already dozing father, into the Warrens, and out through the tunnel. I walked down the long path past the orchards into the woods until I was down on the Street. And I walked to the end, where I found Sophia, seated out on the steps, alone.
Sophia shot me the coldest eye imaginable, and then she walked inside. I came to the door and looked in. I saw that Carrie was asleep on the bed. Sophia was looking away from me. I sat down next to her.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I am so terribly sorry. For everything I have put upon you, I am so very sorry.”
I slipped my fingers between hers. All of my days spent dreaming of her, all of my hours spent wondering if she was lost out there, and all of my amazement at learning that she was down here, and all of my wondering again about what had become of her here, and about who she loved and who loved her, all of those hours of dreams and ghosts and blue whispers, all of it now was real, was right there, between my fingers.
“I want to be better,” I said. “I am trying to be better.”
And Sophia pulled my hand to her lips and kissed it and then turned to me and said, “You want me to be yours, I understand. I have always understood it. But what you must get is that for me to be yours, I must never be yours. Do you understand what I am saying? I must never be any man’s.”
Sophia, my Sophia—the notions I had, the lives I thought we might build, notions and lives all in my head, all built on my sole, lonely ambitions. I sat there looking into her big sun-drop eyes. She was so very beautiful, as beautiful as they said my mother was. And I knew, looking at her there, that those notions, those lives, had never considered Sophia, as she knew herself to be. Because my Sophia had not been a woman to me. She had been an emblem, an ornament, a sign of someone long ago lost, someone whom I now glimpsed only in the fog, someone whom I could not save. Oh, my dear dark mother. The screams. The voices. The water. You were lost to me, lost, and there was nothing I could do to save you.
But we must tell our stories, and not be ensnared by them. That is what I was thinking that evening, in that old cabin down on the Street. And that is why I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small toy horse I’d collected from Georgie’s and put it in Sophia’s hands.
“For Carrie,” I said.
And now Sophia laughed quietly and said, “She a little young for this, Hi.”
“I am trying,” I said, smiling. “I am.”
30
IN THE END, WE—THENA, Sophia, young Carrie, and myself—were all that was stable at Lockless. Powers of blood bound us. Sophia was Nathaniel’s chosen, and Carrie was her daughter. I was my father’s son, and as for Thena, well, to my father, she was the symbol of a bygone era. He had sold her children, an act that, in his mind, was a turn in the road that marked the end of the Virginia he knew. He never quite said this, but my father avoided saying too much to Thena, and if he was walking the property and saw her coming, he would turn the other way. I think now that this was his ambition for her laundry runs, to somehow assuage the guilt of selling a woman’s children on the racetrack.
Guilt or not, it saved Thena, and together, in those gray days, the four of us formed a kind of unit. We fell into a kind of routine. We took our meals together. After, I would see to my father, and then walk Sophia and Caroline back to their quarters down in the Street. One night I was seeing them home and Sophia said, speaking of Thena, “You know she is getting old.”
“She is,” I said.
“It is a hard life, Hi, a hard life on a woman—the laundry, the hauling, the rendering, the lye. I help out as I can, but it is hard. I am glad you came back. She need a break. Tell her sit tight tomorrow. You and me, we can handle the washing. And we’ll do the run on Monday too.”
When I got back, I told Thena our plan. She looked