She knows this day is the last, so she walks, oh so slowly, to the bluff above the lake where she sees white mist floating like a shroud above quiet water. Her mind floats too as she watches Lily wave her fingers, delicate as daisy petals. Melissa bends to cover Lily’s hands with butterfly kisses, light as air, though what she wants to do is cry.

Alert, she checks the rocky beach for signs of danger. One cannot be too careful. Every day bodies are broken and kidnappers lurk. The mist, though fine as lace, stinks of rotting fish. It also hides what can’t be seen but what she senses must be there.

Melissa turns, and walks west beneath tall oaks, past winding drives, toward the library and Juneau. When Lily reaches up to catch the sunlight streaming through rustling leaves, Melissa leans to stroke her cheek, and prays.

Or tries to pray, but no words come. When she was eight her Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Morgan, said that if she prayed she’d feel Jesus lay his hand on her forehead in bed at night. And so she did, hoping it might keep her safe, but from what she wasn’t sure.

But Melissa is now fourteen, Mrs. Morgan is dead, and Jesus is too, crucified on the bloody cross.

Melissa prays anyway. What else can she do?  Every night she prays. “Jesus Jesus, show yourself.”  She sings it, over and over, under her breath. Each night she waits, but he doesn’t return. Or maybe he does only after she’s sleeping. The door opens, creaking, in her dreams. At least she thinks she must be dreaming.

“Jesus, Jesus,” she sings in a whisper as friends pass, biking home from school. They wave once, and are gone. It doesn’t matter. Lily’s birth didn’t surprise them. Her devotion does. They don’t understand, though how can she blame them? She doesn’t understand herself why, for eighteen months, she’s hovered like a moth drawn to Lily’s clear bright flame. Her crib is next to Melissa’s bed. Melissa insisted. She needs to see Lily’s face first thing every morning. Lily, somehow, belongs to her.

  Before Lily, Melissa hugged trees. The white birch, bark soft as skin, was Melissa’s favorite. Ear pressed to the bark, she heard the tree whisper, “I am here. Always. You are not alone.”  For if Lily is a star, Melissa’s mother is the moon.  Untouchable. And if her mother is the moon, her father is the planet Mars, fierce and flaming. A businessman, he travels, and when not traveling, orbits through the house day and night from room to room.

  For thirteen years they were a trinity, a word Melissa knows from Sunday School. Father, Mother, little girl until she’s twelve and her period comes. The Curse, her mother calls it. Her mother is right. It is a curse. She’s a woman now and wishes she weren’t.

  When Lily arrived, glad was too small a word for what Melissa felt. She spent hours sitting beside her, listening to her feathered breathing. She studied her face, the skin like silk, the rosebud mouth, searching for clues. Whose was she really? She held Lily’s ear to hers, listening as if to a shell, hoping to hear whatever secrets were hidden inside.

They reach the park, where Melissa unbuckles Lily and lifts her onto the back of the life-size iron deer that stands beneath the copper beech. She swings up behind her. Holding Lily tight, she tells her how she used to ride through afternoons of lemon light and winter days of cut-glass blue. “Sometimes,” she whispers into Lily’s ear, “I felt the deer rise, and I went soaring where no one could find me.”

Melissa’s breath tickles her ear and Lily laughs, but Lily is always laughing. She is the happiest of babies. And though Melissa knows Lily can’t understand, it helps to say out loud what she’s told no one. There is so much she hasn’t told, but it’s hard to know what’s real. Sometimes she thinks she must be dreaming, or someone else is dreaming her, that she isn’t real either.

Grass shivers in a gentle breeze, and Melissa yearns to feel the lifting with Lily anchored in her arms. Together, the deer will carry them over the ocean to white-capped mountains in Peru where hidden caves await them. The caves are real, Melissa’s seen photographs in the National Geographic; one showed a girl exactly her age, an Aztec princess, who appeared to be sleeping though she’d been dead two thousand years, buried deep in the secret dark. “You’ll be safe there,” says Melissa, though Lily’s too young to understand what Melissa can’t explain, not even to herself.

Holding Lily, she slides down from the deer’s back, slow and smooth like water from rock, and strapping her into the stroller again, pushes Lily up the hill to the library. She sees Juneau sitting on the stone bench in front of the building, the ground littered with the prickly balls of chestnut burrs. She sits as if waiting just for them, blue sneakers set apart, planted solid. Rooted. She sits in silence. Her hair is gray, her eyes a liquid brown flecked with gold.

The secret understanding Melissa shares with Juneau dwells in silence. There is silence everywhere but the silence at home is deep and dark, a well without water. Juneau takes Melissa’s hand, holding it between her own. With Juneau she is not afraid. Their silence flows like light through leaves, a river of honey, sweet and thick. Behind them the library rises, a cathedral of gray granite shot through with mica that glitters in the autumn sun.

Juneau works in Fiction, scrubbing floors. It was there Melissa met her years before when as a child she dreamed her way down the long high-ceilinged stacks. Eyes closed, she fingered dusty pages, smelled the warm book-scented air. Melissa liked the narrow tunnels she followed, her fingers tracing along the spines of books as if reading Braille, so she didn’t see Juneau until she tripped across her kneeling form, and fell.

The floor was wet, slippery with soap, and Melissa, looking at Juneau, felt cold marble melt beneath her. Juneau, kneeling, smiled, revealing white teeth interrupted by one of gold. Melissa was too surprised to cry. In fact, she thought she might be dreaming.

But Juneau lifted her lightly back to her feet. Melissa was six then, maybe seven, small for her age with too thin arms and legs. At fourteen she is almost grown, and almost as tall as Juneau. She sits beside her on the bench as Lily, tugging at the straps, strains towards Melissa, a flower reaching for the sun. Melissa slips off the straps and sets her like a small jewel upon her lap.

Juneau pulls from her pocket a wrinkled waxy paper bag, and from the bag an onion. She peels the layers, one by one. There are so many layers, too many to count. There is an egg, hard-boiled; three radishes, and thick black bread. She breaks the bread. They eat together in silence, safe and easy.

When the bread is gone, the breeze picks up. Melissa shivers. What, she wonders, does Juneau know? Melissa leans against her, listening. She sees her feet, planted, imagines roots thrusting down, holding firm. She imagines Juneau as the trunk, Melissa a branch, and Lily a leaf.  Connected.

          When she first became a woman–-twelve and Lily not yet born—Melissa came to Juneau.  She found her kneeling on a sea of black. Melissa’s face was white. Her stomach hurt. She cried. Blood, it seemed, was everywhere. Juneau brought her water in a cone-shaped paper cup. She held it as Melissa drank. Melissa cried, and Juneau held her.

Melissa’s facts are limited. How could it be otherwise?  Her mother told her nothing. Where babies come from.  How they’re born. Things happen in the dark that no one sees. Then again perhaps they’re dreams, not real.

When Lily was born, her father took Melissa to the hospital to see her, but they wouldn’t let her in—she was too young—so Melissa stood outside the tall brick building; she looked up at her mother, who was in a window, waving, but so high up Melissa could hardly see her, so far away she was no help at all.

Melissa holds Lily against her chest like a shield. She blows lightly into Lily’s ear. Lily wriggles, laughing. Melissa loves her laugh.

“Juneau,” says Melissa, needing to say the name out loud.

What Melissa knows of Juneau can be told in a breath. She was named for the city in which she was born, a city cupped by mountains and watered by rain. She is, has always been an orphan. The nuns who raised her named her, too, teaching her to scrub the floors. The nuns were Russian Orthodox, and wrote a letter Juneau carries explaining who she is, and why she cannot speak, though that too is a secret Juneau has not yet shared.

Melissa knows that she was born and then she grew, and at some time and for some reason slipped down through the mountains, down and down, to settle here. She lives alone. She smells of incense and ammonia. She has never learned to read.

Before Lily, Melissa read to her. Leaning against the rows of books, she read out loud as Juneau, kneeling on a rubber mat, scrubbed the floors until the polished marble shone. Her mouth moved, drinking in the words, but what she heard Melissa didn’t know.

  Melissa sighs, watching light fall from the sky, sinking now behind the trees. The day is ending. “Tomorrow…” she says but that is all. She can’t say more.

“Watch,” says Melissa. She sets Lily down. She thinks Lily might walk but she stares at the ground.  She sees a bug, a ladybug. Crouching, she pokes at it gently. “Bug!” she says clearly. She has been slow to speak. “Bug” is her first real word.  “Bug,” she says again.

“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,” says Melissa, “your house is on fire, your children will burn.”  Lily looks up, and falls, laughing, into Melissa’s arms.  Melissa feels her heart will break.

She hears the footsteps coming closer, the tap of heels on cracked concrete. She knows who it is before she sees her.

“Here you are,” her mother says. “I’ve been looking all over. I should have known.”

She’s parked the car with the engine running. Her hair is swept back, tight in a bun. She wears a green skirt that matches her eyes. “You ought to be packing. You leave early tomorrow.” She does not look at Juneau. She never does. No one, she says, has a name like that. She thinks Melissa has made it up. She thinks Melissa makes everything up.

“Take your sister home,” she says. “It’s getting dark. Your father’s waiting. He came home early for your last night.”

Her mother climbs into the car and drives off. Melissa buries her face in Lily’s neck. Oh, baby girl!  Overhead, the starlings gather, cackling in the chestnut tree. They sound like witches. Maybe they are.

“I’m going to boarding school,” she says to Juneau. “Who is going to keep her safe?”

But Juneau says nothing. There is nothing to say.

Melissa slides Lily into the stroller but doesn’t bother to strap her in. It no longer matters. It won’t help. “Goodbye,” she whispers, not looking at Juneau. Her throat is tight. She feels she’s choking.

She lets the weight of the stroller pull her down the hill to the park where the iron deer waits. Thin shadows stretch like knives across the grass as Melissa lifts Lily from the stroller, and, holding her tight, climbs onto the deer. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she whispers.

She kicks her heels hard against the deer’s flanks. The pain gathers force, traveling from heel to head to heart. Lily begins to cry as Melissa feels the deer uncoil beneath them, to hurtle, weightless, into the air. The park peels away, growing smaller and smaller until everything, all of it, disappears. They fly higher and higher past the sun and moon and all the planets. They fly into the eye of night where nothing is seen or felt or known. Here they are hidden, safe in the dark. Lily is no longer crying, and it will be years before they are found.

Nice Girl

by Julia Carol Folsom

  It’s November 1963, in a small town in rural Georgia. Teenager Callie Ingram is lonely and grieving the death of her beloved Nana, the only mother she’s ever known. Callie’s stuck with her stoic, inept dad and rebellious older sister. There are constant fights at home, and money is scarce. To escape the turmoil and earn a little income, Callie takes a part-time job as a waitress in a diner. And there she meets the man who will upend her life. Nick Gamble, a charismatic, married businessman with a family, is twice her age and looks like a movie star. He charms the naive Callie into a love affair that must be kept secret from the town at any cost. When Callie's sister goes missing and her dad’s health fails, she becomes her father's caretaker, all the while keeping up “A” grades, her job, and liaisons with Nick. But it turns out Nick has troubles of his own. As he becomes increasingly unavailable, Callie’s love edges toward obsession. Then Nick's world explodes, and Callie's alone again, this time facing the most excruciating decision of her life. Available from Amazon and Bookshop.

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