Found Things (10 page)

Chapter 16

“Here's some news that will
make Sonya happy,” Kevin Kale say in art class later that afternoon. “Bunch is out of the hospital.”

“That's not news,” Sonya say. I noticed the flutter that was in her voice the day Daniel Bunch went into the hospital was all gone. I liked her better when she worried about Daniel.

Meadow Lark would say that wish had brought Daniel Bunch back from the brink of death. I say it was just a coincidence. In either case, I needed to see for myself that he was home, and I needed to see that today.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Can someone keep her quiet? That girl talks too much,” Sonya say, turning to me. “And why are you so interested in Daniel? I have it on the best authority, namely Daniel himself, that he hates you. So stop talking about him. In fact, why don't you not talk at all.”

Poor Sonya,
I thought. How could anyone have a crush on Daniel Bunch?

“Everyone,” Ms. Zucchero say from her desk, “we're going to start our final project tomorrow, so please take your collages home today.”

After the last bell rang, instead of waiting for Meadow Lark, I started walking in the direction of Daniel's house. It had started to sprinkle again, so I tucked my collage under my shirt to keep it dry.

“River, wait!” Meadow Lark called from the steps. “Where are you going?”

“I'll be home later,” I say, but waited for her to catch up.

“Can I come?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I have to go by myself.”

“But where are you going?”

I stared at Meadow Lark, then say, “Promise you won't tell anyone.”

She crossed her heart. “Promise.” Then her good eye got wide behind her blue-framed glasses and she say, “Hey, I heard Daniel Bunch is out of the hospital.”

“That's where I'm going . . . to see him for myself.”

Meadow Lark put her hand to her mouth. “So you know what that means. . . . Our wish—it worked.”

“I have to go now,” I say. I didn't want to talk about wishes or miracles or coincidences. “Don't tell anyone, remember?”

“But what if your mama asks?”

“
Especially
don't tell Mama.”

Daniel Bunch's little sister answered the door, holding a bowl of cherries. Cherry juice ran all down her chin and stained her T-shirt in the shape of New Jersey. Her smile revealed a missing front tooth, and her gray neck had pale patches, as if she'd tried to scrub her skin.

She held out the bowl to me. “I'm Honor. Want some?”

I slid my collage out from my shirt and leaned it behind a chair on the porch. It would be safer there than inside, close to Daniel Bunch.

“Take one,” she say again.

I shook my head. “No, thanks.” There was no telling where those cherries had been.

Then she stuck the bowl right under my nose. “You have to. It's the law.”

I took two and closed my hand around them. She kept looking at me, so I say, “I just ate, so I'll save them. Is your brother home?”

“Well . . . ,” she say, looking behind her. “Are you a tutor?”

“Tutor? . . . N-no.”

“My brother wants a tutor,” she whispered.

Then she pointed to the living room. “He's in there trying to do homework.”

I took a deep breath and went into the living room. It smelled like overripe fruit.

Daniel Bunch sat slumped into the sofa in a rumpled-up T-shirt and shorts, his feet flat on the coffee table, with a book open in his lap. His left arm rested on a rolled-up blanket beside him. Daniel Bunch looked like a skeleton in clothes, his shoulder bones poking through his shirt.

He glared at me as I come in, then looked back down at his book. “What are you here for?” he asked. “To finish the job?”

I took another breath, then exhaled the quivers. Tucked into the sofa with the back of his T-shirt pushed up his neck, Daniel Bunch looked like a curled-over old man. And if Meadow Lark was right and the only reason he come home from the hospital from the edge of the death was because of us, he should have been grateful.

“I just come to see you,” I say in a voice I hoped sounded confident.

“Well, you saw me,” he say. “Now get out.”

My heartbeat sped up and my leg muscles twitched. I wanted to run, but instead I stumbled back into a big, soft chair across from Daniel.

He tossed his book on the table with a clap and asked, “Why
did
you come? Did my sister check you for weapons first?”

“I wasn't trying to kill you in the hospital. I was—”

“I wake up and you're holding a knife in my face, and that's not trying to kill me?”

“—trying to see if you were breathing. You looked dead. Even Benjamin say so.”

“Benjamin? What
are
you talking about?”

“That boy across the hall from you.”

“Never met him,” he say.

“Really? Because he seemed to know you.”

“Whatever,” he say, and waved Benjamin away. “As you can see, I'm not dead.”

Daniel shut his eyes and threw his head back against the sofa. My heartbeat returned to normal. Daniel looked too skinny and weak to scare me the way he did at school, and today he didn't even want to try.

“School's almost over. Are you coming back?” I asked.

He let out a big sigh that sounded like,
Why must I put up with you?

“Are you going to graduate sixth grade?”

Then Daniel Bunch shocked me because instead of glaring or telling me to mind my own business, he looked down at his book and shrugged, and wriggled his bony-white toes on his bony-white feet and say, “I don't know.”

“Really? They might not graduate you from sixth?” I almost added “either,” but at the moment, he looked too pitiful.

“Maybe,” he mumbled.

I watched his toes wriggle for a few seconds, and then my gaze drifted to the notebook beside his feet and some words written there in his rat-scratch scrawl:

I wish I had a tutor.

So, Honor had told the truth when she say that Daniel wanted a tutor.

I knew his secret, and, feeling bold, I asked, “What are you flunking?”

He flattened the book on his legs and pushed his head back against the sofa and sighed. But his toes kept wriggling, and finally he say, “Just name it.”

One of Mama's sayings come to me at that moment, the one about being kind to your enemies. I crossed my legs and draped my elbows on the arms of the big chair. “You could go to summer school . . . or you could get a tutor, right?”

For a moment he looked surprised, but the old Daniel Bunch come right back when he looked at me like I was stupid. “Too late,” he say, as he slid the notebook off the table with his foot.

“Well, it's too bad my brother's not here to help,” I say, to uncover his secret wish.

Then he picked up his book again and pretended to read. I could tell because his eyes moved across the same place over and over. “What are you talking about?”

“My brother is a good tutor,” I say, remembering the jobs he did to buy his Giant.

Daniel touched his wrist cast. “Was,” he say.

“How do you . . . ?”

“He used to tutor me.”

Theron—tutored Daniel?
“Theron never told—” I started to say, but Daniel interrupted me.

“But he can't anymore because now he's a fugitive.”

It could have been a real conversation with Daniel. We might have been able to figure out the problem between us, but he destroyed that moment, just like he destroyed my collage. “You need to get your facts straight, Daniel Bunch,” I say, sitting straight in the chair. “He wasn't even arrested.”

“Then why did he run away?”

“People run away for lots of reasons. . . . They're mad or scared or . . . they feel bad,” I say, remembering what Theron say just before he left us
.

I'm leaving. But I'm never coming back, so don't look for me.

I continued. “No wonder you're flunking everything. You don't even know the difference between getting convicted and being accused—
falsely
accused!” I say, and realized my foot was jiggling.

“Get out of here!” Daniel yelled. “No one asked you here.”

He looked so weak in his rumpled-up, torn clothes and his bony-white feet on the coffee table.
Don't be scared of him
, I kept telling myself as I stood up to leave.

Just then Honor come into the living room holding my collage. She still had that bowl of cherries in the other hand. “Is this yours?” she asked. “It might get wet outside.”

Great,
I thought.
Now Daniel will see it.

“Thanks,” I say, and took it from her.

“Let's see that,” Daniel say. “Come on—what is it?”

“You know, Daniel.”

“I thought I destroyed that . . . in an
accident
.”

“Well, you didn't,” I say, and thrust it in front of him so he could get a good look.

Daniel Bunch sat back against the cushions and folded his arms in front of him and studied the collage. Then he put his hand to his chin and a little smile come to his mouth. “Yup, it stinks.”

Daniel still had the power to make me feel like a crushed-up soda can, but I looked down so he wouldn't see.

“No it doesn't,” Honor say.

I smiled at her, at her dirty neck and her stained shirt, for keeping me from crying in front of Daniel.

“You just don't have any taste,” she say.

“And you're stupid, stupid,” he say back.

“He calls me that all the time because he doesn't know many other words,” Honor whispered to me. Then she held out the cherry bowl, and this time I took a handful.

“Daniel,” I asked, “why do you hate me so much?”

“Now what are you talking about?” he say, and turned back to his book.

I waited for his answer. And waited some more, and then I asked, “Well, why?”

“Well, nothing.
Now
get out—or I'll kick you out.”

I whirled around toward the front door and started to leave. Then Daniel did something surprising. He actually say my name, “River,” and when I turned around, Daniel looked at me, his face so red and wide-eyed that it was hard to believe it belonged to Daniel. “Ask your brother. That's why.”

Theron
. What did Theron have to do with why Daniel hated me? For a second, Daniel made me think that it could be that easy—that I could go home and ask Theron why. But just as fast, a sadness thick as mud pressed on my heart, and I say, “I only wish I could.”

Chapter 17

It was still sprinkling when
I left Daniel's house, and I tucked my collage under my shirt to keep it dry. Even though the rain was soft and warm, I shivered. Daniel say that Theron tutored him. What else didn't I know about my brother? What else didn't I know about Daniel?

I wish I had a tutor
, Daniel had scrawled in his notebook. Everyone has a wish, even Daniel, and knowing that made my heart a little softer for him. Caring about other people hurts, I discovered, because your heart breaks with theirs.

I could try being nicer to Daniel and he'd never need to know. He wanted a tutor. I could make that wish for him. Meadow Lark would say she had convinced me that those wishes we floated down the river come true, but she hadn't. I just wanted to do for Daniel what he couldn't do for himself right now. That is, if he even knew about floating wishes down the river.

Wishes—I had so many of my own, and as I walked to the river, they all pushed one another aside in my mind, jostling for my attention:

I wish Mr. Tricks is alive and his wing is healed.

I wish he would come back to Meadow Lark, because she really loves that pidge.

I wish Theron is safe and happy.

I wish Mama would smooth my hair into a ponytail.

I wish Daddy would go to Boston more often, instead of Chicago or Orlando or St. Louis.

I wish Theron misses us.

I wish for a little red heart on my napkin.

I wish Daniel would be nicer.

I wish Mama would like the collage.

I wish Theron wants us to find him.

I wish Meadow Lark would go home so Mama wouldn't pay so much attention to her.

I wish Meadow Lark and I could be best friends again.

I wish Daniel would tell me more about Theron.

I wish Theron would come home.

I couldn't count the number of times each day my heart made that last wish.

By then I had reached the sandy beach. I looked at the river flowing by, imagining myself stepping out there. I remembered how it felt to wake up and feel the river curling around my legs, and I knew I couldn't go out into the water.

But I could go directly to the log and put his wish on it. So I picked my way through the woods to the little cove, and when I reached the log, I noticed something looked different about it. When Meadow Lark and I first found the log, it was stuck firmly into the riverbank and angled upstream. Now it stretched three or four feet farther out over the water and pointed downstream.

Carefully I stepped to where the log met the riverbank, and crouched to get a better look. And blinked. Our three wishes had grown into thirty, all fluttering on the log. It was a collage of wishes. No one else knew about wishing on the river or about the log, so Meadow Lark must have put these wishes here.

Shadows from the opposite bank had reached all the way across the river, calling dusk to settle. Quickly I wrote Daniel's wish for a tutor on a scrap of paper and tossed it into the water in front of the log, and hoped that the log would catch it.

Just as I turned to leave, I saw something floating in the air from across the river. Closer and closer it come, as if it knew my scent. It was a white feather.

I reached out and closed my hand around it, and tucked it into my pocket.

Wishes floated everywhere.