The Valley and the Flood by Rebecca Mahoney (10 best books of all time TXT) 📗

word in our vocabulary for what I saw. I wonder if they ever had a name. I wonder if anyone else ever knew it.

Christie eyes me for a moment. “You don’t seem that surprised.”

“I have a good poker face,” I say faintly.

“You don’t have to be so polite.” She swings her arms behind her back, clasping her hands. The shadows don’t move with her. “This is new to you. I get that. If you have something to ask, ask.”

“Okay . . .” Carefully, to test it, I move my foot into the classroom without touching the floor. The shadows ripple for a moment, as if unsure what to do. Then the tangle of his limbs recedes, creating a bare spot of floor right before my toes.

I laugh and slowly transfer my weight into the circle. Thanks, Rudy.

“So I’m guessing you’d like to start with how,” Christie says.

“And how long,” I say.

“Ten years,” she says.

“Ten—” I swallow the rest of the sentence. “Where did he come from?”

Part of him disconnects from the floor and reaches up—off the ground, the limb rounds out, turns solid and three-dimensional—and comes to rest on her shoulder. She scratches at the underside, and his whole body shivers with delight. When he withdraws, satisfied, the limb flattens and slides to the linoleum, melting back into the maze of shadow.

“Well,” she says. “Not all of us get a prophecy to give us the heads-up. By the time I noticed him, he was already there.”

I shift from foot to foot. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Rudy slide farther back, giving me a little more space. “Were you scared?”

“No more than I already was at the time.” She eyes me, her face impassive. “I was far away from home back then. Far away from everyone who cared about me, with someone I shouldn’t have trusted as much as I did.

“Cassie must have told you that for all the differences between our neighbors, there’s one thing that unites them. They’re born from change—sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always irreversible. But it doesn’t have to be an earth-shattering change. Sometimes it’s just in that moment a relationship drops all pretenses. Becomes as ugly as it always was, deep down.”

She smiles and shrugs. “I’m Lotus Valley born and bred. Some of us go our whole lives without seeing a neighbor up close, let alone have a hand in creating one, but you’re always a little ready for it, you know? So when I stepped out of my building back then and my shadow filled a whole block, it felt like the logical conclusion.”

There’s a sharp crunch. I flinch, Christie doesn’t. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that Rudy appears to be chewing up a takeout container from the trash. So I guess those were mouths.

“Rudy,” Christie says, mildly chiding. “Gross.”

He curls around her ankles, chastened.

“I couldn’t understand him,” she says. “Or make him understand me. But there’s one more thing our neighbors have in common. Like any living thing, there’s always going to be something they need to survive. And like we need food and light and water to live? Rudy seemed to need to protect me.

“He wasn’t violent with my boyfriend, at first. I think he just wanted to scare him.” Christie’s smile drops, and for a moment, I see myself in that car last night, blank-faced and shivering. “Sometimes I think Rudy learned that violence from him. Because when my boyfriend escalated, so did Rudy.”

For a moment, Rudy looks bigger. One of his arms crosses in front of the window, casting the room into brief but total shadow. “I don’t know if I was afraid before,” Christie says. “But I was then.”

“What changed?” I ask slowly.

Catching the look on my face, she laughs. “Believe it or not, I don’t know much more than you do about things like Rudy. I don’t know if they think or feel like we do, or have a sense of right and wrong. For all I know, Rudy wouldn’t have thought much of anything about taking a life. Lotus Valley and the people here, we don’t have any special insight into them, exactly. They’re from everywhere, just like we are. They want different things, just like we do. But the only thing we really have in common is that we’re drawn, in the end, to the same little town.”

She’s thoughtful for a moment. “I know it’s not my fault he exists. But he came from me. So I wanted him to be something good.

“So I left that boyfriend, and that town. And maybe we both felt this place pulling us home, but it was more than that. I felt like whatever we were capable of together, we’d find it here. And on that road I could feel us both getting softer. He liked the car engine. He liked stealing fries out of my bag. And by the fourth motel, I stopped worrying that he was going to hurt someone. When I told him to stop, or calm down, he’d listen.”

She chews on her lower lip. “And he still listens, for the most part. But if there’s a threat that’s beyond my capability to handle . . . it doesn’t leave him much choice.”

“And you never tried to get rid of him?” I say it softly, like there’s any way Rudy might not hear.

She pauses. “Maggie Williams told you about our charter here.”

“To never turn away a soul in need,” I say.

“We didn’t have that charter when I was growing up,” she says. “There was this understanding, like we didn’t have a choice but to try to get along. And not everyone here is like Cassie, you know? Some of us don’t know yet what our particular strangeness is. My family’s been here for so long, we’ve forgotten what drew us to Lotus Valley in the first place.

“I did wonder at first how to make Rudy leave.” She smiles down at the floor. “But welcoming him in—getting to understand him, and understand what we could