by Beth Kephart
“We were best friends,” my uncle Davy would say.
They were.
Everything changes.
My slice of sky has brightened. The day is on. There will be the sponge bath soon, my breakfast on a tray, the questions: “How are you?” “Are you . . . ?” “Do you . . . ?”
After that I will hear you coming.
The slam of the door.
The men on the walk.
The rub of the legs of your jeans.
The sound of your shoes on the stairs.
The first flight of stairs and then the second, and by then the blue moon will have drifted so far past us and you will be the height I didn’t expect, the prettiness, the way you sit, the sadness in you, because there is sadness in you, because you know just what you did.
Victim impact.
You will sit in that chair right there and I will talk and I will wonder if I will ever leave this place again.
28
WHERE WAS I?
I was calling for Matias.
I was calling.
He didn’t answer.
“Terror” is a shorter word than “terrified.” But “terror” feels more true.
29
STANDING UP ON THAT ROCK, I saw nothing but trees and path and a stripe of sun and that stream. I hurried down the stony indents and circled the rock—around and around and it was hard to breathe, hard to know what to do, and the third time around I saw a pair of orange newts rushing out from beneath the shade.
Two orange newts, like roadside signs, rushing over the leaves, across the twigs, into the shadows, toward the old logging path, and there, ahead of them, I saw it. Matias’s cane. Just one of them. Pointing farther east into the woods, away from the path, where the poison vines wrapped the trunks of trees like snakes.
I ran as fast as I could, the low limbs going thwack against my shins, the emergency numbers in The Art of Keppy forgotten for the minute and probably, already, useless, but I didn’t know that yet, I didn’t know anything except I was calling for Matias and Matias wouldn’t answer and my heart was going bang.
The bugs were thick as paste. I half closed my eyes. It was harder and harder to breathe. And now the newts were gone and the squirrels above were going limb to limb in a frantic scurry like they knew, like they were trying to tell me something. I reached Matias’s cane, just that one single cane, and picked it up by its curve, and that curve was warm, and the warmth was wet.
“Matias?”
He was somewhere out there. Somewhere near. He couldn’t have walked that far that fast, and beneath the fallen twigs and the leaves were stones, cobbled granite, like walking a bony spine. Hard enough for me, too hard for Matias, and you can’t know how it felt, how it is in the moment when you know something’s very bad but you don’t know what the bad is, you cannot name it, and you’re spinning, and you need to be brave, you are brave, you try to remember your courage.
The way ahead was rocky. The width between the trees was running narrower and narrower, until any path forward would have to be crissed and crossed, in and out—no one straight pass, just the raw shape of the elastic earth, the way it had been intended and then dented by glaciers, seeds, and time.
“Choose,” my mother had said.
Choose.
The bugs were paste. I closed my eyes. I could see Matias’s face inside my mind. His eyes so bright. His forehead like a storage chest. Think, I thought, what he’d have thought. Where he’d have gone, where he was running to or from.
Running? Not with that body, still recovering fom surgery. Not with our pact: Meet me at the rock.
The pupusa pouch was on the rock. The flipped-up silver stool. The spilled paint but not the limelight of sun, because the morning had moved on, the sun was higher beyond the sky of trees. I could still have turned west. Found the newts, found the big whale rock, taken that pouch, that stool, and hiked not far up to the planked bridge, used my emergency numbers, my straight thinking, Keppy. I could have crossed the stream and run for help to the white house, but every second counted, and Matias was out there, and he needed me now; if I knew anything, that is what I knew. Somewhere east, north, or south of where I was, he was, and except for the birds and the squirrels and the fall of water, everything was silent.
30
THAT KIND OF SILENT.
Which is louder than a scream.
31
THE TREE LIMBS WERE LOW, the ground was twisted, the direction was running in circles. If you aren’t walking by a stream you already know or on a path you already love, it’s easy to lose whatever smarts you have in the woods, biology or no biology, courage or not. I was fighting the paste of bugs and there was a hint of smoke and I should have stopped to wonder about that smoke, to ask myself: What is this smoke, where does it come from?
I didn’t.
I didn’t wonder until a long time after. Until it was much too late. Matias, I’m sorry.
I raised Matias’s cane like a machete. I thought of Tiburcio, touch of the tip. I thought of how I’d protect myself if something happened, if I was in danger. Just a touch of the tip. If.
Meanwhile:
The bad men had left their car.
They were on foot.
They needed ransom.
But you know that.
You helped them.
32
THERE’S EVERYTHING I DIDN’T KNOW then and everything that I’ve learned since, and then there’s what I remember, which goes from vivid to confused to a dream no one should have.
You’re asking. You’re waiting. You’re sitting there with your chin in your hands, your body leaning forward, the core of the apple you just ate leaving a stain on your jeans, and what I remember next is this:
A fox showed up with a raven in its mouth. A red fox with two wings drooping like a fat mustache. You ate your apple straight to the seeds and stem, and now I’m watching the sky through the glass to help me remember and what I see is the fox.
The eyes of the fox were ovals, gold in the sun. The raven’s coat was purple black. “Are you staying or going?” I asked that fox. “Have you seen Matias?” I stood there asking. I stood there pleading, and the fox began to run, like it had seen or it did know, and I followed it up and down, the tip of that tail, the sound of it vanishing off, and now there were less trees and more bushes—rhododendron groves—and it was dark inside the green, and I had to cane the leafy limbs off, had to thwack and thwack, but I couldn’t keep up, and after a while there was no more fox, no more purple-black bird hanging down like a mustache.
Every second counted. I’d left the whale of the rock and the stream I didn’t know how far back, and the fox was gone, the smell of smoke was gone. I heard a riot in the underbrush and thwacked. I heard nothing else except me walking forward now, the cane thwacking the bushes to one side, thwack and thwack, my feet barely keeping up, my heart pounding, and it was so dark in there, so full of snag and itch, and I kept going until at last I heard the sound of water falling.
The bushes thinned.
The trees rose tall.
I walked.
“Matias?” Calling his name still, looking for a sign still, my sneakers rubbing at my ankle bones, and I stopped. The water was falling from the rocks like two white teeth biting into a dark-green pond. A cool spray skimmed off the water as it dropped.
“Matias?”
I’d gone way too far, and I was lost.
33
BY MY FEET, AT THE edge of the pond, a troop of ants were carrying one slight twig on their backs. The ants marched in a single-purpose file, headed to I don’t know what, maybe a hole in the ground, and it made me so sad, because all those ants had a plan and I had no plan and maybe, I thought, Matias had, in all this time, gone back to our rock. Maybe Matias was out there somewhere calling for me, worrying for me, needing the cane I had stolen from the ground.
“Matias?”
You know how big six million acres of park is, and how every tall tree can look th
e same, and every twitchy rhododendron and every criss and cross and every rock could be the tree, the bush, the cross, the rock, you walked past ten minutes before. You know how hard it is to keep a coolheaded count of the little hills and dips and the bugged-out bushes that you push through because a tree fell down over a path. I needed a major assist. I needed Uncle Davy and Matias’s parents and a park ranger or three and a cop. I needed Matias, needed to know he was safe, needed to see him, needed a phone if I was going to make use of my just-remembered emergency numbers.
“Matias?!”
Too many acres and not enough signs, unless you count the newts and, after that, the fox.
I couldn’t think of where my friend would be.
I couldn’t think of why he’d gone.
“Ready for anything,” I had said to Mom.
But that was a lie, and I’m so sorry.
I had to get back to the old schoolhouse, to Uncle Davy. I had to believe that he’d be driving up—soon?—in the ’69 Dodge Dart.
That he would save us.
34
Panic.—In such predicament as this, a man is really in serious peril. The danger is not from the wilderness. . . . The man’s danger is from himself.
35
KEPPY. IN MY PACK. I remembered and unzipped and pulled it out, brushed away my tears, plunked on a log, fingered past the useless bookmark, the photo of my uncle and my mother, young and happy, and read.
“The man’s danger is from himself.”
The girl’s danger too, Keppy.
I skimmed the parts where Keppy was lost and couldn’t tell north from south. The part where a first-class woodsman got mixed up in his own home hunting ground. The part where the man got lost in a patch of cane. I read to get to the point.
WHAT TO DO.—No matter where, or in what circumstances, you may be, the moment you realize that you have lost your bearings, there is just one thing for you to do: STOP! Then sit down.
I was ahead of him on that, sitting there on a mossy log, but I could do what he said next—take the tip of Matias’s cane and draw a sign in the soft ground, mark my spot, my SOS to myself or to anyone else. Then I could take the tip of the cane and draw the path that I’d just walked, if I could remember how I’d walked. Sit very still, Keppy said. Remember how you’ve come.
Well. And. Maybe I couldn’t do that?
How long have you been gone?
I tried to ask myself that.
What did you see that you’d notice again?
A fox, I thought. With a bird like a mustache.
What else? If you can’t remember (Keppy said, I read), you have one choice.
Work yourself downstream until, at last, you find a road.
Downstream, I thought. Down. Stream.
There were two teeth of water falling and a dark-green pond. There was a trickle like a tear headed away from the pond, past my Keens and underneath that log and down over moss and rocks and tree roots. I turned and watched the trickle go and, thin as it was, for as far as I could see, it did not stop; it was a lasting silver thread.
Work yourself downstream, Keppy said.
I zippered him back into my backpack. I went as fast as I knew how, as I could go on my own—more afraid and bruised with thwack than I had ever been.
36
YOU SAW IT, YOU SAY. You saw the blue moon, up there in the sky, free.
You saw it and you thought of me, lying here, beneath my rectangle of sky.
You saw it and you thought of how it might be if I’d been carried out of this room and down the stairs and out onto the lawn and been sat with. If I’d been laid out on the grass and watched the big moon rise and then fall through every blink of night. If I’d seen how maybe the moon wasn’t truly blue, but rare, if some of my story weren’t like the moon’s story—not truly blue, but rare.
My story is blue, wild blue.
And it is rare.
You thought of me.
You thought me free.
It’s coming close to noon. I can read the hour on the clock. I can read the look in your eyes. I can tell that this is hurting you, but it hurts me more, I promise.
* * *
But.
Tell me more about the blue moon?
Because I can’t tell you any more of this story than I just have, not right now, and besides, the apple seeds on your jeans are crying.
37
MY FATHER WAS A COMPLICATED man. My father was someone whose nose looked like mine and whose ears bent like mine, and who could be so funny, he could be hysterical, he could make you laugh if you weren’t crying. He could find you just the right thing and give it at just the right time—like green gumdrops, for example, or blue sneakers, or an Almost skateboard. He could give you a lot and then he could take it away, and I stopped knowing how to trust him.
A story about my father?
Well. Yes. Sure. There are stories about my father. You want one? Here’s one. Very specific.
I was younger than now. My father had a new job, another new job—he was always losing jobs. This job, though, was going to be it; this job was going to last. He’d been invited to a convention. He took me and my mom, who was wearing her hair as a platinum blonde. “This is my wife,” my father said in the hotel halls when he was introducing her. “My wife,” as if all she’d ever done was marry him, as if she didn’t have a proper name, and I wanted her to mind, but she wouldn’t. She wanted to believe in this fresh start. She thought that was her job.
If I tell you about my dad, I have to tell you about my mom.
There were ten hotel stories, three wings, and one hotel pool in the center of it all. On the first morning of us being there, my father took me to the pool to swim. Woke me up, handed me my suit, told me I was coming. I didn’t want to. We walked down the red halls in our towels and suits, went through the lobby and out the pool door, and there was nobody but us out there, with the sun just coming up and the water the temperature of melting ice cubes. Nobody else. Who would?
I sat by the edge of the pool wearing the towel like a cape, my dipped-in toes turning blue. He sat on one of those armchair rafts with the cup of coffee he’d made in the hotel room and the paper they’d slipped under the door and the gold chain he liked to wear over the tan he always worked on.
“Come on, Lizzie,” he said. “Get in.”
“Too cold,” I told him.
“Don’t be ungracious.”
“I can’t,” I said. “It’s too cold.”
But my dad, who was more beautiful than maybe I’ve said, my dad, who could give and take away, had to be the star of this show. He wanted me to thank him for this thing I didn’t want; I wanted to be asleep in bed. “All this trouble,” he said, “that I take to find this job, to bring you here, to put you and your mother up at this convention, and you’re talking about temperature. Be a little brave, Lizzie. Be a little appreciative. Get on in the pool.”
I looked up at all those hotel windows circling the pool. I looked for Mom, but I didn’t see her. I didn’t know what choice I had, seven years old, daughter of a dad who demanded “appreciative.” It was a new job, a fresh start. Get in.
“Come on, Lizzie,” he said again. He’d floated his armchair raft down to the pool’s deep end, where the first of the sun had come in. He was wearing his black trunks and his look-at-me pose—lying out like he was a movie star and not a sales associate for a hardware chain, which is what he was, my mother told me later, a full year later, when we finally talked of it. He wanted to be seen, to be looked out on by the conventioneers. Newest sales associate. Devoted father. Six-pack abs. Gold chain. Look at him. I was part of the story he had spun. There was no “choose.” Come on.
I left the towel by the edge of the pool. I walked to the steps on the shallow side, where the shadows were, and eased myself in. Ankle to knee to hip to waist, my skin turning blue. There were cold little bubbles popping through my yellow-flower bathing suit, goose bumps on my skin. From his armchair raft in the s
un, he waved me deeper in. Father and daughter for a morning swim. What a dad he was. What a specimen.
The floor of the pool sloped down and down and I walked it, bouncing high on my toes, hating every inch, wishing he hadn’t gotten this stupid job, with this stupid convention, and this pool nobody wanted in the morning, not like this. I held my chin above the surface of the ice-cold water, and then again he waved me in, and right there, right like that, the floor of the pool slipped away and the deep end began, and I was dropped into the nothing of it, and I was too cold to swim.
I watched my hair pulling away from my head, the red polish on my toes kicking, my arms doing wild things. I watched me sinking, going down, flipping upside down. I opened my mouth to scream. Chlorine rushed in. My feet were up above me, ten red toes in a frantic kick.