Brave in the Woods Page 10

  Gabby had gotten a DNA kit for Christmas last year and was obsessed with Neanderthal DNA. She believed it explained people who ate red meat and hated algebra, as well as other questionable behavior and bad attitudes.

  As they read over the menu, Juni imagined Anya here all those years ago. Was it a coincidence? Or was it destiny?

  “Did you plan this? With Anya?” Juni said to Luca.

  Luca put his hands up. “No! I swear. No plans.”

  Taxidermy animals hung from the wood-paneled walls. The stuffed bison, elk and buffalo heads, Juni recognized, but there was a whole bunch of other animals she didn’t. Rodent-like things with crazy eyes. A lynx, or an ocelot, maybe.

  “Definitely Neanderthal,” Gabby said. “Look at those poor defenseless animal heads!”

  “They’re vacuumed every other day,” Winona said, having just walked over from seating another table. Her smile had a gap between her two front teeth wide enough to catch a watermelon seed. “I promise.”

  “Well, that’s good to know,” Gabby said.

  “Dead animal heads are not up everyone’s alley, but they’ve been here since the beginning, so they’re part of the story. What can I get for you darlin’s?”

  “I think ice cream sundaes are called for. And french fries,” Luca said, rubbing his hands together. “I’ll take vanilla with dark chocolate fudge.”

  Juni expected Gabby to give a speech about ice cream and french fries not providing the correct nutrition for her soccer training.

  “Perfect!” Gabby said.

  After they’d ordered from what turned out to be a very fancy sundae menu with about a hundred toppings to choose from, Luca flipped through the selections on the tabletop jukebox, and Juni noticed a large plank of wood above the window beside their table. Someone had taken a soldering iron to it. The words burned into the wood read:

  MIRACLE

  An occurrence of wonder

  Juni thought about her birth miracle, as well as the other family stories. Great-Uncle Clive surviving that ball lightning strike, and Juni’s diviner great-great-grandmother. Even Mason had his miracle story about Izzy the German shepherd saving his grandfather’s life.

  Why did some people get miracles and others didn’t?

  And what, exactly, was the opposite of a miracle? An unlikely calamity? A disaster? A mystical catastrophe?

  Eventually, Winona came back with their sundaes and french fries and told them to let her know “if you darlin’s need more toppings or whatnot.”

  “Why is this place called Hickory’s Miracle Café?” Juni asked.

  “Not from around here, huh?” Winona said.

  “We’re from Chester,” Gabby said.

  “Up on Lake Almanor. Caught a kokanee trout on Lake Almanor last summer. She was three pounds.”

  Which was impressive. Lake Almanor was enormous, thirteen miles by six, and the kokanee lurked deep with the catfish, wise to the early-morning schemes of fishermen and their hooks. Pulling a kokanee from Almanor was luck at its finest. Maybe even a miracle. According to the definition burned into the wood above their heads, anyway.

  “Kids mostly don’t believe Hickory’s story. When you don’t find it on the internet anywhere, you think it must not have happened. Tell me why I should waste good time telling you a story you aren’t going to believe.”

  Winona rested her hands on wide hips and Juni had the urge to sketch them, nails bitten, knobby knuckles, reddish skin. She wanted to turn them into antlers.

  “Try us,” Luca said. His smile was half charming, even to Juni.

  “I can use all the unlikely stories I can get,” Juni said.

  Winona studied them for a moment.

  “Theresa! You’ve got the floor. I’m on break!” A woman in a hairnet behind the pie counter raised a wet dishrag in response. “Scoot over, then.”

  Gabby gave up her spot beside Luca and crammed in with Juni and Mason on the bench seat.

  “Dig in! I’ll tell it while you’re eating. Ice cream waits for no one.” Winona grabbed a fry off the pile and used it as a pointer. “First off, Hickory wasn’t his given name. You know anything about hickory wood?”

  “It’s real hard,” Mason said. He had chosen rocky road with marshmallow fluff topping and had already managed to smear both on his T-shirt.

  Winona stuffed the fry into her mouth and chewed. “That’s right, but it’s also as strong as it is hard, so they use it for tool handles, like axes and hammers. They used to make baseball bats from hickory. Anyway, the next thing you should know is that this is a story about how a grove of trees saved ol’ Hickory’s life.”

  “Trees? Saved his life?” Gabby blurted. Caramel sauce and whipped cream dripped over the side of her fountain glass.

  “See? You’ve made up your mind before you’ve heard a word, a sad state of affairs for a person so young. This is exactly why I don’t—”

  “Please,” Juni said. She nudged Gabby’s foot.

  Winona narrowed her eyes at Gabby, but went on. “So that was Hickory. He started out a hard man, who had lived a hard life. Lost a wife and a baby son in his early thirties. Buried their ashes together in a grove of cedar trees he’d planted for them at the north end of his property. He slept out there most nights, probably hoping the woods would take him, too.”

  Juni thought of her dad, and Anya even, how they’d taken to the woods with their sorrow. She remembered what Lena said about trees communicating with each other and wondered if it went beyond that. If trees had a way of calling to those lost in grief. If there might be a comforting language they spoke through their root systems, or in the movement of their leaves and branches.

  “By the time Hickory was in his fifties, he’d built up twenty years’ worth of a hardened heart. If you saw Hickory coming down the sidewalk, you crossed to the other side. He was a drinker, and picked fights in Mel’s Bar on more than one occasion.

  “But he wasn’t all hard. He collected stray dogs. Mutts. He was a pilot. One of the first aerial firefighters. He worked with rescue operations and put out fires with his bright yellow Stearman, which he’d learned to fly during World War Two. A solitary job that suited him just fine.”

  “That’s the plane on top of your restaurant,” Mason said.

  “It is indeed,” Winona said. “Now you have the backstory. The real story starts in 1959 with a lightning fire a bit north of here. He worked day and night, Hickory did, and maybe that was why he missed something in the Stearman’s instrumentation that might have alerted him sooner.”

  Gabby took Juni’s hand.

  “He’d just filled the water tank, and was passing over his own property to get to the outside edges of the fire when his engine cut out. He thought he was a goner, of course, but said he was ready to join his wife and baby boy. What had he been doing the last twenty years, anyway, but biding his time, waiting for death to come for him, too?”

  Gabby squeezed Juni’s hand with both her own.

  “His plane went down at forty-five degrees.” Winona angled her hand in front of them. “When suddenly, he said, the world turned to slow motion and silence. He thought for certain he was in his last moments, when just in front of him, through the haze of forest fire smoke, stood his very own cedar grove. He said it looked to him as though all the branches of those trees were knitting themselves together in a sort of frenzied safety net, and where he should have plunged clean through and smashed to a fiery death, his plane slowed and slowed, gliding through the branches of those trees, dropping to the ground below. He bumped his head at some point, and he said that moments before he passed out, he saw his wife holding their infant son. ‘Free yourself’ was what she said.

  “Of course, he took that to mean he should unharness himself, which he did, and dropped to the ground right beside his plane. He was burned, and he was broken, but he was alive.”r />
  By then, Gabby was squeezing Juni’s hand tight enough to squish her bones together. Juni wiggled her fingers so Gabby would loosen her grip.

  “Surviving took the hardness right out of Hickory. He was a new man. He retired from flying and opened this restaurant instead, finding a passion for cooking and sharing it with friends. He took the tail end of the Stearman and attached it to the roof of this building as an everyday reminder of his good fortune. He stopped drinking, and people didn’t cross to the other side of the street anymore. He fell in love with a widow who had four kids, and he was good to them. He died happy.”

  “That is a great story,” Mason said. “Why doesn’t everyone know about this? It should be a book. Or a movie!”

  Mason loved happy endings and forced Juni to watch old movies regularly. Singin’ in the Rain, An Affair to Remember, It’s a Wonderful Life. Mrs. Wheeler said Mason was a romantic and had an old soul, and Juni believed this was truer than true. Her feelings went whoosh-whoosh-whooshing through her body, like a plane dropping and dropping through a grove of knitted tree branches.

  “So now it’s your turn,” Winona said.

  “Our turn for what?” Juni said.

  “A story for a story.”

  They all stared at one another, probably thinking the same thing. If Connor had been there, he would have been the one to tell the story.

  “You have the look of people on a mission,” Winona said.

  Luca nodded toward Juni. “We are on a mission. For her older brother. My best friend. We’re going to Mammoth to . . . pick up his military service dog. She’s with another family right now, and we hope they’ll let us take her home.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. When did your brother pass?”

  “He didn’t!” Juni said. “He’s missing. In Afghanistan.”

  Luca’s hands were clasped in front of him. He studied them. Hard. Neither Gabby nor Mason met her eyes. It had been five weeks, and still her friends didn’t know how to react when it came up like this.

  “How terrible for you,” Winona said. She reached out both hands for Juni to take, gave a quick squeeze. “I’ll be right back.”

  She slid her tall self out of the booth and went through the flip doors toward the kitchen. About a minute later, she came back with a shoebox.

  Winona placed the box on the table and took off the lid. Inside were five circles of wood with the image of a cedar tree soldered into them. They were each about the size of a coaster.

  Juni let out a small gasp. This had to be what Anya had written about in her story. The cedar tree Great-Grandpa Teddy had given her so she’d remember her visit to Hickory’s Miracle Café.

  “When the airplane crashed through the branches, Hickory collected them and chopped them into rings. For days on end, he took the fine end of a soldering iron and worked his magic into the wood. There are only these few left now, and when I see where one belongs, I give it away.”

  Winona smiled her watermelon-seed-catching smile.

  “‘An occurrence of wonder.’” Winona pointed to the sign. “I burned those words myself as a reminder. It’s easy to miss the wondrous things, big and small, when life goes completely haywire.”

  Maybe it was the way her face had changed when she talked about Hickory, or her lively way of telling the story. “You were one of those kids, weren’t you?” Juni said.

  “Our lives turned around when Mom married Hickory. Same as his. Now you go on, and take that little piece of Hickory’s miracle with you. Sounds like you could use it.”

  Juni wished she had the words to tell Winona just how much.

  A NEW PERSPECTIVE

  BEFORE JUNI LEFT Hickory’s Miracle Café, she gave Winona a long, tight hug. The story had curled inside her the way Penelope used to curl into her lap, leaving her comforted and feeling less alone.

  Hickory’s story had given her something else, too. The idea that a story, no matter how fantastical, was meant to be shared, not buried like something shameful.

  And if you couldn’t tell your best friends your deepest-down stories, who could you tell?

  Gabby and Mason stayed behind to use the restrooms while Luca followed Juni out the back door to look at the airplane tail in the roof. Finding this particular café when Juni had read about it in Anya’s story felt like her very own occurrence of wonder.

  Song sparrows serenaded them from the trees, and Juni took a deep breath, allowing their happy trilling to fill her up. Luca was quiet, both hands shoved in his pockets as he read the small bronze plaque on the wall beneath the airplane.

  A myth tells you where you are.

  Joseph Campbell

  “What does that mean?” Juni said, running her finger along the raised letters.

  “I think it means a story can make you think about your own life, but in a different way. Give you a new perspective.” Luca walked off into the grassy yard and kicked at a rock. Juni noticed the buzz cut he’d had all summer had grown out the smallest bit.

  Before this summer, Luca had always kept his hair longish, wispy-wavy. He’d been known for his hair, and Connor had teased him about the products he used, how Luca spent half an hour each morning to make it look like he’d been caught in a windstorm. Why don’t you skip all that and just hang your head out the car window? Boom. Done. Connor used to say.

  Juni had to admit Luca had amazing hair, that his square jaw and dark brown eyes were handsome. He’d always been thin from running, something Juni knew he did every single day, through rain, snow or dry summer heat. But Juni suddenly realized that Luca was even thinner than usual, his eyes sunken. His hair was short now, even though he’d never worn it that way before.

  A buzz cut like the one Connor got the summer before he left for basic training.

  Juni was struck with fear. Was Luca going to join the army, too? Why else would he have cut his hair so short?

  Before she could ask, Gabby and Mason walked out the screen door and headed in her direction.

  “That was a heck of a good story,” Gabby said. There was a tiny spot of caramel on her chin, and Juni cleaned it away with her thumb. Gabby took Juni’s hand and set her head on Juni’s shoulder. Then Juni took Mason’s hand so the three of them were linked as they looked up at the bright yellow plane.

  Juni was going to tell them everything. What she’d found out from Anya about the Grimm family legend, what she believed about the curse, the quest, all of it. Maybe she’d even tell them about her antler vision on the day Connor went missing. There was nothing lonelier than keeping a secret, and Juni was tired of feeling lonely.

  She would make Luca tell his secret, too. If he had one.

  “So, you believed all that?” Luca said.

  Gabby blinked at her brother. So did Mason. Juni hadn’t seen that coming.

  “What are you talking about? You mean, you didn’t?” Gabby said, also surprising Juni.

  “Come on, Gabby. There’s no way a grove of trees knitted themselves into a net and caught an airplane,” Luca said. “He couldn’t possibly have crashed his plane and survived.”

  “You think because one small piece of the story might be a little exaggerated or strange, it means the whole thing isn’t true?” Gabby said.

  Juni hadn’t realized how much she wanted everyone to believe Hickory’s story. Because of course she did. If they didn’t, how in the world would they ever believe hers?

  “Are you calling Hickory and Winona liars?” Gabby said, as though she were defending close personal friends.

  “I didn’t say they were lying!” Luca said.

  “Then what are you saying, Luciano?”

  “I’m saying”—Luca kicked at another rock—“it’s irresponsible! If the trees saved Hickory, anything can happen. That’s what they want you to believe, and it’s not right to give people false hope.”

  Gabby put
a hand to her heart as though she were protecting it from this attack of not-believing. As though she herself wasn’t usually a skeptic of all things magical and strange.

  “Hickory’s story wasn’t any weirder than the story Connor used to tell about the day Juni was born,” Gabby said, slightly out of breath. “Was Connor lying, too?”

  Luca was not a person to lose his cool. He was steady and reasonable and someone you could always count on to drive the speed limit and eat all his vegetables. So, when he growled deep in his throat, Juni didn’t know what was happening.

  He picked up the rock he’d been toeing with his shoe and threw it hard and fast into the woods, where it plonked against a tree. He picked up another. And another. After seven rocks, he stormed off around the side of the restaurant in the direction of the parking lot. The birds had gone silent.

  Juni, Gabby and Mason stood still as trees, looking as stunned as they had when they’d driven into the parking lot a little less than an hour earlier.

  Before they had a chance to recover, Luca came back. “If you want to stay ahead of your dad, Juni, we need to get on the road.” Then he was gone again.

  Gabby stormed off after him. “Luciano!”

  Juni held on to Mason’s hand. “You believe it, don’t you?” she whispered.

  She knew it shouldn’t matter. Her own believing had to be enough.

  “Yes. Yes I do,” Mason said, which was nice to hear just the same.

  WHAT’S GREEN AND HAS WHEELS?

  LUCA DROVE TO the end of the parking lot and turned right onto Highway 89. Juni watched as he took several deep breaths and drove his usual turtle speed, calming himself. She had a vision of Dad’s white Chevy pickup driving up behind them, wide front grille looming.

  They’d been at the café for an hour, so Dad was still at least an hour behind them. If they were lucky, they’d make it to Tahoe before he did.

  Juni was on a fairy-tale quest, however. So anything was possible.