by Lydia Sharp
“Or maybe he doesn’t have his phone on him at all.” Hunter refers to the map again. “Dad always took the same path, because there are off-road public shelters along the way—small ones, perfect for hunters and extreme wilderness travelers like Dad. He even built one of them. He also built a cabin in the mountains north of Fairbanks, away from civilization and modern conveniences. If Kai’s trying to mimic Dad’s journey, on his way to see where he died, that means no modern technology of any kind. That was the point of it—going off the grid. He walks the whole way, he hunts for his food—”
“And he doesn’t use a phone,” I say. I get it, but it seems crazy. “Why would someone purposely isolate themselves like that?”
“Dad went up there every few years, to get back in touch with the land and reconnect with his soul, or whatever. Not for religious reasons; he just said it made him feel better. Like pushing reset on his brain. That has to be what Kai’s doing, too. Once he’s out of the city, he’ll take the same path through the wild from shelter to shelter until he reaches Dad’s last known location—his cabin. He planned a survivalist hike, and the anniversary of Dad’s death is coming up, and Kai hasn’t been handling anything well since he died. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
“What do you mean he hasn’t been handling anything well since then? He’s the most positive, optimistic, overall happy person I know.” Usually.
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Gabi. He hasn’t grieved Dad at all. He’s still the same person he was before it happened. Even at the funeral, he never shed a tear. It’s like he’s stuck in the denial phase—that’s stage one of grief. It’s basically shock. Until he gets past that and lets reality sink in, he won’t go through the other stages and heal. I’ve been through all of them already. So have Mom and my brothers and sisters who are old enough to grasp the situation. This past year has been hell for all of us. Grieving sucks. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. But it’s also normal.”
“Are you saying Kai isn’t normal?”
“No, I don’t mean that he’s mentally unstable or anything like that,” he says quickly. “He’s not going to do anything reckless, or he would have taken off without making any plans. His viewpoint is just a little messed up. I’m not sure what exactly he’s thinking or what he plans to do at Dad’s cabin, but whatever his reasoning, it isn’t realistic.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? I could have helped him. I could have prevented this.”
“You could have tried,” Hunter corrects me, offering a sympathetic look. “I’ve been trying to get through to him for months, believe me. He wouldn’t hear it. But when you came along, you guys just … clicked. I thought that would help, eventually. I thought he would open up to you—honestly, I thought maybe he already had, since he’s been kind of down recently. But I guess I misinterpreted that.”
“He started to tell me some things, but I wouldn’t say he opened up. He must have been upset about leaving, not about going.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. Now.” Hunter runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t like that he’s taken off on his own, but what if going through with this will help him understand the truth? What if he needs this?”
I stare at the map, at the hulking state of Alaska, full of wilderness and wildlife. People have died out there. Kai’s own father died out there. He hasn’t been thinking straight lately—exacerbated by grief he refuses to acknowledge. Hunter voiced some legitimate what-ifs, but I’ve got a few of my own. “What if he runs out of food? Or gets lost? We can’t just let him go. What if he never comes back?”
Hunter releases a sigh heavier than the moon. “Kai can be an idiot sometimes, but he’s also my closest brother. I’m not going to abandon him if he might be in serious danger. He’s likely using the shelters, which means he’ll be okay. Unless …”
I gesture for him to continue, ready to leap across the table and pull the words out of his head if I have to. “Unless what?”
“Unless he gets caught in the storm tomorrow, between shelters. There’s several miles between each of them. He isn’t completely new to being a survivalist, but he isn’t an expert like my dad was, either. If he can’t stay warm, he’s toast.”
The storm. I hadn’t given it a second thought until now. I open the weather app on my phone, and for a second, I can’t catch a breath. Then, “It’s gotten worse since the forecast this morning. They’re predicting twenty-four inches of snow by this time tomorrow.” I flash the face of my phone toward Hunter and he mutters a curse. That does it. Kai might not even know this storm is on the way. “We need to find him.”
I meet Hunter’s gaze, silently daring him to argue one point further on this. There’s no sunshine in his eyes like in Kai’s, just two dark pools. He says nothing, which is better than telling me I’m wrong, but still no help.
“What do we do? Talk to me, Hunter. Should we tell your mom?”
“No. She’s got enough to worry about right now. Let’s go find him first, try to talk some sense into him. Maybe he’ll listen to you. If he doesn’t, then we call the police and, I don’t know, get him taken in for truancy or running away from home.”
Okay. Am I really going to do this, willingly go farther north and possibly face an oncoming snowstorm? Yes. For Kai, I will. And I won’t be alone; I have Hunter with me. He knows how to navigate this area. He knows which path to take. Except: “Kai’s got a two-day head start. How can we catch up to him before the storm hits?”
Hunter’s mouth quirks up over the edge of his coffee mug. “We don’t have to go by foot just because he is.”
“We should be back before tonight, before the snow gets bad.” Hunter takes a sip from the thermos of coffee we’re sharing, sets it into the Outback’s cup holder between us, and then tosses a cell phone at me. “It’s Kai’s,” he says. “The battery was chirping when I got home last night. Found it in his sock drawer and recharged it. Once we catch up to him, he’s not going anywhere ever again without it, even if I have to surgically implant the thing into his arm.”
I find the stored pictures in his phone and a selfie of Kai and me, taken in August, appears in the line-up. Bright blue sky. Bright white smiles. He looks happy. We look happy. My feelings for him have been genuine from the start. But I wonder, now, how much of his happiness was real and how much was just avoidance of darker emotions. Was my moving in next door to him, and my needing someone to remind me of the good things in life, a convenient distraction for him to put off facing reality? If I’d met him before his dad died, would he even be interested in me?
Hunter said Kai is easily distracted—was I simply another distraction before the next one stole his attention?
The sun hasn’t quite risen yet; it’s just starting to smear orange blush across the horizon. Hunter suggested last night that getting a few hours of sleep before heading out this morning would be safer than venturing into the dark. We’re able to travel much faster than Kai, so I agreed, but then I barely slept at all. How could I, when Kai is out in the cold, alone, planning who knows what?
This is the third time in less than a day that I’ve been in a car with Hunter, the closest I’ve ever been to him, the most words we’ve ever exchanged. It’s awkward but also not. We know each other, but we’re still strangers.
“If we’re gone for only a day, that’s fine,” I say. “My dad won’t even notice.” Today is Sunday, his only full day off. He usually spends Sundays in bed. Not really sleeping, but not really awake, either. “What about your mom and your aunt? Did they ask where you’re going?”
“I said I was going to check on Kai.”
“And they didn’t ask where he is, or think it’s weird that he’s gone?”
“Everything is weird with our family right now. We’re still trying to figure out how our life works without Dad in it. Mom thinks Kai went to stay with a friend to get away from the stress of home, which he’s done before, and Aunt Claire believes her because she doesn’
t have a reason not to. Even before Dad died, Kai just did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, never asked for permission. Once he sets his mind to something, it’s as good as done. Case in point …” He gestures to the road ahead. “And it’s not always in his best interest.”
“Like the jumping-in-the-freezing-lake-naked incident of two weeks ago.”
A smile plays on his lips. “Did they talk you into doing it, too?”
“No. That’s the sort of experience you come out of with fewer brain cells than you had before you went in.” Maybe that’s what’s going on with Kai. His brain is malfunctioning after too many dips in the frigid lake.
I’m trying really hard not to be mad at him for this and to give him the benefit of the doubt. He gave me this necklace— made one for me, and an identical one for him—for a reason. But what else am I going to find out about my boyfriend through his brother?
Well, no more. From now on, I’m going to listen to what Kai actually says, not what I think he means. I saw enough evidence from my parents’ relationship to know communication either builds you up or breaks you down, pulls you together or pushes you apart. I thought Kai and I were doing okay in that area. Clearly, I was wrong. We can do better.
Outside my window, the humble cityscape scuttles by. The part of Anchorage we live in is more suburb than big city. There isn’t much to see besides houses, junkyards, and evergreens. As Hunter shifts lanes to pass a car, a memory from several years ago springs to mind, with my mother’s voice speaking in the heavy Puerto Rican accent she still has even though she’s lived in the U.S. since she was twelve. The voice I used to wish was mine so I could be just like her, back when Sundays used to be special. That was our family day. We did nothing but spend time together. And I don’t know when exactly, but at some point we stopped. Because Mom got too busy? I don’t remember. I was too young. But I do remember one of those Sundays we took a long drive out to San Diego to visit my abuelita on Dad’s side, and that was when Mom made up the license plate rhyme game.
I once met a man from Nevada,
Who only would say yadda yadda.
She always had me and Dad laughing with her silly rhymes made up on the spot, just based on the state of the license plate of the cars we passed. It was fun. She was fun.
Then she changed, and that changed everything.
My eyelids are gritty bags of wet sand. Stress and lack of sleep have caught up to me. My mother’s voice fades with the memory as I close my eyes and let the motion of the car tires against pavement rock me to sleep.
Hunter suddenly swerves a hard right and then an immediate left, tires squealing. My head slams the window and a rainbow of fireworks explodes behind my eyes. My palms instinctively rush in front of me, bracing for impact. It takes another second for me to realize we’re still moving and we didn’t hit anything. Nothing outside the car, anyway.
“That was close. Are you okay?” Hunter’s voice is breathy, like he’s been running. “Did you hit your head?”
“Yes, but I’m okay.” I will my heart rate to drop below freak-out level and peer out the windshield. The road is clear. It’s not even icy. A few snowflakes flutter in the air, but not enough to cause hazardous road conditions. Hunter’s gaze keeps flicking to the rearview mirror.
“I’m okay,” I repeat. “But what …” I turn to look out the back window, and the rest of the question dies on my lips. Something’s standing in the middle of the road. A very large, very furry brown something that doesn’t seem to care we put ourselves in danger to keep it alive.
“What is that behind us?”
“Moose.”
No, that couldn’t have been a regular moose. It was in the middle of the freaking road. It was a moose playing chicken. I’ve seen moose in people’s backyards here before, lazily eating their gardens, but never in the streets with a death wish.
“Sorry,” Hunter says. “There was a curve in the road and I didn’t see the moose until it was right there. Are you sure you’re okay? You’ve got a red mark on your forehead.”
I didn’t notice it before, but now that my adrenaline is fading, every heartbeat pulses a fresh wave of pain. I gently touch my fingertips to my forehead and feel a knot. “It’s swelling.”
Hunter pulls the car over. “There’s a first aid kit in the back.”
Maybe I can play the sympathy card when I see Kai. See what I went through to get to you? Now get your head together before I give you a matching lump.
Hunter hands me a bottle of water and some ibuprofen, then shakes up an emergency ice pack. “Hold this against your forehead. I’ll drive as carefully as I can, but let me know if you start to feel nauseous, okay?”
“Yeah-kay.” My eyelids drift closed and he bats my shoulder. “What are you—”
“Don’t sleep.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know if you have a concussion, and not to be creepy but I need to watch you for symptoms. If you fall asleep before I know for sure, it might not really be sleep. It could be unconsciousness.”
More good news. “Okay, I’ll try to stay awake.”
“If you don’t, I’m gonna have to shake you. Only for the next hour, though, until I know for sure you’re okay.”
“Keep me awake for the next hour, then; I can’t do it on my own. I’m exhausted. Talk to me. Tell me about your wild and exciting life growing up in Alaska.”
He fires up the engine and eases back onto the road. “There isn’t anything wild and exciting to tell. That moose encounter was the most adventure I’ve ever had.”
I don’t believe that for a second. “You said you used to go hunting. Tell me about that.”
He twists his mouth and fiddles with the defrost setting. “I’m not much of a talker.”
“Then sing.”
“I’m even less of a singer,” he says dryly.
“How much less?”
“Below zero. Negative infinity.”
Me, too. “Then let’s play a game. When I was little and we had to sit in the car for a long time, like, if we got stuck in traffic, my mom would play this word game with me …”
That was before she was the Marietta Cruz, before she became a household name and had an affair. She was just an actress with a dream of hitting it big, married to the man of her dreams, who made enough money as a lawyer to support whatever big dreams she had. And beneath that, she was just my mom. Supermom. Everything I wanted to be when I grew up.
At my silence, Hunter presses. “What was the game?”
“Never mind. It was childish.” My forehead aches as it slowly goes numb. “Let’s do something else.”
But now that Mom is in my head, I can’t get her out. Something else she used to say echoes between the throbbing beats of my pulse, something much more recent. When reporters ask you a question you don’t want to answer, or aren’t allowed to answer, deflect. Throw the ball into their court. Get them talking about themselves instead of you.
I don’t have the energy to talk, and Hunter doesn’t want to, which is his usual, but maybe I can get him to talk anyway, to pass the time and keep me awake. I just have to bring up a topic he’s interested in.
So, singing is out. What else do I know about Hunter? Not much. Except: “How did you know that about concussions?”
It’s subtle, but I catch it, even as he continues staring ahead at the road. A soft glint in his eye, a tiny sparkle of passion— nowhere near the strength of what I see in Kai when he talks about Alaska, but it’s there. It’s something. He can give it life if he chooses.
And he does.
Hunter launches into a story about how one of his sisters took a nasty dive off her bike one day and face-planted on the sidewalk. He was twelve and she was three. His parents took her to the hospital, of course, and that was the first time he’d heard the word concussion. It scared him because he didn’t know what it was, or how she “caught” it by falling off her bike, just that it might kill her. So he looked it up online, and then he got su
cked into the unending black hole of internet medical advice. It didn’t take long for him to realize that a lot of it conflicted, and it equally frustrated and fascinated him. Not everyone can be right. Not everyone is wrong, either. He decided he was going to become a doctor, so he would know the difference between truth and BS. Now he’s six months away from high school graduation and has already started earning credits toward his pre-med degree. It’s a lot of schoolwork, on top of everything else he has to take care of at home. “But,” he concludes, “nothing worth having comes easy.”
So that’s why he’s so quiet and has no social life. It isn’t that he’s shy, or he doesn’t like talking to me, or he doesn’t want to go out with friends; he’s just busy and mentally exhausted. He’s given it all up to pursue something “worth having.” And isn’t that the way it is with anything we strongly desire? We believe it is more important than whatever we have to sacrifice.
“Nothing worth having comes easy,” I repeat, thinking of Kai and me and this trip. “I like the sound of that.”
After a sprint on the highway, we divert onto the back roads. The path their dad took was meant to put distance between him and civilization. Hunter says Kai likely left the roads outside the city. The shelters are off-road, too, which means soon we’ll have to abandon the car to reach him. I mean Hunter will have to abandon the car to reach him. I’ll stay in the nice, warm car and wait, thank you very much.
I don’t know where we are specifically—somewhere in the plains north of Anchorage, mountains lining the horizons on either side. It all looks the same. Same mountains, same dilapidated buildings, same trees. Same snow fluttering everywhere but not accumulating. Yet. The piercing headache has dulled to an annoying throb. My brain has given up trying to force me to sleep and remembers that I skipped breakfast. We’ve been on the road for two hours. “I’m hungry.”