Page 104 of The Vanishing Place
Effie lay onher back, her red hair splayed like roots through the undergrowth as she looked up at the rimu trees. Giants that had been born into darkness, into the dirt, but that had crawled out of the cracks to fill the skies.
She curled her fingers into the damp soil, digging hard and deep enough that the earth clogged under her fingernails and the bush seeped into her. She a part of it, and it a part of her. A girl made of dirt and possum shit, tangled in the roots.
The highest branches moved with the breeze, the long leaves swinging and dancing, while the lower branches had withered and fallen to the forest floor with her, decaying like old bones.
No crawling out. No reaching the skies.
Effie wiped a dirty hand over her top, her newly inflated breasts pulling the material tight, and she whispered into the air.
“I’m scared, Lewis.” She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes and swallowed. “If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it, then kick you in the balls. But…I’m scared.”
She blinked away tears, then bit into her tongue.
Her thirteenth birthday had come and gone. Then her fourteenth. The exact days were hard to tell. But she’d watched the kowhai treesflower in spring, their drooping branches bursting with color. In autumn, they’d darkened with the cold, and by winter the tui had deserted them. In August, with the approach of spring, the trees had shed their darkened leaves, and the color returned.
Two springs. Twenty-two months.
Just bush and trees and nothing. No mention of school. No trip to Koraha. No June. No Lewis. Just trees.
Dad lived as a shadow, dark and untouchable. A phantom that haunted the corners of the hut.
“He’s keeping us here, Lewis.”
Effie sniffed.
“He’s forbidden us to leave.”
—
Another full moon passed, shining as bright as the sun, but the light just made the shadows darker.
One moon, then another. Month after month.
Effie stood in the hut—in her prison—gazing out the window. The kahikatea and totara stretched their long limbs to the skies, swaying and toying with the wind. The totara leaves had already turned yellow with the warming air, but the color taunted her, and Dad’s stomping boots and clenched fists pissed on any pleasure the summer might bring.
She sighed and turned from the window. Then she spooned up a serving of lentils and vegetables and placed the bowl in front of Four. She made sure that Tia and Four ate three times a day and that they washed at least twice a week. Four had shot up in the last year, his pants no longer reaching his ankles, and he was always dirty. Dirt stuck to six-year-old boys like sap to tree bark.
“You need to eat the green stuff too,” she said.
Dad came to the hut less and less, preferring the company of trees and feral pigs to his children. And when he did, Effie didn’tlet him eat with them. She left his meals on the deck. He’d starve otherwise. Since Aiden’s death, Dad had shriveled away, a skeleton moving beneath skin, his cheeks hollowed out to shallow caves. Effie half expected to find him slumped dead against a tree, his body wet with booze and vomit.
As they bent over their bowls, swallowing down the tasteless goop, Tia talked about summer flowers and fantails and warm river swims. And as their spoons scraped the bottom of their bowls, Dad’s footsteps climbed the outside steps.Thud. Thud. Thud. Then the door creaked open.
“I have fish,” he said, holding his offering up in the doorway. “The boy needs protein.”
Effie didn’t turn. “I made him lentils,” she said.
“It’s fresh.”
She didn’t look at him. She didn’t acknowledge him as family, as the man whose blood matched her own.
“He needs—”
“You don’t know shit about what he needs.” Effie spun around and glared at him, the hut silenced.
He set the bucket on the floor, metal clanging wood, then walked out.
Dad always went hunting after he’d had a bad night. Effie touched a hand to the soft blue of her arm. He always brought them fish or meat after he’d hurt her. After the ugly drink, and empty bottles left discarded on the floor.
