There You Are

There was once a girl who lived in a house too full of noise for a girl her size. Doors swung, pots clattered, voices climbed over one another to be heard first, and there never seemed to be a corner quiet enough to hear her own thoughts in. So on the days the noise grew too tall around her, she did what she had always done — she slipped out the back door, crossed the yard where the chickens didn't bother to look up, and went down the slope to the creek.

There, growing right at the water's edge, was an old willow tree. Its branches didn't reach up toward the sky the way other trees' did — they reached down, long and trailing, until the very tips of the leaves touched the water and drifted with it. From a distance the tree looked like it was crying softly into the creek. But the girl knew better. She knew that if you stepped carefully between the hanging branches, all those leaves fell closed behind you like a curtain, and once you were inside, no one in the world could see you at all.

It was, she decided the very first time she tried it, the finest hiding place that had ever existed.

Inside the willow's curtain, the world went green and gold and quiet. The creek talked to itself in a low voice over the stones. Dragonflies came and went without minding her. She brought no toys down there, because she needed none — she was a queen the moment she ducked beneath the leaves, and her kingdom was two feet of mossy bank, a bend of shining water, and as much sky as showed through the branches overhead. She held court for the crawfish. She gave the creek a new name every week. Whole afternoons went missing down there, folded into the shade, and nobody came looking for her, because the house never seemed to notice how long she'd been gone.

Except her grandmother.

However far the girl wandered in her mind, however deep into her kingdom she went, her grandmother always seemed to know exactly which way to walk to find her. She never called out, never came crashing through the branches. She would simply appear at the edge of the willow's curtain when the light started to slant gold through the leaves, and say, "There you are," as if the girl had never really been hidden from her at all — only resting somewhere her grandmother had already known to look.

The girl thought about that a great deal, in the private way children think about the things adults do that seem like magic. She decided, eventually, that her grandmother must simply love her enough to always know. That some kinds of love work like a dowsing rod — bending, however faintly, toward the person they're pointed at, no matter how well that person believes they've hidden.

Summer was the willow's gentlest season, but winter was its grandest.

When the cold came down hard enough to still the creek's low talking, ice crept out from the banks and crawled up onto the willow's trailing branches, and there it stayed, glittering, all the long grey afternoons. The girl would go down anyway, bundled to her ears, and duck beneath the curtain to find that her hiding place had changed overnight into something else entirely. The leaves were gone by then, but every branch wore a sleeve of ice instead, and when the low winter sun came sideways through the willow, the whole tree lit up like something built for a queen who was far grander than a girl in a borrowed coat. Icicles hung in rows like chandeliers nobody had to light. The creek beneath, where it hadn't quite frozen, ran black and glassy between white shelves of ice, catching the light and throwing it back up into the branches, so that the whole hollow beneath the tree glowed.

It was, without question, a crystal palace. She never once had to pretend that part.

She would stand very still in the middle of it, breath clouding in front of her, and let herself believe — just for those cold, bright minutes — that the willow had grown its winter armor entirely for her benefit. That every year it iced over and threw up its glittering walls because it, too, knew she'd need somewhere magnificent to disappear to. A girl needs a palace sometimes, even a borrowed one, even one that would melt by March.

And always, just as the cold started working its way past her coat and into her bones, she would hear her grandmother's boots crunching down the slope, unhurried, certain. The curtain of ice-heavy branches would part, and there her grandmother would stand at the edge of the palace, breath clouding same as hers, looking in at her with no surprise at all.

"There you are," she'd say again, exactly as she always did. "Come on home now. It's near suppertime."

And the girl would take her grandmother's hand and step back out through the frozen curtain, leaving her palace standing empty behind her until the next time the noise of the house grew too tall — knowing, the way she always did, that wherever she went, however far into her own kingdom, she was never really lost. Somebody always knew exactly where to find her.

She only had to go on being findable. That, it turned out, was the whole trick of being loved.

I believe, some days, that this is exactly how it will be when it is finally my turn to stop wandering the far side of the creek. That the ones who loved me best won't come crashing through the branches looking — they'll simply appear at the edge of everything, sure as ever, unhurried, the way they always did. And they'll say the same four words they always said, and I'll know I'm not lost, and I never was.