Once Upon a River Page 0,65
needed that? The river had just two directions, upstream and down. A screech owl whinnied, and Margo whinnied back with a sound so mournful she spooked herself.
Junior didn’t come around the next day, and a week passed and he still didn’t come. Once she thought she saw him driving down the road toward her, but Joanna was in the passenger seat, so Margo stayed hidden in the ditch behind the black-eyed Susans. If Junior or his friends showed up at the marijuana house, she’d offer to cook fish for them or catch a snapping turtle and fry up the meat. How nice it would be to feed somebody, to have some company. After the second week, she decided that if Junior didn’t show up soon, she would go to the Murray house and throw rocks at his bedroom window.
Margo stole enough food to feed herself, never too much from any one garden, and drank water from the spring. She saw a few of the Slocum kids, including Julie, come to the spring to fill their jugs and buckets. Margo would have liked to talk to Julie, but if she was still the tattler she always had been, she would tell everyone Margo was there. She wished she had made the effort to talk to Julie during the last year in Murrayville, but back then she’d been unable to shake her anger at her cousin for telling Crane what she’d seen in the shed.
As July melted into August, Margo listened to gangs of newly fledged robins picking at the underbrush in such numbers that the woods floor seemed alive. She watched nuthatches spiral down trees headfirst to the ground and back up again. She watched turkey vultures spiral high above, searching by scent for those creatures that had not survived the summer. And Margo still did not see police boats searching the river for her.
She rediscovered her favorite old mossy places in the Murray woods, where there grew lichens, fiddlehead ferns, and toadstools—some of them brightly colored. She searched for giant puffball mushrooms and chicken-of-the-woods, and each evening at dusk she watched thousands of fireflies charge and discharge. She kept herself hidden as best she could, and was happily surprised that nobody came around to investigate the modest fire she burned each evening and put out each morning. She kept her belongings in the boat, which she covered with her old green tarp and branches. Unless it was raining, she stayed outside. She collected pine needles to create a soft bed beside her campfire, and she gathered mattress stuffing into a plastic bag to make a soft pillow. She found that on the nights when she felt safe and comfortable under the stars, on the nights when she had fed herself well, that was when she felt particularly lonely. Loving a person the way she had loved Michael was something she couldn’t shake off or be done with when it was over. Even having lost Brian saddened her; she had come to know him so well and had learned so much from him, and now the part of her that had been Brian’s companion was of no use.
Michael had given her a regional map with Lake Lynne on it, and they’d discovered that her mother’s road ran alongside the big lake, which was almost a mile across and five miles long. Maybe there was a way to get there by water, if only Margo could get her heavy boat around the dam at Confluence. If only she weren’t, in her grandfather’s words, stuck on the Stark. Margo usually kept the map in her Annie Oakley book, but one night, while sitting at her fire, she tore out the portion of the map surrounding her mother’s place and put it in her wallet so she’d always have it close at hand.
After dark, if the weather was mild, Margo rowed the several miles downstream into town, stood on the unlit iron walking bridge over the waterfall in the park, where a dammed pond flowed into a little stream that led to the river. She walked past the small brick high school she had been so eager to leave every day, and she wondered if she should have tried harder to be more like other kids. She couldn’t see herself ever being very much different than she was, but maybe when she had a chance to make friends in the future she would try harder.
Margo sometimes ate leftover pizza slices from the dumpster behind