“I’m not bringing it inside,” Helen said. “No way is it coming into the house.”

    She held the bundle, fingers plucking at the string, thinking she just needed to give it a tug, unwrap it, see what was inside, but did she really want to know?

No. She did not. She did not want to see what was inside.

Whatever it was, it was awful. She knew that. She could feel it: danger flowing through her fingers like venom from a sting.

“You want me to open it?” Nate said.

“No,” Helen told him. “I can do it.”

The bundle, she believed, had been left for her. For her, because she was the one who’d heard the scream.

She took a deep breath, reminded herself that she was the new Helen. The Helen who was going to live in Vermont and build her own house, learn to kill her own chickens, wield an ax, grow her own food. Helen with the strength of the pioneers. The brave Helen. She could do this.

She tugged on the string, untied it, gently pulled back the folds to see what was inside as Nate shone the light on it.

“What the fuck?” Helen gasped, nearly dropping the bundle (not just dropping it, but throwing it to the ground, trying to get it as far away from her as possible).

But she held tight.

There was a bit of dried grass making a small nest, and in the center, two objects rested: a rusted old square nail and a yellowy-white tooth.

Nate leaned in, reached for the tooth. “A molar,” he said. “From an ungulate.”

“A what?” Helen said.

“A sheep or a deer, maybe.”

“Well, what’s it doing all wrapped up on our front steps?” Helen demanded.

Nate thought a minute, rubbed at the stubble on his chin, which made a faint scratching noise. “I don’t know,” he said, leaning back in and picking up the nail. “This is old. Looks like hand-forged iron.”

“Again, I ask, ‘What the hell is it doing on our front steps?’?” Helen said.

“Maybe it was here all along,” Nate suggested. “In the trailer. And we kicked it out.”

Helen shook her head. “We cleaned. We swept. We would have noticed it.”

    “Maybe it’s a gift,” Nate said.

“A gift from whom? Who would leave us something like this?” Her voice rose in pitch, alarmed but not quite hysterical. She wondered how Nate could be so calm—as if someone had left a batch of welcome-to-the-neighborhood muffins on their front steps.

Nate rubbed his stubble again. Scratch, scratch, scratch. “Someone who’s trying to freak us out?” He looked at her, saw the mounting panic on her face, and pulled her into a tight embrace.

“Well, they’re doing a damn good job,” Helen said, looking over his shoulder, scanning the tree line again, sure that someone (something) was out there, smiling a wicked little smile.

CHAPTER 4

Olive

MAY 19, 2015

Olive danced around the kitchen making breakfast. Daddy wasn’t downstairs yet, but he needed to be out the door in half an hour, so she was sure he’d be popping in at any minute, looking for coffee. And wouldn’t he be surprised when he saw the special breakfast she’d made?

A busy beaver, that’s what Mama used to say when she saw Olive working hard at something. Aren’t you a busy beaver.

Olive smiled. She was an industrious girl. That was a word from a vocabulary sheet a while ago, back when she did her homework regularly.

Industrious.

The old metal percolator was on the back of the stove, bubbling away. They used to have a Mr. Coffee coffeepot, but Mama liked the old-fashioned blue-and-white enameled percolator they used for camping better, so the electric one was put out at a yard sale. Mama loved yard sales—having them, stopping at them. Every spring, she cleaned the house, dragged a whole assortment of things out to the driveway, and set them up on rickety card tables: clothes, books, kitchen things, old toys, funny knickknacks. Stuff Olive was sure no one would want, but people always came and bought it. Then, over the summer, Mama would refill the house with treasures picked up from other people’s yard sales. Sometimes Olive was sure her mother was buying back things she’d sold at her own sale; just this weird cycle of things coming and going from their house. Olive had a boomerang her dad had given her for her birthday. She came to believe that some objects were like that boomerang—they went out, then found their way right back where they started from. Some things didn’t want to let go.

Using the percolator, hearing it bubble up like a living thing as it filled the kitchen with its warm coffee smell, reminded her of Mama.

    Olive had taken to drinking coffee since Mama left; like her mother, she took it sweet with lots of milk. The first time she had it, she didn’t put enough milk and sugar in, and the bitterness made her insides pucker. She had a big cup and her heart raced like a rocket engine. But she learned to pour in plenty of milk, and soon, she found her body craving the jolt the early-morning coffee gave her. She’d taken to it just like she’d taken to a lot of things: cooking, making sure the dishes got done, making sure Daddy was up and out the door to make it to work on time each morning. And the renovations. The endless ripping down of drywall, moving of walls. The way she and Daddy would change something all around, only to put it back just the way it had been a month later.