Red Fox Road

by Frances Greenslade

  Grandma didn’t answer. She kept her eyes on the boat launch on the other side. Wind and water sprayed her face and arms. My arms and legs were bare and shivering. I hadn’t had time to grab a jacket. But I wouldn’t say anything.

  Phoebe was the one who started to run. She was the one who shouted, “Bet you can’t catch me.”

  I wouldn’t say that either.

  I saw her there on the lawn, her hair lifting in the breeze. She stopped and turned to me. The hummingbird whirred and flashed and I watched it dart from the porch feeder to a high branch. When I looked back, Phoebe was on the ground.

  The order that everything happened became important to Mom later. Even when she no longer seemed angry, she asked me to tell her again and again.

  * * *

  I don’t know exactly why Phoebe died. I know it had to do with her heart and it didn’t happen right away. Each day she was in the hospital, I woke up in our bedroom at home with the sun coming through the maple outside our window, and I was excited for Mom to take us down to the beach so we could float on our backs in the lake if the waves weren’t too big. Then I looked over at her untouched bed and remembered. Each day, the weather was nicer than the day before and I waited for her to come home. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Carly and her mom took me with them to the beach, but they liked a different beach than the one we usually went to, so we went there. The sand was too hot to walk on and you could hear the traffic on the highway.

  Mom was at the hospital all day and all night. She had forgotten about me. But she wouldn’t like it if I told her that.

  Dad was the one who came to me one night. Summer had passed. A north wind clattered through the maple and moaned at the window. I was still awake, listening. Some neighborhood cats yowled at each other and then a dog started to bark at them. Dad sat on my bed and said, “Phoebe’s gone.”

  “Where? Without me?”

  “No,” Dad said. Then he didn’t speak for a minute, but made strange choking sounds.

  “No,” he said again. “She’s passed away. Phoebe is dead.”

  I cried into his shirt and Dad patted my back and said to get up, he’d make me some toast and honey. We went down to the kitchen. Everything of Phoebe was there: her handwriting on our little chalkboard and her pictures on the fridge.

  “Do you want to ask me anything?” he said, as he put the plate in front of me and sat down.

  “No,” I said. I ate the toast and watched Dad watch me.

  Then I said, “Is Mom mad at me?”

  “Of course not. No.” But the way he said it so fast, I didn’t believe him.

  * * *

  Afterward, I guess I had thoughts that any twin sister would have if her sister had died. I guess some of them were pretty normal thoughts. I don’t remember a lot of that.

  The thoughts that stick with me? They’re the ones I’m not proud of.

  After the funeral, Grandma took me to Gem Lake. The leaves had turned yellow by then. A cold wind shivered across the surface of the water. Grandma kept me busy during the day, hiking the woods or taking the canoe out if it was calm. But at night I lay in bed and listened to her cleaning up the dirty dishes. Then the screen door creaked and slammed as she went out and I knew she was standing in the porch having her last cigarette of the day and looking at the moon on the lake. And then I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

  I cried, trying not to let her hear me. I didn’t cry because Phoebe was gone, not really. I cried because Mom blamed me and I thought she’d sent me to Gem Lake because she didn’t want me around and because I’d thought—this is the worst thought of all the ones I had—that maybe once Phoebe was gone, Mom would pay more attention to me. But that hadn’t happened. Instead, it was the opposite. I cried because I couldn’t change it.

  What kind of sister has thoughts like that?

  I put another branch on the fire and pulled the sleeping bag closer around my shoulders. A gentle rain had begun to fall. The soft voice on the radio said, “The Eugene Public Library will hold its annual book sale on Saturday, May 10. I know I’ll be there. Like I need more books.”

  I wanted her to keep talking, to tell me about the normal things going on in her town. I wondered if she was drinking a cup of coffee, with her feet up on her desk. I pictured her peeling a juicy orange, setting the segments on a plate so she could eat them while the music played. I wanted an orange so bad.

  “Here are a few songs that borrow from books. We’ll start with something from 1969. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were inspired by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings when they wrote this song.”

  You know the thoughts that you try to keep from coming to the surface? Basement thoughts, I call them. They live down there; I can sense them hiding in the dark. But you don’t want to let them up into the light of day. If I feel them scratching at the door, I do something to try to chase them back down.

  Like the time Carly and I went to Lydia’s house after school one day. Her parents weren’t home yet and we heard their dog whining and clawing at the basement door.

  “That’s Butch,” Lydia said. “I can’t let him out until my mom or dad gets home.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s just a rule.”

  “Is he dangerous?”

  “Not really. He’s just a dog. You know.”

  The dog flung himself again and again at the door, scratching like he was crazed and letting out strangled half-barks, half-whines.

  “Are you sure he’s okay?” I asked.

  “He wears a bark collar; that’s why he sounds like that.”

  “What’s a bark collar?” Carly asked.

  “You know. It shocks him when he barks. To make him stop.”

  “Anyway,” I said. “Mom said I had to clean my room before she gets home, so I better go.”

  Carly frowned at me. She knew I was making it up.

  As I walked away from Lydia’s house, I could still hear the dog at the door. I swore if I ever had a dog, I wouldn’t make him wear a bark collar. I’d felt sorry for the dog. But also, I kept picturing what he was going to be like when the door was finally opened.

  My basement thoughts are like that. They grow bigger and darker the longer I keep them down there.

  The music rang out in the dark and filled the quiet. The time has come to be gone.

  My thoughts whined at the door.

  I made myself think of Gem Lake. Last time I saw Grandma, we’d paddled all the way to the other end of the lake. We’d had lunch on a blanket in the sand. Grandma smoked a cigarette and we named the shapes we saw in the clouds. Kingfishers flitted along the edge of the lake. Sun shone on the water. At the cabin now, the canoe lay flipped over on a wooden rack under the pines. A drift of leaves swept in on it. No one took it out anymore.

  It was better to let the thoughts out. The longer I kept them locked away, the more ferocious they got.

  In the quiet between songs, the rain tinkled on leaves, the forest peeped and rustled and sighed. I lay down under the lean-to and burrowed into my sleeping bag. Around midnight, the radio station faded out.

  * * *

  The cold woke me. I checked my watch: 3:04 a.m. Since being out here on this road, I’d discovered that three in the morning is the time when a fire stops throwing good heat, when my body can’t get warm enough and it seems like the night and the cold will go on like that forever. It’s colder at 4 a.m. But 4 a.m. is closer to morning and to hope. Three a.m. is caught smack between the midnight and the morning. Fears tumble around my ears, flaring like meteors; my heart roars. The soft pop of the fire sounds like stealthy footsteps on dry leaves.

  The basement door gaped open. My heart had stopped beating; the night poured in.

  I could die here and no one would care. Phoebe would have cared, but Phoebe was gone. The world would close over the place where I’d been.

 
The memory calls to me. That time we went to the Gulf Islands. Aunt Sissy was staying at a cabin belonging to one of the lawyers she worked with. It was right on the ocean. She’d invited us out for a week. I remember Phoebe seeming stronger then. We took two ferries and we’d stood out on the deck with the fresh wind rippling through our hair, and our arms outstretched like we could fly. We’d watched over the railing for whales and when we saw three black fins break the smooth ocean surface, we called excitedly to Mom. Then a man standing nearby said, “Those are just porpoises. Porpoises are much smaller than whales.”

  I turned to Phoebe and she made a funny, sour face, secretly meant for the man. I thought that even if they were just porpoises, they were beautiful the way they arced above the water and slid back under, like a sleek black curl. The rest of that trip, whenever someone pointed out something beautiful, Phoebe said, “They’re just porpoises!”

  We spent most of our time on the island playing on the beach in front of the cabin, digging for clams but mostly finding empty shells that shone like rainbows inside, and building canals in the wet sand. But one hot day when Aunt Sissy was away for the day, after lunch was done, Mom said, “Let’s get out of here for a while.”

  She put a lawn chair, some towels, and a jug of water in the trunk, and the three of us drove out to a spit of soft white sand that stretched out and nearly joined a smaller island.

  “Just like a tropical paradise,” she said. “And no one else is here.”

  We could have wondered about why no one else was there on such a perfect day, but we were Interior people, as Mom said later. We didn’t know about the sea.

  She set up the lawn chair and sat reading her book, while Phoebe and I explored the beach, collecting shells that we were using to make the walls of a starfish kingdom for the dead starfish we’d found.

  Every once in a while Mom called out, “That’s far enough. Come back here where I can see you.”

  After a while, Phoebe said, “Look at Mom.” Her book had fallen onto the sand and her head had drooped so that it looked like she had no head, just a straw sunhat where it had been.

  “Come on,” Phoebe said. She took my hand and we ran out to the very edge of the sand where it touched the blue-green water, shining like a mirror. Out in the bay, a boy was putting up the sail of his boat and as he banged around, the hollow wooden sound of the hull and the flapping of his sail echoed across the water. The ocean lapped at our feet and the sand seemed to dissolve beneath our toes, melting away into seawater.

  Phoebe and I stood on the shore watching the sailboat, laughing about Mom asleep with her hat over her face. The water had reached our ankles, although we hadn’t moved. And then it washed in to our knees and we turned to see if Mom was looking, knowing she would be mad. The water out in the bay, which had been so smooth, was ruffled now and gurgling like a creek. Then it reached our hips, and Phoebe and I looked at each other and I saw the same sudden fear in her face that I felt in mine.

  We turned to run as the water rushed in, closing around our bodies. It surged to our armpits just as Mom looked up, her hat tumbled to the sand, and she lurched out of her chair, running toward us. I felt my feet lift, no longer touching the bottom. I grabbed for Mom’s outstretched hand, but where it had been, it was suddenly gone. Phoebe was gone, too, snatched up from beside me and onto Mom’s hip.

  It might have lasted seconds, it was probably only seconds, but those seconds are still so vivid. Reaching for her hand and the shock of finding nothing there. It was probably only seconds, too, before the boy on the sailboat had scooped me up by the strap of my bathing suit, the elastic dug into my skin, my stomach scraped against the wooden edge of his boat and I tumbled in among rope and rubber boots.

  The things behind the door become bigger the more I go over them again and again in my head, and I’m certain I know that that empty space where her hand should have been meant she didn’t love me. It was Phoebe she saved and Phoebe she loved. She loved Phoebe better.

  * * *

  “Who?” came the call of the owl. “Whooo?” The forest echoed with it.

  I pushed out of my sleeping bag, opened it out and draped it like a cape over my shoulders. The rain had stopped. Out on the road, I threw my head back, taking in the starry night. So crisp and clear. A snowfall of stars, bluing up the darkness. Some stars seemed to grow briefly brighter, then their light dwindled, then they pulsed back to brightness again. Some of these stars, I knew, were already dead, but their light was just reaching me now.

  There was the cloudy path of the Milky Way. Really, it was just one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. Earth was part of that galaxy, too, made up of a hundred billion stars, and next door to us, Andromeda, with billions more stars. And the universe contained hundreds of billions of galaxies.

  I leaned against the truck and felt it all spinning around me. All the dead and living stars, all the owls, ants, bears, foxes and deer, all the creatures in all these galaxies, billions of other beings. I was just one among them. No more or no less important, but just one among them.

  Strange, but looking up into the swirl of stars, I felt—found. Freedom flooded my body.

  My own path had been clear all along. I had to do the smart, sensible things it took to survive. And what I had to do was take Red Fox Road and walk north.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I woke before the sun with my head full of calculations.

  I had thought Mom might walk ten hours in a day. I would have about fourteen hours of daylight, from dawn to dusk. Allowing for rests, searching for food and making tea, and at least two hours to make my camp for the night, I thought I’d be able to walk eight hours a day. Maybe nine, if I felt strong. That seemed like a lot. It seemed unlikely. For one thing, I didn’t feel strong. I was starving. Literally starving. I worried whether I’d actually be strong enough to walk it.

  Well, it didn’t matter. I had to try. It was going to be a beautiful day, too. The sun was just coloring the sky above the woods with a warm, pink glow. I stood up to make my fire. There was something lying on the log beside it. At first I thought it was a mushroom and my thoughts went to my survival book and the caution it had about eating any unknown mushrooms in the woods. But when I got closer, I saw that it was a frog. A dead frog. Its legs hung down across the log just like the frog that had been in the fox’s mouth the day before. I swiveled my head, looking for her. Had she brought me this? Was that possible? However it ended up here, it was a gift and I wouldn’t hesitate to eat it.

  I stoked up my fire and put on my tea water to heat. How to cook the frog?

  Last fall, I’d gone to take the garbage out one Sunday afternoon and I saw across the back lane that Duncan’s garage door was open.

  “Come and look at what I’ve got,” he called.

  I was surprised to see a deer hanging from the rafters. Definitely dead.

  “I got it a few days ago. Clean shot. P-p-p-perfect.”

  “Wow,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Wanna watch me butcher it?”

  When he saw the look on my face, he said, “You could learn something.”

  Because I like learning anything about survival and because I liked hanging out with Duncan, I said, “Okay.”

  “Pull up a stool. I’m just sharpening my knife.”

  As he worked, he told me what he was doing.

  “The worst of it, I did in the field. Taking the guts out, all of that. It’s best to do it right away. And then I leave the guts for the coyotes. That’s only fair.”

  “I don’t know if I could do that.”

  “But you eat meat, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I only eat the meat I kill myself now. Otherwise I’m vegetarian.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you eat?”

  “L-l-lots of stuff.
Vegetables. Obviously. Rice. Beans. Lots of people around the world don’t eat meat. Some people say they don’t believe in hunting, but they eat meat every day. Two or three times a day. They don’t want to know where their food comes from. To me that’s hypocritical.”

  I didn’t say anything, so he added, “You know, when someone says they believe something but they do the opposite.”

  “I know what hypocritical means. I was just thinking.”

  “The worst,” Duncan said, “are the people who say they just eat chicken. They should go to a chicken barn. See what a chicken’s life is really like.”

  “You’ve been to one?”

  “Worked in one a couple summers ago. That’s what made me start to think. A wild deer has a pretty good life compared to that. And this one I got with one clean shot. Right through the lungs. Perfect.”

  “What do you do in the field?” I asked him.

  “You make a fire. That’s what I do. To warm up my hands. Then you have to cut out the anus. Do you know what that is?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I guess I know what an anus is. How old do you think I am?”

  He shrugged. “You have to get the stomach out without puncturing it. You don’t want to puncture any of the organs. That spoils the meat.”

  Laying the frog on a rock now, I took out my jackknife, took a deep breath and made the first cut.

  I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just trying not to pierce any organs. And whether cleaning a deer was anything like cleaning a frog, I had no idea. It seemed to have a lot of organs. It seemed to be almost all organs. I used my knife to scrape them out as best I could. But I realized the only real meat was on the legs, a little on the front, more on the back. I took a pointed stick and skewered the frog with it, the way you’d skewer a hotdog. Hotdogs are made of animals, too, I told myself. Duncan would say I was being hypocritical to be squeamish about it. I had just never had to see how a hotdog was made.