“Didn’t you hear me call?” asked Fiona.

“Yes, a few times so I’d head in that direction and I called back but you never answered.”

“I didn’t hear you, Nat,” said Fiona. “Did you hear everyone else calling? Did you call back?”

“No, I didn’t hear anything after I stopped hearing you and I just kept going hoping to hear your voice again but I guess I went in the wrong direction and then the wind and rain started and I got really scared because I was getting so wet and the trees were creaking like they were going to fall on me. And then I got tired and I was wet and cold and I didn’t know why you didn’t hear me and call back when I called and I was afraid to keep going, that I was going even further away, so I just sat under a tree waiting for her.”

“For us, Nat?”

“No,” whispered Nat. “For Mommy.” And she fell asleep.

“It would have happened even if Mommy and Daddy had been alive,” said Marlin to Fiona later after Charlie had fallen asleep too and the two of them had retired to their own beds to stare at the ceiling.

“I know,” said Fiona wretchedly.

“She’s always drifting off without paying attention. It could have happened in Borneo just as easily. But that Al Farber is a waste of space. Did you see he was drunk when he got here?”

“We need a better pretend guardian,” mumbled Fiona because she had already shut her eyes, which were growing too heavy to keep open.

Through her half-awake state she heard Marlin say, “It’s so weird.”

“What’s so weird,” asked Fiona, yawning.

“That Mommy and Daddy will never know we came to Pine Island. That they’ll never know Natasha was lost. That they’ll never know anything that happens to us from now on.”

Davy Clement

THE air grew lighter, the days lengthened, and they entered May, the most glorious of months. The letters, emails, texts, and phone calls from Mr. Pennypacker stopped. Fiona did not know if this was a good thing or a bad thing until one day when she took Al’s dinner over he said, “You gotta get that annoying limpet Hiram Pennypacker off my back.”

Fiona paled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s constantly leaving me threatening messages. He says it’s only because of his loyalty to Martha and the chance that she really did want me as the guardian that he hasn’t gone to social services yet. But it’s the same message on my phone every day, over and over in his annoying high-pitched little squeak. I can’t make him stop, I can’t even call him back, because I have no paperwork to show him and there’s not a reason I can think of that he would believe for not showing it to him if I had it!”

“Oh,” said Fiona.

“Yeah, oh,” said Al. “Whatever I signed up for it wasn’t being nagged to death by that garden gnome.”