are you doing?” I asked.
She didn’t answer me. And after she had dug about a foot down into the earth, she silently dropped the shovel and knelt down next to the hole she had made. She continued to dig with her hands, her expression serious, intent. When she pulled out the soggy cardboard box, I thought it might be some sort of hidden treasure. There was a part of me, even then, that resided in the stories my mother read to me at night. Treasure Island . The Swiss Family Robinson . “What is it?” I asked.
When she looked up at me, her eyes were wet. She blinked hard and lifted the lid of the box. “When I was six,” she said, quiet, like a question, “a bird smashed into our front window. A robin. My mom had just washed the windows, and the stupid bird must not have been able to tell there was glass there. I was playing jacks on the front porch, and I didn’t see it, but I heard it. It sounded like a gun or something. And then the bird was just lying there in the rosebush. There wasn’t any blood or anything, but its neck was all twisted. Its wing was crushed. Mom came running out of the house to see what happened, and when I showed her the bird, she covered my eyes with her hands. They smelled like ammonia. I remember they smelled so clean it could make you sick. She made me go inside, told me to go to my room and not come out until she said. After a long time, she finally came and got me. She told me that the bird was really hurt, but that she fixed its wing. She said that it flew away.” Betsy’s hands were trembling, the box was trembling in her hands. “So I forgot about the bird. And then a few days later I was out here and I saw this pile of dirt. I didn’t know what it was, so I decided to dig it up. And I found this.” She motioned to the box, to the bones inside the box. “Course it wasn’t just bones then. It still had its feathers and everything. Its wing was still broken. Its neck was still broken.”
I knelt down next to Betsy and looked into the box. Inside were yellowed bones, impossibly small and collapsed. The miniature skull with its empty eye sockets was looking up at me.
“She probably just didn’t want you to feel bad,” I said.
“Well I did ,” Betsy said, and she seemed almost angry.
“Are you going to bury it again?” I asked. There was something disconcerting about the skeleton. About Betsy right then.
She nodded and lowered the box back into the ground. “Dumb bird. Flying around, just being a bird, and then bam , it’s over.” She looked at me and frowned. “Nobody bothered to tell him about the glass. You’d have told me, right? If I were that bird? And you were my bird friend?”
I nodded. I would have.
She’d packed for both of us—everything we needed except for my clothes. She’d been stealing food from the pantry for nearly two months. She’d also been pilfering from the pickle jar where Mr. Parker threw his spare change. She had almost forty dollars, which she’d had Nancy Butler’s older sister, who worked at the Two Rivers Savings and Loan, turn into bills so as not to raise any eyebrows. She had toiletries she’d shoplifted from the drugstore and even a pair of men’s hiking boots she’d found at the Goodwill, which she offered to me like a gift. “We’ve got many miles ahead of us,” she said. “I don’t need you going home when your sole blows out.” The way she said it made me think of my soul exploding. My mother did not believe in God, but I had my suspicions.
“Where will we sleep?” I asked.
“I’ve got a tent,” she said. “I was a Brownie, before I got kicked out, you know.”
I didn’t ask any more questions.
I dawdled. I stood in my bedroom, looking for a way out. It was futile. I didn’t even have a proper closet in which I could hide. My closet was full of more of my father’s inventions; no one had dared open that door in years. Downstairs my mother was playing the piano, angry music. Last day of school music. She had a summer of daily piano lessons ahead of her. Never mind a thirteen-year-old boy puttering around the house. My father was at work. By the time he got home, I would be gone. It made me sad. Though Betsy had forbidden me to do so, I got out a piece of paper from my school notebook and scribbled down a quick note: “I’m okay. Don’t worry. I’ll call when I get a chance. Your loving son, Harper Montgomery.” I wasn’t sure why I bothered to sign my last name except that it made the whole thing seem somehow more official. I muttered “Good-bye” to my mother, kissed the top of her head, and she nodded her farewell as she continued to abuse the piano keys.
I met Betsy at the drugstore, as planned, for a final soda pop. I ordered a Vanilla Coke, and she got her usual Orange Crush. Luckily, Brooder and Ray weren’t there or else I might have chickened out. We sat at the counter, both of us making those drinks last as long as they possibly could, until finally Betsy said, “Let’s go.”
By the time the sun was starting to set, I had lost my bearings. Betsy insisted that we travel through the woods until we were out of Two Rivers, lest anyone driving by might wonder what we were up to. She had calculated even the most minute details of our escape. She carried elaborate maps, which she had traced from her father’s road atlas. A compass. A pocketful of stones to make a trail, even, I figured. But after the sound of the river faded into the sound of wind in the trees, I couldn’t tell which way we were headed anymore and I was starting to wonder when one of us would finally say, “Uncle.”
As the sun burned red and orange through the thick foliage all around us, Betsy stopped. “Let’s camp here for the night.” As she pitched the tent and unrolled the sleeping bags, I waited for her to stop what she was doing, to turn to me, punch me in the shoulder and say something like, “All right, let’s head back.” But she didn’t. “Why don’t you go find some wood for a fire?” she asked.
I agreed and set out in the waning light to look for kindling and firewood. Though I didn’t have a watch on, I figured it to be about eight o’clock. If I were at home, my father would be climbing the stairs from his basement laboratory, stretching and calling out to my mother, “Helen, come watch Wyatt Earp with me.” She would mutter something from the other room, and my father would fix himself a peanut butter sandwich as he waited for her. When she emerged from her study, bleary-eyed and yawning, he would motion for her to join him in the living room. They would settle onto the couch then, and my mother would lay her head in my father’s lap so that he could stroke her hair. I would sit Indian-style on the floor in front of them, in front of the TV close enough to reach over and change the channel during the commercials. If someone were to ask me what the word family meant then, this is the image that would have come to mind. We did not eat together, but we did meet religiously for prime-time television. For this, I would abandon games of kick-the-can and hide-n-seek as soon as the streetlights hummed. Now, in the woods, I thought of my father walking up the basement steps, my mother devouring one more paragraph. I wondered at what moment they would realize that I was gone.
I bent over, selecting twigs and fallen branches haphazardly, without any real expertise. I hadn’t joined the Boy Scouts because my mother considered them an organization of Christian zealots. She did think their survival tips were important however, considering the amount of time I spent outside. She found a used copy of the Cub Scout Leader Book as well as the Wilderness Survival Guide at a library sale, and taught me how to make a tourniquet, how to identify edible mushrooms, and how to track a badger. None of this seemed pertinent right now.
I brought the pile of sticks to Betsy, eager for her approval.
“Over there,” she said, motioning to a circle of rocks she had created not far from the opening of the tent.
I dropped the branches on the ground and sat down next to them. I thought of my mother, unwinding her hair from the two frayed braids she wore pinned to the top of her head.
Betsy made a pyramid of twigs, crumpled a piece of newspaper, which materialized from the pack she’d been carrying on her back. She lit a match just as the last embers of sunlight burned beyond the forest, and started the fire. We ate creamed corn and hot dogs, charred from the open flame. I sat next to Betsy, eating quietly, and knew that my parents had probably realized by now that I was missing. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen my mother look afraid.
We