodded.
“Has everyone been here so long?”
“Lee came a couple months after Billy and me. But otherwise, yeah.”
“It seems nice here. I mean, everyone seems . . . nice.”
“Yeah,” she said. “They are.”
I waited, hopeful, but she didn’t say anything more. I added a carrot to my stack and picked up another. In the quiet between us, I drifted to the poppies on my doorstep the night before. Of the blossoms, how soft and light they had been in my palm when I’d lifted them from my mat. How harmless, how confounding. I’d looked out the window after locking my door, certain Blake would be there, staring back at me. I understood: I had come to live in a haunted place.
And then I flinched. Blood pooled on my finger. I had pushed the peeler too far and cut myself. I didn’t cry out, didn’t say anything, just crossed to the sink to run it under cold water. I thought Liz might not notice, but she disappeared to the bathroom and reappeared next to me with a cotton ball and a bandage. She took my hand and dried it.
“As you feel the pain begin, press it close and count to ten,” she recited, pressing the cotton ball to the cut. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . ten.” I glanced at her face but felt heat rush to my own. We were so close. I turned my gaze to our hands. We both had short, smoothly filed fingernails. She wore a gold chain around her wrist. My own wrist was bare.
She removed the pressure. The cotton was red but the cut wasn’t bleeding anymore.
“I’ve never heard that before,” I said.
She wrapped the bandage around my finger. “Becky Anderson,” she said. “Foster mother number three. For a little while I thought she might keep me.”
Then she turned her back to me and finished her slicing. And I wanted to ask her to tell me more, wanted to confess that I had once shared those hopes. Had we all? I didn’t know. But something in her posture, in the way she was suddenly humming a song as though to tune me out, told me that the moment had ended. So, it was back to dinner prep for us, not speaking unless it was to check the recipe.
But once everyone was seated on the benches around the massive kitchen table, spooning their soup and thanking us, Liz caught my eye from across the table and gave me a smile that was nothing if not genuine. It was warm, even. And I thought maybe I should have asked her more after all.
* * *
____________
It was Sunday, market day. In the predawn darkness I’d awakened to the sound of Billy and Liz shuffling past my cabin. I’d heard them again a little later—in the shutting of the truck’s doors, the rumbling of its engine, its wheels down the gravel road and away—before I’d fallen back to sleep.
And now it was light, and I was awake again. I left my cabin, hurried through the cold to the tub, where I let the hot water run and run, stripped off my pajamas, and stepped in. I soaked there as the fog hung heavy in the sky and the steam rose around.
I was lonelier than ever.
Eventually, I wrapped myself in my robe and returned to my room to build a fire. I had become used to the stacking of logs and twigs. The crunch of the newsprint, the strike of the match. I felt myself warm again, little by little, and then I looked at the clock and found it was not even ten in the morning. All the hours of the day stretched before me. Billy and Liz would be at the market. Terry and Julia had taken everyone else to town. I would need something to occupy myself.
I cooked a meal in the quiet kitchen and decided to call Karen. She’d been a constant for so long—the person I knew I could rely on—so it felt strange to have gone that many days without hearing her voice.
“Tell me everything,” she said when she answered.
For a few minutes, as I told her about Lee and our lessons, the house and the animals, the high schoolers and the children, I was less alone.
“How are Terry and Julia?”
“They’re nice. They don’t draw a lot of attention to themselves, I guess. They just make sure we all know our jobs and that the days move according to schedule.”
“I can’t remember if I told you, but they asked a lot of questions. They seemed intense.”
I found that strange. “What kind of questions?”
“I can’t remember exactly . . . Oh! I know. It was Terry. He said, ‘Tell me about her resilience. Would you describe her as a strong person?’ No one had ever asked that about one of my kids.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that after your mom and that man pulled you out of school, kept you in seclusion like that for a full year, you returned to school and made honor roll, and continued to make it every semester. They were clearly looking for exceptional people, so I told them the truth: that you are exceptional, you are resilient, you are amazing.”
At first, I couldn’t speak. I’d never heard anyone use those words to describe me. “Thank you,” I managed to say.
“And is the farm . . . ?”
“Is it what?” I asked.
“I don’t even know what to ask! Just—is it as wonderful as we hoped?”
“It is,” I said.
I left it at that, and Karen assumed what she wanted—that all was good, all was safe. And maybe it was. I don’t know what kept me from telling her everything, only that it seemed better to keep it to myself.
I promised to call her again soon and then I washed my breakfast dishes and headed to the schoolhouse.
* * *
___
It took me two hours just to empty the supply closet of its papers and costumes, old books and folders stuffed with lesson plans, faded paintings and collages and collections of protractors and rulers and calculators. There were baskets of buttons and boxes of thread and tubes of paint so old they were rock hard. I sorted all of it into piles across the room. I wheeled the garbage can from the side of the house and stuffed it with what could not be salvaged. I gathered questionable items into a basket for Terry to go through. Even then, when I looked across the schoolhouse to gauge my progress it was as though a hurricane had swept through. They could arrive back at any moment and find it this way. But all I could do was keep going.
In a far back corner of the closet I found a record player and a box of records. I opened the lid, expecting music, but what I found instead were educational recordings, what seemed to be lectures by experts on various subjects. I was disappointed at first—I’ll admit it. I had imagined finding something soulful to get lost in. But I wiped the dust off the player anyway and pulled a record from its sleeve at random.
A crackle. A voice. “Welcome to Ocean Explorations, an Introduction to Oceanography, produced by National Geographic.” Suddenly, I was no longer alone. As the narrator spoke of ocean currents and plate tectonics, I began to find order. Baskets and boxes once haphazardly filled were now empty, so I sorted and gathered and filled them again, lining them up neatly on the closet shelves. The record spun and taught me a new vocabulary—upwelling, limnology, abyssal plains—while I collected dozens of once-stray colored pencils, sharpened them, and tied them up in twine: a complete set now. The costumes I smoothed and hung from hangers on a rolling rack that had been impossible to access before. Sorting them gave me a glimpse into the past. They had performed The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland—those were the easiest to identify. Some of the costumes were meant to look medieval, while others had bell bottoms and fringe or African motifs. They had been forgotten for so long. They could have become mildewed and moth-eaten, but they had not.