It was beautiful.
Maybe if you were a world-famous architect or interior decorator you wouldn’t think so, but if you were one of us, you couldn’t take your eyes off of that fort.
Saturday morning, two weeks after we had set out to the library to begin our task, Murphy, Donita, Logan, Ricky Ray, and I stood in front of the end result of our many hours of labor, silent at first, and then we couldn’t stop talking.
“It sure is a lot more like a house than I thought it would be,” Donita said, pacing back-and-forth, nodding her approval. “I think the roof makes it seem like it could be a house. We should put shingles on it, though.”
“And we have to paint it.” Logan slapped a wall with the flat of his hand. “Maybe green, so it would be camouflaged. I don’t want this place easy to spot.”
I had so many plans for our fort, they were spilling out of me like water from a faucet. I sat down on the fort’s front step and started going down my shopping list. “The next time Corinne and Dan take us over to Wal-Mart, I’m going to buy us a pitcher and a big jar of instant tea, and that way we can have something to drink whenever we want. I’ll get some gallon jugs of water, too, to make the tea with. And maybe a rug. Do you think we could get wall-to-wall carpeting somewhere?”
In the middle of all this noise, Murphy gave a dramatic clearing of her throat. We all turned to look at her. “I think this is an important occasion that should be marked somehow,” she said, and the rest of us nodded. “Maybe if we got together in a circle and somebody said a few words.”
“Something exactly right,” Ricky Ray put in.
“Something just right,” Murphy agreed. She looked at me. “You read a lot of books, Maddie. Maybe you know the right thing to say.”
“Give me a few seconds,” I told her, thinking she should be the one to say something; she always had such amazing things to say. But she’d handed me the task, so I walked away from the fort to stand behind a sycamore tree, searching for the words like I might find them on the ground among the leaves and the acorns. I peeked around the tree and took the long view of what we’d built. The fort was nestled in a stand of trees, the dappled shadows of leaves falling across its walls. What was once a clearing of dirt and moss and rocks was now home to this collection of boards and nails. I wished that it had an address people could write letters to.
I didn’t have many words to say about it, which was unusual for me. When I walked back to the fort, I motioned for everyone to join me in a circle. I looked at the window and imagined a curtain of blue calico blowing through it.
“Today is a good day,” I said. “And we have made a good place. May it stand for a long time among these trees.”
I thought that keeping it short was best. I could tell by the look in everyone’s eyes that they agreed with me. We smiled at each other, and then Murphy said, “It’s time for the ceremonial march inside, beginning with the youngest.”
And so Ricky Ray, beaming so hard with pride I thought he might just burst into rays of light, led us inside.
Standing in the center of the room, I looked up at the ceiling and turned slowly around. Who would have believed we could’ve done this almost entirely by ourselves?
None of it was easy work, and it took us two weeks of squeezing in time between school and practices and church activities, two weeks of hiking from the Children’s Home up Allen Avenue, over Dewey Payne Road, and a quarter-mile through the woods that ran along the edge of Hampton’s Dairy Farm, hiking until the woods thinned and we could see the backyards of the houses in Logan’s neighborhood through the black walnut and sycamore trees, and then counting one, two, three, four houses, until we were in the farthest back part of Logan’s backyard.
I would have made that hike five times a day. Six times a day. It was that worth it to me.
The inside of the fort was one room, ten feet wide and fourteen feet long. This was plenty of space for everyone to stretch out and get comfortable, which everyone immediately did. You could look into any person’s eyes and see that they were coming up with dreams for the fort. Me, I wanted a place for cubbyholes, the kind that my kindergarten class had, where we could keep our things and maybe leave each other mail.
Even without furniture, the fort was the kind of place I liked to be. There were two windows, one east and one west, and a nice breeze blew through, bringing with it the smell of the woods. Wednesday, after we’d gotten the roof raised with the help of Mr. Potter, we’d all pitched in and painted the walls a soft off-white with paint Logan had borrowed from his parents’ basement. Now the walls seemed to glow with light.
“I believe I’d like to live here forever,” Ricky Ray sighed, leaning back against the wall and breathing in deep a mix of fresh paint and autumn trees.
The rest of us just nodded yes. We didn’t even need to say it out loud.
After that first day, we were all at the fort as often as we could be. Murphy and I got into the habit of hiking up there after we worked at Mr. Potter’s store on Monday afternoons. No one else was there on Mondays—Logan was gone off to play in the marching band, Donita was at choir, and Ricky Ray had his weekly social worker visit—so me and Murphy worked on little projects, just adding bits and pieces to the fort’s decor. Me, I was trying to sew some curtains by hand. Sewing of any sort is not in my nature, but I just flat-out liked the idea of curtains.
“Dagblast it!” I yelled one Monday after I’d poked myself with my needle for the third time in under a minute. “I’m bleeding all over my material!”
“You need a thimble,” Murphy said. “And maybe some sewing lessons.”
I stuck my thumb in my mouth and sucked on it for a second. “I was in Girl Scouts for three weeks once, but I never did get my sewing badge.”
“Did you get any badges?”
“Nope. I was the world’s worst Girl Scout. All I ever wanted to do was go camping, but the whole time I was in it, all anybody ever talked about was cookies this and cookies that.”
Murphy sprinkled some gold glitter over a rusty metal wastebasket Corinne had let her haul off from the dorm. She’d covered the whole thing with swirls of glue first, and now the glitter stuck to the twirly pattern.
“My mother wasn’t the sort of person to sign me up for Girl Scouts,” she told me, shaking the wastebasket so that the extra glitter fell off in a sparkling shower. “She didn’t have much interest in organized activities of any kind. She thought life should be as spontaneous as possible.”
She turned and fixed me with a serious look. “Do you miss your parents?”
The question took me by surprise. I wasn’t too comfortable talking about my parents with anyone. You’d think the subject would come up more often with foster-care kids, but in my case it almost never did unless I was locked in conversation with a social worker. I didn’t have a real dramatic story like some kids I knew.
“I never knew them to miss them,” I said. “I wish I remembered my mama. In my mind, she has silver-blonde hair, but Granny Lane says that’s not right, that Mama’s hair is just like mine, regular old brown. But her eyes are brown and mine are blue. Granny Lane says my eyes must be from my daddy’s side.”
Murphy applied a few more squiggles of glue to her wastebasket, then leaned back on her heels. “If I tell you something, will you keep it to yourself?”
“Sure,” I said nodding, excited that Murphy wanted to confide in me. “I’m real good at keeping secrets.”
“There were a lot of bad things about my parents dying,” she said. “But one of the worst things was that right before the car accident, my mother was teaching me how to fly. Only she died before I learned everything I needed to know.”
“Your mother could fly a plane?”
Murphy looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. “No,” she said slowly. “She could fly. In the air.”
My hands started to tremble. This was the most bold-faced, outrageous thing anyone had ever said to me. It almost scared me to hear it.
“Well, it wasn’t like she was born knowing how to fly,” Murphy continued. “She learned it from some New Guinea tribesmen she and my father met when they were doing research. The entire tribe could fly like a flock of birds. The chief respected my parents, so he taught them how. Really, the most important thing is to have the special talisman.”
“Talisman?”
“Like a good-luck charm. That’s what my blue stone is. My mother gave it to me right before she died.”
“Once, almost. I jumped off of my porch, and suddenly it was like I was floating in the air. I put out my arms, and I ended up landing about five feet away from where I would have naturally hit the ground.”
She paused to sprinkle a little more glitter. Without looking at me, she asked, “You believe me, don’t you?”
If I’d been in fourth grade, I would have believed every word a hundred percent because in fourth grade you still believe in things even though you say you don’t. In fifth grade I would have called her a liar straight to her face. Nobody believes in anything in fifth grade, not even when you’re sitting by yourself in your own room.
But in sixth grade—where nothing was magical, and nobody said anything anymore about hidden bedroom passageways that led to fairylands or being the long-lost daughter of a faraway king—to even whisper in secret that you could almost fly was opening yourself up to a lifetime of laughter and ridicule. It hardly seemed worth it. So for Murphy to make such a claim, well, I had to take it seriously.
“Sure,” I said, doing my best to sound like I didn’t have a doubt in the world. “Of course I believe you.”
Murphy smiled. She stood and rubbed glitter from her hands. “I knew you would. It’s nice to have someone to tell things to, isn’t it?”
Then she came over and kneeled down beside me, picking up the edge of a curtain and running her finger over the crooked hem. “I think my mother would have taught me more, but she was sick a lot.”
“What kind of sick?” I asked, picturing a pale woman lying in bed with a damp rag across her forehead. “Like the flu?”
“No. Nobody knew what was wrong with her,” Murphy said, each word coming out careful, like she was weighing it in her mind before she spoke. “But some days she couldn’t take care of me very well. Flying lessons were out of the question.”
“Couldn’t your daddy teach you?” I asked.
“He was gone a lot, doing research. Fortunately, I’m a very independent person. I can take care of myself.”
She dropped the curtain and hopped back up. “Did you know I know how to bake a ham?” Now her voice was light, carefree as a butterfly. “And I can make potatoes six different ways.”
She went back to her glitter, chattering away about how to double-bake a potato with butter and cheddar cheese. I picked up my needle and started hemming again, humming under my breath. Murphy told me secrets. Murphy was happy to have me to talk to. I couldn’t help but smile, now that I knew for sure that me and Murphy were friends. Of course Murphy can fly, I told myself. Of course I believe her.