contact. “Never. By the time I left, my hair was below my knees. Faithful and Obedience’s is, too. When Pamela cut it off …” I sighed. “I can’t tell you how that felt. I was so light, I could fly. For a wee while there, I cut it short as yours. Kept getting friendly overtures from women.”
He laughed, and I said, “Yeh. I can’t tell you how confusing that was. Somebody had to explain it to me. But Roger and Pamela … Roger picked us up, Dorian and me, the first day. He was out with the dogs, before seven in the morning. He saw us walking down the road, half frozen, covered with mud and scared to death, flattening ourselves in the ditch whenever we heard a car behind us. He put us into the ute with him and took us home to Pamela. We weren’t the first ones they’d done that for, it turned out. They were something like a halfway house. Halfway down the hill, and halfway to freedom. The kindest people I’d ever known, and I was so confused. We were taught that Outside was ruled by the Devil. Not just taught. We knew. Once we left, we were damned. Our name wouldn’t be spoken, even in our family. We were dead. Worse than dead. We were gone. And here were these lovely people, giving us clothes to wear, cutting my hair, helping us navigate the system to get the help we needed, explaining how to choose when we’d never chosen anything. How could they be ruled by the Devil?”
“And one of the things they explained to you,” Gray said, “was the Wanaka Tree.”
We were around the curve, now, and could see it in the distance. Growing out of the water, tiny and graceful and strong. I said, “I finally got the courage to ask them about it when we’d been with them about a week. I’d spent the afternoon cooking for them, making four times what we needed, because I’d never cooked for less than hundreds, or cooked by myself at all. Dorian helped me, after he’d chopped wood for their wood burner, both of us doing anything we could think of to earn our keep. Dorian was useless in the kitchen, didn’t know how to do a single thing: peel an onion, chop a carrot, use a can opener. He told me, ‘Tomorrow, you can show me how to do the washing,’ and I said, ‘And you can show me how to chop wood.’”
“And he said,” Gray guessed, “that it was too dangerous.”
“Yeh. Too dangerous, and too hard. I said, ‘Who just sliced his finger with the knife trying to chop an onion, then?’ And the next day, I did learn how to chop wood.”
“Good on ya,” Gray said. “But the Wanaka Tree.”
“Yeh. It was the first question I’d really asked, the first time I’d brought something up myself, is why I remember it. I was like Obedience is now, not like Fruitful, maybe because I had absolutely no example of how to be anyone different. Women don’t lead the conversation, you see. I asked them, ‘Why does everybody take a photo of the tree in the lake?’ And hoped it wasn’t stupid. Most of my questions were so stupid.”
I fell silent, then, remembering. The scared girl I’d been, and the defiant one, careening between those emotions and so many others. And how Roger and Pamela had answered.
“Ah,” Roger had said, his pale-blue eyes so kind in his weathered face, “you’ve noticed that, have you. Because it’s growing out of the water, I reckon, all alone like that. And because it makes a kind of foreground, you see. A focus point, maybe, for a photo.”
“Oh,” I said doubtfully, but Dorian said eagerly, “That’s what I thought. That it was perfect. The shape of it. The solitariness of it.”
“You’ve got a poet’s soul,” Pamela said, and Dorian flushed and looked down. Pamela said, “No, that’s good. It’s always good to look. It’s even better to see.”
“I want to do that,” Dorian said, the red creeping up into his cheeks. “To be able to stop and look.”
“Right,” I said, because I didn’t have a poet’s soul. “Because it makes a good photo.”
“Oh,” Pamela said, “I don’t think that’s all of it. I think it’s the symbolism, don’t you?”
I looked at her blankly, but Dorian said, “Oh. I see.” And when she looked inquiring, and Roger looked tolerant, he said, “That it’s growing out there alone, and