Wild Blues

by Beth Kephart

  My eyes were closed, and then my eyes were open, and despite the rumbling approach of the coming-closer copter, I fixed my eyes again on the lean-to, on the parts of it that were moving, and it wasn’t the lean-to that had gotten to its feet, it was Matias. His eyes on me. His two arms waving, that Moravian bird in one hand.

  Nothing small about him.

  Everything bright.

  Perfect as a morning star.

  And rising.

  102

  THEY’D TAKEN MATIAS FIRST, A ransom plan. They’d hidden with him in the rhododendrons, waited to work out the rest of their scheme. No car now. Six million acres. The border to another country so many mountains, kettles, and valleys away, and they’d need money and they’d need a reason why no one would shoot if the law got in the way and they’d need a plan, so they took Matias, who had seen them anyway, who couldn’t be trusted not to report back on the two convicts in the woods.

  Me? I’d just missed them, my first morning out there looking. My uncle? He’d spotted them right away. Smelled the smoke and followed its trail. Found them long before they reached the caves. My uncle could have escaped in his slippery shoes and his spotted bow tie and his bad knee, but he would not. Wherever Matias was, Uncle Davy would be. That was my uncle’s plan.

  “You take the boy,” he said, “then you take me.”

  “My nephew,” he said. “My niece’s best best friend.”

  Two were better than one. One was a celebrity. There were four now, out in the woods, and I was just behind them, and I was a full day late, but Uncle Davy and Matias—they knew I’d come for them.

  They’d left those marks for me.

  Through the rhododendrons. To the edge of the pond. Through the underskirts of trees. A night in the cave, with the bats. Out to the shore of the lake and up and through, over the wild blues and the wild greens, toward the mountaintop, up the waterfalls, across the gorge, Matias and my uncle going ahead, my uncle’s TV shoes long gone and his feet bloody, and his knee twisted, and his body bruised, and his heart starting to work all wrong in his chest, his heart giving up, but not his hope, not his plan: Matias and Uncle Davy, to the end.

  Four men. Two tall, two short.

  They reached the gorge. They found themselves there, where the earth breaks apart. They saw that landmark hut, that place to rest, that place to hide, if only for an instant, on their way to Nova Scotia. Uncle Davy raised his arms like a cross and walked the elevated distance to show Matias how it was done. Matias walked on after that, his arms out, his steps short—across the stone bridge, over the stream and the long way down. Matias walked on, to the other side, to my uncle’s arms, and now, in my uncle’s embrace, Matias could hear the heart of my uncle giving in, how it was beating too sloppy and fast inside my uncle’s chest, how it would be up to Matias now to keep my uncle safe, to use his brightness like a shield.

  Matias and Uncle Davy—they had made it there to the other side. They had crossed the bridge, but now my uncle was hurting and Matias was standing guard, and now your father and the other began their trek across the split-faced rocks. Hands out, feet straight on the bridge of stone. Slow by slow. They crossed the gorge, like two hippos on a balance beam, my uncle said, like it would all go wrong if they looked down.

  And that was when, my uncle said, he told us later, from his hospital bed, the sky broke up with a starry blast, a shooting star, like no star he had ever seen, like nothing he would see again, like something arrowed into the atmosphere from another time, another place, like something plumed. There was a force to it, he said, a sound when the brilliant light burst. There was a force, and then it vanished.

  Just an instant.

  Right as myth.

  And your father and the other one looked up.

  And your father and the other one looked down.

  And your father and the other one lost their balance.

  And my uncle and Matias heard them fall.

  103

  “YOUR HEART IS HURT,” MATIAS said.

  Helped my uncle toward the lean-to on the rocky ledge.

  Helped him there, and the clouds came in, the rain, the swelling of the stream that would float the bodies of the men down to a place I could not see, and Matias wouldn’t leave, and he needed help, and he’d had the bird with him, all that time, in the pocket of his madras shorts.

  One note. Two breaths.

  The only thing my best best friend had.

  One whole night like that, in the lean-to, my uncle’s head on his lap, telling the stories that Tiburcio had told in the hammocks of his country, El Salvador.

  104

  THEN.

  Morning.

  Then.

  The sun.

  Then.

  Matias heard the fox bark and the raven squawk and the stream spatter up with splash. He heard the silent spin-spin-spin of his own Day-Glo cap. He heard the copter coming in. He crawled out from the shelter and around to the ledge, and he stood as tall as he could and he looked down and it was me in the stream, my arms, mostly my legs, like snapped twigs, and the running water running red. My head pillowed up on the pack, and the Keppy inside. The photographs. The rarest of finds.

  “Glad for you,” he called out, it echoed.

  “And for you,” my dry lips said.

  If you thought books by dead people were just something to move with the furniture, to dust with a feather, to stack your plate of pie upon, to give to people you don’t love, you didn’t know my story yet.

  You know my story now.

  The big bird with the helicopter wings was near. It rumbled in and pirouetted overhead. Matias waved his arms, brought it close, directed the eyes of the bird to where I lay, to the Day-Glo cap, the pack—the stream rippling through, my pack anchoring me in, my hair rippling out, like the rays of the sun, and the cockpit calling it in, and Sergeant Williams calling the Bondanzas, and the Bondanzas calling my mom, who was already on her way.

  Coming.

  Coming.

  “Ready?” she’d asked.

  I was ready.

  I would be rescued, saved. I would be lifted up into the sky and taken into trauma and put back together again. Three weeks, four weeks, in the hospital, then ambulance home and then two strong men, carrying me here, to the top room in this thin house, where my mother made me a bed and someone cut a hole into the ceiling so I could see fractions of sky.

  So I could see the blue moon, the morning star.

  I would be saved. My uncle would be saved. Two floors down in the hospital where they surgeried me, they surgeried him. His heart is beating just right now. There’s a machine in him that does the ticking.

  Look up.

  The sky can save us.

  For nine months now, it will save you.

  105

  MOM WEARS A HAT ON her head to cover her hair, which has turned all white, from the radiation maybe, or maybe from the rest of this. You’ve seen her when you come. You’ve seen her in the room where my uncle rests. Downstairs. For now. He sends me notes and he will send me notes until the day that he can climb these stairs himself.

  The fireflies have started in on their rev. In five minutes those men will come for you. They will call for you, and when you don’t come, they will come and get you. But there’s one more thing I want to say today.

  It’s this:

  There’s beauty in our world. Beauty bigger than biology.

  There’s Matias and Uncle Davy in the cave, and it’s dark. The convict friends are deep in a drunken snore. The bats are back and the blind things sleep and my uncle and Matias sit side to side, and they’re the only ones awake—this tallest one, this shortest one, Matias with his crooked hips and his perfect heart. The cave at their back drips and slides. The bats squeeze inside their leather. The final embers from the fire fade blue to red to black, and it’s dark, and they tell each other stories. Cape May in the fall, my uncle says. Santa Tecla in December, Matias says. Bird talk. Coffee smells. A boy named Greg. T
iburcio. Their words as quiet as frost. Their stories like forever.

  It might have been dawn, my uncle wrote in his notes to me, when the white moth fluttered in. Dawn when they saw it, the two of them, this white moth breaking that black night with two bright wings of light.

  “I brought the whistle,” Matias said. “With me. I have it right here.” A whisper so soft it made no sound.

  Uncle Davy covered his mouth when he laughed. He shook his head, he says. “Funny thing is,” he told Matias, “that I have another one just like it at the cabin. A rare-bird matched set. An M-B-A for you, Matias. I was waiting for your birthday.”

  “Anything happens to me, you tell Lizzie that she’s my best friend,” Matias said right then, tears in his eyes, Uncle Davy says.

  “You’ll tell her yourself,” my uncle said. “Nothing will happen.”

  “Tell Lizzie,” Matias said again, and Uncle Davy put his arm across my best best friend’s short shoulder.

  There is beauty in God’s earth. There is beauty in the morning star that shines beneath the sun, that lights the loons. There is beauty and also maybe this: When I can walk again, if I will walk again, I will come and visit you.

  106

  I HEAR THE SOUND OF doors.

  I hear the sandpaper shoes.

  They’re coming, and you are so tall when you stand, and I am, I really am, sorry.

  * * *

  Wait.

  Stop.

  Take this with you.

  Matias would want you to have it, Matias would say yes, Matias knows you’re here, I have written to him and I have told him. “She has come,” I said, “and I am telling her our story, I am telling her about the bestness of you, about the star that appeared and fell and plumed, about how tall you stood and how you saved everything that mattered. I am telling her about our rock, about your light, about your bestness, I miss your bestness, Matias. I am telling her,” I wrote, in my postcard to him, which my mother mailed—the extra stamps, the extra distance.

  He would want you to have it. He knows who you are. He knows that you are sorry; you were fooled. Take it. You’ll need a bird whistle of your own. You’ll need a way to call out, if you need us.

  Acknowledgments

  Over the course of more than a year, I helped my father clean out our family home. Among the many found objects were the books Daniel D’Imperio, my antiques-expert uncle, and Horace Kephart, my camp-craft great grandfather, had left behind. These two men, the writers in our family, could not have been more different. But they were where I’d come from. Both are in my blood.

  Every day, after working with my dad, I’d come home to my husband, a Salvadoran artist whose stories about Tiburcio and coffee farms and gold-hearted murderers have, throughout our years together, become part of my own canvas. I’ve spent time in El Salvador, beside my husband, his friends, his family. I’ve picked coffee with Tiburcio, eaten pupusas, and walked the jungle hills with armed guards at my back. I was once told to swallow my ring, so as to keep that piece of family heirloom safe as we drove along a highway. I was once whisked away to safety during rumored rumbles of coming civil unrest. I once walked estuary roads alone, photographing children who had climbed into trees. I once counted bullet holes in a wall otherwise gorgeously alive with bougainvillea. I spent fifteen years writing a memoir, Still Love in Strange Places, about my odyssey to understand my husband’s childhood home—and I’m still reading, still learning, still listening, still deeply saddened by all that threatens that tiny volcanic country and still in love with the beauty and magic and history it yet contains.

  Wild Blues erupted from an idea I had—an instinct, more than anything, about putting my mother’s brother, my father’s grandfather, and my husband’s childhood world all together in one story. At the same time, news of a prison break at the Clinton Correctional Facility in the Adirondacks was ripe that first summer of first-draft writing, and while some of the details in this story were influenced by the actual break, many details, including the character of Caroline and the victim impact statement, are pure fiction. I was thinking about love and loss as I wrote. I was thinking about narcissism and estrangements. I was wrestling with questions: Where are we safe? What will we do for those we choose as family? Who, really, is a hero? I was thinking about those inimitable words of that most sensational bride, Jessica Shoffel: You should write a middle grade novel.

  I thought I had myself a story, after many months of writing and rewriting. But it wasn’t until I received a most exquisite eight-page editorial note from my editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy, that I could see what had to be done to make a very rough draft something closer to a story. For Caitlyn’s immediate interest, her poetic notes, her kind encouragements, and her suggestive green pen, I am so grateful.

  I was standing in an independent bookstore when I first saw the jacket art. John Jay Cabuay, we have never spoken. We didn’t need to. Your work is spectacular. I’m honored to take my story out into the world wrapped up in your vision. Thanks to Michael McCartney, for the jacket design; Vikki Sheatsley, for the gorgeous interior pages; Jeannie Ng and Erica Stahler, for the copyediting; Elizabeth Blake-Linn, for overseeing production; Alex Borbolla, for the quiet and so-competent care; and thanks to Audrey Gibbons, for helping to spread the word about this story.

  I am grateful to Karen Grencik of Red Fox Literary, who stepped into my life at just the right time. Honest and thoughtful, present and caring, Karen read not just this story but so many of my stories with astonishing interest and insight. She said, “I’m here,” and Karen’s being here has meant so much to me. It is also through Karen that I have had the privilege of working with Harim Yim, Claudia Galluzzi, and Allison Hellegers of Rights People, who were so magnificently enthusiastic from the very start.

  I am grateful to Mario Sulit, my brother-in-law, who read not just as a Salvadoran, but as the court translator who first began to speak to me about victim impact statements—and then checked my assumptions against his legal community friends. Thank you, Mario, for your love, your spirit, and your enduring care.

  I am grateful to Patti Costa, executive director of the Human Growth Foundation (hgfound.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting those with disorders of growth and growth hormone. This foundation is doing so much to advance our understanding of growth, and I will always be indebted to Patti for her careful read of the character who is the hero of this story—and for further sharing my pages with Dr. Joel Steelman of Cook Children’s Health Care System of Fort Worth, Texas, who took the time to weigh in as well.

  I have friends without whom this writing life wouldn’t be half the fun, or have half the meaning. Alyson Hagy, Debbie Levy, Ruta Sepetys, A. S. King, Karen Rile, Amy Rennert—you. I’m lucky, too, to know so many independent bookstore owners, teachers, and librarians, and to them (for being who they are and for all the books they point me to), I also say thank you. To my students, past and present, from the University of Pennsylvania and Juncture Workshops (and also, essentially, the wise and most remarkable Jacinda Barrett): I’d be a different writer (and person) if you hadn’t pressed me with your questions. I love the questions, and I adore you.

  My father, named for that Dean of American Campers, continues, to this day, to support me in ways tangible and otherwise. My son, Jeremy, is light; he is profound; he cares. My husband, Bill, is my partner in all things—a man who, years ago, before we were married, sent me watercolors instead of words and now, all these years later, painted the watercolors for this book. He just kissed me on the cheek as I was writing this. “You’re done?” he said.

  Almost.

  About the Author

  Beth Kephart is the author of nearly two dozen books for both adults and young readers. Her first teen novel, Undercover, was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book, a Best Book of 2007 by School Library Journal, and Best Books by Amazon.com and others. Subsequent novels—including Small Damages, Going Over, One Thing Stolen, and This Is the Story of You—were also featured on n
umerous Best Book lists. Kephart is an award-winning lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches creative nonfiction, adult fiction, and middle-grade and young adult fiction. Visit her at junctureworkshops.com.

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  A Caitlyn Dlouhy Book

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Beth Kephart

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2018 by John Jay Cabuay

  Interior illustrations copyright © 2018 by William Sulit

  The quote on p. 75 is from Dan D’Imperio’s The ABCs of Victorian Antiques.

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