Recognition was a punch in the gut, sucking the air from my lungs. I knew those mountains. I’d spent time with my father walking up and down their spines. I had a dim recollection of a small cabin and those jagged, pine-studded peaks looming over it. Home.
It felt good, to know my place. To be able to look at a point, and know I’d lain my eyes upon it before. The world was not so strange, nor so as large, as I’d once imagined.
Imogen was waiting for us on the porch, a basket at her feet and a girl beside her. It was the girl who drew my attention. She had alabaster hair, marbled with gray, and silver eyes. Veins, blue as the sky, traced under her pale skin. She looked like a statue. If she was still, I’d think she was one. She was not beautiful, but frightening, and somehow fragile. Imogen fussed about her once we rounded the bend, making sure her daughter was as covered as possible, in clothes warmer than the weather dictated, before turning to greet Annie.
I stared at the girl while the two women chatted, utterly baffled by her. Imogen walked her daughter to a cart that had one sturdy horse tied to it and helped her onto it. I’d never ridden in a cart before, and I stared at the contraption until Annie helped me into it. The girl watched me, all the while, with wide, curious eyes.
We didn’t speak; I was too shy to even look at her. So I sat, awkward and stiff, watching and not watching her, while Imogen got the cart going, over bumps, jolting on roots, and winding around curves.
The countryside rolled past. Tall trees scraped against the sky. The sun cast dappled shadows. The track had been driven many times before, and the further along we got, the easier the journey became as the road smoothed out. Cabins appeared more often, and closer together. A small wooden bridge crossed a dry creek bed, the horse and cart sounded thunderously loud on the wooden planks. And then, on the other side of it, the town splayed out before us.
Grove wasn’t quite a town, not really. One wide dirt road down the center, with wooden buildings on either side. There was a fork in the road about halfway through, and at the end of that left turn, I could see railroad tracks and an encampment of canvas tents around it. Working men headed to or from the shine fields, I assumed. The town itself, however, had a quaint feel to it. Men shouted at each other from under awnings. Women with baskets and swaying skirts strolled from one building to the other, as they picked up what provisions they needed. On the corner, was a large saloon. Ladies, with breasts heaving from their dresses and impressively painted faces, lurked around the wide doorway.
In the distance, out beyond those tents, the sky was filled with black smoke and I smelled the faint sickly-sweet odor of shine in the air. At the time, I did not understand it. Mayhap, I thought, there was a fire out there. Now, I know it was smoke from the shine fields, always there, and always fragrant.
Imogen turned the cart around a corner and parked it in a small alleyway between a saloon and an apothecary shop. She slid down and hitched the horse to a post before helping her daughter down, and turning to me with a smile. Already, people were staring, jewel-toned strangers standing all around us, whispering, wondering who the dark-haired girl in their midst could be. I had never felt so seen. In a world of rainbows, I stuck out. There was no hiding what I was.
“My brother’s daughter,” Annie said to no one in particular, as though just saying it would give me some small measure of protection from the world, and maybe it did. In the way of small towns, introductions mattered. They made the unknown, known. She grabbed my hand and gave it a kind squeeze. I loved her for that, for not leaving me alone to fight the wolves.
Murmurs trailed after us as we moved at a stately pace toward the general store. We were followed by whispers and wonder. My father, I gathered, was someone the people of Grove knew well, and having me appear in their midst was somewhat akin to having a mythic creature pop out of the ashes. Chris left years ago. No one expected to hear from him again. Outlaws departed. They didn’t return. And yet, here I was. Not Chris, but close enough.
I wish I had known then what I know now, that some burdens are too heavy to put down, and some sin never washes off. My father left me with his own dull patina. Even so young, I saw the truth laid bare in all those prying eyes, in their guffaws and pointing fingers. Heard it in their quiet, shocked voices. I was a mystery, a puzzle. I was something that should not be.
I do not think it is in my nature to know peace. Some people are born with a fight in their bones. I was a rock thrown into a still pond. Already, the ripples were spreading. My very existence was a conflict.
Those whispers, however, grew louder, and closer. There was no escaping them. The eyes that were fixed on me grew hotter. The world started to fade until there was nothing but me, small and uncertain, standing before a crowd of gossiping strangers. Sweat beaded my brow. My vision went black, save for one spot of light at the center of all that dark. My heart hammered beneath my ribs, and air sawed into, and out of, my lungs.
Until this moment, I had been numb.
Numb is not what people think it is. It is not the act of not feeling. Numb is cold. When my father left, winter entered my soul while a storm flooded my body. I waited, day after day, for my bones to become branches of light. There was a hurricane ache deep in my frostbitten heart, and it had overwhelmed me.
That is what numb is. It is the ice. It is the tempest.
Now, that numbness snapped like a dry tree limb. I had been waiting to feel something again, anything, and now all that feeling was rushing in and I was drowning. It was too much. I was lost in a deluge, and all of it happening with an audience. I was on display. Surrounded. It was the terror of that experience that broke through the brittle crust that had protected me.
It is a strange thing to be alone, yet surrounded at the same time. I felt as though I could scream, right then and there, and no one would hear me. I was sure I was suffocating. Panic filled my veins with knives, slicing me from the inside out.
I was too young to know how to steel myself in the face of the hurricane that was buffeting me. I was nothing but a girl, unprepared for all this attention. A gasp tore through me. Tears, hot and potent, pricked my eyes. My nails bit into my palms until I feared they would cut.
I swayed on my feet. The street spun around me. My dress stuck to me with my cold sweat.
Suddenly, a hand shot out, warm and small as my own. “It will get easier,” a quiet voice whispered. I turned to see Ianthe, pale as new snow, beside me. She was solid and real, and I clung to her, wrapped my hand around hers and held on. “It will get easier,” she said again, wise beyond her years.
It was the beginning. The first connection between us. The first tentative threads of that which would bind us.
Back in Union City, there had been all sorts of copper-piece stories about the Wild West, and they’d enchanted Arlen. He’d filled himself up with the tales he’d bought without his father knowing, about shine slingers and wide-open spaces. About a landscape that pitted man against nature. That is, perhaps, what he’d naively anticipated when coming out to Shine Territory. He’d wanted to find himself in one of those stories.
Instead, what amazed him wasn’t how untamed the West was, but how normal everything appeared to be. The streets were wide and cobbled. Women wore the same dresses women wore back east, compete with flirty hats or bonnets. Mothers walked with children in tow. Fathers tipped hats and made way for the gentler sex. Business went on.