at the house, back at Daddy standing on the porch. “If I don’t leave now and get away from here, I’m gonna die myself.”
“That don’t make no sense,” I’d told her.
“I love you, Shelby Jayne. Wish so bad I could take youwith me, but you got school here, and everything you need. I can’t take care of you for a while. Grand-mère is gonna take every ounce of strength I have.”
But I didn’t believe her. I stopped believing anything she said.
I once wrote her a letter, but she just said it was too complicated to explain. Which wasn’t an answer at all. One of those things grown-ups do when they don’t want to talk about something. Or don’t want to admit they did wrong.
Maybe I really don’t want Mirage telling me the truth. I don’t want to know that her love was fake, that I wasn’t worth it. That she’d been pretending her whole life.
I feel a shudder go right up my spine and into my brain. Even though I want answers, I’m afraid of them, too.
At that moment the sun bursts through the clouds, wiping the darkness away as if the sun’s rays were long golden hands.
The chattering rain stops.
The trickles of water running in squiggly lines down the window slow.
And on the other side of the kitchen windows, the air is suddenly filled with an extraordinary blue light.
C HAPTER T HREE
W HAT IS THAT?” I ASK, SHOVING BACK MY CHAIR. “I T’S LIKE the entire world turned into the sky.”
Mirage points to the back door. “Go on out. Door’s unlocked.”
In two seconds, I’m standing on the back porch — which is more stable than the front porch — and I just look and look and look.
A giant tree grows up from the center of the yard, the top of it reaching the sky. And it’s filled with dozens and dozens and dozens of blue bottles. Every single branch, big and little, higher than a cypress and lower than a weed, has a blue bottle stuck on it.
A pillar of sunlight pierces straight down through thestorm clouds, almost like a spotlight. The light catches all those hundreds of bottles, throwing a blue tinge of color over everything in the yard. The tomato plants in the garden look blue, the lawn chairs, a set of old tires, fishing nets stacked against the exterior of the house, a wobbly card table off to one side of the porch cluttered with work tools, and an old chipped ceramic fountain, filled with rainwater. Even the water in the fountain is puddled into a soft, pretty blue.
Mirage’s whole yard is surrounded by cypress trees and hanging with curtains of moss, and the blue glow of all those bottles makes it look just like a fairyland. Never seen anything like it in my whole life.
“It’s a blue bottle tree,” Mirage says, coming up behind me.
I start laughing, even though I don’t want to act happy around her. The name Blue Bottle Tree is so obvious. And perfect.
“Go look, Shelby,” she says, leaning against the porch railing and wrapping her arms around herself like she’s cold.
I jump down the steps and walk closer to the tree.
Raindrops are running down the sides of the bottles, dripping off the ends. There’s a plinking noise as all that rain drip, drip, drips onto the bottles below, like the tree is creating its own magical rain shower.
I throw a look over my shoulder. “Who made the tree that way? Where’d all those bottles come from?”
Mirage’s face looks sort of red and splotchy, but maybe it’s just the light from the clouds and the rain. She clears her throat. “My daddy was the one started it when he and my mamma got married and moved out here. We been adding bottles ever since I was a girl. One a your grand-mère’s favorite things to do was collectin’ blue bottles at garage sales and on the side a the road.”
“I don’t remember ever seeing it before.”
Mirage shoves her hands deep into her pockets and sways on the top step of the porch, and I notice that she doesn’t come any closer. “You haven’t been out here since you were real