Page 38 of Crow’s Shadow

“My mother.” I am on my feet now, the sheet gripped to my chest. “You were sent to make my mother disappear. You were in the doorway to clean her up, not to save me.”

“I didn’t know whose she was.” He is up too, on the far side of the cot, hands open at his sides, not reaching, because even now he knows better than to reach for me. “I was a kid. I knew there was a dead woman and a house set to burn and a child in it who was not supposed to be there. I broke the code to carry you out. Leaving a scene half-cleaned is the one thing we never do. I did it for you. I’ve carried that night with me ever since.”

“You carried it.” The tears come and I let them, furious at every one, because even now the pull in my chest is still there and I cannot hate him the way I want to. “You. What about me? I loved you for pulling me out of that fire. For twenty years, I believed you were the boy who ran into the flames for a stranger’s kid. And the truth is the club sent you to bury what was left of her. You knew she was dead. You knew where she went into the ground. You let me grow up in the house of the men who ordered it, keeping their book, writing down their dead night after night, and not once did you tell me one of those dead was mine.”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“You wouldn’t.”

He has no answer for the difference. There is none. The silence sits between us with teeth in it.

“Where is she?” My voice has gone thin and cold. “You clean bodies. You made her vanish. So, say it plain. Where did you put my mother?”

He does not speak. And his eyes, for half a second, cut past me. To the window. To the dark on the far side of the glass, the six acres of headstones in their tidy rows, the tree line past the last of them where nobody plants a marker.

I turn and follow his eyes.

And I understand.

Every night in that crematory with the book on my knees. Every gray morning walking the rows to get the smoke out of my head. She was there the whole time. Past the last stone, buried on club ground. My mother has been in Crow’s cemetery since the night he carried me out of that fire, and he has stood beside me over and over and never told me.

I do not scream. I do not throw anything. I reach down and take my jacket off the chair, then pull it on over the sheet. My hands are steady now.

“Shadow.” That voice. The wrong one. The afraid one, the same one he used at the fence line the night this whole thing started. “Shadow, don’t. Not out there. Not tonight.”

I open the door.

“Show me,” I say, without turning around. “Take me to her. Right now.”

I walk toward the tree line. Behind me, I hear him follow. Neither of us knows what will happen when Crow stands over my mother’s grave and puts his hand on the dirt.

Chapter fifteen

CROW

She makes me take her to the grave in the dark, and I go, because I owe her every step of it.

The cemetery lies quiet under a low moon, six acres of stone in tidy rows. Past the last marker the ground goes soft and private, the way it always has, the way I made sure it always would. I have stood over this patch a thousand times with a rake in my hand and my face shut. Tonight I stand over it with the woman it belongs to at my side, and my face will not stay shut for anything.

“Here,” I say. It is all I have.

Shadow looks at the ground, then at me. The wild in her has gone very still, the stillness she wore in the lot the night this whole thing started.

“No stone.”

“No stone. Loco’s rule, from before I understood it. A marked grave asks questions. An unmarked one keeps its mouth shut.” The words come out ash. “I dug it myself. Fifteen years old, all night, because I would not let the older men do it rough.”

“You hear the dead now. Since the cannery.” Her voice is flat and terrible. “You touch them and they tell you how they went. She’s right there, Crow. Under your hand any time you wanted. You could have come out here and asked her what happened, and you never did.”

“I was afraid of what she’d say.”

“Afraid.” The word cracks in half. “Put your hand on the ground.”

“Shadow.”

“Put your hand on my mother’s grave and tell her you’re sorry to her face, or don’t ever tell me again.”

So I go down on one knee and lay my palm flat on the cold dirt over Maren.