Maybe a Fox (7 page)

Eat.

Once her belly was full, Senna breathed in long and deep.

Next, the fox parents led their kits to their new above-world home, a hollow beneath a brush pile. There was enough room for all of them to stretch against one another and keep warm in a tangle of twigs and leaves.

Younger Brother turned in a tight circle, crushing the leaves beneath him. He made a spot for himself a few inches away from the rest of them. Older Brother and their parents were already asleep, soaking in the afternoon sun.

But Senna's nose filled with a scent that wasn't pine or dirt or leaves. It was familiar nonetheless. An old scent. At the same time, the cry of an unknown creature came from across the meadow, beyond the woods, almost beyond where she could hear. Though her family slept, Senna could not. The cry filled her ears and lured her from the hollow.

She flattened her paws against the cool earth and pushed up slowly, so slowly that she barely felt herself moving. When she was upright, ears pricked to the far ridgeline, the cry came again. She closed her eyes, the better to hear. She sniffed, the better to know what sort of creature the sound was coming from.

Human. A human girl.

Sylvie.

Sylvie.

Sylvieeeeeee.

The gray-green bars trembled in the air before Senna as the human girl called her sadness to the sky. The weight of her sadness pressed on Senna, and she eased back into her family's nest, where she rested her head on Older Brother's neck and closed her eyes. But the human girl's cries came again, fainter now.

Who was this girl, filled with sorrow, calling and calling and calling?

J
ules had always felt secretly ashamed of not having a burning wish, the way Sylvie and Sam did. But even when she tried to think something up—and she had tried—there hadn't been anything she wanted as much as Sylvie wanted to run faster, or as much as Sam wanted Elk and the catamount to return.

Not until now.

Now she finally had her own burning wish—
find the Grotto
—and there was no Sylvie to tell.

She reached underneath Sylvie's pillow and pulled out the twin agates. Elk hadn't said one word about them, but she was sure he was thinking about them. Why else would he have thought to say, “You're the Rock Girl. If anyone can find that old cave, it should be you.”

Jules clicked the LED light on her hand lens and examined the agates. Even under the magnifier, they were strikingly similar, which was so weird for agates. Most agates were similar before they were split open, with those rough exteriors that looked like dried mud. But on the inside they were all so different, with concentric rings like the ones around Saturn or inside tree stumps, rings that made beautiful patterns. But not these two. Only tiny differences showed up under the glass.

Should she give them back to Elk now? Or should she still try to find the Grotto? What if it was near the Slip? She never wanted to see the Slip again. And there was that stinking invisible line between her and the woods, one that she wasn't supposed to cross. Something that Dad reminded her every single day: “Not for crossing.”

Dad. Dad had changed. Not in huge ways, but in ways that were big enough to be different. At night, for example, when they made popcorn and watched movies together, plenty of room on the couch now, with only two of them, he sometimes put his arm around her. That was not like him, not like the dad she had known her whole life.

But everything was different in After Sylvie time, wasn't it? Maybe he kept his arm around her because without Sylvie, he still had one free to eat popcorn with. Maybe he kept his arm around her because he was afraid that she, too, would disappear. Maybe he kept his arm around her because he didn't want her to think she wasn't his favorite. How could she be his favorite when she had let Sylvie go, and when every memory she had left of Mom grew dimmer by the day?

It had always been Sylvie who kept the memories of Mom alive. Now Dad had only his own memories. Sylvie had messed everything up!

“She slipped. She fell. You know how fast she ran. It was an accident.” Dad said it so often now that it was like a chant. The Chess Sherman chant.

“It was an accident, Juley-Jules.”

“I know, Dad. I know.”

The thing was, if it had been Jules who broke the Do Not that day, there wouldn't have been an accident. Because Jules wouldn't have run. She would have walked. She would have been careful. She would have stayed far back from the edge of the Slip and thrown her rock in. Everything would have been fine. Not like it was now, when nothing was fine.

Just as she clicked off the LED and stuffed the agates back underneath Sylvie's pillow, she heard a knock on the front door. She waited for Dad to answer it but then remembered that he had said something about cleaning out his work shed. The work shed was behind the house, not by the kitchen door.

The knock came again.

“Jules!”

Sam. Of course. Sam brought her schoolwork every day, collecting it from every teacher. It had been his idea to tell Mr. Simon not to stop the bus at the Shermans' driveway anymore because Jules was going to stay out of school for a while. Jules hadn't even known how much she hated seeing the bus sigh to a stop every morning until it didn't anymore. And even though she also hated thinking of Sam sitting in their seat without her and Sylvie squeezed in on either side of him, she still didn't think she was ready to go back, no matter what Dad said.

Sam handed her a stack of folders, and together they stepped into the kitchen.

“We have some root beer,” Jules told him. “Do you want one?”

Root beer was Sam's favorite. Jules's too. Sylvie preferred ginger ale.
Had
preferred ginger ale. Jules reached into the refrigerator for two bottles of root beer and handed one to Sam. The pile of homework kept growing. At first she had tried to keep up, but when she showed her work to Dad, he just nodded. He didn't say, “This is Jules and Sylvie's dad, signing off.” He also didn't say, “This is Jules's dad, signing off.” She didn't know which was worse, to hear it or not to hear it. She plopped the homework down on the kitchen table, and she and Sam both walked out onto the porch into the warm afternoon sun.

“Elk came by today,” she said.

Sam nodded, frowning a little, but he didn't say anything. It was hard on him, how Elk had changed, Jules knew, and she also knew that even if Sam didn't say anything about it, he worried about his brother. Maybe by letting Sam know that Elk hadn't spent the entire day alone in the woods, that he had come by the Shermans' house, visited a little bit with Jules and her dad, maybe that would make him feel better?

But Sam didn't talk about Elk. He leaned toward her, as if he had a secret, and whispered, “Guess what, Jules? Someone spotted a catamount.”

“What?”

A hundred years had passed in these woods without even a trace of a catamount.

“There's been a sighting,” he said. He smiled at her, the first real smile she'd seen from anyone in a while, and for a moment Jules felt her own face relax too.

Ever since she and Sylvie and Sam had seen that stuffed catamount at the museum in Montpelier during a school field trip, Sam had wanted to see a live one. He had stood in front of the glass case where the cat had been mounted since 1881, and stared at it, for nearly the whole rest of the visit, almost as if Sam were in a trance.

Jules understood—its eyes were made of glass, and its coat was faded and shaggy, and she could hardly bear that he wasn't still roaming the woods and mountains, his native territory. It was hard to look at the catamount, but harder to not look at it.

“For real, Sam?” For the first time since Sylvie had gone, something that wasn't sadness or anger crept through Jules.

“Maybe he'll come here,” Sam said, his voice low and soft.

“Maybe,” said Jules. She knew that their woods would be the perfect place for a catamount to make a home. There were plenty of places where a large cat, even a huge one, could hide on their land. In fact, the Grotto would be a good place for a catamount to hide.

The Grotto! Her new burning wish.
Find the Grotto.

After that day at the museum, Sam had thrown hundreds, maybe thousands of wish rocks into the Slip:
Catamount return.
That was, until Elk left for Afghanistan. Then Sam's wishes changed to
Elk return
. Sam's wishes had been granted. Elk came home.

And now the catamount, too?

Without warning, anger zipped its way into her cheeks, small and ugly. Jules tried to clamp down on it, but she couldn't help it.

“That's so unfair!” came out of her mouth. And it was. Not fair that a catamount, the rarest of animals, had come back after a hundred years without Sylvie to see it. Not fair that a hunter or a game ranger or a scientist would probably track him down now, and depending on who found him first, would either kill him or tranquilize him and strap on one of those radio collars. Not fair that a huge cat, a cat that could eat a person, just like that, might be roaming through their woods, the woods that Sylvie once roamed through too.

And now that she, Jules, had a big, burning wish, it wasn't fair that she could never, ever throw a wish rock into the Slip again.

“It makes me so angry!” she said. “
You
make me angry! Why should both your wishes come true?”

Sam's eyes went wide. He backed out onto the porch and down the steps.

“Anyway,” said Sam, his voice shaken. Jules saw that he had only wanted to share the good news with her. The small, ugly anger hovered in the air between them. She wished she could take it back, but it was already free in the world. She wrapped her arms around her waist and tried to swallow the ugliness that tasted like grit inside her mouth.

“I'll see you tomorrow, Jules,” Sam said, lowering his shoulders. Then he disappeared down the drive.

Jules bowed her head. She hadn't meant to be mean, especially to Sam, who brought her homework every day, who sat and talked to her while she sorted through her rocks, who brought her new ones to add to the collection: mica and shale and talc and a triangular-shaped piece of serpentine. Super Friend Sam. She tried to get her feet to move, to run after him. But she was rooted to the bottom step.

She looked over at the invisible line. If she squinted her eyes, the greens and browns and grays of the woods boiled together, glimmered until they turned red-brown, the same color as her sister's hair.
Why, Sylvie? Why did you want to run faster?
Jules pulled her hand back and hurled the bottle of root beer as hard as she could against the tall maple that stood next to their house. It smashed against the trunk and shattered into a thousand pieces.

“It's not fair!” she cried.

Root beer dripped down the bark of the tree. Shards of glass sparkled in the dying sun.

T
he day came when Senna's mother and father took the kits to the Disappearance. Her father led the way, her mother trotted behind the kits. As they approached the river, the smell of water grew stronger.

Slow.

Senna sensed her parents' tension. There was something here, something at the water that her parents didn't like.

Here.

The fox family gathered at the riverbank. Their father and mother parted so that the kits could see what lay before them. Senna stared, not understanding at first. But slowly, as she watched, she saw what was happening to the bright and shining water. Here was where the tumbling, urgent flow of water fell without sign or sound into the below world. A gash in the green earth tugged the water down, and there was no more river.

Never.

The Disappearance was a place of great danger. Her mother and father turned to look sternly at their kits to reinforce their command:
Never.
The kits were never to come here. Farther south, where the river reemerged, that was all right. The river was for water and bathing and fish and prey, the little meadow creatures who came to its side. There was even a small oxbow that made a good pool for splashing.

But the Disappearance?
Never.

The mother and father foxes stood there, stern and rigid, until they were sure that the kits understood. When they were satisfied, they turned away from the Disappearance, looking back to make sure the kits were following.
Come.
A hundred yards to the south, down the path through the woods, along the riverbank, down a bluff and then up again, the kits followed their parents. They clambered over rocks and narrowed themselves to fit beneath overhanging roots, and there it was:

The Reemergence.

Bright water bubbled up out of the ground, through a small opening surrounded by long, flat rocks. The mother and father foxes stood tall on the largest rock, their kits gathered around them. Silently they looked down. There were no predators around, so they stood in the open on the rocks, here where the river returned to the above world from its journey below.

Senna spotted a path leading away from the water, one that had been traveled by many animals. It pulled her in its direction. Older Brother nudged her with his bright black nose.
Come on.
But she ignored him, pushed him away and back to their parents. She stepped onto the path.

She trotted along it for some time, until she came to the tree line, where there was a small open glen. Not twenty yards away, there was a yellow human home and a human girl.

“It's not fair!” At the sound of that voice, Senna's heart leaped. This was the same girl of the other afternoon, the girl calling her sadness to the sky. She was still filled with sorrow. And anger. This girl was all jumbled up. Sad. Angry. Both.

Senna crouched low and watched as the girl threw something, hard, against a tree. It smashed against the maple and burst into pieces, strewn around the base of the tree. They glittered in the late afternoon light.