“Wait a minute, Jack.”
“What, now you want to talk?” I say over my shoulder. “Why don’t you go inside your silo like you always do!”
He opens his mouth to say something, but doesn’t. He hefts Uncle Carl up again and watches us go.
I walk quickly, holding Birdie’s hand the entire way. When I don’t turn down the road to the reserve, Birdie looks up at me, tugging on my sleeve.
“We’re not going to the reserve,” I say. “We’re taking the bus.”
CHAPTER 19 BRIGHT SPOTS IN THE DARK
An hour and a half later, Birdie and me are standing outside a chain-link fence. In the middle of the grass are two big balloons lying sideways. They’re attached to baskets and people stand around and a couple of trucks are parked nearby.
Birdie drinks his hot chocolate. It was the last thing we could buy with our money while we waited for the bus. I also offer my last Honey Bunny Bun, which I’d shoved in my jacket pocket after Uncle Carl crashed into the bush.
The balloons get bigger and bigger as huge fans blow waves of air inside them. Two guys keep them from going anywhere as they inflate.
“Patrick’s going to be so mad when he finds out we didn’t go to the reserve,” says Birdie.
“So what?”
“Don’t you want to see what else is in the shed? There’s like a mountain of bags and boxes in there. I think I even saw Mama’s mannequin.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It was like slipping into another dimension or something.”
“Maybe we did,” says Birdie.
I take the wooden egg from my pocket and give it to Birdie. He squeezes it and then holds it up to his eyes. “It looks like the real thing. It looks like our wooden egg.”
“Yeah. I don’t think we’re dimension hopping.”
Once the balloons are inflated, flames shoot out of some kind of heater, I guess warming the air inside. Within seconds they float up and the baskets sit upright.
“Wow,” says Birdie. “They’re huge.”
I half expect to see Uncle Carl as one of the people waiting to board. But of course he isn’t there.
Birdie leans into the fence, putting his eye up to the metal, and I do the same to get a clear view of takeoff. And before I know it, the baskets are up in the air, higher than the trees.
“Why would Patrick keep that stuff in the silo shed and not tell us?”
Because he’s selfish and cruel.
But I don’t say that.
We watch the balloons for a while as they slowly float higher in the sky. They kind of remind me of the figs from our old tree and I tell Birdie.
“Yeah,” he says. “Kind of like upside-down ones.”
“You know what? I kind of hated that fig tree.”
“Why?”
“Because it hardly ever grew that many figs and it seemed like every year Mama was disappointed and she’d get upset about it.”
Birdie nods, still looking up.
I don’t realize I’m crying until I start talking again. “I hated it when she got upset. Because then she’d disappear and it didn’t matter how many times it happened, I always wondered if she’d come out of her room again.”
“She always came out, though,” says Birdie. “And you always made really good grilled cheese and ramen and bean burritos when she was hiding in her room.”
“But I didn’t want to do that, Birdie. I wanted her to do that. I always wanted her to not disappear.”
“I know,” he says. “Me too.”
The red, green, and blue of the balloons are hardly visible now that the sun is beginning to set.
“Do you ever wonder,” Birdie whispers, “if she’d still be alive if she never came out of her room after that Wolf Day? If she’d stayed inside and left on a different day, maybe a day there wasn’t black ice on the road?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Or maybe if we’d never done a Wolf Day, then everything would have been fine, we’d still be home?”
I hope he isn’t actually looking for an answer. Because I don’t have any.
“Sometimes I hate Wolf Day,” he says.
“Don’t say that.”
“But it’s true. Sometimes I hate it.”
“I know, Birdie. Me too.”
• • •
We’d been all over the city on that last Wolf Day. We’d seen a movie and sneaked into a second. We’d been up in the theater projector room with a woman named Reed and then we drove to where they were setting up for a free movie-in-the-park showing that night. Then we were going to go with a caterer to shell a bunch of beans at this organic farm just outside the city and Mama got really excited since it’d always been one of her dreams to live on an organic farm.
But then the farm owner got weird about having kids come help or maybe it was all the questions Mama was asking and her twitchy enthusiasm that she always had a hard time containing. Either way, the farm owner talked to the caterer and the caterer apologized and said that it would be best if we left.
I could tell Mama was disappointed. More than disappointed, which made me nervous. It was already the late afternoon, so we decided to head home. But Mama said we shouldn’t drive because it might get in the way of us encountering something new, which was important for Wolf Days. Something new might help make up for the farm disappointment.
I tried to convince her otherwise because I was pretty sure it was a long walk. Even the caterer tried to tell us not to walk. Birdie was tired because he was still getting over a cold. It might be five or ten miles before we could find a bus, the caterer said. But Mama shook her head. We left the car at the farm and started on foot.
But then Mama stopped and turned around. She said, you know what? All I need to do is talk to the farm owner and make it clear we
