Chapter 2

“Daddy,” I asked that night, “am I pretty?”

“Everything about you is pretty, River,” he say. “Especially your name.”

Daddy told me all the time how when he and Mama brought me home that first day after they knew I was theirs, they didn’t change my name because it was already too perfect. I knew that like I knew the sound of their voices, but that night I needed to hear it again.

Then, as always, Daddy and I got quiet and listened to the dusk. That’s when the things of the day and the things of the night switch places, and everything blurs. It’s when Daddy rolls back the awning over the deck and we watch the stars grow in the sky. It’s the time of day, Mama say, when angels abound, and if you’re very still you can hear the rustle of their wings descending.

Sometimes I wondered what Daddy thought about at dusk, now that Theron was gone. Did he think about Theron and where he might be, and how Daddy didn’t stop Theron when he say he was leaving us and promised he’d never come back? That’s what I thought about, but I knew dusk was a special time for Daddy—almost a sacred time—so I never asked him about those things on my mind.

After night settled over the sky and tucked us under it, when it was okay to talk again, I asked Daddy if he’d ever seen an angel.

His mouth wrestled a smile. “Besides the one I’m looking at now?”

When he talked like that, I knew that I, too, was a cared-about girl, even with that feeling in the back of my heart that I belonged somewhere else.

Then he leaned over so far to me that his beach chair squeaked and say very low, “Between you and me, I don’t believe in them.”

At that, Mama’s voice come through the kitchen window behind us. “Ingram, you can’t find what you’re not looking for,” she say as one plate clacked against another. “But if you look hard enough, you’ll find it.”

Mama was always saying things like that—don’t wash your hair every day, be kind to your enemies, forgive and be free—and now this: You can’t find it if you’re not looking for it.

Daddy shrugged and then whispered, “She believes, and that’s all that matters.”

I looked up at the sky, which was mute and dotted with stars. I wanted to believe like Mama did in invisible things, and I wanted to believe that Theron might one day come back to us. So, even though I had as much confidence as Daddy in angels and miracles, I found a star and whispered so soft that anyone listening would have had to read my lips, “I wish I had the eyes to see.”

When I walked past Theron’s room on my way to bed, his smell was, as usual, still there. Cinnamon toothpaste, sweaty sneakers, and his shampoo with the pine-tree fragrance. And that sun-warm-skin smell that’s only his. Theron’s scents hovering in his room made me ache to see him again. I stepped one foot inside and touched the things on his bureau that he touched probably every day: his hairbrush, his silver dollar from the river, his picture of Shawna, the all-star trophy he got after he began to “straighten up,” as Daddy call it.

I stretched my arm to touch the spot on his trophy he’d have touched so many times—on the shoulder of the baseball player winding up for a pitch. It would be just like Theron to touch the shoulder. Other people might have remembered different things about Theron, and some of them not very nice, but what I remembered was his hand on someone’s shoulder.

“River Rose Byrne, don’t you put another finger on that statue!”

How Mama slipped up the stairs so softly was one of the great mysteries of the ages. She stood in the hall with her hands on her hips, the silhouette of her head blocking out the ceiling light.

My hand snapped back. “I just—”

“I know what you’re up to. You keep your hands off your brother’s things. What will he do when he comes back and sees fingerprint smudges on his trophy?”

“Probably turn around and go back to where he come from.”

I expected Mama to say, “Came, River,” as usual, but instead she dropped her hands from her hips and pressed her lips together tight, and I realized that was exactly what Mama feared. I wanted to say, Mama, don’t get your hopes up so, because I don’t believe he’ll ever come home. He left here so mad and determined, so full of pepper and pain, that we will never see him again.

Instead I say, “I was only kidding, Mama,” because what else could I tell her as she stood in Theron’s doorway with her face so full of wishing for him to come home?