Seed (10 page)

“So your mom’s happier here, then?” Kate asks. She is staring at Ellis and he can’t avoid her question.

“She’s a different person.”

“Different?” Jack asks.

“She just wasn’t right. You know.”

“No, we don’t know,” Kate says. “That’s why we’re asking.”

A half smile happens on Ellis’s lips, but it doesn’t last. “Mom was all over the place. She couldn’t even work anymore. I reckon
she’s been depressed for years.”

“And Seed is healing her,” I say, pleased.

“Yes.” Ellis catches my eye. “I feel like I’ve got my mom back.”

“What about your father?” Jack asks.

Ellis’s face seems to shut down. “What about him?” He sounds so cold.

“Maybe he could come here too,” Jack says. “We could help him.”

“You wouldn’t want him here.”

“Why?” Kate asks.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” Ellis looks out at the hills rising up behind Dawn Rocks.

“Papa S. is your father now,” I reassure him. But his eyes stay turned away.

There’s a low rumbling from the sky, just as it starts to rain. A few warning drops, but then, with no hesitation, the clouds pour their water on us. Kate jumps up, opens her mouth wide toward the sky. The rain beats on the rock, bouncing in all directions.

I jump down and Kate follows, and then the other two are with us. We all hold hands, lean out, and start to spin. I’m laughing and giddy and when we stop, we look at each other and our clothes are soaked through.

Kate takes off her top first. “Come on,” she shouts above the pointing rain. She’s laughing and she’s reaching for the top of her skirt, pulling it down, peeling the wet material from her legs. Jack is staring, the rain dripping from his eyelashes, his top clinging to his chest. Ellis laughs, but he looks unsure.

“Come on, Pearl,” I hear Kate say to me through the noise of the downpour. And so I reach for my buttons, undo my shirt all the way down, and take it from my shoulders and my arms.

“You too, Jack?” I smile at him. And Kate is laughing, pulling down his suspenders, tugging his shirt free. Jack pushes her hands away, but I’m sure he’s shaking as he takes off his shirt, then his shoes, his trousers. He puts them on the wet rock. And they’re dancing, Kate and Jack, half-naked in the rain, the water spilling on their skin as Ellis and I stand there.

I step out of my skirt. And I feel free. Ellis doesn’t hesitate for long, and he takes his shirt off. His trousers stick, but he yanks at them. I look at Ellis’s body. His skin is paler than Jack’s and he’s slimmer. The rain is falling on his bare stomach and I can’t look away.

Kate and Jack take our hands and we’re turning again in the rain. But we don’t look at the sky this time. We watch each other, still laughing, the rain cold, but warm. Thunder cracks and Kate screams, but we keep on turning.

Ellis looks at me. I feel his eyes on my body, seeing my
underwear, seeing my skin, almost all of my skin. And a feeling rushes to my belly and fizzes down my legs. But then he turns away and I feel Jack’s hand in mine.

Time rushes and stops and rushes and stops and gradually the rain slows down. The water now just taps me slightly. And then we’re standing still, holding hands, soaked to our bones. Suddenly exposed. Suddenly aware. And I want to stay like this, but I want to cover myself too. Part of me wants it never to have happened, but I don’t know why.

Jack is the first to put his clothes back on. He struggles to pull his trousers up, laughing as he tumbles to the wet grass. Kate smiles as she watches him with her hands on her hips. I reach for my shirt, pull it over my arms, fumble with the buttons.

“Getting dressed already?” Ellis asks me. That mocking smile is on his lips.

“I’m cold,” I say. But I’m not. And I don’t understand the feelings I have.

Kate is the last to put her clothes on. She’s watched us struggle with the wet material, and now we watch her. She’s slow, and doesn’t look at us, as she bends over to pick up her skirt. She puts her legs in, pulls it up. I see the look on Jack’s face and it makes me know that he is changing. Am I losing him?

And then we walk, in silence, away from Dawn Rocks, the last of the rain squeezed out of the sky.

He knows that I am here. The little boy. He watches me and he knows.

He speaks to me when no one sees. But I do not understand what he says. I do not know what he asks.

There are footsteps outside my room. I step down from the window and sit quietly on the chair. And I wait.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

P
apa S. has called me to him. I was hoping for good news, hoping for the words that make me his Companion. But as I stand in his study, he has barely spoken to me. He is sitting in his chair behind his desk, with his back to me, his face toward the window.

“Pearl,” he says, his voice so quiet. “You have dissatisfied me and Mother Nature.” I want to ask why, but the word doesn’t come out. “You must ask for forgiveness.”

I know, as soon as he says that word. I will be in that room again.

He says nothing else, but beckons for me to follow him. Walking toward the room, I can hear the sounds of the children outside. And I’m walking, my bare feet on the wooden floor, toward the door. I reach out for the perfectly round door handle. I hold my hand there and I wait for my legs to run. But they don’t, because I trust Papa S., and I’m turning the handle. The door breathes as it opens itself to me and I step inside.

I close the door and there’s silence. It’s like the world outside
has disappeared and I’m the only one left. I walk into the small room and I want to run away, but I know that Papa S. loves me.

Then it begins.

At first it is so quiet that I can barely hear it. But it gets louder. The sound of a woman crying. She’s asking someone to stop, but they don’t, because her cries are getting louder. And she’s begging them now, not to hurt her, don’t hurt her, but they don’t listen and she starts to scream. A sound from so deep within the core of her that I am shaking and even though I tell myself to breathe, she’s still screaming and they’re hurting her and it doesn’t stop. My hands are over my ears, but it doesn’t block out the noise. Nothing can block out the sound of her begging, the sound of her scream ripping through her body, her skin.

Then, that silence.

Nothing else.

It was her, the same woman who has haunted my dreams since I was in this room when I was a child. The woman who screams in the darkness of my nightmares, as she beats on my heart and blocks out my breath.

“Pearl,” Papa S. says. He is not here, but I hear his voice. “Did you hear those screams?”

“Yes.”

“These screams came from your bones. This time it was Nature calling to you, because you have displeased her.”

What have I done that has made Nature crawl through my skin and scream within me? I have tried so hard to do everything right. To do all that I’m asked. But Nature is inside me and she knows my thoughts.

I remember what comes next. The walls slowly begin to close in on me. Closer, closer. I stand with my feet on the ground, hold my arms out to the side, as if that will protect me. Slowly, they’re walking toward me, inch by inch.

“You have done wrong, Pearl,” Papa S. says. “You must ask for forgiveness.”

But I can’t speak. My voice is caught between the woman’s screams and the walls that are coming closer.

“Pearl, admit that you have done wrong,” his voice says from beside me, above me, below me. “You are wicked. You must admit it to cleanse your soul.” But I don’t know what I have done wrong.

The walls creep closer, touch my fingertips. But I don’t know what I have done.

I hear his voice, I feel the walls, and I cannot escape. I push onto them, but they don’t move back. They force my arms down.

And now it’s me screaming, but I know no one can hear. No one but Papa S., but he won’t help me and I don’t know why. I have been bad, but I don’t know how. I have been bad.

“I have done wrong!” I scream, the walls pushing on my back, my front. “I have been bad!”

“What have you done?” His voice fills my skin. The walls stop.

“I don’t know,” I cry.

“It is Nature moving these walls,” Papa S. shouts. “You must confess to Nature.” And so the walls begin to crush me again. I cannot move my head.

“Try again,” he says. “Because I love you, Pearl, and wickedness will fester in you if you don’t release it in words.”

“Ellis,” I manage to say, my voice barely my own. I remember Ellis’s body in the rain. The feeling when he touched me. “My bad thoughts are about Ellis.”

The walls stop. They hold me there, just for a moment, before they begin to inch away, moving back to make the shape of the small room again.

My legs can’t hold me and my lungs are still finding it hard to breathe. And lying on the floor, alone, I wonder at the words I said.

Ellis? Are my thoughts really bad? Round and round, I wonder. I think of him talking to me, looking at me. It’s so different from Jack. Papa S. must have noticed and seen that somewhere deep within me, there were the roots of something he needed to drag out. Bad thoughts. He has helped me. He has wanted to cleanse me.

I leave the Forgiveness Room and walk back to Papa S.’s
study. He is here, waiting for me with his arms open and the warmth of the sunshine in his smile. I have pleased him and suddenly nothing else matters.

“Pearl,” he says to me and I go to him and I am in the safety of his arms. His cloak smells of the lake. Gently, he strokes my hair. He kisses my head and then steps back to look at me. His eyes are like the brightest sky.

Finally, he kisses his palm and rests it on my heart. Through my dress, through my skin, I can hear the shuddering as my heart replies.

Papa S. kisses my forehead again, leads me to the door, and opens it for me. “You have been cleansed,” he says. And I feel such relief that I won’t have those feelings anymore. I shall look at Ellis as I do Jack. He is just a part of our family. One of us.

“Thank you,” I reply, gazing at Papa S.

And he is still smiling as he closes the door behind me.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
know, as soon as I see Ellis at the bottom of the stairs, that it hasn’t worked. In fact, everything is worse. Before, I hadn’t known my thoughts about him. Yet now, I look at Ellis and my skin flushes warm.