At the end of the path, three steps rose up to the porch. Four columns of stacked river rock, held in place by gray mortar, rose three feet from the wooden floor, and then thick pine trunks sprouted from the top of each one, as if the trees had forced their way up through the stone to be part of the house.
The outside of the house was painted a pristine white, and it glowed in the sunlight as if it had been sprinkled with fairy dust. Around each window was a cherry-red frame that popped against the white clapboards like lipstick on a shirt collar.
There were two things in particular that filled young Krissy with the sensation of being a princess spirited away to a secret retreat in the woods. The first was the thick-cut western cedar roof, gray and weathered nearly to the point of petrification. The humid summers had warped the shingles into their own unique shapes. Wedged into the wide spaces between the shingles were dried leaves from autumns past. Patches of bright green moss dotted the roof. This was the roof of a princess’s hideaway, like the fairies’ cottage where Princess Aurora was taken as a baby in hopes that her delicate fingers would never feel the cursed prick of a needle.
The other was the oval window on the right side of the second story. It, too, was trimmed in a brilliant red, but its shape, when coupled with the sunlight glinting off its textured glass, gave it the appearance of a coin at the bottom of a fountain. When the shade was pulled halfway down, it looked like the house was winking—
“Winking?” Sadie whispered in disbelief.
The sound of Sadie’s voice jolted Kris. She hadn’t realized she’d actually been speaking aloud. She rose up in her seat to get a better look into the rearview mirror. Sadie was staring out the window, watching the countryside flash by, her face slack, expressionless.
“Yeah. That’s right, sweetie.”
Flicking on her blinker, Kris steered the Jeep over to the next exit ramp and onto Highway 75. A mere ten miles more and they would leave the highway altogether, exiting to a narrower two-lane road that dipped low between hills much rockier than the lush green mounds of the Flint Hills through which they had just passed.
“I can even remember the way the place smelled,” Kris told her daughter. “Right when you walk in, it’s like the wood in the walls is still alive. At the back of the house, it’s all windows, the whole wall. They look like they stretch up to the sky. You can see the lake from there, behind the house. Sadie, you’ve never seen water as clear as this. It’s like liquid glass. And behind, that’s the red hills, redder than the windows on the house, and you have to wonder if this is just …”
She didn’t say it. She couldn’t. Not aloud.
So her mind finished it for her: … make believe.
The highway, as straight and narrow as every other road they had driven on since entering the Sunflower State, began to dip into the basin of Southeast Kansas. Without warning, the road sloped sharply down as it prepared to pass beneath a rusty, vine-covered railroad bridge. Tendrils hung down like dangling arms, leafy fingers attempting to caress the top of their car as they passed.
The Jeep shot through the shadow cast by the bridge. The vines swung in their wake like a hangman’s ropes. Kris forced these dark thoughts away. She focused on the house. Their house. The reason they had traveled all night to this place.
For Sadie. Because this place could make things a little better. Just as it had for Kris.
“Behind the house, there’s a dock, and a rowboat we can take out on the lake. What do you think of that?” She didn’t bother waiting for the reply she knew would never come. “It’s going to be good, Sadie. You’ll have your own room. And upstairs there’s a playroom—”
“What’s that writing?” Sadie asked. Her soft voice seemed so fragile, the fluffy white mound of a dandelion head, destroyed by the slightest breeze.
Kris glanced up at the reflection of her daughter in the mirror.
“Writing on what?”
Sadie was craning her neck to try to get one last look at something behind them.
“On the bridge?” And then Kris gave a nod, realizing, “You mean graffiti? Was it graffiti?”
Sadie scrunched her eyes, clearly not understanding.
“It’s when people spray-paint things like their names on stuff,” Kris explained.
Sadie’s face relaxed. She nodded. “It was names,” she said, the confirmation not for her mother but for herself.
For a long, silent moment, Kris stared at her daughter’s reflection in the mirror, at the deep red curls twisting down around her face like tentacles, at the porcelain skin that rose to the faintest hint of pink on the tops of her cheeks, at those eyes that glimmered like polished emeralds behind long, curving lashes.
God, she’s so perfect, Kris thought. But she knew this was not true. Sadie had been born perfect, just as every child was until they opened their eyes and realized they were no longer alone. The flaws of their new world destroyed them—not instantly but little by little, over years, chipping at their souls until they no longer remembered what it was like to float in wonderful, absolute silence.
Kris knew that the first thing Sadie had seen when she blinked open her eyes was the sweaty, beaming face of her mother, exhausted from nearly twelve hours of labor yet filled with the exultation of meeting the life she had grown inside her. That moment was perfect. That was safe. It was the next glimpse that worried Kris—the way Jonah’s expression had, for a brief moment, become frozen in a half smile, as if something inside had cautioned him about feeling true joy, like a voice, his own shadow voice, that whispered, Are you sure?
Kris told herself that a baby could not have read such subtlety in an expression. But Kris had. She had felt a sliver of ice slip like a thin blade into her heart. Had the same happened to Sadie? Was it possible that even though they no longer shared a body, this flawless baby girl had felt her mother’s heartbeat stutter? Kris could still picture her child’s dark, wandering eyes as they slowly turned to the man standing over her, and Kris imagined Sadie’s voice—the sweet, tentative voice of her now, at eight years old—speaking in Kris’s mind, asking, Is it okay if I love him? And Kris responding in her calm, even tone, Yes, Sadie. He’s your daddy. He won’t hurt you.
You lied to her, Kris told herself, her grip on the steering wheel tightening. The edges of the aged, cracked leather bit into her fingertips. You were supposed to protect her. And you lied.
On the ridges above them were the swaying green tops of untamed fields. They were below the earth now, where the highway carved a narrow canyon through jagged slopes of red gypsum, pale limestone, and deep brown clay. The mineral glowed like the brick walls of a fireplace in the afternoon sunlight. The sides of the hills became rockier the farther down they went, the road plunging at such a steep angle that Kris felt the ground would open at any moment and swallow them whole.
Kris heard Sadie give a soft gasp and knew what her daughter was thinking: It’s going to smash us, and there will be nothing left but bone and blood and metal. The pass was growing too narrow. They could not make it through.
As a little girl, riding alone on the bench seat behind her mother and father, Kris had felt the same sense of growing unease, tempered only by the understanding that her parents would not purposely put her in danger.
But the fear was only the first half of the experience, because she now knew what came next.