Zadie knew all this because she’d seen her mom do it.
And she’d done nothing to stop her.
ELEVENSIX MONTHS
(UNTILNORAWILDER’S DISAPPEARANCE)
“Tell me a story.”
Nora gently brushed her thumb over the apple of her younger daughter’s cheek, wiping away a smudge of campfire soot. An electric lantern cast an orange light on their faces, projecting their shadows onto the tent wall. Nora had dimmed it as low as it would go so Zadie could sleep. Her older child was almost an adult, but with her eyes closed and her mouth in a sleepy pout, she still looked like the little girl who couldn’t fall asleep unless Nora rubbed her feet and hummed “Sweet Baby James.”
“I thought you said you were too old for bedtime stories.” Nora said in a whisper that sounded like beach grass on a windy day.
“A scary one.”
“Are you sure? Right before bedtime?”
Finn nodded, then quickly added, “But no monsters.”
“Okay. No monsters. And you’re not afraid of ghosts. What else do you find scary?”
“I dunno… bears?”
Nora smiled, amused. “Bears, huh? I like it. A more plausible threat than monsters. Heightens the tension.”
“Nice bears, though.”
“Well, that’s not a very scary story, is it?”
“I guess not.” Finn rolled onto her stomach and began absent-mindedly zipping and unzipping her sleeping bag. “I like camping with you.”
Nora brushed a stray hair off her daughter’s forehead. “I like camping with you, too.”
“Did you go camping with your mom?”
Nora stiffened. “No, honey. My, uh, mom and I didn’t do things like this together.”
“Was she special like me and Zadie?”
“No one’s as special as you girls.”
“Are you special?”
Nora had fielded this question a hundred times before, but today she was tired, tired of fighting the unnamed thing that threatened to tear her apart. She had kept it at bay for now, but she knew it was only a matter of time before it emerged again: her demon, the thing that made herspecial.
Before she knew what was happening, tears were streaming down her face.
Moments later, Finn had her arms around her mother and was patting her back the same way Nora would when her daughter was upset. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”
Nora clung fiercely to her child, afraid that if she let go, Finn would vanish.
TWELVEEVERY STAR HAS A SONG
“Do you think Ursula found anything?” Finn asked her sister for what had to be the tenth time that day. It was all she could think about while she ate her breakfast banana and oatmeal; all she could think about during her morning hike and the hour she spent helping Chuck change a tire on his Oldsmobile. Now, as they walked up the aluminum steps to Ursula and Nic’s double-wide, she realized she was nervous to hear the answer.
“Well, getting stressed about it definitely isn’t going to help.” Zadie had been more sympathetic the first nine times her sister had posed this question. “Let’s just go in and see what she says.” Then she knocked.
A voice from inside called, “It’s open!” and they let themselves in. The trailer was cozy in the most non-patronizing sense of the word. Terra-cotta-colored walls peeked out from behind colorful artwork. The floors were a patchwork of Turkish rugs, and a beaded curtain separated the living area from a hallway on the other side. Trailing jade and philodendron spilled over the sides of baskets that hung from the ceiling, along with bundles of dried herbs and copper pots and pans.