Finch could’ve walked away forever as soon as we hit the sidewalk. He could’ve put me in a cab, ignoring the fact that I had nowhere to go and he knew it. He could’ve used his bottomless bank account to get me a hotel room for the night if he really wanted to go all out.
But he didn’t do any of those things. And somewhere beneath my gratitude and my fear, I couldn’t stop wondering why.
“We have to call the cops. Your stepdad could’ve hurt you.”
I looked at my stupid silent phone and pressed my hands to my chest. It felt like a room squeezing in on itself. “Mom,” I said, raggedly, to the air.
Then Finch had an arm around me again, helping me sit on a low garden wall.
“Hey. Hey. Breathe, okay? Breathe.”
I took shuddering sips of air. I’d never had a panic attack, but Ella used to get them sometimes. She thought she hid them from me, but I knew.
Finch crouched in front of me. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Just breathe.”
His words turned into an irritant, and my body coursed with a sudden fire. I pushed him aside and jumped up, my hands clenching and unclenching and cupping themselves around a phantom cigarette. I saw Ella last night in her cocktail dress, Ella’s sleeping outline in the dark of my room. Ella driving and Ella laughing and Ella’s level brown eyes on mine.
Ever since I was old enough for it, I was the vigilant one, always keeping an eye on the bad luck while Ella did her best to make our squats and claimed corners into a home. But I’d let my guard down. I’d let the bad luck take some unfathomable form and walk right in, and carry Ella away.
“Audrey said the Hinterland took them. What the hell does that mean?”
Finch shook his head apologetically. “I have no idea.”
The street in front of Harold’s apartment looked transformed. The last of the light had died. Everything was shifting shadow, the smell of old smoke, the enervating rustle of half-naked trees. Terror lapped around me and threatened to pull me under. I held it back with motion, with rising anger, with magical thinking: If that light turns green on the count of three, my mother will walk around that corner. It did, but she didn’t.
Finch stood, too, keeping his distance as I paced. “What if—” He stopped talking, waiting for me to ask.
“Spit it out.”
“You’re not gonna like it.”
“There’s nothing here to like. Just say it.” Talking was good. Talking rooted me here, under this streetlight with Finch, instead of racing outward into a wild black galaxy where I couldn’t feel the tug of my mother anywhere.
“What if when she said the Hinterland, she meant the Hinterland.”
“Make sense, Finch. Please.”
“The Hinterland. It’s the place where the stories, you know, connect. They’re all set in the same place.”
He’d snapped into scholar mode, and it helped. The bronchitis squeeze in my chest subsided. “All fairy tales are set in the same place. Once-upon-a-time land.”
“Not Althea’s. There’s a theory…”
I groaned. I’d spent enough time on her message boards, where a mix of fans and folklore scholars swapped theories about the book, to be wary. You’d think she’d be too obscure to have an internet following, but obscurity was half of her appeal. “Oh, my god. You’re deep fan. You’re into the theories?”
That one made it through his optimism. “Yeah, I’m deep fan,” he said sharply, “and suddenly that shit’s exactly what you need. You want to hear it or not?”
I was taken aback, and not in a bad way. I nodded for him to continue.
“So there’s a theory”—he emphasized the word—“about Althea’s disappearance in the sixties. That she was out somewhere collecting the stories, like Alan Lomax did with American folk music. That the Hinterland is a code name for the boonies in some northern country.”
I’d heard that one. It seemed plausible, actually, which was probably why it annoyed me so much.
“So what if that’s the Hinterland Audrey was talking about?” he persisted. “Maybe Althea took a story from someone who’s pissed, someone who wants credit for it, and…”
“And now they’re stalking her family, forty years later?” I finished. “Some, I don’t know, Norwegian herdsman finally made his way to New York to take ancient revenge?”
The redheaded man’s face flickered across my mind’s eye. I should’ve told Finch about him, but I kept thinking of the last part of that Nelson Algren quote: “Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” I was about a mile from sleeping with Finch, but my troubles were becoming his anyway. I didn’t want to pile on more.
He shrugged. “It’s just a theory. It’s got to mean something. They left a page from the book, for god’s sake. Maybe it’s a code.”
“Look, you need to tell me about ‘Alice-Three-Times,’ in case there’s something in it. Any clue on what I’m supposed to do next.”
“Fine. But let’s go somewhere we can be alone.” He saw my face and smiled, tight and brief. “Alone, like, not where my dad and stepmom can hear us. One of them could actually be home by now.”
We ended up at a diner on Seventy-Ninth Street, the kind of place where even a bowl of matzo ball soup costs twelve bucks. That was what Finch ordered, plus a club sandwich with extra pickles on the side. I got pancakes drowning in blueberry syrup, because that’s what I ate at the diner with the red-haired man. They congealed fast on my plate, and failed to bring any repressed memories flooding back.
I kept my phone on the table between us, my heart sinking a little lower every time I looked at its mute black screen. The whole world was bending around the absence of my mother, like light ricocheting off something too dark to illuminate. I saw my face in the bowl of the extra soup spoon the waitress had laid on the table. My eyes were shocked holes.
Finch ate one pickle, put another on the edge of my saucer, and cut the last one in four and tucked each part into a wedge of his sandwich. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I remember about ‘Alice-Three-Times.’”
His recounting was more detailed than I’d hoped it would be, though he kept second-guessing himself and tangling it with other tales. The basic shape of it went like this.