I won’t lie. There were times I daydreamed about what it’d be like to get out of the woods, go to college, and play in the symphony, when Jenessa was older and didn’t need me so much. No way I’d turn into Mama. My moods are steady, dependable. I’m not bipolar; I’m sure of it. I won’t do drugs. I took care of myself and a baby. I kept us safe, kept us fed, kept us smart.
I finish the pages in no time, in under two hours, according to the wristwatch Melissa gave me before we left.
“Carey, honey, wait.”
I slide my shirt on quickly before she opens my bedroom door.
“Yes, ma’am? Do you need help with Nessa?’’
“No, she’s downstairs, ready to go. It’s just that I have something for you. For luck.”
I stiffen, not sure what to do. “For me, ma’am?”
“This was mine when I was in college. It was a high school graduation gift from my father.”
Delaney, passing by, stops to listen.
“Hold out your arm.”
I do. Melissa buckles on the thin straps of a wristwatch. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe she’s giving it to me.
“Mom!” Delaney squeals.
“You have my watch from college graduation. You have plenty of watches, Delly,” she calls out as Delaney stomps down the hallway.
“’Don’t worry about Delly, She can have one of my other ones, if she wants another that badly.”
Now, I stare at the tiny hands, no thicker than a strand of Nessa’s hair, as they tick tick tick around the face. The watch is delicate, with a golden rectangular frame and a creamy mother-of-pearl face, with blond leather straps and a tiny gold buckle to hold it in place.
It’s fine—right fine. I’ve never owned anything so fine before.
I fill in the last question and put down my pencil. I decide I love pencils. Such a convenient invention, if ever there was one. Stretching my legs, I peer out the windows on the back wall. The glass is rectangle-shaped, and the consecutive panels stretch from waist height to high above my five feet, seven inches.
I survey a courtyard filled with children Nessa’s age and younger, swinging on swings and hanging from bars and climbing a roundshaped cage with ladder rungs.
Women dressed like Mrs. Haskell cart folders in their arms and talk to grown folk who watch the children from benches. Some of the women remind me of Mama—worn-out clothes and hair askew, puffing on cigarettes like no one’s business, and, even from my perch, quite obviously putting on the dog, plain as a slice of moldy muskrat meat.
A river of feelings courses through me when I think of Mama. Her memory snaps around me like a cheap bear trap that’ll never let go.
Where is she? Why did she leave us? She could’ve at least said goodbye to Nessa.
I jump at the sound of the door opening. A shiny-headed man peeks through.
“I’m looking for an empty room.”
“You can have this one, sir.”
“Don’t forget your papers,” he says, pointing.
Tripping over my feet, I gather up the sheets and slide past him through the doorway, careful not to touch.
Feeling sneaky, I peer through the tiny glass window in Mrs. Haskell’s office door. True to her word, she and Jenessa are bent over some sort of puzzle made out of yellow, blue, red, and green wood pieces.
I watch them for a moment. Nessa is smiling. That’s all I need to know. I continue toward the waiting room.
My father sits in a chair in the corner, sunlight pouring in from a window above as he reads a newspaper. He folds it and drops it on his lap when he sees me.
“How did the test go?”
“Fine, sir.”
I sit in the chair farthest from him, swinging my feet.
“Glad to hear it. Do you mind if I take a look?”
I walk over and reluctantly hand him the pages. The place where my hand held the paper is wrinkled and damp. It’s impossible to miss the look on his face as he scrutinizes the top sheet, looking up at me and then back at the page.
I lean forward to see what he’s stuck on, following his line of vision. It’s just my name at the top, like Mrs. Haskell told me to write.
My father looks up again, his brow furrowed.
“What’s wrong, sir?”
“You were supposed to put your age on here—”
“I did. See there—” I motion at the page, uncomprehending. “It’s right under my name.”
“But you put down fifteen.“
“Yes, sir.”
My stomach does a wobbly cartwheel, realizing something I haven’t yet. It did the same when I saw him in the woods.
He lets out a long, slow breath, which smells like toothpaste and cigarettes.
“You were born fourteen years ago, Carey.”
Blood beats in my brain like a drum.
“Fifteen, sir.”
My father looks away, squinting into the afternoon light. He shakes his head no. The room shrinks around me, like I’m Alice and I ate the tiny cake. My eyes refocus, and my mind uses all its energy to wrap around his words.
“Fifteen,” I say again, emphasizing thefif, as if I can make it true by repeating it.
“Fourteen. I’m sorry, Carey.”
The hallway is a blur as I run down it, out the front door, and through the parking lot. Can’t breathe. I squat behind his truck, panting, my T-shirt sticking to my back.
No! I can’t be fourteen when I was fourteen already! Mama couldn’t have been that screwed-up!
My mind fills with the whooshing and crashing of the Obed River. The whispering trees, calling for me, wondering why I’ve left them. I’m just like Mama.
I want to go home! MY home!
The eaglets. I concentrate on the eaglets. Ness and I watched them every day after they’d hatched. She was still talking then.
“Oh no!” Nessa cries. “The eaglet’s nest is fattin apart. Look, Carey. It’s bwoken!”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes it is. Look at it!”
I gather her onto my lap, her cheeks slick with tears.
“No, Ness. Over time, the mama eagle pulls away the straws one by one until the babies are left balancin on the branches“
“You’re lyin, Carey Blackburn! Why would she be that mean?”
“It’s not mean. It’s love. If the mama kept bringin them food and they stayed in their comfy little nest, they’d never be brave enough to learn how to fly or to venture out into the world.”
Jenessa takes in a ragged breath, thinkin it over. I play with her hair, waitin’.
“The baby birds are just like us. Right, Carey?”
“How do you mean?”
“Brave, like us. Our mama isn’t here. Does that mean we’re flyin’, too?”
I give her a squeeze. She doesn’t know it, but she’s my wings.
“You bet we are, baby. In our own way, we’re flyin’, too.”
I wonder if the chipped water jug is still there, and the kettle. I think of the key in the hollow hickory. What if someone else finds it?
I hate Mama. HATE her. What kind of mother forgets the age of her child? What kind of mother can’t even keep a birthday straight?
“Hey, you.”
My father stands above me, blocking the sun. He nudges my cowboy boot with his work boot.
“I’m sorry, kiddo. I don’t know why she would’ve lied to you, unless it was to keep you two disguised.”
“Or she forgot.” I don’t look up. “Jenessa’s still six, right?”
“Yes. She got that right.”
I hug my knees to my chest, my arms aching, I hold on so tight. We share the silence for a bit—six minutes, according to my wristwatch—and then he fixes to go back into the building, stopping after a few paces to turn back to me.
“Don’t you go anywhere, you hear? I don’t know if you’re thinking about running, but your sister needs you here.”
I look up at him, my face swollen and tear
-stained.
“I need you here. And Melissa would skin me alive if I came home without you. She’s pretty attached to you two, if you don’t already know it. She’s expecting me to bring both her girls home.”
I swallow my emotions in an audible gulp. He walks back over, nudges my foot again.
“Are we clear?”
I nod, as mute as Jenessa. Then I watch his feet walk away, although it still feels like he’s walking toward me in all the ways that count.
I wonder, in the darkest puzzle piece of my heart, if he’d say those words if he knew, really knew, about the white-star night.
Jenessa would never tell. It had sucked the words right out of her.
I carry the secret close as skin or breath or pee. It rode in the truck with me as surely as those three garbage bags. Even with hours and miles between us, the truth hunkers down fat as a tick tucked into the moistest, darkest place.
Quick as the rabbits I used to shoot for breakfast, I sprint across the asphalt to the bushes and let my breakfast fly.
“You have a bird’s stomach,” Mama says, none too pleased. “You have to get those nerves under control, girl. Why you so scared? No one here but your Mama.”
She was barely there, the last year, and still not there, when she was. And that’s not counting the times she was there and a person wished with all her might she wasn’t.
7
It’s been three weeks since we arrived at our father’s farm, and yet it feels like a year in some ways.
Looking at Jenessa, you’d never know she was the same little girl. Her body, kindling thin and all angles upon arrival, is now pinker and rounder, with the start of little dents Melissa calls “dimples” in her cheeks and at the back of her knees. Her huge, haunted eyes are as sweet as they’ve always been, but the edges of worry have crumbled away, not all of it, but most. Those eyes sparkle brightest when she’s with Shorty, and there’s many a time we sit and watch them play, her company melting years off the old hound, “undoing the gray,” as my father likes to joke.
Last week, Melissa took Ness into town for a haircut, and my sister came back with her blond curls brushing her shoulders, framing rosy apple cheeks. In her new shirts, jeans, chinos, dresses, shoes, slippers, and nightgowns, she looks like a girl, a normal little girl, not the forlorn soul huddling over a tin cup of never-ending beans.
I haven’t fared as well, with so much on my mind. I haven’t gained more than five pounds, if I’m lucky. It’s the bird nerves, like Mama said.
At breakfast, I eat my bacon but pick at the eggs. I’m snug-warm in a pale blue terry-cloth bathrobe, a gift from Melissa. And yet, I’m keening fierce for the campfire, for the early-morning bird chatter launching the sun into orbit as I shiver and poke the sleeping coals awake, the morning not just a vision but a feeling, a scent, a taste that enters your pores and coasts through your veins until it fires up your very soul.
Melissa interrupts my daydreaming, her back to me as she pours herself a cup of coffee from the carafe on the kitchen counter.
“I think it’s your turn, Carey. We need to get you some new clothes. Not just for school but to keep you warm and comfortable, too. Winter’s coming. At the least, you need a new coat.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It’s impossible to say no to Melissa (especially when she’s talking up a new winter coat!), but not because she’s bossy. More because her intentions are always in the right places.
Melissa waits until my seat belt clicks before she turns the key and proceeds down the driveway. She waves to my father, who’s chopping firewood, and to Nessa and Shorty, who are playing fetch out front.
Melissa hums to the radio, to slower songs I’ve never heard before. I sneak a few glances at her, and she catches me, winking at me, and I can’t help but smile back. At least until we reach the ginor-mous (Delaney’s word) bustling place called “the mall,” and I change my mind less than five feet from the entrance.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?”
My feet remain glued to the blacktop. I can’t look at her.
“Carey? Look at me, child.”
I look into her face, my own expressing the tangle of emotions churning my breakfast and flushing my cheeks.
Melissa looks pained, which surprises me. She takes a deep, steadying breath for both of us and then smiles her reassurance, with the kind of strength dredged up from a backbone of steel. Steel. For me.
“Here. Take these.”
She drops the key chain to the SUV into my open palm.
“You can wait in the car, okay? I’ll pick up a few things, and then we’ll go home. How does that sound?”
“Good, ma’am.” I summon up a tiny grin, all monkey arms-awkward. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Do you know how tall you are?”
Longing runs down my innards like Pooh’s honey as I think of the Growing Trees, two hickorys side by side, where I’d carved ascending notches as I’d marked my height on one and Nessa’s on the other.
“Five feet, seven inches.”
“How about your feet? Do you know what size?”
“My sneakers are an eight? And they fit right good.”
Same size as Mama’s. But I don’t say it out loud.
Slumping in the passenger seat, barely blinking, I people-watch my eyes out. There are lots of girls my age dancing around women like Melissa, as excited as Shorty when I hold up a bone and he weaves between my legs in rapidfire anticipation.
I smooth my hair, seeing the girls’ perfect locks. Melissa made mine perfect just last week.
“Unless you want to change your style, I only need to take about an inch off the ends, straight across the bottom. I could do it for you, if you’d like.”
The ends look chunky now, and I can’t stop turning around to see them in the mirror.
I watch women navigate kids with wires hanging out of their ears, their heads bouncing rhythmically. I follow the wires down to little square boxes clipped onto their belts or disappearing inside jacket pockets.
Some talk into rectangular devices pressed to their ears, called “cell phones,” or hold them out in front of them, thumbs tapping wildly. If you did that in Obed, you could fall down a ravine or step on a venomous snake. Not paying attention, you’d miss the snippet of baby rabbit flashing by or the red shuffle fox who could easily be persuaded to visit from time to time in exchange for bread crusts or wild blackberries, twinkly tinfoil or a busted shoestring.
Delaney has both devices, and she laughed at me when I first asked Melissa what they were. In the middle of the conversation, Nessa’s head whipped toward me, her eyes wide as the harvest moon. I shook my head no.
“We cant call Mama.”
Why not? Jenessa’s eyes shout.
“Because Mama don’t—doesn’t—have one of those fancy phones.”
Delaney turns to Melissa, incredulous.
“She’s kidding, right? How can anyone in this century, let alone on this planet, not know what a cell phone or an iPod is?”
Melissa’s lips press into a hard line. Delaney throws up her hands, her signature gesture, I’ve learned by now. She glares at me before turning back to Melissa.
“What? What did I say this time?”
Melissa shakes her head slowly, a look passing between them.
“Fine. If you think I’m bad, Mother, wait until she goes to school. The kids’ll eat her alive if she doesn’t get with the program!”
School.
Each time I replay that conversation, my blood pounds in my ears and my stomach jumps like catfish in the Obed River.
It only takes Melissa one and a half shopping hours, the end of which I spend dozing. I quickly grow tired of scrutinizing my reflection in the mirror, studying the girl who lives in that glass. I hadn’t known I was beautiful until Melissa confirmed it. Going by her voice, it’s supposed to be a good thing—like winning the Mega Millions, which my father plays twice a week, or bringing down a fat buck.
Onl
y, I don’t see it. All I see is me. And I know me. And that word doesn’t fit me. I still look exactly like the girl who lived in the woods. You can take the girl out of the woods, but not the woods out of the girl, I reckon. I still look owl-eyed, pointy-chinned, serious. I still look like I know more than I should, which I do. I still look like I’m hefting huge white-star secrets. I’m surprised every day that no one else can see.
Rap rap rap!
I open my eyes and see Melissa looking in, toting a bunch of large white bags that bump against her thighs.
“Could you pop the trunk for me?”
I watch her eyes remember. I like that she forgets.
“Here. Let me show you how.”
She disappears from view, reappearing by her own door.
I know how to unlock the doors, so I do that. One flick of a switch. It’s amazing.
“Thanks, Carey. See this button here?” I lean toward her, nodding.
She pushes it, and I spin in my seat to watch the trunk open automatically.
“Now you know.”
She smiles softly and disappears around the back. I sit up straight and wipe the sleep from my eyes, smooth my hair again, and wait.
“Just a sec, and we’ll be on our way home,” she calls out.
Home.
That word. It creeps across my consciousness like a plump caterpillar measuring my humerus. You don’t want to hurt it, but you don’t know what to do with it, either. To which I tell myself, home is wherever Jenessa is. It’s as simple as that, really. It doesn’t have to mean more than that unless I want it to. One h word can’t wipe out my Obed life. Nor can it wipe out Mama. Even if sometimes a huge part of me wishes it could.
We carry the humongous (I’m a fast study) bags to my room. I carry a heavy one filled with rectangular white boxes. I have no idea what goes into rectangular white boxes. But they look so clean, so fresh and new. For a moment, everything that’s good in the whole wide world must fit into rectangular white boxes.
I vow to keep the boxes, too.
I’m so curious and excited, I don’t even flinch when Melissa leans in toward me and gives me a hug, her eyes dancing.
“Let’s unpack the loot,” she says, and I don’t know what loot means is, but it sounds like it must be at least as good as rectangular white boxes.