Free Two Rivers by T. Greenwood Page A

her mother grabbed her arm tightly and said, “I died the day I met your father. You are looking at a corpse.” She said her mother’s fingernails left four bloody half moons in the soft skin of her upper arm; she even showed me the four faint scars, which I wanted, but didn’t dare, to touch. It was hard for me to imagine Mrs. Parker with her oven mitts and patent leather pumps saying this about Mr. Parker or to imagine her hurting Betsy. But it wasn’t hard for me to envision Mrs. Parker sitting on a rock with waves crashing below her, a photographer clicking away. Betsy wouldn’t let me see this picture, but I imagined her looking like Annette Funicello, wearing nothing but a smile. I think Betsy envisioned herself perched above a rocky beach. When she fantasized about running away it wasn’t about riding in a horse-drawn wagon but about walking barefoot in the sand, ankles numb in the cold Atlantic. “Besides which,” she offered when I gave her my typically dubious smile, “you can fish. That’s how we’ll make our money.”
    As we left school that afternoon, Betsy didn’t give in to my usual diversions. No stop for Red Hots at the drugstore, where Brooder and Ray would be parked at the counter, digging around in their pockets for loose change. No detours to the cemetery, where I liked to see how many angels I could hit with my slingshot. She was all business, pulling me by the hand until we were in her backyard. She left me standing by the oak tree and went into her father’s shed, where he kept his tools and lawn mower and the stash of dirty magazines, and came out with a small shovel. I followed her to the far corner of her yard, where she looked up at the sky, crossed herself as if she were in church, and then started to dig.
    “What are you doing?” I asked.
    She didn’t answer me. And after she had dug about a foot down into the earth, she silently dropped the shovel and knelt down next to the hole she had made. She continued to dig with her hands, her expression serious, intent. When she pulled out the soggy cardboard box, I thought it might be some sort of hidden treasure. There was a part of me, even then, that resided in the stories my mother read to me at night. Treasure Island . The Swiss Family Robinson . “What is it?” I asked.
    When she looked up at me, her eyes were wet. She blinked hard and lifted the lid of the box. “When I was six,” she said, quiet, like a question, “a bird smashed into our front window. A robin. My mom had just washed the windows, and the stupid bird must not have been able to tell there was glass there. I was playing jacks on the front porch, and I didn’t see it, but I heard it. It sounded like a gun or something. And then the bird was just lying there in the rosebush. There wasn’t any blood or anything, but its neck was all twisted. Its wing was crushed. Mom came running out of the house to see what happened, and when I showed her the bird, she covered my eyes with her hands. They smelled like ammonia. I remember they smelled so clean it could make you sick. She made me go inside, told me to go to my room and not come out until she said. After a long time, she finally came and got me. She told me that the bird was really hurt, but that she fixed its wing. She said that it flew away.” Betsy’s hands were trembling, the box was trembling in her hands. “So I forgot about the bird. And then a few days later I was out here and I saw this pile of dirt. I didn’t know what it was, so I decided to dig it up. And I found this.” She motioned to the box, to the bones inside the box. “Course it wasn’t just bones then. It still had its feathers and everything. Its wing was still broken. Its neck was still broken.”
    I knelt down next to Betsy and looked into the box. Inside were yellowed bones, impossibly small and collapsed. The miniature skull with its empty eye sockets was looking up at me.
    “She probably just didn’t want you to feel bad,” I