Girlwood (3 page)

Polly heard her father's truck pass by the house. after getting nowhere at Bree's school, her dad had gone with Officer Wendt to talk to Aaron Sykes and Brad Meyer. Neither of them had any idea where Bree was. Aaron had been sleeping off another meth blitz when Bree disappeared and Brad hadn't seen Polly's sister for a week. Now Polly's dad was out driving around the neighborhood. Round and round and round.

"She can't survive," Polly said.

Baba gave her what most people call the witch's stare, the
one she fixed on anyone who came to her door for help, to see if they really wanted to get better or not. She didn't like to waste her time. "Why not? You'd survive, wouldn't you? You'd find shelter. You'd make fire the way I taught you, eat wild burdock and chickweed, even hunt if you had to." Baba paused and looked into the living room at Polly's mom. For a moment, her shoulders sagged, but when she turned back to Polly the heaviness was gone. "You'd do what others can't imagine, whatever is necessary," she went on. "That's what women always do."

"But it's all wrong! Bree's weak, and she hates the woods now."

Green, minty steam filled the room as the last neighbor left and Polly's mom slumped into the kitchen. She paused beside Baba's brew and wrinkled her nose. "I wish you wouldn't cook here," she said, leaning against the counter and massaging her forehead. "everyone thinks Bree will be back before dawn."

Baba returned to her pot. "Hmmm."

"Hmmm what?" Polly's mother said, her Hyde face back. "What are you saying, Mom?"

"I'm saying if it wasn't fine when she left, how can it be fine when she comes home?" Baba asked. "Something has to change, and maybe it's Bree. I know you're terrified, Faith, but maybe Bree is doing exactly what she needs to do."

"Destroy me?" Polly's mom said. "That's what she needs to do?" She looked at Polly as if she wanted her to say something, side with her, but Polly didn't dare get between her mother and grandmother. It was a war zone in there, a no-woman's-land.

The only sound was the bubbling of Baba's potion until Polly's mom marched out of the room.

Baba sighed and turned back to her pot. Usually, Polly liked nothing better than to watch the light show around her grandmother—shimmery slivers of green rising from Baba's head and shoulders, like branches on a stately tree. Yet today, something was different. A few of those limbs sagged as Baba reached into her skirt pocket and brought out a handful of red, egg-shaped berries. Polly recognized them instantly as twisted stalk, a plant that tasted like cucumbers and grew by the river in the woods.

"This'll mask the taste of the valerian," Baba said. "Which, believe me, needs to be masked."

She squeezed the berries in her palm and drizzled the juice into the pot, then she lifted the plastic wrap off the neighbors' dishes. She ladled a spoonful of potion into each casserole.

"It's not Bree I'm worried about," Baba said with a sad smile. "It's your mom who'll need help making it through."

***

After Baba left, a second round of visitors arrived. Friends who hadn't gotten the news until after work; reporters; even Miss Galloway, the young, melodramatic counselor at Laramie Junior High, who wanted to know if she could help. Polly went upstairs when they started organizing search parties. They were going to search the woods, but the way they talked, the way Miss Galloway's eyes got all watery, it was obvious they believed they were going in for a body.

Miss Galloway's job, as far as Polly could tell, was to give assemblies on worst-case scenarios. Laramie had a safe-school curriculum, which meant every kid had to know about things like longtime neighbors turning out to be child molesters and unpopular boys taking revenge with machine guns. They were in junior high now, Miss Galloway was always saying. It was time they grew up and Faced Facts.

The energy around Miss Galloway was lethargic and gray, hanging around her shoulders like a heavy, wet shawl. Focusing on those kinds of facts would sap the color from anyone. Abductions, torture, rape, murder, poverty, war, terrorism, AIDS, flu pandemics, hurricanes, tsunamis, global warming, everything you never wanted to know. Polly wanted to be the first person to
never
Face Facts. Let the police and Miss Galloway think the worst about Bree; this was the first time in months that Polly had had any hope for her sister.

Polly picked up her phone to call her best friend, Olivia.
They had each gotten private phone lines last Christmas, and neither of them was surprised when they tried to call each other at the same moment and got busy signals. They were always doing stuff like that, suddenly singing the same song or discovering that they'd eaten the same cereal for breakfast. Olivia lived on the outskirts of junior high society too. She was still baby-faced, dutiful, and something of a crier. Whenever she burst into tears over a B, she got teased.

Polly smiled when Olivia's line was busy, certain that Olivia was trying to call her at the same time. She hung up and waited for the phone to ring, but after a minute of silence, she dialed again. After three tries and nothing but busy signals, Polly began to feel uneasy. If Olivia wasn't calling Polly, whom was she talking to? She must have heard about Bree by now.

Just then, the phone rang. "Oh, Polly," Olivia said. "I just heard."

Polly felt such relief at the sound of Olivia's voice, she let out a weird sound.

"It's gonna be okay," Olivia said. "It will. You'll see."

Polly's eyes were dry, but her body was trembling. It didn't matter how awful Bree had been; once she was gone, it was a whole lot easier to love her.

"There's no sign of her yet?" Olivia asked softly.

"No. That's because she's in the woods."

"No way. Really? On her own?"

Polly realized it wasn't only sorrow that was making her shaky, but envy. Those were
her
woods.
She
should have been the one to go. "Yeah."

Olivia didn't scoff like everyone else, but she hesitated. "Are you sure? Do the police know?"

"They're starting a search, but they think it's for a body."

"Oh, Polly."

"They don't know the woods like I do. Meet me at Miller's Pond in an hour. I know we can find her."

"Now?" Olivia said. "My mom's making dinner, and it'll be dark soon. How about tomorrow? It's Saturday, so we'd have all day."

Polly couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Olivia, my sister's missing. Your mom will let you go. She always—"

"I better tell you," Olivia cut in. "I just got off the phone with Carly Leyland. She needs help on her algebra. You know how she's never talked to me before, but this time ... she invited me over tonight. For a sleepover."

Polly felt like she'd been punched. Olivia wouldn't have a sleepover while Polly's family was falling apart, and even if she did, it wouldn't be with Carly Leyland. Olivia knew how Carly's father, Dan Leyland, had already bought up all the land around Baba's cottage and filled it with tract homes. Olivia had seen the same newscast Polly had—Dan Leyland
touting his next plan for a massive mountaintop subdivision while Carly and her mother beamed in the background.

"I know what you're thinking," Olivia said, but Polly was pretty sure she had no idea. Olivia didn't know words like that.

"She was concerned about Bree," Olivia went on feebly.

"Yeah, right."

"Polly—"

"They're going to live in Mountain Winds themselves," Polly cut in. "You know where? In the only place my grandmother has ever found pyrola. Susie Lucas wouldn't be alive today if it wasn't for that plant. Nothing else would stop the bleeding after she had her baby."

"Look, just because her dad—"

"I thought you cared about the woods too," Polly said.

Olivia said nothing. Polly's father's voice echoed through the house, talking about search parties, flashlights, dogs.

"Great," Polly said. "Fine. My sister's missing and you've got Carly Leyland for your new best friend."

"Tomorrow, Polly," Olivia offered lamely.

"Bree could be dead tomorrow," Polly said, and hung up.

When the phone rang again, Polly yanked the cord from the wall. She stomped downstairs and through a room full of strange, pitying faces. Her mom sat hunched over on a stool in the kitchen, her eyelids sinking to half-mast; Baba's brew was obviously kicking in. Her mom's hand was on the phone,
as if willing it to ring. When it remained silent, Polly knew she had to face one fact, at least: there comes a time when your mom can't make everything right again, when you have as much if not more power than she does.

Her mom made that moan again. The glow around her was thin and wavery, like a candle flame in the wind.

"That's it," Polly said. "I'm going to Baba's. I'm going to find Bree."

Devil's club gets its name from its sharp yellow spines. If left alone, it will quickly form a barbed wire–like fence, sometimes growing to twenty feet in height. The very young shoots are edible if the spines are not too sharp). An essential medicinal plant, devil's club is most often used for the treatment of infections, including tuberculosis.

Polly raced past the throng in the living room and out into the yard. A crowd had gathered in the pink evening light, but when someone called her name, she didn't pause.

The road to her grandmother's house snaked through three sprawling subdivisions, but Polly knew a better route—a narrow badger trail through the woods behind her house. She ran across the lawn and easily leaped Sheep Creek. Breathing in the scent of river, moss, and pine, she immediately felt
safer. The trees closed in around her, like a gaggle of protective friends.

There was just enough daylight left to search for cigarette butts and Bree's favorite diet-soda cans. For once, Polly prayed for litter, but all she found were survey stakes with pink ribbons and beetle-ravaged pines marked for removal. Unfortunately, logging in the area was nothing new. Polly's own grandfather had clear-cut this land forty years ago and might have harvested the second-growth pines as well if Polly's grandmother hadn't come along. Some said Baba bewitched him. In any case, soon after the wedding, Polly's grandfather nearly ruined this town by laying off half its work force and left the forest to its natural cycles of growth and disease.

People branded Baba as the villain, but now saw Carly Leyland's father, the owner of Leyland Corporation, as the hero riding in to save the day. Hiring hundreds of local men for his construction crews, Dan Leyland bought up the forest parcel by parcel and vowed to make the whole place habitable, pretty, and safe again, while adding a thousand homes to the ridges and valleys.

Polly felt like the only person, besides Baba, who liked the forest as it was—spooky, strange, and even ugly, like an old, gnarled woman with a tale to tell. She hated the wall Dan Leyland had put up, a six-foot-tall concrete monster between his precious subdivisions and the hazards of the wild.

Luckily, she knew where there was a gap. Polly rushed down the path and smiled when the wall stopped abruptly at her grandmother's yard, then started up again on the other side. A purple ash towered over Baba's garden—heaps of stinging nettle, mullein, and clover, pineapple weed, dandelion, and plantain, the plants most people in town yanked out by the roots.

Baba's humble wood cottage looked even more primitive surrounded by modern vinyl-sided tract homes. Baba had no lawn, while the new houses around her sported identical blue fescue. The only blue in Baba's yard was the turquoise fence she'd erected around her most potent herbs, such as pasqueflower, which slows the heart, and the beautiful pink-flowered jimsonweed, from the nightshade family, which Baba used to treat motion sickness.

As the last of the daylight faded a dog across the street lunged against his chain and barked. Polly could just make him out, a miserable creature tied to one of Leyland Corporation's signature cherry trees. Polly stepped up to the creaky blue gate, where Baba had installed a sign:
WARNING! POTENT PLANTS AHEAD. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Polly opened the gate, although it did seem risky. The garden released such a riot of scents, she felt dizzy. Baba had once said that half of a plant's potency comes from what a person believes it will do. Polly imagined spells rising from
the plants and zipping past her, brushing her with luck and love and the ability to fly. By the time she reached the cottage, she was so unsteady she sat down on the porch.

The dog across the street barked once more then went quiet. Polly put her head down, then felt a cool finger on her neck.

"Does your mother know you're here?"

Her grandmother stepped out of a cottage that looked more like something sprouting from the earth than a house. It was hard for Polly to picture her mom growing up in a place where vines covered the windows, and sometimes Polly wondered if she really had. Maybe her mother had been adopted or suffered from amnesia. What else could explain why two people from the same family were so different? And why Polly's mom never came here anymore?

The dog suddenly threw back his head and howled. Baba walked straight to the shed, where she retrieved a menacinglooking tool with two curved, glistening blades.

"Steel cutters," she said, and walked across the street.

Polly glanced at the neighbor's dark windows before following her grandmother. The dog, a large husky, wore a torturous spiked chain around his neck and cowered as they approached. He had visible welts on his back, but what struck Polly more was the light around him, a silver glow rippling in the breeze.

"It's all right," Baba said. She touched the dog's head softly, and the light around him shimmered before he wagged his tail weakly. "You know your problem, Bronco? You keep coming back. Believe me, your owner doesn't deserve any more chances."

She glared at the house, then set her blade on the chain around the husky's neck, breaking it in one clean snap. As the horrible collar slipped away, Bronco shook his neck in relief and rolled over onto his back.