Banished (3 page)

In two more years I’d be eighteen. I’d graduate from high school and the social services people would stop coming around checking on me. And if we were lucky, we’d go so far away that they’d never be able to find Chub.

On the other side of the door I heard voices, and I recognized the loudest: Dunston Acey. Not good. I tried to slip quietly to my room, but before I reached the door his whiskey-rough voice came after me.

“Hailey, come out here so’s I can see you!”

I froze, trying to decide if I could pretend I hadn’t heard him, but Gram’s voice followed: “Git the boy put down quick, girl, we got company!”

I did as they said. Once I’d sung to Chub and rubbed his back, and his breathing had gone deep and even with sleep, I couldn’t put it off any longer. They’d only come into the room and turn on the lights and wake Chub up. Nothing stopped Gram and her customers when they were partying.

I walked into the kitchen and said hello with as little enthusiasm as possible.

Three pairs of eyes regarded me—Gram and Dun and another man, who was standing in the shadows in the far corner. When he stepped into the light, I saw with a sinking heart that it was Rattler Sikes.

Of all the sorry and mean and no-good men who came through our house, Rattler was the worst. He was one of the only ones who didn’t do drugs or, as far as I knew, drink alcohol, but once in a while he’d show up in the company of some of the others and stand in the corner of the room, watching and saying little.

Everyone knew the stories about him. Rattler was one of the few people in Trashtown who got talked about by the rest of Gypsum, probably because the sheriff had been trying to nail him for years. Only, he never managed to make any charges stick.

They said Rattler did things to women. Terrible things, things that left them messed up on the outside and the inside alike. It was only Trashtown women that he went after, and maybe that was part of why the sheriff’s department couldn’t bring him down. As long as trouble stayed inside the borders of Trashtown, Gypsum people didn’t care much about what went on there.

They said that women would go out with Rattler—it was hard to imagine they went willingly—and then they’d be found wandering back into town in the early hours of the morning, sometimes barefoot, sometimes nearly naked, always unwilling or unable to talk about what had happened. None of them ever wanted to press charges, but those women were never the same again.

“My, you’re looking fine today,” Dun said, raising a bottle in my direction before taking a long drink. Gram had a policy that anything a customer drank or smoked in the house was free—for the price of a few beers and some weed, she kept them entertained and happy, and if she tacked on a premium for the harder stuff, they never complained.

“I got to git down to the basement,” Gram said, sighing and fixing a look on me. I knew what she wanted—for me to go down and get whatever it was that Dun was buying tonight. But that was the one thing she couldn’t make me do: I refused to get involved with her dealing. I wouldn’t touch the pill bottles, wouldn’t read the labels, wouldn’t help her sort and bag the weed she got from a guy who drove it up from the Ozarks once a month. I wouldn’t do any of it, and whenever she asked I reminded her that all I had to do was make one phone call and she was done.

Of course, I was bluffing. I would never do anything to bring the authorities in, because that would mean that Chub and I would be split up. Gram was stupid about some things, and this most of all: she should have known what Chub meant to me.

Instead, she got up, sighing and snorting, and shuffled off to the basement stairs. It would take her a while, holding on to the handrail and taking the steps one at a time, before she was back with their stuff. I saw the pile of wadded cash in the middle of the table. It would stay there until Dun checked his purchases and slid them in his pockets, and then Gram would stuff the money into her purse on the counter. That was how it was always done.

I took the only empty chair and waited. Gram expected me to make small talk, but that didn’t mean I had to come up with sparkling conversation.

“Nice shirt,” Dun said. “Ain’t that a purty shirt, Rattler?”

I felt myself blush; my shirt was nothing special, a plain green scoop-neck top I’d bought secondhand for fifty cents, but it was old and getting a little tight across my chest.

After that, Dun asked me about school and my grades and what I was watching on TV these days. He didn’t seem to mind that I gave him the shortest possible answers. Now and then he asked Rattler what he thought, but mostly he seemed content to do all the talking and drink his beer, popping the top off a fresh bottle when he finished one.

After what seemed like ages, Gram came clumping back up the stairs. She had two brown paper bags clutched in her hands, their tops folded down. She set them on the table in front of Dun, and the mood in the room changed.

No one was looking at me anymore. Everyone’s eyes were on the bags as Dun unrolled the paper and peered inside. After a second he reached in and pulled out the plastic bottles. He examined the labels, squinting. He looked like he wanted to eat them, plastic caps and all. When he was done checking the bottles, he stuffed them in a big flap pocket of his plaid shirt. He crumpled the brown bags and tossed them toward the trash can in the corner, where they bounced off the edge and landed on the floor.

I waited what I thought was a safe amount of time, and then got up and slid my chair in. “Well, good night,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

As I passed by Dun, he reached out and grabbed the waistband of my jeans.

“Off to bed already, sweetheart?” he drawled, and I caught a whiff of his tobacco-stinking breath. “You need some company?”

“Aw, Dun,” Gram cackled, and slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “Don’t be pestering the child.”

“She ain’t no child no more,” Dun said, winking at Rattler. “Ain’t that right.”

“You know she’s got to get her schooling.” Gram sounded serious now, her voice scolding.

“Looks to me like she’s got herself plenty of schooling. On, on how to be smokin’ hot.” Dun cracked up at his own stupid joke, not even trying to hide the fact that he was staring right at my chest.

I jerked away from him, hard. Gram laughed along with him as I raced to my room and slammed the door.

C
HAPTER
3

I
T WAS THEIR ANNIVERSARY.
An entire year since their first official date
.

That was why she was going through his things. Other women did that, didn’t they? Snooped around their boyfriends’ apartments to find the velvet boxes containing bracelets and earrings, glittering tokens of love?

It was so hard to know what normal was, even though she worked at it all the time. She shopped where other women shopped, dressed as well as any of them. She got her hair cut at a salon where they brought you champagne while you waited. Why not? She had plenty of money now
.

That hadn’t always been the case. It took six years to put herself through college, working full-time and weekends too, six years of living in a sleep-deprived, caffeine-fueled haze before she finally graduated
.

Six more years of research jobs after that, in labs all over the city, taking classes whenever she could to supplement what she learned on the job. Full-time graduate school was out of the question when she was still paying off her debts—the lab jobs didn’t pay enough for her to save much money, even though she kept her expenses down by living in a tiny apartment in a bad part of town
.

Those were lonely years. Even if she had time to date, the memory of her first love stayed in her mind every waking moment. Her heart did not heal. Yes, it scabbed over; the agony dulled to a low ache that was as much a part of her as breathing. But she never forgot
.

She wanted to atone. Her life became an effort to make up for that early mistake. If she could just find a way to use her gift to help people—but the scientific community was not interested in the work she wanted to do
.

Until the day she met him. Of course, he was only her boss for the first couple of years. He’d heard about her—heard about her reputation for hard work and reliable results, but more important, he’d heard about the research she conducted on her own after hours … and the thing she could do that science could not yet explain. She had told almost no one about that part, and still—somehow—he found out. And offered to pay her three times her salary to come work for him
.

And now, in his laboratory, she worked the longest hours of all, but that didn’t matter, did it? Because they were together, and they shared a vision, a dream. They were going to change the world
.

That was what she told herself every morning as she steeled herself to go through the doors of the building where the lab was located. It was unmarked, with no sign out front, nothing to indicate the expensive equipment inside, the experts he had hired from around the world. But he was disciplined that way—he didn’t flaunt it, but he insisted on the best
.

And he said
she
was the best. Without her, he often reminded her, their work would be in vain. He said that studying her was a privilege. So why had it become so hard to return his affection, his touch, lately?

It was
her
fault, because relationships were so much harder for her than for other women. She tried to push the thought away as she finished looking in the drawers of his dresser and considered the sleek ebony desk in the study of his beautiful penthouse apartment with its view of Lake Michigan. Because of what had happened to her all those years ago … maybe it was inevitable that it would take her so long to love again
.

And she
did
love him, she reminded herself as she shifted objects around on the desk, careful not to disturb the placement of the papers and pens and sticky notes and binder clips. The desk was the only messy thing in his life, this private work space in his home. The rest of it—the sterile lab, the gleaming kitchen with its stainless steel appliances, the pressed shirts and suits hanging in the closets—was so neat and orderly, it was as though no real human lived there
.

She suppressed a little shiver. That was not the way she ought to be thinking about her beloved. Especially since there was a chance—he’d hinted around enough, hadn’t he?
—more
than a
chance, a
likelihood
that he was going to propose tonight. That somewhere in this apartment was the ring he would slip on her finger, a beautiful ring, because he insisted on the best of everything, and then they would be united in marriage in addition to their passion for their work, and she would be the happiest woman in the world
.

So why was she feeling sick inside?

Nerves—that was all it was, she chastised herself, quieting the resistant voice inside. She just had to see the ring. Because seeing it would confirm what she suspected, and if she confirmed that suspicion, she could prepare for it. When he got down on one knee later tonight, she’d be ready with the proper display of delight and surprise, and he’d never know that inside her a gnawing fear was growing, a certainty that something was wrong, wrong, wrong
.

She had to master that fear, to hide it away where no one would ever see it, if she ever wanted to live normally. To marry, to have children, perhaps. She would never find anyone more accomplished than her boyfriend. He was wealthy and intelligent and powerful, and he had chosen her. This was
real
love, mature love, and if she found herself thinking about that other love it was only because of the terrible way it had ended. She’d fallen hard the very first time, but what had felt like love had probably just been infatuation
.

Real love was what she had now, the product of shared interests and a cautious escalation of intimacy over time. Her beloved had been patient as their working relationship slowly grew into something more
.

So she would not allow the doubts in, not today. Today was special. The day every woman dreamed of, right? As she opened the file drawers next to the desk, she forced the nagging fears back to the far corners of her mind. So he had recently made a few errors that weren’t like him. Everyone—even the most brilliant people—got distracted. The inconsistencies in the lab reports she’d mistakenly read, the test models and control populations that didn’t look anything like what they had discussed, even the files that contained references to funding sources she’d never heard about—all of that could easily be explained. She had only a bachelor’s degree, after all; everyone else in the lab—all the unfriendly staff who showed up without introduction and dove into the work without ever sharing any personal information—they were so far ahead of her that she barely understood what they were doing
.

She riffled through the files in the last drawer. Suddenly, she stopped, her heart skipping as she read, and then read again, the file’s label, written neatly in his handwriting
.

Her name
.

Her
real
name
.

The one no one had used in years
.

Behind her she heard the door open, and the click of her boyfriend’s Italian shoes on the polished wood floors
.

She didn’t move
. Couldn’t
move. She held the file in her hands, a file thick with papers, and stared at the name she’d thought she buried forever
.

“
Ah.” His deep, cultured voice came from behind her. He didn’t sound angry so much as amused. “Looking through my private files, are you, my darling?
”

The germ of doubt inside her grew, and she began to shake. But still she held on to the file, as she slowly turned to face him. He offered his hand. Without thinking, she took it and allowed herself to be guided to the leather sofa, where they sat together, knees touching. His hands were warm, and even though the voice in her mind screamed in horror and fear, the part of herself that she had trained so carefully to be like everyone else, like normal women, did not pull away
.

“
We have a lot to talk about,” he said. “In a way, your timing is excellent. See, I recently made some discoveries about you. Yes, you. Don’t look so surprised, darling! You know I have always found you fascinating. Who could blame me for wanting to find out everything I possibly could about the woman I love? And now I can share it all with you, oh yes, because I found out something that you don’t even know about yourself, something wonderful, I think. Something exciting, that will mean great things for both of us and for our work.
”

And then he called her by her real name, and the careful shell she’d built up through the years shattered into a million jagged shards, and she realized that she didn’t really know this man at all
.