Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,47

a tune she sang under her breath as she worked.

I listened to that song with every kind of ear I had.

Esther had gone to fetch some firewood, something I usually did, for which I was grateful, though I had not forgotten that standing guard over my father had been, just an hour earlier, her first purpose. That I had been, just an hour earlier, a threat.

Samuel had joined me at the kitchen table and was drawing a picture of a black snake. “So I can show Daddy what was in his bed while he was sleeping.”

The snake looked about three times longer than the bed in the picture. It had a forked tongue and a wild eye.

“Whatever happened to that snake?” I asked my mother as she diced a yellow turnip for the stew.

She paused for a moment. “I would have put it in a soup. I would have chopped it up and put it in a soup . . . if I had caught it before it escaped down the drain.”

She turned to look at me, the knife poised in her hand. “But I was glad I didn’t kill it when I realized it could never have found its own way into your father’s bed with the door shut as it was.”

“Snake soup,” Samuel muttered, his head low over his work. “That’s silly, Mother.” By now the snake in his picture had acquired a set of enormous fangs. “Nobody eats snake soup.”

“Maybe not, if they have something better to eat,” my mother said. “But some people don’t, you know.”

I thought of Cate and Captan.

“I’m going to show this to Daddy,” Samuel said, hoisting the picture like a flag.

“Don’t you wake him up,” my mother said. “He needs his rest.”

And I was amazed, once again, by the idea that she wanted him to sleep now that he had finally awakened. I wanted him up, on his feet, wearing that belt, those gloves and boots, a hat on his poor, battered head, ready for what came next.

“What will we do now?” I said.

My mother gave me a puzzled look. “That’s a broad question, Ellie.”

“I mean when he wakes again. Will we get him up so he can walk?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. It’s too soon for that.” She sighed. “We have to be patient. It might take a long time for him to be well again. And he’ll need all of us to help him. I know you’ll do a lot of that work.” She stirred the stew. “It’s too bad you’re not a boy, Ellie. You have all the makings of a fine doctor.”

It wasn’t possible to live without a heart that could beat, but I still managed to stay right where I was, upright, when she said that.

I’d never thought about being a doctor—that wasn’t the word that had ever come to mind—but doing the work to wake my father and mend Cate had made me feel so very good that I wanted to be more like that girl. The one who tried to make people well. The one Cate needed. To help her heal. To be the reason she got better. Or one of the reasons.

One would be enough.

“I’m going back up the mountain to take care of Miss Cate,” I said slowly.

I remembered the last words my mother had said on that subject: If I find out that you’ve been back up to see her . . . I don’t know what I’ll do.

This time, she spent a long moment looking at me before she said, “I just told you that your father would need a lot of help. And you haven’t had a lesson in days. You can’t go without lessons. And—”

“Miss Cate taught Larkin to read. And she’s already taught me how to heal a festering wound.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” my mother said. “If you had, I would have said that I’m surprised you would rather help a stranger than your own father, especially since you worked so hard to wake him up. And you want to leave? Now? When he’s only just come back?”

“But that’s why I have to go,” I said, learning the reason as I said it. “He’s on his way home to us, and she’s the one leaving. She’s the one who needs help the most.”

But my mother just shook her head. “You confuse me, Ellie. Every time I turn around, you’re wearing a different face. One minute you’re beating a path back and forth to your father’s door, and