Tomorrow River

Over the sound of popping bacon grease, Lou screeches, “Pick your head up off that wiped table, Shenandoah Wilson Carmody. What in tarnation is wrong with ya?”

“Why, there is not one thing wrong with me, Louise Marie Jackson, but aren’t you the sweetest thing to ask.” I’ve had it with her griping. “I’m dead tired is all.” I big-wink at Woody so she knows I’m only being saucy, rise up out of my chair, stiffen my arms, and shuffle across the linoleum towards Lou like one of those resurrected bodies she was fond of telling us about before she got so full of herself. “One of your bloodsucking spirits drained me dry last night. That rotted thing came climbin’ up the fort steps, bit the top off my big toe, stuck in a straw, and sipped aaall niiight looong. And ya know what else? Before it slithered off, it asked me where you slept.”

“Dead tired, huh?” superstitious Lou says, squinting down at my bare feet. Once she’s sure I’m not bleeding all over her kitchen floor, she shoves me clear back to the table. “That’s what a body gets when it’s up late peepin’ on folks with those big glasses of yours from up in that stupid fort. I know ya was watchin’ me Wednesday night, Shenny.” She waves the spatula an inch from our noses. “And you, Jane Woodrow, if ya don’t quit messin’ with your hair, I’ll get my shears out right quick.”

If it was just her and me sitting in the kitchen, Louise wouldn’t dare go uppity like she is. She knows all about my temper. And how I’ll do whatever’s necessary to keep my sister steady. Arguments of any sort bother Woody. She’s started rocking.

“Hey, now,” I say, getting her fingers laced between mine.

Stupid Lou. I’m not saying that I don’t sometimes, but it wasn’t on purpose that I spied her climbing out of her cottage window that particular evening. (She’s been meeting up with a man after midnight for quite some time, but I’m going to keep that to myself for now.) No. The reason my sister and I finished the night up in the fort had nothing to do with our horrible housekeeper extraordinaire. Last Wednesday was Mama’s thirty-fourth birthday.

We’d normally have a party for her with presents and white lanterns hanging from the trees near the garden and a yellow sheet cake with chocolate butter frosting, but Mama is in absentia, so there was none of that and no singing neither. Only the sound of Papa’s weeping coming down the upstairs hall and straight into Woody’s and my ears no matter how many pillows we piled atop our heads. His sad can turn to mad so fast that we won’t know what hit us. That’s why we slipped out from between our sheets and ran out to the fort that night. Not to spy on big-headed Lou.

“I’m warnin’ ya, better watch where ya step when you’re in town,” she says, stabbing the bacon out of the fry pan and onto the white plates. “One of them ’zilary ladies sees ya runnin’ around, ya know how they is. They’ll snitch ya out.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, those auxiliary ladies better watch their mouths.” I do not have warm feelings for those prissy women who prance through town like they own the place and neither did my mother.

“In the legal field, their back-fence talk is called slander and it’s punishable,” I say, even though I know for once in her miserable life she’s right.

Only a few folks know that Papa’s keeping us locked up at Lilyfield. I heard from Vera Ledbetter, who works at the drugstore, that he’s telling everybody who dares to wonder why the Carmody twins are not attending choir practice or skimming rocks down at the reservoir or fishing at the lake with the other kids the way we do every other summer. “The girls are not feeling up to socializing just yet. They need time to recover from the loss of their mother.”

That’s why Woody and I have to be careful. If somebody should notice us flitting here and there, that nosy parker could blab to our father at his weekly Gentlemen’s Club meeting, “Golly, it sure was nice to see the twins running around again, Your Honor.”

(Believe me… that could happen. You live in this town, you got all the privacy of a stampede.)

Lou drops our breakfast plates down in front of us and props her spindly arms on the table. I get busy cutting the flapjacks into baby bites for Woody, which is the only way she’ll eat them.

“If’n she was here,” Lou says, “what do you s’pose your mama’d have to say about all this spookin’ about?”

I could snap back at her, “Well, if Mama was here, we wouldn’t have to be spooking about looking for her, would we, you big ignoramus?” but Woody is about rocking off her chair, so I breathe in deep and answer in my most tempered tone, “‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.’”

“Knock it off,” Lou says, cuffing me on the side of my head. “I ain’t in no mood for any of your mumbo jumbo this mornin’.”

“That’s not mumbo jumbo. That’s poetry. Miss Emily Dickinson.” I’m this close to getting up out of my chair, picking up the fry pan off the stove, grease and all, and using it to flatten the back of her head. She’s all the time doing this. Trying to make me feel like I’m letting our dear mother down when what I’m attempting to do is the exact opposite.

I wonder if right about now you might be agreeing with her. Thinking to yourself:

What’s wrong with this child? Why didn’t she start searching right away? Her mama’s been gone almost a year.

Well, I wouldn’t be too quick to judge if I were you. I did all that I could.

I questioned those that live at Lilyfield. I didn’t want to get our father more jittery than he already was, but I asked Mr. Cole Jackson one afternoon where he thought Mama might’ve gone off to and when she might be coming back. He set down his pruning shears and cast his eyes heavenward. “Some things in this life are not ours for the knowin’. The Almighty’s got a plan for all His children,” he said. “Found it’s best not to question Him.”

I should’ve known that’s what he’d say. That’s his answer to almost anything, so he was no help at all.

I even stooped so low as to bother Lou. “Thought ya was s’posed to be so damn smart,” she sneered when I asked if she knew anything about Mama’s disappearance. “There’s that ten-thousand-dollar reward your granpappy put up, so if’n I knew somethin’ about your mama’s vanishment, don’t you think I woulda told it by now? Shoot. I had that cash money, I’d be livin’ in high cotton ’stead of waitin’ on you spoiled girls hand and foot.”

Reaching a dead end no matter which way I turned, I began to believe that Mama’s goneness was just some sort of silly misunderstanding. Even after Sheriff Andy Nash showed up at our front porch on All Hallow’s Eve, telling Papa in a suitably haunted-sounding voice: “I’m sorry, Your Honor. I… we… all of us have done what we can to find Miss Evelyn. The leads just seemed to dry up.”

The sheriff admitting defeat like that did get my hackles up, but just a hair. I still believed Mama’d come home any moment no matter what dopey Andy Nash thought.

Especially when December 24th rolled around. Our mother loves all the holidays, but Christmas Eve is her absolute favorite. Woody thinks it’s because she was named for it, that’s why. Evelyn. Mr. Cole trudged out to the woods that afternoon with his ax and drug back the prettiest spruce to set in the parlor. I placed the Mitch Miller Christmas album on the hi-fi the same way our mother would’ve to set the mood for tree trimming. After my sister and I hung our stockings, set out the cookies and hot cocoa, we stood by the front window and I sang over and over, “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful,” but you know-Mama didn’t.

And on May Day, I was so positive she’d show up with the better weather that I got up extra early and ran down to the potting shed. But when I threw open the door, all I found was Mama’s gardening shoes, sitting on the workbench wrapped in spiderwebs like a haunted present.

Just like I’d been doing the whole time Mama’s been gone, I told weeping Woody, “Must you always be so dramatic? Just because she hasn’t showed up yet doesn’t mean she’s not goin’ to. We’ll head into the kitchen one of these mornings, and there she’ll be, sipping her tea and reading. ‘Good morning,’ she’ll say, so thrilled to see us. ‘How were your dreams while I was gone, my two peas in a pod? Not half as sweet as you, I bet,’ and then… and then everything will go back the way it was. Better even. Her and Papa have had a nice vacation from one another. Absence always makes the heart grow fonder. Just you wait and see.”

Even though my sister couldn’t come out and actually say so, I could tell she wasn’t buying into that, which was unusual, considering that she believed in the Tooth Fairy until she was almost ten.

But right about then is when it occurred to me that maybe I was the one who was believing in kid stuff beyond the time that is considered normal. Maybe our mother really wasn’t coming back. Not next week. Not next month. Not ever. Maybe Mama was dead.