Found Things

by Marilyn Hilton

  “It was a pleasure meeting you,” Benjamin say with another little bow, and I wandered out of his room and across the hall.

  I knocked lightly on the door, and when there was no answer, I pushed it open and stepped inside.

  The room smelled like rubbing alcohol and bleach. Daniel lay flat in the hospital bed with his eyes closed, as still as a corpse, and white as the pillowcase under his head. His left arm, now in a support bandage, rested on a rolled-up towel at his side.

  Out of respect for his state of possible death, I drew the curtain closed around his bed. Then I stared at him for a minute or so, watching for a telltale eyebrow twitch and listening for a sigh or a stomach gurgle.

  “Is he alive?” Benjamin asked from across the hall.

  I waved my hand in front of Daniel’s eyes, but he didn’t move. “I’ll find out,” I whispered, loud enough to carry.

  Daddy once told me that when he and Mama first brought me home, I slept so quiet and still that they were terrified I’d stopped breathing in my sleep. So Daddy would hold a little mirror under my nose. If he saw vapor on the mirror, he knew I was still alive. Remembering that, I looked around Daniel’s room for something to put under his nose.

  A butter knife lay on a tray near the window. I grabbed it and turned back to Daniel. But just as I was about to slide the knife under his nose, the curtain rings screeched, and the nurse from the front desk stood there with his hands on his hips.

  “Your mother must’ve gotten lost in the parking lot. Time to go,” he say. And then he saw the butter knife. “Hey, what’s that?”

  At exactly that moment, Daniel come out of his coma, and saw the knife.

  “She’s trying to kill me!” he screamed, sitting full up in bed. “She tried to slice me open!” Then, “Oww!” he shrieked, and clutched his throat, as if that dull little knife had actually touched him.

  I ran out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, and out the revolving door. Then I tossed the butter knife into some bushes, hopped on my bike, and took off.

  Pedaling home as fast as I could, I felt glad about one thing—if Daniel Bunch was dying, it was certain he wouldn’t die that day. Because when he sat up and saw that knife in my hand and screamed at me like that, he looked like the same Daniel Bunch that told me in art class that my collage stunk.

  If what Meadow Lark say was true—that we made Daniel Bunch sick by wishing it—then we had to make another wish to make him well again. And we would have to do it fast, before he got any sicker. We would go have to go down to the river and float a get-well wish for Daniel Bunch. Meadow Lark would be home from school when I got home, and Mama would still be at work. So if we hurried, Mama would never know we were gone.

  When I got home, I carefully hung my bike back on its hook next to Theron’s and went into the house, expecting to see Meadow Lark on the sofa or in the kitchen. But the house was quiet.

  “Meadow Lark?” I called, and when she didn’t answer, I went upstairs to our room. “Meadow Lark?” I say again as I pushed open the door.

  She lay on the bed, rolled up with her back to me and shaking so hard that the bed jiggled.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  She turned over to face me, and when I saw her two puffy, red eyes, I knew different. Meadow Lark was crying.

  “He’s gone,” she say, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Who’s . . . gone?” I asked, and then a horror pierced my heart. “You mean Daniel Bunch?” Did she hear something after I left the hospital?

  Meadow Lark shook her head and pointed to Mr. Tricks’s cage on the floor—his empty cage—and then to the window. It was open just enough for a pigeon the size of Mr. Tricks to strut through and fly away.

  Chapter 11

  Meadow Lark sniffled all the way to the river, and every once in a while along the way, as if she saw the empty cage for the first time all over again, she say things like “Mr. Tricks flew out the window!” and “Our poor pidge! His wing wasn’t even healed.”

  “Maybe we didn’t look hard enough,” I say. “Maybe he’s stuck somewhere in the room—did you look behind the bureau, under the beds—”

  “I looked everywhere, River. We looked everywhere. There’s only one place he went, and that was out the window. He probably fell because he can’t fly, and then got eaten up . . . or worse.”

  “Is there anything worse?” I asked.

  “Torture is worse.”

  “Maybe he’ll come back here. Maybe he’s a homing pigeon, and don’t homing pigeons go back to where they come from?”

  “You sound like you don’t even care about him,” Meadow Lark say, and sniffled. “You haven’t even cried for him.”

  By then we’d reached the beach, and I say, “Of course I care about Mr. Tricks. I care if he fell out or got eaten or tortured. But—I’m sorry, Meadow Lark—right now, undoing the wish about Daniel Bunch is more important.”

  The truth was, I feared there was nothing left of Mr. Tricks but a little skeleton and a couple white feathers, though I kept that to myself.

  “Let’s hurry up, then, so we can find our bird,” she say.

  Meadow Lark and I sat on the rock, and she pulled a pen and some paper out of her pocket.

  “You’ll have to write. I just can’t now,” she say, and then her face twisted up and she cried some more for Mr. Tricks.

  I took the pen from her. “I’ll do it,” I say, partly because I knew she was too sad and partly because I didn’t want the wish for Daniel to get crossed out or erased this time. It had to be perfect when we sent it off. “I’ll write them both.”

  I clicked the pen and wrote, We wish Daniel Bunch to get better soon, and then showed it to Meadow Lark. “How’s this?”

  “Be more specific,” she say quietly, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “We might not have another chance.”

  Who was being persnickety now? I thought, but I say, “You’re right,” just because she was so distressed.

  She gave me a new piece of paper, and this time I wrote: We wish Daniel Bunch to get completely and wholly healthy immediately and right away.

  “That’s good. Now, it’s Mr. Tricks’s turn,” she say, and gave me a new piece of paper.

  I touched the pen to my lips and thought about what to write, specifically, and then wrote: We wish Mr. Tricks to come back.

  “Alive,” she say, peering at the paper.

  Alive, I wrote.

  “And not hurt.”

  And not hurt, I wrote, and then, just to be sure, added: Perfectly fine.

  She nodded, her face still puffy from crying. “That’s good. Now we’ll send them off. You do it this time,” she say, but I pushed the wishes at her.

  “You have to—you know that.”

  “And you have to get over that,” she say, shaking her head so her hair shivered around her shoulders. “It’s just water.”

  “I’ve tried. I want to, but I can’t.”

  “I just don’t understand . . . how can you be afraid of the water but want to come here?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s just like a magic place here.” As I say that, I realized it had gotten even more magical since I met Meadow Lark.

  “Maybe,” she say, and slid off the rock and grabbed my hand. “We’ll go out there together.”

  But I yanked my hand out of hers. “No! I just can’t,” I say, and watched the river race by.

  “Oh, all right,” she say, and stepped into the water. “But one day you will.”

  She walked out up to her calves, to where the current ran strong. Then she held up the pieces of paper to show them to me and called, “Here they go,” and dropped them into the water. Right away the river grabbed those wishes and whisked them off. I watched them slip downriver until they disappeared into the ripples.
r />   As I sat on the rock and watched Meadow Lark, all around me the river roared and gurgled and murmured like a thousand voices, all blending into one, saying, Don’t worry, like a whisper up behind me.

  “They’re gone,” Meadow Lark called. “We can stop worrying now.”

  Whether it was a coincidence or not that both spoke the same words at the same time, that same chill ran up to my scalp, and I shivered.

  “We’ve done everything we can,” she say. Then she pointed downriver. “Hey, what’s that bridge down there? I’ve never seen that.”

  “We’re not supposed to go there, remember?”

  “Why not? It looks interesting.”

  “It’s old . . . and scary, and everyone stays off it.”

  She stepped out of the water and put her sandals back on. I thought her curiosity about the bridge was over, but then she say, “So let’s go walk on it.”

  “No, it’s dangerous. It’s off-limits.”

  “Who said?”

  “Everyone—Mama and Daddy, everyone.”

  She acted like she hadn’t heard me, and started walking toward the end of the beach where it met the woods. “Come on, River. We might find Mr. Tricks there.”

  I couldn’t stop her, and I didn’t want her to get lost, so I followed her into the woods. Even with her slow leg, she’d gotten far ahead of me fast.

  “Wait!” I called, trying to keep up with her through the thick underbrush of the forest.

  A few yards later she stopped suddenly and whirled around and tugged at her shirt.

  “Help me, River!” she called. “I’m stuck.”

  A branch had snared her shirt, and the harder she tried to untangle it, the higher it slid up her body. It was only for an instant, but long enough for me to see a map of scars on her belly. Then she tore her shirt free and stuffed the hem into her shorts. As she did, I pretended to study a perfect fern.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She slid her hair behind her ears and nodded, her hair bouncing. “That’s what it feels like to be trapped,” she say. “That’s how Mr. Tricks felt when we found him.”

  “We should go back,” I say, looking behind me. I could hardly see the beach now beyond the canopy of green and shade and brush, which softened the roar of the river into a steady hush.

  “What’s over here?” she asked, and headed toward the riverbank.

  “Just the river. Come on, Meadow Lark. Let’s go back and look for Mr. Tricks.”

  “I want to see,” she say, and took off. I followed her a few more yards, and then the woods opened to a little cove sheltered by oaks and aspen trees sweeping the surface of the water.

  “River . . . what’s that?” she asked, pointing toward the cove at a log, half covered with mud and leaves and vines, jutting out from the bank. At the very end of it was a big, round burl that looked something like a head.

  Meadow Lark stepped over to it.

  “Be careful with your leg,” I say, close behind.

  We squatted as close as we could without falling into the water, and then Meadow Lark leaned over and ran her hands over the bark.

  “It has something stuck to it,” she say, and handed me a square of paper.

  Seeing that paper come off the log grabbed my breath. It was lined paper, just like the kind we wrote our wishes on. I knew before I unfolded it that I would see Meadow Lark’s handwriting on it. And I knew she would find another square of paper with my writing on it. I also knew that if we looked long enough on that log, we’d find the white feather we made our first wish on.

  Meadow Lark started scraping away the mud from the log, and together we cleared away the leaves and vines. Then we saw that the log didn’t just seem to have a head, but the way the branches grew out from each side looked like—

  “They look like wings,” Meadow Lark say.

  “Like wings,” I echoed, hearing the flutter in my voice.

  Meadow Lark held her hand to her throat. “River, do you know what this is? We found ourselves an angel.”

  Chapter 12

  Meadow Lark stared and shook her head at that log. “I can’t believe it—an angel, right here at our river.”

  “Stop being so dramatic, Meadow Lark. It’s just a log, can’t you see?” I say, and blinked away any doubt. It wasn’t an angel. Angels had white robes and white wings. They sang and flew around and brought messages and untangled people from their troubles. This wasn’t an angel—this was a log.

  “Even with one good eye I can see it,” she say, tossing her hair behind her shoulders. “It has wings. And it has a head.”

  Rain began to fall, tapping the trees above and around us. I blinked again. “No, that’s just a giant burl with moss growing on it.”

  “Then how do you explain those?” she asked, pointing to the bits of paper stuck to the log.

  “The current carried them,” I say, watching the way the water curled into the little cove and then swirled in front of the log, teasing it. “Just like it carries everything.”

  Meadow Lark put her finger on her chin and sat, sticking her slow leg out in front of her. “I think the current was taking them to where they needed to go—and this was the place.”

  I felt disappointed that the wishes we floated down the river ended up on a log, which wasn’t special or magical—it was just a log that caught trash. And I was disappointed in Meadow Lark for putting the idea in my head that our wishes could come true, and betrayed by the river for not taking the wishes far away.

  “I think we should take them off and let them go again,” I say.

  “No! They’re here for a reason. I don’t know what, but they need to stay here.”

  “Meadow Lark,” I say, stepping closer to her, “there’s such a thing as looking too hard for things that aren’t there.”

  “You’re so sure about that,” she say, as she studied the log. “Well, just in case, we need to hide this angel so no one else finds it. No telling what they’d do to it.”

  “You mean, like Daniel Bunch?” I say. “He isn’t smart enough to find this. Daniel only finds rusty nails and gum wrappers, because they’re all he expects to find.”

  “You’re right . . . he has no imagination,” she say. “If he saw this, he’d think it was just a log.”

  I sat down beside her. “Are you trying to make a point?”

  The rain had let up, and the leaves appeared translucent. A sparrow called and slid over the smooth surface of the water, and the smell of pine needles filled the air.

  I stared at that log so long that everything around it disappeared, and gradually something like a face began to emerge on that burl. I looked away from the face and shook my head.

  “No, I don’t believe in any of that. Hoping for things to happen—for people to get sick or get better, or to go away or come back—is a waste of time and it just makes you sad when those things don’t happen.”

  I glanced at the log again, and blinked away what began to look like a nose.

  “It’s good to have something to hope for,” Meadow Lark say. “Life would be so dull and boring and sad if you didn’t.”

  “But what if it never happens?”

  “Well,” she say, touching the log, “you keep hoping. As long as it doesn’t happen, you always have something to hope for.”

  “Mama hopes. I think that’s how she can stand it that Theron’s gone.” I twisted off a piece of vine and tossed it on the water. “What do you hope for?” I asked, watching the vine drift away.

  Meadow Lark leaned back on her hands and looked up at the sky for a long time. Finally she say, “A really nice bed, something good to eat every night, the same teacher for a whole school year . . . a best friend, and Mr. Tricks.”

  The sparrow had stopped calling, and a shadow moved above us. Raindrops tapped on the leaves and blurred the water
.

  I stared at the log and tried not to see a face in it. “Well, it’s still just a log.”

  “People make fun of my eye,” she say, “but I can see better than some of them can.”

  The wind stirred the trees above us, and a whisper passed by me. Just when I thought I knew Meadow Lark, she become a mystery again. Maybe, I thought, if she had that kind of sight, she could help me understand something about that house, so I took a breath and say, “Sometimes I see a house that I’ve never been to before, but it’s so familiar to me.”

  Instead of laughing at me or looking surprised, Meadow Lark leaned forward. “Is this house in a dream?” she asked.

  “Not really. It always happens when I’m awake.”

  “Do you know everything about the house? Are people in the house?”

  “No, it makes more of itself the farther I go into it. I can’t explain, except it only exists a few feet around me at a time. And there’s never anyone in the house—I always feel like I’m the only one there.”

  “Wow,” she say. “What do you think it’s all about?”

  “I don’t know. But I feel . . . like there’s something in there for me. I just have to wait and find it.”

  “It’s like the house wants to show you something. Ooh,” she say, and rubbed her arms. “I’ve got goose bumps. Next time, try to stay longer and see what happens.”

  I shivered and rubbed my goose bumps too. “I’ll try. I just wish I knew what it all means.”

  “I wish I could do that—go to a house like that.”

  “I wish I could stop.”

  “We have so many wishes but no more paper.”

  “We don’t need paper, Meadow Lark—we have a log.”

  “An angel,” she say, and stretched her arms above her head. It made her shirt ride up again, and in the gap above her shorts I saw the scars again. Sympathy pains chafed the back of my calves. “Why do you have those?” I asked.

  Meadow Lark yanked her shirt all the way over her belly, and I knew her scars embarrassed her. “When I was born, my insides were upside down. It’s called situs inversus—but that’s what it means. I’ve had a lot of operations.”