This was the other world, the one to which Nest alone had access. Since she was very small, she had worked to understand it, to help Pick maintain it, and to find a way to reconcile it with the world that everyone else inhabited and believed fully defined. There, in no–man's-land between the known and the secret, she was an anomaly, never entirely like her friends, never just another child.
`You've lived in your grandparents' house all your life,' Robert said suddenly, eyes determinedly fixed in a forward direction. They were crossing the entrance road and moving into the scattering of shade trees and spruce that bordered the picnic grounds leading to the chain–link fence and the cemetery. `That house is your home, Nest. If you sell it, you won't have a home anymore.
She scuffed at the damp grass with her tennis shoes. `I know that, Robert:
`Do you need the money?'
`I could use it. Training and competition is expensive. The school doesn't pay for everything:
`Why don't you take out a mortgage, then? Why sell, if you don't have to?'
She couldn't explain it to him, not if she tried all day. It had to do with being who she was, and that wasn't something Robert could know about without having lived her life. She didn't even want to talk about it with him because it was personal and private.
`Maybe I want a new home; she said enigmatically, giving sudden, unexpected voice to the feelings that churned inside her. It was hard to keep from crying as she thought back upon their genesis.
Her friends were gone, all but Robert. She could still see their faces, but she saw them not as they were at the end, but as they were when they were still fourteen and it seemed as if nothing in their lives would ever change. She saw them as they were during that last summer they were all together, on that last weekend before everything changed–when they were close and tight and believed they could stand up to anything.
Brianna Brown and Jared Scott moved away within a year of that summer. Brianna wrote Nest at first, but the time between letters steadily lengthened, and finally the letters ceased altogether. Nest heard later that Brianna was married and had a child.
She never heard from Jared at all.
Cass Minter remained her oldest and closest friend all through high school. Different from each other in so many ways, they continued to find common ground in a lifetime of shared experiences and mutual trust. Cars planned to go to the University of Illinois and study genetics, but two weeks before graduation, she died in her sleep. The doctor said it was an aneurysm. No one had suspected it was there.
Jared, Brianna, and Cass–all gone. Of her old friends, that left only Robert, and by the end of her freshman year at North–western, Nest could already feel herself beginning to drift. Her parents were gone. Her grandparents were gone. Her friends were gone. Even the cats, Mr. Scratch and Miss Minx, were gone, the former dead of old age two years earlier, the latter moved to a neighbour's home with her grandfather's passing. Her future, she thought, lay somewhere else. Her life was going in a different direction, and she could feel Hopewell receding steadily into her past.
They reached the chain–link fence and, without pausing to debate the matter, scrambled over. Holding the flowers for Nest while she completed the climb, Robert gave them a cursory sniff before handing them back. Side by side, the two made their way down the paved road that wound through the rows of tombstones and markers, feeling the October sun grow warmer against their skin as it lifted into a clear autumn sky. Summer might be behind them and winter closing fast, but there was nothing wrong with this day.
She felt her thoughts drift like clouds, returning to the past. She had acquired new friends in high school but they lacked the history she shared with the old, and she couldn't seem to get past that.
Of course, the Petersons still lived next door and Mildred Walker still lived down the street. Reverend Emery still conducted services at the First Congregational Church, and a few of her grandfather's old cronies still gathered for coffee at Josie's each morning to share gossip and memories. Once in a while, she even saw Josie, but she could sense the other's discomfort, and understanding its source, kept her distance. In any event, these were people of a different generation, and their real friendships had been with her grandparents rather than with her.
There was always Pick, though. And, until a year or so ago, there had been Wraith …
Robert left the roadway to cut through the rows of markers, bearing directly for the gravesites of her grandparents. Isn't it odd, she thought, trailing distractedly in his wake, that Hopewell should feel so alien to her? Small towns were supposed to be stable and unchanging. It was part of their charm, one of their virtues, that while larger communities would almost certainly undergo some form of upheaval, they would remain the same. But Hopewell didn't feel like that to her. It felt altered in ways that transcended expectation, ways that did not involve population growth or economic peaks. Those were substantially the same as they had been five years earlier. It was something else, an intangible that she believed might have influenced only her.
Perhaps it was her, she pondered. Perhaps it was she who had changed and not the town at all.
They walked up to her grandparents' graves and stopped below the markers, looking down at the mounds that fronted them. Gran's was thick and smooth with autumn grass; the grass on Old Bob's was still sparse and the earth less settled. Identical tombstones marked their resting places. Nest read her grandmother's. EVELYN OPAL FREEMARK. BELOVED WIFE OF ROBERT. SLEEP WITH ANGELS. WAKE WITH GOD. Old Bob had chosen the wording for Gran's marker, and Nest had simply copied it for his.
Her mother's gravestone stood just to the left. CAITLIN ANNE FREEMARK. BELOVED DAUGHTER & MOTHER.
A fourth plot, just a grassy space now, was reserved for her.
She studied it thoughtfully for a moment, then set about dividing up the flowers she had brought, arranging them carefully in each of the three metal vases that stood on tripods before the headstones. Robert watched her as she worked, saying nothing.
`Bring some water,' she said, pointing toward the spigot and watering can that sat in a small concrete well several dozen yards off.
Robert did, then poured water into each vase, being careful not to disturb Nest's arrangements.
Together, they stood looking down at the plots, the sun streaming through the branches of the old shade trees that surrounded them in curtains of dappled brightness.
`I remember all the times your grandmother baked us cookies; Robert said after a minute. 'She would sit us down at the picnic table out back and bring us a plate heaped with them and glasses of cold milk. She was always saying a child couldn't grow up right without cookies and milk. I could never get that across to my mother. She thought you couldn't grow up right without vegetables'
Nest grinned. 'Gran was big on vegetables, too. You just weren't there for that particular lecture:
`Every Christmas we had that cookie bake in your kitchen. Balls of dough and cookie sheets and cutters and frosting and little bottles of sprinkles and whatnot everywhere. We trashed her kitchen, and she never blinked an eye'
`I remember making cookies for bake sales.' Nest shook her head. `For the church, for mission aid or something. It seemed for a while that I was doing it every other weekend. Gran never objected once, even after she stopped going to church altogether:
Robert nodded. `Your grandmother never needed to go to church. I think God probably told her she didn't have to go, that he would come to see her instead'