look over the shoulder into a wishing well

She’d imagined that she and her brother might fix the cabin up as a rental one day, but in real life it was puny and weather-beaten and sad, more relic than residence. The trees and wildly growing ferns dwarfed it, with no obvious path to the door from the red-brown dirt driveway. (Like her father, she didn’t want to sleep alone at her parents’ main house in the ashes of her childhood ten miles back toward civilization.) But her father’s old Bronco finally appeared in the glare of orange dusk light fighting through the treetops, parked in front of the cabin.Īnd the cabin looked so, so small-much smaller than she remembered. If she’d started her trip closer to dark, she would have had to turn around and wait out the night at the overpriced Hampton Inn off of I-10. She’d never forgotten that wild, frightened look in their eyes. She howled so loudly from the vicious stinging that Dad and Mom heard her all the way from the lake, and when they reached her they expected to find her half dead.

Once, Dad had made her play outside instead of sitting on the couch with her Virginia Hamilton books, and she’d stepped in an anthill up to her shin. Driving back to her family’s cabin twenty years later reminded her that the woods had rarely been restful for her. Joy nearly got lost on the root-knotted red dirt path off of Highway 99, losing sight of the gaps between the live oaks and Spanish moss that fanned across her hood and windows like fingertips.

Look over the shoulder into a wishing well