Once he had turned the car onto the narrow, hidden path, Wes drove slowly, less out of patience than necessity. What may have once been a well-traveled road had become little more than an overgrown trail, nearly filled in by weeds and saplings. Branches scraped along the doors and roof making eerie screaming sounds.
“I don’t like this place,” she said.
“Come on. This’ll be awesome. Trust me.” He gave her thigh a squeeze, playful, but firm enough to convey his power.
A cold numbness blossomed in her chest. The daylight flickered as it filtered down through the canopy of the trees. The effect was hypnotizing. The past, as it sometimes did, reached up from somewhere in the dark and pulled her back into its deep, swift waters.
“You’re a tough girl, Juniper Bowe,” Gertie tells her. “You can do anything you want when you grow up. Don’t let anyone tell you who you are.” Like a writer of fortune cookies, she has a million affirmations to offer her daughter, even though she herself puts up with a man who makes her less than herself. Who takes so many things away.
Todd lands in their lives not long after Juniper’s father decides to chase a twenty-year-old stripper to Vegas and leave his family to the wolves. Gertie quickly agrees to marriage, and while Todd does provide a trailer and a steady income, he takes her friends, her job, her freedom.
It is multiple sclerosis that eventually takes her life. But it may as well have been Todd.
“If you die,” this eleven-year-old version of Juniper tells her mother near the end, “I want to die too.”
“Are you kidding me? And deprive this world of your cooking? That there is a gift you’ve got. Straight from your grandma, to me, to you.”
Juniper lets her shaking head fall, unable to meet her mother’s eyes.
“Listen here, Junebug. This life is a race. Ok? Now, there’s no doubt you got a bad start, right out of the gate. Not your fault. There’s just always going to be folks who get out ahead of the pack. People who are born with money. Born with connections. They get a head start. But, girl…”
Gertie waits, silent, until her daughter looks up again.
“You’re a fast one. You hear me? You’re a goddam fast one.”
Juniper’s lip trembles and her eyes sparkle with tears.
“You got some catching up to do.” Gertie is crying now too. “What I want more than anything is for you to run. Just keep on running. You’ll see. You’ll start passing up these others. The lazy ones. The entitled ones. They won’t have what you have. They won’t have a runner’s heart.”
She sits on the bed and they cuddle close, hiding their pained faces from each other for a moment.
“You’re a goddam fast one,” she repeats, her words warm on Juniper’s shoulder. “You run like hell.”
Two weeks later Gertie is in the ground, leaving a meager bank account, and her daughter, to a man who only knows how to take. Despite what some suspect, Todd never lays a hand on her. Psychological warfare is his game. In the boot camp that her life suddenly becomes, it is straight home from school, laundry, scrub floors and toilet, cook a dinner that she later scrapes most of into the garbage, homework, and lights out at 1700 hours. Constant criticism of her work, her body, her words. She is the dumbest, weakest, most worthless piece of dirt. No friends allowed. No TV allowed.
“You’re in this man’s Army, girl.”
The first time that she voices any resistance, he brings her straight to the Mercy Hospital Emergency Department and tells them that she has, in her fresh grief, attempted to hang herself in the bathroom. She is admitted to the pediatric behavioral hospital, known by many as Ward B, where she spends two weeks being fed a steady diet of Bible verses and soggy vegetables. On the third night a teenage boy twice her size comes into her room and manages to get most of her clothes off before staff intervenes.
For the next seven years she lives as a ghost in public and a servant in private. “Get me a beer and take out that trash. I get any lip from you and it’s straight back to Ward B. Got it?”
“Okay,” she says, and her mantra is born. “Whatever you say.”
“Hell yeah,” Wes shouted, yanking her out of the past with his words like a tug on a leash. The thick cover of trees had opened up to reveal a crumbling gate made of two stone columns and twists of arching wrought iron. The sky had darkened to pewter and raindrops were playing a sparse percussion on the roof.
He killed the ignition and smacked the steering wheel. “We found it,” he said, turning to pull his bag from the back seat.
He proceeded to take out a slim camera, checking the battery and the storage card, then handed her a GoPro with a head strap and a light. “You wear this so you can record me while I’m filming.”
“Uh,” she began to protest, then thought better of it. She untwisted the elastic bands and adjusted the fit. “What is it that we’re looking for again?”
Wes was already out of the car, a narrow sling bag hung over one shoulder and across his chest. He bent and stuck his face back in, pulling the keys out of the steering column and giving her a wild look. “Buried fuckin’ treasure.”
Buried, she thought. He said buried.
He dropped the keys into the bag and zipped it up.
Thick leaves had turned the fence and gate into a lumpy green curtain, hiding whatever might be on the other side. He began tearing at the branches and vines, pulling and separating and searching for a way through.
“Wait,” he commanded, then reached toward her head. Juniper flinched, her hands coming up defensively. “Relax. I just need to turn this thing on.” He pressed a button and she heard a series of beeps. He then switched on his own camera, attached to the end of a stabilizing handle. “Dig it. We’re rolling.” He cleared his throat and turned to her.
“Yo guys, what’s up. This is ya boy Wes, aka the Ghost King. That’s right. I’m up here in the hills, way out in BFE, about to dominate a new legend. This one’s gonna blow your minds. You ready? I hope so. Cause this is the Legend of the Undergrave.”
“Why do you have to talk like that,” she asked. “And what is the Undergrave?”
He stopped and turned back. “I need to be in character. And you can’t interrupt like that. I’m going to have to edit that out.” He was unaware of his fists, tightened into angular balls of bone and skin. Juniper was not. “We’re just here to look around, get some footage of this old ass cemetery, and make a killer video that will go straight exponential. Now, just follow me and record. Quietly.”
The rain was coming down harder. They pushed their way into the twisted vines and then through the gate hidden beneath the growth. For a moment, it was very dark under the wall of leaves, and Juniper had the sensation that they were inside the stomach of some huge beast.
They parted the brush on the far side and stepped out, as if through a portal, into a gothic, decrepit land.
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Juniper's story seems like a genetic/pathological tragedy. I'm rooting for her!