She folded the paper in half and tossed it into the river. She watched the little boat glide swiftly away on the gray glass of water. She imagined her words as five staunch sailors who would endure the hazards of rough water to deliver her message. She watched those words until they disappeared around the river bend.
Sending the message felt satisfying. As if something important had transpired between her and the river.
When her note hadn’t brought results a few days later, she decided to be more specific. That blustery April day, she wrote in careful script, Dear Wind, Please bring Zane back. From Ellis. She scaled her climbing tree to the usual high branch, waited for a strong gust of wind, and let the tiny letter go. It flew out of sight much faster than the first message. She hoped that was a good sign.
It wasn’t, not for bringing Zane back, but she kept writing to the woods anyway. She sent more words downriver and into the wind, tucked tiny messages into tree roots, laid them under rocks, sank them into the soft punk of rotting logs.
She didn’t know why she kept doing it. It just felt good, maybe how some kids felt when they talked to God in their prayers. After a while, you figured out no one was going to answer. That made it better, really, because you could say any secret thing you wouldn’t say to someone who was listening. That was all that mattered, getting some of the words out before they piled too full inside you.
PART ONE
DAUGHTER OF THE WILD WOOD
1
Ellis saw a dark hollow at the base of an oak. It would be a good place to put a message.
What would she write? How would she word what she’d seen when she still couldn’t comprehend it?
She tried to imagine how her nine-year-old self would say it. Concisely, on a small shred of paper: Dear Tree, Jonah has betrayed me. I don’t know what to do. From Ellis.
What she wanted to write was, What should I do? But other than the day she’d asked the wind to bring Zane back, she usually didn’t ask for something directly. Writing the notes had mostly been a way to work through events that troubled her. She did it for years, the messages increasing in length as she got older.
Dear Rock, I wonder where Zane is and if he misses me.
Dear Tree, Mom won’t get up and I have no food. Maybe I should ask Edith for supper.
Dear Salamander, Today Heather told me I should wash my clothes. She said it in front of everyone on the bus. I wish I lived under this log with you. You get to be as dirty as you want.
Jasper and River had run ahead. They were almost at the little pier that jutted over the forest pond.
Ellis had to pull her mind back to where she was.
“Careful!” she called. “Don’t get too close to the water.” The boys were four and a half and had been taught how to stay afloat in swim lessons, but she still feared their nearness to the deep black water.
When she arrived at the dock, they were stretched out on their bellies, fishnets in hand, looking for tadpoles. The muscles in her arms and shoulders released their aching tension as she set down the baby in her car carrier. She gave the boys the two mason jars from the bag in her other hand.
“Shore will be a better place to find them,” she said.
She showed her sons where to find tadpoles, in the muck along the shoreline. In his knee-high rubber boots, River stepped into the water to block Jasper. He wanted to be the first to capture one.
Jonah and Ellis secretly joked that the twins had taken their names too literally: River as loud and impetuous as rushing water, Jasper as quiet and forbearing as a stone. River was born three minutes before his twin, and he’d been three steps ahead of Jasper ever since.
Thinking about Jonah made her physically ill. She sat on the ground next to the baby.
She had to divorce him. Obviously.
He’d probably been with Irene since early in Ellis’s pregnancy. That was when he’d started the lessons. All those months, he’d been sleeping with his hard-bodied tennis instructor while his wife got softer growing his baby. She suspected he’d been lying to her about that tough case at his law firm. Lying to his boys. On Saturday, he wouldn’t even take them to the park. He’d probably been with Irene.
Ellis kept seeing it, Jonah getting into her sporty white car near his work. The passionate kiss. At eleven thirty in the morning. Tennis wasn’t the only reason he’d gotten in shape lately. Apparently, he was doing intense workouts over his long lunch hours.
The boys had been in the van when Ellis saw the kiss. If she hadn’t quickly said something to distract them, they might have seen. Any of her friends might have. Probably some of their mutual friends had seen them together or knew about the affair. Ellis felt betrayed by them, too.
“I found a whole bunch!” River said. “Mom! Come see!”
She glanced at Viola asleep in her carrier. She’d nodded off during the jostling walk through the woods. Ellis left her at the pier to look at the tadpoles.
“Do you see them?” River said. “Mom? Mom?”
“I see.”
“You’re stepping on them,” Jasper said. “River, stop it!”
“I’m not! They swam away.”
“Mom, he’s killing them.”
“Guys, let’s just calm down, okay? Put some pond water in your jars and try to catch a few.”
“How many?” Jasper asked.
“You can each catch about ten. Twenty’s a good number for the big fishbowl, don’t you think?”
“I want to keep mine in a different place from Jasper’s,” River said.
“No, they all go in
