The Light Through the Leaves - Glendy Vanderah Page 0,1

for supper.

Dear Salamander, Today Heather told me I should wash my clothes. She said it in front of everyone on the bus. I wish I lived under this log with you. You get to be as dirty as you want.

Jasper and River had run ahead. They were almost at the little pier that jutted over the forest pond.

Ellis had to pull her mind back to where she was.

“Careful!” she called. “Don’t get too close to the water.” The boys were four and a half and had been taught how to stay afloat in swim lessons, but she still feared their nearness to the deep black water.

When she arrived at the dock, they were stretched out on their bellies, fishnets in hand, looking for tadpoles. The muscles in her arms and shoulders released their aching tension as she set down the baby in her car carrier. She gave the boys the two mason jars from the bag in her other hand.

“Shore will be a better place to find them,” she said.

She showed her sons where to find tadpoles, in the muck along the shoreline. In his knee-high rubber boots, River stepped into the water to block Jasper. He wanted to be the first to capture one.

Jonah and Ellis secretly joked that the twins had taken their names too literally: River as loud and impetuous as rushing water, Jasper as quiet and forbearing as a stone. River was born three minutes before his twin, and he’d been three steps ahead of Jasper ever since.

Thinking about Jonah made her physically ill. She sat on the ground next to the baby.

She had to divorce him. Obviously.

He’d probably been with Irene since early in Ellis’s pregnancy. That was when he’d started the lessons. All those months, he’d been sleeping with his hard-bodied tennis instructor while his wife got softer growing his baby. She suspected he’d been lying to her about that tough case at his law firm. Lying to his boys. On Saturday, he wouldn’t even take them to the park. He’d probably been with Irene.

Ellis kept seeing it, Jonah getting into her sporty white car near his work. The passionate kiss. At eleven thirty in the morning. Tennis wasn’t the only reason he’d gotten in shape lately. Apparently, he was doing intense workouts over his long lunch hours.

The boys had been in the van when Ellis saw the kiss. If she hadn’t quickly said something to distract them, they might have seen. Any of her friends might have. Probably some of their mutual friends had seen them together or knew about the affair. Ellis felt betrayed by them, too.

“I found a whole bunch!” River said. “Mom! Come see!”

She glanced at Viola asleep in her carrier. She’d nodded off during the jostling walk through the woods. Ellis left her at the pier to look at the tadpoles.

“Do you see them?” River said. “Mom? Mom?”

“I see.”

“You’re stepping on them,” Jasper said. “River, stop it!”

“I’m not! They swam away.”

“Mom, he’s killing them.”

“Guys, let’s just calm down, okay? Put some pond water in your jars and try to catch a few.”

“How many?” Jasper asked.

“You can each catch about ten. Twenty’s a good number for the big fishbowl, don’t you think?”

“I want to keep mine in a different place from Jasper’s,” River said.

“No, they all go in the bowl. And once they turn into frogs, we’ll bring them back here.”

“Why?”

“This is their home. They’re adapted to this environment.”

How would the boys adapt to the new life ahead of them? Now they’d be living between two parents and two homes. Would she keep the house or would Jonah? Would she have to get a job? What kind of job would an undergraduate degree in plant biology get her—especially when she had zero experience in anything but babies?

She returned to her daughter and tucked the blanket beneath her cherubic face. Even through Viola’s baby fat, Ellis could see she was going to look like her. She had the brown eyes and tan olive complexion, and she already had a lot of curl to her dark hair. Her daughter would be the first relative she knew who looked like her. The boys took after Jonah and her mother, both with fairer skin, blue eyes, and straight hair. Ellis assumed she and Viola must look like her father, but she knew nothing about him other than a name on her birth certificate. But she even questioned that because her mother said, “I don’t know who your father was,” the one time she’d responded