Lovely Wild Read online

  “What do you think she was doing there?” Ethan looked at a series of Polaroid photos, yellowed with age.

  In them, Mom was sitting at a table, her hair in pigtails. She was grinning, missing her two front teeth. Her hands were above her head and blurred, as though they were moving. In the last picture, Grandpa was sitting with his arm around her. Mom was laughing into the camera. In most of the earlier pictures, she looked unhappy, but not in these.

  “I don’t know, monkey. But she looks happy, doesn’t she?”

  “Yeah. She does. I like it better when she looks like that.”

  “Me, too.” Kendra flipped the page. More pictures. They weren’t labeled, so they could only guess at what’s going on.

  “She was in the hospital,” Ethan said. “Do you think she was sick?”

  Kendra shrugged. “I don’t know. If she was sick, I guess Grandpa was taking care of her. But...what kind of little kid is sick like that?”

  “Whattaya mean?” Ethan rolled to look at her. “She hardly ever gets sick.”

  “Grandpa was a psychiatrist like Daddy. Which means that if Mama was sick, it was in her head.”

  Ethan looked at Kendra with a frown. “You mean like crazy?”

  She looked again at the pictures.

  “What kind of little kid is...crazy?” Ethan asked.

  “I don’t think she was crazy.” But even as Kendra said it, she thought of all the strange things her mother did, the stuff other mothers didn’t. “I think she was just...different.”

  “I don’t care. I miss her. I want to go back home. To where Mama is,” he added, even though Kendra hadn’t reminded him again that they couldn’t go back to the house in Philly until the end of the summer. “Make Daddy let us go back, Kiki. Please?”

  “I can’t, brat—he already said no.”

  “We should run away, then.” Ethan said this so matter-of-factly it was clear he meant it.

  “Right.” She nudged him with her elbow.

  “Can you at least call her?”

  “Her phone must be turned off. She isn’t answering or can’t get a signal. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to talk to us,” Kendra said.

  Ethan’s face screwed up into a frown. “No way. Mama would never not want to talk to us.”

  Kendra wanted to believe that was true. “She’ll call us when she remembers she turned off her phone. Then we can tell her we want to come home. Okay? But until then, we just have to hang in there.”

  “I don’t like it here,” Ethan said like a confession.

  Kendra pulled him closer. “No. Me, neither.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  MARI REMEMBERS CRACKING open eggs and letting the yolks drip raw into her mouth, but she scrambles them now with butter and some crumbled bits of bacon. She makes toast, too, thick slices of it she spreads with more butter and strawberry jam. The food’s so simple it’s almost not a meal, yet when she sets it on the table and sits across from Andrew to eat it, he looks at her as if she’s set the table with gold.

  “I’m an adult, Andrew.” She’s annoyed at his look of wonder. “I’m married. I have children. I can drive a car. I’m not that grotty, silent child who hid under the table.”

  “I know you’re not.” Andrew lifts his fork and tilts it from side to side like he’s trying to catch the light with it, but then he pokes it into the fluffy mess of eggs and bacon on his plate. “It’s just nice to have someone cook for me, that’s all.”

  Mari thinks of that tiny house high up on the mountain. A doll’s house, but this man in front of her is no doll. Time has dug lines around his eyes and streaked his hair with just a strand or two of silver. She sits across from him with her own plate, though she’s not hungry. Instead, she sips from a mug of tea she really only wants to warm her hands with.

  “So. What now?” she says.

  Andrew pauses, mouth full. He chews and swallows. He looks into her eyes. “Did you think about me while you were away? Ever?”

  “Honestly, I...forgot about you.” Until she came back here.

  Andrew’s mouth thins and his eyes narrow. “Thanks.”

  “I was eight years old when they took me out of here. They put me in a psych ward with children who were so disturbed it wasn’t that they didn’t know how to speak, it was that they simply couldn’t. I spent months being poked, prodded and tested every single day for hours at a time.” Mari paused to swallow the bitter taste of those memories. “I think I repressed a lot of what happened here. You included.”

  “They were cruel to you.”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “No, Andrew. They weren’t. But they were doctors, and they were determined to fix me.”

  “You weren’t broken,” Andrew says.

  Mari laughs at this. “So says you, with your eco-friendly house and your wireless internet connection and your work-from-home job. You grew up in a house. Went to school. You had parents who took care of you.”

  Andrew tilts his head to look at her; he gives her a slow, knowing blink. “You think it was so easy for me?”

  “I think you didn’t go hungry or cold. I think you had a normal family.”

  It’s his turn to laugh. “Normal. Right. That’s what you think?”

  “Wasn’t it?” Mari takes a piece of toast and chews it, the jelly rich and sweet but doing nothing to push back the ache in her gut.

  “If you call being raised by a pair of fundamentalists who thought the devil’d already taken my soul and it was their duty to save it normal.” Andrew puts an emphasis on the word that shows what he thinks of it. “If you call being made to kneel on grains of rice while I recited bible verses by rote normal. They never beat me, but they didn’t really have to. When you hear every single day how your soul belongs to Satan, you begin to believe it.”

  Mari had grown up without religion. In their house, they celebrate Christmas with Santa and presents, Easter with candy, because it’s what Ryan had grown up with as a child. She doesn’t believe in Satan any more than she believes in God. Still, hearing the loathing in Andrew’s voice, she can understand some of what he felt.

  “I’m sorry.” She reaches for him. Their fingers link tight. This feels so familiar it’s like holding her own hand.

  “They never took any part of the blame for my sinful state.” His face twists. “By the time I figured out why, exactly, I was so doomed to burn in the everlasting fires of hell, my old man was dying of cancer. It might’ve been the perfect time for him to say he was sorry, to at least explain to me that none of it was really my fault, but nope. To his dying breath he blamed the world, he blamed my mother, he blamed me for looking like her. I was with him when he died, and the only thing I regret was that he didn’t hold on longer so he could suffer more.”

  Mari’s glad she didn’t eat much, because at Andrew’s flat, solid tone her stomach twists so much she’d probably be sick. “I’m sorry.”

  His laugh is as twisted as her guts. “So don’t talk to me about normal, Mari. Normal is what I tried so hard to save you from. From the first moment I saw you, I knew there had to be a better life for you. I was only six years old, and I knew it.”

  She means to ask him how that had happened—how he’d seen her when she was just a baby. Her memory of childhood is patchy and she only remembers meeting him in the woods when she was older, but she’s curious now how long he knew her before she was taken away. How he came to be her protecting prince. Before she can ask, Andrew’s pulling his hand from hers and standing. He paces along the kitchen floor, his bare feet scuffing it.

  He goes to the sink and draws some water into his cupped hands and drinks, then splashes his face. He turns to her, dripping, mouth working on words he can’t seem to force from off his tongue.

  “You are so beautiful,” Andrew whispers over and over. “I knew you would be lovely. I didn’t know you’d break my heart with it.”

  This is the sort of prayer she understands. She studies his face and thinks hard about what this is. What it was