The Cherished by Patricia Ward

The Cherished by Patricia Ward

Author:Patricia Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00


Thirteen

Tom stands with his long ropy arms hanging and his head bent. He bears no expression, staring into the blackness of the cellar as if listening or waiting for something.

“She broke the ward,” he announces at last. “Door’s open.”

Jo gets slowly to her feet, the strange words muddling inside her head. Ward is from storybooks and fairy tales. Door could mean the trapdoor. But he means a different one, she knows. The one down below, where she found the raggedy bits of wing now scattered across the stone floor.

“Did you move the iron?” Hattie asks. She sounds frantic.

“I—I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

Hattie wipes her teary face with her forearm, then she clambers down the steps into the cellar. Tom stands aside, staring after her.

There is a door to another world, her daddy incanted in his storytelling voice. That was always the beginning, the words themselves a door to the magic closeness with him, to tales about fairies and children playing and singing and eating as much ice cream as they wanted. She used to imagine herself dancing into that world in a pretty dress, like the girl in Oz.

He never said it was that gash in the rocks, filled with blackness and cold.

Her mind isn’t working right. What she’s thinking is impossible. It has to be.

Hattie comes back up the steps. “It’s all there,” she says.

Jo feels dumbly relieved, as if she did something right. Tom nods, rubbing his jaw, then he nudges the trapdoor with his boot. For a moment it stands vertical, then it drops. Jo shrinks in anticipation of the bang, but instead the door lands on his other waiting boot. He releases the door with barely a thud. Hattie at once steps onto it and paces back and forth, making sure it’s fully closed. Tom watches her. When she’s finished, she looks at him with a pinched, scared expression. “It should’ve lasted longer.”

“She went poking around,” Tom says, as if Jo isn’t right there.

His remote, indifferent demeanor is somehow worse than Hattie’s panic. “I’m sorry,” Jo whispers. They look at her, so she blurts, by way of an excuse, “We had to come in—we have to get the house ready to show!”

She shouldn’t have said that. Of course she shouldn’t have. Tom’s face hardens. His gaze travels the tattered, dark wing pieces strewn across the floor, his mouth twisted and bitter.

“That may be,” he says. “Door’s still open till it gets closed.”

“What does that mean?”

He ignores her, prods Hattie toward the outside. “We’ve got market to get to.”

Jo stumbles behind them. She almost falls, her body weak as jelly. Outside in the hot sun, Tom slams the door and bars it and claps the padlock shut. “Won’t make a difference but a small delay,” he says, turning around and handing her the key. “Your mama should leave.”

The words don’t register for a long, hot, sunbaked minute. Jo takes in his brown, angled face, the thinness of his lips. His lashes are unusually long and dark.



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