A Song of Many Sounds

Lyd Havens is a junior Creative Writing major and History minor originally from Tucson, Arizona. They have been writing poetry since they were twelve, and just started writing fiction again after over ten years of only writing poetry and nonfiction. They believe that writing is one of the most important skills a person can learn, though the learning never truly ends. After graduating, Lyd will hopefully go on to an MFA program, teach creative writing at a college level, write at least one poetry collection, and try their hand at writing a novel. Outside of Boise State, they help run the Boise Poetry Slam, read, cook, and embroider.

A Song of Many Sounds

In the bright room, a flock asked for her name, and she didn’t know what to say. Just when they stopped poking at her with sharp thin sticks, they came with another tube to stick in her arm. The water they covered the cuts on her face with stung. They put her in an uncomfortable bed and wouldn’t let her leave it. When she had tried to, the nurse with the meanest face had said that if she didn’t stay put she would be restrained. She didn’t know what that word meant, but knew it wasn’t good. It sounded like a word Dad would use if he was unhappy with her. 

A man with a shiny sun on his neck came to visit her the morning after they had taken her. The sun became so bright when he sat down next to her that she couldn’t see anything else for a bit. “Jane,” the man called her. She didn’t know why, or how, but his eyes were good. Nothing like Dad’s. 

“Jane,” he said again, “can you understand me?” 

“Yes,” she said. 

“Okay.” 

“O-kay?” 

The man stared at her for a bit. Then he took a square out of one of his pants pockets. “Do you know when you were born?” 

“A while ago.” 

Again, the man stared. “Do you know what day it is?” 

“It’s just a day.” 

“Do you know who the president is?”

“The who?” 

It went on like this for a while: questions she didn’t know the answer to, and the man’s face became longer and longer, like he was sad. He held up his square—it had a bunch of black lines on it. 

“Do you know what this says?” he asked her, but she could tell he already knew the answer. 

She would end up spending years thinking about the lines—the writing—Dad would put in his own square, dressed in the pelt of a deer he had killed himself and hidden in a new part in the cabin every month. It became a ritual: Dad would tell her to hide in the closet, close her eyes and cover her ears. Sometimes she’d try to figure out the words of the song Dad always played. Sometimes she’d just sing nonsense, anything to keep her quiet, distracted, and obedient. 

She would wonder why Dad even did this. It wasn’t like she would magically learn to read on her own. Even if she had, she probably still wouldn’t have pursued the square. She would have been too scared of him catching her. 

The man with the sun on his neck left, and a new nurse came in. This one’s voice was nicer. “Hi, honey,” the nurse said, giving her another name. “How about we get you cleaned up?” 

She knew that word, clean. “In the bath?” 

“Well, almost. Do you know what a shower is?” 

When she said no, the nurse didn’t seem to care the way everybody else did. 

The nurse walked with her through a longer room that was just as bright as the last, one hand on her shoulder. The nurse’s touch was soft, barely there. It reminded her of all the butterflies and gnats that would land on her skin while she walked through the woods in front of the cabin. 

They walked into a room with a floor covered in small, green squares. Something silver and scary-looking was sticking out of the wall, like a big nail. 

“You’ll need to take the gown off,” the nurse said slowly. When she didn’t react, the nurse pulled on the string behind her, and the gown dropped around her ankles. She stepped out, and the nurse hid the gown. 

When the nurse turned the doorknob under the big nail, water shot out of it with a loud bang. She jumped back, startled. 

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” the nurse said, her voice even nicer than before. “This won’t hurt. It should actually feel good. But if you don’t like it, I’ll turn it off.” 

A feeling began to grow in her. She didn’t know what to call it, but it felt good. Easy. Warm. She decided to believe the nurse, and slowly stepped towards the water. 

At first the water poked at the bruises on her arms and made her skin feel tight and squeaky. The longer she stood under the nail and its water, though, the better it felt. The nurse was right. All her life, she had cleaned herself in the metal tub at the back of the cabin, her knees to her chest and a chipped bowl pouring lukewarm water over her head. Clean at the cabin had only meant slightly less dirty—the nail obviously did a better job. She watched as the water rolled off her body, turning a light brown with dirt as it hit the squares on the floor. Her hair became one thick tangle, like a mess of roots pulled from the earth. 

The nurse took a round bottle and squeezed some thick, flower-smelling oil into her hand. “Can I put this in your hair?” the nurse asked. “It’s called shampoo. It’ll make it clean and smell good.” She turned around and leaned back, letting the oil be slowly, softly worked through her knots. 

After the flower oil was an even thicker, white oil. The nurse called it conditioner. Said it’d make her hair easier to detangle. 

“If it starts to hurt, we can stop for a little bit,” the nurse said softly. She used a comb with bigger teeth than the one she had at home. Somehow, it looked less scary. 

“Wait,” she said suddenly, and the nurse stopped, her arm crooked and frozen in the air. 

“What’s your name?” she asked the nurse. 

The nurse was quiet for a little bit. Then: “Jennifer.” 

“Jennifer,” she repeated. “Jennifer. You can comb my hair now.” 

The two didn’t talk again while Jennifer combed her hair. It did hurt, but not a lot. She was used to more. Jennifer was soft, careful, holding each knot like it was made of glass, or like she herself was made of glass. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the comb’s teeth gently chewing into her hair. 

When Jennifer was done, she took a small circle out of a pocket on her blue shirt. “Can I ask you a question?” 

She paused. “Yes.” 

“Do you know what you look like?” 

She thought back to the girl she sometimes saw looking at her when she looked into the pond, who her arms when she moved her arms and opened her mouth when she opened her mouth. All at once, the girl began to make sense. She herself was beginning to make sense. 

“Can I see right now?” she asked. 

Jennifer held the circle in front of her, and there she was: the girl from the pond. Her dark hair, usually stretched out and scary-looking, was damp and sleek now. Her face looked paler, sharper. She wondered just how much dirt had been washed off of her. She touched both cheeks with each of her hands, careful to avoid the cuts on her lips and below her eyes. She studied the dryer, more withered patches of skin that reminded her of  Dad’s jacket. What had been the word he’d used for it? she asked herself. The word all but ran into her head: leather. Her skin was like leather. She loved it. 

She looked up at Jennifer, her mouth and chin the only part of her the circle showed. “Thank you.” 

When Dad would leave for one of his trips, she would spend all of her time out in the woods, even when it snowed or rained. Dad was always gone for three sunsets; she couldn’t remember whether he had told her this once or if she had somehow figured it out on her own. When Dad began bringing his knives out to the living room, sharpening each one while hunched over in his chair, she knew that meant he was leaving for a trip soon. She’d quietly check the ice chest, see how much deer and squirrel meat was left, and how much she could carry with her.

Besides food, the only thing she would carry with her was an old, dull knife that she used to lock and unlock the door of the cabin when Dad was gone. On his way out, he’d always wordlessly lock the door behind him, and when she was sure he was far away, she’d fish the knife out from under the loose floorboard in the back room, slowly unlock the deadbolt with careful fingers, and quickly shut the door behind her, as if it’d stop Dad from catching her in the act. Then, she’d take her knife, rattle the tip of it around in the thin opening on the door until she heard the satisfying shift of the lock, and off she’d go.

She loved the sound of yellow and red leaves crunching under her thin boots. She also loved the sound of wet brown leaves after a storm. She loved the red berries that stained her hands. She loved the smell of the ground as she slept under the biggest pine tree she could find. If Dad knew she went on her own trips, he never talked to her about it or punished her for it. She always made sure to count the times the sun rose and set. The morning after the third, she’d get up from under the pine tree, brushing its little blades off of her legs as she walked back to the cabin. When she made it back, she’d take the dull knife again, and rattle it through the crack, locking the door once more behind her. When Dad came back, she’d always be sitting in the front room, staring at the wall with the brown stain on it, as if to tell him, I have been right here the whole time. 

She wondered what would happen if she never came back while Dad was gone. Would he look for her? Would he hurt her? Would he even care at all? She felt as though she already knew the answers, and so she always came back, even when she didn’t want to and cried the whole way back to the cabin. She didn’t know the word dread back then, but that was exactly what she had done: she dreaded going back to feeling trapped and afraid everyday, unsure whether breathing too loud or talking too much would make Dad angry. 

Eventually, she would learn the name for what she did with the dull knife: picking locks. Eventually, she’d also learn the name for what Dad was doing on his trips. 

The night after Jennifer had helped her get clean, she woke up to the man with the sun on his neck calling her Jane again. She opened her eyes, and he was standing over. 

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly to her. “I don’t want to wake you up, but I need to talk to you again.” 

Without even coming in, a new nurse’s hand moved towards the wall, and the room became bright again. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. 

“What does it mean?” she asked the man. 

“‘I’m sorry’? It means… It means that I feel bad.” 

“Oh,” she said. “I was talking about ‘Jane’.” 

The man stared at her the way he had the day before. “Is that not your name?”

“No.” 

He got the square out from his pocket again and flipped through it. “I’m sorry,” he said. 

“You don’t have to be.” 

“Do you have a name?” 

She thought about it. “Dad only ever called me ‘You’. But I don’t think that’s a name now.” 

The man pulled a chair closer to her bed and sat on it. He had a small smile on his face, and his voice was just as nice as Jennifer’s. “No, it’s not.” 

“Well, what’s your name?”

The smile widened across his face. “Gregory.” 

She said it back to him. She loved the way it sounded. “That’s a nice name.” 

“Well, thank you. So, listen, we’ll talk about names again soon, but right now I need to ask you about the cabin.” 

She didn’t know what else to say to him, so she just said, “Yes.” 

Gregory flipped to a different part of the square, which had even more black lines than the other parts she had seen. “Was it always just you and your dad there? Did anyone ever come to… visit?” 

“No,” she said, and she meant it. “It was just us.” 

Gregory looked at her, then pulled another, much smaller square out of his pocket. The square was a picture, like one Dad had showed her once. He had said it was him when he was younger—“this is me when I was your age,” he had told her—and all she could do was believe him. 

This was a picture of a woman with dark hair and red lips. The picture seemed yellow, like some of the leaves in the woods. The woman looked nice. The woman looked happy. The woman looked like her, but she knew it wasn’t her. Her stomach became heavy and painful, like it had been stuffed with rocks. 

“Do you know who this is?” Gregory asked her. 

She tried to breathe, but it didn’t feel right. “She… she looks like me. That’s not me, though. Is it?” 

Gregory shifted, looking at her with soft eyes that made her like him the way she liked Jennifer. “No, it’s not you. This is your mom.”

It felt as if she couldn’t understand him. Her chest tightened and felt small, like the crack in the cabin’s door. “Mom?” 

There are only fragments of memories of Mom, and they all start with her eyes. They were like Jennifer and Gregory’s eyes—they were nice, they were good. But they were also like her eyes. It was like they shared the same eyes on their two faces. 

She would come to only think of Mom when she thought about Dad, which began to feel wrong. When Dad was angry and mean, Mom was soft. She remembered Mom’s voice, singing to her when the sky got dark and Dad was on a trip. When Dad would say, “You’re worthless”, Mom would say, “I love you”. Maybe that’s how it became her first name: in those moments, she understood herself to be you. Of course, she only liked it when Mom had called her you. 

She also remembered Mom’s voice when it was loud, and what it would say: No. Let me go. Leave me alone. In the last piece of a memory of Mom, Mom isn’t saying anything, but she is making noise. Loud, scary noise. 

Then, it’s quiet again, and Mom goes on a trip that never ends. 

Gregory ended up leaving after showing her the picture. He said he could tell that she was upset. She realized he was right. After he left, she cried the way she cried when Dad was angry with her, but she didn’t know why. She knew Gregory hadn’t been angry, and the picture hadn’t been either.

She didn’t know how long it’d been since Gregory left when another woman came into the bright room. “I’m Carrie,” was the first thing the woman said. She was learning just how many nice eyes were actually in the world. 

Carrie said she was a social worker. “I’m here to figure out what you need,” Carrie explained. “Is it okay if I ask you some questions?”

She said yes, and Carrie pulled out a bigger, longer square, like Gregory’s. She realized she had a question first. “Carrie,” she said, “What’s that called?” 

“This?” she tapped her finger on the white part of the square. “It’s called a notebook. I write things on here for us to remember later. Do you know how to write?” 

“No.” 

“Okay. That’s all right.” Carrie pulled out a stick that she could see black blood through. Carrie looked up and held up the stick. “This is called a pen.” 

“Okay.” 

Carrie asked about the cabin, Dad, how Dad treated her, what she did everyday. She tried to tell Carrie the truth. 

“I thought the cabin was the only place, and that Dad and me were the only people left. He said everyone else was… dead. When Dad was there, I just sat in the back room. I sang the song a lot.” 

Carrie stopped her. “The song? What song?”

Her chest got tight again. “I—I don’t know if it has a name.” 

“Will you sing some of it for me?” 

So she did. The words blurred together in her mouth, but she was beginning to realize they had to actually mean something. 

It didn’t take long, but Carrie’s eyes lit up as she sang. “I know that song. How did you hear it?” 

“Dad would play it on his r…r… I don’t remember the name.” 

“Radio?” 

That was it. “Yes. His radio.” 

“The song is called ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. It’s by a band called U2. Would you want to hear the song again?” 

She smiled. Her chest loosened with ease and joy. “Yes. I would like that.” 

Carrie smiled back at her. “I’ll bring it for you next time we meet. And, speaking of our next meeting…” Carrie’s voice began to go far away, and her eyes were stuck on a piece of the wall above. 

“I know that someone has already asked about your mother,” Carrie said slowly, gently. 

The rocks pulled themselves back into her stomach. “Yes.” 

“Well, your mother… your mother had a sister.” 

“A sister?” 

“They were born and raised by the same mom and dad. Her name is Stephanie. She’s the only person from your mom’s family who’s still alive, and she really wants to meet you. Is that… is that okay?” 

She had no idea how to answer that question. She could barely make sense of the information Carrie had given her. But she had no idea how to say no, either. 

Sometimes, after hitting or kicking her for upsetting him, Dad would say, “You’re stuck with me, you know. It’s just you and me, forever.” 

She had tried to believe that the world consisted only of the two of them, their cabin, and the woods surrounding them, but there had always been a quiet voice in her head questioning that. Sometimes, while walking through the woods, she would hear a whooshing from far away. Like the tires of Dad’s truck crushing the earth beneath them, only far away. Sometimes she’d hear voices too—she was never close enough to hear words, just the unmistakable sound of voices like hers, or Dad’s, or unlike anything she’d ever heard before. She had considered calling out, just to see if anyone would answer, or if it was like the song on the radio: played over and over, with nothing new to say to anyone. 

Stephanie was a rounder, older version of the picture of Mom. She had her dark hair pulled back, and the silver parts of it glittered like the ponder underneath sunlight. Her white shirt and blue pants were both covered in smears of colors like leaves in the woods: red, yellow, orange.

Through the glass in front of her, she watched Stephanie slowly approach the room, Stephanie’s knees buckling as though she was carrying a whole pine tree on her shoulders. When Stephanie opened the door and looked at her, she covered her mouth with her hand and began to cry. 

“I had no idea you existed,” Stephanie said, “but I’m so glad that you do. Oh, my god. I’m so glad.” 

She had no idea what to say back, so just smiled and said hello. 

“Oh, honey,” Stephanie said while pulling her body down onto the edge of the bed, “I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through. I know you’re probably really confused by all this, but please know, you’ve got folks looking out for you now.”
 She barely understood what Stephanie was trying to say, but could tell that she was warm, and good. She looked into Stephanie’s eyes and saw Mom’s eyes, as well as her own. She knew she was safe. 

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t remember a lot about Mom, but—“

“Oh, that’s okay,” Stephanie said, putting a hand on her blanket-dressed leg. “Your mom, she was just amazing. I was just her dumb kid sister, but she didn’t treat me the way our friends would treat their little sisters. She was kind to me. She looked out for me.” 

Stephanie started telling stories about Mom, and she didn’t want it to ever end. When Mom was a kid, she thought she was rescuing ants by picking them up and bringing them back to the hill Mom assumed was theirs. This was how their parents had found out that she was allergic to ants. In college, Mom had studied art history, and had wanted to be an art teacher at an elementary school. Mom’s favorite color had been green. Her favorite food had been macaroni and cheese. Mom had always wanted a daughter. All of this, she learned during her first visit with Stephanie, and she felt as though all of it became the background in the photo of Mom Gregory had shown her. She felt like she was holding each taste of information on her tongue, like water on the hottest day. 

In the middle of a story about how Mom had backpacked across Spain after graduating high school, Carrie the social worker opened the door, and somehow looked happy and sad at the same time. 

“Well, it seems like you two are getting along splendidly,” Carrie said with a smile. 

“I sure hope we are,” Stephanie answered, looking over her shoulder to make eye contact with Carrie. 

Carrie sat down in a chair next to the end of the bed, and spoke directly to her now. “I don’t want to interrupt, but I was hoping I could ask you something, and that you’ll answer it even if it’s hard for you. Stephanie and I will be here to support you if it is.” 

The smile she had had on her face dropped, and once again her stomach became heavy and stone. She said okay—but she didn’t feel okay.

“Why did you leave the cabin the night the police brought you here?”

She tried to tell Carrie and Stephanie as best she could, but somehow that night had begun to run away from her, just like she had run away from the cabin. She remembered her whole body hitting the wall with the stain on it. She remembered Dad’s hands folding into rocks. She remembered the back of her head being wet and prickly, like grass after it rained. As she told Carrie, her head hit against itself the way it had that night. She remembered tasting metal, and not being able to see like everything was a picture. She remembered Dad yelling the way he always did. She didn’t remember what she had done. Maybe she had chewed too loud, or hadn’t answered him the way he wanted her to. Maybe she hadn’t done anything at all. She just remembered her skin being hot, and wanting to throw Dad against a wall too. She remembered realizing that this was anger. This was what Dad was always full of. 

She remembered he turned around to go to the bathroom while she was on the ground. Her whole body was twitching with the need to get away from him—a feeling she knew well, but had never acted upon. When she could hear him lift the seat of the toilet, she pulled herself up, unlocked the front door with one quick, quiet turn of her hand, and ran out into the woods. She still couldn’t see as well as she wanted, but she ran. She tripped over roots rising out of the ground. She felt her arms and face being cut by branches she tried to pull her body through. She felt her lungs fill with fire, and her heart move from her chest to her ears, but she didn’t stop running. Not until the woods that she thought never ended, ended. She looked around frantically, trying to make sense of the empty around her. She was spinning, and couldn’t stop. Only when her body began to slow down did she notice the man standing near the fallen pine tree, staring at her. A man, like Dad, except he didn’t have any hair on his head. She hadn’t ever seen another man besides Dad. Her body began to shake—not in fear, but in confusion. 

“Are you all right?” he had asked her, keeping the distance between them. 

She started to back away, but she tripped over a loose stone and hit the earth with a painful thud. She didn’t even know how to answer him, so she just cried, her face stinging and her nose dripping. The man spoke to her softly, helped her sit back up and wrapped a warm piece of cloth around her shoulders. “Help is coming,” he kept saying over and over. “Help is coming.” 

The last thing she remembered was a different man carrying her into some sort of machine. “Do you live in the woods?” he had asked her as things began to darken around her. 

She must have told him about the cabin. She would learn later that they had found Dad the same night they had found her. When Gregory would tell her later where the men had taken Dad, he had to explain every name he used: prison, charged, multiple counts, first degree murder, kidnapping, child endangerment, trial, without parole. 

When she finished, all three of them were crying. 

“I’m sorry,” Stephanie quietly said over and over again. “I’m so sorry.” 

Carrie and Stephanie decided that she needed to get some rest, and she didn’t object. The two promised they’d return tomorrow, with a radio and other surprises. 

As she laid in her uncomfortable bed, watching the blurry figures of other nurses and doctors pass by her window, she repeated every story Stephanie had told her about Mom. It played over and over again in her head, like a song—like the song Dad always played on his radio. Eventually, she wouldn’t be able to hear “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” without panicking, without feeling Dad’s hands on her neck or his voice echoing through the cabin. But for now, it was still a comfort, and knowing that it had a name comforted her too. 

When she fell asleep, she found herself back in the woods, running her fingers across the tall grass and looking up at the clouds above her. She could smell the smoke from the fire that kept her company while she ate her dinner of elk meat and berries. She could feel the cold air blanketing her cheeks. It was the same as it had always been before she had run away, but the way her mind raced was different. She could only think in names: Dad, Mom, Gregory, Jennifer, Carrie, Stephanie, Shampoo, Conditioner, Mirror, Notebook, Art History, College, Allergic, Dead, Dead, Dead—

She woke up covered in her own sweat, shivering like she was cold. 

Carrie and Stephanie did come back, with both Jennifer and a radio with them. Jennifer had something too: it looked like Gregory’s notebook, but she explained that this was just called a book. “It’s a baby book,” she said, with her thumb holding it by its center. “It’s got names in it. I thought maybe we could try to find a name for you today.” 

So the four of them sat in the bright room, with the song playing on the radio and Jennifer reading out names. “Stop me when you hear something you like,” Jennifer said. 

“How will I know what I like?” 

Stephanie was the only one who gave her an answer. “You just will.” 

And so it began. The song—“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”—became different songs with different names as Jennifer went on. “With Or Without You”. “Bullet The Blue Sky”. “Running To Stand Still”. Carrie explained it: songs are parts of albums, like whole books full of music. She only caught parts of the whole album while Jennifer read names, pausing between each name to see if she liked what she was hearing. 

“Adriana… Agatha… Alondra… Ashley… Blair… Brenda… Bryce…” 

Jennifer didn’t stop naming names. She named her name. She named Carrie’s. The names seemed to go on forever. They blended together in her mind until she had no idea how to know whether she liked them or not. Until: 

“Rheyna… Rhian… Rhiannon—“

“Stop,” she said, not even thinking about it. “That one.” 

“Rhiannon?” 

“Yes. Say it again.” 

Jennifer did, stretching out each part. “Ree – ann – un.” 

“That’s it. That’s my name. I like it.” 

All three of the women smiled around her. “What about it do you like?” 

“I just… I just like it.” She didn’t have the words for it at the time. She just liked the way it sounded: like a bird’s song, with the wind knocking around the leaves. It was a song of many sounds to her. 

Carrie told her she’d need to learn how to read and write soon, and that she might have a hard time spelling the name at first. “When you learn the letters, it might not make sense to you at first, the way it’s spelled.” 

She didn’t care. All that mattered in the moment how it sounded: warm, comforting. 

“Hey,” Carrie said as she and Jennifer stood up to leave. “There’s a song called ‘Rhiannon’.” 

“There is?” 

“Yeah. It’s really pretty. I’ll bring it for you next time. I promise.”

She stopped Carrie. “You… promise?” 

“It means no matter what, I’m gonna do it.” 

She smiled at Carrie with so much joy her mouth started to hurt. “Okay.”  

“She’s right,” Stephanie told her after Carrie had left. “It’s really pretty.” 

Rhiannon laid back on the pillows on top of her bed. She didn’t feel new, but she did feel different. Everything was a clearer picture now. She watched her own hands tap against the white sheets, raise up, block out the bright light above her. 

“Stephanie, what’s going to happen to me?” she asked after the quiet started feeling too uncomfortable to her. 

Jennifer sat down on the edge of the bed, reached over and started stroking Rhiannon’s hair. “I don’t know for sure. But when the hospital thinks you’re ready, you’ll go home with me. We’ll live together, and we’ll… we’ll be a family. And whatever happens, I’ll be here to help you through it. Does that sound good to you. 

Rhiannon looked up at the light again and smiled. “Yes. It does. I promise.” 

Her name was Rhiannon Alquest. When Stephanie became her legal guardian, Rhiannon was given the same last name as her. The same last name as Mom. 

Dad’s full name was Jeff Carson. Mom’s full name had been Melissa Alquest. Jeff Carson killed Melissa Alquest after five years of holding her hostage. After Rhiannon had been born, he refused to let either of them leave the cabin for any reason. Not to see a doctor, or to see Melissa’s parents—Rhiannon’s grandparents, who died within a year of one another after Melissa had disappeared. Jeff Carson buried Melissa Alquest’s body in the woods. He killed nineteen other women in the towns surrounding the woods in the eight years after killing Melissa. He would take the women out for dinner dates, then strangle them to death in the backseat of his truck. After that, he’d try to meet a new woman, set up a dinner date with her during his next trip, and the cycle would begin all over again. He had kept a journal detailing each of his kills. When Rhiannon heard about this, she thought back to all the times Dad had forced her into the humid closet and distracted herself while he hid and re-hid it. His dirtiest secret, and what apparently made it so easy to convict him of killing every woman. 

Witnesses from the town would say that they only ever saw him for a day or two. Maybe three. 

Eventually, after adopting her, Stephanie would tell Rhiannon that there were no records of her ever being born. “But I know that your mom always said that if she had a baby girl, she’d name her Marjorie.” 

That name sounded familiar to her. She wondered if it had been her name before Mom had been killed. That didn’t matter: Rhiannon loved her mother, but she did not love the name Marjorie. 

They found Mom’s body—or what was left of it—buried at the edge of the woods. Rhiannon wondered if she might have run right across it when she had escaped the cabin. 

She went home with Stephanie soon after that. Stephanie lived in a house that was nothing like the cabin: it was warm, with walls painted yellow like the leaves in the woods. She had pictures of Mom in every room: Mom as a child on a pink bicycle, Mom as a teenager going to prom, Mom with vividly green mountains behind her raised, proud arms. Over time, Stephanie would add framed photos she’d take of Rhiannon to her collection: Rhiannon smiling over the yellow birthday cake Stephanie made for her after the hospital had estimated when exactly she might have been born, Rhiannon looking down at a book while Carrie sat by her side and helped her sound out words, Rhiannon years later, proudly holding her GED degree. She couldn’t really say what her ideal life would have been after the cabin, but deep down, this had been what Rhiannon had hoped for. A life full of love, and proof of that love.

  It had been decided early on that Rhiannon wouldn’t be made to testify against her father during his trial. The full gratitude Rhiannon would feel for this began the day Gregory assured her she didn’t even have to set foot in the courtroom. The week after Dad was convicted of killing her, along with so many women Rhiannon couldn’t count them at the time, Stephanie had a funeral for her. She and Rhiannon were Mom’s only living family, so it was just them, Jennifer, Carrie, Gregory, and a few women that Stephanie said Mom had known before she was Mom. 

“My sister was a good woman who loved a bad man,” Stephanie said to all of them during her elegy. “I don’t blame her for that. I don’t blame her for any of it. It breaks my heart to think of how terrified she must have been, trapped in a house with that… that monster. Everyday, I wish we had known just how much of a monster Jeff is. That this had somehow been his plan all along, and that even after… after…”

Stephanie’s voice faded off into the air, unable to say the blunt truth. “After, he would take so many other lives. So many families, torn apart. So many hearts, broken. My heart has been broken for so many years, but I can feel it piecing itself back together. With the presence of my niece, her daughter, Rhiannon, maybe life can be good again. I see so much of Melissa in Rhiannon. They have the same eyes, the same smile. Rhiannon is good, even though she barely knew goodness in her life for so long.” 

Rhiannon would spend years agonizing over what it meant to be good. Good like her mother; good unlike her father. She wondered if Stephanie or anyone else could see the parts of her that were more like her father: her moments of rage, her feelings of secretiveness around anyone who got too close to her. And the fear—always the fear that Dad had beat into her, a bruise that was never going to fade from her body. 

On a night not too long after Dad’s conviction, Rhiannon had first named all of these fears to Stephanie, her face flooded with tears and shame the whole time. Part of her had been afraid that Stephanie wouldn’t want her anymore after she confessed to all of this, or might even try to beat it out of her. But Stephanie had just taken Rhiannon into her arms and stroked her hair, whispering kindnesses into her ear while her tears left a warm stain on the front of Stephanie’s blouse. 

“It’s okay, Rhi,” Stephanie said over and over again, using the nickname she had taken to using almost all the time. “It’s okay to feel like that. But you’re gonna be okay. No matter what, you’re gonna be okay. And I love you. Oh, I love you.” 

Those three words became like a song Rhiannon could play again and again. It was a song she hoped would never end. 

Carrie had kept her promise after Rhiannon had become Rhiannon, and brought the radio back with her the next time they saw each other in the bright room at the hospital. 

“Is this by U2?” Rhiannon asked.

“Nope. It’s a different band. They’re called Fleetwood Mac. A woman sings this song. Her name is Stevie Nicks. You’d probably like her.” 

Carrie hit the heavy “play” button with one finger, and guitar spilled out of the radio. The woman’s voice was sweet to her, but it also sounded like it could fill a whole room. “Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night,” the woman sang, and Rhiannon wondered how that was possible. She wanted to make it possible. 

“All your life you’ve never seen a woman taken by the wind,” Stevie Nicks repeated, before stretching out the name: “Ree – ann – un”, just like Jennifer the day they had found the name. Rhiannon stared at the ceiling and allowed the soft, warm feeling that was becoming more and more familiar to wash over her body like she was under a shower of it. When she learned the name for that feeling, she wondered if it could have been her name, even though she still loved the name she had ended up with: Trust. There were tears in her eyes, but not because she was sad or afraid. She let them drip down her face slowly and with ease. 

“Thank you, Carrie,” she said when the song had ended. “I loved that very much.”