Free Precious by Sandra Novack Page A

looks around. There is no one. If Vicki came here, she might have swum across the creek. She might have passed over the lacy plants and climbed up the banks, intent simply on running away from everything that bothered her.
    Sissy breaks another branch, sticks it in the mud. The gloominess of the task, the possible peril and injury, consume her, and soon an hour has passed, and what Sissy wants to find, she does: a broken twig that might have been used to ward off threat, a place where rocks seem to form an arrow, moss that may hold an imprint of a hand, a stone shaped like a heart. She notes all these things. She picks up another stone, curls her index finger around it for luck, and then skips it across the water while the sun sinks deeper in the sky. She imagines the stones are Vicki, skipping across the water. She imagines the other side of the bank is another, secret world.
    She does not know when, exactly, she first hears laughter. Possibly seconds after skipping the first stone, maybe minutes. She freezes, stone in hand. On the other side of the creek, at the place where large limestone juts from the ground and a thick tree branch extends over the water, she sees Vicki just as she imagined her, her bedraggled hair crowned with flowers. “I didn’t really believe you’re dead,” Sissy calls out. “I knew I could find you.” Watching her, Sissy can hardly contain her heart, its joyful leaping. Before she can think that she will be famous for her detective skills, and that she will win if not the love of her mother then the love and adoration of Vicki’s mother, all while Vicki ischastised for running away and sent to her room for a month without dinner, before she can think any of this, she blurts out, “People are worried about you, you know. You can’t just leave like that.”
    Vicki says nothing. She bends down and inspects the water, then wades in, disappearing below the surface, a flower floating first in a circle before winding down with the current.
    It is a game of play, a game of magic. Sissy calls out again and waits. She pulls off her sneakers and socks, the cool water pooling around her. Her feet sink into the mud. Instinctively, she kneads her toes. She moves gradually, until her shorts and shirt take in water, until it seems that water is all around her, and that it has always been that way, so much so that water drinks her up and gathers her in.
    She sees her face in the water—her long cheeks, her hair that is pulled back in a ponytail. She sticks her tongue out at herself, scrunches her face. Ugly, perhaps a bit of a horse-face. She squints, trying to see below to where Vicki is hiding. Above her the clouds have grown wispy the sky a shade darker. Her feet lose the ground and she swims. She goes under once, quickly, and reemerges. She spits out water. She pulls in a deep breath of air, holds it, and submerges herself into the murky depths, the pool of diffuse light around her. She imagines the water is not four feet deep but bottomless and ancient. Her task is simple: to find an old friend. So much can happen in an hour, a moment. She adjusts, refocuses, moves deeper.
    There, at the bottom of the swimming hole, she sees a canopy the color of swirled peppermint, and animals: horses with black marble eyes, dark as night, their manes a cool gray, some spotted with flecks of white, and others with cream-colored bodies, all attached to opalescent poles. They rise and fall. She remembers a story her mother told her once, of a magical carousel that protected children. And there is Vicki, having taken up residence in a chariot pulled by lions. Vicki laughs, breathes in water, and in the moment, all of this is real, and all of this comforts Sissy.
    If she strains, Sissy can almost hear a dreamy pulse, a melodicrhythm of pipes, a surge of music and the whirl of a hollow pulse. Everything is in motion. One of the lions turns his head toward Sissy and roars. She expels a short breath, holds back air again.