So Misty pounded her fist against the ground three times. With every blow, a jolt shot through the air, something like a shout, like thunder. The crawdads skittered back to the creek or crawled into their burrows. As William crashed through the underbrush on the hill above the creek, the last crawdad’s tail swished into the water and disappeared.
“Hey!” he called. “What’re you doing?”
“Playing,” Misty said.
“Is them your bells back there?”
She nodded. “That’s my alarm.”
“That’s pretty smart,” he said. “Have you thought about adding something? Like some spikes. Or maybe digging a pit or something for people to fall into. The bells is good but they won’t stop nobody from coming down here.”
“It ain’t supposed to stop nobody. It’s just got to tell me they’re coming.”
William shrugged. “Let me know if you change your mind. I could draw something up for you and show you how it’d work. If you’re interested.”
“Yeah,” Misty said. “What’re you doing anyway?”
William smiled. “Going to the barn. All of us are.”
“Who’s us?” Misty asked.
“Me and Penny and you.”
“Why?”
He grinned. “I got a game for us to play.”
“What kind?”
“You have to come and see. I bet you ain’t never played it before though.”
“What is it?”
William turned and ran through the high weeds without answering. He sent the bells ringing again, louder this time than before, and Misty felt the pluck of his fingers against the string inside her chest, her own ribs fluttering with the sound.
She dipped her hand into the creek before she left, searching for any crawdads that might have lingered. The slow current altered the image of her hand, making it appear as though her finger crooked away at the knuckle, like somewhere beneath the surface of the water her hand was broken and she just hadn’t felt the pain yet.
Three
The barn was old and creaking and filled with things that Misty shouldn’t touch—things sharp and jagged and flowered with rust, things sagging with stale water, bloated until it was impossible to tell what the thing was in its life before. The wooden planks that made up the barn’s walls and roof might have been golden once, but they had since faded to a cloudy gray and grown soft in places where they shouldn’t be soft. Even the breeze stopped at the barn’s door, so the air grew stagnant inside, too warm. It seemed that nothing stirred except for the dust, which lifted from the ground, from the tools, even from the walls, like the barn was shedding itself by inches. One day Misty might wake up and the barn would be gone, carried off by a strong breeze a few miles down the road, rearranged slightly so no one might notice it had been a barn once instead of a bird or a church or whatever barns became when they forgot their making.
The barn belonged to their landlord, Earl, and he had forbidden Misty and Penny and William from going inside. He called them a liability, saw them like a wound waiting to open. He lived in the trailer across the driveway from the barn. Earl owned the bottom where Misty stood and everything on it—three trailers, the barn, the crumbling fence, and the tilted mailboxes. His front yard was a garden where nothing ever grew, no matter how hard he worked. The garden soil was dark and dry and peppered with small stones that Earl tossed across the road when he dug them up. All summer long the stones plinked and skittered across the blacktop and Earl grunted and cursed and sighed, needing the earth so much to be something that it wasn’t.
The garden was one of the few things that Misty didn’t speak to. Earl had begged the ground for so long to be something that it wasn’t—called it growing, called it now, and green, and hurry, that the garden had become something else. Misty felt it like a loose tooth, an aching, unsettled feeling that buzzed in the palms of her hands every time she looked at it. There was something different about the garden, something sad and strange.
Misty had thought of reaching out to it before, of offering her name, but speaking to something that was injured could be dangerous. Misty had learned that the hard way the summer before. She’d been trying to befriend the deer that sometimes grazed in the woods behind her trailer, but they were cautious things. Wide-eyed and slender-legged, they moved through the trees like shadows, and no matter how hard she tried, Misty could never seem to get close to them. She’d offered them pieces of her name, waiting for them to offer their own in return, but they never would. Prey animals were often more guarded. They made Misty work harder to get to know them and took longer to share themselves with her. She still didn’t understand why they saw her as a threat, but she tried to respect them.
She’d gone to the woods every day for weeks and was on the verge of giving up when she found the wounded fawn.
It was the first time she’d seen one alone. They were usually close to their mother’s side, their wide, dark eyes peeking out at Misty from a distance. But this fawn was alone, and bleeding. Its back hip was covered with dark-red blood, the fur matted and thick. Its back legs had slumped to the ground, but the front legs were still standing. They trembled so hard that the whole doe was shaking, its ears twitching back and forth like a light bulb blinking on and off, like any minute the fawn might disappear altogether.
Bloody as it was, the fawn still tried to run when it saw Misty, but it was too weak to do more than shuffle a few steps before tipping into the underbrush. Misty thought about turning back. She could get her mother, or her father, or even Earl. Anyone might know better than her what to do with something this hurt. She’d never seen that much blood before, and the smell of it was enough to make her stomach twist.
But she stayed. And she did the only thing she could think to help the deer.
Misty offered her name, which was shorter back then, and not quite so sad. Her name spilled out of her all in a rush, and the moment it ended, Misty was racked with pain. She dropped to one knee and cried out, but there was no one there to hear her but the fawn, who struggled toward her. Pain swelled in her hip, spreading to her knees and ankles, all her joints on fire. Her fingers spasmed, and her mouth tasted like dirt and blood. Shards of the fawn’s memories lodged in Misty’s mind, temporarily blocking out the fawn in front of her. Misty saw the woods and trees as the fawn did, and she saw her mother, a doe, and the smell of their den, and then there was a shot.
A crack like thunder, but there was no rain, no clouds in the sky.
Her mother bolted through the trees and the fawn tried to follow, but her leg wouldn’t move. Then the pain came. Bright. Strange. She’d never felt anything like it before.
She stumbled through the trees. She cried out for her mother, but her mother was gone.