Eyes of the Innocent

1

Jamie Greaves once lived in a house, but she burned it down on the night of her fifteenth birthday. Now sixteen, she lives alone in a tent with the company of forest animals and the distant, remembered screams of her dying family.
There are nights when she dreams, although seldom do the nightmares end without bloodshed. She has seen so much of it in real life that even sleep cannot repress the images.
Because she often sleepwalks, Jamie wears a rope tied around her ankle and affixed to a stake buried deep within the ground beside her tent. She frequently wakes in the wilderness, but always within the circumference allowed by the rope: her dream-self has not yet learned to untie knots.
In one year, she has made her tent as close to a home as possible. It is a high-end camping model, and contains two sectioned rooms. She has reinforced the walls and ceiling with wood from lumber yards, and through various exploits in the city’s alleys and swap meets, has acquired numerous pieces of furniture: a foldable camping chair, a twin-sized mattress, two lanterns, silverware, many books, canned food, a battery-powered DVD player, a small mirror, multiple changes of clothes, a makeup kit, an acoustic guitar, and an ax.
She also has a refrigerator and small portable stove, which runs because there is a gas-powered generator outside the tent. She has figured out that it is only necessary to run the generator at night and for five hours during the day, just enough to keep the food in the mini-fridge from spoiling. There is a gas can next to the gennie that she fills on occasion.
Jamie is not magic. She has no superhuman abilities. Instead of sorcery and chanted spells, she uses a rusty old Chevy pickup and her own wits to pack the supplies from the city to her tent. She has no driver’s license, but most people mistake her for a college student; long brown hair and a womanly figure give her the façade she needs to travel unnoticed.
Her tent is miles from the nearest house, at the base of majestic mountains. Every time she returns from the city, after parking the truck, she retraces her route back to the main road almost a quarter mile away, scattering leaves and twigs over her fresh tire tracks. Visitors are rare, but she takes no chances.
Only Aaron has seen her hideout, but he will not tell anyone.
This is her life.
Often times, after eating breakfast, Jamie climbs up the ravine behind her tent, through tumbling underbrush and rocky passages, until she reaches a place she has named Lookout Rock. The rock stands atop a small knoll that is free of trees. From here, she can look upon the crowded evergreens carpeting the hillsides, marveling at the sinuous way in which the forest moves as wind coils through.
She also takes comfort in seeing the many miles between her and the nearest house, which looks like a miniature model from this distance. The city, almost beyond sight, is usually a smeared collection of colors and quick-moving dots all blended together, as if the entire thing has been erected from candle wax that is melting in the sun.
Jamie spends her days exploring and working. She washes her clothes in a nearby stream, and hangs them up to dry on cables that she has spread between two trees. She bathes in the stream as well, yelping and shivering at the icy water.
She has a mirror and a comb, and takes care to keep a presentable appearance. If ever an emergency trip to the city is necessary, she needs to be able to blend in. Therefore, she clips her fingernails, plucks her eyebrows, combs her hair and often braids it, sews any rips in her clothes, and does not wear her city clothes while doing daily chores.
She is not, after all, a cave woman.
These grooming tasks keep her feeling human.
Two or three nights a week, she watches movies on her DVD player. Unlike other sixteen-year-old girls, Jamie will not watch anything but horror, fantasy, and science fiction. She prefers horror.
Once, she made the mistake of buying a popular romantic comedy. The plot was interesting, but she was in tears through most of it, and that night was plagued by violent fits of sobbing and nightmares that woke her in screams.
Movies can remind her of what she lost. Any heightened, reality-based scenario triggers horrible grief and remorse, and the sentimentality of most modern films is even worse. Because horror flicks are populated by demons, ghosts, and creatures that do not—and cannot—exist, they are safely removed enough from real life that Jamie can watch them without tearing up.
One of her favorite movies is Predator, with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It doesn’t remind her either of the past or of any grief. She has watched it at least thirty times.
This is her life.
Most people, if they saw her residence, might view her as a feral teen who howls at the moon, who lets her armpit hair grow until it can be braided, who can’t form a coherent sentence, and who doesn’t know what a computer is. They would see the paths that she has made in the forest, observe the way some animals eat out of her hand like household pets, and they would look upon her with pity. She must be wild, that one, they would whisper. One of those children raised by wolves.
They would be wrong. Jamie is neither stupid nor uncivilized. On any given day, she can put on her favorite blue dress, drive to the city, and pass as the daughter of a high-class lawyer or businessman.
Her solitude is voluntary. People scare her. She doesn’t like being around anyone, even Aaron, but his visits are not negotiable.
Like movies, people remind her of what she lost. Of what she did.
Some nights, in the throes of insomnia, she walks outside and remembers her past, hoping that during deep reflection under starlight she can find the confidence to forgive herself. It never works.
It wasn’t always like this. She was normal, once. But some mistakes turn into secrets, and secrets fester, and eventually become an emotion unto themselves, as irrevocable as a severed arm or lame eye.
She is drowning in secrets.
They are many.

2

Before the night that changed everything, three states removed from her future hideaway, Jamie Greaves lived with her mother, father, and older sister in a ranch house eight miles from town. They were situated in the center of numerous acres, bordered by two hay fields and one beet field. Though her father owned the land, all the fields were harvested and maintained by hired hands, most of whom lived in the second, smaller house two hundred yards from the main residence.
That main house was a three-story colonial structure with six bedrooms, four baths, and enough space to satisfy even the most private individual. There was a hot tub on the rear deck and a game room with pool table, foosball table, and three old pinball machines that, according to the rules, were never to be played. The house was lined in front with five white pillars that gave it a royal feel.
Jamie and her sister, Nalani, were home-schooled by an elderly woman named Dolly four days a week. The lessons usually started at eight-thirty in the morning and went until one in the afternoon, with a half hour for lunch.
The girls hated Dolly. She was a pug-nosed, stout old woman who talked with the speed of a sloth and smelled of cigarettes. Whenever either child asked a question, she would glare before answering, as if to reprimand them for needing clarification after her stellar instructions. The sisters had learned quickly not to raise their hands.
No one ever said the old woman’s last name. Jamie and Nalani often joked that she must have been hatched, not born, because it was inconceivable that any parents could raise such a mean-spirited daughter.
Jamie longed to attend a real school. She missed it. Until she was ten, she had attended Wildman Elementary in the nearby town. She made friends there, and enjoyed field trips and soccer at recess and even liked hearing her teachers’ lectures.
Then her parents complained of money problems. School itself was free, of course, but supplies and transportation were not. No busses ran past their house, and gas prices were rising, which led Mark Greaves to stop taking his girls to school.
It didn’t make sense to Jamie. A tutor like Dolly must have cost more than gas to and from school. Besides, her family was wealthy. Anyone who owned as many acres and hired as many people as they did were in no danger of going broke.
One night when she was eleven, frustrated by a memory of Dolly’s scowling face leaning over her paper, red pen hacking through the work, she asked her parents why they stopped sending her to school. They were sitting at the dining room table, speaking in low voices about something in a magazine, and when they gave her the usual dismissive answer, Jamie clapped her hand down on the table and demanded to know the truth.
That night, she enjoyed no supper and two quick paddles on the butt.
Jamie could not remember a time when her parents had a job—a real job, anyway, one that entailed actual work. Her mother, Gail, spent her days mostly in the sewing room upstairs, knitting blankets which she sold to a few friends and donated to the local church. She was forty-five years old and had blonde hair that was always pulled back in a bun. She wore only dresses, blouses, and slacks, never blue jeans, and though she lived on a ranch, never stepped foot in the barn or even on the fields except to yell at her husband.
In contrast, Mark Greaves was a workhorse. At least, that was what Jamie heard from some of the ranch hands. He was up before dawn, out on his morning rounds, and throughout the day buzzed here and there around the property, checking on projects and making a list of supplies needed for his trips into town. He was fifty, with graying black hair, but his body was as fit and toned as someone half his age. When she had attended real school, Jamie’s friends used to joke that she had a model for a dad.
Life on the Greaves ranch was marked by routine. Both Jamie and Nalani were expected to rise at seven-thirty, dress, and do their morning chores.
The fields were tended by the hired help. The family owned several chickens and a cow, however, and it was the girls’ responsibility to make certain they were well cared for.
One of them searched the barn for freshly-laid eggs while the other milked the cow—which had no name—with much grumbling and whining. Then they would bring the milk and eggs back inside before changing into their clean clothes and readying themselves for Dolly’s lesson.
Nalani despised doing these morning chores. When she turned seventeen, she became obsessed with fashion. Every trip to town, she would buy magazines that she read at odd hours, studying the pictures and often times copying the poses made by the models. Even though she had no boyfriend, Nalani liked to sing love songs to the imaginary people that populated her mind: practicing, she said, for when she met Prince Charming.
As she grew older, she also grew irresponsible with her chores as well as her schoolwork. Dolly often had to slap her wrist with a pen to get her attention, and when she was on egg duty, missed several because she was daydreaming.
Jamie grew irritated at her sister, but Nalani would always laugh it off.
“I have a fancy name,” she told Jamie one morning. “People with fancy names and with faces like mine do not milk cows and hunt for eggs. It’s just wrong.”
“Why don’t you tell Dad that?” Jamie said, looking behind two hay bales for an egg.
“He’s just as close-minded as everyone else here. I’m telling you, Jamie, I’m meant for better things than this.”
“So where does that leave me?”
“Oh, you’re meant for a much better destiny than this, too. You’re as pretty as I am, and certainly more kindhearted. You’re like the perfect daughter. Delicious.”
Jamie shrugged. Inside, though, she was beaming. It was a strange choice of words, but she was proud to be thought of as Nalani’s equal. Everyone always said they looked similar. They both had long, curly brown hair, hazel eyes, and bodies that never grew fat no matter how much they ate. At fourteen, they had met many people in town who thought they were twins, even though Nalani was three inches taller and wore a lot of makeup.
“Take away these fields and this barn,” Nalani said as they walked back to the house, “and it would be the perfect home. I mean, look at this place! It could be so hip if Mom and Dad actually tried. Shame.”
“You’re crazy,” Jamie said.
“Maybe.”
“No maybe.”
“You know that creative people are sometimes considered crazy.”
“And sometimes crazy people think they’re creative.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
Despite their commonplace bickering, the sisters were close. They had to be: living in a place as secluded as their ranch fostered trust and companionship among the family. The girls had very few friends outside the ranch.
Jamie was never unhappy. Discouraged sometimes, yes, and quite often annoyed, but never unhappy. She was perceptive enough to recognize the privileges she had been given. She lived in a lovely house, had parents who were not divorced, and the ranch had most everything she could want. Aside from the early-morning chores, there were very few rules by which she had to abide, and best of all, no one hovered. Everyone

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 21.05.2012
ISBN: 978-3-86479-697-5

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