Free The River by Mary Jane Beaufrand Page A

wanted to catch up with her, I would have to cross over.
    I was saved from a total retreat by a rustling in the bushes. This is it, I thought. Whatever I’m waiting for, it’s about to spring on me. I saw a big flash of brown. It was big—maybe a deer, maybe a grizzly, maybe a poacher, maybe a sicko with big hairy arms waiting to force my head underwater.
    Step shuffle step shuffle step shuffle . Tomás emerged from a thicket, wearing a brown rain poncho and waving around a flashlight in broad daylight.
    “Jesus. You scared the hell out of me,” I said.
    “You’re one to talk. Why did you just wander off like that?”
    I didn’t know what to say, and muttered something like, “To save the herd,” but it didn’t make any sense, not even to me. So what? I liked him but that didn’t mean I owed him a coherent explanation.
    “You really had us worried, you know,” he said, and his voice had a cut to it that I’d never heard before, and I was afraid. “You should have told someone where you were going.”
    And then, even though I’d never even seen his abusive father, I got an inkling of what he must’ve been like, because I could see it in the shadows of his son’s eyes. This was what kept him quiet around me. This was what he was guarding against. You can’t be six foot six and mean and still hope to have friends. I never asked Tomás how his father was abusive, but I sometimes pictured it when I looked at the giant ropy scar on his wrist. I mean, if you have a father like that, can you ever be mad? Or would you always be afraid of losing control?
    But that wasn’t the root of the problem. I wondered if he was mad because I was inconsiderate, or if he was mad because he was afraid. I had gone missing the day a body had turned up. “You’re right,” I said, because he was. And that deflated him. Any hint of rage seemed drain out of him, right through his boots.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “We were just really worried, you know. I had to tell your mom and dad that you were off on a lark. And I really really don’t like lying to your dad.”
    Tomás practically worshipped my father. He sometimes even let him win at hoops, which did a ton for Dad’s nonexistent confidence. It was a sweet thing to watch, if I weren’t relegated to watching all the time, wondering how I fit in with them, wondering if I even wanted to. I wasn’t a son; I wasn’t a sister. What was I?
    Water, that’s what. Flowing around everything; part of nothing. It was easier that way.
    “I’ll call them now,” I said. I reached instinctively for the pocket with my cell phone in it. But there was no pocket. These weren’t my running pants—they were my chinos. Work pants. And I never needed my cell when I was in the kitchen.
    “Looking for this?” Tomás asked, and took my phone out of a pocket in his poncho. “Or maybe this?” He took my new lip gloss/pepper spray from another pocket.
    I could only look at them dumbly.
    “What are you doing out here, anyway?”
    I shook my head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
    But then he surprised me. “You guys used to come out here all the time. What are you hoping to find?”
    “I don’t know. A piece of her, I guess. Just something to show that she’d been here.” I meant both on the riverbank and in my life. And Tomás seemed to understand.
    “Like an arrowhead,” he said.
    I reached for the phone. This was a call I really didn’t want to make. Tomás was right. My parents were probably freaked. But Tomás held it back, punched a number, and brought the phone up to his ear. “I got her,” I heard him say. “Yes, she’s all right. It’s my fault. I promised her we’d bank-comb. I should’ve told you. We’ll be back in a while.”
    As he hung up the phone and handed it to me, I felt as though I reached one watery finger through the pane of glass that was still separating us. There were still a lot of things about Tomás that I didn’t know, and until I knew them, I