Lovely Wild. Megan Hart

       ELEVEN

      MARI HAD MADE dinner. Nothing special. Pasta with sauce and some salad from the cold box...no, the refrigerator, she reminded herself. She’d set the table. Two plates, one. Two. She stopped herself from counting them out on her fingers. When she caught herself singing under her breath, she stopped herself from that, too. Leon didn’t like it when she sang. He said it distracted him.

      He enjoyed the food, though. “You’re becoming quite the little cook.”

      His praise, as always, warmed her. She wanted to stretch herself like a barn cat, rub herself beneath his hand. But Leon never touched her. Not since she was small.

      He asked her about her studies. What lessons she’d completed. Had she practiced her handwriting? She must get better at cursive. Had she read the book he’d left for her on the desk?

      “I tried.” Mari pushed pasta around on her plate, her belly full but appetite not sated. Sometimes, she felt like as long as there was food in front of her, she would eat it until it made her sick.

      “What do you mean, you tried?” Leon’s fork spattered red sauce on his white shirt, which Mari will put in the laundry later to soak so that it doesn’t stain. “I expect more from you than trying. You can do better than that. It’s not too difficult for you. You’re a smart girl.”

      She has explained in the past, or tried to, that it wasn’t that the books he chose for her were too difficult. She could read the words. She could understand the meanings. She simply couldn’t understand what they were about.

      “Anne of Green Gables is a classic,” Leon continued. “All girls your age should read it.”

      Anne of Green Gables was about a girl with red hair who is adopted by a family who really wanted a boy. Mari supposed Leon thought she might be able to identify with the concept of being adopted, and in a way she did. But the rest of it, the talk of clothes and school and friends and love...that, Mari did not comprehend.

      She said nothing. She ate her dinner and packed away the leftovers carefully, letting her fingertips dance over the plastic containers stacked in the refrigerator when Leon couldn’t see and tell her to keep her hands still. She washed the dishes and put them away, and she remembered not to sing under her breath.

      “My son,” Leon said from the kitchen doorway. “Ryan. He’ll be here in about an hour.”

      Leon had spoken many times of his son. He’d shown her pictures and video movies of Ryan as a child. Leon had even given her some of Ryan’s old things, not like they were hand-me-downs but as though they were precious gifts she should be honored to claim.

      In fact, a few of the things he gave her were precious to Mari. Not the cast-off football jersey that didn’t fit and still smelled slightly of sweat. And not the boxes of plastic bricks she’d never really learned to put together to make something bigger. But the stuffed bunny, fur worn off on the ears and the tail entirely lost—that she loved. That she still slept with next to her at night though at fifteen she had abandoned all her other dolls and stuffed toys. Leon, who hadn’t asked her to call him father but encouraged the use of his first name, had given Mari that toy when she was much younger and had nothing left of her life before. Later, there were fancy toys and brand-new dresses, brought by well-meaning people who had no idea of what she held as valuable. But the bunny that once belonged to Ryan was something Mari would forever hold precious and dear.

      In the year and a half since she’d been living here, she’d never even known Ryan to call the house. There’d been some trouble with Leon’s wife when he decided to give Mari a permanent home. Mari didn’t know the whole story, had only caught bits and pieces overheard in shouting conversations on the phone late at night when he thought she was asleep. She knew the doctor’s wife didn’t want to become a mother to some random, cast-off girl nobody else wanted, and she couldn’t say she blamed the former Mrs. Doctor Calder. After all, Mari’s own mother hadn’t wanted her, either.

      It might’ve been the trouble with Ryan’s mother that kept him away, or something simpler. He’d been in college, then med school. He was a grown-up. With a girlfriend, Leon said with a small curl of his lip that told Mari exactly what he thought of that. And though Leon had kept many of Ryan’s things and felt free enough with them to give them away, he’d also been honest about the fact he wasn’t very close with his son.

      Mari, Leon often said, was a second chance.

      Since Leon Calder was the only father Mari had ever known, he was her only chance.

      But now Mari stood in the kitchen, in shadow, watching Ryan come in from the outside. He stamped his feet to get the snow off his boots. Brushed it off his shoulders. It was melting in his blond hair, leaving rivulets of water trickling down his temples and making puddles from the hems of his pants on the floor.

      He didn’t see her, and she didn’t want him to. Mari went quiet; she went still. She was silence. Not a breath, not a sigh, not a blink. And Ryan passed by her little corner of shadow and headed for the living room, calling out for his dad.

      She had time to run upstairs and hastily comb through her hair. Put on clean clothes. She didn’t have many pretty things. Leon preferred her to dress in something like a uniform. Appropriate clothes, he said, because he wanted nobody to say there was anything inappropriate going on. People already had enough reason to whisper, he said, though he’d never explained exactly what that meant. Mari didn’t like the plaid skirt, the white blouse, the saddle shoes and knee socks. She’d rather have the sorts of clothes she’d seen the kids on TV wearing. Jeans and sneakers. Now, though, she wished she had something pretty. Flowy. Something soft, like a princess would wear.

      For the first time, she understood why Anne cared about what dress she wore to impress Gilbert Blythe.

      When she crept down the stairs again, her heart pounding, Mari saw Ryan in the living room with his dad. They were drinking from glasses filled with Scotch. Ryan didn’t look very much like his father, but they both turned at the same time and she saw there was something very much the same in their smiles.

      “Ryan,” said Leon, “this...is Mari.”

      “Hey, little sister,” Ryan said. “What have you done?”

      “Nothing,” Mari answered and was confused when Ryan choked with laughter. “What?”

      “She doesn’t know Billy Idol, Ryan.”

      “Oh. Right.” Ryan nodded like he understood, but the quirk of his smile said he didn’t. Not really.

      He