The Second Life of Abigail Walker (8 page)

“Abby,” the girls had called out when they came into the fox's field that afternoon. “Oh, Abby,” in sickly sweet voices, like the voice a raccoon might use to woo its poor, pitiful excuse for a mate. The fox didn't think the girls—sallow-faced, scrawny things—should be there in the field, but she decided to give them one chance to prove her wrong.

They screamed when they saw her. Of course. One even scrambled wildly for something to throw, and so the fox had pulled back her lips to reveal her sharp incisors, which—of course—sent the girls running.

Abby.
The girl's name was Abby, and these two scrawny raccoon girls were after her. The fox had followed them to the edge of the field, watched them hop onto their bikes, calling to each other, “Don't worry, we'll find her, and then she'll be sorry!”

Well. Best not to think of that. Better to think of the long boat, and the grasses that lined the river, redolent of fish and mud. Think of the young men, who built fires at night when they stopped to camp and sat in a circle around them, singing. One man played fiddle, and the others called out the songs they wanted to hear, “Soldier's Joy,” “Bonaparte's Retreat.” And one man—a very young man—kept getting lost. But he was found, again and again, and each time he returned, the men sang louder and laughed harder, the world around them new and theirs for the taking.

abby hadn't
planned on going back to Anders's house on Sunday. Oh, she'd go sometime, she'd thought, but not the next day. It seemed too soon, almost like if she showed up at the Bentons' on Sunday afternoon, she was agreeing to help them with their Lewis and Clark project, and she didn't know if she wanted to help them. She didn't even
know
them.

So, on Sunday morning, she lay in bed and started reading
Undaunted Courage
, about the Lewis and Clark expedition. It wasn't the sort of book she usually read, with its ten million facts
and official-sounding sentences, but she found if she skipped around, there were good parts hidden behind the dates and weights and treaties, parts that were more like a story and less like homework. She wished there were more girls in the book, though she knew if she kept reading, Sacagawea would show up sooner or later.

She was trying to decide whether to keep slogging through or get dressed and see if her mom would make her French toast for breakfast (“It's just bread and eggs, Mom,” she would argue, “bread and eggs have hardly any calories”), when she came across the story of George Shannon. What first got her interest was the fact that George Shannon was only seventeen. There was a famous actor Abby liked who was seventeen, and she imagined George Shannon with the actor's high cheekbones and scruffy brown hair and the way he had of looking at people through half-closed eyes. Picturing George Shannon this way made Abby want to keep reading, which was how she learned the amazing fact that George Shannon had gotten lost two times on the Lewis and Clark expedition—once for
sixteen days without food or water—and that each time he'd found his way back on his own.

Now
that, Abby thought when she finished reading about George Shannon,
is a good story.

So after breakfast she put on her shoes and her jacket and headed across the street to her field, and after she'd looked to see if any new birds were around, she climbed over the fence and walked down to the creek, where Wallace was waiting for her.

What surprised her about this was that she wasn't surprised at all.

Anders was sitting on the front porch when she came around to the front of the Bentons' house. “My dad's here!” Anders greeted her, standing. “I told him all about you. He's really excited to meet you!”

“How did you know I was coming?” Abby asked.

Anders shrugged. “I just knew you would.”

“Hey, Matt,” Anders called as he led Abby into the house. “Abby's here!”

Anders's father was sitting at the round table in the kitchen, writing on a piece of loose-leaf
notebook paper. He looked up when they entered the room, and Abby took a step back, startled by his face, how handsome it was, and how he seemed frightened. He had dark circles under his eyes and a couple of days' worth of stubble on his cheeks. His hair and eyes were black as crows' wings.

“This is Abby,” Anders explained to him. “She's the girl we told you about.”

Relief, then a smile bloomed on the man's face. “Wallace brought you.”

“I guess you could say that,” Abby agreed, and then wondered if that sounded stupid. Suddenly she felt fumbly and tongue-tied. Anders's dad was so handsome! “He led me down to the creek yesterday, and that's where I met Anders.”

“On this side of the creek,” Anders put in. “Don't worry. I didn't cross it.”

“Wallace is my dog,” Anders's father told Abby. “Or he was. Now he's more Mom's than mine. I got him right after high school, taught him how to track. He knows the woods around here better than anybody.”

And then suddenly, without warning, he
pounded a fist on the table and said in a strangled voice, “I have to write, I have to write.”

Anders tapped Abby on the arm. “Why don't we go find Grandma? Matt, you call me if you need me.”

“Your dad is really good-looking,” Abby whispered as they went through the hallway to the front room. “It's sort of amazing.”

“He used to look a lot better,” Anders informed her. “Before he went to Iraq. Iraq kind of took a lot out of him.”

Mrs. Benton was sitting on the porch swing, reading a newsletter called
Riding Instructor
. “This thing is written by idiots,” she declared in way of a greeting. “It's all about dressage and tail braiding. Complete waste of time.” She slapped the newsletter to the floor, then looked at Abby. “You survived to live another day, I see. Anders told me about your troubles. Girls can be rough, but you'll be fine.”

“I'm okay for now,” Abby assured her, sitting down in a rocker. “I'm good.” She studied Mrs. Benton's face, looking for any resemblance to her
son. They both had the same dark brown eyes, the same little dimple in their chins, but Mrs. Benton's features were sharper than Matt's, her nose pointier, her lips thinner. She had deep worry lines etched into her forehead, which Abby found interesting—Mrs. Benton didn't strike her as the worrying type. She sounded so sure of herself all the time, like she could take care of any problem that came her way. But then Abby thought about Matt, the way he'd looked so afraid when she'd walked in the kitchen, and she guessed there might be some problems that Mrs. Benton couldn't do anything about.

“Grandma, did you remind Matt to take his pills?” Anders asked his grandmother, taking a seat next to her on the swing. “'Cause he's acting a little aggravated in there.”

Mrs. Benton looked pained. “I told him to take them, but I can't force them down his throat.”

“He's got to take the pills, Grandma! Just give them to him like he was a kid. Put them in a spoonful of peanut butter.” Anders shook his head. “You act like he's going to take care of himself, but he won't.”

He turned to Abby. “My dad has got some problems, the main one being that he doesn't really want to live anymore.”

Anders's grandmother winced and then made a strange sound from deep in her throat, the sort of sound Abby woke herself up with when she was having a nightmare.

“Our job is to make sure he doesn't do anything stupid,” Anders went on, shooting his grandmother a look. “Our job is to keep him alive.”

Abby rocked back and forth for a moment without saying anything, without having any idea of what to say. Finally she asked, hoping it was okay to ask, “Where's your mom?”

“Virginia. Springfield,” Anders said without a trace of expression in his voice. “She lives there with her sister.”

“Anders's mom and dad aren't together anymore,” Mrs. Benton informed Abby. “It's complicated.”

“Not really.” Anders wriggled in his seat, clearly agitated. “My dad did two tours of duty in Iraq, and me and my mom stayed in Virginia,
and when my dad came home the last time, my mom decided she didn't want to be married to him anymore because the war had changed him so much.”

“Well,” Mrs. Benton said, and Abby could tell she was trying to be diplomatic. “Well. Yes. But she's young, and she didn't plan on”—she waved her hand around in a vague sort of way—“this situation, I guess is one way you could put it.”

“You're supposed to stay married for better or worse,” Anders said. “That's the promise.”

Her grandmother nodded, stared blankly ahead. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Did you know that Lewis and Clark discovered over a hundred twenty mammal specimens?” Abby said after the quiet had been stretched thin and she was starting to feel awkward, like she had stumbled into a private family conversation she really shouldn't be listening to. “I've been sort of reading this book my mom gave me.”

Mrs. Benton nodded toward the door. “That's what he's in there writing about. All the zoological specimens they found along the
way. He's making a list, describing everything. His poem, he calls it. That's what's all over the walls—his notes, the charts he's drawn up. He got interested after I told him about a book I was reading about the expedition.”

“‘It was an undiscovered world,' he keeps saying,” Anders reported. “‘Everything was new.'”

“He says if he finishes the poem, then maybe he'll be okay, so we're all working on it together.” Mrs. Benton pushed herself up out of the swing with a groan. “At least it gives him something to focus on. I'm going to get him to take his pills.”

The screen door slammed behind her. Anders looked at Abby and shook his head. “I keep thinking about that prairie dog. I still can't believe he made it east alive,” he said. And then he added, “It almost gives you hope.”

When Mrs. Benton came back, she handed Abby a piece of paper. “This is a partial list of animals we still need to do research on. Why don't you take it with you? Look a few things up, if you've got the time.”

“You want me to help?” she asked Mrs. Benton after she'd read the list. “With the
research? But you don't even know if I'm good at stuff like that.”

“Oh, I can tell. You went home last night and started reading, didn't you? You've got curiosity, and you know how to get your hands on a book. And”—Mrs. Benton paused and looked Abby straight in the eye—“you came back.”

“I told you she would,” Anders said. “I knew it.”

“The fact is, we need you,” Mrs. Benton continued. She nodded toward Anders. “Right now, there's only two of us. And Matt, of course, but he has his good days and his bad days and can't always concentrate.”

“Couldn't a doctor help him?” Abby asked. “I mean, help him with his feelings?”

“A doctor
is
helping him,” Mrs. Benton said. “And we're trying to get him a place at the Veterans Administration hospital, but with all the budget cuts, they're short on space.”

“It would be great if you could help,” Anders said. “I mean, anything you could do. It would be great.”

So Abby agreed.

On Tuesday,
Anoop gave Abby one of his
dosas
for lunch and Jafar gave her half of a chicken salad sandwich. Her lunch had disappeared, and though she was sure Kristen was responsible, Abby couldn't figure out how she'd done it. She remembered putting her lunch bag in her locker when she'd gotten to school that morning, and she didn't think anyone else knew her combination.

“Maybe you gave your combination to a friend, but forgot?” Jafar suggested.

“But even if that were so,” Anoop countered, “why would her friend take her lunch?”

Jafar thought for a moment. “She was hungry. Or maybe she needed to take a pill. When I take my allergy medicine, I always have to eat something, or else I get dizzy.”

“Then why didn't she eat her own lunch?” Anoop asked.

“Maybe her locker is on the other side of the building.”

“Well, if this is the case, Abby's friend should have come forward and offered to buy Abby another lunch. I don't think her friend is much of a friend.”

While Anoop and Jafar argued across the table from her, Abby observed them, as if she were going to draw their pictures next to the birds in her notebook. Anoop was neat. He parted his dark hair on the side, so you could see the thin, pale line of his scalp. His white shirt was buttoned at the collar, and he had folded his sleeves twice so that they rested mid-forearm. His fingernails were very clean, his posture impressively straight. If he were a bird, he would be a shiny black raven.

Jafar reminded Abby of her little brother, Gabe. His hair was shaggy, his smile lopsided and friendly, and his Atlanta Braves T-shirt had food stains on it. When she showed up at lunch on Friday, he'd exclaimed, “Excellent! Finally someone who will listen to my jokes without making old-lady faces.”