Spots of early-morning sun broke through in patches on the forest floor, lighting clumps of resurrection fern and dense tufts of moss. I tried to slow down and think. Mom wouldn’t find out. She’s taken Thomas to swim practice. Beatrice went with them. Marie’s with Ellen. She’ll be okay. But I was scared. Ellen wasn’t right. She hadn’t slept at all. This morning she was weak and dizzy, and Marie said her heart rate and breathing were both too fast. Marie said it was probably shock, and we needed Valium to help her body calm down and antibiotics to prevent the cuts from getting infected. I still worried about the injuries inside her that we couldn’t see.

I walked down the Horseshoe Trail toward the Kingdom, a secret fort Sage and I had made several summers before. Ahead of me was the crooked tree, our marker for leaving the path to circle into the Kingdom from the back, a routine we had so that there would never be a trace of track or footfall for anyone else to find. We imagined that the crooked tree was one of the ones Indians had used as signposts along trails to signal where there was good hunting or soft ground for shelter. It was an oak that had started to grow upright, but suddenly the trunk made a complete right angle for two or three feet and then grew up straight again. Before the Kingdom even existed, Dad showed me the tree. He said it might have been a marker, but it could also have been caused by a bigger tree falling on the oak when it was young, and then over time the bigger tree rotted and fell apart. The young tree survived but was left with this strange shape.