Chapter 16: Just a Little More Than Mom

The house was warm. It had been warm all day, long enough that the front room smelled like the inside of a car left out in the sun, and Wren sat on the couch with both hands flat on his knees and listened for the door.

He’d been sitting there since Dad brought him home. There was nothing to look at from where he sat except the hooks by the front door and the clock on the stove, and he stayed anyway, because the couch faced the door. A car went by the house and kept going. Then another one did.

His name was Wren. Mom was Vesper and Dad was Hollis and Rennie was his sister, and this was the house at the end of the road, the one with the sagging step and the yard out back. He went down the list in order, the way he’d taught himself to while he was gone, and whenever something else came at him — a hillside in the rain, water running down the side of it, a field he had never stood in — he put it back where it came from and started over.

Ives had told him the useful part was no different from learning anything else. You went over it until it stayed. The rest was the land’s memory, come down through his father, and Ives said he would learn to hold that too, only it would take longer.

Wren. He was Wren. He’d kept that sentence with him every night he was gone, and he’d kept the other one with it: I want to go home. Between the two of them, the other one had done most of the work.

Home was Mom and Dad and Rennie, who never stopped talking, and he had wanted to be back on the couch with all of them somewhere in the house.

Then the front door opened.

He knew it was Rennie without looking. There was only one person in this house who came through a door the way a dog comes through a gate. He had a whole second to move, and he chose not to, and then she hit him at a run and knocked him flat across the cushions.

Mom came in behind her, hung the keys on the hook, and stood there a second looking at the two of them before she went back through the house.

“I missed you,” Rennie said into his chest, three times. Then she got her elbows under her and looked down at his face. “Did you miss me?”

Her coat was half off one arm and one of her shoes was untied, and she was watching him like the answer was going to be something she could keep.

“Yes,” he said. “Part of the time.”

That was enough for her.

“Wait,” she said, and was up and gone. He heard her in her room, under her bed, shoving something around, and then she came down the hall pushing a cardboard box with both hands and one foot at a time, and got it as far as the couch.

“These are all the ones I saved,” she said. “All of them. For you.”

He looked in. Crackers, chips, fruit snacks, half a sleeve of cookies rolled shut at the top. All of it was the stuff she liked, which she didn’t mention. She stood over him with her chin up and her hands on her hips and waited.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome. You’re my favorite.” She climbed up onto the couch next to him. “More than Mom. Just a little more than Mom.”

Then she dug a bag of fruit snacks out of the box, opened it, and handed him one. He ate it. She had two more before he was done.

“Sweet,” he said.

“Right?” Her hand was back in the bag.

The box was for him. She’d just wanted something out of it too.

“I go to school on Monday,” she said. “You should come with me.”

She said it the way she said everything, like it had been decided somewhere and he just hadn’t been told.

“No,” he said.

“Come on.” She leaned her whole weight onto his arm. “Kids go to school. You’re a kid.”

“I said no.”

“It’s fun. We have snack, and we play outside, and we trade stuff.” She was going faster now. “I made a lot of friends. A lot.”

He stopped chewing.

“You made a lot of friends.”

“Yeah. I like playing with them.” There wasn’t any doubt in it. “There’s a new kid. He’s got little horns and they’re so cute, and I gave him some of my candy and I don’t know if he ate it. The teacher says he doesn’t sleep at night. Next week—“

“I want to go,” he said.

She stopped in the middle of a word.

“To school,” he said. “I want to go too.”

For a second she didn’t move. Then she came up off the couch yelling — not at him, at the house — “Dad. Dad, Wren’s coming to school with me,” and her feet went off toward the kitchen, and Dad said something low, and then Rennie shrieked, which meant yes.

He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. He’d meant to think it through first — school was a room full of kids who would look at him all day — and now it was out, and Rennie was telling the whole house.

Mom came back out.

“It’s not—“ he said. “There’s nothing to do here anyway. I’ll go look at it.”

“I know,” she said. She crossed the room and pulled him up off the couch and put her arms around him, one hand flat on the back of his head. “Welcome home, Wren.”

He went stiff the way he always did, and then he didn’t.

“I’ve got all of it now,” he said. “Uncle Ives said so. I don’t have to go back to his house.”

The bad part hadn’t been the hillside or the water. The bad part had been the memory, and the way it came up through him until there were hours at a time when he couldn’t find the line between what was his and what was the land’s.

One of Ives’s wardens had said it once, in the next room, not knowing he could hear. It had happened before. Kids of the land, coming into the memory, forgetting who they were — one of them had walked off from his parents and never come back.

He’d come through it anyway. That was the thing.

Mom let go of him and sat back on the arm of the couch and looked at him.

“Whatever comes down to you,” she said. “Whatever you see, whatever you know. You’re my kid first. And if something’s wrong, you bring it to me.”

He looked at the clock on the stove.

She leaned over and pinched his cheek. “Answer.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll try.”

“Try.” She said it back to him flat. “Try isn’t what I asked for. Your father got all of it when he was little, and he still talked.”

He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “What was Dad like? When he was little.”

She smiled.

“Gentle,” she said. “Patient.” She thought about it. “Cute.”

He pressed his mouth shut.

“Mom.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Can you hug me again?”

“Of course I can.”

She did it the real way, both arms, and he put his face against her shoulder, where it was warm, and left it there.