CHAPTER 14
WHEN I WOKE UP, the sun was streaming through the Buick’s windows, and I had to go to the bathroom.
“We’re in Illinois, coming up on Springfield. There’s a Walmart in twenty miles or so,” Prairie said. “We need to pick up a few things. Can you wait that long?”
“Um… okay.” I was hungry, too, but decided not to mention it. Somehow, it didn’t seem like something I should admit to. After a night like we’d had, who thinks of food?
I did. Which made me wonder. On the one hand, I felt like I should feel worse. Like maybe in shock from the horror of it all, or something. I kept waiting for the guilt to sneak up on me, but it just didn’t happen. I even felt a tiny sense of anticipation. Despite everything that had happened, we were going somewhere new.
I’d never left Missouri before. I’d only been out of Gypsum a few times, on school field trips to Hannibal and St. Joseph, to see Mark Twain’s childhood home and the Pony Express Museum. But I’d never been to a city.
My stomach growled again. To cover the sound, I asked Prairie something that had been bothering me.
“How could you not have known my mom was pregnant?”
Prairie’s jaw tensed and she didn’t look at me. She hadn’t slept at all, and it showed in the faint lines under her eyes and around her mouth.
“When I left Gypsum, I moved to Chicago. I wrote to Clover almost every day,” she finally said. “I knew there would be trouble if Alice ever found out that Clover knew where I was, so I told her to make up a story that we’d had a really bad fight and that we swore we’d never speak to each other again.”
“Why would Gram care?”
“She had… plans for me. Just like I think she did for you.”
Her words filled me with dread. “What do you mean?”
“You have to think about who Alice was, when she was younger. She tried to be a Healer for a long time before she gave up. Mary told me that Alice was devastated when she finally had to accept that she didn’t have the gift. She never got over her failure, and to cope with it she turned all her misery into blame.”
“Blame? But who could she blame for that?”
“Alice decided that the reason she was damaged was that the Tarbells had mixed their blood with outsiders. That they’d married and bore children outside the families, and that had corrupted the lineage.”
“What do you mean, the families? What families?”
“Our ancestors all emigrated here together. The Morries, the Tarbells, we’re all descended from the same village in Ireland.”
“We’re Irish?”
“Yes.” Prairie smiled, but it didn’t reach her troubled eyes. “Our ancestors lived in the same village for centuries. When they came here, they started over. New names, new skills, new homes, but the plan was always that they would stay together. They were known as the Banished, and they-”
“Wait.” I cut her off. What had Milla said-Ain’t any of us Banished got any say in things. “Why were they called that?”
“No one remembers anymore. I mean, there were all these stories. When your mom and I were little, Mary would tell us bedtime stories about faeries and blessings and curses.”
“You don’t believe in them.”
“I…” Prairie hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “It’s not that I don’t believe. The blessings were real, even if I can’t explain them, even if they don’t fit neatly with what science tells us. The Banished are united by some… powerful things. Mary always told me that we Tarbells were meant to serve the Banished, to heal them when they needed us. But that wasn’t the whole story. The rest of the women had a responsibility to keep the village, the people, together after they left Ireland. That’s why we can sense each other, why we are drawn to each other.”
At last, an explanation for the way I felt when I was around the Morries, even if it sounded crazy. A part of me was relieved that I hadn’t imagined it. That it might be real, even if it was something out of a fable. “What else?”
“Well, when they left Ireland the men were all given the gift of visions. They could see into the future, or see things that were happening elsewhere. It was meant to protect them from enemies, disasters, even things like storms that could damage the crops.”
“The Morries have visions?” I thought of the boys at school, their shadowed faces angry, stubborn, bleak. All but Sawyer’s.
“Not much anymore. That gift, that power, is mostly gone.”
“What happened to it?”
Prairie sighed. “A few generations ago, everything started to fall apart. I guess it came from marrying outside the Banished, it weakened the gift. Mary said she remembered the first broken Healer, when she was a little girclass="underline" a Tarbell daughter born like Alice, sick and weak and mean. But she didn’t grow to adulthood. Mary said the strongest Healers were pure Banished. I think it broke her heart when one of her own daughters was… damaged. And Alice could never accept it. I think she always believed that if she could just go back to the source of the gift, she could somehow heal herself.”
Go back to the source… to Ireland? My pulse quickened as I thought of the airplane ticket to Dublin. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” I said, and explained about the folder I’d found in Gram’s room.
Hailey frowned. “So Alice really meant to go. She used to talk about it, sometimes… only, I can’t imagine it would have made a difference. I don’t know how it could change anything just to go back to the village.”
“If it did, then all the Morries-”
“-could be fixed?” Prairie said gently. “It doesn’t work that way, Hailey. The changes in the Banished, they’re deep in the foundations of who they are now. They are afraid of each other. Of what they’ve become. The men… they’ve lost their, their moral compass, I guess you’d say. A lot of them are addicts. They don’t want to work, they don’t take care of their families.”
“But not all of them,” I said, thinking of Sawyer.
“Oh, definitely not. There are still Banished men who are born with all the determination and idealism of the ones who first settled here. But in general… well, I guess that’s how it got to be called Trashtown. You know, I saw a picture once, that Mary had. It was almost a hundred years old and you wouldn’t even know it was Trashtown. Little houses all fixed up, flower beds, happy families, everyone dressed up and smiling.”
I thought about the Morries at school, their patched and dirty clothes, the sickly, malnourished way they looked. I thought of Milla, the combination of fury and fear she wore on her face.
“I don’t understand why they hate me so much now. The Morries.”
“It’s fear, Hailey. They think that after Alice was born… damaged… that the gift was turned into a curse. They don’t believe you truly have the power to heal, just like they never believed Clover or I could. They’re afraid that if you try to heal someone you’ll end up cursing them instead.”
“You never healed anyone when you lived here?”
“Alice wouldn’t let us. She made us go to school in Tipton so we wouldn’t be around the Morries. Mary taught us in secret. Alice always said she’d beat us if she ever caught us healing.”
“Why?”
“I think because she never got over being damaged. She tried to heal, you know, when she was young. Mary told me. And she couldn’t bear the thought that her daughters could do something she couldn’t.”
“And so you just… didn’t?” I tried to imagine resisting the urge, now that I knew what I could do.
“I… took care of people sometimes, but usually I didn’t even tell them. You know-a friend with a strawberry birthmark. Another one with bruises from when her stepfather beat her.”
We rode in silence for a while, each lost in our own thoughts. “Did you ever know your dad?”