Page 5 of Rejected Hollow

Marion Pike could get a cannula into the arm of a screaming child without so much as a twitch, but suddenly she couldn't seem to get the lid off an old toffee tin.

When it finally came loose, I saw papers inside, along with a baby's bracelet made of tiny painted wooden beads that spelled WREN, a lock of dark hair tied with thread, and a photograph.

I had never seen any of it before. Not a single piece. I'd lived in that house for eighteen years, and I would have sworn on my own life that there was nothing in the loft except Christmas decorations and her dead husband's fishing gear.

I picked up the photograph.

It showed a woman standing on a beach somewhere cold, laughing at whoever was holding the camera. She looked about thirty, maybe younger, with dark hair blowing across her face. Running through that dark hair from her left temple was a streak of pure white, so bright against the gray light that it looked almost sharp.

My hand went to my own hair before I could stop it, touching the place at my left temple where I'd been dyeing over the white every six weeks since I was fourteen. That was when a girl at school had called me Cruella, and somehow the name had stuck for the next two years.

"That's your mom," Marion said quietly. "That's Sera."

In my entire life, I had seen exactly one photograph of my mother. It was a blurry picture from a wedding, taken from too far away, with her face turned partly from the camera. Marion had always told me the rest had been lost when the house was cleared out after the crash.

"You told me there weren't any others."

My voice came out flat and strange, so unlike mine that for a second I hardly recognized it.

"I know what I told you."

"No, Marion. You told me every birthday I asked. You told me when I was nine and cried because I wanted to know what she looked like. You told me again when I was fifteen, when I went through that whole loft looking for something—anything—and you stood at the bottom of the ladder and let me do it."

My throat tightened, and I had to force the rest of the words out.

"You said the photographs were gone. You said they went in the clear-out, and you said it like it made you sad."

"It did make me sad." Marion lifted her chin, but her mouth had begun to tremble. "It makes me sad now."

Something hot and unfamiliar was rising inside me. It took me a moment to recognize it.

It was anger.

Real anger, directed at Marion—the woman who had fed me, taught me to drive, and stayed awake with me the entire night after Daniel left. I hadn't been properly angry with her since I was seventeen, and the feeling was so disorienting that it was like discovering the floor beneath my feet was no longer solid.

Beneath the photograph was a sheet of sugar paper folded into quarters. I unfolded it carefully and found a child’s drawing in crayon. There was a crooked green hill, a huge yellow sun with a face, and a deer standing in the middle of the page. It was white, with enormous branching antlers colored in silver crayon. I had pressed so hard with it that the paper had torn in several places. In one corner, written in unsteady capital letters, were the words WREN 4.

“I don’t remember drawing this,” I said.

“You drew hundreds of them.” Marion pressed her lips together. “Every day, that first year. Always white deer. Nothing else. You drew them on the backs of envelopes. Once, you drew one on the wallpaper behind your bed.”

“Where are they?”

She didn’t answer.

“Marion, if I drew them, then where are the rest of them?”

“I burned them.” She kept her eyes fixed on the table. “Every one I found. For years, I would come in here and find you sitting at that table, drawing the same thing again. I’d wait until you were asleep, then I’d take the drawings and put them in the stove.” Her voice wavered. “I kept that one. I knew I shouldn’t, but when the time came, I couldn’t make myself burn it.”

I stayed very still, holding the sheet of sugar paper between my hands.

“What?”

“Your mother made me promise this day would never come,” Marion said. Her hands had begun to shake again, badly enough that she flattened them against the table. “She made me promise I would keep you ordinary. Keep you safe. And I tried, love. God knows I tried. I spent eighteen years trying, and all it took to undo everything was one envelope.”

For a moment, I could only stare at her.

My mother had known this could happen. She had known there might be a day like this, whatever this was. But what day was Marion talking about? What was in the envelope that frightened her so badly? And what did any of it have to do with drawings I had apparently been making since I was a child?