Lovely Wild Read online

  Yuck.

  Watching her mom’s face now, Kendra wondered if the reason she never talked about her childhood was because Kendra had never asked—or if it had been bad. Really bad.

  “Mom?” She reached for her mom’s hand, something she hadn’t done in a long, long time. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “No. It’s okay. I just haven’t thought about it for a while.” She paused and scanned the woods ahead for Ethan. He was still there. Her mom looked down at their hands, fingers linked. “No. That’s not true. I think about it all the time.”

  “So...?” Kendra hadn’t walked this way with her mom in forever. She flashed back to a memory of her little self, running after a balloon the wind had taken. She’d almost darted into traffic, but her mom had grabbed her hand. Held her tight. Kept her from getting squished by an oncoming car. “What about it?”

  “It’s not...easy to talk about.”

  Kendra had always known her mom wasn’t like the other moms. All at once, though, she wished for her mom to be the sort to wear khaki shorts and polo shirts, with a blunt bobbed haircut and matching jewelry. A mom like everyone else’s, and not because it would’ve made it easier for Kendra to fit in, but because it would’ve been easier for her mom.

  “Sammy’s granddad is a drunk,” Kendra blurted.

  Ahead of them, Ethan was swatting at something in the grass. Probably a skunk, it would be just their luck. He was doing karate chops, too. Little moron, she thought, but not in a mean way.

  “Is he?”

  Kendra nodded. “Yeah. She says it’s why her mom never talks about him, but sometimes he calls the house and Sammy talks to him. He sends her cards with lots of money in them. Never on her birthday, though. Just random times. Her mom knows about it, but they don’t talk about it.”

  “It must’ve been hard for Sammy’s mother to have a drunk for a father.”

  Another sort of mother would’ve said “an alcoholic” or maybe even “a dad with problems.” But Kendra’s mom never shaded things over.

  “I guess so. Was your mom...a drunk?”

  “I don’t know, Kiki. She could’ve been anything. I didn’t know her.” Her mom looked up ahead, gaze far away. “My grandmother never talked about her, that I can remember, and she’s the one who raised me. If you could call it that. Oh, look. Here we are.”

  The trees had thinned out directly in front of them, like a giant fist had come down from the sky and punched a hole in the forest. One second they were thick in the woods, the next they stood in a field of boulders. Smooth and gray, tumbled together like in the bottom of a dry riverbed. Ahead of them, the trees closed inward again, and behind that, the mountain rose sharply. It was a space maybe as big as their backyard at home, but totally out of place here in the trees.

  Her mom turned to look at her with a broad grin. “This is it.”

  “What is it? A pile of rocks?”

  “Woo!” Ethan hollered, running and jumping on the rocks.

  “C’mon.” Grinning, Kendra’s mom hopped onto the first rock. “Let’s go into the middle.”

  It was hot in the middle of the field, the sun beating down. The rocks were hot, too, and slippery. Kendra’s sneakers didn’t have deep treads, and she almost wiped out a couple times before she caught up to her mom and Ethan. Her mom shrugged off the backpack and fussed with the zippers.

  “Are we eating here? Can’t we find a place in the shade, with some grass or something?”

  “We’re not eating here.” Her mom pulled out two hammers Kendra hadn’t even known she’d packed. “Here. One for you, one for Ethan. Ethan! Come get this.”

  Ethan turned, whacking his stick on the rocks as he leaped them like a goat instead of a monkeybrat. “What’s this?”

  “Hit the rocks.”

  Kendra and Ethan looked at each other. Their mom had them do some weird things sometimes, no doubt, but this...She laughed and waved her hands at them. Ethan did, tentatively. The rock thumped under his hammer, nothing special.

  “You go, Kiki. Hit that one.”

  Kendra did. The rock...rang. A hollow, metallic sound totally unlike the one Ethan’s had just made. A delighted laugh burst from her, and she gave her mom an incredulous look.

  “They’re special,” Mom said. “Go ahead. See which ones you can make sing.”

  They spent a few minutes pounding away at all the rocks. Most of them made dull thumps when hit with the hammer, but enough of them made that metallic sound to become a challenge. And some of them were higher, some lower, so she and Ethan could almost play a tune.

  “Want to try, Mama?” Ethan held out his hammer.

  “No, baby, you go ahead.”

  “Did you use to do this when you were a kid?” Kendra tapped a rock near her mom’s foot.

  “I did. Sometimes. I came here with...” Her mom trailed off with that faraway look in her eyes again. She shook her head like she could shake out a memory. “Someone. My grandma, I guess. Before she got sick.”

  “What happened to her?” Ethan balanced on a rock, one arm and one leg out.

  “Oh...I believe she had a series of strokes,” Mom said. “Eventually, she died.”

  Ethan jumped across the rocks to hug her, and Kendra wished it were still that easy and casual for her. She envied her brother a lot because he seemed to take up most of her mom’s attention, but she had to admit the kid did earn it sometimes.

  “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  Their mom hugged him, patting his back. “It’s okay, honey. It was a long time ago.”

  “Are you still sad about it?” Kendra asked.

  Mom looked at her with a small frown and the crease between her eyes that meant she was thinking hard. “I don’t think so, honey. I don’t think I was ever...sad.”

  Her mom looked at Kendra, mouth open to say more, but then Ethan screamed. Not the way he’d been hollering before, this was a scream of pain.

  “What’s wrong? Ethan!”

  He pulled his hand away from his face. Blood. Oh, God. There was blood. The world wavered and Kendra’s sneakers slipped on the rocks. Her stomach lurched.

  “What happened?”

  “Something hit me,” Ethan said. He wasn’t crying, but his lower lip trembled and he wiped the blood onto his shirt.

  “Hush,” Mom said. “Let me see. Kiki, bring the water.”

  Kendra had dropped the water jug, but it hadn’t spilled. She brought it, head turned so she didn’t need to look at the blood. “Here. Is he okay?”

  Her mom dug in the backpack for a roll of paper towels she wet from the jug, then pressed against Ethan’s head. “Oh, that’s not bad.”

  “What was it?” He sounded like he still might cry.

  Kendra couldn’t blame him.

  “Were you hitting the rocks too hard? Maybe a piece broke off and shot up,” Mom said.

  But in the next minute, a rock flew from the mountain side of the clearing and spanged the boulder they were sitting on. It left a white mark and made a dull thump. Ethan cried out and Kendra jerked away, searching the edges of the clearing and seeing nothing. No...seeing something, but so far away and so much in shadow she couldn’t make it out.

  Mom stood.

  Another rock, this one smaller but sharper, flew from a slightly different place in the woods. It hit Kendra in the leg. It didn’t break the skin, but the pain was instant and terrifying. She clutched at her leg and let out a wail, scooting backward on the boulder and slipping down the opposite side to get wedged between it and the one beside it.

  “Kiki, don’t move! Ethan, get behind me. Who’s there?” Mom’s voice carried across the field of rocks, but didn’t move the trees.

  Nothing moved, not even a breeze. The heat pounded down on them. Kendra’s leg hurt, and so did her back from where it pressed the rocks. It was burning from the heat of the sun. Something hissed, sliding in between the spaces in the rocks two feet from her head, and she screamed at the top of her lungs