Where Darkness Blooms, page 26
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Delilah.
She turned back and glanced at the fields at the sound of her name. It only took Delilah a moment to realize the sound was coming from somewhere up ahead.
Delilah.
Her mother’s voice.
“This way,” she said, waving on the rest of the girls. Together they walked down the road in a single file line as the sunflower petals twirled in the gentle breeze before them. Indigo didn’t speak another word as they marched through the predawn light.
Delilah was just about to turn around and tell the girls she might have made a mistake when she saw a soft glow just up the road. “There’s something up there!” she yelled.
Excited murmurs followed her as she started to run. A single petal broke off from the others, flipping and twirling in the air, as a small building with a steepled roof appeared before her, milky white light spilling from all the windows. A faded sign hung on the front door: LITTLE PRAIRIE MARKET.
The petal landed gently on the rust-speckled doorknob.
Delilah turned back. The rest of the girls hovered around her, their eyes shining like those of wild animals in the woods. They were all battered and blood splattered, their expressions hollow as ghosts’. They had no clean clothes, no car, no money, and no idea where they were going. Whatever—or whoever—was in the Little Prairie Market was their last hope.
Bells jangled as Delilah stepped inside, and a blast of air conditioning smacked her in the face. It smelled a bit like mothballs and a cheap vanilla candle, and the shelves lining the center rows were stuffed full of trinkets. There were rows of porcelain angels with chipped wings, fake flowers laden with dust, and an entire section of snow globes. Delilah picked up the heaviest one and shook it. Flecks of incandescent glitter swirled around a tiny plastic yeti inside.
“Sodas are in the cooler to the left, and we don’t sell alcohol,” a woman’s voice shouted from the back of the store.
Delilah followed the sound of shuffling boxes until she saw an older woman no taller than five feet, her salt-and-pepper hair cropped close to her head. She glanced up at Delilah, a roll of stickers tucked into her fist. “Can I help you?”
The rest of the girls crowded into the aisle behind Delilah, all bloodied and battered. The woman’s eyes widened. She dropped the stickers into the box at her feet. “Oh my. Come. Come on.”
They followed her into a stuffy storage room in the back. Instantly, it reminded Delilah of the one at Rose and Rain, where Gale-Ann had led her so she could comb through all the phone numbers, searching for the one her mother had written on a faded receipt. That dank room had started this mess. Maybe this one could end it.
“What happened to you girls?” the woman asked once they were all tucked inside. “What do you need? Water? I have some right here.” She started to dig through boxes like a rabid bear digging through trash.
“It’s okay, ma’am,” Delilah said. “Please. We just need help finding someone.”
The woman stilled. She turned slowly toward them, her eyes scanning each of them from head to toe. “You came from that wicked town, didn’t you?”
Delilah’s whole body went numb. “You know about Bishop?”
Her jaw clenched. “Yes, I know about Bishop. There’s been rumors around these parts for years, but I’d never heard of anyone actually from that place until a couple years ago.”
Bo let out a puff of air from somewhere behind her. “Two years ago?”
“When those other women came in here, a mess, just like you all are now. I’m Esther, by the way,” the woman continued. “Ah, there’s that water.”
Esther handed them dusty bottles of water, twisting the caps to crack the seal before she set them in their hands. Delilah tried to calm her heartbeat, which had started to roller-coaster in her chest. “Esther, how many women came in here two years ago?”
Her eyebrows knitted together as she twisted off another cap. This time, she poured the water into her own mouth. “Three,” she said, wiping her mouth.
“Three,” Delilah whispered. She glanced at the rest of the girls, who stared at Esther with wide eyes. “What did they look like?”
“One had dark curly hair. One was tall, thin, with a lot of freckles. Another one had short hair cut kinda like mine,” Esther said. “You know them?”
“Yes,” Whitney said, her voice trembling.
The next question got caught in Delilah’s throat: Where are they now?
Because Esther’s answer to that question could change everything. If she told them that she didn’t know, that they’d moved on from this place without telling anyone where they were going, the girls would have nothing left. The past two years of agonizing and longing would suddenly come to an end, and Delilah wasn’t completely sure that this all had been worth it. It had to be worth it.
As if reading her mind, Esther’s face softened. “They’re okay, honey. In fact, you can see for yourself. They live right up the road.”
Slowly, Delilah turned. Jude stood with the crutches behind her, shaking like roof shingles in the wind. Whitney clung to Alma, eyes shining, and splotches of pink had already started to bloom on Bo’s cheeks.
They’re alive.
They’re right down the street.
“Esther, thank you,” Delilah said breathlessly. “Which way do we go from here?”
“Take a quick right out the door, then a straight shot down. It’s the first house you’ll come up to. If you start seeing a lot of houses, you’re all the way in Fowler, and you’ve gone too far.”
“Thank you,” Delilah said again, squeezing Esther’s hands. She spun around and rushed out the storage room door.
“Wait, do y’all want to take your waters with you?” Esther called after them.
But Delilah was already running, her footsteps making the porcelain angels shake on the shelves. “No, thanks!”
Whitney threw open the shop door, the bells still jangling as she jumped down the steps. Alma followed, mindful to stay close to Jude as she hobbled toward the road. Delilah ran. She ran until her heart thrummed through her veins, until her muscles burned. This time, when the wind threaded itself through her hair, she welcomed it. It felt like freedom.
As their footsteps smacked the cement, Whitney let out a laugh that echoed in the summer air around them. It was a precious thing, so rare since Eleanor died that Delilah had almost forgotten the sound of it. She let out a laugh of her own. Tears streamed down her face as she laughed so hard that the muscles in her neck pinched against her stitches.
Bo.
Delilah jerked to a stop. Alma, Whitney, and Jude kept going up ahead. She spun around.
Bo was far behind, her silhouette just barely visible in the tepid glow from the single streetlight. She jogged back.
“Hey,” she said, sidling up to Bo. “What’s wrong?”
Bo shook her head, but almost instantly she sighed, as if she already knew that Delilah wouldn’t stop asking. She stopped walking. “What if, when I tell my mom what I did, she … she doesn’t want to be around me?”
“Oh, Bo.” Delilah scooped her up like a stray cat on the side of the road and held her close to her chest. “That will never happen,” she whispered into Bo’s hair.
“You coming?” Jude’s voice called from up ahead.
Delilah pulled away. She stared into Bo’s eyes and watched her face crumple as Delilah told her, with her thoughts, all the things she’d always wanted to say.
You’re the bravest person I know.
I’ve never looked up to you more than I do right now.
I love you. I love you.
I love you.
They held hands as they raced down the street, trailing behind the rest. It wasn’t long before the glow of a porch light greeted them. The rest of the house came into view, piece by piece: a sprawling front porch, just like the one on Old Fairview Lane. A steepled roof of a different color. Terra-cotta pots tucked into every corner of the porch, the flowerbeds, the windowsills, each one filled with something fragrant and blooming.
And a single sunflower flush with the porch, standing tall as if guarding the place. Delilah swore she saw it shiver as they stood together at the foot of the steps.
The front door flung open. A silhouette stood in the frame, but Delilah knew.
She knew it was her mother.
“MOM!” she yelled, running up the stairs.
“Delilah?” Indigo said softly. She stepped onto the porch. “Oh my god, Delilah. Cori! Ava! Come here quick!”
Delilah threw herself into her mother’s arms like she was five years old and had scraped her knee on the gravel driveway. She squeezed Indigo extra tightly so she could feel her mother’s shoulder blades and sun-warmed skin and the solidness of her. The realness of something she’d dreamed of for so long.
“Mom,” she whispered.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
When Bo woke, she wasn’t in the house on Old Fairview Lane, but it felt just the same. The walls were a creamy white instead of plastered with floral wallpaper, and early morning light splashed every corner of her mother’s modest bedroom. The kitchen hummed with activity beneath her, voices Bo had only heard in her dreams the past two years falling into the soothing rhythm of everyday life.
They had found their mothers three days ago, and still, Bo couldn’t find the words that everyone else seemed to sink into with ease.
Indigo and Delilah hadn’t stopped talking since they’d found each other again. Well after the sun had sunk below the horizon, Bo could hear them speaking in their room across the hall in urgent whispers, like one of them could disappear again at any second. Whitney and Jude had settled into an amicable rhythm, too, with Jude taking up the mornings on the sun-soaked porch, reading with Ava while Whitney curled up between her and Alma on the couch in the evenings.
Bo had barely said anything to her mother.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to—Bo had dreamed of all the things she’d talk to Cori about again one day, if she ever got the chance.
What were you like when you were my age?
What did you want to be when you were my age?
Did you feel as angry as I always do?
She wanted to ask her about growing up in Bishop, and if a boy had ever hurt her like Caleb had hurt her, and when was the last time she’d talked to Bo’s father, and what had really happened that last day, the last time Bo saw her. Each night, Bo crawled silently into a sleeping bag on the floor instead of lying in bed next to her mother, whispering her questions into the dark.
She pushed the sleeping bag to her ankles and climbed to her feet. An old ballet-pink T-shirt hung to her thighs, but fortunately, their mothers had made a trip to Fowler’s single clothing store to get them all new underwear. Cori had bought her a size too small. It was the size Bo had worn before her mother left.
Morning scents wafted up the stairs—coffee and dish soap and a sunbaked breeze. Delilah’s laugh echoed through the house like a tinkling bell. Bo bypassed the kitchen and went out the front door.
Cori sat in front of one of the garden beds, a riot of garden tools surrounding her. The day had just begun, but there were already beads of sweat clinging to the back of her neck. She glanced up from the wilting tomato plant she had been trying to rehab. “Morning.”
“Morning.” Bo made her way to the porch steps and sat, careful not to flash her new underwear, although there weren’t really any neighbors around to see. “What are you working on?”
Cori sighed. “This tomato plant just doesn’t want to produce. I’ve tried fertilizing it, watering it more, watering it less, pruning it. It won’t bloom.” She held a spindly vine between her fingers. Where there should have been a smattering of yellow flowers and a bulging tomato, there was nothing at all.
“Maybe it’s just not ready,” Bo said softly. “Maybe it needs a little more time.”
Cori looked at Bo for a long time before gently dropping the vine. “I know you’re angry with me.”
Bo shook her head. “I’m not—”
“Don’t lie to me, sweetheart,” Cori said, her face crumpling. “We’ve been apart way too long for that.”
Bo closed her eyes. “I don’t want to be mad at you. But you left me. You knew what that place was capable of, and you left me there. And I know what you all told us about how Indigo had figured out William had something to do with it, and how he was targeting Ava and he might have killed her. But you weren’t a part of that, Mom. You had nothing to do with William or the Hardings. You could have just … stayed.”
Cori looked up at the single sunflower planted in the bed. Her eyes shone with tears. “It wasn’t that simple. I knew Ava and Indigo were in danger, and they refused to leave without me. Indigo told me she’d ‘rather stay and risk dying’ than leave me alone in that town. Plus, she had a point: once William found out they were gone, he’d know that I knew something, too. And it would only be a matter of time before he killed me. Or worse: killed you.”
She dabbed at the delicate skin beneath her eyes. “I didn’t want to leave you, baby. God, I didn’t want to leave you. Following Ava and Indigo out the door that day was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But I knew if we had a chance at living a real life—all of us—I had to go. I was always, always going to come back for you.”
“But you didn’t,” Bo choked. Damn it. She didn’t want to cry. It was easier to be mad.
“Look,” Cori said softly. She waved her arm toward the wall of sunflowers across the road, the same labyrinth of petals they had both walked through for miles and miles. “They wouldn’t let us go back.”
Bo blinked. “The … sunflowers?”
Cori nodded. “They cleared the way for us to leave, but once we had escaped, the sunflowers wouldn’t let us come back. They knotted together. Every time we tried to push through, they pushed back, and there were thousands—millions—more of them than us. They kept whispering to us. You have to stay. You have to stay. I can’t tell you how many times I sat there on the side of the road and just begged, Bo. I pleaded with them to let me come back to you, but they told me that if I went back, I’d never get out alive, and neither would you. So I just talked to them. I whispered back to them. I told the flowers everything I wanted to tell you—Look closer, run, fight back. And I prayed that somehow you could hear me.”
A knot formed in Bo’s throat as she watched the sunflowers sway in the light. They’d saved the girls the night they’d escaped Caleb and William and Bishop, but they’d also been trying to save them for years before it ever came to that. She remembered the sunflower tipping through the window while Bo searched through the town records. Look, it had whispered.
How they’d hovered over her while she lay half dead and beaten in the field and told her to Get up, get up, get up.
How, when she’d been on the gravel path that pressed up against the sunflowers, she’d heard the faintest echo of her mother’s voice as the wind carried it through the petals. Run.
“It wasn’t enough, Mom. I needed you.” Bo swallowed. “I turned into a monster without you there.”
Cori brushed the dirt from her hands and joined Bo on the steps. She cupped her daughter’s face with both of her soil-streaked palms and forced Bo to look at her. “What happened out there?” she asked gently.
Bo told her. She told her about how Evan had died, and how the last time she’d seen him she’d told him to piss off. She told her about the night in the cellar and what Caleb had done to her, and how her rage had spread like a wildfire ever since, burning down everything she touched.
And finally, she told her about what had happened in the field.
Cori never took her eyes off Bo as she told her about the sound of footsteps following, circling. How everything in her hurt. The sound the knife made, and how Bo could only remember slivers of it, but she could still feel the weight of the blade in her hand every time she closed her fist.
When she was finished, she couldn’t bear to look at her mother’s face. She squeezed her eyes closed and let her tears fall into Cori’s open palms. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“Bo, look at me.”
Bo opened her eyes. Her mother’s face appeared, and to Bo’s surprise, she didn’t look disgusted, or even angry. She pressed her forehead to her daughter’s. “A monster is someone who hurts people for their own gain. You didn’t do that, sweetheart. You made a sacrifice and you used that anger so that no one else would have to do what you did, and you freed us all. That’s called being a hero.”
“Mom, I…” The rest of the words dropped away like leaves from a tree. She started to sob.
“Listen to me,” Cori said, wrapping Bo in a hug so tight that it made her ache. “I am damned proud of you. Because of you, anything is possible now. For all of us.”
Anything is possible.
Bo let the words roll around in her mind. Anything. She hadn’t been able to think of anything except survival for so long, the idea that she could do anything, or be anything, or go anywhere felt absurdly surreal, like something she’d read in a fantasy book long ago.
Cori unwrapped her arms from Bo’s shoulders and glanced back at her garden. “Maybe this tomato plant was never going to work out because it wasn’t meant to be. Maybe the soil and the nutrients wanted to put all their attention on growing something else, something even more magnificent this time.”
Cori looked up at the sunflower. Bo followed her gaze. Its cheery yellow halo tipped toward the sunlight, soaking in the endless possibilities a single day could bring.
“Maybe it’ll grow even bigger now,” her mother said.
Maybe it would.
Maybe she would.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Whitney had tried not to think about Bishop at all over the last couple of days, but as she helped her mom make dinner, her mind kept drifting back there.
It had taken less than a day for the news of the fire to spread throughout the state. Whitney had woken to her mother and Jude curled up on the sofa, watching the news on an old TV. The woman on the screen was blurry around the edges, but her voice was clear. “State police are stunned by the wreckage of a fire gone rogue in the central Kansas town of Bishop,” she said as fuzzy lines cut across the screen. “According to authorities, multiple bodies have been found. The town appears to be abandoned at this point. Stay tuned for updates as they develop.”
