Dark River (originally published under the title The River) will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.
Dark River (originally published under the title The River) will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.
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Overview
Dark River (originally published under the title The River) will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780316202312 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Little, Brown Books for Young Readers |
| Publication date: | 04/10/2012 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 733 KB |
| Age Range: | 15 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dark River
By Beaufrand, Mary Jane
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Copyright © 2012 Beaufrand, Mary JaneAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780316199056
1
I suppose there are worse things than being soggy and dateless and shoveling bunny carcasses into a garbage bin on Valentine’s Day, but if there are, I can’t think of any. Dad might say being dead in a ditch is worse. Mom would say being dead in a ditch wearing tattered underwear is worse still, at which point Dad might say dead is dead, what does underwear have to do with it anyway, and Mom would shut him up with a pumpkin bar delicately spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon, slathered with cream cheese frosting, which Dad would eat thinking he had cleverly won his case, while the real winner went back to the kitchen to check on her rack of lamb.
Be that as it may, it was ten at night on Valentine’s Day, the most romantic day of the year. Fred the Eagle had dropped his latest kill on the back porch again and some of our guests had complained, so I went out to deal with the problem before the neighborhood dogs did.
This being February and the western side of the Cascade Mountains, I hadn’t been outside for a minute before I was marinated in cold rainwater. I did my best to deal with the carcass problem quickly, while inside the inn diners wearing shades of red and pink had graduated from tables in the café to the sofas around the river rock fireplace in the sunken living room, where they snuggled, forking chocolate fondue into each other’s mouths, flush with heat and growing passion. I had never felt so outside, as though I weren’t a real girl made of flesh and blood but some spirit made of rainwater, doomed forever to hover around windows of places I couldn’t enter.
“I’ve been dumped,” said a voice behind me, drawing me back to my own skin. I turned around to see a dark figure in a rain parka and thick-soled boots stomp up the porch steps. He pulled back his hood and I exhaled. It was Ranger Dave.
“What do you mean, dumped?” I said. I was still thinking of an eagle pecking at a bunny and then dumping it on our back lawn.
“Dumped. D-U-M-P-E-D. Like a bald tire or a three-legged dog,” he said. It was a weird comparison but I understood. Our place was the last building on a dead-end road in the middle of nowhere. Random people decided that this stretch was great for getting rid of things they no longer needed. Tires, puppies, kittens, Styrofoam coolers—it all turned up in our ditches. Including, apparently, Ranger Dave.
Poor guy. His face seemed to have eroded, like an embankment worn away by a swift current. He needed help fast. I’d have to postpone feeling sorry for myself. I hoisted the bunny carcass into the bin marked yard waste and stowed the shovel against the house.
“Let’s get you inside,” I said.
As Ranger Dave shook the water off his parka in the sun porch, I leaned on the carved-beaver banister at the top of the stairs that led down to the Astro Lounge. “Dad!” I yelled. “Ranger Dave’s here!”
Dad’s head appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He was drying a huge beer stein. We’d been country innkeepers for almost a year, but I still hadn’t gotten used to the change in my father. He had morphed from Republican Attorney Dad to Hairy Viking Dad. He had facial hair. He wore flannel.
“Veronica, what have I said about shouting?” he yelled just as loudly as I had. He took in all the rainwater sluicing off me and onto the carpet. “Get a towel and change your shirt, please. And wash your hands!”
I ignored him. “Ranger Dave is having a crisis.”
Dad and I stared at each other for a beat. I continued to drip.
“What kind of crisis?”
“Girl kind.”
Dad kept wiping, even though the stein was clean and dry. “Be right there,” he finally said.
Ranger Dave, meanwhile, either didn’t hear me broadcasting his woe, or didn’t care. He took off his boots and shuffled over to the hearth, where he carefully swept little embers back into the fireplace. As an employee of the U.S. Forest Service, he was always on the lookout for anything untended and emitting smoke.
When Dad emerged he was holding two bottles of Black Butte Porter, one of which he handed to Ranger Dave.
“What is it, dude? What’s going on?” Dad asked. I don’t think my father had ever had a cool friend before, so now he got all embarrassing when Ranger Dave was around. He called him man and dude and even slouched. Ranger Dave was in his thirties and had that long, grunge-band hair, so it was okay for him to at least pretend to be hip; but on Dad it just seemed wrong. He should stick to his new strengths. Chopping trees. Eating manly breakfasts. Sacking villages.
“Kristi dumped me,” Ranger Dave said, not looking at my father as he said it—not looking at any of us.
“Oh,” Dad said, trying to look serious, stroking his beard to hide his smirk. Kristi’s boobs were bigger than her IQ. She didn’t deserve him. And dumping him on Valentine’s Day? That was cold. Colder than runoff.
Ranger Dave sighed. “And I thought she might have been the one.”
“Seriously?” I interrupted. “I mean, she listened to Christian rock. Don’t you hate Christian rock? I thought you said it was an oxymoron.”
“I thought it was cute,” he said, whacking a burning log.
“That is not cute, it’s pathetic,” Dad said, rolling his eyes. “Even I know that.”
“And remember what you used to say about Kristi’s hair?” I prodded.
Dad winked at me and mouthed the words good one behind Ranger Dave’s back.
“I said she could punch a hole in the ozone layer above her vanity table with all the Aqua Net,” Ranger Dave admitted.
Dad smiled. The two of us, working together, had forced a confession. Ranger Dave’s case for heartbreak had just collapsed into a heap of black embers. Now we could all get on with our lives.
But rather than feeling better, Ranger Dave seemed worse. He put the poker down and didn’t even touch his beer, just slouched against the fireplace and sighed as though all the air had been beaten out of him. And Dad? He took our inability to cheer up our guest as his own personal failure. He sat there, stroking his beard, extracting little flakes of dead skin, which he rolled into little pill shapes and flicked onto the carpet.
“Come on, man,” Dad said gently, urging him downstairs. “I’ll let you kick my butt at darts.”
“That’s okay, Paul. I don’t really feel like playing right now.”
Now Dad was really alarmed. Ranger Dave was always up for a game.
Fortunately, at this point, the kitchen door swung open and Mom came out. Her brown hair was secured with a banana clip on the back of her head, and her white chef’s smock and black-checked pants were baggy over her thin frame, making her look like a hip-hop cook.
She carried a tray covered with an elaborate linen napkin. She placed it on Ranger Dave’s lap. Suddenly we were surrounded. Our dinner guests stopped smooching; our wait staff, including Daisy and Wanda, not to mention Tomás and Gretchen, my only friends in town, pushed forward with the promise of witnessing something spectacular.
What would Mom offer him? Cardamom bread? Northwest pizza with smoked salmon, roasted red peppers, and feta cheese? Sacher torte, so dense and rich, each bite landed like semisweet buckshot in your stomach?
With a flourish, she whisked the napkin away, revealing a bag of marshmallows, two slabs of Hershey’s chocolate, and a box of graham crackers. She speared a marshmallow on a fondue fork for Ranger Dave and held it out to him, as if he were a child of five. “Here ya go,” she said.
I held my breath. Mom could usually read people’s hunger with an uncanny level with accuracy, but she was wrong on this one. Ranger Dave, when he wasn’t live-trapping aggressive bears or putting out brush fires, was Mr. Ultra Healthy Marathon Man. He once told me he survived a whole week on nothing but bottled water, bananas, and orange GU gel. To him, food was fuel.
S’mores? Mom might as well have offered him a big plate of Styrofoam.
I held my breath as Ranger Dave took the fondue fork and stuck the marshmallow by the embers of the fire. He was humoring Mom. Had to be. We all watched as his marshmallow turned from white to golden to brown and finally black. He pulled it out of the hearth, blew the flame out, and put the hot, black goo in the chocolate graham sandwich Mom held out for him.
He devoured his s’more, then licked the gunk off his fingers one by one. When he was done he carefully closed his eyes. “Disgusting,” he pronounced.
But he reached for another.
Around us, people politely applauded and Mom circulated the s’mores plate around the rest of them. You could tell what they were thinking: I always liked s’mores, but now it’s okay to admit it because Claire Severance serves them. Dad, meanwhile, poured more champagne to anyone who wanted it, all the while smiling at the shadow Mom cast over the soft firelight, a shadow that seemed to cover all of us like a blanket. She’d worked her magic yet again. Dad knew she would; Ranger Dave knew she would (which is why he’d come to us to begin with); our guests and employees had known as well. Mom’s culinary powers were legendary. There was nothing she couldn’t put right with food.
Nothing, that is, except for me.
Don’t get me wrong: I had some decent days—days when I didn’t dwell too much on what I’d lost when we moved here, like coffee shops, Nordstrom, clubs with all-ages shows, a school with funding for arts programs.
But then there were other nights when I couldn’t filter out the loneliness, and I would lie awake torturing myself, listening to the sounds of the Santiam River running through the backyard, pretending it was just the familiar city cries of the drunks and the meth addicts staggering home from an after-hours show at the Crystal Ballroom.
There was nothing wrong with my life that going home—my real home—couldn’t correct.
At least that was what I thought that Valentine’s Day, when I still hoped I could be fixed—when I hoped all of us could be fixed. Now I know better. I know there are things we can understand and control, and then there is the wilderness of the unknowable. Our inn was situated on the frontier between the two—the last building on a dead-end road; beyond us there were only trees and mountains and sky and river—always the river.
And what happened there, at the boundary between the wild and the tame? That I need more strength to tell. Best to stop here with marshmallows and chocolate.
2
Lost lost lost…
The next morning was Saturday. When I woke up the river had a new mood. I thought I’d heard every noise it could make. When the water was high and swift and muddy, it seemed to be shouting; when it was low and treacherous and soothing, it was almost like a lullaby, one of the lovely but really brutal ones. Come, dip your toes in my glacial goodness. I will rock you to sleep, and then dash your head against a submerged boulder.
I’d heard the river angry, I’d heard the river playful, but until that morning I’d never heard the river grieve.
My bedroom was in the attic under a sloping ceiling—a scrawny room that must once have belonged to the hired help or a very cold nun when my great-grandmother first ran Patchworks during the Depression. Back then it was a kind of homey barracks for lumberjacks—a place where a woman with a genteel southern lilt served stacks of biscuits and sweet corn on the cob to men who wanted to remember they weren’t one hundred percent wild.
The crow’s nest (as Mom called my room) was in the corner on the river side and had a turret with a territorial view. And man, did it cover a lot of territory—rushing water, tall trees, rolling foothills—if I opened the window in winter and leaned out I could almost see the Hoodoo Ski Bowl. But since I didn’t ski it was no big deal. I felt no need to conquer mountains or speed down them. Since I was a runner, my attitude was: downhill is cheating.
My room was also the noisiest in the place, especially in a storm. Between the rain slapping the roof and the white water rushing out back, most of the time I woke up feeling pelted. But not that morning. That morning I felt more adrift than usual, as though someone had cut an anchor.
I got out of bed and smoothed the three layers of antique quilts behind me. As I did, I closed my eyes and listened. It definitely seemed as though the river were crying.
I looked out the window. The water was brown and high, but we seemed in no danger of flooding, so I shook off the creepy feeling as I pulled on my sweats and dashed downstairs.
Dad was sitting at his favorite table in front of the picture windows in the café, eating his three-berry bran waffles and looking up every so often to make sure Fred the Eagle was still in his aerie in the treetops along the opposite bank.
I was hoping to sneak past him but he looked up and saw me.
“Hold on, missy. Where do you think you’re going?”
Just once I would have liked to have gotten away without him harassing me. My Saturday morning run was my one hour of freedom a week. And to think: months ago I imagined that when he went on serotonin inhibitors I’d be able to get away with more stuff. All the drugs had done was make him more vigilant.
“To Tiny’s and back.” That was my loop. About a 10K. It took me along the Santiam River Road, past the Kid for Sale sign, past the Santiam National Forest Ranger Station, to Tiny’s Garage, which was next to Highway 22, then reverse.
“Got your cell?”
I pulled it out of my sweatshirt pocket and showed it to him.
“Is it juiced?”
I nodded.
He looked at his watch and clicked a button. “I’ll call Tiny,” he said.
Dad said he got the chills just thinking of me gallivanting along that isolated road (his word—gallivant), so he alerted our neighbors to keep an eye out for me: the Armstrongs at the Kid for Sale sign; Ranger Dave (hopefully less brokenhearted this morning); and finally, Tiny of Tiny’s Garage and Minit-Mart. I suppose the neighborhood watch was sweet, but they weighed me down. Without neighbors I could’ve shaved thirty seconds off my best time, easy.
Mom poked her head out of the kitchen. Ropes of raw dough were peeling off her arms like extra layers of skin. “There’s a breakfast burrito for you on the warmer,” she said, and went back to slapping a loaf into shape.
I had no desire to eat. Dad had already set his watch; it was time to go.
I burst through the wooden door and into the chilly damp air. It was raining biblically hard, but that made it perfect running weather. I took my first step across the porch and nearly tripped over a two-by-four plank with three mud pies arranged neatly on top, each with a sprig of a fat purple blossom (lupine?) sticking up like a birthday candle. Whoa, great presentation, I thought. Mom would be impressed.
I knew who left us the present. Karen, third of four Armstrong children, she of the blue whale rain slicker and cross-shaped scar on her forehead, Kid for Sale. I babysat for her and her brothers and sister yesterday while their parents grabbed a bite at the inn. These mud pies must be Karen’s way of saying thank you.
I nudged them to the side of the door and began what would be a very long race.
Of all the buildings in Hoodoo, ours was the only one with “curb appeal.” Everyone else focused their gardening skills on their backyards since that was where the river was. Their front yards were either a quarter mile of grit, or a quarter mile of grit peppered with rusted pickups and unfenced, unleashed mongrels. At first I was afraid of these canines, some of whom were large and imposing, running free, but I soon learned that most dogs think of runners as a pack. Sometimes by the time I reached Tiny’s I was running with a posse of six dogs. Today, before I ran up to the Armstrongs’ house, I’d only picked up Trixie, an energetic terrier, and Thor, a giant, lean German shepherd with a huge bark and a half-masted ear, which made him look always perplexed. Thor was harmless except for the parasites crawling on his belly and ears.
This morning Thor—with his crooked but functional sonar—heard the cries before I did.
“Karen! Karen!”
I rounded the bend and there was Mr. Armstrong standing by his mailbox where the Kid for Sale sign used to be. He was a compact guy with sandy brown hair and leathery skin of someone who worked outside a lot—which he did, being in construction. Behind him, his yard was being chewed to mud by three stubborn goats.
Mr. Armstrong was worried about something. He tried to hide it, but anxiety was dusting his face like pollen.
“Morning.” I nodded.
“Have you seen Karen?” he asked.
“No,” I said. And in my heart I felt something do a light somersault. I should’ve been used to it by now. Karen was an explorer—always charting new places and experiences. When she was off trailblazing she didn’t always remember to check in. But she always came back.
I remembered my foot connecting with the mud pies before I started out. “I think she was at the inn earlier. She left us a present. But I haven’t seen her.”
Mr. Armstrong smiled, but he was holding his breath. “I hope she isn’t down by the river. She knows she’s not supposed to go there alone.”
At that moment, even though I was saturated, I got a chill. On days like these with the snowcaps beginning to melt, the rapids were swift. Lost lost lost… even here I could hear the river wailing. Nothing’s wrong, I told myself. She disappears all the time.
“I’m sure she’s fine. I’ll bring her home if I see her.” I glanced at my watch. “I should be back in thirty-four minutes. If we haven’t found her by then, I’ll help you beat the brush.”
Mr. Armstrong sighed and looked at his own watch. “Thirty-three. You’ve got time to make up.”
“For Karen? I’ll make it in thirty-two.”
I smiled at him in what I hoped was a confident, reassuring way. Then I waved and left, happy to be gone. Mr. Armstrong’s worry was so palpable it felt like a wall. Some things, I was discovering, you can’t run past.
By the time my pack and I hit the Santiam National Forest Ranger Station, Thor and Trixie and I had picked up Bailey, a mutt that looked like a normal golden retriever from the chest up, but his legs were short and stubby, like a basset’s. It was hard to take Bailey seriously. Those stubby legs made him look like a real clown.
The sign in front of the ranger station announced that the danger of a forest fire was low today. I spat the rainwater that had funneled from my hair, down my nose, and into my mouth. I once made the mistake of suggesting to Ranger Dave that his pie chart should have a “Well, duh,” setting for days like this. And he’d rounded on me, furious, poking a lean finger at my chest. “Do you know how much acreage we lost last summer? Have you even seen the east side of the pass? That burn was so out of control we’re lucky no one got killed.”
At the time I apologized sincerely and offered him more Penn Cove Mussels with ancho chile salsa, but I think that was the moment I realized that Hoodoo was so different from my old life I could take nothing for granted. In Hoodoo, I couldn’t even make jokes about the weather.
This morning Ranger Dave was sitting on the covered porch, dry and smug, sipping a mug of coffee. His long brown hair was loose and shaggy. He wore a Dalmation robe and a raccoon was draped around his shoulders like a stole. He fed it bites of cruller, which the raccoon grasped and ate in tiny delicate bites. The critter froze when he saw us jogging past, and Thor’s sonar went up. I sense the presence of something chaseable. But when I kept running, so did he.
Seeing Ranger Dave and his critter, I tensed, ready to spring. I cocked my arms back, my strides became jumpy and anxious. Then I watched in what seemed like super slo-mo as Ranger Dave clicked a button on his stopwatch.
Even though I was too far away to hear the noise it made, I heard the click and it sounded like the word go. Something shifted channels inside me and my pack and the landscape fell away. I was pure movement, a swift current, strong enough to flow over anything in my path.
Run, Ronnie, run.
And I did. I ran off the bunny carcasses, shredded and stringy. I ran off our move and my dad’s burnout. I ran off Mr. Armstrong’s worry. I ran off my own lost hopes of having friends with a future and having a future of my own.
A mile later I stopped and tagged the gas pump at Tiny’s Garage, my chest heaving. I brought my sweatshirt up to wipe the rain from my face. I looked above my head. There, with its narrow, twisty shoulders and thundering traffic, was the highway. Trucks thundered past carrying giant logs, mobile homes with bikes mounted on the rear, Audi SUVs with ski racks shedding snow—all on their way back to Portland. But not me. For me, this highway was as far as I could go. Any way further by foot was blocked. And today, like I did every Saturday, as I stood there confronted with my limit, I understood that I ran mostly because I couldn’t run away.
Tiny waved to me and flashed me the thumbs-up from behind the counter in his Minit-Mart. I had been speedy, but that didn’t matter to me now, because I had to turn around and go back. I allowed myself to trot a few paces, Thor matching me, Trixie and Bailey bounding energetically behind. I would sprint again at the ranger station.
But halfway there, Thor’s crooked sonar shot up. He wasn’t looking in the direction of Ranger Dave’s raccoon—he was looking down the embankment at the river.
I stood next to him and peered over the edge. The noise! It was so loud here! Lost lost lost… I could feel it building in my head, pulsing, pacing my heartbeat to its own rhythm.
Just below the rapids was a little eddy, a pool no larger than me. There was something sticking out of it, something an unnatural shade of blue. Whatever it was had snagged on a log and was making circles in the water.
I think I knew what it was even then. But I told myself: no. I told myself: it has to be something else. An abandoned dog, maybe. A tire. A canvas bag. A rusty bicycle.
Then I thought: Someone else must have seen this before me. I can’t be the first. Even now a competent neighbor is dialing 911. Then I remembered the lackadaisical way Ranger Dave drank his coffee and the thumbs-up Tiny flashed me when I ran past. No one could see what I was seeing and still saunter and sip coffee.
Then I realized: I was here. I was the help.
I climbed down the embankment, jumped in the eddy and unhooked the blue rain slicker from the log. The body stopped circling and the feet began to point downstream. I put two hands directly under the armpits. What I gripped was cold and sickeningly squishy. I pulled with all my strength. The body was still stuck.
I heaved again and there was a plop! Like a suction being broken, and the body came free. I pulled it out of the eddy and flipped it over on the bank.
The scalp on the side of her head flapped, her hair opening and closing like a trapdoor. I patted it back into place because I couldn’t look at it. And not because it was gross (there was no blood underneath, only swollen flesh), but because the effect was so awful it looked tacky, like a toupee.
Her face was brown with muddy water and I cleaned it off as best I could. Underneath, her features were bloated and pale. Her eyes were open but they weren’t looking at anything. Unfocused, they looked like white jelly.
I grasped her wrist, looking for a pulse. Her skin was no colder than mine. I brought my watch up to my face and began to count her pulse. Nothing. I couldn’t get a vein. I tried her neck and I still couldn’t find it. My hands were so shaky, I was bungling this.
Maybe I should go straight to CPR. I straddled her and pressed my palms into her sternum. Muddy water spewed from her mouth, but nothing else happened. She didn’t move; didn’t see.
What was I doing wrong? Maybe there was an obstruction. I turned her head to the side, plunged two fingers into her gunky mouth, and pulled out more mud and a couple of pebbles. Still no reaction. I reached further and further back into her throat. I kept thinking: I’m going to gag her. Come on. Why wasn’t anything happening? Maybe I wasn’t using enough force. I pulled my fingers out of her mouth and whacked her on the back, softly at first, then harder and harder. When I finally gave up and let go, she rolled onto her back like a log. Her arm flopped away from her body. It was as though she didn’t have any bones.
I rocked back on my heels. I had to be missing something. This was the world’s most incompetent rescue. Later, when we were both back at the inn sipping hot chocolate she was going to nail me for sure. Karen didn’t have any patience for my City Mouse ways. She would think there was no excuse for not being up to date on my CPR, just like there was no excuse for not knowing which way was north at all times.
I looked up. North didn’t help me here, where the trees made a canopy of everything and moss grew on every side of every trunk.
So what was I supposed to do next? I pulled off my jacket and covered her cold body. I was out of ideas. Thor, above me on the banks, had stopped whimpering and was now howling loudly, nose pointed at the low, gray sky. Trixie and Bailey joined in. Behind me, the river’s voice swelled. Lost! Lost! LOST! The howling and the rapids rose to one giant shriek that made my head throb, and I finally knew, because everything around me told me so, that I had failed.
I took the bank in two leaps. Here was something I could do: I could run. I could get help. Maybe it wasn’t too late. I took off past my pack to Ranger Dave’s.
I thought I had run quickly before; that was nothing compared to now. Now I ran so fast and my legs were so cold I couldn’t even feel them touch the ground.
I flew.
Even as I ran I knew she was dead, but that wasn’t the part that made me hysterical. It wasn’t even that the body was small, or that it wore a familiar blue rain slicker: it was the cross-shaped scar on the forehead—the same scar she’d gotten two months ago bouncing on a trampoline by the Kid for Sale sign.
3
There’s probably something you should know about Karen, which is that she was mine. Not literally, of course. She was ten years old. I would have had to give birth when I was in grade school.
No, Karen was mine in a way that her brothers and sister were not. She was my guide, and I was her rescuer.
I first met Karen last August. I’d been living in Hoodoo for three months. Patchworks had been rodent-free for two. Mom’s café and the Astro Lounge were already thriving, thanks to a sign on the highway:
GAS FOOD LODGING
CLAIRE SEVERANCE’S
PATCHWORKS INN
3 MILES →
That Saturday the weather was still good, the river was low, and risk of forest fire was high. I was a mile into my run when I heard crying. I closed my eyes and the listened. It wasn’t the river. The river noise was gentle and atmospheric: the kind of ambient sound you’d hear in a psychiatrist’s waiting room. (Unfortunately, I knew exactly what that was like from waiting for my dad.)
No, the crying was coming from somewhere else.
I drew up to the house with the Kid for Sale sign in front and the sound grew louder. We’d driven past this house before. I knew the sign meant baby goats for sale, and not the children bouncing on a trampoline in the front yard.
But that day one of them was off the trampoline and wailing in the gravel driveway. She was the source of the crying.
I slowed my pace and walked up to the girl. She was sitting in a heap with her back to me. There was no one else around. “You’re okay, right?” I said, more to myself than her. I didn’t want to stop—I wanted to keep going. I had no desire to know my neighbors.
Then the little girl turned around, still wailing, and I saw that her forehead was a mass of blood and gravel, drenching her cheeks and pooling in her eyes. I didn’t know what to do. I only knew I couldn’t stand still. “Stay here,” I told her. “I’ll be back with help.”
I sprinted up the drive to a small red house. The front door was open and I knocked lightly. Inside, a short blond woman was putting away groceries (canned tomatoes, canned beans, canned mushrooms—Mom would have had a fit. Canned beans she could probably understand, but she said canned mushrooms tasted like rubber).
“Excuse me,” I said.
She turned to me; her face was thin and haggard, and it fell a bit, as though she knew what I was going to say before I said it.
“I think your little girl fell off the trampoline.”
She placed a can on the counter and it rolled off and into the sink. She didn’t even notice.
Continues...
Excerpted from Dark River by Beaufrand, Mary Jane Copyright © 2012 by Beaufrand, Mary Jane. Excerpted by permission.
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