“It’s real,” he told me. “It’s called rye grass.”
We rolled past driveways—cement, stone, and asphalt. Beside each driveway was a mailbox, most of them tiny towers of brick or gothic-looking, wrought-iron things. We would see a driveway but sometimes no house, and then the woods again for intervals, as if the road led nowhere but a magic forest.
The houses we did see flashed between tree trunks. These were fancy houses, even fancier than anything I’d seen in Uptown. For one thing, they were larger, sometimes looking more like bed and breakfasts than real houses people lived in. One looked like a castle. Two others were what my Daddy said was Greek revival style, with thick columns and, in one case, a driveway made of red brick. We passed what my mom called a wedding cake house: white and dressy, with a flat roof and columns on a big front porch.
Mansions. These country houses were real mansions.
Rather than a normal forest floor, that shock of rye grass rolled between the trees. These impeccable lawns were dotted with iron benches, stone bird baths, and gazebos. Great oaks donned tree-houses and rope swings. Almost every house had a pool. Not just regular pools, but ones with water shooting up into the sky and big, plastic slides and diving boards.
In between the houses, there were trails, not made of dirt, but gently pressed-down grass. Once, as we passed the grounds between a brick, columned home and one made of gray stone, I saw a boy about my age riding a four-wheeler.
“Is this the Hundred Acre Wood?” I asked my dad, thinking of Winnie the Pooh.
He shook his head absently and didn’t speak again until we pulled into the circle-drive in front of a smaller, two-story, non-mansion house with walls made out of gray wood shingles.
He walked around and opened my door, and I wriggled out of my booster seat, the soles of my Mary Janes clapping gently on the cement of the driveway.
“How would you like to live here, Amelia?” He pointed toward the house’s roof. “Up there in the top, with those big windows?”
“No.” I shook my head.
The Uptown house had Mama’s clothes. Her smell. Her green toothbrush still in the cup by mine. The floral placemats I had helped her pick at Nordstrom just a few weeks back.
Daddy crouched down in front of me, the rips in his paint-stained jeans exposing hair-dusted knees and shins.
“Amelia, baby, Mom’s not there. She’s not in our house. She’s out here.” He stood up and held his arms out. “Feel the wind blow? That’s your Mama. Look up at the sky. At night we’ll see the stars here. She’s up there watching you. She didn’t want to go, but sometimes we don’t have a choice. When you see the stars twinkle, you’ll know she’s thinking about you.” He crouched down by me again, his brown eyes red and damp.
“You’ll see your Mom again one day, sweetheart. But first, she wants to watch you ride your bike and swing and play at school. She wants to see what you’re gonna do. And when you’re really old, you might get married and have kids of your own. You’ll be their mom. She’ll be so proud of you. Anything you do, she’ll be so glad to see you. She wants you to have lots of fun, like we could have out here. It’s going to be summer soon, and we’ll be able to hear beetles singing at night. And maybe even see some lightning bugs. They glow, remember? You and me…we’ll have a good time here.” He pressed a fingertip gently on the tip of my nose. “What do you say, cowgirl?”
Seeing Daddy’s cheeks wet made me feel like I was going to explode. My chest was warm and hot, my eyes aching with pressure.
“No!” I yelled, and for reasons unknown now, I bolted.
All around the house were grassy meadows. In late March, spring had sprung. I remember wildflowers batting my sandaled feet as I tore toward a row of trees I thought would offer me some cover.
As I ran, I listened for my father’s harder footfall. Nothing. When I noticed that, the painful rock inside my chest shattered, blurring my eyes and splattering all over my thick glasses. When crying didn’t feel enough, I screamed bloody murder, and it felt so good to scream and run, the air around me bright and cool, the flowers tucked against the pine grove out in front of me a cruel reminder of how beautiful the world had seemed till Mama left.
I ran into the woods, spurred faster by the quiet behind me. If Daddy didn’t want me, I would run away and never come back. Never ever.
Maybe he really didn’t, I realized, as the trees rose up around me and the shadows shifted on the muddy ground. My dad worked a lot. His studio had a bed and a refrigerator, even a secretary during the day. It was nowhere near here. Maybe he was banishing me, like a fairy tale girl locked in a castle tower.
Through the tear-splattered lenses of my glasses, everything was smeary—and besides, my head was spinning. I didn’t notice that the woods were ending, giving way to a new field, until I found myself in wildflowers again. Then a big, gray bird flew overhead, and my gaze lifted toward the sky.
I’ll never know exactly how it happened. One minute, I was shifting my gaze from the bird to something I had noticed on my right: an unfinished house, it seemed, with wood planks rising toward the sky, no roof yet. The next second, I hit something hard and cold. I must have opened my mouth to scream, because water filled my throat and nose. I realized as I flailed and choked that I was in a pool.
I tried to scream and panicked when I couldn’t, when I couldn’t get un-choked. That’s when I felt the hands on me.
I was so scared, I couldn’t process anything but hands squeezing my shoulders, the sensation of being pulled through the water by someone larger.
“Grab onto the side,” he ordered, and I grappled for it.
I’d lost my glasses, and without them, I was blind. Which meant when he climbed out and pulled me up onto the deck, I couldn’t see his face. Just rich brown hair and suntanned skin, smeared by movement as he hovered for a moment in front of me and then started slapping my back. His voice cut through the sound of my choking.
“Breathe! C’mon, you have to keep on coughing!”
I pulled air into my wet lungs painfully, between violent coughing. Moments later, I heard my father’s shouts.
“She’s okay,” the boy called.
I felt his hand on my back, rubbing slowly, and I realized I could breathe again. Flooded with panic, I started crying. Before my dad could reach us, the boy pulled me up against him and, after a second’s hesitation, wrapped both arms around me.
“It’s okay. You’re okay. What’s your name?” he asked me gently.
I could only sob.
“You know… You’ve got red hair, I think, but I’m going to go with Dove. I saw you watching one when you were running. That’s what you were doing when you tripped into the pool. I told my dad the other day we need a gate around it. They built the pool before the house, so we come swimming here sometimes. Me and my sister.”