Free Crooked River: A Novel by Valerie Geary

coffin was empty and why we’d had a funeral if there was no body.
    Mom looked surprised. “Who told you that?”
    “Aunt Charlotte.”
    “Your aunt Charlotte’s gone, sweetheart.”
    “But she was at the cemetery with Grandma,” I said.
    Mom started to cry then and pulled me into the chair beside her and told me about heaven, how people went to live there after they died and Aunt Charlotte was smiling and singing with the angels. I let her say what she needed to say, even though I worried some of it might not be true.
    I asked my sister once if she saw them too.
    “What?”
    “Shimmering. The shiny, light parts people leave behind when they die.”
    “You’re talking crazy.”
    “Do you think they’re ghosts?”
    My sister rolled her eyes. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
    “What about angels?”
    She shook her head. “Nope. Don’t believe in them, either.”
    “Then what happens after you die?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Something happens,” I said.
    “Nothing and nothing and nothing.” She spun tight circles in the middle of the living room. “You get buried in the ground like Aunt Charlotte and then people come and cry over you for a while and then things go back to the way they were before. And that’s what happens.”
    “But what about your soul?”
    “If there is such a thing as a soul, it probably gets buried too.”
    “Of course there’s such a thing as a soul,” I said.
    “What’s a soul if you don’t have a body?” My sister stuck out her tongue.
    I stuck out my tongue too. I said, “What’s a body if you don’t have a soul?”
    “I’m telling Mom,” my sister said.
    T he doctor wore a plaid skirt and a red blouse and smiled too wide and called me Miss Olivia. One foot tapping, tapping, in constant motion.
    “Tell me about these . . . Shimmering. How often do you see them?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Every day?”
    “No.”
    “And how do they make you feel? Scared? Excited? Happy? Nervous?”
    “Like someone’s trying to open my chest and slip inside,” I told her.
    She wrote something on a yellow notepad, then smiled at Mom and said, “This kind of fantasy play is typical for kids her age, especially after losing someone they love in such a traumatic way. She’s filling in the gaps. Try not to worry. She’ll grow out of it. But just in case . . .” and handed her a slip of white paper.
    In the car on the way back home, my sister pinched me and said, “You’re a freak.”
    T he one who follows me floats like a cloud above us. She flickers soft pink and rose red, sky blue and honey gold. She likes it when we’re all together—my sister, my father, and me. She’s pretending she’s here with us too and that makes her happy. But she’s not here. Not in the way that counts.
    The one from the river coils tight and tighter around the leather satchel my sister left in the bed of the truck. She hisses at me, but I ignore her.
    My sister uses the handsaw to cut the branch from the apple tree. Some of the bees fly close to her veiled face, but she keeps working, carefully, slowly, the way she’s seen Bear work. She sets the cut branch and swarm gently into the bucket and covers it with a mesh lid.
    “Good work,” Bear says.
    Papa Zeb shivers. “Makes my skin crawl.”
    My sister climbs down the ladder with her bucket of bees and brings it to the truck. The buzzing is so loud, I cover my ears.

 
    9
sam

    F riday breakfast at Zeb and Franny’s was a standing tradition for Bear, and me when I was visiting, and now for Ollie, too. We were supposed to be at the house, sitting down at the table, by nine o’clock sharp, but when Ollie and I woke up that morning, Bear was gone. He’d left a note pinned to the inside of the teepee flap: Be back soon. I turned it over, looking for more of an explanation, but the other side was blank. Ollie and I waited until we couldn’t wait any longer, then we walked the quarter mile to Zeb and Franny’s without him.
    They lived in a