I knew I was out of line. I shouldn’ta been mean to Mom, and especially not to Scotty. I shoulda kept a lid on all that emotional stuff, but sometimes it builds up too fast, a pressure cooker of all the words I don’t say superheated by all the feelings I bury. I think my steam valve must’ve overloaded.
I’ve barely walked a quarter mile when Kimana rides up, her long hair whipping from the back of her helmet, the beaded pouch bobbing low against her thigh. Two bucks says she jumped on her bike the minute I called—right after I said not to come.
Real friends know when to listen, when to help, and when to totally ignore everything you say and come save you anyway.
She slows beside me, her engine puttering. “What’s going on?”
“T-Rex was with my grandpa, but I’m still looking for Royal. Can’t find him anywhere.”
“Where’s your truck? You gonna walk all eighty acres on foot? Hop on. You look left and I’ll look right, and we’ll cover a bunch of ground really fast.” She unstraps the half-shell helmet from the rack on the back and passes it to me, then tucks her hair into her gray hoodie to keep it out of my face.
“Okay.” I swing a leg over, fold down the tiny footrests, and hold onto her waist. “Ready.”
The bike wobbles a little when we start to roll, but evens out as we pick up speed along the canal, gray sky reflecting across the water beside us. I scour every branch, tree, and hollow in the fields. I lean with her into corners and hold tight when she flies down one bank and up another.
A pheasant struts through the wheat, and two hawks glide in lazy circles high overhead. Dogs stop to watch us from neighboring fields, but I can’t tell if those were the dogs in my barn. Cows and calves graze, and Milkshake lies in the grass with her calf. Chickens scratch in the pasture, and horses’ ears perk up as we drive by, but Royal is nowhere.
After circling the farm with no luck, we pull up behind the house.
“Have you checked our fort?” Kimana hangs her helmet on the handlebars and shakes out her hair while I clip the spare onto the rack.
“Not yet.” I peer into the shadows of trees around the house and barn, hoping against hope that this time, I’ll see Royal perched on a branch somewhere. But he’s not, and it hurts my heart to keep looking for someone I’m never going to find. I’ve done that for too long already.
At our tree, Kimana climbs the rungs nailed to the trunk and slips up through the trapdoor onto the platform of our tree fort.
“Do you see anything?” I call up.
“Just a minute.” Kimana takes her time studying each tree all the way around. “Do you know you have an owl in your pine tree?”
“Hoo, hoo!” The owl calls out, but I can’t see it from the ground.
“Yeah, he and Royal were kind of hanging out yesterday.”
She stays another half minute, then starts down. “I can’t see Royal, but your owl is creepy.”
“I think it’s the same one that used to be in the potato cellar. He flew right over my head when I opened the doors. Great big, powerful wings. Fast too. I used to think owls were the prettiest birds on the farm, but that was before Royal.”
Kimana falls into step with me on the way to the chicken barn. “Their feathers are made for different things,” she says. “One’s built for speed and stealth in the dark, and the other’s for looking pretty in the light.”
“True.”
Inside the barn, we clean up Mom’s totes with the sashes and trophies, but when I pick up the roses Dad gave her, the petals crumble off the stems, raining down over my hand like ashes.
“Oh man.” I pick up a couple petals, but they shatter at my touch.
This shouldn’t be so hard. Just pick up the flowers and put them back. Maybe glue can fix it. I can do this. Gingerly, I pick up another petal, but it breaks in half.
“Dang it!” I throw the naked stem across the barn. “I can’t fix anything. This is all so hard. Why does this have to be so hard?”
“Some things can’t be fixed.” Kimana brushes what’s left of the roses off the plastic lid and tosses them outside. “And that’s not your fault.”
“But it was my job to look after things. I promised I would.” We worked so good together—me and Dad. It was like I was the spark and he the fire, but with him gone, I’m sparking as hard as I can, but the engine just won’t go. I’m stuck, and there’s no way to make it better.
“Sit with me a minute.” She sits on a straw bale, pulls her note cards out of her pouch, sets them between us, and then pulls out a long leather lanyard with blue-green beads vining a few inches up either side.
“Is that the peacock one I asked for? I thought you had a bunch of orders that needed to be done first.”
She passes it to me. “Yeah, I do, and it’s not done, but I’m working on it in between. Even if Royal never comes back, I’ll still finish this, so you can remember him.”
“Thank you.” It’s easy to see the bead pattern as feathers, and it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t stop me from imagining Royal hurt or stuck somewhere.
“Do you really think that this farm is the only legacy your dad left behind? Seems to me, a person’s legacy is more than what they own.”
“The farm was his whole world—it was his dream.” I slump down beside her and trace the beadwork draped across the callouses on my hands. “It’s like trying to build a robot without the right parts, or coding when half the program disappears. I don’t know how we’ll make it without him.”
“You will make it. I lost my mom, remember? I can’t finish her work or do her job, but I can be the sort of person she wanted me to be. She was kind, she loved her family, and she cared about people. That’s how I’m trying to be—how I carry on her legacy. Do you really think your dad’s dream was for you to work yourself into the ground?”
A dirt bike growls up to the barn, and Mateo cuts the engine and jumps off. “Hey, my dad said you called, but I called back and you didn’t answer . . .” His steps slow as he takes in the mess. “What happened?”
“Best I can tell, dogs chased a fox in here and they all went crazy and broke Royal’s cage all to bits.” I pass the lanyard to Kimana, and she tucks it into her pouch.
He whistles. “Did they get him?”
“I don’t know. I can’t find him.”
“That stinks.” He grabs a bale and tosses it on top of the stack, but it doesn’t catch right, teeters, and falls back. With a grunt, he grabs the strings again. “Here, you climb up top, and I’ll pass it to you.”
“You don’t have to. I can get it.”
“Yeah, yeah, you can—but you don’t have to.”
I scramble up the stack, kneel down, and reach for the bale. One bale after the other, we wedge them back in place while Kimana cleans up the twine and broken pieces.
“Have you called Mr. Ferro yet?” He grunts and shoves another bale up.
I grasp the twine and heave it onto the stack. “Not yet.”
“It’s his peacock. You should tell him. He can help look.”
“You call him.”
He throws the last bale hard enough that it almost knocks me over. “Aw, come on! The one time you call me, I missed it.”
“Mateo, will you put these away? Why are they in here, anyway?” Kimana picks up a stack of black planting trays and hands it to him. “You could call Mr. Ferro on the way.”
“Sure.” He grabs the trays and walks out.
Kimana stacks pieces of the rabbit hutch by the door while I pitchfork broken bales into the chicken coop. Ten minutes later, we’ve got the barn mostly put back to rights again.
A siren chirps outside—whoop, whoop!—and blue-and-red lights flash across the barn as a Fort Hall police cruiser pulls up.
Kimana drops some wood onto the pile and runs to meet the officer getting out of the car. “My dad’s here!”
<
br /> With more gadgets on his utility belt than Batman, Officer Charging Horse gives Kimana a one-armed hug.
“Officer Charging Horse.” Mateo nods and slips past us into the barn.
Kimana grins and waves me over. “I told him you had dog trouble today.”
Kimana’s dad nods to me. “I already talked to your grandpa about bringing over some live traps, but I’m actually here to pick up Kimana.”
“Me? What for?” she asks.
He smiles down at her. “Feather had her baby and needs you to come stay at the cabin with the cousins.”
“Okay. Yeah. I’ll come right now.” She grabs her helmet and waves at me over her shoulder. “I gotta go. See you in a few days.”
“Good luck!” I call, as she kicks the starter and rides away, Officer Charging Horse following behind in the cruiser.
“Wow. What do you think? Boy or girl?” I look for Mateo by the stack, but he stands by the coop door, his arms folded. “Hey! Boy or girl?”
He shrugs. “When were you going to tell me?”
“What do you mean? I heard about the baby just now, same as you.”
“The flower basket. The one gift we had for my mom this weekend. It was supposed to be a surprise. If you didn’t want to take care of it, you could have told me, and I would have figured something else out.”
“Shoot.” The trays. The trays he took back to the greenhouse—right next to the roasted and frozen flower basket. “I’m sorry. I was gonna buy you another one.”
“You can’t buy another one like that. Not here. My dad drove to Utah to get it. Asked them to make it special with the pink survivor ribbons for my mom.”
Unsure how to fix it, or even if there’s a way to fix it, I reach for him. “I wanted to tell you, but I thought I could make it better first.”
“I know you didn’t mean to.” He walks past me. “I know you’re stressed. I get it. I told you, I’m here to help.” He touches his heart, his promise. “And I am. But if you didn’t want to take care of it—or if it was too much to do—you should’ve said so. I coulda taken it back.”
I hurry to catch up to him as he leaves the barn. “I can ask Grandpa to help. We can find something.”
“There’s no time to get another. It’s for this weekend.” He stops and looks at me. “You know what’s dumb? I thought about checking on it before, but didn’t because I trusted you.”
My throat prickles like I’ve swallowed a cocklebur. “You can trust me. You know you can.”
“I thought I did.” He gets on his bike.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“All you got to do is talk.” He pulls his phone from his pocket. “And if you can’t say it out loud, at least you could text.” He shakes his head. “But not you. Never a text from you. I bet you haven’t even read my texts since the accident, have you?”
What am I supposed to say? He knows I don’t text. I don’t hide it.
“One call. That’s all you had to do.”
“Mateo, wait.”
“I gotta go. Chores.” He starts the engine and drives away. “Text you later.”
Long after the sound of his dirt bike fades to nothing, I start moving again, putting new food and water on the floor and on top of the stack, in case Royal comes back to either spot. Kimana’s note cards lay on the straw where she left them, and I put them inside the house on the kitchen table for safekeeping. I go through the motions, do all the chores as if someone else programed me to move, more robot than girl. I do pretty good at not thinking until I haul the broken bits of wood to the burn pile.
Seeing the broken pieces of Royal’s cage left in a place that used to give us hope is almost more than I can stand.
Never has it seemed less magical for a wishfire than today, every piled scrap and splinter feeling more like shattered dreams than wood.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Royal didn’t come back that night. Or the next morning.
Mr. Ferro came over and looked all over the place with that little city hat of his and a net, but he didn’t have any better luck than I did.
At school, Mr. Collier chewed on me for dozing off in class again, but all night, whenever I’d closed my eyes, I’d imagined new places for Royal to be stuck, or hurt, or both, and the not-knowing was frying my brain.
So I did the only thing I know how to do when thinking is too much: I worked.
Over the next three days, Grandpa really stepped up—working while I was at school, moving pipe with us, and fixing the tractors. He’s a lot slower than he used to be, and he sometimes has to stop and catch his breath, but it feels a little like it used to when all of us were working together with Dad—except Scotty won’t look at me, let alone talk to me.
Mr. Ferro keeps coming around to look for Royal, and ends up staying to help Grandpa or Mom. He messes up a lot, and doesn’t know much, but he tries real hard. His new tennis shoes are even starting to look lived-in. He even brought us a couple things he found while cleaning out his grandparents’ house, things he thought we’d like, as kind of a thank you for caring for Royal—which was probably nicer than we deserved. He gave Scotty a National Geographic magazine with a feature on peacocks, which Scotty read all the way to school.
And he gave me a little wooden plate with a peacock feather engraved around the outside and a quote in the middle. It said: “‘The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail.’—Tagore.”
Seems to me, a sparrow only wishes it could have a peacock tail. But at least the feather around the outside is pretty.
I miss Mateo’s morning drive-by stops on his paper route, and when I try to talk to him at school, he gives me short answers or says nothing at all.
Kimana says her cousin and the baby are doing great, but she doesn’t know when she’ll be back.
My heart adds both of my friends’ names to my list of missing:
Royal, Dad, Kimana, Mateo.
By now my world has so many missing pieces, I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be a picture of.
This afternoon, Scotty and I are moving pipe while Mr. Ferro helps Grandpa with the tractor—or at least tries to help. Once we get the lines all hooked together in their new spot, Scotty runs to the pump and flips it on while I wait in the field with wire in hand.
As pressure rises inside the lines, water scurries along the belly of the pipe, spilling out at each joint into tiny pools before rushing ahead to the next. I know it’s close when air hisses from the Rain Bird sprinklers atop the risers, the shhhh sound growing more urgent until water chokes off the air and gurgles up into weak arcs of water dribbling out the spouts.
Some of the birds spin in lazy circles, the water looping the risers ’round and ’round, while others cough and sputter, spraying mist. Then comes the magic moment when the lines pressurize, and the birds come up all at once, rising from trickles to silver rainbows arcing over the field.
In my pipe-moving boots, I listen and watch for breaks in the lines, or clogged birds. We’re lucky today. I only have to shove the wire down three birds to clear them out before they all work.
By the time I get back to the truck, Scotty’s already there, watching the road and very definitely not looking at me. In fact, he’s not-looking so hard, his little body is rigid. When I start the engine, he bumps a can of WD-40 with his foot, knocking it gently against a can of starting fluid. The clink, clink is better than silence, which is all Scotty’s been giving me for days. Half the time when I do catch his gaze, he looks past me as if he’s about to cry, so I don’t push it, but I’m mighty tired of being invisible. All this silence is the pits.
With a sigh, I sneak a glance from the dirt road to Scotty. “Okay, I give.”
Not even a flicker to show he heard me.
“Scotty, I’m sorry I yelled at you. Really, I am. I
know better, and I was scared for Royal and then really scared for T-Rex, and I was mad.”
He stirs a bit, and I nudge his shoulder.
“I’m not mad at you,” I continue. “Never at you. I know it seemed that way. I mean, I acted like I was mad at you, but I was angry at a lot of things. And it’s not your fault.”
His eyes flick to my open hand and away.
Well, that’s something. A start, at least. “Well, think about it. Okay? I’m tired of not talking. You hear?”
His shoulders curl up toward his ears, and I know he wants to plug them to block me out.
Fine. I’ll try again later.
As we near the house, I crane my head to look for Grandpa, and find him hobbling behind the disc all stiff-legged and slower than a garden tractor in first low gear. Mr. Ferro follows behind, holding a toolbox under one arm and a big wrench in the other.
We pull in beside them. “Got the water done on one field. One more to go.”
“Good.” Grandpa grabs the handle by the tractor door, rocks back and forth, and heaves his leg up with a grunt, but his boot hits the metal step and goes back down. He adjusts his grip, lips mashed in a thin line under his whiskers, and tries again, but his boot doesn’t quite make it past the guard. “Dangnabbit!”
“What’s wrong with your leg?” Scotty beats me to the question.
“It’s nothing,” Grandpa grumbles. “Paige, get up in there and start ’er up.”
Mr. Ferro waits till Grandpa turns his back, then mouths, He fell off the tractor.
Is he okay? I mouth back.
He shrugs and teeters his hand back and forth.
“Paige! Get up there.”
“Sure thing, Grandpa!” I run up the steps and jump in the seat.
In park? Check.
Step on both brake and clutch pedals. Check and check.
Make sure everyone is clear of the tires. Check.
Okay. I pull the throttle down a little so it has some juice, turn the key, and press the start button.
The Wish and the Peacock Page 17