The Bone Box

She dressed beautifully every day for work. Weekends around Port Orchard, she always put on dressy slacks and a nice top. Jeans-and not even new ones at that-were reserved for visits home.

She put on a pair of Lee’s from Walmart and a sweater. In Port Orchard, she was Dr. Waterman, and she wore her accomplishments proudly. At home, where they would certainly be noticed, she was merely Birdy. And she did everything she could to keep herself from giving the appearance that she’d made it.

And, yet, everyone on the reservation knew she had. There were very few secrets kept among the Makah.

Maybe just one.

CHAPTER TWO

The front steps of the old mobile home were spongy. Each tread had soaked in rainwater on such a steady basis that the fact they were intact was some kind of minor miracle in a place that was decidedly short on them.

Birdy knocked on the door and waited, feeling the past come at her like it always did. Her mother’s house. The home she and her siblings had grown up in. It was only fiberglass, aluminum, and carpet that hadn’t been changed since the home was delivered to the reservation in 1969 as a part of a government-sponsored effort to help impoverished Native Americans get a step or two closer to something that had eluded them-hope.

The Makah people weren’t so foolish to think that a mobile home was the equivalent of the American Dream.

Birdy’s father, Mackie Waterman, had put it very succinctly the day the doublewide was rolled into position.

“If this is their idea of making things even, they’re working with the wrong set of scales.”

As she stood there on the wobbly stoop, the memory of her father brought a smile. He’d been gone for a couple of years, but in a very real way, he was always with her. While her mother could be cold, her father had doted on her. He’d called her every variation of her name-Baby Bird, Purty Birdy, and when she was didn’t do as she was told, he jokingly called her Birdzilla. She used to wait on those very steps for him to come home from one of his extended fishing trips or from the lumber mill where he’d worked in the off-season.

Birdy let the memory pass as she knocked. She knew the door wasn’t locked, but it seemed that her mom and her boyfriend of the moment required the courtesy of a warning. Neither owned a car, so a vehicle check wouldn’t tell her if anyone was home. Birdy hadn’t liked what she’d seen the last time she opened the door without knocking. No child ever wants to see her mother doing that.

Natalie Waterman twisted the knob and the chintzy aluminum door swung open a sliver. Birdy’s mother stood quiet for a second. Dark eyes scanning. Silver-streaked black hair going every which way like a turn indicator on an old car.

“You keep coming,” Natalie said. “Don’t know just why, but you do.”

The door opened the rest of the way, and Birdy, feeling like she had when she was ten years old, went inside the small living room. The TV was blaring, smoke curling along the dingy yellow ceiling, leggy houseplants clawing their way toward the saggy curtain-framed windows that looked out over a chicken pen and a woodpile.

Just like it always had.

Birdy hugged her mother, who remained stiff. “I come because I love you, Mom. Even when you don’t make it easy. I still do.”

A cigarette dangled from Natalie’s nicotine-stained fingertips, and she braced herself as she allowed the physical contact with her oldest daughter.

“My, my, aren’t you the giver,” Natalie said, falling into the recliner pointed at the home shopping channel, where a bubbly actress was promoting Christmas candles and wreaths “guaranteed to freshen a room with holiday smells.”

It was the type of item Birdy hoped her mother would buy. She’d offered to help get the trailer home in order, but Natalie always refused. Charity, she said, was for losers and that simply wasn’t her at all.

Birdy pretended to ignore the sarcasm that seemed to pour from Natalie’s cigarette-puckered lips. “You looking for your sister? She’s not here. She’s at home with her no-good husband and her litter of no-good brats.”

Her mother-a charmer, she wasn’t.

“No, Mom,” Birdy said, softly. “I came to see you today.”

Natalie’s eyes stayed fixed on home shopping, but she answered her daughter.

“Look at me. I must have won the lotto,” she said, without even trying to offer a smile. “If you want some coffee, I’m out. Might have some instant in the cupboard somewhere.”

“I’m good,” Birdy said, as she took a seat across from her mother in the familiar green La-Z-Boy recliner that had been artfully crisscrossed with black electrical tape and silver duct tape. It had been her father’s favorite chair. She ran her fingers over the armrest.

“I’m going to Walla Walla to see Tommy,” she said.

Natalie sucked the life out of her cigarette before answering.

“What for? Haven’t you done enough to that boy?”

“He’s not a boy,” she said. “He’s almost forty.”

“Fine, but why are you going to see him?”

“Because he wrote and asked me to come. And besides, Mom, I have never felt right about him going to prison.”

“A little late for you to say that now.”

“I liked Tommy. I probably even loved him, even if he was my cousin.”

“You are making me sick now, Birdy. Let it be. Go back to the dead people you seem to love so much. Leave the living alone.”

It was cruel remark and it hurt. Natalie was a sharpshooter when it came to piercing her daughter’s insecurities. She always had been. Where most mothers sought to comfort a child, Natalie seemed to seek ways to hurt. Counselors and teachers, mentors and friends, each had tried to convince Birdy that her mother’s cruelty was a sign of her own insecurities, but that did little to alleviate a girl’s pain.

“I knew you’d be supportive, Mom,” Birdy said, in a futile attempt at jabbing.

“Leave Tommy alone,” Natalie said. “Let him be. Let sleeping dogs lie. You got that, Birdy? You’re never satisfied with the way things are. You understand?”

Birdy’s neck muscles pulsed. Her neck. It was like a barometer of her stress.

“I understand what you are saying, yes,” she said. “But I don’t agree with it. I don’t know what Tommy will tell me when I see him, but I do know I want to hear it.”

“All you need to know is that he’s in prison because of you,” Natalie said.

Birdy laid her palm against her neck. “I was fourteen, Mom.”

“I had my first baby at fifteen. Fourteen isn’t so young. Being young isn’t an excuse for anything.”

“It wasn’t an excuse, but a fact. I did what I was supposed to do.”

The room went silent as Natalie Waterman pressed the MUTE button. She wanted to make her point without the home shopping hostess’s over-the-top spiel about a “Christmas kitten ceramic coming up next.”

“You went against the family, Birdy,” she said. “Twenty years is just a drop in the ocean. Families never forget a betrayer. You’re a smart girl. You’d think with all your schooling you’d understand something as simple as that.”

The sound went back up on the TV.

“I don’t know,” Birdy said, “I thought that you’d be glad about it. Happy maybe. Something positive about seeing him.”

“You don’t know me and I don’t know you. On second thought,” Natalie said, pulling herself up from the recliner. “I’m pretty sure I’m out of that instant coffee. You better run along home. Go back to your precious job and