Chapter 2
2
Bliss
Twenty-Four Years Before
A butterfly with bright blue and yellow wings wafted past eight-year-old Bliss Morgan’s nose, coming so close that she felt the tiniest whisper of a breeze against her skin.
She stood perfectly still, forgetting for a moment that her mother had taken off again, just a week ago, that her dad was lying drunk in the abandoned camper-trailer they’d been squatting in for a full month now, even that she was hungry. And she willed that butterfly to land on her outstretched hand, if only for a second or two, so that she could admire it up close.
The butterfly didn’t cooperate—Bliss hadn’t really expected it to—though she couldn’t help a sigh of disappointment.
She was used to hoping for things that never seemed to happen, though, so she recovered quickly.
She found a moss-covered block of a headstone and sat down.
The small cemetery, hidden away in the woods behind the Big House—Bettencourt Hall, it was called—was a favorite refuge, one of several secret places where her father wouldn’t bother to look for her.
Not that he ever actually did that.
He just stood in the doorway of that rusted and dented metal cubicle they currently called home and bellowed her name.
Thankfully, that wouldn’t be happening anytime soon; he’d come home from town late the night before, causing the camper to groan with the shifting of his weight as he bumbled toward the bench behind the tiny table and fell flat on his stupid face.
Bliss, still perched on the familiar headstone, which belonged to someone named Charles C. Bettencourt III, bent from the waist to pluck a ghostly dandelion from the tall grass.
She closed her eyes, made a wish that her mom would come back, and blew. Hard.
Moments later, she blinked, because all of the sudden her eyes stung, then watched as wispy little dandelion trees floated off into the sunlight, and she hid her wish away in her heart, along with all the others that probably wouldn’t come true.
Meanwhile, birds chirped and chattered in the surrounding trees—oak, maple and birch, fir and pine, and the breeze rustled in the grass, like the footfalls of a passing fairy tribe, on its way to somewhere wonderful.
Bliss believed in fairies.
Even in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, though she knew she was too old, at eight, according to her recently vanished mother, for such silliness.
Ideas like that were for rich kids, Mona had said.
She never got tired of reminding Bliss that they were a poor family, mainly because her dad, Duke, was a good-for-nothing drunkard with an allergy to hard work and a penchant for rambling from one ass-end-of-nowhere town to another.
Mona preferred big cities and bright lights to poopholes like Painted Pony Creek, Montana, she’d said, and two weeks ago, just when the pinto beans and other stuff from the food bank had begun to run out, she’d taken off, Mona had.
Didn’t even say goodbye.
But, then, she never did.
She’d be back one day, all smiles, with presents from the dime store and a thousand excuses for disappearing. Again.
Bliss felt sad, recalling the last time Mona had hit the road, when Bliss had come home from another favorite retreat, the hidden place where the creek, wide and rushing, bent like an elbow, splashing against big rocks, throwing up a silvery mist that struck her little-girl fancy as magical.
Liquid fairy dust.
It was magical, that hideaway spot, at least sometimes.
Bliss had seen and heard strange things there. Other nearby places, too.
Her dad would say she was imagining the stuff that went on where the creek bent, and maybe she was.
Bliss didn’t care.
It was okay to imagine things, and it was okay to believe in them.
The way she’d decided that Jolly Old Saint Nick and the Big Rabbit were real, even if they never brought her anything.
Bliss liked to make up people and places and things.
She’d lived a hundred interesting lives, just by deciding to believe.
She believed in another family, for instance, with a father who showered and shaved and worked at a real job, and a mother who kept their nice house clean and made a lot of money selling cosmetics door-to-door and at parties.
In her imaginary family, she had sisters and brothers.
Two of each.
She had a big goofy dog named Ruffles.
She went to school, where she got smarter every single day, and she had friends, too. Lots of them. They played jump rope and hide-and-seek and tag, and Santa visited all their houses every Christmas Eve, leaving stockings bulging with toys and candy, and still more presents under the great, glittering tree in front of the picture window in the living room.
Oh, yes. Bliss was very good at believing.
And sometimes she believed so hard that her invented family seemed almost real enough to touch.
She dreamed about them at night, when she wasn’t sucked into nightmares—her real dad yelling at her real mom, and sometimes hitting her. Mona screeching insults and using her fingernails on Duke’s face like claws.
Bliss dreaded the bad dreams.
That was why she always practiced being with her other family in her mind, right before she went to sleep. Most of the time, the trick worked, and she ended up where she wanted to go.
A twig snapped, jolting Bliss out of her mixed-up thoughts, and she straightened her spine. Smoothed her grubby jeans shorts and too-tight T-shirt and summoned up a smile.
Her front teeth were crooked, so Bliss was self-conscious about her smile.
Mona said she’d need braces.
Her dad, Duke, said they needed lots of things, and braces were way down on the list.
Then Madison appeared, as pretty as the butterfly Bliss had glimpsed earlier, holding a big basket by its handle.
Madison was the kind of girl Bliss’s mom and dad scoffed at. A rich kid, probably spoiled, with no real interest in making friends with grubby little girls who lived in sheds, tents, abandoned houses, and campers forgotten in the woods.
Except that Madison wasn’t spoiled, or mean, either.
She wore good clothes, brand-new from the looks of them, and her face was always shiny-clean, like her thick brown hair.
Today, it was pulled back into a tidy ponytail that bounced when she walked.
Bliss felt a faint twinge of envy; her own hair was dirty-blond, tangled and matted in places. Her clothes were old, fished out of dumpsters or bought at garage sales.
Madison beamed at her, her big eyes bright.
“I brought food,” she said, approaching. “Sandwiches and fruit and cupcakes.”
Sandwiches, fruit and cupcakes.
Bliss’s stomach rumbled. She’d found some blackberries growing near one of the special places earlier that day, and last night, she’d eaten a piece of cold pizza, not daring to take more than one, because her dad would get mad if she did.
Madison set the basket down, opened it, and took out a red-and-black-checked blanket, spreading it efficiently in the wide, grassy spot between Abigail Flannery Bettencourt, 1900–1918, and Franklin J. Bettencourt, 1923–1940.
Once the blanket was down, Madison bent her long, tanned legs and knelt. Like Bliss, Madison was eight years old; in the fall, she said, she’d be in the third grade.
So far, Bliss’s education had been patchy, at best—during rare visits to her grandmother’s house in Missoula, she’d been sent to school, and Granny H, Mona’s mom, had taught her to read and count—but she knew she was smart.
She listened.
She thought about stuff.
She borrowed from the free library down by the road, which wasn’t a library at all, really, but a wooden box stuck on top of a short, splintery pole. There was a door in the front, and folks exchanged books there by swapping out the ones they’d read for the ones they hadn’t.
Sometimes, there was a sleeve of crackers inside, or a candy bar.
Bliss was always glad when that happened.
“Come on,” Madison urged when Bliss hesitated. “Let’s eat. Estelle, my grandmother’s housekeeper, made chicken salad for our sandwiches, and there are sliced strawberries and green grapes, too.” Another broad smile lit Madison’s pretty face and danced in her eyes, which changed from green to gray to light brown, depending on what she was wearing or what mood the sky happened to be in at the time.
Today, they were green, like the worn sea glass Bliss had gathered when she and her mom and dad had lived, very briefly, in a cramped, run-down apartment someplace in California.
Mona had loved California.
Duke had hated the traffic and all the fancy people looking down their noses at him, thinking they were better.
So they’d moved on, as always.
Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico—and now, Montana.
Though Duke was already making noises about loading their belongings into the back of his ancient black truck and heading out for wherever the road might take them.
Bliss worried her mom wouldn’t be able to find them if they left before she got back.
“Bliss?” Madison prompted.
Bliss shook off the sad feeling she got whenever she thought about moving on to somewhere new and starting over. She didn’t like living in the camper—it was small and there were spiders and holes in the floor, and the toilet didn’t work—but the special places were here, just outside Painted Pony Creek, Montana.
She wanted to cry, just to think of leaving them.
But the prospect of real food cheered her right up.
She joined Madison on the blanket, both of them sitting cross-legged, with the basket beside them, overflowing with good things to eat.
“My grandmother thinks I made you up,” Madison said, once they’d both helped themselves to a thick, delicious sandwich. The bread was soft and fresh, and there weren’t any blue spots on it anywhere, nothing Bliss had to pick off with her fingers. “She says you’re an imaginary friend.”
Bliss chewed, slowly and carefully, then swallowed.
“I’m pretty sure I’m real,” she replied. “But you never know.”
She had, it was true, considered the possibility that Madison might be a made-up person, though. The friend she’d always wanted—clean and pretty and smart. Funny and kindhearted, too. Never judgy.
Madison often brought food along when she came to the cemetery, usually snacks in little colorful bags meant for one person, plus apples or bananas and, sometimes, candy or homemade cookies.
“You could come to my house,” Madison suggested, chewing. “Then Coralee would know you’re an actual, flesh-and-blood person.”
Madison was the only person Bliss knew who called her own grandmother by her first name. Her mom and dad were only Duke and Mona in her mind.
Bliss shifted uncomfortably on the scratchy blanket. The fabric rubbed against her bare legs and made them itch.
“My dad would lose it if I went to somebody’s place without telling him.”
A mischievous twinkle sparked in Madison’s eyes. Her lashes were long and thick, and her teeth were whiter than white, like the people on TV had.
Not that Bliss got to watch much TV these days.
There was no electricity in the camper.
No running water, either.
Suddenly, Bliss felt dirty. She longed for that Other Mother, the made-up one who let her take bubble baths and kept her hair squeaky-clean, brushed and braided. With pretty colored ribbons woven through.
“You don’t have to tell your dad,” Madison said, lowering her voice a little.
Bliss scrunched up her nose and narrowed her eyes. “He’d know,” she said.
“Okay,” Madison replied. Her voice was gentle. “Could I come to your house, then? Maybe if your dad met me, he’d let you come for a sleepover or supper or something.”
Bliss had seen Madison’s home, the back of it at least, from a hiding spot in the trees out beyond the clotheslines.
It was big and white, that house, with a lot of windows and a screened-in porch.
The porch alone was bigger than the camper Bliss lived in.
She shook her head. She might be willing to disobey her dad, under the right circumstances, but setting foot inside Madison Bettencourt’s huge house was out of the question.
What if being there was so nice that her heart would split in two, since she surely wouldn’t be allowed to stay long?
What if she broke something, something precious and expensive?
What if Madison’s grandma took one look at Bliss, with her bare, dirty feet and her awful clothes, and ordered her outside?
That had happened to Bliss before, though the houses she’d visited had been much smaller than Madison’s, and not nearly so fancy. Other kids’ moms didn’t trust her—they thought she might have head lice, or something else that was catching or that she’d steal something.
Sometimes, they’d given her food, half-filled bottles of shampoo, bars of soap, clothes their own kids had outgrown or simply gotten tired of, but sooner or later they always frowned at her and said something like, “Go outside and play,” or, “Run along home now. We’re about to have supper.”
When she’d brought home the clothes and shampoo and soap—she only made that mistake once—Mona had flown into a furious fit of indignation, tearing the little T-shirt and the jeans into rags, throwing the other things into the garbage.
“We’re not charity cases!” Mona had shrieked, causing Bliss to tremble in her worn-out sneakers. “How dare that woman give us her castoffs, like we’re beggars or something?!”
Bliss hadn’t had an answer, and she’d fled the living space of the moment—it had been a cheap and very dirty motel room that time—to hide until her mom and dad had both left to do the things they did when they went to town.
“Do you think I’m a charity case?” she asked now, watching as Madison took two bottles of ice-cold soda from the basket and handed one to Bliss.
“No,” Madison responded matter-of-factly. “Coralee would probably toss you in the shower, brush out your hair and outfit you in new clothes, but she’s like that. If she sees a need, she wants to fill it.”
“That’s charity, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s kindness,” Madison said, after a few moments of consideration. “Just because someone wants to be nice to you, and give you things, it doesn’t mean they think you’re a bum.”
Bliss felt a pang of—something. “My dad’s a bum,” she said. “Granny H says so.” A pause, a breath. “What’s your dad like? And your mom? I bet she’s pretty, your mom, and dresses up real nice every day, and goes places like the library and the supermarket and bingo and church.”
A look of infinite sadness spread across Madison’s face like a shadow. “My mom and dad are dead,” she said. “They fell off a mountain when I was four. That’s when I came to live with my grandmother.”
“Oh,” said Bliss, and that was all, because she didn’t know what else to say in the face of such an enormous loss.
Madison took another bite of her sandwich. “Why do you come here, Bliss? To the cemetery, I mean?”
Because it’s one of my special places , Bliss thought, but didn’t say. Special places were also secret places, and she rarely spoke of them.
She raised one skinny little shoulder in a shrug. “It’s nice here. And sometimes you show up, and bring sandwiches, or cookies, or apples or pears.” She paused, finished off her fancy chicken salad sandwich. Helped herself to a sprig of plump green grapes, the kind that made her mouth water before she even tasted them. “Why do you come here? You must have your own bedroom and books and a bicycle and everything.”
“I do,” Madison said, but she sounded sad again. “Don’t you?”
“No,” Bliss replied, unwilling to share the full truth, that she lived in an old camper someone had left behind in the woods, and long since forgotten. That her dad was an ornery drunk and her mom tended to run off whenever life got too hard.
“Will you be going to school in Painted Pony Creek, or over in Silver Hills, like I do?” Madison asked.
Bliss crushed a fat grape between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, loving the explosion of tart sweetness that followed.
What would it be like to live in a house where there were grapes to eat, whenever you wanted, and lots of other wonderful things in the fridge, there for the taking?
“I’m homeschooled,” she answered, after a few moments had passed.
That was what Mona told the social workers, whenever they tracked her down, though Duke and Mona’s idea of homeschooling was to toss a tattered textbook her way, whenever they managed to score one from a library sale or the thrift shop, and tell her to get busy and smarten up a little.
Madison’s forehead crumpled into a frown, though Bliss didn’t feel looked down on, seeing her friend’s expression. “Really?”
For Bliss, learning was catch-as-catch-can.
She could read as well as anybody, though, and she knew some big words. She could name all fifty states and the first sixteen presidents, clear up to Abraham Lincoln.
He was her favorite, Abraham Lincoln.
She liked his beard and his stovepipe hat and the way he enjoyed making jokes.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Madison asked, her tone conversational now.
“A doctor,” Bliss said. “Or maybe a pole dancer.”
Madison laughed, though not in a mean way. “A pole dancer?”
“They make a lot of money,” Bliss replied matter-of-factly. “What about you?”
“More than anything,” Madison said, looking and sounding wistful now, “I want to have a family. A real family, with me for the mom, and a nice husband and three or four kids.”
“Four would be a handful,” Bliss commented, after considering the idea for a moment or so. “Mona says that’s what I am. A handful.”
“Mona? Is that your mom?”
“Yes. Sometimes, she’s my older sister, though. That’s when Duke’s off somewhere on a binge, or in jail, and she gets herself a boyfriend. Then, if I don’t want a good smack, I have to say she’s my sister, and I’ll be going back to my regular family soon, so I won’t be around long enough to get underfoot or cost any money.”
Madison looked troubled. “Oh,” she said.
Bliss didn’t reply. She’d already said too much.
So she just took a long swig from her soda—cherry crème it was, and delicious, with real sugar instead of high-fructose syrup. Fancy stuff.
“Maybe we should go and talk to Coralee,” Madison ventured cautiously. “About the boyfriends and the jail and the drinking, I mean.”
Bliss stiffened, narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you dare tell her anything!” she warned.
Madison leaned back a little way, startled. “She might be able to help you,” she said.
Bliss got to her feet, lickety-split. Clenched her fists and fought back hot, angry tears. “I don’t want no help from her or you or anybody else!” she shouted, regretting the outburst even as it happened. It was as though she were two people just then—one a tough little scrapper, the other standing slightly to one side and watching helplessly, wanting to take everything back and say sorry.
It didn’t happen.
By then, Madison was standing up, too. Her face was calm, her eyes full of sympathy. “Okay,” she said, holding out both palms, as if to stop Bliss from lunging at her. “Okay. I didn’t mean to make you mad.”
The tears escaped then, trickling down Bliss’s face zigzag-like, probably leaving a trail because, even though she’d washed up down by the creek a while ago, she felt as though she’d been coated in dry dirt.
“Don’t you tell nobody about me, Madison Bettencourt! You’ll be sorry if you do!”
Madison was still calm, still kind, and that shamed Bliss Morgan right down to the calloused soles of her bare, sunbrowned feet.
“I won’t,” she said, very quietly. “I promise, I won’t.”
Bliss dashed away the humiliating tears with the back of one hand, tossed the half-finished bottle of cherry crème soda to the ground with the other, and then, without another word, turned and ran away, as fast and as far as she could.
Mona had been right about rich kids.
Even when they were nice, it was only because they felt sorry for you.
Pitied you.
She’d been downright stupid, thinking Madison liked her, wanted to be her friend.
All Bliss’s friends had been imaginary, before Madison, and she meant to keep it that way.