by Beth Kephart
I woke up on the hard ledge of the pool. My towel was soaked beneath my head. My mother, in a bathrobe, was holding my hand. My throat was full of the chlorine choke. My hair was everywhere. There was a second bathrobe, on top of me, a terry-cloth blanket keeping me warm. Far away, on the other side of the pool, I could see the blur of my father at the center of a small crowd—guests in their pajamas or their half-buttoned shirts, hotel men, security. I could hear his voice and his hero story, about how he’d rescued the daughter who’d insisted on a morning swim.
“You do what you must do,” he said.
I couldn’t talk for all the choke inside my throat. I couldn’t say what was true, there on the ground; my mother was holding my hand. Out in the pool the armchair raft floated, the mug of hotel-room coffee, the newspaper, the sun.
“I rescued her,” my father said.
But I knew it was Mom who had looked down from her hotel window. I knew it was Mom who’d run. Mom who’d saved me. Mom.
We were better off without my dad.
I knew that then.
But you: You believed in your father when you shouldn’t have. You believed in him, and that’s why everything that happened to Matias and Uncle Davy and me happened.
38
WHEN YOU’RE RUNNING THROUGH THE woods, the woods are running you.
That’s how it seems, since you asked.
That’s how it feels.
You’re blur and the woods are blur, and when the brown suede moves and then the strike is white, you realize it’s a deer out there, maybe a stag, and maybe you’ve scared it. Either that or it’s on your team, clearing the way through the brush, helping you downstream.
I followed the silver thread.
I followed the deer as it ran.
I heard my own feet and my own breath and the pack thumping my back, maybe the squirrels overhead. A mountain going down doesn’t always go straight down. The silver thread of a stream can disappear, hide underground, and then it’s back again, and the deer is still running, just ahead, and you’re running, fast as you can.
I don’t know how long it took, but Keppy was right. Downstream. It gets you there.
I could see the road, at last, from where I was. A flash of lights. I could hear “Copy that,” “Stand by,” “En route,” and I kept running, knowing now that they’d come for us, that they’d heard my SOS, my cry for help in the woods. “I’m here!” I called, and the trees were thinning, and the asphalt curve of the road was right up ahead, and the edge of the mountain was tumbling, and I knew where I was, somewhere near Herbalish, six curves from the reno’ed schoolhouse. “I need help out here!” I cried, my words hoarse inside my breath, and now the crackle and the sirens answered back:
“Let me see your hands.”
The trees stopped. The road began. There were four of them—state troopers—with their guns pointed straight at me.
I couldn’t stop. I tried to stop. The speed was in me still, inside my Keens, raw and ripped, inside my ankles, twitchy.
“Freeze!” they said.
I put my hands up to my head.
“I can’t find him,” I said, out of breath. “I can’t.”
There were four of them, like I said. One woman and three men in gray wool shirts and black striped pants, Stetsons on their heads. There were two police cars, white as the waterfall, parked perpendicular to the way the road ran, lights flashing, and now the woman lowered her gun and approached, talked into her lapel. “We have,” she said, “a minor.”
“Stand by,” a policeman said.
“Go ahead,” said the female officer.
“He’s not there,” I said.
She walked first and the others followed. She said her name was Sergeant Williams, from Troop G. She had a purple band and a leather strap around her Stetson, patches on her sleeves, a thick black belt, blue eyes, and I was trying to catch my breath, and she came closer and closer, holstered her gun, kneeled down.
“Tell us your name, young lady,” she said.
I said what it was. Lizzie.
“Tell us your address.”
“The reno’ed schoolhouse,” I said.
“Now slow down and take a breath,” she said. “And tell us what you saw.”
What I saw? I thought. What part? The paint, the steam of the pupusas, the newts, the cane on the ground—I still had that cane in my hand—and then the water falling, and the pond, and the silver thread, and the deer.
“He wouldn’t have gone off,” I said. “Like that.”
“Who?” Sergeant Williams said, lifting her lapel microphone to her mouth, on the ready to report whatever I said. “Which one?”
“Which one?” I said. “Only one,” I said. “Matias.”
“He told you his name was Matias?”
Her forehead crinkled over her light-blue eyes. Her mouth frowned.
“Because his name is Matias,” I said. “Matias Bondanza. My friend.”
She stared at me. Shook her head. Pulled her lapel up to her lips, had the two-way radio on.
“Your friend,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Matias Bondanza.” I was still breathing hard. The flashing lights were hurting my head. “He’s not so tall,” I said. “This is his cane,” I said. “He left the rock. And I couldn’t find him.”
“You’ve been out looking for your friend?”
“Yes,” I said. “Just like I said.”
“A boy your age?”
“This tall.” I showed her with my hand.
“We’ve got a possible kidnapping,” Sergeant Williams said. Into the radio on her lapel. Into the crackle. To the three other men.
“What’s going on?” I finally said.
“Affirmative,” the crackle said.
39
YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DID. You know all of that. Put me in the back of a car with its lights swirly and asked me, over and again. Describe Matias, describe my path, describe what I saw, give what I remember, tell them the timing on that. It was Sergeant Williams, First Sergeant Williams, she said, the same woman with the blue eyes in the back of the Crown, writing it down. Every now and then some news would come in through the crackle, or some news would go out through the radio on her lapel, and I don’t know how long it took, but it was soon by the time they had Matias’s mom on the phone, and “affirmative that.”
He’d gone out in the morning.
He had not come back.
Just like I had said.
“Received,” Sergeant Williams said into her mike, and now she looked at me, steady, while Sergeant Charles Rose pursued my uncle’s whereabouts, called the cabin first, nothing, called the library, but he’d left, called Herbalish and Timber and the two friends whose names I had, but he appeared to be in transit; that’s what Sergeant Rose, talking to Sergeant Williams, said.
“He’s famous,” I said.
Sergeant Williams pushed the bangs out of my eyes.
She shook her head.
“We’re working on it,” she said.
She asked me did my arm hurt, and I looked down. For the first time I saw the places where the thorns had dug in, the start of a poison-ivy rash on my elbow, a bruise already turning the color of a dark sky.
She got out, clicked the trunk, and returned. “Give me that,” she said, meaning my arm. She was careful as she swabbed the alcohol on, fixed the Band-Aids, put the calamine on the open rash, the sick pink smell of it. She told me, as she worked, about herself. She had a kid named Sammy. Her husband drove a forklift truck. They lived beside a kettle pond, where the fish were best. She asked me was I hungry and suddenly I was, and now she was peeling the banana that would have been her lunch, offering some Cadbury chocolate. Left over from Easter, she said.
“What else, Lizzie?” she said.
My arm stung. The Band-Aid crinkled. I had banana breath. My ankles twitched. I looked past the first sergeant, through the car window, toward the other troopers, two of them hiking up into the woods now, Charle
s Rose standing by with his radio on.
“I still don’t understand,” I said.
Because she hadn’t told me. Not yet. It was like she couldn’t tell me until I’d given everything I had, and I had, or thought I had, and even then, due process of law or whatever it was, she couldn’t fully tell.
“I thought you’d come for Matias,” I said.
“We’re looking for him now,” she said.
“Who were you looking for originally, then?”
“The escapees,” she said.
I didn’t follow. I had the upside-down umbrella of the banana on my lap, the backpack still on my back, Matias’s cane resting on the floor of the car.
“There’s been a break,” she said.
“Break?”
“At Little Siberia.”
I looked at her. I shook my head.
“Two convicts,” she said. “Armed and dangerous. We’re following any lead.”
I closed my eyes.
“Matias is out there,” I said.
“We’ve got troopers, rangers, feds,” she said.
She didn’t say “I promise.”
40
IT’S FAST AND IT’S SLOW, what happened next. I remember rushing underneath the swirl of light, up the curves of the road, past Herbalish, to the schoolhouse, the first sergeant driving and the staff sergeant up in the passenger seat beside her and everything crackling.
Then we were at the schoolhouse, on the pebble drive, pulling in behind my uncle’s ’69 Dart and his trailer. I watched the front door, waiting for him to run out—his green socks, his apron on. I watched the windows for his shadow. The only thing that I actually saw was the dust the car had churned up.
I started to climb out. Sergeant Williams called me back. Reached her hand around. Said, “Stop.”
“This is my uncle’s house,” I said.
“Secure the property,” she said to Sergeant Rose, but he was already out, walking with a hunch. He circled past the trailer and the Dart, past the bushes, to the back. A few minutes passed, and there he was, on the other side.
“Clear,” he said, and Sergeant Williams loosened up, got out, asked me for the key, told me to stay put for my own good, to duck if anything happened, “Please trust us, Lizzie.” She walked in a crouch. She joined Sergeant Rose up on the porch, and my heart sank because I knew that if Uncle Davy were okay, if he were home, if he were near, he’d be beside me now. He’d have come and flung open the door to the car and hugged me hard like that.
He would have known, looking at me, that I’d lost Matias.
Because that’s how it was feeling by then. That I had lost Matias. That I hadn’t been there, on alert, when he’d needed me. I had two strong legs and smarts and science, and I should have been there, I should have known, that’s what you do for friends. You’re there. You feel something, hear something, sense something, and you go running, and I didn’t go running soon enough, and when I did, I got all tangled up in the woods.
Armed and dangerous. Cops everywhere. Matias missing and my uncle gone, and this was bad like you don’t know bad, like nothing can prepare you for, like you don’t know what to do with the banging drum of your heart, like you can’t really breathe but you have to.
“Choose,” my mother had said.
But I didn’t choose this.
41
PLEASE.
Ask them for water. Call down the steps. Tell them I am choking, I can’t swallow, I can’t breathe.
I was afraid, okay? I was.
I was afraid, and that’s not brave. That’s not who I thought I was.
42
SERGEANT ROSE WORKED THE LOCK. He called my uncle’s name, Sergeant Williams at his back. When Sergeant Rose turned the knob and pushed the door, they both stood back to a boom of silence—nothing and no one in there but the M-B-As. The loft above. The trundle below. The finds. The record player from which no Sinatra was singing out.
From the car I watched the sergeants, moving slow, then moving fast. Through the house, around the things, past the chalkboard, near the crazy grandfather clock. After I don’t know how long, Sergeant Williams bent down and picked something up. Stood up. Read it out loud.
I had rolled my window down.
Dear Lizzie,
Danger is afoot. I’ve gone looking for you. If you return before I do, ask for help. Get to Matias’s house.
“Second possible kidnapping,” Sergeant Rose said. His voice going out through the crackle.
43
THEY ASKED ME TO PACK. They drove me down the road to the snow-white house, where the police cars were parked at the top of the drive—the lights on, the sirens silenced. They asked me who else needed to know my whereabouts, and I thought quick and lied. What they didn’t know they didn’t know, and they didn’t know my mother or radioactive iodine. They didn’t know the healing that she needed. They didn’t know the promise I kept. If they called, they would find my mother’s secret out. Worse, my mom would find out about this.
I couldn’t let it get to that.
Your mother needs quiet.
Secrets are secrets.
They’re kept.
All this time, in all my knowing of Matias, I’d never been inside his house. It had always been its own country up there, its own white fort and castle. We’d meet at the rock, we’d meet at the schoolhouse, we’d meet at Timber and at Herbalish, but never here, not this sacred, from-another-country house, where Matias slept, where the pupusas were made, where we only ever dropped him off, and now I was standing there, and I’ll tell you because you’re asking me that this is what it was:
A square house with a center square cut out. Tiles the color of terra-cotta. Walls pure stucco white. There were silk parakeets hanging from strings and photographs of jungle cliffs and a collection of pinned butterflies hung from the ceilings or hooked on the walls. Between the house itself and the center courtyard there were four sides of glass, one door on each side, so that you could walk room by room through the inside, then open a door into a glass courtyard. Like entering a greenhouse. They were out in the courtyard when I arrived. Mr. and Mrs. Bondanza. Two troopers. Photographs on a garden table, like a tablecloth.
“Oh,” Mrs. Bondanza said when she saw me. “Lizzie.” Half standing, half reaching for me. Come here. Come now. I hurried through the glass door into the smell of gardenias and forced lilacs. I let her crush me with her hug. I slipped the backpack to the floor, fixed the cap on my head, gave her the cane I had found.
“He’ll be asking for that back,” I said.
Like waterfalls. Her tears like that.
“If,” she said.
44
IF MATIAS CAME BACK.
If the convicts called for ransom.
If any man on the loose from Little Siberia approached.
If my uncle.
All ifs.
After a while most of the police people left.
45
SERGEANT ROSE DIDN’T.
He was on the lookout for a change in direction.
He was on the prowl.
From wherever I looked I could see him—the swoop of his belly in his gray dress shirt, the black stripes of his pants, the Stetson he never took from his head. He kept his radio on. He let the news crackle in. Sometimes I saw him in doubles. The real him and the reflected one. The wait in him. The watching. Wherever I was. Wherever he went. We walked in circles.
Not knowing is tragic. We were full of nothing known.
The hours ticked.
Come home. Come home. Come home.
We’d left my uncle a note. We’d called his phone. Sergeant Williams had found and taken my phone, saying, “We need to be the first line of communication.” She stood with me and watched the windows with me and the doors for any sign. A newt. A fox. A cane. A boy. My uncle with his nephew.
Please come.
Nothing came.
So here I was now, at this snow-fort house with a garden stuck inside. Where Matias
lived in the summertime, and where I’d never been before, because some people have secrets and Matias’s secret was his house, the way he lived, at least part of him lived, like he was still in El Salvador.
The clouds had started to push out the sun. There was itch beneath the peel of the calamine, a stinging like bees along my arm, ache in my ankles. My head was hot inside the heat of my cap, and inside all that glass of that house I would sometimes catch a glimpse of me—the dirt still on my cheeks, the twisted P, the droop of my socks, the squints of my worry. I don’t know what time it was when Mr. B. left the courtyard for the living room and sat down on the striped couch. When he reached for his iPad. Finger-tapped in.
I watched him. Through the windows. Through the glass. I came near. Stood behind him. He opened to an alphabet of Adirondack maps. Topographs. Aerials. Maps that went zoom. Six million acres of elastic. I stood watching as he found the snow-fort house, the schoolhouse house, the stream, the whale of that rock. He tapped, zoomed in, zoomed out, and then he asked me: “Re-create.” “Re-create,” with the rolling r’s. “Por favor.”
Put the facts of my morning on the map.
I leaned across his shoulder and drew the whole thing out. The newts. The cane. The fox. The mess of rhododendrons. The patch where I got lost. The teeth of water falling. The same facts I’d told the sergeants. The same ground I’d covered, again, at this house. Everyone asking and me telling, and no matter how I told it, I had not found Matias.
“You’re sure?”
There, or somewhere near there, I pointed again, was the fox.
There, or close.
Sergeant Rose was watching me work, standing at my side behind the couch. Mrs. B. had stopped pacing, had sat beside Mr. B. She looked up to find my eyes. Sergeant Rose looked back. They asked me to show them again, the same story, again, and now, this time, I remembered something I had somehow forgotten—that smell of smoke in the breeze.