Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,9

he wake up for those?”

She took her hands from my shoulders and stepped back. “Go apologize to him,” she said.

Which made no sense. If he was too deeply asleep for cold water to slap him awake, how could he hear me say I was sorry?

And that, right there, was the first time I understood how complicated hope could be.

But all I said was “Sorry.” Because I was. Sorry that she had lost so much. That she might lose even more.

“Say it to him,” she said, turning away.

I bumped into Esther as she bustled out of his bedroom, her arms full of wet bedclothes.

“That was a terrible thing to do,” she said. “Do you want him to get sick?”

Which I ignored. None of us wanted him sick.

But sick he was.

And after months of watching him lie there, I was suddenly convinced I could do something about it.

My mother would have called that pride.

My sister: stupidity.

My brother: silliness.

But it was my father whose opinion mattered most.

“Daddy,” I whispered into his ear, up close, though a sourness had replaced the good, clean sweat, woodsmoke, dusty dog smell he’d had before. “Mother says I have to apologize to you, so here: This is my apology.” I paused and took a long breath. “I’m sorry if that water was cold.”

But, like Esther had said before, if was quite a word.

“I’m sorry,” I amended, “that the water was so cold. But I wanted you to feel it.”

I told him about the puppy. About Quiet waking in the cold water.

“You felt it, too, didn’t you?” I asked, but he didn’t move again. Not even a little.

I leaned away from him, looked toward the empty door, leaned back. “We’re in a bad way without you, Daddy. Mother is tired all the time and never laughs. Never. Hasn’t sung or played her mandolin since you got hurt. Samuel acts like a kid, but he’s as sad as a stump. I can tell. And Esther thinks she’s got to be grown up all at once.” I paused and gathered myself.

“And I want to burn down every tree on the mountain.” And I did. Though I didn’t. I loved trees. Even the dead ones. Even the one that had hurt my father as it fell. “It’s terrible without you, Daddy. We need you back.”

It wasn’t a lullaby.

No more lullabies from me.

“And you’re the only one who knows it wasn’t my fault,” I said, my voice breaking.

Although that wasn’t really true.

I knew it, too.

And maybe someone else, watching from the woods.

But none of that would matter, if he woke up.

When he woke up.

Before I left the room, I kissed my father on his head. On the scar there.

It felt like a map against my lips.

So I followed it.

* * *

—

For lunch, my mother and Esther and Samuel ate johnnycakes and eggs fried in butter.

I ate gruel.

“You need to learn a thing or two,” my mother said, though there wasn’t much bite in her bark. “Next time you have a wild idea, maybe you’ll think twice.”

“Or thrice,” Esther said. Every hair on her head was in place. Her shirt was buttoned at the cuffs. She was only three years older than me, but she acted like she lived in an older world. A smarter world. One where everything followed the rules, though I knew there was no such place.

So I ate my gruel in silence, and I washed the dishes without complaint. If that was the price for heeding the flame in my chest, it was a small one.

Then I took the table scraps—which we’d all left deliberately on our plates, hungry as we were—out to Maisie and fed them to her bit by bit while she lay in the straw, the puppies again at her milk. She was as thirsty and hungry as they were, and she licked my hand over and over until every trace of the food was gone. And then she drank the milk I’d brought her, as they drank hers.

Slowly, slowly, I reached out toward the puppies, and she did not object as I touched their tiny heads, lingering over Quiet, who pressed back briefly against my hand as if to say, I’m busy now but just wait. I’ll be along soon enough.

Then I left the shed and walked up the path and, after a bit, into the woods, through a hemlock grove so full of shadows that almost nothing grew between the trunks of the old trees, the deep layer of dead needles underfoot like the soft