Bedful of Moonlight, Raven Held [story books for 5 year olds .TXT] 📗

broken down shack. I mean, you stow me inside here for a month and expect me to stay in there all day, doing crossword puzzles?”
There was a gloomy pause.
“Besides, I didn’t hurt your girlfriend. All I wanted to do was chat with her a little. Have a little human contact with someone other than you. Not that you’re such a poor companion, of course. It’s just –”
“You were standing in front of an entire row of houses, dad. In full view. Which part of the word risky do you not understand? Do you want to go back to jail – is that it? You’re sick of running from the law and now you’re just –”
“Hey, don’t take that tone with me, Caleb –” His eyes snapped to attention, like a deer suddenly aware of a predator nearby.
I tried not to move, which was a feat seeing as how I had just slipped on some wet leaves and stubbed my toe against a tree root.
“I’m just saying,” Caleb went on, more calmly, “that you were the one who chose this life. You have to be careful, or it’s back to jail for you. It’s just too bad you’re bored. You should have thought of that before you burgled that house and stole that car. I can’t do anything if you’re wanted by the police.”
“Alright, enough with the lecturing already. I don’t need my son telling me what to do.”
I silently thanked Caleb for not having heard me.
“By the way, I don’t know if you noticed, but that girl.…”
Having steeled myself for something along the lines of she’s crazy or how weird is she, I was taken aback when he said, “She couldn’t take her eyes off you the whole time you were with her.”
My face was aflame in the dark; I almost expected it to give off a reddish glow and betray my presence.
“That’s because she was grateful for my showing up while you were scaring her with your unshaven face and request to let you take her back to civilisation,” Caleb said, not missing a beat.
“My shaver’s rusty. I can’t possibly use it anymore.”
Caleb sighed. I barely missed tripping on another root. “Fine. I’ll get you a new one tomorrow.”
“So why did Oliver run away, anyway?”
“He feels it’s his fault that grandpa is in the hospital. I don’t know where he got that idea from, but he was really quiet today and –”
A snap cracked the muffled air, and I slowly lifted my foot to see a twig – now in two – underneath.
“Who’s there?” Caleb’s dad called out.
There was a pause, where I waited, holding my breath still.
“Someone’s here,” he said, and turned around. I could hear the grim determination to find me in his voice.
“Maybe it was an animal, dad,” Caleb said, sounding exasperated. “Or a stray camper.”
“We have to make sure.”
That was when I turn tailed and ran, not caring if a hundred twigs snapped under my feet.

*

The campers were still there, huddled around their pitiable little fire, beer cans littered around them.
“Hey.” He waved. “You found who you lost yet?”
Not even close. “Not yet.”
“Well, good luck.” He raised his beer can at me.
“Thanks.”
Roughly an hour passed before I finally found Oliver at a playground near the bicycle rental shop. He was perched on one end of the see-saw, kicking sand at his feet.
“Oliver,” I sighed, thanking the world that he was okay, and broke into a jog towards him. “Oliver,” I said again as I knelt down next to him. “Hey. You had trouble sleeping?”
“Is grandpa going to be okay?”
“He is okay, Oliver. You don’t have to worry, he wouldn’t want you too.”
“But Aunty Annabel told me –”
“Aunty Annabel is bullshitting.” She had no right to say that to him, considering that she knew nothing about her family because she chose to disconnect herself from it.
“You swore.”
“What?”
A grin crept onto his face. “You said bullsh –”
“Yeah, I know,” I said quickly. After a brief moment, I asked him if he was ready to go home. “You made us all really worried by running off like that.”
“I didn’t know where to go, though. The playground’s no fun at this time of the day.” He looked up at the sky. “Night.”
“That’s because everyone’s in bed like they should be,” I said, waiting for Caleb to pick up his phone.
“Why aren’t you in bed, then?”
“Because I –” Unknowingly, Caleb saved me by answering the call at that moment.
“Kristen?”
“Caleb, I found him.”
I heard a brief muffled conversation, where Caleb probably had his hand over the speaker. He was still with his father, then.
We hung up after I described our location.
I sat on the other end of the see-saw. “Oliver? What else did Aunty Annabel say to you?”
He scrunched up his face. “It was a long time ago. But she doesn’t seem to like me very much. Or mommy. Mommy tells me to just leave her alone and not make her angry whenever she comes back. Aunty Annabel pretends not to see us when sometimes. I know she sees us.”
“Did your grandpa ever talk about her?”
“We don’t talk about her a lot.” He bounced a few times on the see-saw, clearly bored with this topic. Then he hopped off and climbed up the slide. It was amazing how much energy that little pint-sized thing could have in him, even at night. But at least he was not beating himself up anymore.
When Caleb, Hyde and Belle arrived, Oliver was still going at it, scaling the net to what looked like a turret. Belle and Hyde rushed to him, Belle in tears but trying to look angry.
I tried to glance around subtly, wondering where Caleb’s father was hiding.
“Who else are we waiting for?”
“Huh?” I snapped back to attention.
Caleb was staring around like I was. “Are we expecting anyone else?”
I stopped looking and fixed my gaze on him. “No. No-one else.”


Eighteen


The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.”
~ Dale Carnegie (American lecturer and writer, 1888 – 1955)


It was bright when I woke up.
For a moment, nothing made sense. There was an unfamiliar sense of restfulness in me that I had not experienced in ages. Looking around, I realised I had actually fallen asleep. Dreamlessly.
And then I remembered how Caleb and I had both felt strangely tired after having found Oliver last night, that we had gathered our mugs of cold tea from the porch step and collapsed into our beds the minute we came back. Or at least, I had.
“Morning,” Jade said, breezing in and pulling her hair into a ponytail in front of the dressing table. “This must be the first time since you came here that you wake up later than me.” She threw a sidelong glance at me. “That is, if you even sleep at all.”
I gave her a polite smile.
“You don’t, do you.”
“What time is it?”
“Ten-fifteen.” She stopped brushing her ponytail and hopped onto my bed. “So what do you and my brother do at night? Grave-digging?”
My eyes widened. “You know about Caleb’s insomnia?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course I do. He scared the pants off me the first time I went down for a glass of water and saw him at the kitchen table.”
“Oh.”
Her gaze narrowed as she pursed her lips. “So … I don’t mean to pry. I mean, I know it’s none of my business, but – are you and my brother…?” She raised her brows suggestively.
“What? No. No, we’re not.” That was not enough to satisfy her, so I clarified further, “It’s just, we both have difficulty sleeping, so we thought we might as well have some company.”
She didn’t look convinced.
“He said his sleeping problems started about three years ago,” I said, “when everything started – or ended, depending on how I see it. What does that mean?”
Taking a deep breath, she said, fiddling with my bed-sheets, “He’s probably going to kill me for blabbing, but personally, I think it’s unhealthy to sweep everything under the carpet.”
“Of course.”
She fixed me with an appraising look before saying, “My parents – my real parents, that is – had some problems. Well, a lot of problems. Dad had some trouble at work – and there was something else too, but I don’t know what – and pretty soon, my parents stopped talking to one another. It was almost a year-long ongoing cold war. And then dad went to jail, and mom married Gabriel and moved us all here –”
“What was your dad in jail for?”
She stopped and stared, as though suddenly realising whom she was telling all this to and how much she had said. “Please,” she said, her eyes wide and begging, “don’t tell Caleb – or anyone – I told you this. I swear, sometimes my mouth is so huge I should really put a needle and thread to it.”
It was, I supposed, too late to ask any further questions, so I mimed zipping my lips.
“Kristen,” Jade went on. “Don’t get me wrong. I mean, you seem nice and all, but in this estate, people talk, and I don’t know what to think. My brother is obviously crazy about you.” Surprise must have registered on my face, because she said, “Yes, he is. I’m sure of it. I mean, it’s obvious, how he seems to want to hang out with you so much and help you out with your mother and all, even with his, you know, disinclination to be around people.”
“Oh, no, actually we –”
“But I also heard what those people said about you mistaking him for your” – her voice dropped to a whisper, as she looked around in case, say, a spirit may be lurking nearby – “boyfriend at the fete the other day.”
I waited for her bottom line.
“My brother may be a huge pain, but I’m sure even he doesn’t deserve being stuck in the frame of your old boyfriend that you keep trying to squeeze him into.”
My mouth hung open. “I don’t –”
She shrugged. “I’m just saying.” Bouncing off my bed, she added, “Get dressed, Kristen. We’re going to visit grandpa. You know Caleb will ask you to come along too.”
Caleb was just back from his run when I went downstairs. We met at the end of the stairway, as he pulled out his earphones.
“Imagine that.”
“What?”
“We both actually fell asleep. At night. Like normal people.” He grinned.
“Maybe Oliver sucks the life out of people around him so he’s always full of energy.”
“That has always been my theory,” he deadpanned.
“So, last night….”
He waited.
“Was so unexpected, wasn’t it?”
“I guess it was.”
I nodded, waiting for him to go on.
Giving me a strange look, he said, “Oliver doesn’t usually pull vanishing acts like this. Never had, in fact.”
He was not taking the bait. And why should he? He had no reason to think I knew about his secret. Was it even a secret? Maybe Hyde and the rest knew about it, and just weren’t talking about it.
But if he was not going to share anything, then there was no sense letting him know what I knew. What good would that do, after all?
I did not know what good it would do, but it certainly brought a lot of inconvenience. Keeping secrets from everyone – including the person whose secret you were keeping – was a chore I had