Blue Hollow Falls

by Donna Kauffman

Sunny shook her head. “No, that wasn’t it. My mom was pretty sick most of my life. All of it, really. One of her problems was respiratory, meaning—”

  “I know what ‘respiratory’ means. She couldn’t breathe right.”

  Sunny smiled. “Yep. So—”

  “You could have had a fish. Or a dog that doesn’t shed.”

  Sunny nodded. “Could have, but it was just better all around that we didn’t.” She didn’t want to get into the particulars of some of her mother’s mental flights of fancy. At least, that’s how her mama had phrased them. Daisy Rose was often a delightful force of nature, but she had her issues, and not all of them were physical. So, even with the part-time care Sunny had eventually arranged while she was at school and, later on, at work, Sunny couldn’t trust that her mother wouldn’t get it in her head to set the fish free . . . or some other “live long and prosper” type thing she said her little voices occasionally coached her to do. Daisy Rose didn’t believe in any of nature’s wild creatures being kept in captivity, and Sunny often thought that included Daisy Rose herself.

  To Sunny’s surprise, Bailey nodded and said, “I get that.”

  Sunny wanted to ask her more, find out why she got that, get more of a feel for what Bailey’s life had been like up to that point, but figured it was better to let Bailey reveal things at her own pace. On the other hand, maybe a direct approach would let Bailey know that Sunny might understand more than her young half sister thought she did. Sunny had grown up in one place with one parent, but neither of their childhoods had been what anyone would consider normal. “Addie told me a little about your file,” Sunny told her, opting for the direct route. “I’m sorry you had to move around so much. I guess that made it hard to have a pet.”

  Bailey shrugged, then turned and continued walking.

  Sunny thought maybe her comment had been too frank, but then Bailey said, “I never thought about it. Not at first. None of the places I lived had any. It didn’t come up.”

  Sunny knew there was a “but” in there somewhere, so she just said, “Yeah. I knew early on it wasn’t going to happen for me, either, so I didn’t let myself go there. Well, except about the horse, but, you know . . . horses. Hard not to want one of those.” Bailey said nothing to that, so Sunny went on. “I think that was why I did the fairy gardens. I wasn’t much of a doll or stuffed animal type person.”

  Bailey glanced back at that. “Me, either.”

  She didn’t look or sound sad about that, like she’d shunned dolls and stuffed animals for fear of letting herself get attached to anything. She’d said it much like Sunny had, as if it was just how she was. “Well, I still have that backyard. I live in the same house I grew up in. The gardens I started as a kid are a bit more elaborate now, but the fairy places are still there. You know, if you’d like to come see them, maybe hang out with me for a weekend or whatever, I’d like to do that. I was going to ask Addie today if we might work something out. If you’re cool with that, I mean.”

  Bailey paused again, and Sunny almost bumped into her. She turned. “Really?”

  Sunny looked down into those pretty blue eyes and saw not defiance or disbelief . . . but hope. And her heart teetered. “Really.”

  “I’ll ask Addie,” Bailey said, then immediately turned around and kept on walking, maybe a bit more determined than before.

  Sunny smiled, and walked on behind her. Baby steps.

  “I had a goat,” Bailey said, almost in a rush, after another minute or two had passed in silence.

  A more companionable silence now, Sunny had thought, and apparently she’d been right. “You did? At the farm you mean? Your last foster home?”

  Bailey nodded, but kept trudging forward, her head a bit bowed now.

  Sunny couldn’t have said what made her do it, but she caught up to Bailey and put her hand on the girl’s shoulder, gently halting her, then immediately let go, feeling that she didn’t want to invade this girl’s personal space unless invited to do so. Bailey had so little control over her life, Sunny wanted to respect what control she did have.

  She waited for Bailey to turn around. When she did, the young girl’s features were smooth. “It’s okay,” she told Sunny, as if guessing why Sunny had suddenly stopped her. “He’s fine where he is. He belongs to them anyway.”

  “But he was yours, too?”

  Bailey lifted a knobby shoulder and for the first time she looked exactly like the little girl she was. “I helped birth him. The Frasers—the family I was with—they raised pygmy goats. Little pains in the butts, really, they get into everything. But . . . you know . . . kind of cute, too.”

  “I bet,” Sunny said, smiling. “You helped a mother goat with her baby? By yourself?”

  Bailey shook her head. “No, Mrs. Fraser was doing the hard part, but she said I could help. I took care of the goats and she said when I proved myself, I could help with the babies.”

  “Wow, so I guess you did that. Good for you.”

  Bailey nodded. “It was totally gross,” she said. “But, you know, pretty cool, too.”

  Sunny laughed. “My thoughts on birth exactly.”

  Bailey looked up sharply then. “Do you have kids?”

  “Oh, no. No, I don’t. But I had a friend when I was in college who had a cat she’d smuggled into her dorm room. I lived at home and commuted to school, but I happened to be there hanging out when the mama cat had kittens.” Sunny wrinkled her nose. “You described it pretty much exactly how I remember it.”

  Bailey grinned then, and Sunny was struck again by how it transformed her face. She recalled hearing the giggle that Sawyer had somehow gotten out of her when they were walking along the Mall. She really hoped that this latest change in Bailey’s young life would bring more reasons to laugh. A lot more.

  They both turned up the trail again. Sunny could see brighter light ahead and thought maybe they were going to one of the high meadows. Maybe to see some ancient mulberry trees or something. After all of her reading on the subject, she’d actually be really interested in doing that. As the path widened, she and Bailey fell into step together, side by side, and Sunny wondered if maybe she shouldn’t have checked with Addie or Sawyer personally before the two of them had taken off. What she knew of Bailey’s background led Sunny to believe the girl had been telling the truth when she’d claimed Addie knew about their hike, but they were going a bit farther than Sunny had expected.

  Her thoughts went back to the goat, though, and the farm Bailey had been on before the inheritance had changed things. “Did you like the Frasers?”

  Bailey nodded. “Yeah, they were okay.”

  “I’m sorry you had to leave like you did. Did you get the chance to go back and say good-bye to them? I mean, you went back to get your stuff and all, right?”

  “We did that,” Bailey told her. “Addie took me. We had to get papers signed. There was a lawyer, and we had to see Miss Jackson again.”

  “Oh,” Sunny said, feeling suddenly and stupidly left out, realizing how much more there had been to Bailey’s transition than she’d realized. “I’m sorry I didn’t think to ask you that day you came to visit me.”

  “No problem,” Bailey said, and Sunny wondered how often she’d said that in her life.

  “So . . . did you get to see your goat?”

  She thought she heard a little intake of breath, and Bailey just nodded. Sunny stopped her again, only this time, she left her hand resting gently on Bailey’s shoulder. “I’m really sorry, Bailey. I—I guess I haven’t been very good about this. I just—it’s all new to me, too. But I do want to try,” and she realized as she said it, just how much she meant that.

  “Your mom just died,” Bailey said. “I’m sorry for that, by the way. But I know you don’t want—”

  Sunny crouched down. “It’s not a matter of want. I didn’t know what to even think about all of this. I’ve just been . . . trying to process everything, I guess. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know you, for us to know ea
ch other. I don’t know what we can be to each other, or what you want us to be, but I’m open to figuring it out.” She waited for Bailey to meet her eyes. “Cool?”

  Bailey’s eyes weren’t watering, but that didn’t mean they weren’t swimming in emotion. Sunny felt her heart clutch tight in her chest when the young girl nodded. Bailey might play it like she was cool as a cucumber, and about a lot of things, probably she was. But at the heart of it all, she was just a kid. Sunny recalled that when she’d been Bailey’s age and the truth of how her life was going to be really began to hit home . . . she’d toughened up a great deal, too. And yet, if someone had stepped into her world, like a Sawyer or maybe an older half sister . . . she’d have been hard-pressed not to let those walls crumble a little bit either. Hope was a hard thing to quash, and that wasn’t a bad thing. Not at all.

  “I can’t pretend to know what it was like, living how you have so far,” Sunny told her, deciding if the two of them were going to build anything, there had to be a solid foundation of honesty and trust. Without that, anything they constructed would be flimsy at best. “Just as most kids couldn’t comprehend what my life was like, taking care of my mom the way I did. But I didn’t care if they understood. I just cared that they wanted to be my friend, regardless of what my life was like.”

  “Yeah,” Bailey said. “I get that.”

  Now Sunny’s eyes were swimming in emotion. “I want to hug you, and tell you it’s all going to be okay, and at the same time, I don’t want you to get your hopes up about things I can’t control. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone telling me that when I was your age.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said, and Sunny let her hand fall away, respecting that this was a lot for Bailey, too. “I’m good. Addie is nice.” She looked around, then back at Sunny. “It’s good here.”

  “Did you have friends at school, where you were? Do you want them to come visit you here? Has Addie talked about school here?”

  “The Frasers homeschooled. She had two older kids. It was okay.”

  “Will Addie homeschool you here then? Does Blue Hollow Falls even have a school?” She’d yet to see the town itself, but she couldn’t imagine it was of any real size.

  Bailey shook her head. “I had to go to the elementary school down in the valley—it’s the closest one to here—and take some tests so they could figure out what grade to put me in. And we had to get the papers done first before she could enroll me.”

  “Oh,” Sunny said, “well, that’s good. I hope, anyway. You can meet kids your own age.”

  Bailey didn’t say anything to that, which Sunny understood all too well. Making friends was dangerous, but much yearned for territory. And Sunny hadn’t had to change schools every year, either.

  “They said I could go in at a grade above my age, but Addie said it would be better for me to stay with kids my own age.”

  “What do you think?”

  Bailey just shrugged.

  “I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was in grade school,” Sunny confided. “I have a weird name and I was different. My mom was what they used to call a hippie, and I wasn’t dressed like the other kids.”

  “What’s a hippie?” Bailey looked interested once again, and maybe relieved not to be talking about herself.

  “Well . . . I don’t really know how to explain that. She lived on a—” Sunny broke off, thinking a commune wasn’t something she wanted to try to explain to a ten-year-old. “A kind of mountain farming community. Everyone worked together and lived together and they grew and raised their own food and lived off the land. They tended to favor tie-dyed clothes and handmade things and . . . you know, I can’t really explain it. But it was an alternate lifestyle that kids in the city definitely did not get.”

  “Your name’s not weird,” Bailey said.

  Sunny smiled. “My full name is Sunshine Meadow Aquarius Morrison Goodwin.”

  That got a reaction out of the otherwise unflappable youngster. “Whoa. That’s like a crazy bunch of names. Really?”

  Sunny pulled her phone out of her coat pocket and opened the wallet side of the phone case. She slid out her driver’s license. “Really,” she said, handing it to Bailey.

  Bailey took it and looked at the front. She looked back to Sunny. “Do all hippies have five names?”

  Sunny laughed, shook her head. “My mother had six. She chose hers when she was eighteen. She chose mine, too.”

  “Why didn’t you change yours then?”

  “Oh, I planned on doing that, believe me. But by the time I got old enough, I had decided to own it instead. It’s part of who I am, part of my heritage.”

  Bailey handed the license back, but didn’t say anything. Then she blurted out, “My middle name is Danielle.” She made a face. “I’m not a fan.”

  Sunny snorted out a surprised laugh at the attitude. “I’m not laughing at the name,” she quickly added. “I think it’s pretty. I do.”

  “It’s kind of . . . foofy,” Bailey said. “You know, like a frilly doll name.”

  “Well, if you wanted, you could go by Dani. But one thing I learned is that you get to go through almost your whole life once you’re an adult without having to tell anyone your middle name.” She smiled. “Even if you have three of them.”

  Bailey smiled a little at that, nodded.

  “You know, that day you came to visit? My co-worker Stevie and I had just that day shared our middle names, and we’ve worked together and become really good friends now for well over a year.”

  “What’s her middle name?”

  “Aretha.”

  Bailey wrinkled her freckled nose. “Is that even a name?”

  Sunny laughed. “Yes. It belongs to a really famous singer, actually.”

  “Well, she is a pretty good singer, so I guess that makes sense.”

  “You know, I guess it does,” Sunny said, and pushed up to a stand. “I know this all has to be a lot to take in,” Sunny told her. “But I think everyone is trying to do right by you. Addie and Sawyer definitely stepped up more than I did, but I will do better.”

  “It’s okay,” Bailey told her. “I’m—”

  “Good,” Sunny finished for her with a smile. “I know. You’re also a kid who needs a family she can stay with until she figures out what she wants to do on her own. I think you have that family now, or at least the foundation for one. Doesn’t mean it will be easy, or that starting all over again doesn’t suck.”

  Bailey glanced at her then.

  “You know you don’t have to be okay, or good,” Sunny said. “Not all the time.” When Bailey frowned, as if confused, she added, “What I mean is, you can tell us when you’re not okay, when you’re mad, or frustrated, or when you want to do something differently. You might not get what you want, but it’s okay to speak up.”

  When Bailey didn’t react to that pro or con, Sunny smiled and added, “Sawyer told me he was a holy terror as a kid—his words—and Addie hung on to him. I’m not saying go full-on holy terror, but you can go full-on Bailey, and be yourself. She’ll hang on to you, too. We all will.” Sunny had no idea what it was she was actually promising, only that she’d be true to her word in every way she could. For all that she’d finally found her freedom from family responsibility and wanted to revel in it, possibly forever, being Bailey’s sister didn’t feel like a burden to her. It felt like . . . a new beginning. A good one.

  She tucked her license back in her wallet and fished out one of her business cards. “I know this is formal looking and all, but it has my e-mail and my cell phone number on it. So you can always get to me, no matter what.”

  Bailey took the card, looked at it, then back at Sunny. “Thanks,” she said, and stuffed it in the back pocket of her jeans.

  Sunny wasn’t sure if Bailey was just being polite, or what she thought of the speech Sunny had just made, and decided it didn’t really matter at the moment. What mattered was she’d made sure Bailey knew she could reach out and had given her the tools to do
so. More baby steps.

  “We’d better go,” Bailey said. “It’s right up there.”

  Sunny tucked her phone back in her pocket and gave her a quick salute, much as she had Sawyer. “Lead on, Bailey Dani.”

  Bailey glanced up, the smirk on her lips almost a grin. “Right,” she said, adding more quietly after she’d turned and gone a few steps, “Sunshine Meadow,” the humor in her voice, clear as a bell.

  Sunny hadn’t thought about the plusses that might come with having family. She’d only fretted the minuses. For all that she’d worked so hard to maintain a positive attitude toward her caregiver role, she hadn’t succeeded as well as she’d thought. Because, at that particular moment, she felt awash in happiness, and joy, and she was a little stunned by that. The prospect of befriending a smart-beyond-her-years, ten-year-old girl suddenly didn’t seem so fraught with potential danger signs and lifestyle restrictions. In all of her pondering about what she should or shouldn’t do where her newly discovered baby sister was concerned, never once had it occurred to her that Bailey might be giving something of equal or even greater value back to her.

  They got to the edge of the woods just then and Sunny stepped behind Bailey out into a small clearing filled with overgrown wildflowers that the warmer than average fall weather had kept from going to seed far longer than usual. Bailey didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to.

  Sunny couldn’t have spoken if she’d wanted to, because all the air had gone out of her on one stunned gasp. She took a small, almost stumbling step around Bailey and moved forward until she was standing in the middle of the hip-high meadow growth. It was both haunting and stunning, and for the second time in a row, this visit to Blue Hollow Falls had shown her something that left her utterly awestruck and speechless.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Bailey said, her voice hushed, as if the structure in front of them warranted a certain reverence.

  Sunny nodded, agreeing on the sentiment, and the tone in which Bailey had delivered it.

  In front of them stood an enormous, horribly dilapidated and long abandoned, yet utterly stunning glass and wrought iron greenhouse.