When it was my turn, I didn’t pause. I added, “Rainer, this isn’t just the jar. You need to be humble like a single tree in a forest.” I had been through this too, and I had survived. Again I felt the intimacy with him I’d felt in the forest, when I could have sliced his neck. Dice must have felt this way all the time: a godlike feeling. The family nodded all along the table.

winter

CHAPTER 25

Bay left that evening. His taillights washed the bedroom in red. I guessed he was going to Durham, because before he left, he gave me a kiss on the ear and whispered, “See you soon.” I hoped he’d be back quickly. I imagined him pulling up to my mother’s house, making his way over her lawn. I imagined him feeling around in the clay terrier for my key. She would be at work, she was always at work, and I didn’t need to worry. Bay would enter the house. He’d notice the mean and poor materials, the linoleum and the vinyl, and he’d notice the care she took with everything. If he looked he could find out everything about her. He could find her ribbons and papers for wrapping presents, her napkin rings and candleholders, her clothes that were larger than life-size. He could go to my room and find my track spikes and the photos of me as a spinning blur and my heart-diffraction glasses, all evidence of a girl who’d wanted to break into a different world.

I imagined my mother coming home from work, afterward. Maybe she’d set down her keys and catch the Ash Family scent in the air: horses, frost, wood smoke. Maybe she’d see her dresses pushed aside. She’d shake her head—I hated to imagine—she’d think she was being foolish. I wondered how often she checked the tin for the earrings. Maybe once a week, or once a day. I imagined the detectives raising Bay’s fingerprints in their flour. My mother didn’t have the resources to pursue an investigation, I was fairly certain. It was likely, anyway, that she would know right away it was me. She’d picture me creeping through the house. This was what made me weep: she’d know it was me—who else knew about the tin?

All I wanted was for Bay to return. Once he returned, I could settle down again, and begin the process of forgetting, which I knew was inevitable. Sometime soon I wouldn’t care about the earrings, but the family and the stewardship of the mountain and Dice’s truth would last forever.

We underwent a week with thunderstorms every afternoon, thunderheads mounting above the ridges, tall and dark blue blots against a raging pink sky, which swept into our holler, forcing leaves down flat and shiny on the sodden forest floor.