Birdy Waterman 01 - The Bone Box

in prison because of you,” Natalie said.
    Birdy laid her palm against her neck. “I was fourteen, Mom.”
    “I had my first baby at fifteen. Fourteen isn’t so young. Being young isn’t an excuse for anything.”
    “It wasn’t an excuse, but a fact. I did what I was supposed to do.”
    The room went silent as Natalie Waterman pressed the MUTE button. She wanted to make her point without the home shopping hostess’s over-the-top spiel about a “Christmas kitten ceramic coming up next.”
    “You went against the family, Birdy,” she said. “Twenty years is just a drop in the ocean. Families never forget a betrayer. You’re a smart girl. You’d think with all your schooling you’d understand something as simple as that.”
    The sound went back up on the TV.
    “I don’t know,” Birdy said, “I thought that you’d be glad about it. Happy maybe. Something positive about seeing him.”
    “You don’t know me and I don’t know you. On second thought,” Natalie said, pulling herself up from the recliner. “I’m pretty sure I’m out of that instant coffee. You better run along home. Go back to your precious job and forget about all of us up here. You’re too busy. Too important. I’m surprised you even remember where you came from.”
    Birdy stayed planted, thinking that if she stood her ground her mother would calm down a little and take back what she just said.
    Yet that wasn’t about to happen.
    It was a stalemate and not the first one. “Are you waiting for something?” Natalie asked.
    Birdy’s heart was racing and her stomach was in knots, but she didn’t want her mother to know that she’d gotten to her—like she always did. She’d seen a gentle side of her mother in the past and she craved it again. Didn’t every child?
    “I’m waiting for you to be a mother,” Birdy said, her voice soft as though it was too much to even ask. “That’s what.”
    Natalie laughed. “You don’t need a mother. And I don’t need a daughter like you. Why don’t you go on now? I’m watching Judge Judy next, back-to-back episodes. Do me a favor, Birdy.”
    Birdy wasn’t a crier. If she had been, she would have dissolved into tears right then. But not now. Not in front of her. Not with her mother’s seeming indifference, or outright hostility.
    “What’s that, Mom?”
    Natalie turned the sound up on the remote.
    “Don’t mention Tommy again and don’t go see him,” she said. “Leave it be. Let the past fade away. Leave it.”

    Birdy Waterman slumped in her car in front of her mother’s house. All visits home were bad, but on the scale of their relationship, this visit had been particularly disastrous. Natalie Waterman had come up empty-handed if she’d sought a reason to be happy. Few on the reservation would argue that she had many reasons to be happy. She was an alcoholic. Her husband had died in a fishing accident off the Pacific coast. Arthritis had taken its toll on her joints. Natalie was angry at the world and maybe rightly so. Knowing all of that didn’t make the pain pass any easier.
    Somewhere in the time line of her mother’s downfall were the murder of Anna Jo and the subsequent conviction of her nephew Tommy for the most reprehensible of crimes.
    Birdy pulled out of the muddy drive way and drove west toward the trail along the coast. The sky was clear and sunlight jabbed downward through the thick covering of spruce trees that contorted away from the ocean. She parked her car and started down the trail, each step taking her back twenty years to the day she’d seen the unimaginable.

C HAPTER T HREE
    Summer weather along the Pacific is governed by a kind of strange roulette wheel, one that makes anyone with concrete plans on the all-but-certain losing end of things. Not until the moment one ventures outside to experience the world of nature is it apparent if it is sunny or rainy or a mix of both. Its unpredictability is the only sure thing.
    Three days after her fourteenth birthday, Birdy Waterman dragged a wagon down the coast trail to gather kindling. This was something she did nearly every day in the summer, and most weekend days during the school year. In the rain. In the snow. In the most blustery of autumn days. It didn’t matter. Birdy’s family heated their little aluminum box of a house with a woodstove. Wood was free if one was skilled with a chainsaw. She wore two layers of clothing, a T-shirt and a sweatshirt that she’d undoubtedly peel off once she got