by Beth Kephart
Well.
Every second counts.
I crouched. I unsheathed the machete. I walked into the rhododendrons, holding one hand out in front of my face and thwacking where I had to thwack, like Zorro might, like Tiburcio. My pack was getting slapped around by the thicket of limbs. I heard the pulse of my heart beneath the twisted P of my cap. I crept on, thwacking, heading up to higher ground, until I could feel the lean of the earth in my feet, and soon I didn’t know how far I’d gone.
I kept trying to remember Keppy. Don’t panic. Mark your trail as you go. Keep your head upon your shoulders. Remember your purpose.
The hill climbed. The earth went from dirty soft to rocky. When I forgot to breathe, I couldn’t breathe. When I breathed, I swallowed bugs. Sometimes the bushes were so thick that it was easier to walk on top of them, like walking on a trampoline, springing from limb to limb, but that only worked for a little bit and then it was safer to hack back the thickest limbs or to crawl on the ground, where there was nothing but dirt and bare roots and sometimes a baby rabbit with its ears full of twitch, and the zing of a million bugs.
I couldn’t hear a single thing but me in the rhododendron grove. I couldn’t imagine Matias out here, or Uncle Davy, or the Little Siberia men, but I’d smelled smoke, and it’d come from up high, and Matias had left me a sign.
MB.
60
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG it took.
There are things I can’t remember.
I was lost in rhododendrons, couldn’t find the light through rhododendrons, thought maybe I’d die right there, inside the fist of rhododendrons, until all of a sudden they stopped. There weren’t any more rhododendrons, and I fell. Straight into a pond. Water so blue.
Sudden sky and sudden pond.
It was like the rhododendrons had tossed me out, thrown me overboard into the muck and water. I took three steps forward and the water squished high, and I knew in that moment that there’d be no walking across this watered-up hole.
There’d be only going around.
61
I NEED TO TAKE A little break, and no, I don’t want to see what’s in your tote.
62
IT’S GOING TO RAIN.
Rain used to be peaceful.
63
I LIKED IT WHEN IT rained at Uncle Davy’s house, especially at night, the summer before this. In the loft, Uncle Davy would hear the rain, sit up, and whisper through the dark: “Betty Boop?”
He’d tiptoe down the loft steps with his monster-size flashlight, throwing a cone of yellow across the room.
“I could use some company,” he’d say. One pillow at my back, one pillow fluffed for his, we’d sit side by side, calling out the seconds between thunder rolls and lightning strikes, watching the crescent moons cry their sorrows out. The worst storms canceled the cicada songs. The squirrels stayed in their nests. The start of the fruits and vegetables knocked the back of the house.
Storms were the best. If they lasted all night, we’d stay awake the whole time, like it was a movie we were watching. Uncle Davy would start telling the stories of the cinema’s greatest M-B-As as the storm simmered and raged. The tempestuous (that was his word, those were his people) Tallulah Bankhead and Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo and Mitzi Gaynor, Ginger Rogers floating out on top of a dance, Ethel Merman like a lotus flower in a swimming pool—he knew them all, a first-name basis.
“Oh,” he’d say, and when the lightning struck, I could see the way he must have looked at the theater on the beach street where he and my mother lived. The movie stars were goddesses, mermaids, femmes fatales, fringed lashes, trouble, and after the show he’d walk home, whistling the movie songs, and find my mother doing homework at the table. He’d take out his pen. He’d sit and write to the stars. Once Judy Garland wrote back:
“Find the courage to be yourself.”
In the schoolhouse cabin, inside the storms, my uncle’s memories of the old movies flickered off and on until the rain stopped. We’d open the door and listen. Sometimes to the frogs. Sometimes to the sound of those white-tailed deer, running.
In the morning, when my uncle was back upstairs sleeping the stories off, I’d go outside and call my mom. She’d be awake even if it was dawn. She hardly slept after Dad was gone.
And that summer she was wearing her hair in braids, the bottom parts of each braid dipped in green. She’d gone from that orange to black and now to these tips of green, like she could work the revolution of her life through the strands of her hair. I’d picture her as I’d call. I’d see her walking around with a porcelain coffee cup, her nose dipped toward the steam. I’d see her sit down with the phone when she heard it ring. Leave the cup on a sill. Put her knees to her chin.
“Lizzie. How are things?”
I’d tell her about the storm. About how the rain had hammered and the frogs had sung, how Uncle Davy was in love with Judy Garland.
In the loft of the schoolhouse cabin Uncle Davy would sleep. On the phone, talking to Mom, I’d watch the clouds that seemed to tumble down—the white chasing the black, and the white followed by sky.
“Lizzie,” she’d say. “I got another no.”
I’d feel my heart drop. My eyes burn. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“I can’t seem to fit. Anywhere.”
“You fit with me and Uncle Davy, Mom.”
“Honey. I need a job. A real one.”
She’d had one, or halves of ones. She’d had, ever since Dad left, a part-time life. Baker’s assistant. Restaurant hostess. Receptionist for a landscaper. Cashier at Good House. Scraps of jobs, she’d call them. Nowhere-to-go-but-out jobs. Seasonal fixes. Never enough. The leftover employment. Mom wanted a real, full job. She sent her letters, wore her suits, drove into town—searching, asking, making promises—but there was always a better someone. Mom had started to see herself as the world’s unluckiest runner-up. I was twelve that year, and I couldn’t help her see all I knew she was.
“I wish,” I’d say, “I could hug you right now.”
“Yeah.”
That was the year before this. In the weeks before Uncle Davy and Mom had their fight. Before I knew the word “estrangement.”
The rain has come in.
See how it falls.
64
BACK AT THE SNOW-WHITE HOUSE, Sergeant Williams was calling in three possible kidnaps, but I didn’t know that then. I knew the pond was too deep to walk across and that there were the eskers to one side and petrified logs to the right, and I had to choose a path and I chose left. The water sloshing out of my sneaks, the cold mountain water up through my bones, my heart like a stampede.
A pinecone fell from the shelf of a tree.
A deer ran past.
I ran and I walked and I ran and the woods echoed slosh. The paths were weaving in and out, sometimes thin and sometimes fat, and I kept having to choose with the sky growing dark.
65
I DON’T KNOW HOW FAR I’d walked when I saw Matias’s cap. Beneath the overhang of a hemlock. On the back side of a rock.
The genius of my best friend, and proof: Matias knew I’d come.
Matias!
Uncle Davy!
I nearly called.
But I’d ruin any chance we had if I yelled their names out loud.
I reached the rock. I studied the cap, the jab of its bill. Over the gravel and moss, with the thump of the pack on my back, I ran, the cap like a flag in my hand. The first of the rain had started pattering down. It hit the leaves of the trees high up, and then it struck. A drizzle down my back.
I smashed Matias’s cap over the cap on my head. I notched the bark of a tree and kept running. I notched another. The ground cranked and popped, and I could not see that far ahead.
Adirondack bears are black as the bottom of a burned pan.
Into the blackness I ran.
Over the mossed logs and smashed twigs, into the shadows, with the rain falling down and the mountain rising, I ran. Toward bears and maybe wolv
es I ran.
CNN. Daily News. The Times. They can tell you. How far I’d gone, how the weather’d turned, how my shoes had left my footprints behind, saddest things you’ve ever seen, stuck down there, in the mud. They can tell you the mileage, the acreage, the forecast, the count of bears, the tilt of the earth, the whole thing.
But they don’t know how it felt to be me. And neither do you, though I can see that you’re trying.
66
AND THERE, RIGHT THERE, IS the night’s first firefly.
67
WAIT, I ALMOST CALL TO you. Because you’ve left your tote behind. Because it will stay here all night, in this room with me, and there is nothing I can do about it. Nowhere for me to go beneath this rectangle of sky.
Not like I can get up, out of this bed, walk across the room, bend down, and steal inside the tote you left.
Not like I’ll be able to do anything like that for a long time.
68
NOW IN THE MORNING I hear you. The car door slams. Your feet hit the walk. The men who drive you stay with the car, quietly talking to each other. You open the door to this house. You walk up these steps. You are outside my door, and now you stop. You drop something to the floor, and it rolls around, it clatters. You turn, leave, and go back down the steps, all the way to the front door, and back outside to the car.
Then you turn, come back down the walk, toward the house. You come up all these steps, and you drop something else, and then you go back down the stairs.
The third time you do this, I can hear how out of breath you are, but you’re done. Whatever you have brought here has been brought here, and now I feel you standing just inside my door.
I turn.
Your cheeks are red. You’re still breathing hard.
—We’re running out of time. It’s my turn to tell you something.
Those aren’t the rules.
—It’s important.
I don’t have to listen. I tell you when you talk.
—If you don’t listen to my story, then your story will never make sense to you.
What happened will never make sense, I say. It can’t.
—You won’t know until you listen.
69
—HERE.
You pull five long plastic tubes in from the hall and dump them on my bed. Then you bend down to pick up the yellow tote you left behind yesterday.
Out of each of the five tubes you pull a roll of canvas, then flatten it straight. You lay each one out on this bed, side by side, as if they are a quilt. You pull the sixth roll of canvas out of the yellow tote and press it flat too, and it’s much smaller than the other ones, looks a little funny on my bed. You stand back. You cross your arms. I try to push myself up, but then I’m stopped by all the pain in my legs and head.
The paint on the canvas is thick as Spackle and cracked. Each painting, I start to see, is of a single room, and each room is painted as if the painter is standing just outside a door and staring in. You can see the toothpaste there, the coffee mug over there, the diamond-tiled floor, the game of checkers, the bathtub claws, the dog on the rug, the stripes of paper on the wall, the smoking cigarette. You can see most of the things in each room, but you can’t see it all.
Green is the thickest color and the green through the windows is the thickest of all. Green trees, green air, the green of the mountains far off, the green turning to blue, wild blue. The paintings are not really about the rooms at all. They’re about what is happening beyond the rooms, outside, in the land of the free.
If I touched all that crusty painted green, I’d bleed.
What is this? I say.
—This is the story. This is him.
This is just a bunch of paintings, I say.
—Not just a bunch of paintings. They are paintings painted by him.
70
I STARE AT YOU, CONFUSED.
—Keep talking. You’ll see.
Keep talking?
—Go back to where you were. Take me back. To your story.
71
I WAS CLIMBING THAT HILL through a storm, that’s where I was. The trees were growing thin. It was like the trees had decided to stop clinging to the dirt, so they quit and then all there was up there on the hill was stone. Big backs of gray rocks you would lie down on if it weren’t raining. The rocks were like a game of dominoes somebody lost and tossed—everything fallen down and cracked.
The storm had slicked the stones. My sneaks had no more grip. The weight of my pack kept hauling me back, and even with the machete in its sleeve and Matias’s cap over my cap, and even walking the way Keppy says a walker should walk—glide, Keppy says, and keep your knees springy soft—I couldn’t get forward. The rain and the tilt of the rocks were bigger than any strength I had. My ankles cranked and popped.
When you can’t scale the rocks, you walk around. I walked the thin edge between the end of the trees and the start of the rocks, where the trail was green from so much moss, but also dark with mud.
A nest had fallen, and it sat like a lost hat on the path. I almost bent to pick it up and then I thought I heard a song—somebody singing far away in the rain—and I stopped. It was hard to see in the white rain by the rocks, hard to find the source of the song. Nobody who is kidnapped sings in the rain, that’s what I thought, and what kind of kidnapper would sing—in any weather? I stopped and stood and listened. I was desperate for more signs.
Come on, Matias.
I’m coming, Matias.
Show me where to go.
But there was nothing out there, nothing but the rain and rocks, and I thought about maybe going back—down the hill, through the woods, down the slope, to the pond, into the mesh of the rhododendron jungle, past the rock, over the stream, toward the white house and the Bondanzas and Sergeant Williams and the news, maybe there was news.
But hours had gone past, and maybe there was no news, and if there wasn’t, what good would it all have been for if I turned around, gave up? The rain was really coming now—hard white slashes of it straight through my shirt, my skin. It felt like it was raining inside me—nails of the stuff through the ivy rash and the bruises and the scratches I already had. The earth was loose. The rain was falling down and bouncing back up, slapping me in the knees, and up ahead the path was splitting. There were three ways that I could go, and I’d have to choose. I didn’t know what to choose, so I just kept walking.
I was practically right up to it before I saw it. Right there, on the ground, like a twig or a tiny tree root, but it wasn’t that: It was a brush. One of Matias’s watercolor brushes, laid down, arrow fashion, its brush part pointing to the rightmost path, and despite everything then I started running. I called his name, but the rain kept swallowing the sound. I ran until there was nowhere else to run. Until I found where Matias must have been going to.
The biggest cave I’d ever seen.
It was like someone had built a room out of the rocks and then the earth beneath the rocks had sunk down. Try to imagine a bear in the middle of a yawn. The mouth of the cave looked just like that. It was where Matias had gone, it had to be, and it was shelter besides that.
The air of a true cave is purer and more invigorating than any to be breathed on earth.
says Keppy.
The air of a true cave is not white slash. I walked as fast as I could into its mouth.
“Matias,” I whispered now, because inside the cave my footsteps echoed. “I’m coming. Wait for me. Hold on.”
72
I SMELLED WOODSMOKE AND BAT crap. I heard the hollow sound of cave drip and my sneaks talking to themselves every time I moved, every time I walked, and the farther I got, the darker it was.
Stay calm.
Don’t panic.
I was wet to the bone in a damp place and when I turned to look behind me, toward the mouth of the cave, I could see that the rain outside was falling harder than before. Out in the acres my footsteps were being swallowed up. There’d be no trace of me except for the notche
s in the trees. And were those enough? Would they save me?
I had come this far.
Maybe that cave goes on for miles. Maybe it’s a tunnel all the way to Canada and after that to the Arctic Circle. I didn’t know and I couldn’t tell and I couldn’t keep walking deeper in. I felt the pounding of my heart. The sudden total tiredness of every muscle. I dropped my pack to my feet and slid to the ground. I pushed back against the cool damp of the cave rock and I tried, I really tried, not to cry.
It’s just a cave, I told myself.
It’s just a cave.
But a cave is a cave. A cave is spooky, creepy, bumps and slime, and I didn’t know what would happen if I walked deeper in. I’d left my phone in Sergeant Williams’s hands, just in case the kidnappers dialed in. I’d told no one where I was going. I was in a cave, a poison-ivy itch crawling up my arm, and an infection starting in beneath one of the Band-Aids the sergeant had put on, and what was going to happen? To me? Thirteen years isn’t a long time to live, but it was starting to look like thirteen years was all I had. Because I couldn’t go back and I couldn’t go on, and the more I thought about it, the more the fat tears came. I was all there was, and all I had, and I didn’t have a plan.
I thought about the cops out there in the rain.