Found Things (2 page)

Chapter 3

I couldn't stop thinking about
what Mama and Daddy say about angels and being watchful. As if my wish began to draw breath while I slept, the next day I decided to focus my eyes in a new way. The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that Mama wasn't humming in the kitchen. For as long as I could remember, every morning Mama had hummed in the kitchen, but this morning I realized that she hadn't done that since Theron went away. Most times I didn't want to hear it anyway, being so sleepy that it made my bones itch, but this morning I realized how much I missed that sound.

Mama wasn't even in the kitchen that morning. I found her sitting on her bed, tracing her finger along the chenille pattern of their bedspread. The room smelled spicy of aftershave, and Daddy come out of their bathroom smoothing the gray hair above his ear.

“Where you going today?” I asked.

“Just down the track to Boston.”

We both looked at Mama, and I say to her, “Don't worry—he'll be back tonight.”

Daddy worked as a train porter, and Boston was one of his shortest runs. When he went down to Boston, he was back home again almost before we knew he had gone. It was like he had a regular job.

“I know that,” Mama say, and nodded. “Just please, Ingram, don't be late coming home.”

There was a look between them then, as alive as a violin string pulling out a last note, that made me hold my breath until Daddy answered her. “As long as there's coal in the bin and the rails don't buckle.” It was what he always say when she worried that he wouldn't come back.

Mama smiled, and my new eyes opened again and saw that she was wearing her red lipstick. She looked so pretty. Maybe she wanted Daddy to think so too, so that when he traveled far away, he'd always want to come home.

At school I watched the clumps of kids in the quad before the first bell, and the teachers in my classes, and then my tennis shoes running the track in PE. I imagined looking at everyone through the prism Mama kept on the kitchen windowsill, all of them appearing stretched and rainbow. Seeing things differently wasn't so hard. The hard part was knowing exactly what I was looking for, though I sensed it could be right around the corner.

That good feeling lasted only until lunch, when Daniel come to me again and my day shrank into its usual colors. I rubbed my apple hard on my sleeve, to make it look like I didn't notice him, but that didn't work. As he strolled by me, he muttered, “I'm watching you. Always watching you,” spending extra time on each
W
sound.

After he passed, I looked up and saw Meadow Lark Frankenfield. Just like the day before, she come and sat on my bench and opened her curlicue bag.

I wanted Cheetos today and would have taken one when she offered it, but instead she pulled out a bag of pretzel sticks. Pretzel sticks are what you get when everything else in the snack pack is gone. So when she pulled open the bag of pretzels and held it out to me, I stared at her. I stared and didn't say a word. It felt good.

Then she looked away and reached into that bag and put a pretzel stick in her mouth. As she did, a strand of her hair slipped in with it. It had felt good to stare and not say a word when she held out that sad bag of pretzel sticks, and it felt even better to watch her chew on a strand of her own hair.

“I'm not working today,” Mama had told me that morning soon after Daddy left. “So bring home a quart of milk after school.”

When Theron was here, she brought home a gallon every few days from Shaw's, where she worked. But now that he was gone, even a quart went sour before we used it up. Mama used to say we went through so much milk that we should buy a cow and put her in the backyard, but she never said that anymore.

“Don't stop along the way—and you know what I mean,” she told me as she handed me a five-dollar bill. Mama could smell the river and knew if I have been near that water.

I knew exactly what she meant. Buying milk gave me a reason to walk down along the river, my magic place. Something about the river, especially in spring when it rippled and ran high, pulled me toward it, and I couldn't ever walk by it without paying a visit. I'd tell myself,
You just keep going,
but before I knew, I'd be walking down the path in back of the library to the sandy beach, and tugging off my sneakers and socks and rolling up my jeans past my knees. Then I sat on the big, flat rock fixed halfway into the water.

The rocks at the bottom were furry and you had to be careful where you stepped or you'd slip. But the water was clear and quiet in the shallow places—the only places I would go—and the rocks trapped all kinds of things. Once I found a tiny gold ring with a deep green stone and swirls etched into the gold band. When I first found it, I could wear it on my pinkie, but then it got too small to squeeze my finger through. Now it was in my music box, the one with the broken ballerina that Mama say I got on my first birthday—though I was too young to remember—along with a necklace I got for my sixth birthday and the things I didn't put on the collage. Sometimes when I looked at that ring, I'd wonder if the baby who lost it was still searching for it. Or even if she knew she ever had such a pretty ring to lose.

Sometime after I couldn't fit the ring on my finger anymore, and before Theron left, I asked Mama, “What would you do if I got lost?”

“I would spend the rest of my life looking for you,” she say. That from Mama made me feel cared about.

When I went down the path to the river that day, what I found was that new girl, Meadow Lark Frankenfield, sitting on my rock and dabbling her feet in the water.

She looked up with her good eye and her popped-out eye and smiled at me, but I had to blink and look away. I just wasn't used to her face yet.

“This is my place, and that's my rock,” I say without looking at her. And definitely without smiling.

“Really?” Meadow Lark asked, and out of the corner of my eye I saw her looking around. “I don't see the sign.”

“Sign?”

“The one that says ‘Keep Off River Rose Byrne's Rock.'”

That took the pepper out of my pants, and I asked, “How do you know my name?” If she knew my whole name, I wondered what else she knew about me.

“Well, it's hardly a secret,” she say, but she didn't budge from where she sat on the rock. Instead she kicked up a curl of water. I watched the ripples slide away with the current.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

“Phoenix. Do you know where that is?”

“I know where it is.” Well, I knew it was a star on a map somewhere in the west, farther away than Texas, where red mountains and blue sky happened every day. And just so she wouldn't ask me if I knew exactly where, I stepped closer to the rock, hoping it would make her move off. But Meadow Lark just kept kicking the river, churning it up with her feet, stirring up the soft stuff that grew on the bottom.

“Stop mucking up the water like that.”

She surprised me when she stopped, and that made me start to like her.

“Rivers are nice,” she say. “Is that how you got your name?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. It's the name my mama gave me.”

“I didn't have a river in Phoenix. And I don't have a mama. You're lucky. You have both.”

I walked a few steps upstream from her and took off my sneakers and rolled up my jeans. Then I held my breath against the cold water and stepped in only until my toes were covered, and crouched.

“But that was my other mama,” I say, flattening my palms against the surface of the river. “I'm adopted.”

“Then you have a river and two mamas.”

“Well . . . I don't know anything about my first one, and no one lets me ask about her, so I just consider that I have one.”

Meadow Lark got off the log and come and crouched next to me. “Since I have none, then maybe you understand a little how I feel.” In the sun her pumpkin-colored hair looked more carrot.

I did understand how she felt, being new and not having a mama, so I hoped she wouldn't mind if I asked her a personal question. “How can you see out of that eye?”

When she laughed, I knew it was okay.

“My glasses help,” she say, “but sometimes I have to squint. And if I get tired, outlines get blurry and separate into colors.”

“You mean like a prism?”

“I guess you could say that I have my own prism.” She kept looking into the water. “I could have an operation to fix it, but I'm sick of operations.”

I wanted to ask her about those operations, but by the thin way she answered, I decided to tuck my questions away for later.

“One time I found a bone right here,” I say. “It looked like a squirrel bone, and it had a BB in it.”

“Really?” she say, now drawing slow figure eights in the water. Something else, not bones with BBs in them, was on her mind, and she asked suddenly, “Why does Daniel Bunch talk to you like that?”

Right away I felt my back stiffen up. “Like what?”

“Like he knows a secret about you.”

I shrugged and reached for a green-and-white stone through the water. “Daniel talks to everybody like that.” My neck started to prickle, and the prickling crawled up my scalp.

“No, he doesn't,” she say, and stopped drawing.

Now my face burned, not because Daniel Bunch talked like that to me, but because Meadow Lark had noticed that he did. It was the same feeling I had when she sat with me on the bench after she'd seen Daniel talking to me. I didn't want her—or anyone—seeing that.

I splashed a handful of water on my face to cool off. “I do this all the time,” I say so she wouldn't know I was embarrassed again. “Since you know all about me, you tell me the secret.”

“I didn't say there was a secret, but just that he acts like there's one.”

“You know he's the one started that name about you.”

Then she stepped out of the water and sat on the sand with her legs straight out in front, and tied her hair into a knot. “I've been called lots of names before—Popeye, Hunchback, Frankenstein—but Frankenfemme's the most creative.”

“But doesn't it hurt when they say things like that?”

Meadow Lark Frankenfield shrugged. “Not most of the time. I have more important things to do.”

Anyone who wasn't afraid of Daniel Bunch was someone I wanted to know. I stepped out of the water and sat W next to Meadow Lark.

“You can do that too? Look,” Meadow Lark say, and bent her legs same way, with her calves at her sides and ankles pointed out.

“My parents keep telling me not to, but I can't sit crisscross, like most kids can.”

“Me neither,” Meadow Lark say, and pressed her knees flat onto the sand. “Crisscross hurts.”

Maybe the new girl and I had more in common than liking Cheetos. Even her popped-out eye didn't surprise me anymore. It had become the way Meadow Lark looked. Then I realized there was more pretty about her than just her name.

“You want to walk along the shore?” she asked, looking downriver. “Maybe we'll find something there.”

I shook my head. “We can't. I'm not even supposed to be
here
.”

“So what's down there?” she asked.

I picked up some sand and let it run through my curled-up fist. “Just . . . we're not supposed to go there.”

“Doesn't that make you want to?”

“No. You're really, really not supposed to go there. Besides, the best things from the river stop right here. I found some glasses and a tiny plastic doll, and once I found a silver dollar.”

A dragonfly hovered over the water and glided through the air toward us. Meadow Lark shrieked and sprang up from the sand. “I hate dragonflies!”

It was so funny to see a girl who was not afraid of Daniel Bunch running around and waving her arms and screaming over a dragonfly. Finally it swooped away, and she stepped back to the shore and peered into the water.

Then two thoughts come to me. One: How could a person who wasn't afraid of Daniel Bunch be afraid of a beautiful dragonfly? And two: I was a lot like Meadow Lark—no better and no worse—because we were both afraid of something. That's when I began to hope that Meadow Lark Frankenfield would be my friend.