Wish Girl (9 page)

I spent that night on a dictionary-and-thesaurus site looking up big, beautiful words and staring at pictures of outdoor art installations until Laura kicked me off the computer.

I thought I understood what Annie was talking about.

“How did you like hanging out with those boys?” Dad whispered after dinner, once Mom was out of the room. I got it: He hadn't told her he'd ungrounded me. “What were their names?”

“Doug and Jake,” I said. “You know, they shot that vulture.”

“Yeah, cool, huh?” He looked a little uncertain, but happy.

Cool
was not the word I would have used.
Cruel
, maybe. “Um, okay.”

“Well, they seemed nice enough, a little rough-and-tumble.” Dad ran a hand over the top of his head like he was checking the size of his bald spot. “But I think it would be good for you to have some guy friends. Maybe you could invite them over here tomorrow.”

Invite them over? They'd probably torture Carlie for fun. I was never, ever going to invite them into the house.

Dad was waiting for me to say something. I just shrugged. He cleared his throat. “You know, I worry sometimes that you didn't have many friends in San Antonio. That was probably at the root of all the . . . problems. This might be a good chance to start over. These guys could end up being your best friends.”

Best friends? I wanted to puke. Should I tell him about the cat and what they'd planned to do with the vulture? Should I say what I really thought? It would probably just disappoint him again. He didn't get me; he never had.

For all I knew, he wanted me to be just like those kids. He'd probably offer to buy me a gun next.

“I was thinking,” Dad said, walking across to the doorway and peering through it, like he was checking for eavesdroppers. “I know it's been hard to move here. You don't have anybody to hang out with.”

I never hung out with anyone to begin with
, I wanted to say. I didn't speak, but the same thought was there, in Dad's eyes. He couldn't understand; Dad was one of those guys everyone liked, always laughing and yelling, staying out with his musician friends whenever he and Mom could get Laura to babysit.

Me? I hadn't even had friends in elementary school, except for a couple of girls who moved away in second grade. Nobody liked the quiet kid, the serious one. I had been that way since I was born, as far as I could figure. I'd seen my baby pictures; I wasn't smiling in almost any of them.

The silence stretched uncomfortably long until Dad cleared his throat. “I had an idea. A way you could make friends, maybe with those two guys. How would you like me to get you a pellet rifle?”

I almost laughed. He was so predictable. “Maybe later, Dad,” I said. I had an idea, but my palms started to sweat just considering it.

I was going to lie to Dad. I had never lied to him, not really. I took a quick breath. “Um, actually, the guys have an extra one. They invited me to come hunting with them tomorrow afternoon. I told them I was grounded. . . . ”

“Can you be back in by five?” Dad whispered. I nodded, hoping he didn't notice my red face.

“Then you go.” Dad smiled. “I always wanted to hunt when I was a kid. Never got to. What are you going to shoot?”

I remembered Annie's comment: It was nothing-at-all season. “Um, varmints,” I said. “Pests. Rats, maybe.” Did they even have rats out here? I hoped Dad wouldn't ask any more questions about hunting. I didn't even know how to shoot a real gun; I sure didn't want him volunteering to come with us and show me. “Maybe a rabbit.”

“Awesome,” he said, then gave me a weird side hug. “My son, the hunter.”

Huh. Finally, I was doing something Dad approved of. Or at least he thought I was.

What a jerk.

But, hey! At least I was going to be able to return to the valley. And even though I was sneaking off to do it, I had a feeling making art with Annie would give me the chance to do something I never thought I could do, without running away.

I could be happy.

S
neaking off the next day was the easy part. Making art? With no paint, no paper, no supplies of any kind? Way harder.

When I got to the pool that afternoon, Annie wasn't there. I thought I would try to figure out what we could use to make art in the wild, but there wasn't anything. Just water, rocks, leaves, and an enormous bullfrog that made as much noise as Carlie on a bad day. I plucked a few strands of grass and wove them into a small ring, then made more as I waited, setting the wreaths to float on the surface of the water. It didn't take long for little minnows to start nibbling at them and then to begin jumping through the rings, like miniature dolphins at SeaWorld.

I smiled. The leaping minnows glittered in the patchy sunlight, splashing more than I thought they could, making an un-fishlike amount of sound.
Pretty loud
, I thought.
I'm impressed.

After a moment, birds started singing like it was a contest or something, and the insects in the bushes buzzed and hummed so much, it almost made my teeth shake. I'd never thought of nature as noisy. I moved down, closer to the pool, and realized something. The stone lip that jutted out on the side of the water was making all the sounds louder. Maybe we should call it Amplification Pool. Or Reverberation Pond. Or—

“Hey, Stone Boy!” Annie had arrived at last. “Whatcha doin'?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, we have about two hours before the camp counselors start freaking out about where I'm at, so let's get down into the valley and start making art.” She leaned down, ripped her ankle supports off, and stuffed them in her bag. The tone of her voice made me look at her face more closely. Her features were drawn tight, like she had to hold her lips and eyes close together to keep something from escaping. Anger, or pain.

“What happened, Annie?” I stood up and jumped across the rocks to her side. “Bad day?”

“You could say that,” she said. “But art makes everything better. I learned that in New York.”

She started down into the valley, and I followed. I didn't ask for details; I hated it when people pressed me to tell them more than I was ready. She'd get to it. Or not. It was her story to tell. Sure enough, by the time we'd gotten to the stream at the base of the hill, Annie started talking.

“So, when I was six, I got sick. They thought it was pretty bad.” She laughed once. “Little did they know . . . Anyway, treatment takes about two years, two and a half, until they'll use words like
remission
. I had been pestering Mom to take me to the modern art museum in Houston, and when I went there, I just . . . fell in love with art. So Mom got in touch with Make-A-Wish, and they sent me up to New York to visit the big ones. It was amazing. I never knew you could make things that moved people, out of anything. Canvas, sure, but they also made art out of trash, and concrete and graffiti, and natural stuff—stones, sticks, leaves. . . . ” She stopped. “Hey, mud!”

We'd reached the edge of the stream bank, and Annie pressed her hands down into the silty soil that spread like a mud beach on one side of the gently flowing water. “This could totally work as glue later this week. But what to use for today's project . . . ” She was off again, darting back and forth, looking for something. Then she found it. “Fossils!” The streambed was littered with limestone fossils—clamshell-shaped ones, snails, and stones with little embedded ammonites. “Okay, Stone Boy, this is your job.” All the pain was gone from her voice now. Annie was on a mission. I sighed. I had a feeling her mission was going to be hard work for me.

“We'll need as many of these fossils as you can find. At least a hundred,” she said, confirming my suspicion.

“What for?”

“We're going to make fossil cairns,” she said and ran off, like I had any idea what she meant. What was a cairn, anyway?

I took off my shoes and set them by the stream, then waded in, looking for fossils. When I'd found a couple, I'd tuck them into my pockets. But that only worked for so long. Soon, I had a sizeable pile on the bank. It was weird: At first glance, it hadn't seemed like there were that many fossils to find. But after a while, as I worked quietly, letting my breath be the only sound I made, listening to the soft lap of the water on my ankles and rocks, the fossils seemed to . . . just show up. It got weirder: After twenty minutes, almost every stone I reached for turned out to be a fossil flipped on its side, or my hand would be drawn at the last second to a different rock than the one I was reaching for, and the new rock was a perfectly formed shell.

Was the valley doing it? I didn't know. All I knew was I had a pile of at least two hundred fossils in an hour, and when Annie came skidding back into the clearing, yelling, “I found the site!” she stopped and looked at me like I'd sprouted wings.

“Where did you find all those?” she sputtered. “There have to be three hundred!”

Three
hundred? “I thought maybe two hundred,” I joked. “Sorry, I'll try to work faster.”

“Faster? Where did these . . . how did you . . . ”

I straightened, feeling my back pop and crack as I did. “Dunno. They just sort of . . . showed up.”

“Well . . . good.” Annie seemed slightly disturbed. It
was
an awful lot of fossils. Like, a suspicious number. I thought the valley was having fun with us.

Or making fun of us.

“So, what were you planning to do with these again?”

“Build cairns,” she said, examining some of the best specimens on the pile. “I think the boulder meadow is the best spot.”

“And cairns are?”

“Oh, I'm . . . I'm sorry,” Annie stammered. I wasn't sure why she was embarrassed; I was the stupid one. “They're stacks of stones. People in practically every civilization have built them to honor their dead.”

“Cheerful. Why can't we just leave the pile here?”

“Oh, no,” Annie said. “You'll need to carry them into the meadow. And put them into shape. We could use something to stick them together, I guess, but I think they'll hold if you stack them right. . . . ”

I tried not to laugh. Annie had no idea how bossy she'd sounded. She reminded me of Carlie more than ever.

“I'll need to move them? All of them?”

She blinked at me, like I wasn't speaking English or something.

“Just me?”

She blinked again. “Yes, just you. I couldn't carry all those. Anyway, I have a headache coming on.” Annie sat down by the stream, fanning herself. I would have bet money she was faking it.

“Which shape?” I had a feeling I knew before she said.

“Well, pyramids.”

Pyramids. I grinned. “No problem. Where do you want them, Pharaoh?”

I called her that the rest of the afternoon, until she stopped talking and really started working. She must have realized that, cancer or not, if she wanted three hundred stones moved and stacked in the next hour, she was going to have to help.

What I hadn't realized was that while I'd been collecting stones, Annie had been preparing other supplies in the meadow. She'd made . . . well, sort of small rugs out of flower petals, a different color on each boulder.

“I like the juxtaposition,” she said as we stacked the fossils on top of the flower petals. “The transitory serving as the base of the eternal.”

I rolled my eyes at her arty-sounding words. “Whatever. Eternal work for me, anyway.”

I didn't want to talk about the art—I had a feeling I would sound dumb if I tried. But I sort of saw what she meant. When we'd finished, seven of the boulders in the meadow had carpets of flower petals—orange, red, and yellow. The fossils were stacked in near-perfect four-sided pyramids on top of each flower carpet. The gray of the stones on top of the bright colors was . . . interesting, that was for sure.

And it did make me think. About things like how long those fossils had been there, how many millions of years ago they had been alive. And how many minutes the petals had left before they would be gone, with no fossils to record them. Nothing to remember them except me and Annie and—
click!

I turned. Annie had a camera in her hand and was taking pictures. “Move out of this shot, Peter,” she demanded.

“Yes, Pharaoh,” I said, bowing as I did. Had she ever heard the word
please?

“Sorry,” she said. “I get caught up. Thanks for doing this. I'm just worried. It won't last long. Not the petals, anyway . . .” She moved around the meadow, taking shot after shot of the boulders.

The cool breezes that'd fanned our faces as we'd worked had very strangely not shifted a single petal. I smiled up at the sky, wondering if the valley was watching us. First the fossils, now the breeze? Maybe the valley liked art.

I did. And it
was
art, if Annie's definition was true. I looked at it, and I saw something more than petals and stones. There was meaning there. I'd like to have spent some time sitting in it, thinking. Being still. Or even being noisy, like Annie.

Huh. I hadn't expected to have so much fun with her. I sure hadn't thought we'd make anything in the valley seem even more amazing.

“No more pictures, I'm done,” I heard.

A breeze came then, blowing petals up and around me—and Annie, I saw. In a sort of tornado of petals, with funnels of red, orange, and yellow twisting around me, making the sky fill with dots of color that looked like multicolored snow. It was breathtaking, but . . .

“Annie,” I said. “It's gone.”

She had closed her eyes and wasn't seeing what was happening to her art. I felt sort of sorry for her. It was gone, already gone, in one stiff gust of wind.

But when Annie opened her eyes, she smiled as wide as I'd ever seen.

“You're . . . you're happy,” I stammered.

“It's part of the art,” she explained, motioning toward the stream. “The bringing together of the pieces, then the way they disappear when it's time—when the wind, or water, or gravity, whatever—makes the art lose its hold. It's not meant to stay forever. Some people”—she paused—“some people wouldn't get it. They'd fight to keep it. They'd do all sorts of unnatural things to make it stay just like it was. Glue it, staple it, cement it. Even though that would ruin it.”

Overhead, a hawk flew, cutting the sky in two pieces. We watched it, silent together, then started walking when it had gone.

Annie's voice was low when she spoke again. “You have to learn to let go when it's time.” She smiled her tight smile again, the one that had all sorts of pain and secrets behind it, and I had a dark thought in the middle of the sunny day.

I didn't think she was talking about art anymore. I had a feeling she was talking about life.

Her life.