Orin Wanderwood's Arc

Chapter 9 of 26

The cart rattled onto the east trail an hour after dark. Mr. Echo held the cone up beside the driver's bench. The ticking had thinned to almost nothing. Kate held the reins. Marrow sat behind with her knife across her knees. Orin kept one hand flat on the painted panel inside his coat. He kept turning the same worry over. Lily had not seen his face in years. To her, he was a stranger climbing down from a cart. If he showed her the swallow too fast, she would run, and the pale woman's voice would catch her on the road. They saw the tin roof through the alders. Kate stopped the cart short and they walked in on foot. Lily stood at the shed wall with her back to the boards. She was small and barefoot in a white dress, hair pale as smoke. She saw Marrow first and pressed harder against the wood. She saw Orin and her face went blank the way a candle goes out. Orin stopped where he was. He knelt in the dirt. He did not say her name. He took the panel from his coat and set it on the ground between them, dark swallow up, thin moon showing. Then he stepped back three paces and sat. "Your brother kept this," he said. "I brought it because he can't." Kate stayed behind him. Marrow lowered her knife into the grass. Lily looked at the panel a long time. She did not move toward it. She moved toward the trees instead, one slow step, then another, listening for something none of them could hear. Orin's throat closed. He had brought the right thing and shown it the right way and she was going anyway. The white rabbit ran past his knee. It stopped between Lily and the trees and sat up on its back legs. Lily looked down at it. Her mouth opened. The rabbit's ears twitched twice. Whatever passed between them passed in the silence the dead share with animals. Lily turned back. She walked to the panel and picked it up in both hands. She looked at Orin over the top of it. "Ollie's," she said. Her voice was thin but it was hers. "You have his face a little." Orin nodded. He could not speak yet. Behind them, past the alders, a tall shape stepped onto the trail, long ears against the sky, and stopped. It did not come closer. It watched. Mr. Echo's cone went dead quiet in his hand. "She knows we're here," he said. Kate lifted Lily onto her hip. Marrow picked up the panel. They ran for the shed door as the silence began to walk toward them across the field.