Waiting for the Night Song

by Julie Carrick Dalton

  “They’ve already moved on to another tree,” she said.

  “It looks like writing. Almost graceful.” Garrett floated his fingers over the lacy lines, as if trying to extract meaning from the markings.

  Cadie squinted to see the carved lines through his eyes. Her heart rate fluttered at the intricacies, delicate curves, and wild arches etched into the wood. Garrett’s eyes widened. Cadie swallowed hard to quiet her breath.

  A rat-a-tat-tat rose above the chirps and clicks in the forest. Cadie held a finger to her lips. Garrett froze, not even moving his eyes.

  Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat resounded through the treetops.

  “The forest is fighting back,” Cadie said. “Woodpeckers devour beetles.”

  “So how do we encourage more woodpeckers to show up?”

  “The scale makes it unfeasible, and they’d cause too much other damage if we tried to relocate them here in large numbers. Everything’s a delicate balance.” The woodpecker paused, clearing the air for a melodic pit-pit-pit chirrup.

  “A wood thrush,” Garrett whispered.

  The fluted call lifted high above the chatter of forest noises. The rustle of leaves, the crush of squirrel paws, the hum of insects drove a breathy crescendo that only the lilt of a Bicknell’s thrush could complete.

  A melancholy silence hung at the end of the song. Cadie cleared her throat to break the tension of the unfulfilled melody.

  “They didn’t thin trees in time in Colorado or California. And look what happened there.” Cadie palmed the broad pine trunk like a mother taking a child’s temperature. Maple leaves drooped in the steamy air. Premature brown tinged the tips of oak leaves. The forest felt unstable, on edge.

  “You can’t cut down the entire forest,” Garrett said.

  “We have to do something. I feel like I’ve been screaming ‘fire’ in a theater and no one is running out. It’s going to take a significant fire before people will believe how serious this is,” Cadie said.

  “I believe you. Tell me what I can do to help,” Garrett said.

  “Don’t you have to get back to work?” Cadie turned her back to Garrett to hide her smile and walked back down the rocky slope. Cadie felt the urge to jump from rock to moss-covered rock the way she had as a girl. To skip. To bounce. To fly.

  Garrett hustled to catch up.

  The precise perfume of the crushed leaves and pine needles in Maple Crest, a sweeter, mushroomier aroma than that in the forests where she worked, stirred in Cadie a fierce desire to protect the home she had long ago forsaken and the people she had come back for.

  16

  THAT SUMMER

  Fear can generate a fever, Cadie discovered the day after she helped Garrett and Dolores in the woods. She tried to force the images of misaligned buttons, the rusty shovel, and Garrett’s mud-streaked face out of her mind. She visualized the molecules in her brain rubbing together in panic until they generated enough heat that her mother could feel it when she touched her forehead.

  Her mother stayed home and made her tea and soup. Cadie’s stomach hurt if she ate. It hurt if she didn’t eat. She waited until Raúl and Dolores would be at the store and called Daniela, but the answering machine picked up again and again.

  Cadie’s mother went back to work the second day, and Cadie finished the last of her library books.

  The cottage felt too small, the air too stale. She paced. She tried to draw. She sat on the porch with Friar. She waited for the phone to ring. By the time her parents got home, she needed to get out of the house.

  “I’m going to the library,” Cadie said as she cleared her plate after dinner.

  “I’ll drive you,” her dad said.

  “I’m taking my bike. I need some air.” Cadie wanted to bike up the hill, to cry and rage and sweat and scream.

  “Be back before dark.” Her mom kissed her forehead, letting her lips linger on Cadie’s skin to gauge her temperature. “You sure you’re feeling better?”

  “I’m fine.” She loaded her backpack with books to return.

  Cadie took longer than planned picking out six new books. By the time the librarian flickered the lights to indicate it was closing time, the sun touched the mountain ridge, threatening to set.

  Her mom would be worried.

  Cadie looked down at her feet as she walked around the back of the library to get her bike. She would read The Hobbit when she got home and disappear into that other world.

  Magic lived in her forest too, Cadie had been certain. But now the magic felt dark and Cadie wanted to get home. She jogged toward her bike, her bag of books thumping against her hip. When she turned the corner of the building, her feet turned to lead.

  Clyde waited for her, sitting on her bike. She turned to run, but Clyde jumped up. “Don’t be an idiot. You know I can catch you. I just want to talk.”

  Her heart racing, she backed up until she hit a large maple tree.

  He put his hand on her shoulder and pressed her body against the maple. She tried to scream, but it emerged as a high-pitched yelp.

  “No one can hear you.”

  No one would come to the back courtyard at this time of night.

  “I don’t know what you think you know, but you better keep your mouth shut,” he hissed in her ear. “You want your little friend to get sent back to Mexico?”

  Cadie stiffened. El Salvador, she corrected him in her mind.

  “I hear stuff on the farm.” He growled against her cheek. “That whole family’s illegal, you know. And I’ll make sure they get sent back if you talk.”

  She clung to the tree, the spongy bark giving way as her nails dug deep, slivers driving up under her fingernails.

  “You want your friend to disappear?”

  Like Juan? she wanted to scream. Cadie fixed her gaze on the trio of birch trees behind Clyde and let his words slide over her, around her. She breathed in his sour body odor mixed with stale cigarette smoke.

  Cadie shook her head.

  “Then you keep your mouth shut.”

  Cadie bit the side of her tongue.

  A sharp breeze stirred behind him, swirling prematurely fallen leaves into a loose funnel that crept toward them. She imagined Garrett standing on his pier, sweeping his arms to control the air. Clyde spun around as the leaves and the wind hit him, choking him with dust. The cloud moved over her, through her, leaving dirt in her mouth and eyes. The wind tugged on her braid then dissipated to nothing.

  Clyde released the pressure on her shoulder and pushed her to the ground as he choked on the dust.

  “You understand me?” His eyes darted across the parking lot, at the woods, then back at Cadie. He almost looked ashamed. His narrow eyes opened wide to show a flash of the same blue in Garrett’s eyes.

  He stepped back from Cadie, kicked her bike over, and sprinted toward the woods.

  The humid air, saturated with the lingering hopes of summer, teased of fall. Pressing her back against the warmth of the tree, she sucked the bark out from under her nails. She scooped up a handful of the leaves that had interrupted Clyde and saved her. “Thank you,” she whispered to the forest behind her, and shoved the leaves in her pocket.

  Her own sinewy shadow chased her home as the sun sank in the sky. By the time she reached the long driveway to her house, Cadie couldn’t make out the dips and divots in the dark, bumpy road. She squeezed the well-worn, rubbery handlebar grips. The torn plastic of the seat chafed her thighs. Holding her breath between patches of light on the gravel road, she strained to see far enough ahead of her to maintain her speed. A long stretch of darkness lay before her.

  She hit a bump. Not a pothole, but something rising up above the road. A soft object, yet heavy enough to slow the momentum of her bike and throw her over the handlebars. Gravel tore at her shoulder as she slid across the rocks and sand.

  Cadie saw the outline of a dead opossum lying on the road behind her. She shivered at the glistening, splayed intestines feet from her rear tire. Its eyes glowed in the da
rk. Shaking, she got back on her bike and pedaled hard the rest of the way home, grateful for the fresh cuts and bruises that gave her permission to cry in her mother’s arms without raising questions she didn’t want to answer.

  Before going to bed Cadie fished the crumpled leaves out of her pocket and flattened them on her lap. Magic still lived in her woods. She pressed the leaves into the pages of Kidnapped as a reminder.

  17

  THAT SUMMER

  Three days after the shooting, Cadie lay in bed staring at the ceiling until the sun crept to its 6 A.M. position. She hadn’t slept. Instead, she had watched shadows on her wall shift with the rise and fall of the moon and the sun.

  The warped glass of the antique window panes morphed the tree branches into grotesque distortions of faces and bodies against her wall. She startled at the thump of the local newspaper landing on the porch. The first edition printed since the shooting.

  “Morning, sunshine,” her father greeted her as she shuffled into the kitchen.

  She collected the newspaper from the porch, careful not to look at the front page as she extracted the comics. She tried to position herself so she couldn’t read the headlines her father held up in front of his face as he drank his coffee. Friar nuzzled his head under Cadie’s arm and put his front paws on Cadie’s lap to help distract her. Cadie dug her hands into Friar’s long fur and buried her face in her dog’s back. But her eyes kept drifting up.

  Once she saw the headline, she couldn’t stop herself from reading.

  Someone had held up a convenience store two towns over and shot the store owner. The bullet passed through the shopkeeper’s shoulder. He would recover. The shooter wore a mask, so the man could not ID him. He only took fifty dollars, although the register drawer held over three hundred at the time of the robbery.

  The police were looking for Clyde, but they didn’t know it.

  Cadie’s mother walked into the kitchen. She sat on a chair behind Cadie and stroked her back.

  “You okay?”

  Cadie nodded. She was not okay.

  “Let me braid your hair. You never let me do your hair anymore.”

  Her mother returned with a comb, which she dipped in water to calm Cadie’s unruly curls.

  “It’s grown out so beautifully.” The comb jerked Cadie’s head back as it hit snarl after snarl. The pain from each yank distracted Cadie from the noise in her head. “I wish you would have sat this still when you were little. You used to scream and cry every time I picked up a brush.”

  Cadie wanted to scream and cry right then. She wanted to tell her parents about the boy on the pier, the gunshot, Juan. The rustle of newsprint in her father’s hands crackled in the air like static.

  “I can do my own hair.” Cadie pulled her hair from her mother’s hand and went to her room.

  “We’re leaving for work, hon.” Her mom tapped on Cadie’s door a few minutes later. “Why don’t you come in with us today? I miss having you around the studio.”

  “Fine,” Cadie grumbled, grateful not to have to stay home alone. She quickly tossed on some clothes and grabbed a book. Friar jumped into the backseat next to her. The ten-minute ride to town went by too quickly. She would have liked to ride in the car with her parents and dog for hours, drive far away, and never look back.

  The studio, flooded with sunlight, seemed overly cheerful as Cadie settled into a cushy chair near her mother’s pottery wheel. Cadie had always been afraid to watch the spinning of her mother’s wheel for too long because she believed it might hypnotize her. The spinning, spinning, spinning made her dizzy.

  But on this day, Cadie longed for the world to disappear. She perched next to her mother and stared at the clay. It oozed between her mother’s fingers as she centered a mound and coaxed it up into a cylinder. Slippery mud dripped down her wrist all the way to her elbow.

  Cadie chewed on her thumbnail, trying to pry out the stubborn mud that hid under her nails since digging in the woods. She dislodged a grain of sand and rolled it around on her tongue as her mother pulled the vessel taller, mud thinning out between her fingers.

  So much mud.

  She hadn’t felt the retch coming, but just as her mother finished the first cup, Cadie swallowed the grain of sand and dry heaved. She squeezed her eyes closed, trying not to think about vomiting in the woods days earlier.

  “Are you going to be sick?” Her mother slowed the wheel and put the back of her muddy hand on Cadie’s forehead. Cadie leaned against her mother’s shoulder but the smell of clay and earth made her gag again.

  “I’m taking you home,” her mother said. “Give me a sec to wash my hands.”

  “I’ll wait on the porch.” Cadie walked out to the front steps of the studio. Across the street she saw Raúl taping papers up in the windows of the post office. He saw Cadie and waved.

  Cadie buried her face in her knees, hoping he wouldn’t come over, but within a few seconds she heard his footsteps approaching.

  “I thought Daniela said you two were picking berries this morning.” He looked worried.

  “I’m going home in a few minutes.” Cadie’s pulse sped up. Maybe Daniela had forgiven her.

  “Can I put this in the shop window?” He held up a flyer with a large picture of Juan’s face under bold letters spelling out Have you seen this man? Under the picture and a description of Juan, it listed the Garcias’ home number to call with any information. “One of my employees is missing. It’s been a few days, but the police won’t look into it yet. But I know him. He wouldn’t run off without telling me.”

  Cadie took the paper and pretended to look concerned. Juan, with the gap between his front teeth, smiled up at her from the grainy black-and-white image. The page trembled as she handed it back.

  “Will your parents mind if I put this up?”

  Cadie shook her head and watched as he taped the paper to the door of the studio.

  “Someone’s seen him, I’m sure of it,” Raúl said. “He’s a great kid. If he isn’t found by tomorrow, the police promised to organize a search of the woods near the farm where he works. You and your parents can help if you want.”

  Unable to locate her voice, Cadie nodded.

  “You girls be careful in the woods today,” he said as he walked away to hang more flyers.

  * * *

  After she got home, Cadie waited until she heard her mother’s car leave to go back to the studio before jumping off the couch where her mother had tucked her in with a can of ginger ale, saltines, and a bucket in case she got sick. She sprinted through the woods toward the rock, hoping Daniela might be waiting for her, as Raúl had suggested.

  Her heart skipped a beat when she saw her friend’s silhouette. Daniela sat with her arms wrapped around her shins and her head buried in her knees. Cadie sat next to Daniela for several moments, neither of them speaking.

  “Clyde knows we were there,” Cadie finally blurted out when the silence became too much.

  “I guess your boyfriend can’t keep his mouth shut either.” Daniela lifted her head so her eyes showed. The skin on her forehead furrowed so deeply it looked like she might crack. Purple half-moons hung under her eyes.

  “He followed me to the library. He said if I—if we—told anyone, he’d tell everyone your family’s illegal.”

  Daniela ducked her head back into her knees. Crickets chirped loudly, so loudly Cadie could barely think. Katydid, katydid. Cadie did, Cadie did.

  Cadie picked up a small stone and skipped it across the lake surface, smacking the water three times before the pebble sank.

  “The police came to my house last night.” Daniela’s voice sounded far away, muffled by her knees.

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “They didn’t want to talk to me. They wanted my dad. They were asking him questions about Juan. The farm where he lives reported him missing. Remember when my dad argued with him outside the store the other day? When we were in the diner? That was the last time anyone saw Juan. Fighting with my
dad in front of the hardware store.”

  “What did your mom say?” Cadie rubbed the jagged edge of a fingernail on the coarse granite slab. Tender scratches, scabs, and blisters covered the tips of her fingers.

  “Nothing. She seemed fine when she came home. I think she believes me that you and I were fighting and you were making stuff up.”

  Cadie longed to tell Daniela the truth about finding Dolores in the woods. She wanted to tell her friend about the nightmares she had. Nightmares about Clyde, nightmares about Juan, nightmares about Daniela never speaking to her again.

  “We messed up bad.” Daniela turned to face Cadie.

  “There’s no way they will believe your dad did anything. I mean, he didn’t do anything.” A scab on her finger reopened as she rubbed it on the rock. She put her finger in her mouth. The blood tasted like damp soil.

  “God, Cadie, you don’t get it.” Daniela buried her face in her knees again.

  “Get what?”

  “This isn’t some adventure in one of your stupid books. The worst that could happen to you is you’d get grounded.” Daniela drew in a long, stuttered breath. “We’re not from here. Juan wasn’t from here. We will never be from here.”

  Waves lapped up against the rock in a slow rhythm that stretched out the silence between the girls. How many thousands of years would it take for the water to erode the boulder they sat on? Eating away at it, one lick at a time. Swollen seconds slipped into the waves. Cadie wanted to dive into the lake and scream underwater where her breath would split open the fractured rocks, thrusting themselves up from the lake bottom until they exploded where no one could see or hear.

  “Maybe we’d all be safer if we told the police,” Cadie said.

  “It’s too late. If we tell, they’ll figure out I’m not supposed to be here, and they’ll know my parents aren’t either. We could get sent away. If you’re here illegally and commit a crime, you get sent back no matter what. We hid evidence. We committed a crime. I ruined everything for my parents.” Daniela pounded her fist on the gray-and-white-speckled granite over and over. “I’m trapped.”