Gloaming
an excerpt

Epilogue

Tara shaded her eyes against the sun and looked at the mountains in the distance. She had never seen such young mountains before arriving in this place a few days ago. The mountains of home were old and rolling, without sharp edges or snowy caps that disappeared into the clouds.

Lifting her nose, she was unable to pick up the faint saltiness she was accustomed to in the air. They had travelled a long way from the ocean. A long way from everything she had ever known. A kestrel flew overhead, and Tara tried hard not to think about that now-distant memory of warm sun beating down on feathers.

From her spot in the doorway of their shabby motel room, she shifted her eyes to Pandora. The young girl was seated at a picnic table nearby, drawing with pencil crayons in her thick art pad. It amazed Tara that her young niece had so painlessly made the transition when she herself had broken down a half hour into their journey, had needed to get out of the truck and try to find that humming, throbbing thing she had lived with for so long.

It was gone.

Will had put his arms around her, tried to console her. It had been an hour before she could get back in the truck and continue their voyage.

“The trip itself is a kind of magic,” he had said as she settled into the passenger seat next to Pandora again. “Think of the things we’ll discover.”

The girl had nodded and smiled hopefully, but Tara had turned away from the two of them and their conspiracies, and she did not speak again for some time.

Now they waited, she and Pandora, at this motel where they seemed to be the only guests, for Will to return. He had left earlier that day in search of a house they could buy. Because this was the place, he had assured her. This is the place where they could make a home.

Just then, she and Pandora heard the familiar growl of the old pick-up as it turned from the highway into to the motel parking lot. Will pulled in next to them and got out, grinning.

“I think I’ve found it,” he said.

“Yeah?” Tara asked.

“Yeah.” He looked at Pandora, who was packing her pencil crayons back into their tin. “You want to go see it?”

Pandora smiled and nodded vigorously.

“Right now?” Tara asked. “We can see it now?”

“Well, the real estate agent won’t still be there. It’ll be locked. But no one’s home. We can look around the property, maybe peek through the windows. It’s great. You guys are going to love it.”

Tara moved out of the doorway for Pandora, who ran inside and stashed her art supplies in a drawer.

“Grab your jacket,” Tara told her. “It’s beginning to get cold.”

She looked back at Will, sceptical.

“Come on,” Will said, just above a whisper. “Let me put that smile back on your face. I hate to see you like this.”

He reached out and put his hand on her arm, squeezing gently.

“Does it have a garden?” she asked.

“Just wait. I can’t describe it. You have to see it.”

Pandora had run past them, her jacket in hand, and clambered up into the truck.

“Let’s go!” she urged.

It was a thirty minute drive, during which Tara had little to say. Beside her, Pandora was practically leaping from her seat at every farmhouse they passed down the long stretch of highway, asking if that was it.

Will laughed, and this warmed Tara a little. She found herself feeling better than she had in the three weeks since they’d left Gloaming. Maybe it was the cheerfulness of her niece and husband. It was infectious.

And at last, the car slowed as they approached a big, white house set well back from the highway. There was a modest-sized barn out back, a shed, and several willow trees in the wide yard. The land stretched off on both sides of the house into corn fields, and toward the back, into forest.

They pulled into the driveway, drove right up to the house, and got out.

Pandora squealed and ran off to one of the willows where an old tire was hanging from a rope.

“Be careful,” Tara shouted in caution. “Wait until Will checks the rope!”

Pandora paid her no attention, and Will took her hand.

“Don’t worry.”

The young girl was soon sailing back and forth below the sweeping, low branches.

“She likes it,” Will said.

“Yeah, I guess so.” Tara looked up at the house. “It’s big.”

“Four bedrooms, two baths. Well, one-and-a-half baths. And a nice big kitchen, a lot like your mother’s. I wish I could show it to you now. But tomorrow the real estate agent will come to take all three of us on a tour.”

“Can we afford it?” Tara asked.

“Oh, come on! Look at the place!”

Tara looked. She did not want to have to admit she liked it, the white clapboard farmhouse, the red barn not unlike the one the Pruitt sisters once had. The willows swayed gently, and behind the home three jack pines towered.

“The property isn’t as large as it looks. The fields to either side were recently sold to the neighbours. They’ll plant and cultivate it. But the property does go all the way back into those woods, quite a bit. And there’s room for a garden right here. I can dig it for you before the snow falls. It’ll be ready for planting in the spring.”

Tara nodded.

“You can grow anything in this earth,” he assured her. “And look, come this way.”

Will took her by the arm and pulled her around the side of the house. There, just several feet behind the jack pines, was a small apple tree, no taller than three metres.

“Goodland apples,” he told her. “I asked.”

“Perfect for baking,” Tara murmured, reaching to touch a bare branch.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. It’s just hard.”

“I know.”

“You once told me that all memory resides in the soil.”

Will smiled at the thought of that night.

“Well,” Tara went on, trying not to sound panicked. “What if, away from the valley, away from Gloaming, we forget? Won’t we forget?”

“No. The soil is still here beneath us. It’s good soil. I can’t make the apple tree blossom for you. Not now, maybe not ever, but we won’t forget a thing.”

They were silent for a long time.

“I like it. I do,” she assured him after several minutes.

A giggle interrupted them, and they turned to see Pandora kneeling on the ground at the base of the willow she had been swinging from just moments earlier, her ear to the ground.

“Pandora,” said Tara. “What are you doing?”

But she knew what the girl was doing. Tara fought off the notion even as she hoped, and her heart leaped.

“It’s down there,” Pandora said.

They walked toward her, hand in hand. She lifted her head and smiled at them.

“I hear it. It’s down there.”

And as Tara approached the willow, she felt it, a buzzing in the soles of her feet. It was slight, not much, but it was there.

She smiled, and her eyes welled up.

“I guess this is it?” Will asked.

Tara nodded but could not speak. She squeezed his hand instead. And Pandora went back to listening to the earth.