I Know You Remember

by Jennifer Donaldson

  I sink down from the side of the tub to the floor, grab her by the shoulders, and make her look at me.

  “You think she killed herself,” I say flatly.

  Her face crumples, her lip shuddering into sobs. She doesn’t have to say yes. That’s when I realize she’s not trying to punish her mom with all this.

  She’s punishing herself.

  “There’s no reason to think she killed herself,” I say, shaking her a little. “They haven’t found a note, they haven’t found any kind of evidence . . .”

  “I never meant for her to get so upset,” she says, as if she hasn’t heard me. “I didn’t mean for it to be so ugly.”

  I go silent again, watching her face. She closes her eyes for a moment, her lashes wet with tears, and then goes on.

  “I just didn’t want him to get hurt. And he just thinks she’s so . . . perfect, like she’s some kind of . . . angel, or something,” Tabitha pleads. “I mean, I’ve been best friends with him since third grade, I’m allowed to want to protect him, okay?”

  I let go of her then, sitting down hard on my bottom.

  “You told Ben about Seb,” I say softly. When she doesn’t answer, I go on. “She told you about the kiss, didn’t she? And you told Ben.”

  “It’s not fair!” The words rend the air, a shriek of rage, her mood suddenly pivoting to anger. “Fucking everyone’s in love with Zahra. God, I’m probably half in love with her. And she’s . . . not perfect, okay? So yeah, fine, I told Ben about her kissing some other guy, and they broke up, and she killed herself. And I wish . . . I wish . . .”

  But she never says what she wishes. She just gives a sob and lies down on the bath mat, spent.

  I don’t ask any more questions. I help her change into clean clothes. Then I get her to her bed. Mr. Pants comes over with an inquisitive trill, curls up by her neck, and goes to sleep.

  I watch her for a moment, drool already gathering at the corner of her mouth. Could she be right about what happened to Zahra? I don’t want to believe it . . . but at this point, Tabitha might just know her better than me. Tabitha might have a better idea what she’s really capable of.

  I shake my head, almost violently, and start to gather up the dirty clothes strewn all over the room, just to have something to do. I won’t believe it. I can’t. Until there’s some new bit of evidence, some new sign, I can’t.

  If I thought Tabitha was right, I’d fall apart myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I STAY AT TABITHA’S all night, sleeping on a little trundle bed on her floor. She wakes up a few times, moaning in pain. I make sure she drinks water. In the morning I go down to the kitchen and rifle through her cabinets. There’s a bag of bagels in the breadbox that are only mildly stale, so I take them upstairs, along with a large thermos of ice water, and put it all by her bedside.

  She’s pale and clammy, but it looks like she’s through the worst of it. Her eyes flicker open, red-rimmed.

  “Go back to sleep,” I whisper. “I’ll tell Ms. Yi you’re sick.”

  “You stayed?” she mumbles.

  “I’m heading out now. Go back to sleep.”

  She nestles back down under the covers with a sigh. I give Mr. Pants a little scratch on the chin and turn to start gathering up my stuff.

  Outside, I sit in my car for a few minutes, my breath billowing around me in the early morning darkness. It’s almost seven. I’d promised Dad I’d make it to school on time today—last night I told him Tabitha was sick and home alone and needed some help, and he’d grudgingly agreed to let me stay over—but suddenly the idea seems impossible.

  I look down at my phone, my hand pale and cold curving around it. Then, before I can second-guess myself, I text Ben.

  Saw T last night. She’s convinced Z did something to hurt herself.

  I pause for a moment, trying to figure out how to phrase my question.

  Where do you think she’d go if she wanted to be alone?

  He replies almost immediately.

  Don’t know why I didn’t think of it before but I can think of one place we haven’t checked.

  My eyebrows shoot up. My hands start to tremble with the cold.

  Okay, I text back. Let’s go check, then.

  * * *

  —

  “SO TELL ME, WHAT’S the story with this place? Where are we going?” I ask, glancing at Ben in the passenger seat.

  The sun is just starting to flare above the mountains. By the time I picked him up, topped off the tank of my car, and bought a bag of gas station snacks for the road, it was almost nine. We hit the highway, and I wonder vaguely what time the school sends out the automated phone calls reporting absences to parents. Will Dad know I’m skipping by now? Or will it be this afternoon, when we’re already halfway to Glenallen?

  “It’s an island. It used to be a church camp, but they shut it down back in the nineties,” Ben answers. “I guess there was some kind of accident. A kid died.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Oh, come on, that’s, like, the premise of every slasher movie of all time.”

  “No, I’m serious. Some kid wandered away from camp and got lost in the woods, and I guess he died of exposure.”

  “That’s . . . awful,” I say. Then I frown. “If it closed in the nineties, how’d Zahra even know about it?”

  He smirks. “Guess who owned the camp?”

  My stomach turns. “Dale Worthen.”

  “Right in one.” He shakes his head, looking out the window. “Zahra’d never been up there before, but last summer a bunch of us drove up to check it out. Morbid curiosity and all that. But it’s really pretty up there, and there are all these abandoned cabins you can stay in. It’s kind of fun to explore—there’s all kinds of old stuff left behind.”

  I smile. Because there’s another glimpse of the Zahra I’d known. The one who loves abandoned spaces, things left behind.

  “We’ve been back a bunch of times since then,” he says. “Sometimes with a group. Sometimes just the two of us.” His neck reddens a little. My gaze jerks straight ahead, out the windshield. “Anyway,” he says quickly. “We’ve got to at least look out there.”

  We sink into silence for a while. Soon, we cross the Knik River and pass the state fairgrounds. Looking up I see that the snow has made it halfway down the mountains. It won’t be long before it starts to snow in town. And if we haven’t found Zahra by then . . .

  I try to block out the thought.

  In a few more miles the radio starts cutting out. I plug in my iPhone and turn on a playlist—Chvrches and Bon Iver and Arcade Fire. He glances sidelong at me.

  “Look at the Portland hipster,” he teases. But his fingertips tap along with the music, and he sings along when a Neko Case song comes on. “Do you have family there or something?”

  The question jerks me out of my head with a start. “Hm?”

  “You know. Why’d you guys end up there?” He leans his head back against the rest, watching me. I squirm a little under his gaze.

  “Oh.” I shake my head. “No family. Mom was just looking for a change after the divorce, and she ended up finding a pretty good job.”

  “Did you like it?” he asks.

  “It’s okay, I guess.” I adjust my seat back a little, straighten up. “But I was always homesick.”

  He looks back out the window. “Yeah, I bet. I don’t know what I’m going to do next year.”

  “Are you planning to go to college in the lower forty-eight?” I ask.

  “Mom wants me to. I’ve got a chance at a good scholarship, depending on how this season goes, and a lot of the best cross-country schools are down there. But I don’t know.” He looks out the window. The Matanuska Glacier pops in and out of view, wedged between the mountains. “I’ll miss my family. And it’ll be weird, being somewhere without Natives. Or . . . being somewh
ere with different Natives, I guess.”

  I nod. Leaving was hard enough for me. I can’t imagine how it’d feel if I had deeper roots, deeper traditions.

  “Arizona State’s been sending me love letters, but can you even imagine going somewhere that hot?” He grimaces. “I already sweat through my clothes running in fifty degrees. I don’t even know how people do it other places.”

  “I don’t even know how people do it, period,” I say. “I used to feign twisted ankles in PE class all the time just so I wouldn’t have to jog.”

  He snorts a little. “You and Zahra both.”

  I give him a surprised look. “Zahra’s on the cross-country team, right?”

  “The JV team,” he says. “No shade, but she’s kind of awful. I think she mostly does it because she likes the trails. She likes to be outside. She’s poky as hell, and she doesn’t seem to care much about winning.” He smiles a little. “Last year she came in dead last at regionals, because she found an injured squirrel and stopped to try to help it.”

  There she is again—another little glimmer of the Zahra I knew, flashing like something darting between the trees. She’d never been very athletic, but she loved to walk the trails. She loved to explore and point out the plants and birds and things that lived there. I was always so preoccupied, so in my head, I didn’t notice most of it. But she did.

  “How long have you guys been dating, anyway?” I ask.

  “A little more than a year. We were friends before that. She and Tabitha and I were in a group together for film class sophomore year. We made this dumb-ass parody of a noir movie. It was really cheesy, but it looked amazing, because Zahra turns everything she touches into art.” He shakes his head, remembering. “I mean, she found the costumes at a thrift shop—these boring old church clothes. Nothing special. And I just remember her coming at me with a dozen safety pins and a necktie and suddenly I’m, like, Don Draper.”

  I can picture it so clearly. The look on her face, a little abstract, a little distant. The way she’d hum to herself.

  “Does she still write?” I ask.

  “Write?” His brow furrows. “Like, in a journal, or what?”

  “No, like . . . like stories. Fiction,” I say.

  “Not that I know of. But maybe. She doesn’t tell me everything.” He goes silent for a few minutes. The radio thrums softly, just audible over the sound of the wheels on the pavement. “Sometimes I feel like she doesn’t tell me anything.”

  * * *

  —

  GETTING ANYWHERE IN ALASKA takes forever. It’s hard for most people to get that—after all, we’re usually in a tiny little box in the corner of the schoolroom map, only slightly bigger than Hawaii. But it’s enormous—a fifth the size of the United States as a whole.

  It takes almost four hours to get to the lake. Ben dozes for a while, and I’m left alone, crawling along sheer cliff faces, driving alongside blue-gray glacier runoff. It’s lunchtime when we make it to the Cormorant Lodge—a combination inn, restaurant, and boat launch that serves the lake.

  I wait on the dock while Ben goes in to try to rent a boat. Gray-green waves slap up against the support beams, a handful of late-season boats rising and falling rhythmically. I don’t remember having been out here before. When I was really little—before Dad’s drinking got so bad—we went on a few family camping trips. One time he woke me up—pulling me out of the tent, my head nodding against his shoulder—to show me a fox that lurked on the edge of our campsite. I remember s’mores over a fire; I remember Mom trying to teach me how to cast a line at the edge of a lake.

  “You okay?”

  Ben’s voice comes from right next to me; somehow I didn’t notice him approach. I give a little shudder and then nod.

  “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He cocks his head. “You just looked . . . I don’t know. Sad, I guess.”

  “I’m fine.” I hitch my backpack up a little. “Any luck with the boat?”

  He nods toward a broad green fishing boat. There are three long planks for seats, rotten and splintered, and a motor that looks like it’s about a hundred years old. “Our chariot,” he says.

  “Goody.” I look down into it. There’s a thin rim of water on the bottom. “You have everything you need?”

  “Yup.” He hops down into the boat, surefooted. In a bin near the rudder there are a couple of lumpy old life vests; he hands me one and I hook it over my head. Then he holds out his hand to me.

  My fingers rest in his for only a moment. His hand is warm, compared to the sharp wind coming off the lake. I let him help me down. The boat wavers under my feet; I take a deep breath.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, OUR little craft bumps gently against a crumbling wooden dock. Ben jumps out and ties it off. Then he holds out his hand to help me out.

  The island rises like a turtle’s shell out of the water, steep on all sides, flat across the top. Trees bristle out from the sides, save for a wide path that looks like it used to be regularly cultivated. I stand for a moment, getting used to the unmoving ground beneath my feet, and look around.

  “The camp is up that way,” he says. “Come on.”

  It’s a steep climb. Ben has to slow down a few times to wait for me. It’s not long before my breath is short. The ground is dried mud, pitted and knobbed like an alien landscape. I stumble once, catching myself on my palms, and the hard crust scrapes my skin raw.

  Ben helps me up. “Almost there,” he says.

  And then we’re at the top.

  A half dozen simple wooden buildings stand, paint peeling, wood splintering. Weeds grow in every crevice, and the pine trees are stark against the clouds. A row of abandoned mud nests hang under every eave, the barn swallows already gone for the winter.

  “You should see the place in the summer,” he says. “It’s really nice then.”

  I can picture it. I’m sure it’s beautiful. Now, the chill air feels almost tense with neglect. As if the place is holding its breath, waiting either for the campers to return, or for the wilderness to reclaim the island entirely.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s get moving.”

  None of the doors are locked. We move in and out of the different buildings, looking for signs of life. A thick coat of dust and cobweb covers everything. Daddy longlegs skitter in the corners of the rooms. In one, there’s an ancient pot-bellied stove and a long row of tables. A mess hall, clearly. A large chalkboard next to the cafeteria window still lists the last meal: enchiladas, green salad, rice. In a smaller building there are upended boxes of crafting materials scattered across the floor.

  “Some raven’s got a sequined nest now,” Ben says, nudging one of the boxes with his toe.

  A faded poster on one wall shows an angel with a sword dripping blood. When I look closer, I see that the angel has a grotesque leer on its face, a look of almost obscene pleasure. It points with its free hand to an image of a devil. The paper is tattered, nibbled by insects and animals, but I can just make out that the devil seems to have been disemboweled.

  “Ah, now I see evidence that Pastor Worthen was here,” I say.

  “Yeah.” He grimaces at the poster. “That guy’s such an asshole. I’ve never been a fan, but especially not since I started dating Zahra. You know he used to come to our practices and meets and stuff? He’d just sit in his car and watch like some kind of creeper. Sometimes she’d go talk to him, sometimes she’d just ignore him.”

  “Really? I didn’t think they had any contact after she moved out of his place freshman year,” I say.

  He shrugs. “I think he was still trying to get her to come back to church or something. Once he even got out of his car and shook her by the shoulders. I was out on the field leading stretches when it happened but I swear, I was ready to go beat his ass. But she pushed him
away and he drove off before I could do anything.”

  “That’s really messed up.” I frown. “Did you guys ever call the cops or anything?”

  “Nah. That was last year. He never came back again. And she didn’t want to upset her parents.” He exhales upward, and a lock of his hair lifts from his forehead before settling back down. “Her mom’s super sensitive about it all.”

  I nod slowly. It’s not a surprise—from what I saw of Worthen’s preaching style, I’m sure he feels entitled to harass whomever he wants. Especially a young woman; especially one related to him.

  Classrooms, study rooms. A chapel with pews and a podium of rough-hewn wood. A storage room full of weird props—a moth-eaten papier-mâché tombstone, a rack of dusty costumes, a handmade puppet that looks like it could either be a dragon or a green dog. A few unspeakable outhouses—there’s no plumbing out here. It’s all silent and still.

  “What a romantic getaway,” I say.

  He gives a lopsided grin.

  “It’s a little different when it’s nice out.” He points toward a path. “The cabins are this way.”

  He leads me toward the center of the island. Ahead of us on the trail I see an ermine scuttling away into the trees, its black-tipped tail sweeping behind. It looks like it’s molting for the winter; there are patches of white along its legs. A camp robber screams from a nearby branch as we pass.

  The path opens up into another large clearing, with a dozen painted wooden cabins arranged in a circle. At the center there’s a small rusty playground that can’t help but remind me of the abandoned one in Russian Jack. Maybe Zahra is just drawn to the neglected, the damaged.

  We walk slowly around the ring of little A-frames. He points one out, a yellow one across from us, on the far side of the playground.

  “That’s where we used to stay. I think it belonged to her grandparents. Still has some of their old stuff in there. If she’s been here . . . it’ll be in there.”

  But something is off. I get a sharp whiff that stings my nostrils. At first I think it’s come off the playground—there’s a tang of rusted metal to it. It gets stronger as we approach the cabin, tinged with something else. Something hot, and heavy.