The Deepest Roots Read online

  My daughter was going to be Evangeline Remington, the Queen of Cottonwood Hollow. I had imagined this town growing into a real city with society, like the Boston I loved and left behind. But it’s only ever been storms and wind and drought and sunburned farmers looking mournfully over their meager crops. Life on the prairie is hard, and it has made its people harder. I was foolish to come here, foolish to dream that John and I would have a perfect life.

  It has cost me my love, my daughter, and soon my life as well. The birthing of my stillborn child has left me weak, and our neighbor, Maisie, who comes to tend me, looks more solemn each time she visits. She wanted to take Evangeline from me already, but I refused. I will hold my daughter into the next life, so that we can go together.

  But this is one thing I will wish with my dying breath upon all the daughters of Cottonwood Hollow who follow mine: May they depend on each other; protect each other no matter what the cost, as my sister would have done for me if she were here. May they be blessed with the strength to survive here. I will not, but I know now what I needed. May they possess a clever wit to fill their days with joy, hone the skills to fix what seems beyond repair, find what becomes lost in this vast, open grassland, and heal those who are unwell, like my darling Evangeline. May they have the gift of foresight to avoid the perils that lie around every turn in this unforgiving place, and the ability to read who is trustworthy and who is not before they make the same mistakes I did with John. May they always find a way to have enough, even when times are hard. And may they be sirens who can draw a man back to them, though I could not. For it is a lonely world without love. And I don’t even have the love of my daughter to comfort me now.

  There’s a cold ache in my chest. It feels as if I’ve lost everything. There’s no hope, no happiness left in my body. I am strangely weighted, as if grief has taken over my body and made my bones into iron. I feel like I am Emmeline Remington and I have lost everything I ever loved.

  I skim through the diary and turn to the last page. The handwriting is shaky, almost erratic, as if Emmeline is losing control of her body. Or maybe her mind.

  May 2nd

  John took my daughter. Maisie said he buried her. I don’t know where, but I will find her, even if I have to claw at the dirt with my fingernails to get her back.

  He’s leaving with the woman. Maisie saw him going through the house, looking for the silver I brought with me, and the dowry chest Mother and Father sent for Evangeline. He came in here and shouted, saying he needed it. He said I could have the house and the land, though he knows I’m not going to live much longer. He wants to sell it all and go to California to hunt for gold with his new lady love.

  Well, the last laugh shall be mine. I’ve hidden it all—the deed to the land, the gifts from my parents. No one should have that dowry chest or the land but a daughter of Cottonwood Hollow.

  The diary slams itself shut.

  “Holy shit.”

  Six

  I CLIMB THROUGH THE OVERGROWN shrubbery in the back of Lux’s house. The window is open, and I can hear voices, like maybe she’s watching television in her room. When I get close enough, I can see through her parted lavender curtains.

  I’m about to hiss, “Lux,” through the screen when I realize the voices aren’t from a television and I duck down so I’m not seen in case my presence might get Lux in trouble.

  “You sure you didn’t bait him?” Lux’s mother asks.

  “I wasn’t doing anything to Aaron. He’s lying.”

  “Well, that’s not what he’s saying.”

  “So you’re going to believe him over me?”

  “It’s not a contest, Lux. And I’m sure it was an accident. He’s been under a lot of stress lately since his hours got cut.”

  I stand up just enough so I can barely peer through the window, trying to see what happened to Lux. Tina lays a hand on Lux’s face, which is red and damp with tears. Tina’s Healing her, I realize. I put the pieces together; that son of a bitch Aaron hit Lux.

  “Why do you stay with him?” Lux asks, her voice so soft that I have to take a step closer to hear her. “We don’t need him. Please, Mom, for once, just listen to me. Make him leave.”

  “We do need him, Lux,” Tina whispers. “He makes good money at the plant. You like those pretty clothes and your cable TV? The new computer we bought you for school last month? All that costs money. Look at Rome and her mama. You want to live like that? Hand-to-mouth in an old trailer out on the edge of town?”

  Once when I was eleven, I got into a fight with Roger Wyatt for calling my mom a whore. It was going pretty well for me until he punched me in the solar plexus and it felt like all the air had left my body. Maybe it’s the truth of what Tina said that makes her words feel like that fight with Roger Wyatt, but her words hurt no matter what. I clench the diary in my hand, grounding myself in reality, in the here and now.

  “Well, nobody’s having to Heal Rome, are they?” Lux murmurs when her mom pulls her hand away from Lux’s cheek.

  “Just stay out of his way. He’s not a bad man. And he’s a good provider. This is just a rough patch, you’ll see. He’ll get his full shifts back and things will get better again.” Tina pats Lux’s leg, but doesn’t look her in the eye.

  Then Tina leaves Lux alone in her lavender bedroom.

  “Lux,” I hiss through the screen. “Lux, come here.”

  Lux’s face jerks up from where she’s been staring down at the carpet. She rubs her face, wiping away tears with the soft palms of her hands. She takes a swipe or two at her nose before coming to the window and parting the curtains. “How long were you out there?” she asks.

  “Long enough. Your douchebag stepdad hit you?”

  Lux’s face threatens to crumple, her full lower lip trembling slightly. I want to ask her if it’s happened before, and if it has, why she never told me. But I suppose it’s for the same reason that I never told her that we were behind on the rent, or that I didn’t have any lunch money.

  I put my hand on the screen, all five fingers spread out. Lux puts her hand against mine, and I see the thin white scar across her palm before the wire netting is between us. Just like the secrets.

  “Don’t tell Mercy,” she whispers. “Or anyone. I don’t want them to know. I didn’t want you to know.”

  I remember my own secrets. How I have been helping to pay the rent since Mom’s shifts got cut nearly a year ago. How we don’t have the rent money now. How I wish my life was broken pottery or a rusty hinge, something that could be Fixed.

  “I can keep a secret,” I reply, hating how the words taste like metal in my mouth. Blood, I think. They taste like blood. But if Lux can have her secrets, then it makes it okay for me to have mine, too.

  Lux nods, a curtain of strawberry-blond hair falling over her face.

  “Can you come out?” I ask her. “I have something to show you. And Mercy.”

  Lux withdraws her hand, shakes her hair back from her face with a careless tilt of her chin, as if nothing had just passed between us. No secrets at all. She rolls her eyes. “You know what a pain it’s going to be to get her out. It’s almost eleven.”

  “Yeah, but we need to talk. Before school isn’t going to be enough for this.”

  Lux crosses the room back to the door and locks it as soundlessly as she can. Then she comes back to the window and pushes up the screen. “Give me some room,” she grunts as she turns her butt toward me and starts poking her long legs out the window. I slog back through the bushes until I get into the grass and brush twigs and leaves from my clothes.

  “You look great, by the way,” Lux says when she joins me, still dressed in her school uniform.

  “I like to be comfortable,” I reply, noticing the beginnings of a hole in the knee of my sweat pants.

  “So what’s this all about?” she asks.

  “Let’s get Mercy, and I’ll tell you both at once.”

  We walk across town, passing over the main drag and the crowd that’s gather
ed at Flynn’s, the local bar. The neon lights cast a soft glow across the wide, raised sidewalk, and the air is thick with the smells of cigarette smoke and frying onions. It makes me wish that I’d bothered to eat something. Wynona, a waitress there, is standing outside smoking a cigarette and talking to Meg Farley. She gives us a friendly wave. We pass the humming soda machines and the grain bins near the co-op, Lux distracting herself by dodging the cracks on the sidewalk as we go.

  When we get to Mercy’s pretty two-story house, we go straight to the garage. Mr. Montoya keeps a ladder hanging on the back of it, out of sight so that everything looks neat and tidy. Lux and I each grab an end and lift it off the hooks, carrying the ladder between us to the side of the house where Mercy’s bedroom is. Carefully, I lean the ladder up against the siding. Lux holds the bottom while I climb up to Mercy’s bedroom window. Her parents are in the room directly below hers, so we have to be as quiet as possible, or they’ll peer through their blinds to see Lux holding a ladder.

  The steps of the wooden ladder are rough and old, and I don’t suspect they’ll hold long enough for Neveah’s friends to sneak her out of her bedroom.

  When I get to the top, I don’t look down. I’ve never been a huge fan of heights, but after Lux got splinters in both hands last summer, she’s always made me climb. I tap as quietly as possible on the glass of Mercy’s window. Of course, it’s closed. When she’s not reading romances that she smuggles into her house from the library or Mom’s dog-eared collection, Mercy reads a lot of true crime novels, which lead her to believe that sleeping with a window open could get her kidnapped and locked in a cellar or chopped into a million bits.

  Mercy’s curtains part hesitantly, but when she spies me outside she throws open the window. “Are you crazy?” she whisper-shouts. “I thought you were a psycho killer. I was ready to start screaming for my dad.”

  “Mercy, how many times have we come to your window now? Thirty? Forty? Psycho murderers aren’t coming to your window on a fifteen-foot ladder. They’re just going to take the stairs like normal people.”

  Mercy slaps a hand over her mouth before she laughs. “Let me grab my robe,” she says, darting back inside the dark cocoon of her bedroom to pull on a pink floral robe over her nightgown. She climbs fearlessly out her window and down the ladder. Mercy is not afraid of heights at all, the ladder having been her idea in the first place.

  We scurry into her dad’s garage, Mercy finding the light switch in the dark. The bulbs flicker and buzz briefly before turning on all the way. There’s a pool table in one back corner and a poker table in the other for when Mr. Montoya’s buddies from the meat-packing plant come over every third Friday night to play cards. A 1968 Mustang sits in the middle of the garage, a project car that Mr. Montoya has been working on since we were kids. It’s got a 302 in it, and I resist the urge to look under the hood to see what he’s done to it lately. Sometimes he asks me my opinion on something like rebuilding the carburetor, and it’s all I can do to rein in my enthusiasm and leave him to his weekend tinkering rather than taking over the project myself. He tried to get Mercy or Neveah interested in it, but they’re not at all, and Malakai is too little to do much more than hand him wrenches.

  Lux takes a seat on the pool table, scooting up on the edge and grabbing the cue ball to send it skiing across the table to crack into the other balls.

  Mercy sends Lux a dark look. “Could you not make so much noise?”

  “Please,” Lux scoffs, leaning back. “Your parents won’t know we’re out here. I’ve listened to your mom snore. That’s the only sound anyone in your house is hearing right now.”

  I nudge Lux’s knee as she swings her legs. “Focus,” I tell her. “I have to talk to you both.”

  “What?” Mercy asks, her expressive brows arching with excitement. “Did you finally get a boyfriend?” Mercy has been waiting for Sam Buford from her Bible study group to notice her for what seems like forever. Until then, she lives vicariously through our romantic endeavors.

  I roll my eyes, thinking back briefly to my evening with Jett Rodriguez, baseball pitcher and beef jerky buyer. “No,” I answer. “This is about the box that Neveah Found last night after the tornado.”

  “The box?” Mercy and Lux ask in unison, curiosity piqued.

  “I opened it tonight. And this was inside.” I hold up Emmeline Remington’s diary.

  “What is it?” Lux asks, sitting up and taking it from me just as Mercy skims a finger over the leather.

  When the three of us touch the diary, a cold wind whips across the pool table, shooting the balls against each other in a great clacking noise and scattering them into the holes, banishing them from the green felt table.

  Lux falls off the edge of the pool table, dropping the diary onto it in her haste. “Holy shit! What in the hell was that?” she hisses as she looks around the well-lit garage.

  Mercy grabs my arm like she’s going to pull me from danger. “Leave it and let’s get out of here!” she yelps.

  “It’s Emmeline Remington’s diary,” I whisper. The lights flicker.

  Mercy tenses, as if she’s expecting something else to go flying across the room. When a few moments pass with no further activity, she asks, “Are you sure?” She takes a cautious step forward and picks up the diary with one small, trembling hand. She looks around the room again, waiting to see if something else is going to happen now that she’s touched the diary.

  “I’m sure. I read some of it before I came over. And the stories are wrong. About almost everything.”

  Lux picks herself up off the floor. “What do you mean, wrong?” she asks, her eyes darting up to the lights to see if they will flicker again. She lets out a frightened gasp when a june bug lands on her shoulder, leaping away at the scratchy touch and jamming her hip against the table. “Damn it,” she curses, rubbing her hip and glaring at the diary as if it had caused her to injure herself.

  “Emmeline was left by her husband, but she had a baby. A daughter who was stillborn.”

  Mercy’s face falls. “That’s so sad. Oh, how awful for her.”

  “Still not a good reason to curse us, though,” Lux points out.

  “That’s why you have to read this,” I tell them. I show them Emmeline’s wish for the girls of Cottonwood Hollow.

  Mercy traces a finger across the spidery handwriting, reading Emmeline’s words.

  “I don’t know if the tornado woke her up or what, but I think she wants us to know this. She wants us to know that she never meant for our talents to be a curse,” I whisper. “They were supposed to be gifts. All of them.” I’ve never thought of my talent for Fixing things as anything but a curse simply because it was such a need. But to see it as a gift changes it, shifting it ever so slightly. How many times had my ability to Fix things been the difference between eating and going hungry? It had certainly helped me get the job at Red’s Auto so that I could help pay the rent. And even before that, the very first time I Fixed that microwave so that we could make supper. It wasn’t supposed to make me an outcast, an oddity. It was supposed to keep me alive.

  Lux looks away. “Being a Siren is a curse if you don’t want to keep any man around,” she mutters. And it’s true. Almost any other talent you could see as a gift. But for Lux, being a Siren has never been a good thing.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Mercy asks, looking at Lux and then me. “To think of how differently you could live if you knew you were supposed to be blessed and not cursed. You could just spend all your time walking around doing good for other people, like Emmeline tried to do for us.” I can see Mercy filtering things through her belief. Her parents have always seen what their girls have as a gift from God. And maybe it is. Mercy’s family has certainly never wanted for anything since she was born, the first Enough in Cottonwood Hollow for nearly thirty years.

  Lux shrugs. “I’m cursed and so’s my mom. I don’t care what the book says.” My mind flashes back to Tina standing over Lux, Healing the bruise forming on her
daughter’s cheek. Who knew that a talent for Healing could be a curse?

  Mercy comes closer to Lux and leans her head against Lux’s shoulder. Mercy doesn’t know why Lux could ever see Healing as a curse, but I do.

  But if Mercy knew Aaron hit Lux, she’d be over there in an instant, probably wielding one of Mrs. Montoya’s meat tenderizers. Lux’s widowed mom marrying Aaron was straight out of a fairy tale. Tina had been widowed while she was pregnant with Lux, and it wasn’t until Lux was in the third grade that she remarried. Suddenly Tina lost that tight, strained look on her face, and Lux had pretty dresses and a Barbie dream house that she reluctantly let me remodel to add a garage for my Matchbox cars. The three of us had been flower girls at the wedding, and even then, Mercy had been in love with romance and knights in shining armor. If Mercy suspected Aaron was less than a prince, she’d be devastated. And maybe Lux and Tina would be, too, if they had to admit that their fairy tale wasn’t real after all.

  I read the last pages aloud, finishing with Emmeline’s final words, “No one should have that dowry chest or the land but a daughter of Cottonwood Hollow.”

  Lux jolts, jarring Mercy, who’d still been leaning on her. “A treasure?” she squeaks. “Why didn’t you lead with that? You’re saying Emmeline Remington left a box of treasure for any daughter of Cottonwood Hollow?”

  “It sounds like it was a lot of silverware and baby clothes,” Mercy says hesitantly, looking at Lux.

  “Yeah, silver silverware. Like the kind that can be melted down and sold,” Lux says. “And a gold bar.”

  “And the deed to the land. So that’s where it is. She left a stipulation in her will, you know. The town pays the taxes on the land so that they can lease out the north forty acres to farm,” Mercy says. “The Johnsons and the McGraws farm it. The money from the lease pays for the taxes and makes sure that the homestead is preserved as part of the town’s history.”