day, I’ll be gone, as will you. But this land, it will still be here. Spring to summer to fall to winter—growing, changing, thriving if it’s left alone. I take comfort in that, somehow.”
Rain thought of the tree in which she had hidden, that smell of bark, of vegetation, of decay, of life, how it sheltered her, hid her. Instead of feeling shame, for the first time she felt gratitude that whatever came, she was still here now.
“If you let it, the earth will cover everything that happened there,” said Greta. “Nature is full of murder, you know. The soil accepts everything, recycles it. Death brings life.”
“Greta,” said Rain. “Do you know what happened there the night that Kreskey was killed?”
She turned owl eyes on Rain.
“I know as much as you do, Miss Winter.”
THIRTY
There’s a trail behind my house and it connects to a state trail adjacent to my property. I spend hours back there, forest bathing, as the Japanese call it—shinrin-yoku, welcoming the peace of solitude, the long quiet of early mornings, or late afternoons.
It’s odd that I would find comfort in the woods, don’t you think? It wouldn’t be surprising if the imperviousness of trees, the sound of wind, the sight of dappled sunlight on the ground triggered the memory of trauma. But I am at peace as I walk.
These are not my trails. I trudge through the night, using the scant moonlight to see. I’ll try not to use the flashlight unless I have to.
I lost myself after Kreskey. The boy who returned in the back of Detective Harper’s car was not the same boy who got on his bike that day—that very same day.
The way people looked at me—did they look at you the same way? Revulsion wrapped inside pity. As if it might have been something I was, or something I did that marked me as a victim. As if I had something that they or someone they loved might catch. The words were always kind, but the eyes don’t lie.
My dad. He couldn’t even look at me anymore. My mother wouldn’t let me out of her sight. Within months, they’d sold our house and moved us to Florida near my grandparents, to a condo on the beach. Another museum-like space with white walls and high ceilings, the jewel-green Gulf of Mexico dominating our views. Florida—land of palm trees and blazing sun, strip malls, and sugar sand, stunningly beautiful and somehow ugly, dilapidated and strange. A place that never seems to quite get it right, even though it makes no end of promises.
The ocean is going to heal us, Hank, my mother would say as we floated in the salt water. We’re going to swim every day and wash away the past.
Always a seeker, she dove deep into her “spiritual practice,” reading to me from the books of Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer. She’d quit her job in marketing, decided she was going to devote herself full-time to motherhood. My father’s company had an office in Tampa. We started over in Florida’s stultifying heat (my god we would just drip sweat, wilt under that brutal sun). We started over. Except that I was a ghost.
Sometimes I wondered as I floated with my beautiful mother—whose skin turned a deep golden, whose hair faded blonder, who grew thinner and toned from daily yoga—if I had died up there at Kreskey’s place.
If all of this was just a dream.
I wouldn’t have had the language for it then, but I think of those years in Florida as a kind of bardo—a time between two existences. The boy I was, happy and free, a hopeless geek who loved his friends and comic books, who was in love with a girl who didn’t love him. (That hasn’t changed, Lara, as you know.) And the man I would become, the fractured, solitary misfit who nonetheless helps (or tries to help) other injured children through their vilest days.
It was probably my grandfather who saved me, who managed to patch back together the pieces of me that survived.
We weren’t close before; he’d always seemed odd, distant when he came to visit. We rarely went to Florida to see them. The old man knew about trauma; he was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He and my grandmother had a big old house—boxy rooms that smelled of mold, wood paneling, giant televisions in wood cabinets, my grandmother’s watercolors of sunsets and sailboats, palm trees swaying in the moonlight—tucked into a strip of land