Lovely Wild Read online

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s not supposed to mean anything. It’s a fact.” Mom shrugged and got up from the table to put her dishes in the sink.

  Dad stabbed at the eggs and chewed. Swallowed. “You’re full of facts, all of a sudden?”

  Other parents fought. Some more than others, but they all did. Sammy’s parents practically killed each other over who’d forgotten to take out the trash. But Kendra’s parents never fought, not ever.

  “C’mon, Ethan,” she murmured. She yanked him by the wrist when he sat there like an asshat, staring with a wide-open, sausage-stuffed mouth. “Let’s go.”

  “You sit right there and finish your breakfast.” Her dad scowled and dumped eggs on her plate, three times as many as she’d ever eat even if she liked eggs.

  “But I don’t—”

  “Don’t back talk me!” Dad shouted.

  Mom turned from the sink, her hands clenched. “Don’t you yell at her!”

  Shit, shit, shit, Kendra thought, miserable, wishing she could fall through the floor. She scooped up some eggs on her fork, opening her mouth and trying to breathe through her nose so she wouldn’t puke if she ate them.

  Her mom slapped the fork from her hands.

  Eggs splattered onto the tabletop. The fork clattered to the floor and went spinning under the table. Ethan let out a small cry, but all Kendra could do was stare.

  “You don’t have to eat anything you don’t want to.” Mom’s voice shook, but she kept her gaze on Dad’s. “Ever. Do you understand?”

  Sudden silence made Kendra’s stomach hurt. Ethan started to cry, a bubble of snot in one nostril. Under the table, she grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

  “My children,” Mom said in a low, rasping voice nothing like her own, “will never be forced to eat something just because it’s there. Do you understand that, Ryan? Never.”

  Dad nodded slowly. He still had that angry look on his face, but there was something else in his eyes, too. Something that scared Kendra more than his anger.

  Her dad looked scared, too.

  Mom looked at all of them, her expression fierce but fading immediately into the same calm look she almost always had. She cleared her throat and visibly relaxed her posture. Normally she’d have comforted Ethan, but now she only looked at him swipe at his eyes. Then at Kendra.

  “Go outside,” Mom told them both. “Find something to do.”

  Kendra took Ethan by the hand and away from the table. She had no idea what they were going to do outside, just that they had to get out of the kitchen. By the time they got into the front yard, her stomach had stopped cramping, but Ethan was still sniffling.

  “I’ll watch you at the creek, if you want,” she said.

  Since the day there’d been mud all over the house, Ethan had been banned from playing in the water without someone to watch him. In fifteen minutes they were settled by the water, Kendra in a soft patch of grass with her back propped against a rock and far enough from the water that she wasn’t going to get muddy or even wet. Ethan on the other hand, jumped right in, both feet.

  She bent to her book while her brother happily began gathering sticks and small rocks to block off one of the creek’s small side streams. She’d picked something sort of at random from one of the library’s back shelves in the fiction section. Soon she’d lost herself in the story, not paying too much attention to Ethan’s chatter. Every so often he’d say “look, Kiki,” and she’d mumble a response, so it wasn’t until she’d made it through two whole chapters without hearing from him that she looked up.

  “Ethan?” Kendra put the book aside and got to her feet. “Where’d you go?”

  She heard a faint answer from beyond the two biggest rocks, where the creek took a bend. Following it meant splashing through the small pond Ethan’s dam had made. Mud squelched around her flip-flops, but the water felt good. Even here in the trees, the summer heat had started to press down on her.

  “Ethan!”

  “I’m here.” Covered in mud and wearing a huge grin, Ethan turned to show her a double fistful of some kind of water grass.

  “What the...” Kendra sighed. “Why are you doing that?”

  Ethan shrugged and looked surprised that she’d even asked. “Because?”

  “You’re going to get in trouble for being messy. You’d better wash all that off,” she warned, then stretched and looked up at the sky. The trees were thinner here. She could see clouds and sun. “It looks like it’s going to rain.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” Ethan said at once. “Kiki, do you think Mama and Daddy are still fighting?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not,” she added. “But if they are, we’ll just ignore them, okay?”

  Something caught her attention as she pulled him upward from the creek. Indentations in the mud, too big to be from Ethan. Bare footprints.

  From far away, thunder rumbled. Kendra looked to the sky but could see little of it through the trees. What she did see looked dark. She looked again at the ground, but Ethan had stepped all over the place, blurring the lines.

  “I thought I saw something,” she said. “Like footprints.”

  Ethan shrugged, looking down at the mud. “Oh, yeah. I saw those the other day.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

  He shrugged. Typical. Kendra pushed him to the side to look more closely at the mud, but all she could see were the marks left by Ethan’s feet.

  Something rustled in the trees behind them.

  Kendra turned, but could see nothing beyond the shrubbery. “C’mon. Let’s go home.”

  “I don’t want to,” Ethan protested, but the sudden, closer rumbling of thunder stopped him.

  “C’mon, brat.” With barely a backward glance, Kendra stalked back to the rock where she’d been sitting just as the trees began to rustle with first drops of rain.

  “But, Kiki, I saw—”

  “I don’t care!” she shouted. “It’s starting to rain, let’s go! Or else I’m not playing any games with you, nothing.”

  That at last got him moving. They made it back to the house just as lightning split the now-dark sky. The rain came a few minutes later. The house inside was dark, no lights on except at the back where their Dad had locked himself away inside his office, complete with the door he’d hung back up so nobody would bother him.

  “Where’s Mama?”

  “Upstairs? I don’t know.” Kendra, annoyed and wet, didn’t really care.

  It wasn’t until later that night that she realized she’d forgotten her library book. And shit, it would be ruined out there in the storm still raging. Kendra went to the window to look out at the backyard. Her mom would scold her gently, which was worse than if her dad yelled about having to replace it, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.

  The storm lashed the trees, though the lightning and thunder had moved away so there was only an occasional faint flash in the sky. She watched it for a while, wanting to kick herself for forgetting all about the book. But then, she thought, brow furrowed and concentrating, she hadn’t even seen it.

  That was right. Kendra hopped back into bed, and pulled the covers over her bare legs. She’d gone back to the rock where she’d been sitting, but there was no book there. She remembered putting it down in the grass beside her, but when she’d gone back, there was nothing. She hadn’t forgotten the book.

  It had simply disappeared.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE SMALL GIRL with tangled dark hair crouched in a wooden chair sized for her. A woman in a navy blue pantsuit stood behind her, while Leon sat in the in the tiny chair opposite, looking comically oversize.

  “Are you getting this, Lois?” Leon Calder leaned toward the child.

  Little Mari. Seeing his wife as a child had become easier the longer Ryan watched. Maybe it was being able to see his children in her, or maybe it was being able to see the woman she was now that helped to make the scenes of