Free All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen Page A

She was good at taking directions.

    â€œWhy are you showing me this?”
    â€œBecause it looks dead, but it is alive,” he said. “We call it Corpse Weed. The living dead of nature. You see? Death grows, it lives with you. Go to your mother, sit with her, and listen to her.”
    â€œBut I can’t stand it,” said Isabella.
    Once, long before theatre school, before high school even, at the age of 11, she took up her mother’s guitar and began to play, thinking to please Moira with a song that she had made up herself. Moira came into the room, drink in hand. She sat down to listen. Part way through the second verse, Moira stood up and carefully placed her drink down on the coffee table.
    â€œYou have made a mistake,” she said in a quiet, cold voice. Before Isabella could ask how Moira knew that when she had written the song herself, Moira grabbed the guitar out of Isabella’s hands, and swung it, smashing its back against the stone wall of the living room.
    â€œI said you have made a mistake,” she said again, without raising her voice. “I am the singer, not you.”
    The corpse plant was stupid and ugly and the colour of an old dog turd. Isabella wanted to crush it under her heel. Hopelessness crept through her skull like mist, hung like a damp aura about the bright vision of her mother, once Moira Delacourt the lounge singer, now spread out upon the couch at the motel, aggressively eating donuts to show the world that she could still do something. Isabella did not especially want her mother to live or die, what she wanted was a different mother.

    â€œHow come you know so much, Mr Pascal Park Warden?” she said.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œI said how come you know so much?”
    â€œMother, sister, breast cancer. Okay?”
    Her mouth refused to work. She could not think what to say.
    â€œOkay,” he said, looking off up the hill. “So now I am going to check the permit of fishing. You know where to go? Down the hill, along the lake.”
    Her mouth unfroze long enough to twitch out the words of thanks for his time.
    â€œNo problem. Bonne chance with that miracle.” He disappeared up the hill on his bike.
    Isabella took off her skirt, suddenly sick of it, and bunched it up in front of her. Barelegged she started down the path, kicking at the brown stones as she went, reciting Ophelia’s lines in a sulky voice. He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone.
    She was surprised by the tinging of bells ahead. Two men on mountain bikes were making their way up the track, ringing as they went. They looked at Isabella’s legs and with some enthusiasm announced that they had seen a bear, so she ought to make noise as she went. Show tunes, they suggested. Show tunes? Isabella could do show tunes.
    She knew it looked out of the ordinary: a woman with dark green hair emerging from among the trees, her legs scratched by briars and thorns, belting out that the sun would come out tomorrow; singing to keep the bears at bay.

The Frog
    C ARL COULD NOT HAVE been out of sight for more than seconds before Robyn could no longer hear the sticks cracking under his sandals. The sound of the boy’s movements had blended into the overhead rush of the leaves and the rustling of the river water around the rocks. Robyn sat very still on the riverbank. A lone maple leaf spooled past in the current. It was silly to panic on a Sunday morning.
    â€œLet’s cut through the trees here. The portage trail must be over the hill.”
    Robyn’s older sister Sandrine had made the suggestion not five minutes ago. They were supposed to be rock-hopping down the river to the next lake. Robyn knew that the river would arrive at the lake and so would the portage trail, but that did not mean that the portage trail would follow the river. She didn’t want to cut through the trees.
    There was already a woman missing in the national park. Yesterday they had seen her