“If you really hate your hair, then why dye it a lighter version of itself? What if you did something completely different?”
Zadie’s attention was piqued. She looked up at her mom. “Like what?”
“Stay there. I’ll be right back.”
Twenty minutes later, Nora returned with two boxes of hair dye. Zadie read the label. “Mermaid Blue?”
“I got one for each of us.”
Zadie stared at the picture of the woman on the box. Her hair was the color of toilet bowl cleaner. She was in love. “Let’s do it.”
Nora and Zadie ordered a pizza and took turns painting dye onto each other’s roots. While they waited for their hair to transform from that of mere mortals to that of mythic seacreatures, they watchedSplashon the motel TV and laid the seashells they’d collected that day out on the bedspread. For three inimitable hours, Zadie forgot all about their fight the week before. She felt like a kid again, watching birds outside her window as her mom hummed softly and swayed, and swayed, and swayed until Zadie was too big to fit in her arms anymore. Now that they were the same height, they could sway together. They could dance if Zadie let them.
EIGHTEENHOUSE OF MEMORIES
It smelled like rain, like exhumed earthworms and peckish robins; high, fast rivers and overflowing storm drains that turned into their own little creeks in the gutters of roads. It smelled like growth, not bullish leaps of progress, but infinitesimal shifts in color and shape, seedling to flower in many thousands of blinks of an eye. Rain meant change and change was coming. Finn could feel it.
They were winding down a two-lane highway that had been blasted out of a mountainside a hundred years ago by railcars hauling explosives. Not hundreds, but millions of years’ worth of sediment towered on either side of them like castle walls, and ahead, the base of an evergreen mountain, the top of which was hidden behind a dense fog that looked like a plume of uncarded wool.
Joel had offered to give Zadie a break from driving and was now behind the wheel. “Almost there,” he said as he glanced over at the GPS on his phone. Finn was quiet. She didn’t need a GPS to know they were getting close. She could feel it in her gut the same way she could sense a memory.I’ve been here before,she thought, even though she hadn’t.
Joel took the next exit onto a narrow unmarked side road that shimmied its way through a jungle of red cedar, hemlock, and giant prehistoric ferns. The house, according to whatever satellite was still able to send them coordinates, was tucked at the end of theroad, three miles deep into the forest and about fifteen from the nearest town. “I can’t believe we still have a signal,” Finn remarked. Then, as fate once tempted is wont to do, the signal dropped.
Minutes later, patches of sky began to pierce the thick canopy and the road widened. Around another bend, part of the forest gave way to a meadow laced with yellow wildflowers. A blue spruce rose from its center, guarded by three small scarecrows. As the car drew closer, Finn realized the scarecrows weren’t scarecrows at all, but rather, young girls. All three stood perfectly still as though they had been caught in a game of freeze tag. “Joel, stop the car.”
Joel did as he was told without asking why. Zadie, on the other hand, seemed very interested in thewhy.“Why are we stopping?” she asked, sitting up in her seat. Finn pointed out the window to the three motionless girls. “What are they doing?”
“I dunno.”
Finn turned to Zadie. “We should see if they need help.”
Joel leaned over to peer through the passenger-side window, then instantly recoiled. “Are you crazy? Have you never seenChildren of the Corn?”
“Are you telling me you’re scared of a few little girls, Joel?” Finn teased.
“No,” he said defensively. “But someone needs to stay with the car.”
“Suit yourself.”
Finn and Zadie trudged through the grass slowly, not wanting to startle the girls. When they were about ten feet away, Finn stopped and gestured for her sister to do the same. “Hi!” she called out.
The girls were silent and eerily still. Finn couldn’t see their faces, but she imagined they weren’t blinking, either. She tried again. “We were driving by and saw you out here. Do you need help?”
“I don’t think they can hear you,” Zadie whispered, eyeing the girls nervously.
Finn began approaching again, this time making a wide arc so she could face them. By their chestnut hair and the gentle curves of their noses, she guessed they were probably sisters. The youngest was seven, maybe eight, and the oldest looked like she had just finished her first year of high school. Finn had been wrong about one thing: the girlswereblinking, but their expressions were contentedly blank, like domesticated rabbits.
Finn turned back to Zadie with an inquisitive grin. “Is that what I look like? During my echoes?”
“Yeah. Kinda.”
“It’s freaky.”
“I told you.”
The girl closest to her, the youngest, resembled Huckleberry Finn in her dirty overalls that she’d rolled up to her knees. It was only once she saw the girl’s sneakers lying beside her that Finn realized why she’d rolled her pant legs up.
“Look.” She pointed to the girl’s feet—or rather, what she could see of the girl’s feet. “Huck” was standing barefoot in a shallow hole, only deep enough to cover her toes and part of her heel. A quick glance at the other girls revealed they were doing the same.