There are secret paths all over my neighborhood, trails of crushed leaves and beaten grass. The animals follow them—wild ones and pets, raccoons and badgers and everyone’s dogs. The paths are narrow, almost hidden. We hear about them from the teenage girls who babysit or from someone’s big brother. We trade information at block parties, gathering in someone’s basement, while our parents drink martinis. The trails lead from one backyard to another, through the old woods near Overlook Pool and Recreation Center. They follow creeks and lead between boulders, ending at the cliff above the river.
The last summer we were friends, Lark and I explored the path from the pool to the cliff. There was a secret place, a fallen tree where you could sit and see the river, that we wanted to find. She was thirteen and I was twelve. We took the fork that led to the river instead of the one that emptied in the cul-de-sac by our street. Our swimsuits were still damp. We tucked our towels under the straps so they hung down our backs like capes. Our flip-flops left ridged prints in the mud. Birds flitted to the water and drank. A flash of red was a cardinal; yellow, an oriole. There were catbirds and hummingbirds, chickadees, too. I learned all the birds from handouts at the nature center when I was little. I colored them so furiously I picked up the grain from the picnic table.
The trail leads behind the new subdivision my dad designed. We smelled the sap oozing from fences in the summer heat. We heard the sounds of families and barbecues. Big Wheels on decks. Bags of ice emptying into coolers. The fizz of soda poured into cups. Sloshing through the creek in the culvert, we scraped a stick against the corrugated tin, the circle of light ahead of us tinged with green.
Once we were out the other side, the trail ended and our neighborhood disappeared. It was like being in a spell cast by a good witch. Generations of fallen leaves gathered against tree trunks and saplings. The ground was loamy and soft as felt. We walked stealthy and silent on the outside of our feet because we didn’t want to scare the animals away. They watched us from tree limbs and burrows—stern, silent owls and a family of foxes, a bobcat twitching the black tip of its tail.
Hundreds of feet below us, the Potomac rumbled and roared. We crept along the edge until we found the huge tree the teenagers told us about, a sycamore struck by lightning that had started to roll down the cliff years ago. It was moss covered and hollow, trapped by the roots and trunks of other trees. We sat there and looked out to the three tiny islands in the middle of the river.
They’re called the Three Sisters. The river swirls and eddies around them. One has a tree growing in the middle. They’re named after three Indian princesses who ran away from home. Their father wanted to marry off the oldest one to a chief in another village, but the sisters loved one another too much to be separated. So they begged the river god to hide their footsteps and let them pass. He agreed, but since he was cruel and they were beautiful, he turned them into three small islands to keep for himself.
That day the noise of the river smothered our voices. We had to yell to hear ourselves, but we wanted the animals to stay with us, so we stopped talking. We took turns throwing stones into the river, trying to reach the islands, trying to say hello to the three Indian girls. We dug past layers of crinkly leaves and dry dirt to the damp soil where the stones were buried. They were rough and gray just like the islands. The stones arced through the air, past the farthest branches of the most far-leaning trees, disappearing once they left our hands. Sometimes they streamed past the canopy of branches, and for a moment we saw them sailing through a patch of blue sky.
Later that summer, something bad happened to me. I tried telling Lark, but she wouldn’t listen and my mom asked the wrong questions. I buried it deep inside me, like the rough stones we found under the leaves.