After we’d finished our shift at the farm stand that morning, Arden and I escaped down to our playhouse. We’d built it last summer, right by where the curve of Hummingbird Bay met the edge of the Hawthorne farm, and both our daddies hated it because we’d made it ourselves out of old plywood we scavenged from the supplies my daddy used to build our chicken coop last year. Before that we’d spent years playing in an old tobacco shed, but the playhouse was better, because it was made with our own hands.
Mr. Ben said it was unsafe and would fall over on us next time a hurricane rolled through town, but Arden always shot back that we didn’t plan to stay in the playhouse during a hurricane, so that wouldn’t be a problem.
The playhouse was our place, the one place in Maryville where nobody could come unless we let them. Today Arden had all her younger siblings to watch except the baby, but the three of them were busy down at the water’s edge trying to catch tadpoles and water skimmers in nets, so Arden and I got the playhouse to ourselves as long as we kept a good eye on them. We were painting the walls with paints and brushes we’d snuck out of Arden’s mama’s craft room, trying to make it look as much like a real house as a rickety plywood box nailed together by two eleven-year-olds can. Arden wanted to paint the whole thing over with flowers once we’d finished with the base coat, but I hadn’t decided what I thought yet. The idea of making something that permanent, the kind of thing you couldn’t just wash off and start over, made me nervous.
“Eli!” Arden yelled, looking up from her painting to see her brother wading into the bay so far his shorts got wet. Eli hated being bossed. “Get out of the water! Mom said no swimming unless she or Dad are with us.”
Arden and I went swimming in there without any grown-ups all the time, dunking each other under the brackish water or trying to swim all the way out to the point where the bay opened up into the Albemarle Sound, but nobody else but us knew about that.
Eli stuck out his tongue at us, but he obeyed, trudging back to the shore with his skinny white legs dripping water.
“I can’t believe summer’s nearly half over.” Arden sounded wistful.
“Me neither.” I’d always been shy, and every new school year was like jumping back into a cold pool once you’ve finally warmed up. Seventh grade had to be better than sixth—starting at a new school was worse than almost anything—but I still wasn’t looking forward to it. The seventh graders last year had seemed so old, so smart, so mysterious. There had been whispers about kissing and boyfriends and things I didn’t feel ready for. “I wish you were going to be with me. You could be on the track team, and we could have lunch together . . .”
“I wish you could do school with me.”
“Me too.” Arden got to pick all her own homeschool projects, and as long as she got her work done it didn’t matter if she finished up by lunchtime and could spend the rest of the day doing whatever she wanted. Last year, her mama had let her spend a whole school year studying the changes in the water plants by the bay’s edge and called it botany, while my science class had to dissect frogs. I’d smelled like formaldehyde for days.
“Mom’s already planning a whole unit on aeronautics. We’re going to take a day trip to Kitty Hawk and everything. Mom says maybe if the weather’s nice we’ll rent a condo on the beach for a few days, maybe drive up to Corolla and see the wild horses.”
“It sounds nice.” I squeezed the paintbrush in my hand. What would my family be doing this autumn?
Would Mama be in the hospital by the time I got back to school at the end of August?
“Want to go for a run with me tomorrow?” Arden asked.
“No.” I liked swimming, and when school was in session I did fine in PE, but as far as I was concerned, running was not something a person should do for fun, especially when it was hitting triple-digit temperatures before breakfast.
“Is . . . something going on with you, Della?” Arden asked, dipping her brush back into the Styrofoam plate we’d filled with paint. She kept her eyes on the plywood wall as she drew her brush across it, leaving a thick green streak in its wake. She was watching that wall so hard she might have been waiting for it to sprout flowers or start talking.
“I’m fine.” All week long, the words I’d wanted to say had fizzled before they hit my tongue, leaving me with a whole lot of buzzing in my head and no way to let it out. I’d wanted more than anything to talk to Arden about my mama and the things that had started coming out of her mouth again, but every time I’d been with her, I found I just couldn’t. There was always something else going on: her brother and sisters causing trouble, or customers coming to the farm stand just as I opened my mouth to spill out the truth, or a little spark of worry in her eyes that made my skin crawl uneasily.
What could Arden do, anyway? The Hawthornes and the Kellys were twined together like the branches of a weeping willow, but in the twelve years since Mama’s sickness came on, the best they’d been able to do was watch me when things got extra bad four years ago.
Arden painted right over the same spot she’d just done, like she didn’t even notice it. She looked hurt, her eyebrows pinched together just a tiny bit in the middle, her cheek pulled in like she was chewing on it.
“You sure? You’ve just been so quiet. You didn’t even laugh when I asked you to go for a run. Is . . . is something the matter with your mama?”
“She’s fine.” A trio of ladybugs flew around our heads, their pointed red wings blurring with their flight. One after another, they came to rest on the top of the playhouse. In the sunshine, they looked like little jewels, shining and bright and such a rich scarlet color my eyes could hardly take it in.
Four years ago, when Mama’s sickness had gotten so bad, the doctor had taken her away and put her in the mental hospital in Alberta. I couldn’t see her for weeks and weeks; I’d had to stay with Arden’s family every time Daddy drove out to visit. I could still remember crawling into Daddy’s bed every night after I was supposed to have already been asleep, asking him if Mama was ever gonna come back to us.
I’d opened that Emily Dickinson book from Miss Lorena’s box library yesterday, let the pages fall open in the middle until my heart was full up with the smell of old books. Most of the poems in it I didn’t much understand, but I liked the way they sounded, the way they pulled at something inside of me. There had been one that talked about grief, about how sometimes it hurts to live.
That’s how it had felt when Mama went away to the Alberta hospital last time.
If I told Arden about the things that had been happening this week, it would make it real—make it so I couldn’t ignore or explain away the things Mama had said, the way she’d been so much worse than she ever had been since the bad time after Grandpa Case died.
“Rena!” Arden shouted, so loud I almost let my paintbrush tumble into the dirt. “Put that snake back where you got it, and leave Charlotte alone.”
Rena looked up at us so fast her hair bounced, and then dropped the garter snake she’d been teasing her little sister with, so it could slither back away into the marsh.
Arden looked back at me. “You sure, Dell?”
“Positive,” I said, hoping it was true, knowing I had to find a way to fix Mama for good before she disappeared like that again. Last night, hearing Mama talk about Grandpa Case like he was still alive and talking to her, that had been bad. But it couldn’t be too late yet—it just couldn’t.
I’d been littler the last time Mama had gotten so sick. I hadn’t been able to help as much. Maybe this time, I could make the difference.