Listen! (9780062213358) by Tolan Stephanie S

Author:Tolan, Stephanie S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

15

Five Weeks

“‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’—John Muir.”

* * *

Charley is sitting on her bed, looking at her mother’s book. The photo that goes with this quotation is a perfect circle of white mushrooms, some big, some small, against a background of brilliant green moss. A fairy ring. The mushrooms, she knows, are attached to one another—are really only a single fungus, its connections underground. It is called a fairy ring because it seems to appear by magic, overnight. One day it isn’t there; the next it is. In a few days it will be gone, as if the fairies came to dance there in the moonlight and then moved on, leaving their magic to fade.

Charley remembers believing that. She remembers being in this place when a fairy ring was there, begging to be allowed to stay out at night to watch. “If humans are there, the fairies won’t come,” her mother told her.

Later, of course, she gave up the idea of fairies dancing in the moonlight. But this place where the photo was taken remained a special place, different from the rest of the Eagle Lake woods of beech and hickory, oak and sweet gum, dogwood and sourwood. Her mother called it the Pine Grove—a small hillock covered entirely with evergreens—pines and cedars and holly. Charley doesn’t remember exactly where it is, but she knows it isn’t on the lake trail. In all the days of walking around the lake, she hasn’t passed it.

Sitting with the book open on her lap, staring at the fairy ring, Charley has a strange sensation. It’s as if she is looking through her mother’s eyes. She can almost feel the camera in her hands, the pine needles and small stones under her as she kneels to get exactly this angle, this contrast of green and white, shadows of pine boughs on the moss.

Goose bumps rise along her arms. She reaches to close the book and finds her mother’s face looking at her from a photo on the back jacket flap. Colleen Morgan, dark hair, blue eyes, splotches of pink on her cheeks against skin as pale as skim milk. Her mother called those splotches her “continents”—the shape of South America on one cheek, Africa on the other—proof of the Irish heritage that Charley shares. Charley touches her own cheek now, feeling the surge of heat, knowing that if she had a mirror she would see the pink that for her appears only when feelings rise like a tidal wave and threaten to wash her away. It doesn’t matter what the feelings are—anger, embarrassment, this rush of loss—her cheeks broadcast it to the world.

She did not know there was a picture of her mother in this book. It has been hiding like a scorpion, waiting to sting. She pushes the book back under her pillow, pulls the sheet up over it, piles the other pillow on top. Her throat has closed so that she almost cannot swallow at all.

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