Found Things

by Marilyn Hilton

  “Quiet, people,” Ms. Zucchero say to our table.

  When she looked back at her crocheting, Martin whispered, “They took him on Sunday.”

  Sonya must really like Daniel, I thought, because she blushed deeper than that CrimsonCrisp in the middle of the table and say, “No, Martin, you’re a liar.”

  The next thing I remembered was feeling dizzy like when you get to the bottom of a roller coaster, and hearing a knock on the floor—which I later realized was my head—and then Ms. Zucchero looking down at me.

  “River, can you sit up?” she asked, squeezing my arm. My head was buzzing. “We need to take you to Mrs. Bertetti’s office. Someone bring her some water.”

  Then Ms. Zucchero wheeled her chair over to me and helped me sit in it. I cried a little because she was being so careful with me and because everyone stared and say how pale I looked. Ms. Zucchero couldn’t have wheeled me out fast enough.

  She rolled me down to Mrs. Bertetti, the school nurse. The two of them talked and Mrs. Bertetti told me to lie down on the bed with my knees up.

  “I hope you feel better soon,” Ms. Zucchero say before she left to go back to class.

  Mrs. Bertetti took my temperature, which was normal, and then held my wrist with her fingertips while she looked at her watch. Her lips moved as she stared at it.

  Finally she put my hand back down on the bed and asked, “Can your mother drive you home?”

  I shook my head. “She doesn’t drive. She stopped driving . . . a while ago.” Mrs. Bertetti didn’t have to know everything. “But I can walk home.”

  “Not after that tumble. What about your father?”

  “He’s in New York.” Daddy had left again almost as soon as he’d come back from Orlando.

  “Your brother? Oh—” Mrs. Bertetti say, cutting herself off.

  Everything today reminded me of Theron. I just wanted to go home.

  Maybe she felt bad for bringing up Theron, so she went out of the nurse’s office for a few minutes and come back with a glass of water and set it on the table beside me. “I called your mother. She’ll find you a ride home.”

  As she took my pulse again, I looked up at the ceiling tiles and asked, “Do you know Daniel Bunch?”

  “I know all my students,” she say, and set my hand back down beside me. “Is Daniel your friend?”

  “He’s in my art class.”

  “Then you must know he’s sick.”

  I was glad to be lying down, or I’d have probably fainted again. But I had to find out as much as I could. “Is he in the hospital?”

  “Because he’s your friend, I’ll tell you that he is in the hospital. But I don’t know anything more.”

  Then Mrs. Bertetti sat down at her desk and started writing on a form. “What did you eat for breakfast?” she asked.

  I sat up, propping myself on my elbows. “When did Daniel go to the hospital?”

  She didn’t take her eyes off her desk when she told me, almost in a whisper, “I heard it was Sunday. Now that’s it. No more information, okay?”

  “Oh,” I say, and my heart pounded so strong that I thought it would fling me off the bed. I sank back down onto the mattress. And then the worry nodded at me and say, Wishes are powerful things.

  Mrs. Bertetti stopped writing and looked up. “I’m sure it would make him very happy if you paid him a visit.”

  Chapter 9

  “It was just a coincidence,” I say to Meadow Lark. “Nothing more than that.”

  Meadow Lark was sitting W on her bed, and I was trying to sit crisscross, but it hurt the insides of my knees. I liked that she and I shared the way we sat and that, for a while at least, we shared the same room. It was like we were friends, almost like sisters.

  She had set Mr. Tricks’s cage on her bed and was making kissing noises at him. Mr. Tricks strutted headfirst over to the wires and blinked at her. “That was more than a coincidence, and you know it,” she say.

  I slid the facecloth off my forehead and tossed it on the night table, next to the glass of ginger ale Mama had brought to me. When she first laid that cool facecloth across my forehead, it felt so good. But soon it turned warm and dirty-feeling, like a tea bag on a saucer.

  “We make a wish, and then Daniel Bunch goes to the hospital,” she say, and kiss-kissed close to the cage. “That’s not how coincidences work, is it, Mr. Tricks?”

  “They happen all the time like that. You hear a word you’ve never heard before and the next thing you know, you hear it fifteen times. A song come into your head, and then the next person you see is singing it. Those are coincidences, just like Daniel Bunch just happened to get sick after we just happened to make a wish about it.”

  “Things like that happen to you?” she asked.

  “Don’t they happen to everyone?”

  “Not me. But that was no coincidence,” she say, and opened the paper lunch bag that Mama put together for her that morning. She pulled out a zipper bag of carrot sticks. “Want some?”

  I shook my head and closed my eyes. The Cheetos I ate at lunch now sat on my stomach like a brick. They tasted good when I ate them, but that was before I heard about Daniel Bunch.

  Meadow Lark kept harping. “Was it a coincidence we were put in the same homeroom?” she asked. “Or another coincidence that we went to the river at the same time? Or that we found Mr. Tricks just when he needed us?”

  “I think so,” I say, though she had a point. “What do you call them?”

  “I don’t know,” Meadow Lark say, “except not coincidences.” She bit off some carrot and chewed it. “I call them miracles.”

  “You and Mama should talk.”

  Mr. Tricks cocked his head at one angle and then another, as Meadow Lark spoke.

  “He can’t be sick just because we wished it,” I say.

  “Are you scared that maybe he is, and it’s true?” she mumbled.

  Then she spit the chewed-up carrot onto her finger and stuck it between the wires of the cage. Mr. Tricks stretched his neck and pecked the carrot off her finger, then opened his beak and shook his head at her like he expected more. Mr. Tricks was in love with Meadow Lark.

  “I’m scared,” she say, answering her own question.

  “Me too,” I say. “I just don’t want to believe we made him sick.”

  Then Meadow Lark turned the lunch bag upside down and shook out a napkin, the same kind of napkin Mama put in my bag that morning. But in the corner of Meadow Lark’s napkin was a little red heart, just like the one I saw the first day we met.

  “Look, we don’t even know for sure he’s sick,” Meadow Lark say, wiping her fingers on that napkin with the heart drawn on it. “Kids exaggerate all the time.” Then she popped the rest of the carrot in her mouth. “Especially those kids.”

  “But Mrs. Bertetti even say it was true.” I tried to hide that my lip quivered and my voice flapped just like Sonya’s when she heard that Daniel Bunch was in the hospital. Meadow Lark’s napkin had a red heart on it and mine did not. I never had a red heart on a napkin.

  Meadow Lark spit more carrot onto her finger and swallowed the rest. “It could just be a rumor and she heard it and believed it and told it to you.” Then she folded up the napkin into quarters, with the heart on the outside.

  I had something that was better than a red heart. I got up and opened my ballerina box and took out the little emerald ring and pressed it into the top of my thumb like a crown, and held it out to Meadow Lark. “See my ring?”

  Meadow Lark finished feeding the carrot to Mr. Tricks. “Pretty. Where did you get it?”

  “In the river . . . I think. It’s my favorite thing.” Then I took off the ring and set it down. My head still hurt, and I lay back down on my bed.

  “So, back to Daniel,” she say. “We have to find out if the rumor is true,” Meadow Lark say, as i
f I had interrupted her by showing her the ring. “One of us has to go to the hospital to make sure, or we’ll just wonder about it the rest of our lives. We can’t be scared forever.” She popped the last carrot in her mouth and put Mr. Tricks’s cage back on the floor.

  My stomach gurgled and I rolled onto my side to face her. “What if he is there? What if he is sick? Then what do we do?”

  “I don’t know—we’ll figure something out. Nothing like this ever happened to me before, so we’ll take it one step at a time.”

  “But you’re the one who wrote the wish. I thought you knew all about wishes. And then you put it in the river. I thought you knew what you were doing.”

  “Well, one of us has to go to the hospital,” she say, “and it won’t be me. I’ve had enough of hospitals for a long time.”

  I knew she would be as stubborn about not going to the hospital as I was about not going into the water, so to save time I sat up and finished the ginger ale all at once, and then I worked out a burp that sounded like “I’ll go.” That’s how we decided.

  The fact was, I knew from the start it would be me. Unless I saw Daniel Bunch in the hospital with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe he was sick. Even if Meadow Lark went and come back and told me it was true, I’d still want to see for myself.

  “I just have to figure out how. And with Mama around, we will need a miracle.”

  Meadow Lark got up and crumpled the lunch bag and tossed it in the wastebasket. But I noticed she saved the napkin and slipped it into her bureau drawer.

  “Mr. Tricks must hate being in that cage after being out in the wild all his life,” she say, opening the cage. Mr. Tricks looked at the open door and strutted right out like he owned the place.

  “Okay,” I say, “but don’t forget to put him back in and shut the door tight.”

  Even though Meadow Lark warned me about her sleepwalking, she caught me off guard that night. Mr. Tricks cooed and woke me up, and when I got up to see what was wrong with him, I noticed that Meadow Lark wasn’t in her bed.

  “Meadow Lark?” I whispered, but she didn’t answer.

  Our door was open, so I stepped out. Meadow Lark was walking down the hall toward Theron’s room. She stopped at the door and put her hand on the knob.

  “Meadow Lark,” I say again, careful not to wake her up.

  She must have heard me that time, because she turned around and, without looking at me, walked back to the room and got into her bed.

  That was it, but I lay awake for a long time after that to make sure she didn’t get up again.

  Without realizing it, Mama helped me see Daniel the next day.

  “Does your head still hurt, dear?” she asked as I lay in bed with the comforter up to my nose. Her hand on my forehead felt as cool as that facecloth did.

  “Now it’s my stomach,” I groaned.

  Meadow Lark, all ready for school with her backpack over her shoulder and her lunch bag in her hand, stood a few feet behind Mama. For a second I wondered if she had another red heart on her napkin in that lunch bag.

  Mama sat back. “I have to work extra hours today, which means I’ll be gone until near suppertime. I could call in sick so I can stay home with you,” she say, but I knew she wanted those extra hours.

  “You can’t miss work, Mama,” I say, trying to make my voice crackle. “Besides, I’m old enough to stay home by myself now.” After all, according to Mr. Clapton, I was almost in high school.

  “I’ll tell school you’re sick today,” Meadow Lark say, and widened her good eye as if she were telling me, This is your miracle! Meadow Lark seemed to have recovered from her episode the night before.

  “Yes, you are,” Mama say, and smoothed out my comforter. “I sure hope you feel better by tonight. Daddy’s coming home, and I’m making a roast.”

  Chapter 10

  I hadn’t ridden my bike since last fall. It hung in the garage next to Theron’s Giant. Theron had mowed lawns, shoveled snow, helped Sonya’s daddy paint houses, and tutored for an entire year for the money to buy his bike, and it was his treasure. How I wanted to ride it to the hospital, grip the same handlebars my brother gripped and slice through the wind just like he did. But Theron had a rule that only he could touch that bike he worked so hard to buy. And now, just like my bike from the Goodwill, his treasure was shrouded in dust and cobwebs.

  After carefully unhooking my bike and wiping it down, I set off for the hospital, riding low so that no one would see me and ask why I wasn’t in school. Or worse, tell Mama.

  “Bunch, Daniel,” say the nurse, a man with big pores and hair that stuck out like a brush, to his computer screen. “Room three-fourteen.”

  It was only when I asked, “Which way is three-fourteen?” that he looked up at me.

  His eye narrowed. “How old are you?”

  “Twelve.” I added a year, because in some places that year made a difference between being allowed or forbidden to visit.

  “You can’t visit without an adult,” he say. “Where is your adult?”

  “My mama’s parking the car,” I say, which was a lie in every universe. “She told me to hurry and see Daniel before visiting hours were over.”

  “Your mama does know that visiting hours don’t end until eight, doesn’t she?”

  To stop myself from telling any more lies, like the one about Mama only understanding Portuguese and the one about us being from Alaska, I just stood there. He looked at me hard. I thought he was going to send me home, but then he pointed to the left. “Go on,” he say, “Three-fourteen’s down that way, end of the hall. You’re his first visitor.”

  “Today?”

  “Ever. I’ll send your mama there . . . after she parks the car.”

  My legs felt like noodles and my pulse played drums in my ears as I walked down the hall toward Daniel’s room. It was my own fault I was here. I might not believe that Daniel was in the hospital because of Meadow Lark and me, but she did, and it was my duty as her friend to see how bad off he actually was. So I kept walking toward room 314 and wishing I wasn’t so scared.

  Daniel Bunch’s door was open a crack, and I stood outside, breathing slowly and trying to stop shaking, not knowing what I’d see. I actually hoped Daniel would be nasty to me, like he usually was, because that would mean he wasn’t sick. It would mean everyone was wrong.

  “Hello,” come a voice from across the hall.

  “Hello,” I say. I couldn’t see anyone, so I walked toward the voice and looked in the room. “Do you need something—a nurse?”

  A boy with a mop of sandy-colored hair half sat up in the hospital bed reading an Edgar Allan Poe comic book. A cast covering his whole leg hung just above the bed, aimed at the TV on the wall.

  “Password,” the boy say, and lay his comic book down on his stomach.

  “Hmm,” I say, and looked at the title. “Usher.”

  His face grew a smile. “Impressive.” The boy’s teeth were so short that it looked like he didn’t have any, and his cheeks were patchy red, like they’d been rubbed with snowballs.

  “Either you’re a genius or a mind reader,” he say. “Or perhaps the password is too obvious. I’ll have to change it as a precaution.”

  “You could have just say I was wrong.”

  “I could have,” he say, “but that would have been dishonest.” Then he took in a breath. “Are you here to visit someone? That boy across the hall, perhaps?”

  I nodded. “The nurse say that’s Daniel Bunch’s room.”

  “It is his room. Are you his . . . sister, a friend, a . . . ?”

  “I go to school with him.”

  “Oh. Has anyone ever told you that you have an unusual way of talking?”

  Him too? I thought. “Yes, everyone say that.”

  He crossed his arms. “And I’m sure you get teased about it.”

/>   I shrugged. “I can’t help it,” I say. “I woke up one morning after my brother leave us and I start talking like this.” Then I glanced across the hall for a glimpse of Daniel. A glimpse was all I wanted of him at the moment. And then maybe another glimpse, and then I would have the courage to see him.

  The boy scratched his chin and looked at the ceiling. “I’ve read about that. It’s rare, but it has a name. People wake up talking with a French accent or an Australian accent or a Japanese accent. You found your accent somewhere very far south of New Hampshire—I’d say from somewhere in the Carolinas.”

  “Well, I wasn’t looking for it, so it must have found me.”

  “That’s an interesting way of describing it,” he say, and picked up his comic book. “Just so you know, it’s rather charming. However, if you don’t like it, you can force yourself to lose it.”

  “You talk funny too,” I told him. “You sound like a professor.”

  When he finished ha-ha-ha-ing behind his comic book, he say, “Actually, you are a mind reader, because that’s what I’m called—Professor—by people who don’t understand me. My real name is Benjamin,” he added with a little bow of his head.

  “I’m River,” I say, and bow back at him.

  “Pleasure meeting you,” he say. “By the way, if you’re here to see Daniel Bunch, you’ll have to do all the talking, because he’s extremely ill.”

  “Oh,” I say, suddenly agitated at the mention of Daniel, and I hoped Benjamin wouldn’t see my heart beating through my T-shirt.

  “Sorry if that upset you,” he say.

  “It’s just a big shock. Is he really that sick?”

  “He might even be dead, but go see for yourself.”

  So what everyone in art class say was true. And maybe what Meadow Lark say was true too—that it wasn’t a coincidence, and it was our fault Daniel was in the hospital.

  I looked at Benjamin. “It’s time. I have to see him now.”

  This wasn’t like when Theron had his 103-degree fever in the bathtub and I had the choice not to look. This was different. When Benjamin say Daniel was so sick, I began to believe that it was our fault, so I had to pay him a visit and report back to Meadow Lark.