Free Wild Fell by Michael Rowe Page A

felt tiny fingers settle on my shoulder, and I heard a voice like glacier water whisper in my ear.
    You
are
home
, Amanda said.
This
is
home.
    If I woke screaming, there were no echoes of it in my bedroom when my eyes snapped open in the dark and it disturbed no one in the silent house. There were no footsteps on the floors above—either the living room directly above my bedroom, or my parents’ bedroom above the living room—no heavy adult tread taking the stairs two at a time to save me from any monster that had followed me out of my dreams and into the world.
    Instead I woke to broad planks of moonlight on my bedroom floor from the open window on the other side of the room, and to the dreadful silence every child who wakes from a nightmare alone in his bedroom knows. As I lay tangled up in the maze of sweaty sheets and trapped under the suffocating blankets, the only sound in all that quiet was my own heart in my chest, and the pounding of blood in my temples.
    Next to my bed, the mirror was black and opaque, as though even the moon was afraid of what it might call to life from the depths of the glass by shining on it.
    I lay awake for what seemed like hours. Eventually, the sky began to turn to flush pink. When there was enough light outside to at least bring the contours of my bedroom back into the realm of the safe and the real, I slept, blissfully dreamless this time.
    The next morning at breakfast, the phone in the hallway rang. My father looked at the clock and frowned. My mother shrugged and lit her second cigarette of the morning, blowing another plume of smoke into the shimmering blue cloud already hanging over the breakfast table.
    My father said, “It’s a bit early for callers, isn’t it, Alice?”
    “Well, it’s ringing,” my mother replied tautly. “Either answer it or don’t answer it. I don’t care. But it’s ringing.” She took another sip of her black coffee. My mother wasn’t generally much of a conversationalist at breakfast, at least until she’d had her very own particular breakfast of caffeine and nicotine. All three of us knew it, and neither my father nor I attempted to engage her seriously until after the breakfast dishes were done, preferably by him, preferably with no audible clattering of crockery and silverware in the sink.
    My father pushed his chair away from the table and stood up. “So it is,” he said. “It
is
ringing. Excuse me, my dear.”
    Out in the hallway, his voice rose and fell. There was a long pause, then another soft volley of words. Then I heard him hang up the phone. When he returned to the table, his face was ashen. He sat down heavily and rubbed his chin the way he did when he was thinking about how, or whether, to say something painful or difficult.
    I put my spoon back in my bowl of Froot Loops. “Who was it, Daddy?”
    My father took a deep breath. “Well, Jamie, the police found your bike. We can go over and pick it up after breakfast.”
    My mother perked up. “Really? Really, Peter? They found Jamie’s bike? Where? Did they catch the thief?” She seemed genuinely shocked, as though the prospect of my Schwinn coming home wasn’t anything she’d ever seriously entertained. It occurred to me that she sounded disappointed that the long, punitive lesson she’d hoped to teach me about responsibility was now lost to her forever, or at least until my next major cock-up.
    My father delicately ignored her question, turning to me instead. “Jamie, you said you don’t know the name of the boy who took your bike, right? You’d never seen him before yesterday?”
    “Right, Daddy. Was that him on the phone?”
    “No, Jamie,” my father said slowly. “That was a policeman. I called them yesterday and told them what happened and gave them a description of the bike. The boy . . . well, his name is Terry Dodds. Damnedest thing. His kid brother brought the bike in to the police station this morning and told them Terry had stolen it and he wanted to