Jack banged his body against his stall and whinnied like crazy when Elv got there in the morning. When she whistled, he came right over, like an enormous, well-trained dog. Sometimes she sat in the straw in his stall and just talked to him. He looked at her with his big dark eyes and she felt tears rising. Not crocodile tears, but real ones. Maybe when she left she would steal him. Or she would leave his stall door open and he could run away and be free. The horses didn’t judge Elv by the way she looked or discern that she was marked and ruined. They didn’t care that something bad had happened to her and that no one saw who she was. They didn’t care that she wore ugly clothes, or that she burned herself with cigarettes, or that she sat in the hay and wept when she thought about how long Claire had waited for her at the corner, all day, until darkness fell and the mosquitoes filled the air. Claire was the one who had been crying for hours, her face streaky and hot. It was Elv who’d had to comfort her.
Sometimes Elv and Michael would hide out behind the stables and smoke the cigarettes his brother smuggled to him on visiting days. Elv was now doing all of Michael’s schoolwork, even the math. Lately, she skipped evening activities in order to get back to The Scarlet Letter. Sometimes she chose it over drifting into Arnelle. She hated Dimsdale and wanted to see him get his comeuppance. It wasn’t real life, so perhaps a horrible human being really would get what he deserved and the girl who’d been ruined would turn and walk away.
SHE WAS HEADED back from the stables one windy day as Michael was leaving the administration building. He was an honor student, due to Elv’s hard work, and as such he was allowed unsupervised visits with relatives. He had only one visitor, his brother from New York City. Elv was standing in the tall grass, which had turned a pale green. It was early spring and the ground was muddy. The air was chilly and fresh. She had been away for six months. The outside world didn’t even exist anymore. She could barely picture her mother’s face. She didn’t bother opening her letters. Everything that came before her time at Westfield was a blur. Elv was ready for the next thing to happen. She was waiting for a new life.
On the first day that it seemed as if winter might actually be over, she left her jacket behind, even though the air was still cool. In New Hampshire, people were desperate for spring, and she was among them. She wore oversized jeans and a sweatshirt over her green T-shirt—hideous clothes she knew were supposed to make her feel less like an individual. Everyone was equal at Westfield, even if that meant feeling ugly. Elv had on tall rubber boots that were splattered with mud. Her long black hair was all she had of the person she used to be. Still, she felt hopeful when she stood out in the grass. Another world must surely exist somewhere, one where she would be known in some deep way that was far beyond words.
Michael was telling his brother about some guy from their old neighborhood who had just been busted, but Lorry wasn’t listening. He was twenty-five, his own man. There was a gap of eight years between the brothers and they were different people entirely. Whereas Michael was a braggart, Lorry was more of a storyteller. Whereas Michael was a car thief, grabbing for what he wanted greedily, always getting caught, Lorry liked people to hand over what was precious to them, convinced that they had made their own decision to do so. He was tall and thin, handsome, dark, with hooded eyes and an uncanny ability to read people. Women said he had a lethal smile and that he was difficult to resist. Everyone agreed—he could talk himself out of just about any kind of trouble. In the city he was known for his tattoos. On one hand there was a crown of thorns, on the other a crown of roses. Above each was a black star. The back of the hand was one of the most painful places to be tattooed—the skin was paper thin—but Lorry hadn’t minded. He told himself there was a price to pay for any story worth telling, and that his tattoos would tell the story for him when he didn’t have the time, or the energy, or the heart to tell it himself.
He saw the girl who had come out of the stables standing in the grass, her hair flying out behind her. There was pollen in the air; everything looked hazy and green.
“Who’s that?” he asked his brother.
“Her? She’s a little suburban bitch whose parents thought she was uncontrollable. I’ve got her doing all my schoolwork.” Michael always had to show off for his brother. “She does whatever I tell her.”
Lorry laughed. Unlike his little brother, he didn’t have to brag. He simply knew what he wanted. “Not anymore.”
Elv saw Michael and his visitor, but assumed they hadn’t spied her. She thought she was invisible. She was in Arnelle, far from the muddy green-edged spring. She was in a field where the violets were as big as cabbages, where the tomatoes were black and poisonous, love apples that dared you to take a bite. She went there whenever she left the stables. In New Hampshire, she was nothing, a speck in the grass, but her demon court had taken over the otherworld. They’d chased out the turncoat faeries who’d turned out to be cowards, willing to make bargains with human beings. They’d built houses of straw and mud, ringed with the black stones of vengeance, a curse to anyone who tried to harm them.
Elv assumed the handsome man approaching was on his way to the parking lot beyond the field. She’d never seen Michael’s brother before, but she’d heard about his exploits. He was like a magician, Michael had said. He could make things appear when you least expected it—money, drugs, a free apartment, a car with a full tank of gas. Elv suddenly realized he was headed straight for her. She felt light-headed, forced to step out of Arnelle. It was as if she was being torn out of something. She heard a crack, as though the atmosphere was breaking apart. She moved into this world. She could feel her heart beating hard.
“Nobody as beautiful as you should be here,” Lorry told her.
The first words he ever said to her went right through her. She was there in New Hampshire, standing in the grass in her terrible clothes, pushing the hair out of her eyes so she could see him more clearly.
“They should have never put you here,” he went on, as though they were in the middle of a conversation, as if he knew her better than anyone.
He was almost too good-looking, like a movie star who’d wandered into the New Hampshire meadow by accident. He wore a black coat, jeans, boots, black leather gloves. He was so tall, Elv had to look up to see his face. No man had ever spoken to her that directly. Usually, Elv would have flirted or, if she was in a foul mood, walked away. But in his presence, she felt overwhelmed. She lifted her chin like a child setting out a dare, trying to undo whatever spell had befallen her.
“I’ll bet you don’t even know my name.”
He squinted through the green pollen in the air. “It’s Elv.”
Her own name sounded beautiful to her for the first time. The spell intensified twofold.
“Let’s get out of here.” Lorry had a fluid energy that took control. He grabbed her hand and they went past the stables, into the woods. The air was chilly, but the grass was green. Little bits of it were sticking to her clothes. The woods were thick, filled with birch and pine. The fiddlehead ferns were unfolding, and masses of swamp cabbage were greening, with huge, musty leaves. Lunch in the cafeteria had already been served, but no one would miss her. She often stayed with the horses until she had to be in class; sometimes she didn’t appear until the dinner hour. Julie Hagen gave her an absence note if she needed one. She was Miss Hagen’s pet, after all, the girl who had been controlled and transformed, who knew how to behave, until she found a way to escape.
As they walked along, Lorry began to tell the story of his life. He had grown up in Queens, but his parents had abandoned him and his brother. He’d been on his own from the time he was ten. He’d learned how to survive when everyone else turned away. He stopped suddenly, in midsentence, so that she crashed into him. Lorry grinned. He put a hand on her waist to steady her. His touch was hot; it spread along her body. “Unless you don’t want to hear it,” Lorry said.
“No. Tell me.” Elv was overcome with emotion. Most people were so boring, she tuned them right out
, but not him. She was ready to listen. “Once you start a story you have to finish it.”
“It’s not the kind your mother told you at bedtime,” Lorry warned. “It’s scary,” he said in a fevered tone that warned her to think twice. Some stories stayed with you even when you wanted to forget them.
Still, Elv remained stubborn. “Those are the best kind of stories.”
Lorry laughed, charmed. She was such a gorgeous girl, delicious in her stubbornness and her beauty. He had good reason to charm her right back. He put everything on the slow burner; he’d let her burn and come to him. “Once upon a time,” he said and again they both laughed. There were crows calling from the trees. He waited for quiet and soon enough the noisy crows in the pines took flight. He told her he’d been on his own since they tried to beat him to death at his last foster home. It had been bad before that—at one place they’d made him stand out in the pouring rain and he’d come down with pneumonia. In another, they fed him only bread and water. In a third, they’d put pennies on his eyelids, the way they did for the dead, and he’d had to sleep without moving all night long so that the pennies didn’t shift. But the last house was the worst. They’d kept him locked in a tiny room they called his bedroom whenever he wasn’t in school. It was an airless closet. It was where they kept their trash and old shoes. When he’d had enough, he slipped a knife into his pocket in the school cafeteria. That night he cut through the ropes.
“They tied you up?” Elv was mesmerized. She put her hand up to her chest to try to stop her heart from pounding. Her secret incantation had somehow been revealed. Rope, Iron, Water, Bread.
“People who are weak do that. It’s the only way they can get power. They don’t have anything within themselves, so they try to tie you up, hold you captive. That wasn’t going to happen to me.”
He climbed out the window and never looked back. One cold night when he thought he’d freeze to death, he found a hidden staircase on Thirty-third Street behind an iron gate. It was the way all treasures were found, when you weren’t even looking for them. Like today, for instance, seeing her across the field.
Elv thought about the word treasure and told him to keep going. He pulled her down and they sat close together. The sun came through the trees with pinpricks of light.
He opened the iron gate, then went down so many steps that before long the subway ran above him. He could not believe what he’d found.
There were gnats circling in the air, but Elv barely noticed. Her breath came fast.
“You lived underground?”
“I’ll tell you about it sometime.” Lorry shrugged. “It’s a long story.”
“No.” Elv’s tone was urgent. “Tell me now.”
He had her and he knew it. He said it would have to wait until next time. The dinner bell had been ringing, Elv just hadn’t heard it. She’d miss dinner if she didn’t hurry. Then there would be one of the Westfield punishments, either isolation or humiliation. They had been in the woods for hours. It was the time when the field mice ventured out, after the hawks had settled in the trees but before the owls came to hunt. The sky was now the color Elv liked best—a tender dark blue, falling to earth like ashes.
“I don’t want you to find yourself in trouble,” Lorry said. He walked her back, stopping to light a cigarette. He had bad habits, but he could control his excesses, unlike most of the fools he knew. “I can quit anytime I want,” he told Elv. “I’m not a slave to anything or anyone.”
He’d taken off his gloves to strike the match, revealing the black stars, the roses and the thorns. Something dropped in the pit of Elv’s stomach. These were the images from her own stories, skin and bones, flesh and blood. She thought, Is this how it happens? When she looked at him, a shiver went through her. She had talked about being turned inside out by love. Now for the first time she had an idea of what that meant. She had the same feeling she’d always had before she jumped off a dock into deep, cold water. Half wanting it, half terrified.
Lorry came close. She thought he was going to kiss her, but instead he wrapped his arms around her. Sheltered by his embrace, she could scarcely breathe. Before she could contain herself, she started to cry. She knew she was about to surrender to him. She didn’t even try to stop herself.
She didn’t care about time. Lorry walked her back in the fading light. When he left, Elv went to the window of the dining hall and gazed out. She had become a sky expert. She could tell the hour by the position of the sun and the stars. She made a wish, the way she used to, when her mother took her into the garden to tell stories, to watch the white moths, to see the moon rise above North Point Harbor.
“Where the hell have you been?” Michael asked when she had grabbed a dinner tray—meat loaf, soggy green beans, and a sad-looking ice cream sundae.
Elv sat down at the long metal table, across from him. She wasn’t sure herself, so she merely shrugged and asked if he wanted her dessert. Greedy as always, he grabbed it. Not that she wasn’t greedy as well. When Lorry’s next visit came around, she was waiting by the gate.
HE VISITED WESTFIELD every other week. It was some time before he even kissed her, but when he did, she felt her world fall away. She fell in love feetfirst, as though dropped from a bridge. Headfirst was too rational for what happened to her. By then she knew more of the story. He had lived underground for seven years after fleeing his last foster home. He set up camp on a platform eight stories below Penn Station. You wouldn’t think the world was that deep, but it was. He had a tent, a lantern, a canteen. It was homey, if you didn’t notice the trains screaming past at all hours. He was a Boy Scout, only in reverse, not in it for fun and games, merely trying to survive. The others there called themselves the People, but they were nothing like the human beings aboveground. They were kinder, braver, stronger. Some were so dangerous they were combustible—one wrong word could be the match that set them aflame. Some were lost. There was a giant who was so difficult to find you had to write his name on a piece of wood and leave it beside the train tracks and a week later he might show up to sell you weed or mushrooms. The best of the People took pity on Lorry. They taught him to get fresh water from the restrooms in subway stations built decades ago by the city, but never used. They showed him how to pick pockets, how to bind a wound with a spiderweb to keep away infection, how to chase away rats, how to wait outside bakeries aboveground till closing time when what was day-old to them was a treasure to him.
He was ten, but hardly easy prey. He had a knife, the ability to sleep with his eyes open, and a talent for hiding. He had enemies underground, but he had friends as well, people who saw him through such tough times anyone else would have died.
The giant took a liking to him and so did the giant’s wife, who worked at a restaurant aboveground and often left Lorry a cooked dinner. “You don’t belong here,” she told him. “I want to see the day when you leave here and go back up to the world.”
But there was nothing for him in that world. He soon realized that the realm he’d chosen to replace it was just as dangerous as the world aboveground. Luckily, only a few weeks after he arrived underground he adopted a dog he named Mother, half husky, half German shepherd, abused by an unbalanced homeless owner, turned vicious, then abandoned. Mother had saved his life more than once. Hence the name. The mother he never had, one with teeth and claws. A beast whose very presence scared the evil residents away, but who would eat from his hand and never once bite. That’s how he came to understand what loyalty was. It was the first worthwhile human trait he ever learned.
THEY WERE IN the grass in the place where the robin’s bones had been scattered, where they’d broken her ribs. His arms were around her, under her clothes. He was so hot she felt he was the match that had been set to her skin, like those combustible men belowground, just waiting to be ignited. “Should I let go of you?” he asked.
Being close to him was like being in another world. Elv felt safe in a way she didn’t understand. She closed her eyes. She thought about the
wild dog and the subway platform lit by torchlight. Most men would have rushed her, but Lorry had waited until she was ready. She told him not to let go. Nothing else seemed to matter anymore, not even Arnelle. Everything that had happened to her before was part of a ghost life. This alone was real and beautiful.
“You can trust me,” he said. “People tell you that all the time, and you know you can’t believe them. But this is me, Elv. Just me.”
She could not remember the last time she trusted anyone. He slipped her clothes off, ran his hands over her, took his time. She gave herself to him completely. It was pointless to fight what was happening; it seemed preordained. She wanted someone to protect her, to know her. She felt herself swoon like some foolish girl who believed in love and fate. He talked to her the whole time, and the more he spoke, the more entwined they were. She gasped when he moved to enter her, shocked by how much she wanted him. With all those boys back home, she’d stood outside herself, watching. Now she was on the inside looking out. What she saw was a man who couldn’t take his eyes off her. It was exactly what she wanted.
He didn’t kiss her until the very end. By then she belonged to him. He told her that he’d made a vow to never kiss a woman he didn’t love, that it went against his nature, because it was the way you entered into another person’s soul. He waited while she pulled on her T-shirt, buttoned her jeans. When he drew her to him once again, Elv realized that he’d never taken off his coat. He’d spent his life on the run, he told her. But he wasn’t running now.
They were hidden in the woods. Elv could see the angles of the school through the trees. She didn’t want to go back. She curled up, covered her face, distraught. Once you started to feel things, this is what happened, it went on and on, taking you over.