Maybe a Fox (9 page)

Dad had already climbed back into the truck. She peered into the window, panic filling her chest. He looked back at her and winked, as if he knew how she felt.
I'll see you this afternoon,
he mouthed. The motor roared as he turned the key in the ignition. She reached for the door handle, but Sam pulled her away.

“Come on,” he said, and it was her turn to nod.

“I'm okay,” she said, even though she was pretty sure that wasn't true.

“I saw a fox this morning,” he told her.

“I saw one too! Right before the bridge!”

“Probably the same one,” Sam said, and for the first time in a long time he held out his fist and she bumped it with her own.

Okay. The fox was a small, good thing. Jules took a deep breath, and together she and Sam walked through the front doors of the school. The lockers along the hallways, the posters tacked up on the walls announcing the school play, announcing tryouts for Little League. Nothing had changed. It was all the same.

Until.

There, at the end of the hallway, was a huge poster of Sylvie at track practice, fingers brushing the ground in her sprinter's crouch, wearing the very same Flo-Jo T-shirt that Jules was wearing right now under her hoodie. Sylvie's beaming face, surrounded with signatures of their friends, with messages, looked directly at her.

Miss you.

Love you.

You were the best.

Jules felt the punch of it as it hit her full force, slammed her against the wall, and pinned her there.

“Hey,” said Sam. He grabbed her arm and shook it. “Jules.”

“I can't do this,” she said. She pressed her sleeve against her eyes, pressed the tears back. Tried to take deep breaths.

“Yes, you can,” Sam said. He tightened his grip on her arm.

But how? She was here for the first time in her whole life without her sister. Jules looked down at the concrete floor of Hobbston School. She could do this. She could. One step at a time. Lockers clanged around her, opening and shutting. The first-period buzzer blared down the halls, and Sam urged her onward.

“Come on,” he said. “I'll walk you to class.”

Jules tried moving forward, Sam's hand on her arm.

“Come on,” said Sam again. And then she heard other voices too. Familiar voices, voices she had not heard in all this time, all calling her name: “Jules . . . You're back. . . . Hey, Jules. . . . Jules is back. . . . Jules . . . Jules . . . Jules.” So many friendly voices. And hugs. A whole swarm of hugs. They felt good to her, all those hugs, and they somehow helped her hold the tears back. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed being there, with all the familiar faces.

Sam stayed right by her side as they walked down the hallway and into her sixth-grade science class. The smell of rotten eggs greeted her. The science lab always smelled like rotten eggs. When she looked over her shoulder, Sam was still there.

“I'll see you after school,” he said, handing over her backpack. Jules nodded to him. She turned around so that she couldn't see him walk away.

The morning went by, new and familiar at the same time. People in Hobbston, Vermont, knew each other across lifetimes. Families had lived next to one another for generations. Their properties, their farms, their homesteads were practically ingrained in their bones and skin and fingernails.

Once Dad had taken Jules's left hand and turned it palm up. He traced the shortest line that ran from her index finger to the edge of her palm.

“Here's the North River,” he said. Then he traced the very thin line that crossed it, from her middle finger to her wrist. Where the two lines met, he said, “Here's Hobbston.”

The longer parallel line ran beyond the first line. “Here's the Whippoorwill.” Their river. The one that split their property with the Harlesses and the Porters, the one that disappeared into the earth for a hundred yards, like a gullet, the Slip that had swallowed up her sister.

Still holding her palm up, Jules had asked him what the other line on her palm was.

“That's your lifeline, honey. Look how long it is.” He smiled and traced his finger along the line. “Full of love and adventure, that's how long it is.” Had he ever traced the lines of Sylvie's palm? Jules didn't know.

S
enna and her brothers were old enough now to roam and hunt on their own. While Younger Brother preferred solitude, Older Brother and Senna liked trotting along the animal path together, playing by the river, hunting in tandem. But there was a point each day when Older Brother left Senna alone, because his fear of the catamount could not be overcome, whereas Senna was drawn to the giant cat.

They both were Kennen, after all. Each day Senna watched the giant cat as he waited out of sight, alone on the cooling grass of the ridgetop. Soon enough, Elk appeared, just as he had every day since he had returned from far away.

When Elk appeared, the catamount breathed in his scent, the same way that Senna breathed in the scent of her human, Jules. Jules and Elk. Their stories were intermingled, she could tell.

But Elk's scent, and the history that it filled in, was patchy and rough. He wore the scent of trees and earth and rocks, same as Jules, but he also wore the smell of sand and metal and black smoke, smells that he couldn't cast off, smells that clung to him like a sticky spider's web.

Senna crouched in the underbrush, observing the catamount, who had hidden himself underneath the long, flat rocks that bordered the clearing as Elk approached. The clearing was anchored by a century-old oak that shaded a big rock at its base. This was Elk's sanctuary, his hideout. It was very near the cave of rocks, the one that Senna had scented on her very first day in the above world, that hidden cave that held the mingled traces of animals and humans.

Elk sank down onto the damp ground and fell back. He stretched his arms out over his head and stared up through the leaves of the tree into the early morning sky. They were next to a small oxbow, formed by a curve in the river, just downstream from the Reemergence. The catamount stayed put on the flat rocks, the same color as his tawny coat, perfect camouflage.

Elk's scent was powerful and mysterious. It contained the scents of other humans, ones that he came across in the routine of his days. He lay still on the forest floor for a long while, and then he took a deep breath.

“Zeke?” he said, his voice quiet. “I know you're out here.”

Senna watched the catamount's ears prick up. The man wasn't talking to the catamount; he wasn't talking to anything. He was just talking.

His voice was so low, almost a whisper, and to Senna the words themselves looked like tiny puffs of smoke when he said them. Words like
home
and
desert
and
miss
and
rocks
 . . . words that hung in the air and then dissolved.

The gray-green bars trembled in front of Elk. The catamount was motionless, listening.

“I miss you, brother,” Elk said.

Senna was not linked to Elk, but she could still sense the pain that lived inside his strong body. She fought the urge to run away from it, to rejoin Older Brother and run—
run
—to the river and back. This pain must be far worse for the catamount, for he lowered his head and rested it on his enormous paws.

Even the sun, just emerging through the dark trees, seemed sullen, alone in its own brightness.

J
ules was behind in every subject. That was what happened when you stayed out of school for a month. When you quit doing homework. When you couldn't care less about school because something huge and awful happened, something that felt so much bigger than homework ever could. She sat in her classroom and glanced at the wall, lined with books and stacks of paper, and an old clock that was stuck at exactly 2:18.

At last the final bell rang, and she stuffed everything into her already stuffed backpack and stood by her locker, waiting for Sam. He had told her to, so that they could walk to the bus together. That was when Liz Redding, the second-fastest girl in school next to Sylvie, walked up. Jules had known Liz since kindergarten. She swung her backpack onto her shoulder, wincing at the weight of it, just as Sam stepped up beside her.

Liz looked directly at Jules. “Still no sign of the body?”

Kapow!
The shock of Liz's question felt to Jules like another blow, like seeing the poster in the hallway that morning had felt like a blow.

Liz said it again. “Still no body?”

Her sister,
a body
?

Then Jules realized that all day long the faces of her friends had been silently asking this question, but no one had spoken it out loud. No one until Liz. Her words hung in the hallway air.
Still no sign of the body?

A sharp ache jabbed her in her throat. She swallowed, desperate to get away and onto the bus. But Liz kept going. “I mean, don't you think it's weird that there's absolutely no sign of her? Nothing?”

“Liz!” said Sam. “Quit it!”

“What?” Liz said.

Jules started to shake. At the far end of the hall, Sylvie's beaming face glowed bright on the enormous poster. Jules shook with anger at Liz. Liz who didn't deserve to walk the same hall as Sylvie had walked, Liz who had so casually referred to “the body.”
The body?
Jules leaped toward Liz, fists ready. It was only because Sam jumped between the two of them that Jules didn't plow into her with fists and feet and silent rage.

With Sam in the way, Jules darted around him and then she kept on going, all the way down to the end of the hall. There she jumped straight up in the air, as high as she could, and yanked at the poster of Sylvie. Jumped and yanked and tore at it until it hung in shreds. Until her sister was hidden, safe from the prying eyes of people like Liz Redding.

Sam was beside her not a moment later, but the poster was already ripped and crumpled and torn up.

“Come on,” he said, breathless, grabbing her hand. “Come on, Jules,” and he practically dragged her out of the school. There was the bus. Exhaust fumes filled their noses. Sam pulled her toward the opening door. His cheeks blazed red.

“Let's go,” he said.

“But—”

Sam pushed her ahead of him. “Don't pay any attention to her,” he said, his voice low and dark. “She doesn't know anything.”

They walked right past their usual seat—the one that they had shared with Sylvie for years and years—to the very back of the bus. It would take them home. Jules curled into the seat by the window. There was a paper cut on the side of her hand, and she rubbed it on her jeans. Liz's words tumbled around in her head, making her remember Mrs. Harless's story about the beautiful boys, that stupid, stupid story about how the river had kept one brother as a prize, while many years later the other brother screamed out his terrible secret, then stepped into the river and vanished.

An image of Sylvie running and running and running flew into her head, running so fast.
Faster than a tidal wave, faster than a wind tunnel, faster than an arrow. So fast.

So that . . .
Sylvie's secret.

Jules leaned back against the green vinyl seat. So that what?
What?
There had to be an answer that she could figure out. Sam dug a pack of gum out of his backpack and handed her a piece. Cinnamon. Jules watched as he slowly unwrapped it and placed it in his mouth, watched the muscles in his jaw flex as he chewed. Liz's horrible question rang in her ears.

Jules sank farther down in the seat and closed her eyes. She leaned against Sam, grateful that he was right next to her.

The bus strained as it went uphill. And then it sighed as if in relief while the driver, Mr. Simon, shoved the gear into neutral and let it coast down toward the bridge that crossed the river right before he pulled up to Jules's drive. As they crossed, she opened her eyes in time to look down, to look for the fox again. But there was nothing to see except the river itself.

From the road, her yellow house looked sunny in the afternoon light, the same color as the buttercups that would appear in summer, the same flowers that were stitched on her mother's blue hair band. But how could summer possibly happen without Sylvie?

The late afternoon sun agreed. In that same instant, it slipped behind a cloud and took the glow off the house. Now all it looked like was lonesome. Mrs. Harless was inside, waiting for her. Dad had told her she'd be there.
Probably with more soup,
thought Jules. More quiet house. More no-Sylvie. More soup.

Mr. Simon waved her forward. “Let's go, Jules,” he called, not unkindly. As she stepped off the bus and onto the ground, she looked over her shoulder at Sam, waving good-bye to her from the window.

After the bus drove away and she could no longer hear the puff of its brakes, she stood alone in the driveway. The chatter of birds circled her head. The trees seemed to lean in, toward her. The warm spring afternoon filled her lungs. And all around, the green, green, green of spring rushed toward her. She turned her face to the sky.

Where do you go when you die?

Maybe you turn into wind.

Maybe you turn into stars.

Maybe you turn into a firefly and light up the night.

Jules dropped her backpack on the driveway. She looked across the yard. Her father would be home soon.

But then she turned toward the woods. There was the invisible line. Despite the grayness all around, it shimmered in the dim light. If she ran as fast as she could, faster than a cheetah, faster than a thoroughbred, faster than a hornet, she could cross it. And then she would be in the woods again, the woods that she and Sylvie loved. Elk went there every day, to a clearing, he had told her.

“I go there to talk to Zeke,” he'd said. “It's weird, but somehow it feels like he's nearby.”