As a whirlwind of snow pummeled the window, rattling it, I felt sick. I had to tell Danny. There had to be something we could do. I closed the door on the room and hurried along the hall to the stairs. A window on the landing cast a ghostly glow on the opposite wall. This old lodge must have seen many storms as bad as this, I thought.

  Downstairs, another flashlight beam was coming along the dark hall toward me.

  “Francie! Where were you? I was looking for you.”

  “Danny, you won’t believe what I just found.”

  “Where were you? Did you go upstairs?”

  “How did you even know that?”

  “I just had a feeling. You did, didn’t you?”

  “I heard a noise. I didn’t think about it.”

  “You didn’t think to tell me you were going up to the room we’ve been wanting to get into all fall?”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. Listen, this is more important. I saw an email.”

  I told her what I’d read.

  “That can’t happen,” Danny said. “We just got here. I have plans.”

  “There’s got to be something we can do,” I said.

  “Poor Grace,” said Danny.

  “Poor Grace? Really?”

  “Larry said she’s part of the problem. It’s true. She’s her own worst enemy. You can see how mad she gets at herself.”

  “You’re more observant than I am, I guess,” I said.

  “Well, that’s probably true.” Danny smiled. “But didn’t you notice what she did for our hike the other day?”

  “Nearly biting Jasie’s head off, you mean?”

  “Before that. She volunteered to partner with Jasie.”

  “That’s true. That was weird, considering.”

  “Not really. She’s trying.”

  We’d been eating breakfast and arranging the partners for our hike.

  “Teams of two,” Lucy said. “Should we draw names?”

  “I’ll go with Jasie,” Grace said, then she gave a sideways look to see if Lill had noticed. She had. She’d nodded her approval.

  “She’s trying her best to make up for the Soleil incident,” Danny said now. “The school can’t afford to lose any more girls. That’s what Larry meant in his email. Grace’s temper is a big pain for the sisters. Everybody knows it.”

  “She doesn’t have a temper, exactly.”

  “You’re right. See, you are observant.”

  “She just speaks her thoughts out loud. Which you’d think would be normal.”

  Grace’s thoughts, when we hiked out into the middle of thick bush with a chill wind coming off the cliffs, and she discovered that Jasie had forgotten to pick up their lunches off the kitchen counter, were: “Can you not get one thing straight? How hard is it? You had one job—to carry the lunches.”

  Jasie’s eyes had filled up and she’d stood with her fists balled at her sides, just taking it. As tears spilled over onto her cheeks she’d whispered, “I’m hopeless.”

  “And can you please please stop saying that?” Grace had added. “It doesn’t solve anything.”

  “She was right,” I said to Danny. “It was a bad mistake.”

  “Lill reamed Grace out later. Her whole plan to be nice totally backfired.”

  “But what are we going to do about the school?” I said.

  “Maybe I’ll email Mom about it on Sunday,” Danny said. Danny’s mom was chief financial officer of their First Nation. Danny told me her mom was happiest sitting at the dining room table with stacks of paper, a cup of coffee, and her laptop open to spreadsheets full of numbers. “She knows about all that financial stuff.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. Won’t that make her have doubts? What if she pulls you out of the school?”

  “She knows how much I wanted to come here. I begged her for a year. I don’t think she’ll change her mind.”

  “But she could, couldn’t she?”

  “You worry too much, Francie.”

  A bang overhead made us both jump and clutch each other’s hand. Something had slammed into the roof. Whatever it was rolled along it in a series of thumps and cracks that made the building shudder.

  Ms. B came rushing down the hall, followed by the crowd of girls, all talking at once.

  “What was that?”

  “It had to be a tree.”

  “It sounded like it crashed right through the roof.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Listen, you can still hear it. It’s scratching against the roof.”

  “I’ve been here the longest and I’ve never seen a storm like this before,” said Grace.

  “Everyone back to their sleeping bags,” said Ms. B.

  “We should investigate,” said Grace.

  “No one is going outside,” Ms. B said. “Not in these conditions.”

  “We could check upstairs,” I said.

  “And what do we do if there’s a hole in the roof?”

  “A hole in the roof is the last thing this school needs,” said Grace. Everyone turned to look at her.

  “I’m just saying. We can’t afford to fix the generator. You think we can afford a new roof?”

  “Okay,” said Ms. B. “Let’s all try to be helpful if we can.”

  “I don’t get how that’s unhelpful. It’s just a fact.”

  “We can do without your kind of facts,” Meredith said.

  “My kind of facts? Like there’s a kind of facts?”

  “Yeah, your specialty is the kind of facts that make people feel bad,” Meredith said.

  “Facts or no facts,” Ms. B said, “we’re going to stay down here where it’s safe. No one goes anywhere.”

  chapter six

  Everyone knew that Meredith was talking about “the Soleil incident,” as Danny called it.

  Soleil was the ninth girl around the great room table on the first day of September. She had a head of yellow-white curls fuzzed around her face, and when she stood in the sunlight, or even near a bright lamp, her hair glowed like a halo. She rarely smiled, but when she did, it was like you’d won a prize.

  “I like to draw,” Soleil said when her turn came to tell her first-day story. Her face came up and caught the light as she spoke. “Mostly birds,” she added. Then she bent her head again. She was done.

  Lill said, “And you live in Victoria. I hear you’re a kayaker.”

  “Yes,” said Soleil, not raising her head.

  Lill gave it another try. “Grace draws, too.”

  “I don’t draw birds,” Grace said. “I draw useful things.”

  The more Lill tried to help Soleil fit in, the worse it was.

  “Don’t force it,” I heard Lucy say to Lill one evening as I carried the supper dishes into the kitchen. “She’ll find her way. Just let her.”

  But Lill liked to fix things—and not just squeaky hinges and lights that flickered. Lucy said if Lill wasn’t on a ladder, she was under something: a sink, a vehicle, the porch where the wasps made their nests. Soleil became one of her fix-it projects.

  One warm Sunday morning in late September as we ate breakfast, Lill said, “I saw a mountain bluebird near the bench earlier. You could take your sketchbook out there, Soleil.”

  Soleil’s face momentarily lit up.

  “Is that the bird in the painting?” She gestured with her chin to the painting that hung between the windows near the dining table. It was the most beautiful of all the paintings in the school—a delicately shaded mountain bluebird perched on a fencepost, its chest feathers going from radiant blue and fading into pale white, and a single sprig of yellow grass crossing the background.

  Her question was the most we’d heard her say in a single sitting since she’d arrived.

  “She can’t use the bench,” Grace burst out. “I’m fixing it.”

  “Fixing it? What’s wrong with it?” Lill asked.

  “There are wasps,” Grace said. “And one of the boards is loose. Besides, I was going to sit out there myself.”

  Lill took a deep breath and cleared her throat. She always did that when she was annoyed.

  “All right,” she said. “Then Grace, you can take Soleil out to Swamp Thing Lake. That’s the best place to see bird life this time of year.”

  “Why do I have to take her?” Grace asked. “Shouldn’t someone who likes her take her?”

  Lill threw down her napkin and shoved her chair back as she rose from the table. “Can we talk in the kitchen please, Grace?”

  Soleil looked like she wanted the floor to open and swallow her. She put down her half-eaten toast and worked at making her napkin into a perfect triangle.

  “Lindsay and I are taking our bikes down the road later,” Ming said. “You can come with us, Soleil.”

  But Lill was determined to teach Grace a lesson. So after breakfast, Soleil tucked her sketchbook and pencils into her backpack, put on her boots and followed Grace out the door.

  Sundays were free days, and Lucy and Lill only made us follow one rule: make sure someone knows where you’re going. Danny and I had our internet hour after breakfast, but neither of us ever took the full time. We were done in fifteen minutes and we packed lunches to take to the Sasquatch Caves.

  As we got our boots on by the door, Grace came back in, alone.

  “Where’s Soleil?” Meredith asked, coming from the kitchen.

  “I left her at the lake,” Grace said. “She doesn’t talk much, in case you didn’t notice. I didn’t see any point in staying.”

  “I wonder what Lill will say.”

  “Why would you wonder that? Don’t you have anything more interesting to think about?” Grace grabbed her tool bag and went back outside.

  Danny and I spent the afternoon at the Sasquatch Caves. On our way back, some clouds scudded across the sky, blocking the sun, and the wind picked up, cooling the air. Our light jackets, which had been more than we needed in the morning, weren’t quite warm enough. The nip in the air made it good to come inside. A fire popped and roared in the woodstove and the smell of Lucy’s vegetable curry mingled with the woodsmoke. The chill had brought everyone back from their outings. Except Soleil.

  “Where’s Soleil?” Lill asked, coming in just behind us. She held the cordless drill and a tin of screws. As usual, she had been fixing something.

  “We didn’t see her,” Danny said.

  “Grace?” Lill called to where she sat at the dining table with a ruler and a graph paper, drawing a plan for something.

  “Last I saw her she was at the lake,” Grace said.

  “Ming, take someone else and go look for Soleil.” She took her drill and went down to the basement.

  “I’ll go,” said Danny.

  “I’ll come, too,” I said.

  As we put on warmer jackets, Grace, without looking up from her drawing, said, “She was going to the south end.”

  “The south end?”

  “Is there an echo in here?” Grace said.

  “The south end where the quicksand is, you mean?” Ming asked.

  Grace didn’t answer. She erased something from her drawing and blew the crumbs off the page.

  “Let’s go,” Ming said.

  We took the trail at a quick jog.

  “What’s the quicksand?” I asked.

  “We never go to the south end of the lake because if it’s been wet, the mud is like quicksand. You can’t even get to the shore. You’ll sink to your knees before that.”

  We’d been hiking about twenty minutes when we saw Soleil coming toward us through the trees. Her feet were bare and coated in thick black mud that went halfway up her legs. Patches of it had dried on her face and her T-shirt was streaked with it.

  “Take my jacket,” Ming said, stripping it off and helping Soleil into it. “You’re shivering.”

  She put Soleil’s backpack on her own back and said, “Francie, you and Soleil head back to the school. Danny and I will go get Soleil’s boots.”

  “You won’t find them,” Soleil said.

  “We’ll find them. Don’t worry. Now get going.”

  We hurried back to the school and let ourselves in the back door.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Soleil said.

  “I won’t. I’ll take you upstairs and run a bath for you.”

  Soleil’s room was in the new wing, so it was easy enough to go up the back stairs without anyone seeing us.

  “Did you see any birds?”

  “I saw a great blue heron. I was trying to get closer to it,” Soleil said through chattering teeth.

  “I’ll knock on your door when the bath is ready.”

  Her green eyes when she looked at me were full of tears, but she turned away quickly without saying anything more.

  As I ran the bath in the shared bathroom down the hall, I thought how it could have been funny. Maybe if it hadn’t been done intentionally, maybe if it had happened to me or to Danny, it would have been a funny story to tell at dinner. But it was Soleil, and Grace had done it to be mean. So it wasn’t funny.

  I didn’t tell anyone, and neither did Ming or Danny. Danny cleaned Soleil’s boots, which she’d gotten to by laying dead branches across the quicksand, and no one asked questions about why the boots were drying by the woodstove. It was normal to see an assortment of footwear by the stove at the end of the day with the laces loosened and the tongues pulled out, draped over the drying rack Lill had made out of coat hangers.

  At dinner, Lucy and Carmen, who were both singers, had chattered about where they should bring in the harmony on the song they were learning together and whether it should be high or low harmony. They had made us join in as they tried it, though neither Grace nor Soleil nor Lill did, I noticed. Soleil kept her eyes on her plate, as she usually did, and when Lucy asked her about what birds she’d seen at Swamp Thing Lake, she’d said, “A great blue heron.” And those were the last four words any of us heard her speak.

  Two days later Lill helped Soleil put her bags in the back of the SUV. We waved from the porch and Soleil briefly raised her hand at the car window, then faced straight ahead to the road taking her back to town.

  chapter seven

  Danny had said the storm would get crazy and she was right. Ms. B wouldn’t let us go outside to investigate what had hit the roof, but from the window we could see that a big, broken tree limb had tumbled across the lawn to rest near the porch.

  “That’s probably from the cottonwood near the end of the driveway,” Lindsay said. “That poor old tree. It’s over a hundred years old, but it’s sure taken a beating.”

  The cottonwood’s trunk was so big, Danny and I couldn’t circle it with our arms, even with our hands linked. Limbs had already broken off or died, and flickers used holes in them for homes.

  “Come away from the windows,” Ms. B called. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “We’re safe in here,” Lindsay said. “Don’t worry.”

  Ms. B sat back down with her knitting and turned the radio on again.

  Meredith, wearing an apron and oven mitts, brought her pie over and set it on the stone hearth in front of the fire.

  “It’s a little crispy, but I think it will still taste good,” she said.

  She had finished baking it in a small compartment on the side of the woodstove. One side was browner than the other, but it smelled delicious.

  “What about ice cream?” Grace said.

  “I’m on it,” said Lindsay, jumping up.

  We ate the crispy pie while watching the fire.

  I knew we were safe, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the missing plane and the three people on it. I had a feeling that I couldn’t shake, something I was on the edge of seeing but that wouldn’t quite come into focus.

  “Oh, turn it up!” Carmen suddenly cried. She jumped up with her fork in her fist.

  “Catch Me” was on the radio. All the girls in the school had the song on their phones and we played it while we did indoor chores. Even Lucy and Lill loved it.

  “Just because you see me run, doesn’t mean you’re not the one,” she sang into her fork microphone.

  “Catch me!” We all joined in on the chorus. It was impossible to resist. Meredith pulled Jasie to her feet and they danced in front of the fireplace. Ming and Lindsay did the backup vocals.

  “Who sings this?” Ms. B asked, laughing.

  No one answered. We knew all the words and we had to sing them all.

  “Oh, I hate when they do that!” Carmen cried as the radio announcer’s voice cut in just before the last note. “They need to let the song finish.”

  “You’ve really never heard of Diamond Lee?” Grace said to Ms. B. “She’s only the biggest singer in Canada right now. Maybe North America.”

  “Well, this isn’t my usual radio station,” she said, smiling.

  Everyone settled back to their blankets on the floor. For three minutes, Jasie had forgotten to be lonely, I had forgotten to think about the missing plane, and Grace and Meredith had forgotten to be mad at each other.

  But as soon as we were quiet again, my mind remembered the little fire I kept smoldering in my heart and I piled on more worried thoughts to get it burning again. I had not seen Mom since Dad was found. Aunt Sissy had written a long email explaining what Mom’s doctor had said and why Aunt Sissy decided not to come and get me. She used words like shock and unfortunate and wrote that her response was not expected, words I spent a long time trying to decipher. I couldn’t help thinking that if Mom had wanted to see me, Aunt Sissy would have come out to get me right away.

  Not that I wanted to go to the city. In my dream, Mom comes to see me. I show her the fire tower and the creek where kokanee salmon run in the fall. I sit with her beside the trembling aspens, their yellow leaves shimmering with life. I knew that if Mom came out here, she would want to live again. There was nothing in that drab, chemical-smelling hospital ward that would make anyone want to live.

 

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