Page 44 of Mazywood

“That’s not gonna happen,” Imani said. Sharise looked resolute, so Imani tried the one thing she never wanted to say: “You’re right. Something’s going on with Mom and Daddy.”

Sharise’s eyes widened. Her face wavered with relief, grief, pity. “You see it too?”

Imani nodded. She was only half lying this time; yes, she had noticed that Daddy especially wasn’t acting like himself. And Mom was running to the bathroom a lot, which could be to hide her crying. But Imani wasn’t ready to leap to the conclusion that they were getting a divorce, which sounded like a typical Sharise panic attack.

“Something’s wrong,” Imani said. “And if you’re right… I don’t want to ruin everything good on this trip over a dumb deer. If it’s… the last trip… you know? As a family.” Imani was surprised to feel her throat tighten in a suppressed sob. Maybe she did believe it.

“Imani…” Sharise said in a voice so sad that Imani could have just confessed that she had a deadly disease. Sharise pulled Imani close to hug her. Imani wasn’t wild about hugs, especially tight ones, but she allowed her big sister to fuss over her. She was warm, anyway. “I’ll always be here for you. No matter what. Okay?”

“Cool,” Imani said. “So, you won’t say anything?”

Sharise glanced at her almost as if she suspected she was being played. But when Sharise studied Imani’s eyes, whatever she saw convinced her.

“No coming out here alone, got it?” Sharise said. “Ever.”

“Promise!” Imani said. “Only with you. To board.”

“All right,” Sharise said. “The deer head is our secret.”

When Sharise said deer head, Imani took another step away from the woods just beyond the boulder, trying to avoid accidentally seeing the deer’s frigid grave.

But she couldn’t unsee the severed head’s blindly staring white eye.

Fifteen

THE NARROW DOOR TO HIS grandmother’s “powder room” was open at the end of the long downstairs hall. Mazelle Washington’s red, fur-lined robe swayed in the doorway, no longer on the living room mannequin. Johnny felt his past bearing down on him with every step toward the robe’s fur-weighted hemline.

“Suits you,” he said to Tasha.

Tasha whirled around, startled. Her hands moved to her shoulders, as if to take off the robe. She had turned on two of the surviving bulbs on his grandmother’s vanity table, the only real furniture in the room. She posed in a mirror so dusty that it hid her face.

“I’m sorry, I planned to ask you…” she said. “Is this too old for me to wear?”

“No, keep it on. It’s like… that Alice Walker story?”

“ ‘Everyday Use,’ ” Tasha said, because of course she knew. She smiled at him, impressed by his reference from Af-Am Lit. He didn’t remember the story well, but it had resonated with him in grad school because it reminded him of his mother’s relationship with Bear Creek Lodge, always held at a distance, a tradition he had followed. The story argued that family mementos should not be stored like artifacts. Or hidden away, Johnny thought ruefully.

The rabbit fur grazed Johnny’s fingers as he gently caught the robe to prevent Tasha from easing it off. No one in their family wore fur. The presence of real animal fur made the garment feel alive, and not just because of the way it shook loose so many jarring, fragmented images of his grandmother. The folds of fabric under the sleeves had unfurled like a bat’s wings the first night he spent in this room.

God, he could even smell her. Had the robe retained her scent this long?

“You’re sure?” Tasha asked, seeing everything unsaid in his face, as always.

Sometimes Johnny felt annoyed when Tasha second-guessed his responses: I said it, didn’t I? But they both knew how he felt about Mazelle, even if she didn’t know everything yet. It was more than fair to ask.

“I’m sure. It’s probably good for me.”

Tasha smiled, hunching her shoulders so the fur collar would nuzzle her cheeks. “Good, because this thing feels decadent and divine,” she said. “If it had been mine, I would’ve worn it everywhere. In the yard. Movies. The grocery store.”

“Not in L.A.,” Johnny said, chuckling, and the sound of his own mirth made him realize that Tasha was already a kind of tonic for this room. He’d physically flinched when he opened this door with Hollman two years ago, barely giving the room a glance. The doorway wasn’t six feet high, which he hadn’t noticed when he was a kid. With Tasha and the vanity table inside, he didn’t have room to fit, much less stand up straight. But he could see its shape in the flickering light.

Of all the spaces in Bear Creek Lodge, this one might have changed the least. This room smelled its age. The space was narrow and windowless, an afterthought. Maybe she’d intended it to be a glorified closet that morphed into storage. It was hard to imagine Mazelle sitting in front of this vanity mirror in such a dreary room instead of her more luxurious master bathroom down the hall. She’d called it a “powder room” with that gold star on the door as a prop for visitors who saw it, but that wasn’t its true function.

“This is where she made me sleep,” Johnny said quietly.

Tasha looked at him with alarm that reminded Johnny of the way his mother had looked at him when he told her what happened on his visit. “But why? There are so many other rooms.”

“In fact, she promised Mom I could sleep in one of the cabins with Uncle Ricky,” Johnny said. “Mom didn’t want me to spend the night under Mazelle’s roof. But as soon as I got here, Mazelle was like, ‘This is all you.’ And said I would sleep in here.”