“Sounds familiar,” River said.

“He didn’t even say goodbye,” Ellis said.

“If you think that day you said goodbye somehow helped, it didn’t,” River said. “It actually traumatized me pretty bad.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I regretted leaving you,” Ellis said.

“Then why didn’t you come back?”

“So many reasons. The divorce, Irene—”

“Irene only stuck around for about three months,” River said.

“It was a lot more than her and the divorce. Even after I got off the drugs and booze, I was sick with guilt about losing the baby. And by then, I’d been away for a long time. I was afraid coming back into your lives would hurt more than help.”

“You could have come back,” River said.

“Maybe. But something happened . . .”

“What?” Jasper asked.

Ellis looked too fragile to stand. She sat on the couch next to Raven.

“I was . . . attacked by two men in a campground. They stabbed me in the side.”

“Holy shit,” River whispered.

Tears dripped down her cheeks. “I almost let myself die from an infection. At first, I didn’t go to a hospital. I thought maybe I deserved to die. But I was scared, too. I was afraid you and your father would find out.”

“Why would that matter?” Jasper asked.

“I don’t know! I was screwed up! Do you see why I left you? Even when I wasn’t on drugs, I made bad decisions. I could barely keep myself alive, let alone take care of two little children. I loved you boys too much to come anywhere near you. To keep myself from wanting you, I made myself relive the day I left Viola in the woods. Over and over. It was like an actual circle of Hell.”

It always came back to that. To the day Mama found the baby with raven hair and eyes. Her dream daughter. Her miracle.

Jasper had tears in his eyes. River stared forcefully at Raven. As if to say, Do you see what that crazy lady who took you did to us?

Ellis continued her story. “I had bad anxiety after the assault. For a while, I couldn’t drive. I was having panic attacks.”

Like Jackie after his father died.

“That was how I ended up in Gainesville,” she said. “A friend from college lived there. I stayed with her for two years. She was the one who encouraged me to get into plant nursery work.”

“And by then, no way were you coming back,” River said.

“That’s right,” she said. “I felt better. I thought I was healing, and I supposed you two were. To come back to you then, to dredge it all up again, might have been a disaster for all of us. Or so I told myself.”

She clasped her hands and looked down at them. “But it wasn’t like you said before—as if my children were files on a computer I’d deleted.”

“You thought about us?” Jasper asked.

She stared at her knotted hands. “Trees can do this amazing thing called Compartmentalization of Decay. When they get an injury, the cells around the wound change and put up a wall that contains the process of decay. Around that wall, a different kind of change in the cells forms another wall. Then a third wall. And a fourth.”

She looked at Jasper and River. “Down the hill, there’s a huge live oak that has a big hollow in its trunk, but the tree is thriving. The protective walls allowed the growth of wood to continue around the injury even as it turned hollow.”

“So you’re basically saying you’re a rotten tree?” River said.

“I’m saying that’s a better metaphor for what happened. I didn’t discard you. You’ve always been there, at the core of me. But enclosed in a way that let me survive the pain.”

“Shit, now I’m the rotten tree,” River said.

“Not rotten. Go out there tomorrow and look at how beautiful that oak is.”

He had no joke to follow.

“I’m not saying the walls I put up were good, and I’m not saying they were bad. This is simply how some people survive trauma. Maybe it’s how this whole family got to where we are today.”

“Sounds about right to me,” River said. “A family of hollow trees.” He drained his beer. “At this point, my stomach is so hollow, I’d eat shite-tan.”

“I’d go back to cooking if y’all would stop fighting for five minutes,” Ellis said.

“Oh my god, you say y’all now?” River said.

“Stay here a few more days, and it’ll infect you, too.”

“We need to get out of here,” he said to Jasper.

“Not till we do the gator-wrestling thing,” Jasper said.

Raven wondered what they were talking about. But for a moment, there was peace between them, and that was enough.

6

ELLIS

“Your daughter works as hard as you do,” Tom said.

She did. Raven was very like her in that respect. She enjoyed physical work, especially as a way of managing stress. Raven was always moving—out walking, helping with the nursery plants, or cleaning, doing laundry, or cooking in the house. When she was inactive, she was engaged with schoolwork or a novel. Ellis sensed her perpetual need to keep active helped her cope with being thrown from one life into another she didn’t want.