Found Things Read online

  The rocks at the bottom were furry and you had to be careful where you stepped or you’d slip. But the water was clear and quiet in the shallow places—the only places I would go—and the rocks trapped all kinds of things. Once I found a tiny gold ring with a deep green stone and swirls etched into the gold band. When I first found it, I could wear it on my pinkie, but then it got too small to squeeze my finger through. Now it was in my music box, the one with the broken ballerina that Mama say I got on my first birthday—though I was too young to remember—along with a necklace I got for my sixth birthday and the things I didn’t put on the collage. Sometimes when I looked at that ring, I’d wonder if the baby who lost it was still searching for it. Or even if she knew she ever had such a pretty ring to lose.

  Sometime after I couldn’t fit the ring on my finger anymore, and before Theron left, I asked Mama, “What would you do if I got lost?”

  “I would spend the rest of my life looking for you,” she say. That from Mama made me feel cared about.

  When I went down the path to the river that day, what I found was that new girl, Meadow Lark Frankenfield, sitting on my rock and dabbling her feet in the water.

  She looked up with her good eye and her popped-out eye and smiled at me, but I had to blink and look away. I just wasn’t used to her face yet.

  “This is my place, and that’s my rock,” I say without looking at her. And definitely without smiling.

  “Really?” Meadow Lark asked, and out of the corner of my eye I saw her looking around. “I don’t see the sign.”

  “Sign?”

  “The one that says ‘Keep Off River Rose Byrne’s Rock.’”

  That took the pepper out of my pants, and I asked, “How do you know my name?” If she knew my whole name, I wondered what else she knew about me.

  “Well, it’s hardly a secret,” she say, but she didn’t budge from where she sat on the rock. Instead she kicked up a curl of water. I watched the ripples slide away with the current.

  “Where did you come from?” I asked.

  “Phoenix. Do you know where that is?”

  “I know where it is.” Well, I knew it was a star on a map somewhere in the west, farther away than Texas, where red mountains and blue sky happened every day. And just so she wouldn’t ask me if I knew exactly where, I stepped closer to the rock, hoping it would make her move off. But Meadow Lark just kept kicking the river, churning it up with her feet, stirring up the soft stuff that grew on the bottom.

  “Stop mucking up the water like that.”

  She surprised me when she stopped, and that made me start to like her.

  “Rivers are nice,” she say. “Is that how you got your name?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. It’s the name my mama gave me.”

  “I didn’t have a river in Phoenix. And I don’t have a mama. You’re lucky. You have both.”

  I walked a few steps upstream from her and took off my sneakers and rolled up my jeans. Then I held my breath against the cold water and stepped in only until my toes were covered, and crouched.

  “But that was my other mama,” I say, flattening my palms against the surface of the river. “I’m adopted.”

  “Then you have a river and two mamas.”

  “Well . . . I don’t know anything about my first one, and no one lets me ask about her, so I just consider that I have one.”

  Meadow Lark got off the log and come and crouched next to me. “Since I have none, then maybe you understand a little how I feel.” In the sun her pumpkin-colored hair looked more carrot.

  I did understand how she felt, being new and not having a mama, so I hoped she wouldn’t mind if I asked her a personal question. “How can you see out of that eye?”

  When she laughed, I knew it was okay.

  “My glasses help,” she say, “but sometimes I have to squint. And if I get tired, outlines get blurry and separate into colors.”

  “You mean like a prism?”

  “I guess you could say that I have my own prism.” She kept looking into the water. “I could have an operation to fix it, but I’m sick of operations.”

  I wanted to ask her about those operations, but by the thin way she answered, I decided to tuck my questions away for later.

  “One time I found a bone right here,” I say. “It looked like a squirrel bone, and it had a BB in it.”

  “Really?” she say, now drawing slow figure eights in the water. Something else, not bones with BBs in them, was on her mind, and she asked suddenly, “Why does Daniel Bunch talk to you like that?”

  Right away I felt my back stiffen up. “Like what?”

  “Like he knows a secret about you.”

  I shrugged and reached for a green-and-white stone through the water. “Daniel talks to everybody like that.” My neck started to prickle, and the prickling crawled up my scalp.

  “No, he doesn’t,” she say, and stopped drawing.

  Now my face burned, not because Daniel Bunch talked like that to me, but because Meadow Lark had noticed that he did. It was the same feeling I had when she sat with me on the bench after she’d seen Daniel talking to me. I didn’t want her—or anyone—seeing that.

  I splashed a handful of water on my face to cool off. “I do this all the time,” I say so she wouldn’t know I was embarrassed again. “Since you know all about me, you tell me the secret.”

  “I didn’t say there was a secret, but just that he acts like there’s one.”

  “You know he’s the one started that name about you.”

  Then she stepped out of the water and sat on the sand with her legs straight out in front, and tied her hair into a knot. “I’ve been called lots of names before—Popeye, Hunchback, Frankenstein—but Frankenfemme’s the most creative.”

  “But doesn’t it hurt when they say things like that?”

  Meadow Lark Frankenfield shrugged. “Not most of the time. I have more important things to do.”

  Anyone who wasn’t afraid of Daniel Bunch was someone I wanted to know. I stepped out of the water and sat W next to Meadow Lark.

  “You can do that too? Look,” Meadow Lark say, and bent her legs same way, with her calves at her sides and ankles pointed out.

  “My parents keep telling me not to, but I can’t sit crisscross, like most kids can.”

  “Me neither,” Meadow Lark say, and pressed her knees flat onto the sand. “Crisscross hurts.”

  Maybe the new girl and I had more in common than liking Cheetos. Even her popped-out eye didn’t surprise me anymore. It had become the way Meadow Lark looked. Then I realized there was more pretty about her than just her name.

  “You want to walk along the shore?” she asked, looking downriver. “Maybe we’ll find something there.”

  I shook my head. “We can’t. I’m not even supposed to be here.”

  “So what’s down there?” she asked.

  I picked up some sand and let it run through my curled-up fist. “Just . . . we’re not supposed to go there.”

  “Doesn’t that make you want to?”

  “No. You’re really, really not supposed to go there. Besides, the best things from the river stop right here. I found some glasses and a tiny plastic doll, and once I found a silver dollar.”

  A dragonfly hovered over the water and glided through the air toward us. Meadow Lark shrieked and sprang up from the sand. “I hate dragonflies!”

  It was so funny to see a girl who was not afraid of Daniel Bunch running around and waving her arms and screaming over a dragonfly. Finally it swooped away, and she stepped back to the shore and peered into the water.

  Then two thoughts come to me. One: How could a person who wasn’t afraid of Daniel Bunch be afraid of a beautiful dragonfly? And two: I was a lot like Meadow Lark—no better and no worse—because we were both afraid of something. That’s when I began to hope tha
t Meadow Lark Frankenfield would be my friend.

  “I found a skull in the desert,” Meadow Lark say. “Not a human one—it was a lizard. Now it’s on my dresser in my new house. What did you do with everything you found here?”

  “Most of them are on my collage at school.”

  “I wish I could find something today,” she say, reaching into the water, “like this.”

  Meadow Lark pulled up a yellow bead shaped like a flower. “Here,” she say, and dropped it into my palm, where it sparkled with water and sand.

  “Pretty,” I say, and handed it back to her.

  But she shook her head. “It’s yours,” she say, and looked back into the water.

  “Thanks,” I say. It would be perfect for my collage, I thought, and tucked it deep into my pocket.

  “I think,” Meadow Lark say, “all those things landed here just for you, because they knew you like to come here.”

  Maybe it had to do with her eye, but Meadow Lark had a different way of seeing. But I shrugged and say politely, “Maybe.”

  Then she pointed upriver to where it curved and made a sandbar. “Let’s go out there. I bet there are lots of treasures stuck in those rocks.”

  I looked at where she was pointing. To get to the sandbar, you had to walk in the water up to your knees, at least, and I couldn’t do that. “Y-you can go,” I say, sloshing the water with my toes.

  She waded out into the river until the water reached the middle of her calves. “Come on out,” she called, and when I shook my head, she say, “Are you scared? I’ll come get you.”

  “No, I’ll . . . keep looking here.”

  “Whatever you want,” she say. “But it’s just a little water.” Then she waded over to the sandbar and peered into the river.

  Beside the chocolate bits was a jar of flour, and then I turned and saw a room beyond the pantry, on the other side of the kitchen. This brand-new room smelled like leather and the forest. It had a high ceiling and a big, solid table with birds and vines carved into its sides. Three legs fanned out beneath the table, planted on an Oriental rug that was deep red, with green and orange and brown and a milk-colored white woven into it, and fringed all around the edge. A dark wooden desk gouged with pencil marks and scratches sat against the wall, and a shelf with wooden slots stood on top, stuffed with envelopes and rolled-up papers. An old adding machine also sat on the desk, and I punched a few of its keys. Two tall windows side by side looked onto a sun porch, and a radiator—the kind with pipes—sat below them. Another doorway led back to the kitchen.

  Just as I began to step through that door, Meadow Lark say, “It’s getting cold,” and I was back at the river.

  Meadow Lark stood nearby, shivering. She wrapped her arms around herself, and goose bumps dotted her arms. The shadows from the trees on the other side reached across, and the chill licked my wet feet. It was time to go, but my hands were empty. I had nothing from the water except the yellow flower bead that Meadow Lark gave me.

  “Maybe next time we’ll find something else,” Meadow Lark say, as if she knew exactly what I’d been thinking.

  I liked that there would be a next time, but just so she wouldn’t expect to find silver dollars and gold rings every time, I told her, “I only find something good every once in a while.”

  “Maybe you need to look harder.”

  And just as she say that, something fluttered on the sand near the rock—a feather as white as a baby’s eye and shorter than my thumb.

  I set it in my palm and held it out to Meadow Lark. “Here, you keep it,” I say, and noticed for the first time that her eyes were the same color brown as the river bottom when the sun shone on it.

  “No, you found it, so it’s yours,” she say, waving it away.

  Just then, a puff of breeze lifted the feather off my hand, and I grabbed for it. But it was too quick and darted off.

  “Over there,” Meadow Lark say, pointing to a bush. She couldn’t run very fast on her slow leg, so I dashed ahead of her. The feather had caught in a bush, but just as I got close, it fluttered off, and then again, always out of my reach. I followed it around the bend, and then stopped when the old covered bridge come into view, dark and menacing in the green of the woods. I saw the bank leading to its mouth and tall weeds growing on what used to be a path.

  The feather quivered on a branch just a few feet away, teasing. I was already too close to the bridge, and the murky sight of it was enough to plant dread in my stomach. I grabbed for the feather and pinched it in my fingers. Then I carried it back to the beach and showed Meadow Lark.

  “It’s a perfect feather,” she say, looking close. “It’s the kind you make a wish on.”

  “You want to wish on it?” I asked, watching the feather flutter in my hand.

  “Let’s both make a wish, at the same time. Ready?” She crossed her fingers and squeezed her eyes shut. “One-two-three—go.”

  I’d already made my wish the night before, so I watched Meadow Lark’s lips move to hers. When she was finished, she opened her eyes and asked, “All done?”

  “I didn’t make a wish.”

  “Then go ahead.”

  I shook my head. “No, I want to save my wishes.”

  “Save them for what?”

  “Until I really need them,” I say. “Let’s just send it off now, okay?”

  “River, what’s the matter?” Meadow Lark asked.

  What was the matter was always the same—Theron. I’d wished for more than two months for him to come back, and he hadn’t. All the talk about wishes and miracles was just talk. What good would it do to wish on a feather?

  But all I say was, “Nothing. I just don’t know the wish rules.”

  “There aren’t any rules. It’s just a game.”

  “So go ahead and blow it away.”

  Meadow Lark shook her head. “No, you float it on the river.”

  “I never heard of that. Did you just make it up?”

  “That’s what they do where I come from.”

  “Where you come from?” I asked, puzzled. “I thought you didn’t have a river in Phoenix.”

  “Well . . . ,” she say slowly, “I’ve lived in lots of places. And in the other places—not Phoenix—that’s what we did. I can’t believe you’ve never heard of it.”

  “We must be slow,” I say, and glanced at the feather ruffling in the light breeze. It looked alive.

  “Sure you don’t want to make a wish first?” she asked.

  “Oh, okay, I’ll make a silly little wish.” That way, I figured, I wouldn’t be disappointed when nothing come of it.

  “No, you have to make a big, crazy wish that you’d never, ever believe would come true. It has to be so big and crazy that it hurts to make and would break your heart if it didn’t come true.”

  Too many hearts were already broken over Theron, so I thought of something else that could be big and crazy. Then I looked at Meadow Lark. “Okay, I have one.”

  “Remember, make it big and crazy,” she say.

  I closed my eyes and made my wish. I want to know my real mama.

  When I opened my eyes, Meadow Lark say very seriously, “Now we put it in the water.”

  It was such a pretty feather, pretty enough to keep, pretty enough to put in your pocket as a lucky feather. It would be a shame to waste it down the river. “Sure you don’t want to hold on to it?” I asked.

  She shook her head and took the feather from me. “No, it has to carry those wishes away.”

  Then Meadow Lark stepped into the river up to her knees, out far enough for the current to carry our wishes a long way. She set the feather on the surface, and the river snatched it and whisked it off.

  I watched the feather slide and twirl on the water until I couldn’t see it anymore, letting my big, crazy, silly wish about my mama last only as long as I co
uld see the feather. After it was gone, I wished I’d tucked that pretty feather in my pocket, so I could keep it in my ballerina box next to my emerald ring.

  The pink light of dusk hung in the air when I got home, and as soon as I stepped inside and smelled onion casserole, I remembered the milk.

  “Did you forget something, River?” Mama asked me, her hands planted on her hips and her mouth a straight line. “Just when I was at my last drop. Now I’ll have to go out. Where . . .” She stopped and sniffed the air. “You’ve been down at the river. What have we told you about that?”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry. I just forgot about the milk.”

  “Forgot? Get upstairs and stay there till I call you down,” she say, unhooking her pocketbook from the rack by the door. “Think about what it means to be dependable.”

  “Where’s Daddy?” I asked. It was dusk and he wasn’t home yet from Boston.

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  I went upstairs, like Mama say, and tried to think about being dependable, but instead I fell asleep. Sometime later their voices woke me up, and then I heard Daddy’s footsteps coming up the stairs and a soft knock on my door.

  “River?”

  I slid my bedspread halfway over my nose and I closed my eyes. The door opened slowly. Daddy come and sat on the bed and put his hand on the bedspread, where my ankle was, and jiggled it.

  “Wake up, River. It’s past eight. You have to eat.”

  I fluttered my eyelids, pretending to wake up, and mumbled, “Is it morning already?”

  “No, it’s already nighttime.”

  I rubbed my eyes and brushed the hair off my face. “I told Mama I was sorry about the milk, but she send me up here anyway.”

  “You have to be gentle with her. You know she’s like a piece of glass these days,” Daddy say. “And,” he say with a little squeeze on my ankle, “remember to correct yourself when you talk.”

  “Sent. I’m trying, but I forget.”

  “I understand,” he say, and smiled gently.

  I yawned and then say, “I wish I knew how to make Mama happy again.”