It became apparent very quickly that twelve miles would not be easy at all. The trail was narrow and winding and, at times, all but invisible. Winter had brought down a number of huge trees across the path that they had to scramble over or detour around, and in some places there was still a crust of icy snow on the ground that made walking treacherous. After an hour it was clear they would never make it to Grace Lake before sundown. Robert said as much to Terri, and she took the map out.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. But look, there’s another campsite closer in. Logging Lake.”
“I think the sign at the trailhead said it’s closed.”
“What does that even mean out here—no continental breakfast? We can just sleep there and go to Grace Lake in the morning. No one will know.”
With an end in sight, they picked up their pace. Terri began singing at the top of her voice, which destroyed the peacefulness of the walk but which Robert found lifted his spirits. This would be fun after all.
When they reached the spot where the trail split toward the camp, however, there was a large sign blocking the path: “Wolf Area. A family of gray wolves has made its home at Logging Lake. To encourage this species to flourish, and for the safety of our hikers, Logging Lake Campground is closed until further notice.”
“Well, shit,” said Robert. “I guess we’re going to Grace Lake after all.”
“Hmm,” said Terri. She walked around the sign, looking at it closely as though it required interpretation. “I mean, does that make sense? Wouldn’t it make more sense to sleep here?”
“No,” said Robert. “Because wolves live here.”
“We can make a fire to keep them away. I’d much rather do that than be walking around wolf country in the middle of the night in the pitch-dark. We’ll never see them coming.”
“But it’s their territory,” Robert said.
Terri started walking toward the campground.
“Terri, come on.”
“It’ll be fine. We need to gather firewood before it gets dark.”
* * *
—
Watching Terri light the fire was the high point of Robert’s evening. She got a blaze going quickly, and for a moment he thought he had misjudged her. The firelight turned her hair bronze and threw golden flickers across her face that made her look like some kind of mysterious woodland spirit, and the sun set over the lake in a burst of pink and orange. But then the light started fading, and Terri was cursing as the pot of water she’d propped in the flames tipped over and spilled for the third time. Finally, they ended up eating lukewarm mush by the embers of the dying fire and crawling into the tent.
Robert had pictured this moment repeatedly in the days since Terri had proposed the trip. He had imagined he would be decisive and bold, drag the sleeping bags out of the tent, peel off those layers of hiking clothes in a way that would make her crazy with anticipation, make love in the chilly air under a sky full of stars. But now he had no interest in doing any of those things. It was more than chilly, it was downright cold, and his muscles were so stiff it felt like a tremendous effort even to remove his boots and strip down to his long underwear. Say Yes to Everything, he told himself, but what he wanted to say yes to was eight hours of sleep. In the profound darkness that settled over the tent Terri was all but invisible, but he could hear her soft, even breathing filling the space between them. What was she thinking? Was she waiting for him to do something? Come on, he told himself. Get going.
It was then that the wolves began to howl. They sounded uncomfortably close, perhaps only as far as the edge of the lake. Terri reached out in the darkness and grabbed his hand.
“What makes them sing like that?”
Hunger, Robert thought. They’re ready for a killing spree. But he chided himself for being so pessimistic. No wonder Linda hated him; he couldn’t enjoy anything. Terri wasn’t worried about being eaten by wolves. Terri was living in the moment.
“Can I tell you something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while now?” Terri said.
“Sure.”
“The reason I might seem a little…shy sometimes…is because my last relationship was abusive.”
Shy? Robert thought, but he said, “Oh, God. I’m so sorry. Your boyfriend hit you?”
“Everyone says that, like that’s the only kind of abuse. He never laid a hand on me. I mean spiritually abusive. Karmically. Anyway, he wasn’t my boyfriend.”
Robert waited but she did not elaborate. “Wow,” he said. This didn’t seem like an adequate response, but it also felt inappropriate to tell someone who had just confessed to having been abused that they were full of shit. And who knew, maybe he was the one who was full of shit. Maybe he was spiritually abusive, too, and Linda was in bed with some guy right now telling him about all the years of spiritual abuse she had endured at Robert’s hands. The thought made him feel sick, and he leaned in and kissed Terri. “I’m sorry that happened to you,” he said.
“It has been the worst year up till now,” she said. “The worst.”
“Yeah,” Robert said. The sound of the wolves was pushing him toward a state of profound anxiety, making it hard to think.
“I knew you would understand. You know what it’s like to have someone destroy your life.”
Robert leaned back from her. He knew he had never told Terri about Linda. He never discussed Linda with anyone anymore, even mutual friends of theirs. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry. That’s all over. This is the place where things start to get better.” The wolves changed their pitch and Terri gripped his fingers even tighter, so tight it started to hurt. Robert pried his hand loose and put his arm around her.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said, though his voice sounded unconvincing even to him.
She laughed softly, more awe than amusement. “I’m not afraid. I think it’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.” She hummed a clear note, skimming up and down the scale until she landed in harmony with the wolves. Still holding his hand, she lay down, and Robert did the same. “Close your eyes. You can hear them even better.”
Robert did as he was told. The weird music of Terri and the wolves filled the tent and knit itself into an endless, tuneless melody. He could not say how long it was before he fell asleep.
* * *
—
In the morning he woke early. Terri was not in the tent. Robert wriggled into his clothes and crawled outside.
A half-empty water bottle sat beside the remains of the fire. Robert continued down the trail to the outhouse, but once he finished taking a piss and rubbing his face with cold water from the lake it occurred to him that he should have passed Terri somewhere on the path. He went back to the campsite and called for her, but heard nothing. He decided to start getting ready for the day and returned to the tent, where he noticed that Terri’s boots were still sitting by the door, her heavy wool socks balled up and stuffed inside.
For the first time he stopped and took stock of his surroundings. Both backpacks leaned against a rock beside the fire. He had a clear line of sight all the way down to the edge of Logging Lake and could not see any movement. He shouted Terri’s name several times, but got no response.
A crawling, panicky tremble crept into his body. Where was Terri? She couldn’t have gone far without boots. Unless she had other shoes, but this seemed unlikely. Or unless the wolves…but surely he would have heard something. Wouldn’t he? He scanned the ground around the tent, looking for signs of a struggle. Right, like you’re some master tracker. The ground was hard and gritty, and for all he knew you could drag an elephant across it with a backhoe and not leave any trace.
The thing to do was to be logical. Panicking was an Old Bob kind of thing to do. New Robert could handle this. Maybe she had just decided to go on a little morning walk and hadn’t wanted to wake him. Maybe she liked to walk barefoot. Over
sticks, in the snow. Call her phone, he thought, but when he fished his phone from his pack and tried to turn it on he found the battery had died during the night.
Surely he had to wait for her for at least a little while before he went for help. How ridiculous would he feel flagging down a ranger on the side of the road, only to come back and find Terri warming her toes by the fire? But three hours later there was still no sign of her. He had spent the time alternately calling for her, pacing the campground, and sitting in worried silence.
Now was the time to do something decisive. If he left now, he could reach the main road and hopefully flag down a car before dark. But why call in the rangers when he hadn’t even tried to find Terri? That was a mistake, depending on someone else to take charge. For all he knew, she had gone a little ways down the path and twisted her ankle and was just hoping he found her. He had to take a look.
Reenergized, he grabbed a water bottle and set off down a trail that curved along the edge of the lake, intermittently calling for Terri and listening for a response. He could already imagine her weakened voice calling back to him, see himself lifting her from whatever patch of vegetation she had collapsed on and carrying her back to the campground. The trail was flat and easy, and he breathed deeply and nodded to himself. He could do this. He would find her.
But the lake was huge, and by the time he reached the far side, thick clouds were gathering on the horizon, cutting short the daylight he’d been counting on. In the sudden pall he picked up his pace, moving urgently back toward camp, his boldness draining away with the sunshine. Every chipmunk rustling through the bushes caused him a momentary panic as he froze in anticipation of a wolf springing onto the path. He was more frightened than he wanted to admit, and worst of all, he couldn’t say what scared him most—the gathering darkness, Terri’s disappearance, or being completely out of his depth. What if he got lost trying to get back to the campsite? What if he got struck by lightning? What was wrong with Terri to plan a trip like this to begin with?
* * *
—
Just as he reached the campground, it began to rain. First a few scattered drops, but almost immediately violent sheets of water. The tent was hunkered like a huge orange animal just beyond the fire ring, and he ran toward it, slipping in the newly formed mud. Once inside he zipped the doors shut and peeled off his wet clothes. His long underwear was still mostly dry, and he shoved the pile of sopping fleece into one corner and pulled both sleeping bags around him. As he did, he saw something fall to the floor of the tent: Terri’s phone, gleaming a dull blue in the dim interior. He flipped it open, only to find that there was no signal. It was an ancient model, without games or photos or any of the other distractions he would have found on his own phone, but still, something about that small, concrete piece of civilization consoled him, and he cradled the phone against his chest, letting the light from the screen illuminate the cave of the tent.
* * *
—
Robert did not sleep that night, and with the first sunlight he headed out immediately. He abandoned the tent and all but a few supplies, ran practically the whole way back to the road, farther than he’d known he could run. The trucker who picked him up looked at him with concern but said nothing, just dropped him off at the road that led to the ranger station. As Robert walked the final mile toward the station, he found himself moving more and more slowly. The adrenaline of panic had worn off, and now he had to think about what came next. There would be alarm, suspicion, dozens of questions he was ill-prepared to answer. Just thinking about the impending drama made him nauseated, and he wished desperately for the comfort of something familiar here in all this wilderness.
He took Terri’s phone from his pocket. One tiny little nub of a bar showed at the bottom of the reception scale. He dialed Linda’s number and held his breath. She answered on the third ring.
“Lin,” he said. “It’s me. It’s Bob.”
* * *
—
The aftermath was both better and worse than he’d feared. The rangers went into action immediately, calling in a search team and notifying the police, and Bob told the same story again and again to various people. But after that initial flurry of activity, things slowed down. The search team—rangers, police, rescue volunteers, bloodhounds—found neither a living Terri nor a body. No one reported seeing her on the road back to the main entrance, or anywhere else in the park or surrounding towns. Two days later, a late-May snowstorm rolled through, which made searching difficult and drastically reduced any chance that Terri would be found alive. An expanded net of special investigators asked Bob the same questions again, but his answers never changed and they seemed to believe him. The rangers hypothesized that Terri had gone off-trail, which meant she could have ended up almost anywhere. Her remains might turn up months or years later, discovered by some other unfortunate hiker who chose the same path.
* * *
—
When Bob arrived back at his apartment in Seattle—exhausted from a week of restless nights and police interrogation—Linda was outside waiting for him. He could only guess that she had learned his return date from one of the many articles that had been written in the Montana papers about Terri’s disappearance and his role as a suspect. The same articles reported that the police had not been able to find anyone to provide information about Terri—no family or friends, no ex-boyfriend, no employer, only a few neighbors who said she had been quiet and withdrawn, timid to the point of vanishing.
Bob had not seen Linda in almost a year; she had grown her hair out and dyed it a rich auburn, and he would have walked right past without recognizing her if she hadn’t jumped up from where she leaned against her car and grabbed his hand. She looked at him uncertainly for a moment before pulling him into a tight hug, saying, “My God, I can’t imagine.”
Bob knew he ought to tell Linda to go to hell; that it was too late and he didn’t want anything to do with her; that calling her had been a moment of weakness. But the truth was he wanted nothing more than to walk to the door of what had been their apartment, to which she probably still had the damn key, for God’s sake, and let her take care of everything.
* * *
—
They got married the following summer, a small ceremony with their parents and siblings and a handful of friends. “Of course, none of us were fooled by this whole ‘we’re calling it quits’ thing that happened a couple of years ago,” Linda’s sister crowed during her toast, and while the rest of the guests laughed and Linda clasped Bob’s hand, he looked down at his plate. He had certainly been fooled. He wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t still being fooled, in some fashion he had just failed to identify.
In some ways, their renewed life together was everything he’d missed during the long months of Linda’s absence: shared cooking and complaining about work and watching movies in bed at night. There were also some changes. They bought a cat, and new furniture; they spent more time out at plays and restaurants. But these shifts seemed to him superficial, and while Linda never complained anymore about being stagnated, Bob couldn’t help but feel that her renewed attraction to him was based largely on Terri’s disappearance. His connection to the bizarre tragedy gave him all the things she’d complained he lacked: an air of adventure, of mystery and possibility. He had occasional nightmares about Terri in which she emerged from Logging Lake, naked and muddy, her arms outstretched to embrace him, and others in which he came around a bend in the trail and found her crouched over a deer carcass, feeding from the ribs and grinning up at him with bloody teeth. When he woke from these dreams, breathing hard, every muscle in his body tense, Linda would inevitably give him a look of such tenderness that he wanted to scream.
If he and Terri had simply gone on their trip and come back home, Bob doubted he and Linda would ever have spoken again. The idea made him uncomfortable when he thought about it too much, which ensured that h
e never described to Linda that last night of the hiking trip, when he sat in the tent with Terri’s phone in his hand, waiting for morning. Not long after the rain stopped, he had heard the wolves again, though farther away this time. Still, their calls pierced the thin walls of the tent, every wavering nuance audible, until the air seemed to thicken into tangible waves. Alone, shivering, clutching his knees against his chest, he heard what Terri had heard the night before—the sound was beautiful. Every hair on his body was lifted with the electricity of the wolves’ voices, and he swore he could smell every item in the tent, from his wet socks to the tube of ChapStick in his pants pocket. And at the same time that he was saturated with the song’s grandeur, he wanted it to stop.
He unzipped the front door of the tent and looked out. It was three in the morning, and he could see almost nothing. The dark glistening of the lake felt as ominous as the undulating edge of a black hole, and in that moment he felt sure in his bones of one thing: Terri was dead, or at least she was never coming back. The world outside the tent was exactly what she had come here looking for, a place that transcended the lives they had both left behind in Seattle, and it had somehow consumed her. He felt this was exactly what Terri would have wanted, but it was not anything he could bring himself to desire, even in its safer forms. If he were to set foot outside, he would instantly be frightened, chilly, bothered by the grit in his toes and the sticky film of sweat on his skin. The thought struck him with a sharp bitterness that quickly faded to acceptance. He didn’t need a place like this. He could be happy without it—happier, really. If he died without ever seeing Paris he would not regret it for a moment, something Old Bob had known instinctively.
A knock on the doorframe brought him out of the memory. Linda was standing there, looking at him, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed with one sock in his hand and the other still on his left foot.
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