Found Things (3 page)

“I found a skull in the desert,” Meadow Lark say. “Not a human one—it was a lizard. Now it's on my dresser in my new house. What did you do with everything you found here?”

“Most of them are on my collage at school.”

“I wish I could find something today,” she say, reaching into the water, “like this.”

Meadow Lark pulled up a yellow bead shaped like a flower. “Here,” she say, and dropped it into my palm, where it sparkled with water and sand.

“Pretty,” I say, and handed it back to her.

But she shook her head. “It's yours,” she say, and looked back into the water.

“Thanks,” I say.
It would be perfect for my collage,
I thought, and tucked it deep into my pocket.

“I think,” Meadow Lark say, “all those things landed here just for you, because they knew you like to come here.”

Maybe it had to do with her eye, but Meadow Lark had a different way of seeing. But I shrugged and say politely, “Maybe.”

Then she pointed upriver to where it curved and made a sandbar. “Let's go out there. I bet there are lots of treasures stuck in those rocks.”

I looked at where she was pointing. To get to the sandbar, you had to walk in the water up to your knees, at least, and I couldn't do that. “Y-you can go,” I say, sloshing the water with my toes.

She waded out into the river until the water reached the middle of her calves. “Come on out,” she called, and when I shook my head, she say, “Are you scared? I'll come get you.”

“No, I'll . . . keep looking here.”

“Whatever you want,” she say. “But it's just a little water.” Then she waded over to the sandbar and peered into the river.

Beside the chocolate bits was a jar of flour, and then I turned and saw a room beyond the pantry, on the other side of the kitchen. This brand-new room smelled like leather and the forest. It had a high ceiling and a big, solid table with birds and vines carved into its sides. Three legs fanned out beneath the table, planted on an Oriental rug that was deep red, with green and orange and brown and a milk-colored white woven into it, and fringed all around the edge. A dark wooden desk gouged with pencil marks and scratches sat against the wall, and a shelf with wooden slots stood on top, stuffed with envelopes and rolled-up papers. An old adding machine also sat on the desk, and I punched a few of its keys. Two tall windows side by side looked onto a sun porch, and a radiator—the kind with pipes—sat below them. Another doorway led back to the kitchen.

Just as I began to step through that door, Meadow Lark say, “It's getting cold,” and I was back at the river.

Meadow Lark stood nearby, shivering. She wrapped her arms around herself, and goose bumps dotted her arms. The shadows from the trees on the other side reached across, and the chill licked my wet feet. It was time to go, but my hands were empty. I had nothing from the water except the yellow flower bead that Meadow Lark gave me.

“Maybe next time we'll find something else,” Meadow Lark say, as if she knew exactly what I'd been thinking.

I liked that there would be a next time, but just so she wouldn't expect to find silver dollars and gold rings every time, I told her, “I only find something good every once in a while.”

“Maybe you need to look harder.”

And just as she say that, something fluttered on the sand near the rock—a feather as white as a baby's eye and shorter than my thumb.

I set it in my palm and held it out to Meadow Lark. “Here, you keep it,” I say, and noticed for the first time that her eyes were the same color brown as the river bottom when the sun shone on it.

“No, you found it, so it's yours,” she say, waving it away.

Just then, a puff of breeze lifted the feather off my hand, and I grabbed for it. But it was too quick and darted off.

“Over there,” Meadow Lark say, pointing to a bush. She couldn't run very fast on her slow leg, so I dashed ahead of her. The feather had caught in a bush, but just as I got close, it fluttered off, and then again, always out of my reach. I followed it around the bend, and then stopped when the old covered bridge come into view, dark and menacing in the green of the woods. I saw the bank leading to its mouth and tall weeds growing on what used to be a path.

The feather quivered on a branch just a few feet away, teasing. I was already too close to the bridge, and the murky sight of it was enough to plant dread in my stomach. I grabbed for the feather and pinched it in my fingers. Then I carried it back to the beach and showed Meadow Lark.

“It's a perfect feather,” she say, looking close. “It's the kind you make a wish on.”

“You want to wish on it?” I asked, watching the feather flutter in my hand.

“Let's both make a wish, at the same time. Ready?” She crossed her fingers and squeezed her eyes shut. “One-two-three—go.”

I'd already made my wish the night before, so I watched Meadow Lark's lips move to hers. When she was finished, she opened her eyes and asked, “All done?”

“I didn't make a wish.”

“Then go ahead.”

I shook my head. “No, I want to save my wishes.”

“Save them for what?”

“Until I really need them,” I say. “Let's just send it off now, okay?”

“River, what's the matter?” Meadow Lark asked.

What was the matter was always the same—Theron. I'd wished for more than two months for him to come back, and he hadn't. All the talk about wishes and miracles was just talk. What good would it do to wish on a feather?

But all I say was, “Nothing. I just don't know the wish rules.”

“There aren't any rules. It's just a game.”

“So go ahead and blow it away.”

Meadow Lark shook her head. “No, you float it on the river.”

“I never heard of that. Did you just make it up?”

“That's what they do where I come from.”

“Where you come from?” I asked, puzzled. “I thought you didn't have a river in Phoenix.”

“Well . . . ,” she say slowly, “I've lived in lots of places. And in the other places—not Phoenix—that's what we did. I can't believe you've never heard of it.”

“We must be slow,” I say, and glanced at the feather ruffling in the light breeze. It looked alive.

“Sure you don't want to make a wish first?” she asked.

“Oh, okay, I'll make a silly little wish.” That way, I figured, I wouldn't be disappointed when nothing come of it.

“No, you have to make a big, crazy wish that you'd never, ever believe would come true. It has to be so big and crazy that it hurts to make and would break your heart if it didn't come true.”

Too many hearts were already broken over Theron, so I thought of something else that could be big and crazy. Then I looked at Meadow Lark. “Okay, I have one.”

“Remember, make it big and crazy,” she say.

I closed my eyes and made my wish.
I want to know my real mama.

When I opened my eyes, Meadow Lark say very seriously, “Now we put it in the water.”

It was such a pretty feather, pretty enough to keep, pretty enough to put in your pocket as a lucky feather. It would be a shame to waste it down the river. “Sure you don't want to hold on to it?” I asked.

She shook her head and took the feather from me. “No, it has to carry those wishes away.”

Then Meadow Lark stepped into the river up to her knees, out far enough for the current to carry our wishes a long way. She set the feather on the surface, and the river snatched it and whisked it off.

I watched the feather slide and twirl on the water until I couldn't see it anymore, letting my big, crazy, silly wish about my mama last only as long as I could see the feather. After it was gone, I wished I'd tucked that pretty feather in my pocket, so I could keep it in my ballerina box next to my emerald ring.

The pink light of dusk hung in the air when I got home, and as soon as I stepped inside and smelled onion casserole, I remembered the milk.

“Did you forget something, River?” Mama asked me, her hands planted on her hips and her mouth a straight line. “Just when I was at my last drop. Now I'll have to go out. Where . . .” She stopped and sniffed the air. “You've been down at the river. What have we told you about that?”

I nodded. “I'm sorry. I just forgot about the milk.”

“Forgot? Get upstairs and stay there till I call you down,” she say, unhooking her pocketbook from the rack by the door. “Think about what it means to be dependable.”

“Where's Daddy?” I asked. It was dusk and he wasn't home yet from Boston.

“Don't change the subject.”

I went upstairs, like Mama say, and tried to think about being dependable, but instead I fell asleep. Sometime later their voices woke me up, and then I heard Daddy's footsteps coming up the stairs and a soft knock on my door.

“River?”

I slid my bedspread halfway over my nose and I closed my eyes. The door opened slowly. Daddy come and sat on the bed and put his hand on the bedspread, where my ankle was, and jiggled it.

“Wake up, River. It's past eight. You have to eat.”

I fluttered my eyelids, pretending to wake up, and mumbled, “Is it morning already?”

“No, it's already nighttime.”

I rubbed my eyes and brushed the hair off my face. “I told Mama I was sorry about the milk, but she send me up here anyway.”

“You have to be gentle with her. You know she's like a piece of glass these days,” Daddy say. “And,” he say with a little squeeze on my ankle, “remember to correct yourself when you talk.”

“
Sent.
I'm trying, but I forget.”

“I understand,” he say, and smiled gently.

I yawned and then say, “I wish I knew how to make Mama happy again.”

Daddy looked down at his hand on my ankle, and I noticed for the first time since Theron left how the skin of his cheeks folded like draperies beside his mouth. “Me too, honey.”

Then a thought come to me, as if it walked in the door and sat on the bed with us. “Maybe what make—makes—her happy now is being sad. And being sad is the way she'll always be from now on.”

Daddy squeezed my ankle again. “I sure hope that's not true.”

He sat there on my bed while the wind-up clock they gave me last birthday ticked. I counted forty-three ticks. When my stomach growled, I realized the only thing I'd eaten since breakfast was half an apple—and none of Meadow Lark's pretzel sticks.

“Are you sure it's safe to go downstairs?” I asked.

“Mmm-hmm,” Daddy say, and raised one eyebrow. “But if she starts to hum, let her sing.”

At that moment I'd have given anything—even my emerald ring—to hear Mama hum again.

Chapter 4

That Sunday, as Mama and
I sat in church—holy hot dogs!—my stomach started growling again.

“Shh!”
Mama say, keeping her eyes on the altar. This was her sacred time.

My stomach felt stuck to the back of the pew, I was so hungry, and all I could think about was the stack of blueberry pancakes waiting at Doby's and the little bottles of syrup all lined up at each table. So I pressed my hands over my stomach and hunched over to muffle the noise, wondering if that little cube of bread about to come around on the silver tray could keep it quiet until lunchtime.

Mama flickered her eyes at me as a warning. She never let me go to Sunday school. She say Sunday school was a waste of good time for a girl like me, so ever since I was old enough to remember, I come into church with her and Daddy and Theron. These days Daddy stayed until the offering plates started passing across the pews, and then he slipped to the side and out the back door. He say the Cathedral of Nature was the only church he cared to attend anymore.

“Pay attention,” Mama say. It was what she always say to me whenever communion began and a hush as heavy as whipped cream filled the sanctuary. While other kids had doodle pads to keep them quiet, I wasn't allowed. I had to sit up straight with my ears perked and eyes wide open. If ever there was a time to pay attention, Mama say, it was during communion. While Pastor talked about the body, and then broke the loaf of bread in two, Mama stared straight at him. “Keep your eyes on that bread,” she always say when he broke it, “because that's when you might see the truth.”

“The truth of what?” I always ask, but she always just shushes me.

Sometimes I think she meant Jesus, after he come back to life and ate with his friends. I haven't seen him yet. Haven't seen him in the stained glass behind the communion table, haven't heard him in the flapping of bulletins, or smelled him in the breath of prayers around me. Haven't ever sensed a glow of him crouched in the murky space beside the pulpit. When I asked Mama if she ever saw the truth during communion, she say, “Not yet.”

But I learned that, for Mama, that's what hope is—the moment just before the bread breaks or when dusk falls. It's the moment she holds her breath and waits to see with her eyes what her heart longs for.

After service, Mama stopped to talk to Pastor, so I threaded my way through the crowd and went outside to find Daddy. Before Theron left, Daddy often stood on the grass with the other men. Like Daddy, they wore pastel-colored shirts. Like Daddy, the smell of their aftershaves floated on the breeze. And like Daddy, they belonged to the Cathedral of Nature, the Church of Fishing, and the Fellowship of Barbecue. But these days he was usually in the car, reading the paper or listening to the ball game or thumb-tapping the steering wheel waiting for Mama and me to finish.

I was never sure if it was their choice or his that he be in the car by himself instead of with the men, but I knew it had something to do with Theron and what everyone say he'd done. I hoped it wasn't the men's decision to leave Daddy out, because church—like family—was supposed to be a place to forgive.

After I left Mama, I went out to the parking lot to look for him. Today he wasn't in the car, but then I looked across the lawn and saw Daddy standing with the other men.

It had begun to rain a fine mist that drifted like fog, the kind of drizzle that started off soft and steady but hinted at days and days of rain to come. I stepped carefully on the grass to keep from sinking into the moist earth.

As I got closer to Daddy, he reached out his arm to touch me as soon as he could. All the time it took me to reach him, he didn't stop looking at the other men as they talked. Usually they leaned back and laughed or put their hands in their pockets, or slapped their thighs. But today, by the way they stood like a grove and crossed their arms over their chests or leaned in to one another, or rubbed their cheeks or pulled their chins, I knew this conversation was of a serious nature.

I ran into Daddy's arm, and when he wrapped it around me, I tried hanging off him.

“How big are you now?” Mr. Clapton asked. He had one tooth that stuck out, even when his mouth was closed.

“Eleven.”

“Well, you're way too big to hang now. You're almost in high school.”

I looked at Daddy, who shrugged at me, and then back at Mr. Clapton. I remembered he didn't have any kids, and decided he didn't know how old you had to be in high school. Also, Mama say he'd had a hard life and relied on his community for help, and that we needed to be good neighbors.

“Almost,” I say, to be polite. Then I whispered to Daddy, “Mama's dying for Doby's.”

“Mama?” he say, and raised his eyebrow. He put his finger to his lips, not like Mama in church, but as if to say,
Wait a little bit, until we're done talking.
Whenever Daddy talked to me like that, I had trouble believing I ever heard him raise his voice to Theron.

“I'm telling you,” Mr. Mittell, Sonya's daddy, say, “we're in for a flood this year. Watch the rain, watch the bridges. You remember that summer—”

“Rain didn't swell the river that summer, Vin,” Daddy say. “It was snow melt.”

“It was rain, Ingram,” Mr. Clapton say to Daddy, though he looked at me. “The same year the old bridge flooded and you—”

“No,” Daddy say, very short. I felt his arm tighten, and he shook his head like a muscle twitch, as if to tell Mr. Clapton to stop talking.

The covered bridge?
I wondered.

“If you hadn't been on the bridge to save them . . . ,” Mr. Clapton say, and then glanced at me without another word. By the way Daddy had tensed up and cut Mr. Clapton off, I knew better than to ask what he meant. So I just waited for Mr. Clapton to open his mouth, to see if all his teeth were crooked.

Daddy waved away the conversation. “That was the past. It's all over with,” he say, and then I knew that Daddy had a secret.

“It can happen again,” Mr. Mittell say, looking up at the gray sky. “The rain's already started.” Then he looked straight at me. “And you, young lady, you stay off the bridges.”

After Daddy and I moved away from the men and went looking for Mama, I asked, “What were they talking about?”

But all he say was, “Did someone say something about pancakes?”

On the fourth Sunday of each month, Mama takes flowers to the family. She piles all the gardening equipment into the trunk—spades, gardening gloves, the big metal watering pot, and a cardboard box lid with the flowers she bought at Pike's Nursery the day before—and then lets Daddy take over until we arrive at the Green Memorial Cemetery.

Every time before we go, she say, “River, take that watering can outside and run the hose through it.” There's usually a spider or two that made a home in that can since the month before, but sometimes it's worse. Two years ago I found a dead mouse. Daddy set it aside and Theron and I buried it later behind the stone-wall fence because I felt sad for it.

But this Sunday there was only one spider. Not a big, hairy one, but a daddy longlegs. They don't really qualify as spiders because I'm not afraid of them. This one was still alive, and I let it walk up my arm before lowering it to the grass.

Mama stopped driving after Theron left us. She say it was like a hunger strike, but Daddy grumbled that the only person affected was everyone else. Meaning him, who had to drive her everywhere she couldn't walk to. I think Theron was just an excuse, because by the time she stopped driving, she had put dents in both sides of the back bumper, sliced off the side-view mirror on a mailbox, and driven off the road more than three times in the same month.

Just after Theron left, Mama was driving us to Concord when a thunderstorm hit. In three seconds the highway turned into a pond. Daddy told her to slow down. I had a bag of pretzel sticks in my lap and was about to put a pretzel in my mouth when the car wiggled and spun around, and then it took off and slid clear across the highway.

I watched Daddy's hands grip the dash until all his knuckles turned pink and, when he was sure nothing worse was going to happen, heard the breath wobble out of him. Later, Mama say that I screeched so loud she thought we'd hit a clowder of cats, and I didn't stop screaming until we come to rest a foot from the cement divider wall.

Nothing hit us, and we didn't hit anything, we didn't flip over, and no one got hurt. We spun around and around and stopped, facing in the right direction. That's when I remembered my pretzels, but when I put one in my mouth, I poked a hole in my cheek because my hand shook so.

As Daddy's breathing come back to normal, Mama stared straight out the windshield. “What did I tell you?” she say. “Angels.”

After Mama loaded the trunk that Sunday after church, she left it open until Daddy inspected it to make sure everything was there so we wouldn't have to turn back once we got to the cemetery. Then we all climbed into the car. Even with the sprinkling rain, there were no exceptions to going to the family. We had ponchos and umbrellas if the sprinkles turned into a downpour.

Beside me in the backseat was that empty yawn where Theron would have sat. He'd be sitting behind Mama because Daddy had to push his own seat back and Theron's legs were too long.

We drove through town and along the lonely two-lane road that eventually ran into the highway. Daddy turned the car onto the narrow gravel road, and the tires crunched all the way to the little hill in the shade, near the faucet that poked out of the ground. Some of the headstones had little flags beside them, others had flowers, and those without either looked left out.

While Daddy carried the box lid full of flowerpots and I filled the watering can, Mama put on her visor and slipped on her gloves. Then she took the spades over to the family headstones and started digging.

Mama planted flowers according to the season. In summer she planted pots of phlox and daylilies, in fall she planted asters and chrysanthemums, in winter she brought arrangements of grasses and leaves and twigs, and in spring she planted pink impatiens and crocuses and columbines for the family. And she always brought more than we needed, and dropped off the leftovers at the hospital, where she used to volunteer, a few miles down the road.

Today she carried a box of daffodils, a flower that bloomed in the seam of spring and summer. Also because it was Grampa Raymond's favorite flower.

By now Daddy was done with his part of the job, and he sat in the car with the door open and one foot flat on the ground. The ball game was on the radio, and the announcer's sharp voice cut into the cemetery quiet.

“Bring some water over here, River,” Mama say after she patted down the dirt around Grampa's flowers. I lugged the can over to her, trying to keep the water from sloshing out.

She sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead with her arm. “You remember your Grampa Raymond, don't you?”

I looked at the headstone. Nothing about it helped me remember my grampa. “I remember his cheeks were scratchy.”

“Well, you were just a baby—I mean, just a little girl,” Mama say, as if she'd forgotten I didn't come to them until I was almost two.

“Well, he lay asleep for a week, and your grandma thought he was gone. Suddenly, he sat straight up and opened his eyes wide, like he heard a thunderclap, and said, ‘There they are, Mother.' And then he lay back down and closed his eyes.”

“What did he see?”

“We don't know, because right after that he was gone,” she say, and leaned forward onto her knees again and finished patting down the dirt, though it already looked perfect to me. “But Grandma thought he might have seen . . . people.”

I knew Mama meant angels because she believed in them, but she say, “We'll never know.”

She planted three flowers for every stone in the family, which was four—plus the big one that the two sets of great-grandparents shared—and there was always one extra flowerpot in the box lid.