Lost & Found Girls

"I know something you don't know." Two girls stood at the top of a sloping embankment. One tall, one small. The grass beneath their feet was August burnt and dry. The pond that the grass met was low and still, with a sickly film of algae. Behind them, on one side, sat a tired house leaning into its cracked foundation with tired, cracked people on the inside. On the other was a smaller, tidier, but emptier home with a white picket fence. A birdhouse was staked in the center of the yard; a replica of the white dormered cape style house behind it, right down to the navy-blue shuttered windows. "That so? You gonna tell, or am I supposed to guess?" The pair stared disinterestedly downhill, over the rock-strewn slope at what was once a lively pond, but since had become a lazy marsh in the drought. The sun weighed heavy in the sky; the air pre-storm still and oddly quiet. Later, much later, the taller and older girl, Shayne, would think of that day only as The Day It Rained because she sometimes liked to imagine she was writing a book inside her head, giving titles to her days as though they were chapters. She was intrigued rather than annoyed by the smaller girl's words. Mostly because she didn't say it in an obnoxious sing-song cadence; it wasn't a taunt. It was the first and likely the only sentence she'd speak all day. Shayne hadn't known the smaller girl very long, but she knew already she wasn't the type to play those bratty kid games. If Reyanne said she knew something Shayne didn't know, she meant it straightforward. Shayne glanced at Reyanne, at her moppy blonde hair and faded yellow smock that hung limply over her shoulders, as she scratched her pale cheek, and then tucked her fly-aways behind her ears with nail-bitten fingers. She didn't look at Shayne, she just looked out. Shayne followed the younger child's gaze, and even though she'd looked away from her, she knew the small-for-her-age blonde girl had begun to bite at one of those already too short nails, so she reached for her hand to distract her and tells her, "Your mama is gonna put hot sauce on those hands if you don't quit." Reyanne gave her a funny look, like she couldn't possibly know such a thing. But at night, with her bedroom window open to catch a warm breeze and counter the frigid air-conditioned temperature, Shayne could hear the kinds of stuff Reyanne's mama said. Shouted. Yes, Reyanne's mama had a loud mouth and a mean tongue, and that's exactly the kind of thing she'd say, Shayne just knew it. Shayne's mama wasn't mean. She wasn't anything except gone; meaning the dead kind of gone, and now it was just her and papa in the quiet white house because Luke left for school not long after mama left for heaven. She wasn't sure who missed mama more, her or papa, but she did know that mama's absence left a big hole in their universe. It was like that big sinkhole that opened up on RT 84 a few years back, swallowed up a Buick, a mini-van, and Lester Cannon's hot dog cart; only their sinkhole swallowed up their words. Their family. Papa was alternately angry or sad, and he was always distant. In fact, it was like Shayne wasn't even there most of the time, even when she was right behind him. In his grief, he tried to make everything that reminded him of mama disappear, as if throwing away stuff and things could erase a lifetime of memories. Although each time he did something like that, he'd go quietly in the middle of the night out to the trash bins and retrieve the boxes and bags he'd tossed in anger and bring them right back inside. Even though Shayne knew he was 'processing his emotions' (thanks to sneaking a quick read through the 'The Spouses Guide to Healing After Loss' book some well-intentioned relative left on the living room coffee table), his total disregard of her hurt. In fact, Shayne more than half thought he maybe wanted for her to disappear too. All on account of how much she resembled her mama...