Raising Wrecker

CHAPTER TWO





Melody wrestled her bus along the muddy ruts of the farm road, gunned it uphill, and came to a valve-pinging, clutch-stinking stop on top of the small rise. Beyond this the drive gave way to weeds and water. They’d made a feeble effort to fix it the year before, digging channels and hacking away at the greenery for an hour until their hands blistered and Melody quit, dropping her shovel and slumping against a mossy rock. The forest wants the road that bad? She’d waved her hand royally, dispensing with the territory. Let it have it. We’ll carry our shit from here.

Carrying their shit didn’t seem like such a good plan at this point. Not when her shit included an eight-foot, hundred-pound post she’d just salvaged from a fish shack slated for tear down in Eureka. Melody got out and circled the Volkswagen. The bus was decorated with spots, painted one day in a pique of fancy (and with the assistance of mildly hallucinogenic mushrooms) to resemble a ladybug. It looked like a bread loaf with a bad rash, which is how Melody felt the day after, and she left it that way as a reminder to go easy on her body chemistry. She leaned back now and squinted up at her rescued treasure, strapped with loops of clothesline to the roof. There was no way she was going to get it off the bus, down the hill, past the farmhouse, and over the next hundred yards or so to the barn. Not by herself, anyway.

But Bow Farm was good that way. In a pinch there was always someone to count on for help. Or to bitch to, or to gripe about, or to bum money off of, or to suffer alongside—yes, and thank you, Jesus, there was room enough to get the hell away from one another when they needed that, too. That was its raison d’être, really. To be French about it. Which Melody was not. But it gave it a kind of weight, made what they were choosing to do seem considered, intentional, instead of the crazy shot in the dark they were really taking. The bottom line was simple: do what you want and no one will stop you. The alpha and omega. Freedom.

Melody hitched up her jeans, glanced over her shoulder once more at the post, and headed down the rutted path. Buying the place had been her bright idea, and now, with three wet winters under her belt, she could start to take some credit for the accomplishment. It was touch-and-go for a while there, admittedly. She’d gone to college for drinking, sex, a little art history and some basic accounting courses, and dropped out before becoming truly proficient at any of them. Twenty-five years old, loose-jointed, lazy, and green as this afternoon’s salad, she’d jumped off the path her parents had ordained and was beating her way around a miserable thicket. She’d been flailing for some years and had nothing to show for it but a number of psychic bruises and the growing sense that she would have to take action if anything were going to change. What she needed was a permanent address. A place to park her weary bones. It sounded like land to the more levelheaded of her friends, and land sounded like money. Ask your father, they suggested.

Melody said bluntly, No.

She winced, remembering. Ask her father? Hell, no. She would do it herself. Somehow. When she was eighty, maybe. When she was a hundred and twenty. But then she agreed to fill in for a friend at that beachfront gallery opening, and Willow turned up among the hundreds, and to avoid the crowd they ducked outside and walked and talked. Willow had just settled a divorce, changed her name, and begun to bend her considerable attention to forgetting the past twenty years. She had a good livelihood and similar aims, and in time Melody mustered her courage and launched her idea. Crazy, she knew. Harebrained, probably. But what if they were to go in on a piece of land, far enough north and neglected enough to afford, and cut loose from the rest of the world and its cranky opinions on how they should live?

Go in? Willow asked, her natural courtesy masking her natural skepticism. Did Melody mean split the cost? And did that mean—

Ask your father, Melody’s friends insisted.

She wavered. But why not? He’d bought her everything she didn’t want. Braces and prep school and two miserable years of college where she slept with every boy who asked her until she discovered, yawning, that that was just another brand of commerce. He’d paid her bail when she was busted sharing a blunt behind the local cemetery, hired his lawyer to clean up her record, bribed the newspaper to keep the family name off the roll of recent miscreants. Then he shelled out a healthy deposit for one of Miss Porter’s extended trips to Europe, where she would be properly chaperoned and might be encouraged to develop appropriate remorse for the mess she had gotten her family involved in. She declined to participate. And forgot to visit them for two years.

Just ask, her friends said. All he can say is—

Melody broke down, scripted an appeal, and went to her father. Look, she said, desperate to keep the waver out of her voice. I know how to read and write and do math adequate for my own use. I can speak French, which is utterly useless to me now, and I can spot a con man a mile away. I am not vulnerable to those who would use my ambition against me, as I have none and am furthermore indifferent to the standard brands of happiness that are most frequently purveyed. Give me twenty thousand dollars and you may omit me from your will without incurring any bitterness on my part.

Her father was a man who knew a good deal when he saw one. He looked up over his reading glasses at this young woman standing in front of his desk. He adopted a look of deep concentration. Melody was not fooled. If she had said one hundred thousand dollars he would have had exactly the same look on his face. And then he would have written the check.

He wrote the check. He handed it to her and when she reached to take it he continued to hold on. Their skin didn’t touch, but they were connected through the medium of that piece of paper.

Melody did not dare let go. It had taken all of her courage and more humility than she thought she owned to come this far. If she released the check she would not have had the strength to lift her arm and reach for it again.

She held on. He let go.

Thanks a million, Pops, she said. She wanted him to know what a bargain he had struck.

It’s nothing, he said perversely. Don’t spend it all in one place.

But she did.

Hadn’t she been vindicated, though? Bow Farm was paradise. Melody paused at a level patch halfway down the hill. Ahead of her squatted the farmhouse, and beyond that the barn, gone to gray and tilting off its foundations like a drunken matron, her dear old home sweet home. And now she was going to have to lug that post all that distance to it. Shit. She had embarked on a restoration project that rivaled any other and couldn’t seem to curb her impulse to collect materials to sustain it. Nothing was paid for but nothing was stolen, either—although a few broken slabs of marble had been liberated from the back side of an old bank without explicit permission. Real work hadn’t actually commenced on the project; apart from some basic tasks like replacing broken panes of glass so the rain would stay out and making a monumental effort (okay, Ruth’s monumental effort) to clean the hayloft so she could set up a bedroom, she was still in the collecting phase. So? They owned the place. She, Willow, and that finance company Willow had finagled a loan from. She could work on it for the next half century if she lasted that long. Sure, there was the balloon payment to deal with—but that was fifteen long years in the future.

The trees that flanked the path to the farmhouse were scruffy little scrub oaks that gave way to stately buckeyes in the dooryard. Melody shuffled on, glancing east when a break in the brush let the view yawn before her. Loggers had hauled out the best timber decades before, but there were still patches of old firs tucked among the scrub and hardwoods. There was something comforting about them. Generations of disasters befell them, and look, Ma—still standing! She glimpsed a movement below and heard the screen door of the farmhouse slam. Ruth. No mistaking that distinctive waddle. The boy buzzed around her, an errant electron tethered by affinity to the massive nucleus Ruthie presented. Melody skirted the log farmhouse and followed them around to the backyard.

Ruthie’s mouth was puckered with clothespins and she reached to clip a sacklike flowered nightdress alongside some voluminous undergarments. She toed the wicker basket of wet clothes Melody’s way. “Make yourself useful,” she mumbled.

“Kid can’t reach?” Melody dipped into the basket and shook out a miniature pair of corduroy pants before pinning them to the line. At least he was out of diapers.

Ruth used the last of her clothespins to pair socks. “Reach, nothing. He’s got a vertical leap Tarzan would envy. I had to retie the line after he was swinging on it.” She nodded toward the kitchen. “I sent him in to play. I’ve washed this load twice already and I wouldn’t mind seeing it dry without dragging in the mud first.”

Melody glanced at the sky. “You must think spring is coming.”

“Oh, ye of little faith.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” In Mattole they measured rainfall by the foot. Winter came and the creeks flooded, the land slid, and what looked like paradise in the golden rays of autumn turned into a muddy mess. How else would they have managed to buy the land so cheap? That, and distance. If San Francisco was the center of the universe, the Mattole Valley hovered in its nether reaches, a day’s drive north and so rugged and remote that even the coast highway surrendered its ocean view and headed inland for more stable footing. But Melody’s hopes had soared when they stumbled across Bow Farm. Remote, dilapidated, the neglected farmstead covered eighty acres of cleared meadow and mixed conifers and a year-round spring, the water sweet tasting and cold enough to set their teeth. The huge barn was weathered to a slant but still standing, the farmhouse itself frayed but sound. It was perfect. And thirty thousand dollars more than they were prepared to spend. Melody stood behind the real estate agent and scribbled furiously on the back of an envelope. OLD TREES! she wrote. ROSE BUSHES! She tapped her pen against her front teeth and tried not to scuttle the deal with her breathlessness. Willow cast an amused glance her way. In thirty seconds she had the agent charmed; in ten minutes he was looking for creative ways to finance; in three weeks Bow Farm was theirs, with a mortgage they could handle and a lump sum due at the end of it.

Ruth took back the basket. “I’ll finish this. Go in. He was asking for you.”

“Everything okay?”

“Bad night, Johnny said.”

Melody ducked under the line and jumped the steps. The back door to the kitchen had a half-window in it and she peered in to see the boy hunched, splay-legged, on the linoleum. He held something in his hand. Melody pushed open the door.

Wrecker tilted his dirt-smudged face toward her. “Oh. Deedee.” His voice was munchkinlike, piping but throaty—a flute that aspired to run away from the orchestra. This nickname business, it was a new thing. The last time she’d been called anything but her own name had been in college, and the tag had to do with her prowess at knocking back shots.

“Hey, little man. Show me what you’ve got.” Melody ran a hand over the velvet of his head. Ruth had just taken the clippers to his mop, and his ears lunged from the sides of his head like vulnerable creatures suddenly stripped of shelter. She examined the wad of paper he handed her. It was folded into a dense, bulky triangle. “What is it?”

“Watch.” He reached up to retrieve his toy and with his left hand he carefully stood it on one point. The sinews on the back of his neck guarded a tender hollow no bigger than the nail of Melody’s thumb. She’d never been around kids, much. Not up close. She couldn’t get over it, how small he was, and how much noise and energy and willfulness and—and person there was. She squatted down to observe his preparations. He made a circle with the index finger of his right hand and then he let loose and flicked the wadded football hard. It bounced off the lower cabinets and ricocheted back to collide with Ruth’s shin as she entered the kitchen.

“Finesse, buddy.” Ruth set down the basket. “And keep it out of my stew.”

“Stew? That’s what smells so good.” Melody followed Ruth to the woodstove and peered over her shoulder as she clattered about, lifting lids and rattling utensils. Ruthie was queen of the kitchen. When she arrived there was still a layer of grease on the windowpanes left over from the previous owners, and the refrigerator coils were lost in a thick matting of dog hair and dust. No dirt, they soon learned, stood a chance against Ruth’s eagle eye and elbow grease. She cleaned with a fury and she cooked that way, too, staking a claim to the four-burner woodstove and turning out real meals with whatever she could find. Eggs from Johnny Appleseed’s wild chickens fried in butter; scalloped potatoes with a thick coating of salt and cheese—she had a penchant for grease and sweets, and was killing them with it. Ruth dipped a spoonful of stew for Melody to taste. “Got barley in it.” With a defensive edge to her voice, she added, “It’s good for you.”

“Stew?”

“Hold on, little sweetheart. It’s still cooking.” Ruth dragged a chair out from the table, its legs screeching against the linoleum, and pushed it up against the sink. “See what you can do to lose some of that dirt.”

Melody watched Wrecker climb onto the chair and twist the faucet, wet his hands, and wipe them dry on the front of his shirt. They were a pair, those two. The boy had been at Bow Farm for two months, now, but it hadn’t taken any time at all for him to peg Ruth for a kindred soul. Wrecker gravitated to commotion, and even when Ruth dozed her breathing made a distinct wheezing whistle. She was sliding down the backside of middle age, losing the war against gravity, and wore her considerable weight in a soft wide landing pad around her middle. The better to hug him with, Melody figured; the better to do the Bump as they boogied around the kitchen. Ruth had fallen for the boy hard and thought nothing of spending the whole day in foolery to coax an unexpected smile from the foursquare of his face. Melody had watched Ruth sneak glances at Wrecker throughout each day; together they’d seen his sober face go quickly livid with anger or frustration, watched it brighten with delight until he noticed and swallowed it, embarrassed. The change was quicker and more intimate than the weather. He was scarred and volatile and more luminous than any celestial body. There had to be a way to defuse some of his explosive anger, Ruth worried, before the boy blew himself up by accident.

“I made you something,” Ruth said, her eyebrows lifting and wiggling like nascent caterpillars. Wrecker chortled, a cascade of raspy giggles that Melody matched without meaning to. He had wrinkled his face, trying to duplicate the burlesque routine Ruth performed with her bushy brows. Ruth turned away and reached under the sink, rustled about with some clinking sounds. She creaked herself back up. In her hands shimmered a sheet of crushed soda cans wired together. “Get over here,” she commanded. When Wrecker advanced toward her, she fed his arms through holes in the sides and let the tunic-shaped contraption dangle about him. She stood back and beamed. “You’re invincible, buddy. Nobody can mess with you now.”

“Dinty Spaceman?” Melody ventured.

“In the flesh. Newly outfitted with his ray-deflecting armor.” Ruth gave him a gentle shove and the tin cans jingled. “Now get out to your spaceship and make the galaxy safe for mankind.”

Melody stepped narrowly out of his path as Wrecker bulldozed his way for the back door. The woman was obsessed when it came to the boy’s happiness. Ruth lived in a makeshift room under the rafters of the farmhouse and came down most mornings to find him waiting impatiently for her in the kitchen, and each day Ruth outdid herself, inventing games no one had played before and tableaux Wrecker could reenact for hours. She folded paper airplanes that fell from the sky, grew expert at farting noises made under her armpit. The two of them invented knock-knock jokes with incoherent punch lines. Twice a week she would fill the metal tub and scrub Wrecker raw, banish dirt from behind his ears and between his toes, and discuss twenty-car pileups. But none of that held a candle to Dinty Spaceman-a-Go-Go, with his metal colander for a helmet and rocket ship docked in the yard. In the absence of rocket fuel, Dinty Spaceman had to dance on the hood to activate the thrust engines and prepare for takeoff. Indeed, any time he noticed a decrease in power he had only to climb through the window and stomp a few steps—the wilder the better, as Go-Go was never mild—on the wide hood to revitalize the engine. He could fly to the moon, then. He could zoom through the Milky Way.

Sure, and he could slip off the rain-slicked car hood and crack his head so his brains poured out, Melody thought, but so far there had been no serious injuries.

Melody watched the boy through the kitchen window and glanced toward the front door when the hinges squeaked. Sitka the dog entered first, with Johnny Appleseed the human close behind. Johnny Appleseed the mostly human, Melody corrected herself. Her friend was as far on the spectrum as a person could get and still belong to the same species. Tiny, leathern, silent as the night, he pictured himself some hybrid form of plant and animal in a base of dirt and water. The women moved over to make room for him at the window. Melody lifted her chin and gestured toward the boy. “He gave you some trouble last night?”

Johnny shrugged. “He’s no trouble to me. Just to himself.” He tipped his head toward the boy in a gesture of respect. The day before, as they were driving the Mattole Road toward South Fork, the motor of Johnny’s beloved Ford Falcon had burst into flames. “That was the end of it,” he told them, his dark eyes drooping sorrowfully. With Wrecker’s help he had shoved the rusty vehicle from the bridge into the river below. Aghast and euphoric, they’d watched it dip and bob in the current, and then they’d trudged the nine miles back to the farm. The boy rode the last four, exhausted, clinging to Johnny’s back, and hadn’t complained once. “It was a long day. More than he could handle, maybe.” Johnny held Melody’s gaze for a long beat before turning to Ruth. “Most nights he’s fine.”

Melody, shoulder to shoulder with Ruth, felt the older woman falter. If a train were barreling down on the boy, Ruth would heave herself in front of it to save him. But this train was stealthier, colliding with him in his sleep and leaving him squalling or, worse, nearly silent, his eyes wide and his pajamas soaked in sweat—and there was nothing any of them could do to stop it. Melody glanced at Johnny. They all knew it was more than just exhaustion that had clobbered the boy. Whatever he’d been through before had left its mark on him. “What do you think happened to him?” She kept her voice low. “Before he got here, I mean.”

They watched as Wrecker quit bouncing on the roof and slid back into the car through the open window. His face was half shaded, half in sun. He had just powered up the rockets and was intent on navigating.

“He’s here, isn’t he?” Johnny Appleseed dispensed his words like drops of water from a bedouin’s goatskin canteen. “He can’t go back. So help him go forward.”

“What’s done is done,” Ruth said crisply, as if she believed it.

Melody wasn’t so sure. Everyone at Bow Farm seemed to have some private, unresolved reason for being there. The land had a way of calling to its own. That first August they’d dragged Ruth half dead out of the sea, bullied her back to life only to discover that she’d been making an honest effort to leave it. Whoever she’d been before—her old name, her old home—had drowned in the attempt. The March after that Johnny Appleseed had wandered mysteriously from the woods that fringed the bowl of cleared meadow. Now the boy had arrived, with his blue eyes and his short fuse and that trash bag for a suitcase, and made himself at home.

“Maybe,” Melody said. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something important had changed.

Ruth and Johnny helped Melody haul the post down from the roof of the bus. They’d lugged it as far as the farmhouse when the drizzle began, and they dropped the post and ran for the laundry.

“Go ahead in with Wrecker,” Willow told Ruth, arriving in time to cross the yard and offer Melody some shelter with her umbrella.

Melody was sick and tired of the rain by this time of year. She pushed inside with the laundry basket under one arm while Willow sat on the porch bench and removed her muddy boots. That was Willow: the picture of preparedness. She kept a spare pair of shoes next to the door so she wouldn’t track dirt into the farmhouse. Melody had trouble keeping track of her rain hat. Her keys. Half the time, her mind. But Willow was Willow, which meant Bow Farm had cloth napkins and matching cutlery nesting together in a drawer in the kitchen. They had olives, the occasional bottle of good wine, cured salami, Gorgonzola cheese, a decent assortment of fruits and vegetables. Ruth was averse to commerce and cooked with whatever the others brought home. Johnny Appleseed—who would have been content with moss and small grubs—raised hens for their eggs, traded for meat, and produced cases of canned goods he acquired through mysterious channels. Melody offered beans and grains from the Mercantile that had to be soaked overnight and cooked for hours to become palatable. She was committed to eating natural foods but hid a valuable stash of Snickers bars and Cracker Jack boxes in the barn for bad cramps and midnight cravings. It was her secret. Wrecker knew, but she’d paid for his silence with chocolate.

Ruth lifted the lid from the soup pot and ladled it into bowls.

“Told you it would rain.” Melody reached for her bowl and parked herself at the round kitchen table between Wrecker and Johnny Appleseed.

The boy had finished half his stew by the time Ruth eased herself down. “Mind your manners,” Ruth told him. “Nobody eats until everybody sits.” Melody looked up guiltily and laid her spoon beside her bowl. Ruth glanced at her. “Rain?” she scoffed. “That was a sprinkle. Spring’s here.”

“Not by a long shot.” Melody lifted her spoon again and went to work on the stew. “Pretty good stuff, Ruth.”

Johnny Appleseed nodded reverently. “You’re the best, Ruthie.” He turned to Melody. “She’s right, you know. Winter’s over.” He glanced around the table. “Day after tomorrow, I start planting.”

There was a moment of shocked silence.

“What?” Melody shook her head and laughed at him. “Are you crazy?” She gestured toward the boy. He sat at her elbow, shoveling the stew in as fast as he could. “You can’t go yet. Where would he sleep?”

Johnny’s face clouded. “The ground’s ready,” he said softly.

Melody put her spoon down and stared at him. She cupped her hands over Wrecker’s ears. “No f*cking way, Johnny.” She enunciated slowly and forcefully so that there would be no confusion. Johnny had his dates wrong. Once he left for his planting contracts they wouldn’t see him for weeks. He lived in the forest with his crew of wild boys and worked dawn to dusk, planting seedlings over acres of lumber company clear-cuts. On the side he tended his own crop, hidden in obscure patches on federal land.

“Will you excuse us?” Willow rose from the table, cleared her bowl, and gathered Wrecker from his seat stacked with pillows. She gave Melody a meaningful glance. “You three work it out. Whatever you need from me, I’ll try to do,” she said, and carried the boy into the living room.

Melody felt the red creep into her cheeks as she watched Willow settle the boy down against the base of her armchair. She hadn’t signed on for this. Things were fine so long as Johnny took care of him, nights, but if Johnny left—she swung her head toward Ruth and spoke in a low mutter. “I thought we were in this together. Tell him, Ruthie. If he goes now, there’s no one to cover for him.”

Johnny Appleseed sighed. “I’m right here,” he said. “I’m listening.” Melody glared at him as Willow’s voice floated in from the other room. Some nights she read to Wrecker from Sinbad or Aladdin, the language a great wafting cloud of image and incomprehension; other times she made up stories, launching her characters—almost always two big boys and their smaller sister—into the unknown on the back of a flying carpet. This night’s story began with a lion, his mane thick and luxuriant, the muscles on his back a cushion for the small boy who rode up there. “Hold on, Wrecker,” she called softly, swaying him back and forth between her calves and introducing sound effects—the soft swish of the wind, the bark of hyenas in the night—that filled the stony silence in the kitchen.

“I can’t wait, Melody,” Johnny said. His eyes were dark and dewy, softly beseeching. “When it’s time, it’s time.”

“Ruthie?”

Melody already knew the answer. Ruth would spend all day with Wrecker, would feed him and pick up after him and wash his clothes for him and mend his scrapes. She would do anything Melody asked her to do. She just couldn’t let Wrecker sleep up in her room with her. It was killing her to say no. “If he bugs you too much,” Ruth promised, “he can go back to the living room. I’ll sleep in the chair. It wasn’t so bad.”

Melody scowled. Together they turned to look at Willow and Wrecker. Genies, camels, sand dunes, and an elephant of the king, to whose palace Wrecker was invited for royal tea—but not a single word about who would look after him in real life. “Why bother,” Melody muttered to herself, morose. Willow was fond of the boy, but she had set her boundaries. She did everything on her own terms.

Willow continued. “The king had a beautiful daughter. He had horsemen and minions and a magnificent library with shelves that stretched four stories high. He lived in a palace surrounded by water that was greener than emeralds and warmed by springs that went deep to the center of the earth.”

“A moat?” Wrecker clung to wakefulness, shipwrecked in an ocean of sleep.

“A moat,” Willow said, hardly louder than a whisper. Melody had to strain to hear her. “Yes. And when the elephant reached the moat he knelt down. First one giant leg”—she extended her left leg—“and then the other giant leg”—now the right—“and with his lo-o-o-o-ng trunk, he reached over his head for the little boy.”

“For me,” Wrecker mumbled, his lids sinking.

“For you.” Willow’s voice was softer still, more melodious than ever, and she smoothed the hair around his ears. “And a boat was waiting.” Sleep billowed over the boy and he relaxed his neck and let the weight of his head fall into her hands. “And the boat slowly carried the boy across the emerald water.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him snug. “And into the land of sleep.” Willow glanced toward the kitchen and held Melody’s gaze. She lifted him onto the pillow and covered him with a throw.

There was a tentative knock at the door.

Willow stepped forward and opened it. Len hadn’t washed up from the afternoon’s work. He wore a stripe of pine sap across one cheekbone and clutched a full paper sack in both arms. “I forgot to give these to you.” He extended it toward her. “Your library books.”

Willow opened the door wider and motioned him forward.

He hesitated. “Is something wrong?”

Willow leaned toward him to take the books and said something softly.

Len swallowed. He looked stricken.

Willow led him into the kitchen. “Hey, Len,” Johnny Appleseed said, and Ruth and Melody nodded.

Len’s voice was gravelly. “I’ll take him tomorrow.”

Ruth gave a small cry, and her hand flew to cover her mouth.

The color drained from Melody’s face. “What?”

Len’s gaze darted from her face to Willow’s and back again. “I thought—”

“Is there a family for him?” Ruth asked.

“No, but—”

Melody shot Willow a look and turned her back to them. She shook her hands, thinking. Her shoulders rose and fell with each breath. When she turned again, her mouth was set in a resolute line. Len’s jaw dropped. Melody watched him glance quickly at Willow and the others. Was it that obvious? Panic, but she was fending that off. “Fine,” Melody said. “He’ll start sleeping in the barn.” Her voice quavered slightly. “What the hell, right? While Johnny’s gone, Wrecker can stay up there with me.” She glanced at Ruth. “You’ll help me get it ready?”

“Of course,” Ruth murmured.

“I’ll spend tomorrow with him,” Johnny said. “Give you some time to prepare.”

Melody nodded. Her right hand started flicking, but she stilled it by gripping a chair, pulling it out from the table. “Sit,” she told Len. “Eat.”

Len was in no position to argue.

“Give it up, already,” Melody said. Ruth was starting to irritate her, apologizing, trying to make amends. They were rigging a makeshift wall in the barn loft to prevent the kid from pitching over the side. They had already commandeered a mattress for him and rearranged the space to make room for it. “It’s fine for him to be here. I said so. Let’s just go over the instructions once more.”

If he choked. If he fell down the steps. If he broke a limb. If he needed to pee in the night. If he wanted a glass of water. If he spit where he shouldn’t. If he couldn’t get to sleep. If he woke up in the night and she couldn’t calm him. There were a thousand things that could go wrong, and Melody wanted to be prepared. At least he was small enough for her to throw him over her shoulder and run for help.

Everything would be okay, Ruth assured her. He was a good boy.

And if he got under her skin?

The truth was, things were getting out of hand. No one knew how long it was going to take for Len to work out some permanent arrangement for the kid, and the longer he was there—well, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the longer he stayed, the more at home he’d make himself. And the more he’d weasel his way into their affections.

Weasel? Wrong animal. This boy was a dog straight up and down, though it pained Melody to admit it, bothered her that a person—especially a kid, way too young to have figured out what kind of persona to move in through the world—a person could be so completely what they were. He had a doglike way of attaching himself to any person who fed him or made him feel good, and a way of muscling through the world that was as much like a dog as any other animal Melody could think of. He ran directly at things, stopped to smell them, tested their resistance to his enthusiastic battering, and ran directly on. He was interested in everything, fearless and physically skilled enough to engage in nearly any activity he could think up—enough so that Melody and Johnny Appleseed and certainly Ruth, who hadn’t the advantage of youth, wore themselves out worrying over his safety. He was different with Willow; quieter, better behaved. Melody understood this. She loved Willow’s arch wit and prodigious intelligence and her singular sense of style, but there was something in Willow that inspired an odd formality. Around Willow, you wanted to do your best. They all felt it. No one wanted to disappoint her.

With Wrecker, there was this other thing, too. The boy didn’t seem to need petting, but when he was tired he didn’t resist it. Even Melody had carried him around, felt his body grow heavy with sleep and slump against her. On trips to town he would keel over on the seat and sleep with his head in her lap. Melody was awkward with her body, strong but gangly and not much given to hugging, but the boy might come up beside her on a walk and without any self-consciousness slip his small hand into hers and walk that way until something caught his attention and he went sprinting off. It stung her. She could never initiate that affection—couldn’t sweep him up in a bear hug as Ruthie would do, or pat her lap for him to climb into after supper—but it surprised her, the flood of emotion that arose when, unbidden, he leaned his weight against her or wrapped his arms around her neck for a free ride to anywhere.

They were going to have to find him a home, soon. Because she was starting to wonder—just to herself, she would admit this to no one—how she could manage to let him go.

Ruth fixed a special dinner for Johnny’s last day before planting. She roasted beets, pan-fried some venison Len had brought over, opened a can of string beans, baked a blackberry cobbler with fruit she’d put up the season before. Wrecker finished most of his plate before he fell asleep at the table. Ruthie was impressed. “Where’d you take him? He didn’t even make it to dessert.”

“He’s a tough little kid.” Johnny allowed a small smile. “We went all over.”

Yeah, Melody thought, she bet they did. She’d tagged along on a couple of Johnny’s marathon routes. It was hard to keep up with him as he leapt over grassy hummocks, wove through stands of madrone, skidded down steep slopes, vaulted the trunks of fallen trees—her legs were longer, but he knew the territory like it was his own skin. She could picture Wrecker motoring along beside him, pumping through brush and undergrowth, his clothes dampened with sweat and the rainwater that glistened on sheltered leaves. He adored Johnny and the dogs, and would sooner tear his heart out than let himself be left behind.

The kid was amazing, physically. But for all his kinetic energy, there was a part of Wrecker that was stunned and paralyzed. No one felt this more than Johnny. He knew what it meant to yearn for something hopelessly distant. Distant and essential. Distant and so wished for, so furiously sought, it warped your dreams. Time after time he had stolen glances at the boy’s face, watched the want rise palpably into his features. The kid had been yanked without warning from his people, set adrift in paradise, when all he wanted was to be back on home ground. Whatever it was his mother had done, Johnny told them, it wasn’t bad enough to turn her son. Even at this distance his heart tracked her like a plant hungry for light.

It was six years already since Johnny Appleseed—John Chapman in those days, youngest of seven, idly loved and adequately fed and largely overlooked—had walked away from his family, his job, the tule fog of the Sacramento River delta, and the honest and earnest affection of a young woman who craved the very things that John yearned to be free of. Carpets. Bedspreads. Movie dates and backyard swings and someday kids to swing in them. John aged up from apprentice to journeyman printer at the Sacramento Bee and couldn’t shake the feeling that trees were better fit in a forest than cut for the pulp he printed on. He craved chaos, the wild disorder of duff to sleep on and acorns and morels to eat. When Johnny first heard about Humboldt it struck a bell so deep in him the vibration had not yet stopped sounding. Land so wild no human had set foot there, in some places; trees unclimbed before, unmeasured, maybe even unseen. He bought his girl a ring. The freedom ring, he called it on the note he sent along with it, and he walked out the door and headed north, didn’t stop until the trees towered so high he couldn’t see the tops of them. He took a job planting seedlings. He honed his senses. He watched the shadows, he listened to the breeze. Deeper and deeper into the woods Johnny Appleseed went in search of the wildest thickets and the world’s tallest trees.

“Best dinner ever,” Johnny said softly, and walked his dishes to the sink.

Johnny hefted the sleeping boy in his arms and carried him the long route to the barn. Melody hovered behind as he climbed the ladder to the loft. “Nice,” he said, glancing at the changes. He delivered the boy into the bed she’d made for him and straightened the blankets to cover him. Below, Sitka and her pups circled and huffed, settling into the wood chips Johnny had spread for them. “You don’t mind taking care of the dogs while I’m gone?”

“Come back soon, buddy.”

Johnny Appleseed smiled. Melody watched his face soften and grow sober as he gazed at the boy. He put a hand to Wrecker’s cheek and the boy snuffled and turned. Johnny smiled again, but his eyes were sad. Melody waited. “The dogs will be fine,” she said.

“Of course they will.” He gazed at her. “Remember that maple?”

“Up the hill? Where you can see the water?”

“I took him there.”

He’d shown her the tree the year before. The tree stretched horizontally, a broadleaf maple so old, so venerable, Johnny said, it seemed as much a part of the hillside as the rocks and soil. Venerable? She didn’t know, but it was as broad as the back of an ox, and it looked like it had poured itself down the hillside, spurning the sky above in favor of the adjacent air. Its corrugated bark was softened with moss. She’d sat up there and slowly inched her way forward for the view. The ribbon of Mattole glinted past the manzanita, and past that, so far it was no more than a hint of different blue beside the blue sky, was the sea. Melody squinted at him. “Did he get scared?”

Johnny glanced again at the sleeping boy. Not exactly, Johnny said. Melody watched him stumble for the words to describe it. He’d held on to Wrecker as the boy slid his way forward, gripping the ridges of the bark, easing his legs around limbs that branched off, feeling the fresh new leaves brush his face. Soon the ground dropped away. Johnny had hold of Wrecker by the waist, and he could feel him tremble. Why wouldn’t he? He was a little boy in the middle of the sky. It was a different world aloft, humid and softly sussurant, the air buzzing as though the tree breathed with them. A horned owl gave a low hoot, coasting from tree to tree below them in the dusk. The boy’s small back was pressed snug against Johnny Appleseed’s chest, the top of his head tucked under Johnny’s chin.

Melody shut her eyes and pictured Bow Farm the way Johnny drew it, a few roofs scattered across the patchy acreage and Ruth a small figure in the yard of the farmhouse, working the hand pump to fill a bucket. Down the path stood the barn where Melody had set up camp. Past that—they all knew how far, by foot—was Willow’s yurt, a cupcake house planted on the edge of the meadow. Farther on Len’s place with its roofs the color of rusty nails; farther still the rollicking Mattole, the river black and broad and giddy with runoff. And then the forest closed in dense and green. In every direction were miles and miles and miles of trees. And glinting fiercely with the low-slung sun, the sea.

Beyond the sea—

“ ‘Is it there?’ I asked him,” Johnny said. His voice was low and his face half in shadow as he glanced at Melody and then back at the boy. “ ‘What you’re looking for?’ ”

Melody opened her eyes and blinked at him quizzically. “Is what there?”

Johnny laughed softly. “The same sea. How far can a kid swim if he wants that badly to go home?” He turned his head to gaze at Wrecker. The boy sighed in his sleep. “Remember your mother, I told him. Remember everything. It’s bound to be a long while.” He cleared his throat and focused on Melody. “Before he gets back, I mean.”

Melody gave her head a little shake. Wrecker had escaped all that, she said.

Johnny Appleseed dipped his head and flashed an enigmatic smile. “You think it was bad, what he left behind.”

“Wasn’t it?”

He looked at her for a long time. And then Johnny bent forward to rest his cheek on Wrecker’s forehead. He straightened himself, breathed deep, and stood to leave. He had thousands of seedlings to set where a grove had been clear-cut, and he gathered his crew of wild boys about him and took to the woods.

Wrecker had cried, soundless and trembling, for an hour, Johnny said.

Was it bad? Johnny had looked at her with something close to pity in his eyes before he answered.

It was everything.

Weeks passed, and still Wrecker did not fall down the stairs, nor break a bone, nor throw a tantrum from which he couldn’t by chocolate and reasonable patience be retrieved. The nightmares came less often. Melody rummaged through the free box at the Mercantile for hand-me-downs that would fit the kid. He’d stretched out of everything he had come with and had busted through two pairs of shoes since his arrival. Five months? Six, almost. Long enough for all the relationships at Bow Farm to subtly shift to accommodate him. And according to the papers Len had on him, Wrecker was about due to turn four.

All signs pointed to a party. It was the height of summer, and everything alive was bursting its seams with the pure urgency of growth. The days were long, and the night sky, when dusk finally surrendered to dark, was filled with stars and meteor showers and the unspeakably rich odors of deep grass and damp riverbank and tree sap and the family of skunks who had taken up residence under the tumbledown shed that housed Ruth’s farm implements. Johnny Appleseed had a few days to lay low at the farm before heading back to the forest. Ruth’s garden had produced a champion watermelon. It was time to celebrate.

Johnny sent word over the green wire, and in pairs and threes his wild and unkempt treeboys trickled in from the woods. Melody’s coworkers from the Mercantile piled into pickup trucks to get there; they brought children and dogs and guitars and draft-dodging cousins who’d caught wind of how easy it was to get lost in this untamed stretch of overgrown coast. Len ironed his clothes before coming. He brought six pairs of new socks and a savings bond for the boy. And Willow summoned her friend Daria, who raised white doves; she brought them to offer Wrecker the spectacle of their flight, and he laughed and clapped his hands with the others when she set them free and they circled the farm twice, a pageant of wingbeat and white fluff, before heading for home.

It was late in the afternoon on the third day, a day fat and full and green and with enough of a breeze to keep them from broiling, that the last of the guests shook off the celebratory stupor occasioned by Ruth’s extraordinary blue sheet cake and made their way home. Melody lay sprawled in the hammock, one foot trailing out to gently press the ground and keep it rocking. “Know what I think?” She proceeded, undaunted by silence. “I think we should go to the beach.”

Willow peered over her book, raised her eyebrows, and went back to reading. She turned the page. “Ruth won’t go.”

“Ruth never goes,” Melody said. Ruth had swallowed enough seawater the day they found her to sweat ocean brine for the rest of her life. “What about you?”

Johnny Appleseed came around the corner of the farmhouse. He held an elk ivory drilled for a wire loop and strung on a piece of rawhide. “Wrecker around?” When the boy crawled out from under the porch, twigs and dry leaves stuck to his scruffy hair, Johnny stepped forward and looped it around his neck. “Happy birthday, kid. May it keep you strong and free.”

Wrecker fingered the creamy tooth. He had on a pair of shorts and no shirt and the tooth was bright against his tanned chest. He grinned. Johnny Appleseed dazzled him. Wrecker said, “Want to go to the beach?”

“With you? Anywhere.”

Melody reached out a foot and nudged the leg of Willow’s lawn chair. “Come on.”

Willow shook her head.

Wrecker padded closer to her. He stayed a few feet away, as though he needed permission to enter her force field. When he caught her attention he lifted the ivory to show her. His face was earnest and he stood his ground. Melody watched Willow reach out and gently take hold of the tooth. “Nice,” she said. She looked down at her book and sighed, then folded it shut. “All right,” she said. “For a little while.”

They picked the easiest beach to get to. Forty minutes of twisting mountain roads to suffer through, but once there they could park the van and walk directly onto the sand. It was state-run and more developed than the out-of-the-way black sand beaches Melody favored, but it was wide enough for Wrecker and Johnny Appleseed to race along and send airborne the newsprint kite they’d hastily assembled. Melody found herself a drift log to flop against and watched the cheery flyer pit itself against the swells. In a pile next to her Wrecker had deposited his collection of shells and slimy kelp and a fluorescent orange Frisbee with teeth marks all around the rim, and the briny, old-rot smell made her oddly happy.

She pulled her knees to her chest and listened to the waves. Ahead, Willow made her way to the edge of the water. The older woman faced out to sea and twisted her elegant body into yoga poses. No surprise, Melody thought. They all knew Willow could do anything. Speak Russian, for one. Operate a small aircraft. Make a pair of historically accurate breeches for a town production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado two hours before the performance and take her seat unflustered, every hair in place and no trace of sweat or frustration. There were only a handful of people in the world as skilled as she at restoring precious carpets, and her work for international collectors was amply rewarded. But when she turned her hand to the thing she loved best—turning spun wool into weavings that dazzled the eye and caught the heart—something much more vital than competence came into play. It was magic, Melody had to admit. A simple array of colors and textures could remind you of someone you’d loved and lost. It could call out the person you’d once hoped to be. It could make you think (why not? the weavings said; who else?) there was still hope.

But Willow didn’t drive. Melody took some comfort in this. Not that Willow couldn’t, Melody was sure, if she’d wanted to; but to know that there was one thing—for one moment, anyway—Melody could do that Willow did not gave her a cheap thrill of satisfaction. Honestly, it was hard to be around such competence all the time. If she’d been haughty or condescending they could at least ridicule her privately. But she wasn’t. She loved them all, in her way. She loved Len and Melody best. She just stopped short, Melody realized with sadness, of loving the boy.

Melody scanned the beach and found Wrecker a ways off, dragging a piece of driftwood toward a pile Johnny Appleseed guarded. She let her eyes return to Willow. She was sharp-focus, while Melody was all broad-spectrum. Did that just mean lazy? The thought tired her. She had plenty of qualities, but it would take some effort to remember what they were. Better just to curl herself against the log and drift to sleep.

She was deep in a dream when something startled her awake. She blinked hard. Her head felt gelatinous. Willow’s face came in close and unsmiling and she gripped Melody’s elbow. “Get up,” she said, and stood back while Melody pushed herself to standing. “We can’t find the boy.”

Melody rubbed her nose and tried to make sense of the words. “What do you mean,” she said, her heart beating faster as the thought settled in, “you can’t find him?”

“We were gathering driftwood.” Johnny Appleseed came into focus. “I thought he came back here. I thought you had him.”

They all turned to stare at the waves. Collectively, with horror, they searched for a bob of blond hair, for a flash of red sweatshirt. The water looked calm and satisfied, and Willow turned away first. “I can’t imagine he’d go in for a swim,” she said, her voice calm, nearly nonchalant. “It’s too cold for that.”

Melody felt a chill ripple through her body. She wanted to tear Willow’s head off. And then she wanted to reach up and tear off her own. Her legs weakened under her, and she sat hard in the sand. “Oh God,” she said. He could not be gone. The thought filled her mind with a blackness that came on so fast and so thoroughly there was nothing she could do to resist it. She could not stop it from roaring out of her chest.

It involved hours of waiting. It involved Willow’s Zen-like calm and Johnny Appleseed’s steady rubbing of the stone bear talisman he carried in his pocket and Melody’s thoroughly humiliating hysteria. It involved numerous prostrations to the earth mother and the god of the sea and just for good measure several tight-lipped appeals to Saint Anthony, patron of lost things, and some unmentionable promises of exceptionally generous behavior before Wrecker was returned to them. Melody held him tight.

“I ought to wring your neck,” she said, her voice rough as a crow’s caw.

Willow said, “What were you thinking?”

Johnny Appleseed said nothing. He gazed at the boy with the appraising eye of a fellow traveler.

He had walked down the salt river and past the lagoon and beyond the parking area and along the road. He was headed for the highway. An old couple vacationing with their towed trailer had pulled over, alarmed at the sight of a small boy walking alone on the pavement. He was the same size as their youngest grandson. They offered him cookies and wiped the dirt off his face with a travel wipe. They asked him his name and he told them. They asked him where his mother was.

San Francisco, he said, stumbling over the syllables.

And did he mean to walk there?

Yes.

It crashed over Melody like a wave, a sense of what he had lost. The bitter, open ache of it.

They were angry, now, this pair. Righteously indignant. They wanted to know how any mother could be so inattentive as to let her son wander off like that. And at the beach, no less! Wasn’t she watching? Didn’t she know a mother has got to have eyes in the back of her head? They hadn’t raised four children for nothing. They could tell her a thing or two.

Melody felt her anger rise in her like an upward flow of lava, steaming and corrosive. Who were these people? What could they possibly know? But she looked down and caught Wrecker’s blue eyes watching her carefully. Maybe it was the sky that had clouded over, but those eyes had half again as much gray in them as they’d had that morning. Steady on her.

How close she had come to losing him.

She laid her hand softly on the back of his neck. She squatted until they were eye to eye.

Something shifted in her, then. A rock rolled away from a chamber of her heart she had not even known was there. She could not guess what her future would bring but suddenly it did not matter, so long as it held him.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.