Lovely Wild Read online

  Her hands shook, and what had she expected, anyway? To use her nonexistent karate skills to fend off the boogeyman? She backed up a step, out the door, leaving it ajar.

  “Ethan! Let’s go!” Five signal bars or not, this place was creepy. “Now!”

  “But...”

  “Now,” Kendra said the way her mom did when she meant business. “Let’s get out of here.”

  At the edge of the clearing she looked back. It might’ve been the shadows or the fact she needed glasses, but what she saw made her shove her brother along faster.

  The door to the shack had closed.

  TWENTY-NINE

  BARE FEET PRESSED the soft grass. Cluck, cluck, clucking chickens scratched and pecked in the yard beyond. Victor, tail spread wide, showed off for her. She would find his feathers in the grass, take them inside. Long and soft and pretty, they would make her a princess.

  In the kitchen, Gran offered a plate of bread and jelly and allowed Mari to sit at the table while she talked and talked. Mari didn’t understand what Gran said, her mouth was mushy and mumbly, no teeth and a flapping, slobbery tongue. But Them had come two sleeps ago and so there was food, enough to go around, even with small bits dropped on the floor to satisfy the always begging dogs. After eating, Gran brushed Mari’s hair and washed her face and sent her back outside to play with the new kittens in the barn. That was a good day.

  Long, long days of sunshine and freedom. Fresh air that tangled her hair and blushed her cheeks. Running, running, spinning in circles, arms out.

  That was her childhood.

  There were bad times, too, Mari thinks as she scatters a handful of feed for the chickens Rosie from down the lane is supposed to take care of. She bends to let them peck from her hand. There is one red hen called Sally who will sit on her lap and be petted, if Mari lets her, and after a moment or so, she settles onto the ground. Her clothes will get dirty, but she doesn’t care.

  Her childhood was filled with bad times by anyone’s standards. She knows it. Hunger. Fear. Deprivation. Loss.

  And yet, back again in the place where she’d been small, Mari only feels content. No carpooling or music lessons or play dates to arrange. No constant blather from the television set. No honking traffic.

  Here there is the sound of chuckling water she so longed for. The sigh of breezes in the trees. There is sunshine and the fresh scent of grass and of wildflowers when she goes into the field behind the barn where the weeds have grown high enough to hide her when she crouches.

  Here her children don’t spend hours in front of their computers or behind a desk or locked inside the shadows. Now they’ve both gone to wade in the stream, to build a fort from fallen branches. Kendra, who usually clings to her phone like it was going to take her to the prom, left it on the counter this morning. They’ve both gone brown from the sun, lean from activity. Here they are lovely and wild.

  When they come down out of the woods, something in their shifting gazes tells her they were not doing what they said they’d been doing, but to ask them would mean she has to confront them about being untruthful. Then there must be punishment and discipline, and right now Mari wants nothing to do with that sort of thing. Instead, she calls to them, her brightest shining stars. Her delight.

  She takes their hands and dances with them in the dirt of the farmyard the way she’s done with them all their lives, and even Kendra concedes to dip and sway. Chickens peck and squawk around their feet. The three of them link their fingers. Make a circle.

  Never ending.

  THIRTY

  AT THE KNOCK on the door, Ryan turned off the TV before saying, “Yeah?”

  He’d been watching the same two tapes for the past couple hours, fascinated by the change in the little girl from the beginning of her treatment and the final tape, recorded a few days before Mari left the hospital and went to the halfway house where she’d lived for two years before being adopted by his father. He was even more fascinated in the differences between the girl he met at his father’s house, the one who eventually seduced him in front of the living room fireplace, and the one who stood in front of him now with a sandwich and chips on a plate in one hand, a beer in the other.

  “Hungry?” Mari asked. “I made you some lunch.”

  “Thanks, babe.” He wasn’t hungry. To turn her down would be to earn a puzzled frown, so he took the plate and settled it on the desk. He caught her wrist before she could leave. “Where are the kids?”

  “Outside playing.”

  He pulled her onto his lap for a nuzzle she seemed glad to give him. “You sure they’ll be okay?”

  “I told them to stay close. We can’t keep them locked up, Ryan.”

  “No. I know that. Just after what happened...”

  Mari hesitated, then said, “Sometimes, bad things happen.”

  He knew that, too. “Are you going out today?”

  “No. Do you need something?” His wife made like she was going to get up, but Ryan pulled her close again.

  “I thought if you were going to the library I’d tag along. Do some stuff online.” There were some secondary research resources he wanted to look into.

  “Oh.” She shook her head a little. “I wasn’t planning on it, today. But I do have to get there this week to return books and pay for the one Kendra lost.”

  “What do you mean, lost?” Ryan frowned.

  Mari kissed him. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “She has to be more responsible—”

  She kissed him again, silencing him. “I’ll take care of it.”

  He was only slightly mollified, but let it go.

  “How’s the writing going?”

  It was his turn to hesitate. “Still taking notes. Some stuff doesn’t add up. I need to do some research.”

  “Oh? Like what?” She didn’t sound interested, and he was sure it was because she wasn’t.

  That was a good thing, since Ryan had yet to tell her the subject of his research, his book, was her. It wasn’t a lie, he reminded himself, if she didn’t ask him outright.

  He’d always known how special Mari was, but the more he learned, the more he understood. She’d done more than simply survive, she’d done what hardly any other children who’d gone through what she had had been able to do. She’d thrived.

  But there were pieces of the puzzle missing. An entire six months’ worth of files were gone, and he thought he knew where they’d be. In storage at his mother’s house. Ryan had no desire to ask her for them. It would open up a vitriolic box of venom, at the very least. But he had to find out everything. Like how they’d figured out Mari could speak with words, and how that had changed how they worked with her. Or who was the forest prince she’d spoken of in a few of the early tapes, using her hands to ask for him and eventually stopping when nobody had given her an answer, probably because that early on they’d been unable to interpret her question.

  Ryan could, because he’d worn his eyes to blurriness watching those videos over and over again. His dad and Lois had missed so much in the beginning. Mari’s simple signs hadn’t been able to communicate any kind of complex ideas, yet she’d been very clear about what she wanted. And they’d missed it, time and again, more consumed later with the discovery she’d been able to understand them, and even speak to some degree, all along.

  “Oh...need to check a few things, that’s all.” He didn’t want to mention he’d be visiting his mother. “I might have to take a trip sometime soon. Do some more research. Maybe talk to some people.”

  “What?” She frowned. “Where? When?”

  “Just back to Philly, babe. No big deal.” He kept his voice light. “I’m going to have to go back, anyway, to meet with Saul and Jack about...stuff. I’ll just take an overnight. Maybe,” he added quickly when he saw her face. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  Mari bit the inside of her cheek. “Could we all go? The kids would probably like a couple nights in the city. We could go to the museum or something.”

&nb