“Keep going!” Daniela hissed. “Don’t let him see your face.”
Cadie lowered her head and paddled faster. But the boy’s frantic stare gripped her. He pushed his hair out of his face and looked back over his shoulders at the shore, then back at Cadie, then back at the woods behind him, then back again at Cadie.
His pier stuck out from a peninsula between two large natural rock ledges. The rock wall to the right of the pier loomed about twelve feet above the water. A tackle box and a fishing pole lay on top of the ledge next to a second lawn chair that matched the one he sat in.
The boy, with wide, panicked eyes, frantically waved his arms, as if he were trying to move the wind and push them away. The distance between the boy and the boat widened as he swooped his arms. A red-tailed hawk rode an air current above them in a tightening downward spiral. Cadie’s breath quickened. The boy’s urgency pressed Cadie to paddle harder, faster, until they rounded the bend in the shoreline and paddled out of his sight.
“What a weirdo,” Daniela said. “Must be some rich summer kid afraid of townies.”
“What if he’s in trouble? What if he was kidnapped or being held hostage and he’s afraid the kidnappers might see us and kidnap us too?”
Daniela rolled her eyes.
The bubbly anticipation Cadie usually experienced as she approached their cove fell flat, like a soda left open overnight. She kept seeing the Summer Kid’s eyes. The panic. The girls resumed a silent, steady pace, not talking for several minutes. They both paused when they spotted a loon with two fuzzy babies swimming about twenty yards offshore. Cadie searched for the other parent.
She tilted her face up to the sky, not caring that she had forgotten to put on sunscreen.
The boat twisted in the gentle current, and Cadie craned her neck, turning to find a break in the water’s surface where the other loon parent might be swimming. A plume of sudsy clouds reflected off the water, revealing the height of the sky trapped in the depths of the lake. As Cadie adjusted her eyes, shifting her focus from the reflection above to the contours below, the mother loon burst through the clouds and the water and stared straight at her. The precision of her fine white collar on the shiny black neck, the bloodred eyes, stole Cadie’s breath.
The loon’s howl bounced across the water. Her mate answered with the same ethereal note, so close it echoed in Cadie’s chest. Two ashen chicks hustled to keep up. The family regrouped and swam away, their wake leaving an expanding triangle aimed like an arrow back toward the Summer Kid on his pier.
“I bet Angie would double the order if we offered to pick more berries,” Daniela said after they settled into their normal blueberry-picking routine.
Cadie didn’t respond.
“Don’t you want to make more money?”
“Yeah, but I want to go swimming too. And explore stuff.”
Daniela stopped paddling. “Okay. We increase by fifty percent. Not double it.”
Cadie didn’t answer. She wanted a pirate ship, not a merchant vessel. She wanted to climb the rocks and slash through the dense interiors of the dozens of unexplored islands in the cove.
“Do you think that Summer Kid’s in trouble?” Cadie said.
“I don’t know. You’re picking really slow. I have almost twice as many as you.”
Cadie put her bucket down and reached into her backpack. She scribbled a note in her pad, tore the page out.
Are you okay? Do you need help? Leave us a signal.
“I’m going to climb the rock wall and leave it there. It’s so far around the bend there’s no way he will be able to see us or the boat from there,” Cadie said.
“What if someone else sees us?” Daniela cocked her head to one side and chewed on a strand of hair. “It could ruin our whole business if someone finds out we’re stealing berries.”
“Poaching.”
“Whatever. We should sell Angie more berries.”
Only one year older than Cadie, Daniela seemed a thousand times more sophisticated. Even the way she chewed her hair made her look older. Her black hair fell thick and wavy, almost curly, but not frizzy. Most days she wore it back in a ponytail, but that morning it hung loose, skimming her tan shoulders.
Cadie’s own deep red curls stuck out in every direction when they got the chance. After painful years of growing it out, her hair hung almost to her shoulder blades. Every morning she woke up, parted it down the middle, wet it, wrestled the knots out, and braided it into two tight plaits. The bottom two inches stuck out below the elastic and wound into tight springs. She liked the way the coils sprang back when she stretched them out. On hot days like this one, short wisps of hair above her temples frizzed into tiny ringlets framing her face. Cadie pressed down the childish curls as she watched Daniela.
As they paddled past the Summer Kid on the way home, neither Cadie nor Daniela looked up at the boy, but his fear sizzled in the air. They rounded the bend out of his line of vision and aimed for the shore, where they tucked the boat in below the rock ledge. Cadie put the note in her pocket and stepped out of the boat into the shallows. She scrambled for footholds as she scaled the wall, which looked much higher up close.
Cadie clawed her way up high enough to see over the top of the ledge and found a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson on the ground near the lawn chair. She opened the book to the bookmark, and scanned the familiar words, brushing her fingers over the damp linen cover. The same salty smell as her own copy of the book wafted up from the worn pages, although she owned a much older edition. She tucked the note next to the bookmark and placed the book back where she found it.
Her knees trembled as she shimmied down the rock face. Blindly seeking a solid ledge below her, she lost her footing and slipped. She smacked her face on the top of the ledge as she came down. She grabbed at a tree root and balanced there, her mouth and nose pressed against the granite, afraid to move. She turned her head to Daniela, who splashed through the water toward Cadie. The empty boat drifted behind her.
The dirt on Cadie’s lips mixed with blood pooling from a gash on her lip. As she made her way back toward the boat, Cadie scooped a handful of water into her mouth and swished it around to soothe the cut. Lake water could heal anything. She spit out the blood and watched the lake absorb the crimson swirl.
* * *
The next day, as she paddled close to the Summer Kid’s ledge, the cut on Cadie’s lip throbbed in rhythm with her oar strokes. A rock the size of a cantaloupe perched where the book had sat the day before. A brown piece of paper stuck out from underneath.
Daniela raised her eyebrows and paddled closer, trying hard not to splash. “I’ll do it this time.”
“No. I got it.” Cadie didn’t give Daniela a chance to argue as she stood up in the wobbling boat and stepped into the water. Daniela leapt to her feet, poised to jump in if Cadie fell. When Cadie’s head cleared the ledge, she found a note written on a torn piece of a paper grocery bag folded under the rock. She forced herself to put it in her pocket so she and Daniela could read the message together.
“Go,” she instructed Daniela as soon as she got one foot in the boat. They paddled hard for several minutes until they were out of sight, then let the boat drift while they read the note. I’m so bored. Can you bring me a book? I’ll give it back.
“That’s it? Don’t his kidnappers let him read?” Daniela said, turning the note upside down to search for clues or hidden messages. Cadie had moved on to the reading list. If he liked Swiss Family Robinson, he would love Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island.
“Let’s give him Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” Daniela said. “Can you imagine?”
“No way.” Cadie squirmed, setting the boat off-balance.
“I’m calling Angie when we get home to see if she wants more berries tomorrow.”
“Kidnapped! We have to give him Kidnapped. Get it? Kidnapped? Then Treasure Island. Or, oh my God, The Dark Is Rising? I love that one.” Cadie bounced on her knees, rocking the boat.
> “Geez, calm down.”
“This is important.” The magnitude of her power shivered up Cadie’s spine. She gripped the sides of the boat and scooted closer to Daniela. “We get to shape someone’s brain.”
“I thought you wanted to rescue him.”
“Maybe we are rescuing him.”
6
PRESENT DAY
Cadie slept fitfully the night after she and Daniela failed to find the gun. Forest noises that had been her childhood lullaby jarred her awake. Lying in bed by an open window, she licked her lips and attempted to mimic the night song of the Bicknell’s thrush. She called out to the bird again and again, as she tried to purge the image of the Summer Kid’s terrified eyes from her mind.
She should have helped him. She should have been braver.
She held her breath and waited, but the thrush did not answer.
At 5 A.M., she stopped fighting the insomnia and watched the sun rise from the back porch while wrapped in her grandmother’s afghan. A reminder of the previous night’s failed expedition throbbed under her fingernail where Daniela had extracted the splinter.
A row of empty beer cans sat on the kitchen counter next to a puddle of melted ice cream shaped like a fist giving her the finger. The pounding in her head and thumb clashed in uncoordinated rhythms. She had several hours until she had promised to meet Daniela in the parking lot outside the police station.
She flipped through a stack of her old comic books, a mix of Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, and all twelve issues of Captain Planet and the Planeteers. She winced remembering the Planeteers Club she had tried to organize. No one showed up at the inaugural—and only—meeting.
If her parents had been home, her dad would have been rousing soon to fry up some eggs and bacon. Her dad looked like a cartoon character in the morning. His hair—redder and curlier even than Cadie’s—stuck out in every direction. He would be wearing a Campbell’s Soup apron.
“Morning, angel,” he would have said.
Her mother would have crawled out of bed to read the paper with a cup of coffee on the porch.
But the cottage sat empty.
Out of desperation, she made a cup of stale instant coffee. Three cans of tuna, two cans of lentil soup, and a few half-full spice jars sat on the otherwise empty pantry shelves. Above the fridge she found an unopened box of saltines. She tore a sleeve open with her teeth and carried the coffee and crackers out to the back porch. Steamy heat from the previous day already asserted itself.
Cadie walked barefoot into the forest toward the clearing about a hundred yards behind her house. She treaded gently on crackling twigs and pine cones, the tender soles of her feet no longer seasoned the way they had been in her youth. Small trees had sprouted, older ones had slumped and melted away. But the unmistakable silhouette of a familiar hemlock remained unchanged. The thick trunk had hidden her pocketknife, the matches, their hand-drawn map of the cove and the woods, and The Poachers’ Code inside a slim hollow near the base of the tree.
Cadie crouched down and eased her hand into the dark opening. Although the exterior of the pine looked the same, the opening, which once barely held a jelly jar, had expanded so wide it could have swallowed a football. Other than Cadie’s old pocketknife, now rusted closed, the hollow was empty, their laminated map and The Poachers’ Code carried away by squirrels, weather, and time.
The code of ethics she and Daniela had sworn an oath to had become a guidepost for Cadie even into adulthood. A measure of right and wrong. What she should do and what she should never do. Never kill a bug, she had written on the inside cover of her first entomology textbook in college.
The Code had given her a compass when she needed direction. Maybe more than afraid of defying her rules, she had been terrified of betraying Daniela.
She knelt on the forest floor, unmoored.
Cadie squeezed a fistful of decay from inside the hollow. The tree, it seemed, was rotting, digesting itself from the inside out. She swallowed the last of her bitter coffee, and walked back toward the beach.
The surface of the lake reflected the morning rays, making it hard to look directly at the water. Bobbing white lilies peeled open toward the morning light, exposing their saffron centers.
The diving rock peeked out through the glassy surface, stirring in Cadie an urge to jump in. She couldn’t see any fishing boats, or even another house, from her beach nestled in its quiet cove. She shimmied out of her sweatpants. Pulling her arms into her T-shirt, she undid her bra and tossed it on the pier with her pants. After a quick scan for fishermen, she yanked off her shirt and slipped into the water.
Free and aimless, she drifted. She sank until the chill enveloped the crown of her head. Lake water lived inside her. She had swallowed and inhaled it in gulps and gasps. Flecks of eroded granite boulders and millennia-old secrets had settled in her cells. She had always been made of these mountains. This lake. This forest. She had reciprocated with sacrifices of her own blood, tears, sweat, and urine, which circulated among the fish, feeding the lilies and the roots of blueberry bushes.
Could the forest have absorbed that gun? Her younger self would have imagined roots and tendrils pulling the ugly memories deep below the surface. She longed to believe in the magic of the forest again, instead of the indisputable reality that only a person could have removed the gun.
Cadie pulled with fierce strokes away from the shore toward the tanning rock. Happy memories lived here too. The rough, uneven surface had been their favorite spot to soak up the sun. Daniela always sat on the flat side, her feet dangling in the water. Cadie preferred the higher, sloping side.
“Do you think I’ll ever get boobs?” Cadie had asked Daniela as they lay on the rock, Daniela, with her newly rounded breasts in a bikini, next to Cadie in her red racing-back one-piece suit.
“Nope. I think you’ll be a pancake forever,” Daniela had said, yanking on Cadie’s braid. “Just kidding. You’ll get boobs. I got my period last week.”
“What?” Cadie rolled over on her side to see if Daniela looked different. “I can’t even grow boobs.” Cadie flopped onto her back, a sharp protrusion in the rock jabbing her under her left shoulder blade. It left a tender bruise that lasted weeks, reminding Cadie she had no breasts every time she raised her arm.
* * *
Rings of white, tan, and green now circled the rock, marking decades of rising and falling water levels. Cadie had never seen the lake water this low. Tips of rocks, normally hidden under the surface, reached up ready to snag cocky boaters who thought they knew this lake. Cadie knew better than to trust a smooth surface.
She closed her eyes as she floated on her back and let the lake rock her. The increasing amplitude of the waves confirmed that boaters were awake. She rolled her shoulders forward and let her whole body sink, keeping her eyes wide open. Morning sun broke through the surface in blurry shafts of orange highlighting the outline of her feet.
She longed to stay under, to be the weightless mermaid she imagined herself at eight years old. She had trained herself to draw in a deep breath, then release it, emptying her lungs so she wouldn’t float, to see how long she could sit cross-legged on the throne she had built herself out of rocks below the surface.
The minerality of the lake, the same water she ingested by the gallon as a child, filled her mouth. Every particle in the water felt familiar on her tongue, stirring the dormant granite racing through her, the tug she had tried to ignore for twenty-seven years. Swimming back toward shore she once again felt like part of the lake, the water so temperate she couldn’t feel where she ended and it began.
A chorus of birds chirped and twittered around her. Cadie tried to isolate the sounds and distinguish the morning chirrup of a Bicknell’s thrush, but it did not rise. As the tiny bird had pushed north out of central New Hampshire, it left the high-elevation orchestra without their piccolo. The gray-cheeked bird never should have settled in these woods, which made its absence an even greater loss.
We live at t
he wrong elevation, her father had told her as they swung in the hammock, practicing bird calls. Bicknell’s prefer mountaintops and dense balsam forests.
Yet every year they returned to Cadie’s woods. Like magic. There had been so much magic in the forest of her childhood.
She reminded herself to write back to Piper, the grad student, and ask about her research into the Bicknell’s disappearance even in the northern elevations. Thinking about the daytime forest without the Bicknell’s melody seemed unfortunate, but imagining that she might never hear its night song again made her eyes sting with unexpected tears.
A twig snapped on shore. The distortion of sound moving over water made it difficult for Cadie to guess where the noise came from. Probably a deer. She slowed her movements and scanned the water’s edge, hoping for a glimpse of a timid black nose dipping into the lake.
Another crack erupted from the trees, then a burst of movement along the shoreline. Deer wouldn’t be so careless. Bears wouldn’t be so light-footed. Footsteps. Human footsteps, erratic and hurried, crashed through the forest.
A cold current swirled around Cadie’s feet and a strand of lake grass grabbed her ankle.
She yanked her leg free and pulled up a handful of a feathery green boa of a plant that had infiltrated the lake. She sculled in place, trying not to attract attention to herself. Her teeth chattered.
The woods, again, fell silent.
Cadie swam toward shore and ran naked to the house, not pausing as sharp pebbles and acorns jabbed at her bare feet. She locked the door and pulled the kitchen curtains closed, immediately feeling foolish. Deer, fox, moose, and bears tromped through these woods every day. Not people.
The balm of lake water lingered on her skin, but a chill she couldn’t shed sank deep into her bones.
Waiting for the Night Song Page 5