Chapter 4 #3
Taylor nodded rapidly. “It’s time.” Then she pulled out a baby book and laid it on the table between them.
Its cover was padded fabric with rearing mustangs, and when she opened the book, Willow gulped.
There was her mother, so much younger, in a hospital bed, holding a tiny newborn baby.
He had a thick head of black hair, a comically turned-up nose, and intense brown eyes.
He looked like a wise, nut-brown elf who knew all the secrets of the universe.
“What’s that on his wrist?”
“A bracelet. Made by a shaman as a gift.”
“Shaman? What shaman?” Willow asked.
Taylor smiled, her gaze turning inward. “Turtle. An old friend of your father’s.
We thought he’d passed, but…it arrived at the hospital within minutes of his birth with a blank card that had a turtle on it.
” She focused on the photo again. “Your dad put it on him the day he was born. A bond to his family, clan, and tribe. See the wolf stone in the center?”
“I see it.”
“When your father put it on him, he…” Her mother made a soft sound and Willow turned to her.
“Maybe I can’t do this after all,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry, Willow. I’m sorry. Can you…?
” She closed the book and dropped it back into the strongbox atop baby blankets and clothes. “Just take it, can you? I can’t…”
She got up, and Willow did, too.
Her mother hugged her. “Sorry, honey. I love you.” Then she turned and went to the staircase and up it without looking back.
Willow closed her eyes and swore under her breath. Sighing, she texted Drew.
Project Wolf. Meet at my OLD place ASAP
Drew responded with a thumbs-up emoji.
Willow left her mom’s house, carrying the strongbox in front of her. It was heavy, but not from its contents. The box itself was heavy.
By the time she’d trudged down the long stretch of driveway between her parents’ house and the guest cottage where she’d lived before moving in with Jeremiah, Drew was already pulling in.
Her rusty gray 1988 VW Jetta with its squared off headlights and boxy grill rumbled closer. It was the most fuel-efficient model she could afford on her own income. Drew parked and jumped out, then ran ahead to open the cottage door. “What is it?”
“Everything, I think.” Willow carried the box inside with Drew on her heels. She set it on the coffee table and took off the lid. “Mom started to show me, then she kind of lost it.” Her throat convulsed so hard it hurt. “I’ve never seen her like this.”
“You messed up. You know that, right?” Drew moved through the place like she owned it, heading into the kitchen, opening the fridge. Willow didn’t live there, but she still kept supplies on hand for cousin meetings and the like.
Drew came back with two Cokes, passing one to Willow before dropping onto the sofa.
Willow took the baby book out of the box, set it on the coffee table, then looked to see what else was inside. Baby blankets, baby clothes, booties, a little plastic hospital bracelet with “Jonathon Wolf Brand” on it.
Drew was turning pages in the baby book. “His birth certificate. Oh, look, his little footprints!”
Willow set the hospital bracelet down and scooted closer to Drew as she turned pages.
So many shots of that baby boy. That other bracelet, the one gifted to him by a shaman, was on his chubby wrist in every single photo.
There were shots of Willow’s dad holding him, Willow’s mom holding him, and the three of them posing in the most beautiful baby-makes-three shots ever taken.
Dozens of photographs of Johnny Wolf with each of his uncles and most of his aunts, each photo with his age underneath in days.
They didn’t go past fifteen.
The last photo was of him in a car seat in the back of an SUV Willow had never seen, with “Sky Dancer Ranch” painted on the side. Underneath, it said, “Fifteen days old and ready for his first checkup.”
God, that had to be his final day. “Drew!”
Drew jumped, startled. “What?”
“I think this is the day it happened. On his way for his first checkup.”
“Oh God,” Drew whispered, leaning nearer the photo.
Taylor was smiling in the picture, crouched beside the car near the car seat in that very driveway Willow just walked, while someone else took the shot.
“That’s heartbreaking,” Drew said. “Wait, is he wearing a bracelet?”
One pudgy baby hand had extricated itself from the woven receiving blanket in which the baby was swaddled, as if reaching for the camera.
Wrapped around his wrist was that leather bracelet, lined in beads, white with blue around the edges, and the name “WOLF” spelled out in turquoise and carnelian.
The letter O was a moonstone with an intricately carved wolf’s head in its face.
Drew pulled out her phone and took a photo of the printed photograph. “A scan would be better, but later. This is good for now.”
“The bracelet’s native-made,” Willow said. “A gift from a shaman, Mom said.”
“The blanket’s Native too, and distinctive,” Drew added.
“We found the blanket,” said a deep voice. Willow’s dad had come in and stood in the open door of the guest cottage. “It was tangled on some branches in a stretch of rough current, way downriver.”
“But no baby,” Willow whispered.
Wes shook his head, slow and sad. “Rangers said wildlife prob’ly…” He closed his eyes, shuddered.
Drew whispered, “Where, Uncle Wes? Where, exactly, was the blanket found?”
The way his eyes looked when he opened them compelled Willow to add, “We want to do a ceremony for him. Just us cousins.”
Wes’s eyes focused on hers, and she knew he was looking for the lie. She held his gaze, defiant. He couldn’t stop her from trying to find out what had happened to her brother. She wouldn’t let him stop her. Her mom didn’t have to know.
They were locked that way, in ocular combat, until Wes sighed and said, “It’s right at the border of Big Bend.
Rapids after that. Even if he made it that far, there’s no way he could’ve…
” Again, he let his words trail off. “A ceremony’ll be good for you, I guess.
Maybe you need it. Just…don’t mention it to your mother. ”
“Is she okay?”
Wes nodded. “She’s stronger now than she was back then.
Hell, that experience is probably what made her stronger once she…
came back to herself.” He met Willow’s eyes and his were bleak.
“For a while I wasn’t sure she would. I thought I’d lost the both of ’em.
” He reached out and pushed Willow’s long, dark hair behind one ear.
“You’re so much like her. You healed us when you came along.
As much as we could be healed. You’re our miracle. Never doubt it.”
“Oh, Dad.” She rose and hugged him and he hugged her back.
“If you have questions, you can ask me. I’m not mad at you. You have a right to know about your brother.”
She pressed her lips and nodded against his shoulder. “Thanks, Dad.”
“The thing is, uh, if you do go diggin’, there won’t be much to find.”
“What do you mean?” Drew was the one who asked.
Willow was too busy trying to put it together in her mind.
“Your mom was falling apart. The flood took her baby right out of her arms and that was just too good a story. If it’d hit the papers or the townsfolk had known—she couldn’t have handled that. So we kept it quiet.”
“That’s what Uncle Garrett said,” she murmured.
“Garrett being Sheriff helped. He could have every resource out there looking for him without it being front-page news. We told folks he’d passed, and that was all. Most assumed SIDS, and we let ’em.”
“But, Dad, couldn’t the press have helped?” Willow asked, the breaks in her words echoing those in her heart. “What if someone found him or something?”
He lowered his head. “You don’t know how much we prayed for that. And Garret left no stone unturned. But once we found the blanket, we knew.” When he raised his head again, his eyes were wet. “You’ll see.”
Camellia
Camellia left the public library, jogging down the steps to the sidewalk, taking out her favorite hair pin on the way.
It was six inches long and made of jade.
She’d been nine years old and on a family vacation, seeing the sights in San Francisco with her mom and dad.
She’d spotted a whale on that trip and seals basking in the ocean.
They’d stopped at a souvenir shop in Chinatown.
Camellia’s hair had been long her entire life, way beyond her shoulders. She loved her hair and rarely cut it. But it had been hot that day, and she remembered wishing she’d brought a scrunchy to put her hair up.
The shop was cool, and everything in it was fascinating, exotic, and bright.
There were dragons in red and black and green, and statues of milky white glass, and fans and vases and fountains.
She’d been admiring the hairpins in the glass case, particularly the jade, with the intricate carvings all along its length and Chinese letters spelling out words.
“You like the hairpins?” asked an elderly woman, probably the owner.
“Yeah, but they’d never work for me,” she’d said. “Too much hair.” She’d shaken her locks a little as she’d said it.
“You just have to know how. Come here. Sit right here. I’ll show you.” As she said it, the old woman opened the case and took out the jade hairpin Camellia had been admiring.
She’d sent an eager smile her mom’s way, and got the go-ahead nod. So she scooted up onto the small stool the lady had indicated. There was a mirror on a stand on the counter, and the lady turned it around so Camellia could watch her work.
She gathered her hair up, twisted it around, but not tightly, and wove the hairpin in and out and through, resulting in a delightfully messy bun. “There, you see? Easy.” The whole thing had taken about three seconds.
Camellia had loved the look and adopted it on the spot.
“What are the words?” she’d asked.
“Love fearlessly.”
“Good words,” her dad had said, pulling out his wallet. “It looks too pretty on her to leave behind.”
As she tapped over the sidewalk in front of the library, heading back to her car, Camellia caught her hair in both hands, smoothed it, re-twisted it, and stuck the hairpin back through.
It had become a habit to undo and redo the messy bun.
No two were ever alike. She sometimes did it to channel frustration, and she was definitely frustrated.
She’d found absolutely nothing about a missing baby. The flood, yes, and the timing of it fit, but no mention of a missing baby
“How can there not be anything?”
She wanted to see Wolf again. She wanted it more than was smart and more than was healthy. It had been three days and her eagerness to see him worried her, because she was determined they could only be friends. She would not put herself in harm’s way ever again.
They could be friends only. And that could work.
She liked him; he was easy to be around.
But she needed a reason to see him, and she hadn’t found a thing.
Nothing. No mention in any newspaper of a missing baby anywhere upstream of the park around the time of the flash flood.
She’d turned up nothing on the net either. It was weird, was what it was.
Could Cilla have lied?
It seemed unlikely she’d go to all the trouble to falsify those journals twenty-eight years ahead of time. Okay, so what if she didn’t lie, what if she just got her facts wrong?
Maybe poor Wolf hadn’t washed down the river at all. Maybe somebody had left him there, close enough to a campsite to ensure he’d be found. It was a weird way to abandon a baby, but it seemed more likely than a newborn surviving a trip down the Rio Grande without a boat.
She’d said he was a newborn, but Camellia wondered if a fourteen-year-old girl would be very good at guessing a baby’s age.
She took out her key fob and unlocked her car. Her phone rang as soon as she did, and she took it from her shoulder bag while sliding behind the wheel, glanced at the number, which she did not recognize, and answered it anyway. Could be a new client. “You’ve got Camellia Rio,” she said.
“Who is he?” said the voice she’d hoped to never hear again.
Frost formed over her veins. She found the end call button with her thumb and threw the phone away from her, onto the passenger seat, wanting to wash her hands.
It immediately rang again. And again. She waited until it stopped and then, her hands shaking, she reached across the car to pick the phone up. She turned it to face her and tapped on the dots beside recent calls. The dropdown menu included “BLOCK CALLER.”
It rang again before she could touch it, and it startled her so badly she hit answer instead of end. And in the instant she realized it, her fear turned to anger, rose up in her chest, and exited in a rush through her lips. “Leave me alone, you fucking psychopath!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey…”
It was not the voice she’d expected. It was Wolf’s voice. She closed her eyes, whispered his name with a question mark after. “Wolf?”
“Where are you?”
“Public library. Parked in front.”
“Okay, I know the area. Go around the block. There’s a bar on the other side, Joe’s Place. I’ll be there in five.”
She looked around and wondered if Earl was out there watching her the way he used to. Or at her house, watching it and her mom. Her mom!
“I’ll wait here instead. Parking’s crap over there. Pick me up?” The truth was she didn’t trust herself to drive. Her hands were shaking. Her heart was racing.
There was the slightest hesitation before he replied, “Sure. Sure I will, Camellia. I’ll be there soon.”