Skeleton Tree

by Kim Ventrella

  Clang! The pick shot back, almost hitting Miren in the face.

  “Hey!” said Miren. “It’s like he doesn’t want anyone to dig him up.”

  “He?” said Stanly.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Jaxon said, screwing up his forehead. “There has to be a reasonable explanation. I know! Let’s try to dig somewhere else. That way, we’ll know if it’s just this spot where we can’t dig, or the whole yard.”

  Stanly, Jaxon, and Miren used their tools to make holes all over the yard. The metal parts slid easily into the wet dirt. Digging with Miren ended up not being so bad, since it kept her occupied and Stanly mostly didn’t have to listen to her blab.

  “It’s just this one spot,” Stanly said, shaking his head. “What kind of bones don’t let you dig them up?”

  “Highly illogical ones.” Jaxon came over to stand beside Stanly. “This would never happen in a Darby Brothers’ mystery.”

  They stared down at the hand. As they did, the little finger shot back.

  Jaxon screamed.

  Stanly yelped.

  Miren stood still, mouth forming a tiny O.

  Nobody moved for a full minute, and then Stanly crept over to the hand, gooseflesh arching up his spine. He touched the tip of the knobby little finger. The bone was cold and hard beneath his skin.

  “What are you doing?” Jaxon whispered. “Didn’t you see it move?”

  “I bet nobody else in the whole world is going to discover something like this,” Stanly said.

  Images raced through Stanly’s mind. He could see the headline now: “World’s Youngest Archaeologist Discovers Moving Skeleton.” He would be famous. Even without his camera, he’d find a way. His mom wouldn’t have to work at Walgreens anymore. They’d live in a mansion, and he’d have a hundred iPads, and his dad would be so happy he would—

  “Momma! You’re home!” Miren ran toward the house, and Mom picked her up and spun her around.

  “What’s your mom doing home so early?” Jaxon said.

  “I don’t know. Help me hide it. She can’t find out.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Stanly and Jaxon scooted in front of the hand, blocking it from view. If she found out now, everything would be ruined. She’d call the police or the Department of Health or something, and guys in white suits would come take the bones away.

  “You’re home early,” he said, reaching for Miren, pulling her toward him before she could open her big mouth and—

  “Momma, look what we found!” Miren pointed behind Stanly’s shins, smiling her stupid spider monkey smile. She jumped up and down, and then her smile collapsed when she looked at Stanly’s face.

  “What are you two hiding?” said Mom.

  She peeked behind Stanly’s legs, then stared down at the garden tools and out at the yard.

  “Stanly Stanwright.” She smoothed down her frizzy curls. This was it, the instant she put an end to his dreams of winning the contest. “Can you explain to me how all of these holes got here?” Suddenly, her voice sounded brittle, like it might crack.

  “You see, Mrs. Stanwright, it was—”

  “I want Stanly to explain.” Mom cut Jaxon off.

  Holes? That’s what she was worried about? She looked again at the spot where the hand stuck up from the ground. She looked directly at it, but her eyes whizzed past, like she didn’t see anything but a few twigs stacked on the grass.

  “We were being archanologists,” Miren said, hugging Mom’s hip. “I’m Stanly’s assistant. His official assistant, like how Stanly used to help Daddy dig up dinos, and that—”

  “Archaeologists,” Stanly interrupted. “Like in National Geographic.” Stanly sighed. He could already tell Mom wouldn’t understand, even if, by some miracle, she didn’t notice the bones right in front of her. Worse, she flinched when Miren said the word “Daddy,” like just hearing it hurt.

  “So you thought you could just dig up the yard? Do you know how much it’s going to cost to fill all this in?” Her mouth tugged down at the edges.

  “We can fill it in, Mom. I’m sorry. We didn’t think about—”

  “No, you weren’t thinking.” Mom squeezed her eyes shut. “Just go inside, Stanly. You can stay with Ms. Francine while Miren and I go to the movies. I already bought three tickets, but I guess that money’s just going to be wasted.”

  “Woot! What are we going to see? Because I heard there’s this new movie with Radish Redfern, that’s Stripy Pony’s best friend, and if so we have to see it.” Miren skipped around the yard, even though she had to gasp for air. “Can Stanly come, too? Pleeease, Mom!”

  “Not today, sweetie. Stanly can stay home and think about what he’s done.”

  “Mrs. Stanwright, if I may,” Jaxon said. “I think I might be able to explain. You see, it all started with the Darby Brothers’ Mystery #148, The Case of the Missing—”

  “Get in the car, Jaxon. I’ll drop you off on the way to the movies.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Stanwright.”

  They left Stanly alone in the garden. He slumped down next to the bone hand. He couldn’t understand why his mother couldn’t see it. Part of him was glad, because it meant he could keep digging, but the other part felt weird. Not just because he’d made her mad. There was something else, too. Kind of an itchy feeling behind his ears. Like the tickle he sometimes got when he was stopped at the top of a roller coaster waiting for the big plunge.

  After a few minutes, the sky thundered and fat raindrops plopped on Stanly’s head. He looked up as a finger of lightning streaked across the sky.

  “Come inside,” called Ms. Francine from the kitchen window. “I made fresh bread to go with your borsch.”

  Stanly ignored her. He picked up Miren’s tiny shovel and went around the yard filling in the holes.

  He watched the hand out of the corner of his eye as he worked. It stayed still, except when the wind blew hard and made the spindly bones shiver. Before he went in, he smoothed a thick layer of mud on top of the bones. Better safe than sorry. He closed the door, and when he peeked through the back window, lightning illuminated a single white knuckle already free of mud.

  At midnight, Stanly padded into Miren’s room and found her bed empty. He’d had a dream that she’d been crying, and he wanted to tell her he wasn’t mad anymore that she’d spilled his secret. Not that it had mattered.

  Ms. Francine stood by the back window, talking on the phone.

  “Of course I’m sure. I can stay as long as you need. Don’t worry about me and Stanly.” She pressed her face to the glass. Stanly couldn’t see what she was looking at. “What do you want me to tell him?”

  Stanly tiptoed across the cool tile and peeked into the living room.

  “Ah, wait,” Ms. Francine said without turning around. “Here he is now. You can tell him yourself. Your momma,” she said, patting his head and handing him the phone.

  “Mom, where are you? Where’s Miren?”

  “Stanly,” Mom said. Her voice sounded sticky and broken. “I’m sorry about what I said earlier. I don’t care about the yard.”

  “I know,” Stanly said. “It looks better now anyway, I fixed it. What’s going on?”

  “Your sister got sick at the movies, Stan, she couldn’t … We had to go to the hospital, but don’t worry, okay? Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “What kind of sick?” Stanly said, the sides of his mouth going numb. He remembered what he’d said earlier about wishing Miren would disappear, that she didn’t even exist.

  “We’ll be home in the morning.” Mom drew in a sharp breath. “Ms. Francine said she’ll bake you cookies for breakfast. The kind from the tube, your favorite.”

  “Can I talk to Miren?”

  “I have to go now, sweetheart. I love you. Be good for Ms. Francine.”

  “Mom!”

  The line clicked off before Stanly could say goodbye.

  Ms. Francine peeled the phone from his hand and put it back
on the charger.

  “How about a midnight snack? We can eat hot cocoa with marshmallows and chocolate sauce.”

  “No thanks,” Stanly said.

  He pressed his face to the glass like Ms. Francine had done. He saw the pieces of his camera lying forgotten in the grass. The hand flapped back and forth in the wind, the bones making a clicking sort of music. The mud he’d piled on top of them was gone.

  “How come you can see it and my mom can’t?”

  Ms. Francine closed a wrinkly hand around Stanly’s shoulder.

  “We see what we want to see,” said Ms. Francine, and she went into the kitchen to boil water for the cocoa.

  Miren squirmed as Mom slid the soft tubes into her nose the next morning at the dining table. She hadn’t said anything all morning, not even when Stanly offered to pick the blueberries out of her blueberry pancakes.

  “See, Miren just needs to breathe some fresh air for a while, then she’ll feel all better. Right, baby?” Mom scooted aside a stack of old magazines to make room for Miren’s new oxygen tank. It looked like the tank they used to blow up balloons at Party Dollar, only this one had a handle and wheels attached.

  “Why does she need an oxygen tank to get fresh air anyway?” Stanly didn’t understand anything that was happening. Why was Miren being so quiet?

  “You need to hurry up or you’ll miss the bus,” Mom said. She got up and stuffed her phone and a pack of Kleenexes into her crackled blue purse.

  “Mom!”

  Stanly followed her to her room. She picked through the laundry piled on the La-Z-Boy, searching for clean socks. She didn’t even look up at him. She found a pair and then walked right past him back into the dining room.

  “Call me if you need anything,” she was telling Ms. Francine. “I left Dr. Cynthia’s number on the fridge, and—”

  “Mom!” Something inside Stanly cracked. Without Slurpy to keep him in check, his anger bubbled up quickly, swirling around his stomach like a volcano. “I need you to tell me the truth!”

  He was so frustrated he could’ve punched a hole in the dining room table, but instead he started to cry. Big, stupid tears that burned his cheeks. Mom folded her arms around him, trying to make him feel better, but he just kept crying. Like he really was a volcano, and everything he’d been holding inside was erupting.

  “Your sister’s going to be fine, Stanly.”

  “How do you know that?” he said between sobs.

  Mom held him for so long he ran out of tears and ended up with a salty face and a sore throat. “I think I hear the bus coming. Can you make it in time?” She released him, and he saw that her cheeks were wet, too.

  “I guess,” he said, even though she still hadn’t answered his question.

  He pulled on his backpack and Miren’s face crumpled. She’d been kind of stunned during the whole sob fest thing, but now she looked ready to explode, too. “I want Stanly to stay with me. Mom, you have to let him!”

  “Sweetheart, Stanly has to go to school.” Mom pulled them both into a hug. To Stanly’s surprise, Miren didn’t cry. The anger kind of oozed out of her, like she was too tired to even throw a tantrum. “I’m so sorry, baby.” Mom looked at Miren for a long time, at the tubes stretching over her ears and into her nostrils and at the way her bottom lip kept tugging downward. Finally, she sighed and said, “Well, maybe just for today.”

  “Yes!” Miren said, some of her usual enthusiasm returning. “Stanly and I are going on an adventure, right Butt-Breath? Only I can’t tell you about it, because it’s a secret.”

  “Not too much of an adventure, I hope,” Mom said. “And sweetie, try not to call your brother Butt-Breath.” She kissed Miren and Stanly on their foreheads and then left for work.

  “What is this adventure I hear about?” Ms. Francine said. She smelled like coconut and her hair was wet from the shower. Sometimes, if Mom worked really late, or if something happened like Miren getting sick, Ms. Francine stayed overnight.

  “Nothing,” Stanly said.

  “Nothing,” echoed Miren. He could tell it was causing Miren physical pain to keep quiet.

  “Well, if this nothing has to do with the hand flapping in the wind last night, you might go take a look.” She stared out the window like she was remembering something sad and happy all at once. “It grows faster than you think, this kind of tree. Especially with all that rain.”

  Stanly looked at Miren. Her mouth dropped open.

  Miren leapt out of her seat and started for the door. “Last one to—” The tubes caught in her nose and pulled her backward. She hit the ground, hard, and the tank tumbled after her, cracking onto the tile.

  Miren lay still for a second, a rag doll with the stuffing pulled out, and then her face turned red and her whole body started to shake. Ms. Francine scooped her up and let her cry and scream into her shoulder. Stanly smoothed the hair out of her mouth and eyes.

  After a while, Miren’s cries turned to heaves and she stopped shaking. Stanly thought that meant she felt better, because she wasn’t sobbing anymore, but then her lungs started to make these terrible scratchy noises. All the pink drained from her face, and she was gasping for air. Quickly, Ms. Francine pressed the tubes back into her nose.

  The scratchy sounds died away. Stanly rubbed Miren’s shoulder and wished things could go back to how they were before, when Miren was a baby and her biggest problem was a dirty diaper or a scraped knee. The three of them sat on the kitchen floor like that for a while, until Miren turned pink again and her breathing sounded normal. Stanly picked at a peeling vinyl tile. He still remembered the day she’d tripped over it and broken her little finger. He’d thought that was the worst thing that would ever happen to her, but now … now he didn’t know what to think.

  “Maybe little one will take a rest. What do you say, little one?”

  Miren balled up her fists. “I’m not little,” she said, her voice ragged. “And I don’t need a nap.”

  “Very well.”

  Ms. Francine carried Miren and her tank into the yard. A breeze ruffled Stanly’s hair. He didn’t understand why it was better to get air from a machine than from outside, but he could see now that Miren really was sick.

  He stopped dead a few feet away from the bone hand. Ms. Francine had been right. It wasn’t just a hand anymore. Miren wiggled free of Ms. Francine’s grasp.

  “Slowly, little girl. You will run out of air if you move so fast.”

  A skeletal arm stretched up from the ground, fingers curled into a claw, like they were trying to snatch a cloud from the sky. Stanly stopped, and for a moment he could almost feel those bony fingers reaching down his throat. That itchy feeling snaked its way under his skin again, too. Not afraid, not really, just waiting.

  Then he remembered about the camera, and the tingling went away and a sour taste filled his mouth. If Miren hadn’t broken it, he could’ve snapped a shot right now that might have won him the Young Discoverer’s Prize. Dad would have gone on the trip with him, and maybe he’d see what he was missing and decide to come home and take care of him and Miren like he was supposed to.

  But he couldn’t think about that now. Not when Miren was so sick. How could he be mad at her when she couldn’t even breathe by herself? Like it or not, the contest would have to wait.

  Miren tiptoed right up to the arm and pinched the bony thumb. White fingers closed around her fist. Stanly lunged forward to help her, but she laughed and said, “Hey! That tickles.”

  She eased her fingers free, and the hand twisted around to form a thumbs-up. Miren clapped and giggled and snorted, just like the time they saw the seals dancing at SeaWorld. Ms. Francine patted her eyes and looked at the arm like it was an old friend.

  “We should water it,” Miren said. Her voice sounded all weird and far away, and it gave Stanly the creeps.

  But Miren was sick, and even though she was annoying, Stanly realized he would do anything to make her feel better.

  Even if it was super spooky.

&
nbsp; He helped Miren fill a coffee can with water and pour it at the base of the bone. They sat and watched to see if the skeleton would grow again. The whole time, Stanly’s mind reeled. He had so many new facts, impossible facts, that he didn’t know where to put them all. Like that time he tried to run too many games at once and his computer crashed. That was how his brain felt.

  At lunchtime, Ms. Francine brought them cucumber salad served in coffee mugs. They ate the crunchy salad and washed it down with glasses of iced mint tea. Stanly stacked the dishes inside the empty coffee can.

  He looked up when he was done and saw the skeleton arm quiver. It started at the base, like a tiny earthquake, and shot all the way up to the bony fingers. He let the can of dishes he’d been holding fall with a clunk onto the grass. Miren jumped and shouted and pointed as a shoulder blade pushed up through the mud, followed by a rib and the top part of a skull.

  She jumped so much her breath got scratchy, and Stanly had to make her sit down next to him in the grass. He put his arms around her to keep her still, but in the end he was the one who was shaking.

  They watched the skeleton closely for the rest of the day, Stanly too stunned to say much, Miren talking nonstop about how the skeleton was awesome and how he was going to be her new best friend. Stanly wasn’t so sure about that. The same frozen, itchy fingers curled around his lungs and squeezed. He remembered the feeling he’d had when he first saw the bone, like nothing would ever be the same again. The bone had changed things, and no matter how hard he might try, he could never go back to before.

  Before Miren got sick, or before the bone started to grow.

  “Stanly, are you even listening to me? I said, what type of gift do you give a skeleton for Christmas? I mean, it’s not for a while and everything, but I was thinking about a coat, because it’s probably cold not having skin … or maybe a new pair of tap shoes!”

  “Why would you give tap shoes to a skeleton?” Stanly said, so dazed he was hardly listening.

  “They’re for dancing, duh, don’t you know anything?”

  Miren went on like that until the sun dipped behind the fence, casting the shed and the shrubs and the bones in a blazing gold glow. “Dinnertime!” called Ms. Francine from inside the house. Her voice was so big she didn’t even need to open a window, which was good, because otherwise Stanly might not have heard her. His brain felt about a million miles away.