“No, and Alice never told me who he was. I never even knew if Clover had the same father.”
I couldn’t imagine Gram young. Couldn’t imagine a man falling in love with her, wanting a child with her. “What about your grandfather?”
“No. He died young, not long after Alice was born, and Mary never talked about him. All Alice ever told me about him was that he was mixed blood.”
“Was he?”
“Yes. There weren’t very many purebloods left even a generation ago, and Mary’s husband was part Cherokee and part German.”
“How can you be sure about that?”
Prairie gave me a quick, sad smile before returning her attention to the road. “I studied genetics, when I finally went to college. And then I worked in a lab. By the time Bryce hired me, I’d traced my origins pretty thoroughly.”
“You can tell all that? Just from blood?”
“You’d be surprised. The tests are a little complex, but you can track your heredity with considerable accuracy.”
I thought for a moment. “Could you… test me? I mean, could you figure out what my dad was?”
“Not the way you’re thinking, Hailey. Unless you were doing full-on DNA testing and looking for genetic paternity or something like that. And besides, if you’re wondering about the healing, it doesn’t matter. Alice was wrong. As long as a Healer’s partner is part Banished, she will pass on the gift, nine times out of ten.”
“You can tell that from your testing?” I demanded, surprised.
“No. That, I learned from Mary. It’s not exactly scientific, but I have no reason to doubt it’s true. Mary told me that some Healers are more powerful than others, depending on the blood of their fathers. And other factors too, some of which I doubt we’ll ever understand. Like Alice. I don’t know why the gift was corrupted in her. I… sometimes I can almost feel pity for her, for the way she was born, with the powers stunted along with her body. But then…”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. I guessed we both had our memories, of Gram’s meanness, her cruelty. Yes, it was possible to feel compassion for her… until you remembered who she was.
“So Gram wanted to make sure you married one of the Banished,” I guessed. “So your children didn’t end up like her.”
“That’s right,” Prairie said. “But it went further than that. Alice started to feel that she was responsible for ensuring that the Tarbell line continued. She used to say that when I graduated from high school, she’d choose one of the purebloods for me.”
“And when you left-”
“There was only Clover. And I’ve always wondered…”
It took only a moment for me to figure it out. “You think Gram… chose someone for my mom. Once she realized you weren’t coming back.”
“Yes,” Prairie said softly. “I think she didn’t want to wait until Clover graduated. And I think she-Clover-didn’t have any choice in the matter, that he-whoever he was-he must have…”
As Prairie struggled to find the right words, I realized why her pain showed through whenever she talked about Clover. About my mother. Gram had sacrificed her, had handed her off to one of the Morries-someone like the cruel-eyed, shadow-fleeting boys I knew from the halls of Gypsum High-so that she could be impregnated by a pureblood. So that her child would carry on the Tarbell legacy and be a true Healer.
Horror washed over me, closing my throat so it was difficult to breathe. I was the child of a violation of someone even younger than me. When I thought of my mother, alone, having lost the one person who cared about her, who could protect her, my heart fractured.
“Did she die in childbirth?” I asked. I had to know.
“Oh, Hailey.” Prairie took a deep breath. “No. Clover killed herself.”
“She…”
But I couldn’t speak. I had always thought of my mother as a stranger, until I met Prairie. Gram had said she was mentally disabled and I had believed her, and somehow that made my mother less real to me. I felt like I had been born of nothing, in a way, like I had just appeared one day in the house I grew up in.
“You were a few weeks old when she died,” Prairie continued quietly. “Bryce’s investigators found the records at the county office, and he told me a few days ago. I was… devastated, thinking about how frightened Clover must have been.”
“How did she… you know?”
“She hanged herself, Hailey. In the bedroom closet. Bryce found the police reports.”
My closet. No wonder I had been drawn to that tiny space; no wonder I’d found the secret hiding place. It was her presence I’d felt there, her sadness. “But… why…”
“I think she felt like she was out of options. She was too ashamed to tell me she was pregnant. And I think she knew that if she had told me, I would have come back. I think she was protecting me, in her own way.”
“But what about…” I swallowed the lump in my throat. What about me? I was thinking. Didn’t she care about me? Didn’t she want to make sure her baby was all right?
“You must never think that your mother didn’t love you,” Prairie said fiercely. “Clover loved you with all her heart. But she knew that Alice would have taken you from her, like she tried to take everything. Alice saw you as the future of the Tarbells, and that was all she cared about. A last chance for her to get it right. A last chance to purify the bloodline.”
You are the future, Hailey.
“And she wouldn’t have allowed anything to interfere with that. I am sure that she would have put Clover out on the street before she let her raise you.”
I could barely absorb the full horror of what Prairie was saying. I thought of all the times Gram whispered and laughed with Dun Acey, the way he looked at me with his hungry eyes. I wondered if he was the one Gram had chosen for me, the man who would father my child, the pureblood Banished who would ensure that my baby was a Healer.
I thought I would throw up. I made a strangled sound in my throat and Prairie looked at me in alarm.
“Hailey, are you all right? The exit’s coming up in a minute-can you make it?”
“I think so,” I said, swallowing hard. “Just… tell me the rest. All of it. How did you find out my mom was dead? What did you do?”
“When she stopped answering my letters, I got worried. I had saved a little money by then, so I took a bus back to Gypsum to get her. But when I got to the house… she wasn’t there, and Alice told me she had killed herself. I was just going to leave; all I could think to do was get out of there, out of the house, away from Alice. But she stopped me. She told me that she could make people think I did it. She said Clover had been talking about the huge fight we’d had…”
“The one you told her to make up? When you wrote to her?”
“Yes. And she said I’d better not let any of the authorities find out I was in town, or they’d take me in for questioning or worse. Now I understand she was just trying to make sure that I never came back. Because if I ever found out about you, I might fight for you. And she was not about to lose you.”
That was the final piece of the puzzle. Now I had the whole story of why I’d grown up without a mother. She hadn’t abandoned me on purpose.
And if Prairie had come for me long ago, I wouldn’t have Chub. I looked over the seat at him, rosy-cheeked in sleep, his mouth a sweet little O.
Until Chub, I had grown up with no love at all. But he had given me a reason to keep going, to keep trying.
Prairie had saved me last night, I thought as we reached the exit. But maybe Chub had saved me first.
We coasted off the highway, almost directly into an enormous parking lot. I was starving, and I knew Chub would be too the minute he woke up.
“We’re going to eat here?”
“I’m afraid so. There’s a McDonald’s in the Walmart. I’ll pick up what we need while you take Chub and get breakfast for the two of you.”