Look Both Ways

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  But they hadn’t hit the end of their driveway when Mallory had to stop to tie her shoe.

  “I’ll catch up,” she called to her mother and knelt to make a careful double loop.

  And then she saw it, in a tiny puddle of leftover rainwater that sparkled in the sun—the garnet a dot of bright blood. Eagerly, her heart quickening, Mallory tugged and finally dislodged the chain and the dream catcher, dirty but undamaged, from the oddly shaped hollow in the ground—where it had lain perhaps for weeks, as the last dregs of the long winter and muddy spring melted away. But no, she thought, it had been warm on the day of the junior prom, warm enough for her to be comfortable on her run in a sleeveless tee.

  The snow had melted a month before that late April night. If the necklace had been there, she’d have seen it.

  Mally’s first impulse was to call out to her mother, who was gamely trudging up Pilgrim Road, to wait until she could bring the necklace back inside. She couldn’t risk losing it again, not until she got a jeweler to make sure the clasp was intact. But when she studied the clasp, she saw it was closed and whole.

  And so, Mally slipped the chain carefully over her head.

  It was only when the necklace was safe around her neck and against her skin, cold and gritty, but gloriously in its place, that she looked down and examined the curious-looking depression in the mud just a foot off the curve of her driveway.

  It had dried in the sun, holding the necklace secure in the spring mud. Only a teaspoon of water still stood in the pool, a round, scooped-out mark with five separate parts, like a palm with four thick fingers. Mallory reached down and placed her own fingers lightly against the hollow spot. As distinct in every detail as a perfect fossil, it was a paw mark twice the size of Mallory’s hand.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank my beloved friend, physician Ann Cullison Collins, for invaluable information on emergency-room procedures and protocols.

  Again, I wish to thank my Cree Indian relatives, especially my cousin Rain and my late Aunt Patricia, for their tales and sense of the magic as poignant and possible.

  I thank my son, Marty, and his friends for lifting a corner of the teenage girl and my daughter, Mia, for endless round-offs and back flips in the service of literature.