His smile was sad. “I know, Jo. I want to hear your story. And I want to tell you mine. Tell you about Woodside and why they sent me there.” His fingers ran through my hair and caressed my cheek. “Let’s do something really fucking crazy and trust each other.”
I laughed a small sob. “Okay.”
“Mr. Salinger?” A man’s voice was calling. “A word? And Miss Clark? You’re late for class.”
We looked around. Assistant Principal Wallace stood outside the school’s exit doors, sunlight glinting off both his glasses and his bald head.
Evan took my hand. “Come somewhere with me.”
I blinked and glanced at Wallace. “We’ll get in trouble. You’re already in trouble.”
“Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”
Wallace called our names again, his voice echoing off brick.
Fuck it.
I squeezed Evan’s hand tight. “Let’s go.”
We ran to the parking lot, heading for Evan’s tomato-red Chevy truck. It looked like a clunker, with a scratched up paint job and one dented fender. But the interior was immaculate, the old leather free of holes and clean, the dash polished and gleaming. Evan took good care of this baby.
The inside smelled of him—engine grease, little bit of chlorine, the scent of his skin and clothing. As it drew over me, like another seatbelt, I felt safe. Even safer when he slid behind the wheel and started the engine. A little tingle shivered along my skin. Something about sitting in a guy’s truck and watching him drive with masculine expertise was such a turn-on.
The color rose up high in my face and I turned to the window to hide it. Evan drove east for twenty minutes, past fields and fields of corn. An ocean of green stalks stretching past forever. We turned north along the Mississippi River, where it borders Wisconsin. A thick forest of rich, deeper green replaced the cornfields.
A sign came up on my side: Effigy Mounds National Monument.
“Are we going there?” I asked. “Burial mounds?”
“Yeah. Have you ever been?”
“Never. What is it, a cemetery?”
“Sort of. It’s old. Older than this country. Before Planerville built the water park I’d come here sometimes. It’s peaceful. I think you might like it.”
He parked in front of squat, brown visitor center and we went inside. It was library-quiet, only soft footsteps and the hushed voices of a few other tourists. Native American artifacts behind glass hung on the walls. In the center of the main room was a table with a huge 3-D map of the park, hiking trails marked in different colors.
I pointed at a strange chain through the model trees, rudimentary outlines of animals. Bears and birds mostly.
“Those are the burial mounds,” Evan said. “They can be up to forty feet wide in some places.”
“Who made them?”
“The First Nation tribes, from Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Hundreds of years ago.”
Visitors weren’t allowed to climb atop the mounds, but the hiking trails would take you right alongside the ancient graves. We left the visitors’ center and picked a path at random, heading into the cool woods.
Evan was right about the peacefulness of this place. The air between the trees felt thick and rich with history and time and legend.
We crested a hill and came out overlooking one of the mounds. Flattened at the top and overgrown with grass, we could just make out it was in the shape of a bear.
“I see why you like coming here,” I told Evan. “So peaceful.”
“Yes. But it’s not the only reason.”
His low voice carried through the trees as we walked around the base of the mound. He held my hand, but kept his eyes up on the rise of land.
“In my junior year, we studied the First Nations in my American history class,” he said. “I loved it. Best thing I ever learned in school. We learned about the Ojibwe tribe, their beliefs and traditions and about these mounds. It just…made sense. Everything I read, everything I learned…It made a part of me make sense.”
“You think your parents are Native American?” I asked, taking in his very Caucasian blond hair and blue eyes.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever know.” His fingers wove tighter with mine. “I’m okay with it. I just want to be okay with the rest of what I am. Be at peace with what I do know.”
We walked along the trail and sat down on a fallen log, back-to-back to prop us up. Evan told me about his stint at the Woodside Institution. He told me everything, and I felt his trust as if it were something tangible. Something delicate and precious that he set in my hand.
“I was fifteen years old, and the ink on my adoption papers had hardly dried. I’d been a Salinger for about a month. And this one morning, I woke up feeling like I was in tune with my new family. I could feel this…hum running through the house, like a power line had gone down outside. I thought maybe I was so happy to have been adopted that my imagination was working overtime. But it felt good. Natural. And then I thought maybe it wasn’t just me. Maybe everyone else could feel it too. All of us, sitting there, in each other’s space and feeling…everything.”