I wasn’t dim.
But I understood why she might think so, given I’d avoided speaking to her and her wife, Rhonda, whenever I could get away with it. It wasn’t that they were bad people. It was that I found I had nothing to say, not even when someone asked me a direct question.
I thought, maybe, I had left my voice back in Entrance. That it had torn out of my throat while I was screaming for my parents to stop fighting. For my mother not to die.
“Just plays outside all day long. Obviously, her parents let her run wild! She comes home with dirty hands and skinned knees and then won’t even tell me where she’s been.”
I didn’t get why she cared. I didn’t cause any trouble, didn’t bother any of the other farmers in the small valley of Summerland, B.C., so why did it matter what I did?
“I’m telling you, Lisa, we’ve had all kinds of kids stay with us, but Lila? She…well, it’s like she doesn’t care about anything. She just exists. It’s not as if she’s a problem child, but it’s concerning, and honestly, a little creepy. She does exactly as she’s told with this blank face, and she never talks unless we ask her a direct question. I’m worried we won’t be able to reach her. She’s been here six weeks and no change.”
No change.
I pulled the old flip phone from the back pocket of my jean shorts and opened it to read the last text message.
Jonathon: We’re working on it, Flower Child. Be patient and safe, yeah?
Dane: Nine weeks and eleven days, Li. I’ll be there no matter what in nine weeks and eleven days. Even if we don’t have the legal shit sorted out, I’ll be there, and you’ll come with me. I promise.
I moved my thumb over the little screen, wishing I could actually see the Booths, actually touch Dane.
I felt slightly breathless without them. The crushing weight of missing them too heavy on my chest, cutting off my air flow at every inhale.
“The only time she ever gets cross is when I try to throw out her flowers,” Marge continued as she ran the tap. “So I don’t touch them anymore, even when they wilt and rot in the glass. Rhonda used to collect bugs, so they have something in common, but I barely know how to talk to the girl.”
Done with eavesdropping, I pushed off the step and began my twilight walk of the property.
Rhonda and Marge Croft owned a blueberry farm on the edge of Summerland, and their sweeping property was my happy place. Every evening before dinner, I walked under the ponderosa pine trees, trailing my fingers through the long wheatgrass, dragging deep, clean droughts of hot, arid summer air through my open mouth so I could taste the mineral breeze off Lake Okanogan. I took pictures with my phone. The tight bunch of a blue hydrangea, the fading edge of Giant’s Head Mountain against the darkening sky, the silky black back of a raven lurking in the gloomy pines.
It was our ritual.
Dane and Jonathon and me.
We took pictures of pretty things to send to each other.
Dane sent photos of Vancouver, the hard angles of blue-tinted glass buildings and the sweep of the Pacific Ocean spread out from rocky beaches.
Jonathon sent pictures of people from home, of Molly in her kitchen and Diogo coming home from work still done up in his wet canvas overalls. He sent videos of Milo and Oliver playing basketball at the hoop in their driveway and shots of Hudson making a mess everywhere he went. He walked along Main Street every week to snap shots of Mac’s Grocer and Honey Bear Café and Stella’s Diner.
He knew Dane and I lived for those photos.
I’d scroll through them before I fell asleep, the glare of the phone harsh beneath the covers of my bed.
My favourite were the images Jonathon sent of his graffiti.
He graffitied everything. Every inch of skin he could reach with a pen on his arms and legs, chest and feet. The entire interior of the Booth’s modest farmhouse had been transformed by his art, painted onto the floors and up the walls where the designs bloomed on ceilings and around doorframes.
And now he had taken to graffitiing the town.
Dane and I both knew it was for us.
A sunflower on the black brick of Evergreen Gas Station.
A pair of blue eyes, Dane’s eyes, looking out from the seawall in the bay.
He was leaving pieces of us all over the town we’d been forced to abandon.
I cried whenever he sent a freshly spray-painted design, and I laughed when he took to wearing a black skeleton bandana over his face as he crept around in the dark to do his work.
Even kilometres apart, Jonathon Booth knew how to bring joy to the Davalos kids.
But nothing could reach me that night.
It was Ignacio’s birthday.
Maybe I shouldn’t have felt so sad about it, that I wasn’t with my father and never again would be to celebrate his birth. He’d killed my mother, after all.
But he was still my papá.
The man who let us shove his face into the tres leches cake while we chanted mordida! Who taught me how tie my shoes and patiently braided my hair in the morning before school.
The man who provided the only adult guidance I’d ever known.
There was an ache in my chest like the two sides were divided by a crater I would never be able to bridge between loving him and hating him.
It throbbed acutely as I lay down in the dirt between the rows of low blueberry bushes and stared up at the blackening bowl of the sky.
The night was so quiet in the farming valley that I heard the crunch of tires on gravel long before I would have in Entrance.
It didn’t interest me at first.
Marge and Rhonda were good people, often having friends and family drop by to visit, but I wasn’t in the mood to pretend I was okay around company, so I stayed in the dirt.
When my phone buzzed with an alert, I raced to flip it open to find the latest update from Dane or Jonathon. It had been two days since they’d texted.
It was a picture from Dane, the plastic black curve of a glove compartment.
Not his best effort.
I was about to flip it closed when it vibrated again.
A photo from Jonathon, this one of his knee. There was a tear in his worn jeans and on the skin showing through the gap he had drawn a sunflower he’d labeled ”Suntastic Yellow.”
My chest warmed as I drew my thumb over the screen, pretending I could touch the petals.
Before I could reply, another image came through.
I tapped it and immediately choked on my inhalation of shocked breath.
A selfie of Dane and Jonathon pressed cheek to cheek. My brother was beaming widely, his face so dazzling to me that tears pricked the backs of my eyes and started to roll down my cheeks into the dirt. To see his face expressing genuine happiness again felt like a punch to the solar lexis. And then, Jonathon beside him. More subdued, his grin a curling of lips and the slight cocking of a single eyebrow that made him look rakish and mischievous.
Like he was keeping a secret.
Before I could even begin to wonder what it could mean that Dane and Jonathan were together again, there was a clamor of voices coming from the front of the house.
“Lila,” I imagined someone called.
But then again, louder, someone did. “Lila!”
My heart stopped for one long moment, and then as if prompted by a starter gun, I took off at a sprint. I jumped from the dirt and ran through the rows of bushes, scattered blueberries bursting under my toes, arms pumping, legs churning so hard they burned after only a few steps.