Page 23 of Otto: The Hawthornes

I clenched my hands as he put goop on the end of it and pressed it just below my navel, but it didn’t hurt. Seconds later a little whoosh-whoosh sound filled the room and my breath caught.

“Strong heart beat. 156 beats per minute,” he said to himself.

“So everything is okay?” Aunt Lacy asked quietly.

“It seems so,” he said brusquely. “She should’ve come in months ago.”

“We just found out,” Aunt Lacy replied, looking at me.

I’d never heard my aunt lie before.

“Surely,youknew?” the doctor said, glaring at me. “Do you care nothing for the precious life you’re carrying?”

I just looked at him. What could I say? It hadn’t exactly been my choice.

“Come back in a month,” he ordered with a sigh. “We’ll do an ultrasound then—the technician is only here once a week. Then come every month until the thirty-sixth week. Then it’ll be weekly until the birth.”

“Okay,” I rasped, since he was clearly waiting for a reply that time and was actually talking tome.

My hands shook as I got dressed again. I couldn’t even look at Aunt Lacy after the doctor had gone. She hadn’t warned me or reassured me. She’d just sat there while he poked and prodded, his face a foot away from a place that only one other person had even gotten close to. I felt like I was going to throw up or scream.

I ignored everyone as we walked back outside, my clothes didn’t feel like enough protection from the eyes that followed us. I wanted my big jacket, the one I’d left in the cabin. I was freezing.

“All set?” Uncle Hank asked as soon as we’d climbed back into the car.

“Yes,” Aunt Lacy replied. “Everything is fine.”

“Good,” he replied. “Good.”

Everything was not fine. None of it was fine. I wanted to yell. Scream. Reach forward and start swinging. I didn’t care which of them I hit, either would do.

“We’ll stop and get you more supplies on our way out of town,” Uncle Hank said, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.

I ignored him, clenching my hands together in my lap. I just wanted to get as far from the two of them as possible. I didn’t care if I was going to the cabin or the moon as long as they’d leave me alone.

I wasn’t allowed out of the car as Uncle Hank stocked up on supplies at the store, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t want to see anyone anyway. I was dying to get back to my little place in the woods. The world that had felt comforting just a couple hours before now felt loud and intrusive.

The ride back went by quickly as I dozed in the back seat, surrounded by paper grocery bags and jugs of water. If I’d had any doubt that I would be at the cabin for a while that was long gone. I’d seen the amount of food and small containers of propane Uncle Hank had filled the trunk and back seat with. Well, I knew I wouldn’t starve. That was something at least.

We carried everything inside in silence. Aunt Lacy was ordered to stay in the car, probably so she wouldn’t see the inside of the cabin. And then, as quickly as they’d shown up, they were gone and I was alone again.

I went straight to my wash bucket and went about setting up a bath. Even though my hair felt clean and soft and the rest of me smelled like Becka’s body wash, I felt dirtier than I’d been when I left the cabin that morning.

Standing naked, my skin pink from scrubbing, I suddenly froze and glanced around the cabin. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was, everything was how I’d left it, but something wasoff. Someone had been there.

I glanced at the door to make sure that it was bolted shut and slowly spun in a circle, cataloging everything. The sleeping bag was still neatly rolled at the end of the couch, the food in the kitchen still stacked how I’d left it, the floor littered with the new bags I hadn’t unloaded yet. My suitcase still sat closed against the wall. I stopped, my eyes on the wood stacked next to the fireplace. The top two pieces were missing. I remembered them because when I’d stacked them that morning they had rolled off the top of the stack because each had a knot in the center that had made them hard as heck to split and made them weirdly shaped. I looked at the fire, which was still burning and shouldn’t have been.

Quickly, I started for my suitcase, and my foot caught on a little lip in the floor that I’d never tripped on before. I’d paced that cabin a thousand times in my stocking feet, and I’d never once snagged my foot. Cautiously, I knelt down, shivering, and ran my fingers along the floorboards.

It was a trap door that I would’ve never noticed in a million years, except whoever had been in the cabin hadn’t closed it properly.

I got dressed quickly, putting on boots and a coat in case I needed to run, and grabbed the pistol my dad had left me. It had seemed strange when he’d set it down on the kitchen counter before he left—why in the world would I need a pistol—but the weight of it in my hand felt suddenly comforting.

Then I threw open the trap door with one hand.

I shouldn’t have bothered—with the clothes or the pistol—because there was no one inside the little room under the floor. My jaw dropped open as I looked around the space and the stacks and stacks of crates, some open and some closed. The open ones were filled with rifles, not the kind my dad used for hunting, the kind that looked like something out of the future.

I dropped to my butt, stunned, as I stared down into the room. Where in God’s name had they come from and why were they there?

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