I was grateful she said it, but the tense. She loved me. I loved her. It was in the past. My whole life was now in the past.
“Maggie,” Linda said, studying my face. “Time for a rest?”
I welled up. We’d known each other a long time. I nodded.
She squeezed my arm. “I’ll let myself out, but call me when you get up. The second you get up.”
She stood, gathered the empty mugs that littered the table, and put them in the sink. “Leave those dishes,” she said as she walked out the door. “I love you.”
I heard her gunshot engine starting and her car pulling away.
She was gone, and I was alone.
Allison
Stop.
Breathe.
I’ve been climbing for hours now. Palms scraped, knees bloodied, lungs screaming, back aching. But now I’m at the summit. The top of the world, if the world didn’t seem so far away.
The land stretches out like a ragged carpet. The descent is steep and treacherous, but I can see the faint outline of a trail snaking down the side of the mountain. If I take it, I’ll have to be careful not to get turned around. If I don’t take it, I’ll increase my chances of falling down a crevice and splitting open my skull.
The whiteness of bone.
So many ways to die.
The plan is Take the Path.
I take a sip of water, the first in hours, and eat half a Luna bar. The greenbottles swarm but I don’t bother to swipe them away anymore. I’m already covered in angry welts and bloodied scabs—I figure there isn’t much skin left for them to bite. I’m wrong about that, of course. They just bite the welts and scabs, the fuckers.
The humming sound has returned, louder now, insistent. I’m dehydrated, but I can’t tell how badly. All I know is that I can’t afford to faint. I take another sip and shove the bottle back in my bag. That’s enough. It’ll have to be. On my feet. It’s time to go.
I set out for the path, navigating the sharp rocks with inching side steps, shifting my way down the steep ridges, the bag bumping on the small of my back with each step. The movement becomes almost meditative, the slow shift from left foot to right, the steady rasp of my breath, the persistent drone of encircling flies.
Then, suddenly and with a clarity that takes my breath away, it comes. A memory. Me zipped into a snowsuit, small arms and legs too hot beneath the pillowy fabric, wool hat itching my forehead, and my father dressed in corduroys and boots and his old ski jacket pulling me up a hill on a red plastic sled. Climbing in behind me, pushing us off with a shove, trees whizzing past as we careered down the hill on the icy track, him holding on to me tightly as I screamed the sort of scream that comes when you are completely safe inside a brief terror.
And then, too soon, it’s replaced with another image. Him, thin skinned, yellowed and brittle, lying on the sofa, lips cracked and bleeding, whispering something urgent that I couldn’t understand. My mother crouched down beside him, holding both of his hands in one of hers, the skin underneath her eyes pouched and bruise dark.
I can still conjure up the anger I felt toward her. For months after I saw her open the valve on his morphine drip, I carried the hatred around with me, like a flame protected by cupped palms. She killed him. She took him away from me. She didn’t warn me. She didn’t even give me the chance to say goodbye.
And then, like waking up after a long fever, the anger broke, replaced by waves of grief and regret. But by then it was too late.
I push this away, down to where memories like that are kept. Deep down and out of sight. I can’t think about that right now. I can’t afford to think about anything other than keeping myself alive.
I shuffle my way down the smooth face of a boulder. Think of a song to sing. Or a poem to recite. But I don’t know any poems by heart and the only songs I can think of are Christmas ones, and Christmas songs remind me of my father and winter and us sledding down the hill, and the image of my father in the sled brings me back to his legs so thin beneath the afghan, and his skin like wax, and the way I recoiled when I knew he was reaching for me. I had watched my mother hold both of my father’s hands, and the thing I had felt the most had been revulsion. I hate myself for that. Among other things.
I trip and fall, hard, wrenching my bad shoulder. “Fuck!” I holler into the nothing. I look back at what tripped me. A tree stump.
Stupid, silly girl.
My palms sting and my shoulder throbs but the pain clears my mind.
The plan is Stay Alive.
I get back to my feet and start toward the path. Slowly. Carefully. There are a few hours until dusk, four at most. I need to set up camp before dark. One foot in front of the other, careful where I place each step.
I take a sip of water as a reward when I reach the path, but I don’t have much left, only half a bottle, and the sun’s heat is unrelenting even as it starts to dip in the sky. The hum in my skull is now a steady roar.
Hurry.
The dark is encroaching by the time the path levels out. I step off the trail and into the forest, letting the trees swallow me.
In a small clearing, I shrug off my bag, wincing. I run my fingers across the ridges left by the straps; the skin is tender and bloodied underneath. My body is a symphony of pain, each part of me registering a specific octave.
The sky is a deep velvet navy. The temperature has dropped. All the day’s heat has been replaced with a dry chill. I shiver and dig the sweatshirt out of my bag, but it isn’t enough: the cold works its way into my bones. I need to build a fire.
Gather wood. Tote it to the clearing. Check the direction of the wind and the location of the trees. I build the fire just like my father taught me. A bundle of tinder. A tepee of bark and kindling. Large dry sticks at the ready, to feed any hopeful sparks.
I take out the silver lighter and flick it open. The pale blue flame flickers as I touch it to the pine needles. They glow orange as they catch. I wait until it has spread evenly through the kindling and then gently place a few larger branches onto the fire. It begins to crackle and spit.
The heat of the fire warms the metal of my watch, so I slip it into the zippered pocket on my bag. It doesn’t matter what time it is, anyway. I try to ignore the growl of my stomach and the dryness in my mouth and the hulking terror squatting at the base of my throat.
I watch the flames lick at the branches, turning them to ash. I was nine the day my dad taught me to build a fire. He had a desk job at the town hall, but every free minute he had he was outdoors. He spent the winters snowshoeing and the summers camping and climbing, and as soon I could walk, he took me along.
That night, we were building a bonfire in the backyard to burn the dried leaves we’d raked up the day before. He’d sent me off to fetch kindling from the trees near our house and then showed me how to place everything just right, and when it came time to light it, he held out a pair of stones: a piece of quartz and a flat rock.
“Watch close, Allycat,” he’d said. “It’s like a magic trick.” And he struck the stones until—there! A spark.
“You try,” he’d said, handing me the two rocks and showing me how to hold them. “You want to hit the handstone with the striker right there,” he’d said, pointing to the center of the flat stone.
I hit the stone again and again, but nothing happened. “Keep at it,” he’d said. “You’ll get there.”
I kept going. Nothing happened. My arms started to ache and my fingers seized. “This is stupid. Why am I doing this?” I’d asked. “We have matches in the house!”
“It’s important.” That’s all he said. Because he said it, I started to think it was important, too.
I broke the flat rock. He found me another. “Don’t give up,” he’d said. “You’re tough. You’re patient. You can do this.”
And then it happened. A single bright orange spark and then, with the next strike, a tiny shower of them. He’d whooped with glee. “Do it again!” he’d said. “Over the tinder this time!” I did it aga
in, and one of the tiny orange sparks fell on the pile of fluff and pine needles and my dad cupped his hands around it and blew gently until it caught, and then we both sat back and watched the tiny flame grow in strength until it reached up into the pile of sticks and twigs and then, suddenly, it was a fire. I had made fire. I remember him putting his arm around me and pulling me in close. “I knew you could do it.”
In that moment, I thought I could do anything.
But then he died and I betrayed him. I’d allowed myself to become useless, decorative. Good for only one thing.
I look back at the fire. The chill has been chased from the air now, and the feeling is starting to return to my fingers and toes. I pull out the bag of nuts and eat two peanuts and a walnut, one by one, chewing and chewing until they’re nothing but paste. Then, to celebrate the successful fire, I follow it with half a Luna bar. The food wakes up my stomach and it twists with hunger.
There are two and a half Luna bars left and a half bag of nuts. Enough for another couple of days, max. I’ll have to figure something out, though Lord knows what. But first, sleep.
Down go the canopy cover and the blanket. Off come my shoes. Inspect the new blisters. One of my toenails is sore to the touch, and I can see the tinge of blackness underneath the pink polish. I’ll lose that one.
I lie down and tuck the blanket around me. The fire crackles. I can smell my father in the smoke and I feel something beneath the sore muscles, the cuts and bruises, and the deep, unshakable anxiety rooted in my breastbone. It feels a little like comfort.
You’re tough. You can do this.
That’s the last thing I think as I go to sleep under a black sky and a half moon and a sea of tiny, sparkling stars.
Maggie
I hadn’t meant to tell Linda what happened between me and Ally, but now that I had, it felt like a weight had been lifted.
Ally had been gone from me for two years. In the months after Charles had died, I had tried to make things right. I called her apartment, left messages on the answering machine and with her roommate, sent her letters begging her to talk to me, but all of it was met with silence. She didn’t want me in her life—she’d made that very clear, and I was too rubbed raw with grief and guilt and regret to keep knocking on a door that was bolted shut. I told myself it was for the best, that I was obeying Ally’s wishes, respecting her decision. The truth was, I was weak. I should have kept pushing. I should have turned up on her doorstep and refused to leave until she agreed to see me. She was my daughter, and she was hurting. I should have done everything in my power to make things right.
Now she was gone forever. It was too late to patch that rift, but I owed it to her to find out what had happened to her. I hadn’t fought for her then, I thought, but I could fight for her now.
I had to see that picture.
I waited for the six o’clock news to come on, coiled in Charles’s old armchair like a snake. I leaned forward as the opening credits rolled.
A redheaded woman in a startlingly bright red suit sat behind a desk and grimaced at the camera. “In our top story tonight, a Bangor woman is accused of attacking her own son in what witnesses are describing as a brutal moment of madness . . .”
I muted it and sat back in the chair. I had no interest in listening to other people’s misery when I had so much of my own.
I clicked the sound back on as they were wrapping up a segment about the Red Sox’s no-hitter against the Orioles.
“It looks like Sox fans finally have something to smile about,” said the sportscaster with the rolled-up sleeves.
The redheaded anchor nodded at him. “Sure does, Jim,” she said, before turning back to the camera and pulling her face into a frown. “Investigators are still searching for the cause of a plane crash that left a woman with ties to the Maine area dead.”
A photograph appeared to the left of the redhead’s face. Her hair was blond and she was thin. Too thin. She was smiling over her shoulder in a backless black dress, each of her vertebrae visible. Her hair falling in caramel waves. Her cheekbones were high and her skin glowed and her teeth were blindingly white in her broad smile. She was beautiful, breathtakingly so, but she looked nothing like the daughter I had known. Ally had always been beautiful, of course, but this woman looked like a film star. It had taken me a second to recognize my daughter.
“Allison Carpenter, thirty-one, was the only passenger on board the single-engine aircraft when it went down in the middle of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The pilot has yet to be identified. Ms. Carpenter grew up in Maine but was most recently a resident of San Diego, California. Authorities are still trying to determine the cause of the crash but at the moment, it is not a criminal investigation. We’ll have more as this story unfolds.”
The anchorwoman’s face shifted again. “Tonight’s lottery rollover is set to be a record $1.6 million. Have you got your ticket, Brad?”
“I sure do, Melanie—”
I switched off the television. The silence settled around me along with the dust glittering in the remains of the day’s light.
I thought about the photo of Ally, the glossiness of her. How could she have afforded that dress? That haircut? I didn’t know much about fashion, but I knew that she didn’t make enough for all that. She did something with advertising for a women’s magazine that had just gotten off the ground called Faces. She’d shown us issues when we’d visited. It was full of beautiful women of every color under the sun, some heavy, some thin. One with a scar lashing across her face. None of them looked a thing like the woman whose photograph was on that news report. “We’re interested in representation,” Ally had said, her brows knitting together. “The magazine is all about women celebrating women, in all the ways it looks, in all the things it means. We want to do more than be a tool for big companies. We want to interrogate the industry.” Neither Charles nor I knew what she was talking about, but we knew her fiery passion well. “That sounds great, dear,” we’d said. I’d taken the issue and read it on the plane. I liked it, but I didn’t know who would ever buy advertising in it. But maybe it had taken off. Though surely I would have heard if it had become a success, and I couldn’t remember ever seeing it on the magazine racks at Target.
I walked into the kitchen and fired up the ancient iMac that we had sent Ally to college with and inherited when she had enough money to buy herself a sleek silver laptop. The fan whirred and the bootup screen cycled on. Most of my friends didn’t understand how the internet worked and only the most savvy had Facebook accounts. Linda had finally convinced her daughter-in-law to stop sending links to pictures from their vacations entirely; instead, she would just upload them to a drugstore’s website and give her a call to say there were some photos for her to pick up. Not me. Twenty years on the research desk at the Bowdoin College library had made me perfectly capable of navigating the Web. The computer we kept at home was slow, but it worked fine enough, and my retired staff badge got me access to everything I could ever need at the college library, whenever I wanted it. Despite all that, having the knowledge and the equipment, I hadn’t looked up Ally’s name online since I gave up trying to contact her. The least I could do, I had thought, was respect her wishes and stay out of her life. Stupid me.
I started by typing her name into the search bar, but all that came up were stories about the crash. No Facebook profile, either, though I knew she’d had one at one point because she’d showed it to me a few years earlier when she was home over Christmas break. We’d spent a couple of hours looking up old friends of hers from high school, seeing who was up to what. “Jenny has three kids,” she’d said, mouth hanging open. “Can you believe it?” But there were no Allison Carpenters from San Diego on the list, and none of the thumbnail photographs grinning out at me looked anything like her, not even the movie-star version of her.
I tried googling “Faces magazine” next, but nothing much came up there, either. The first link was a Wikipedia entry. As any good student can tell you, Wikipedia isn�
��t a reliable source, but it can be a good place to start. The entry was brief, detailing the mission statement Ally had told us about. There was a scandal involving a pop star whose name I vaguely recognized saying something awful about the models. Under a picture of the first issue on the right-hand side was a list of facts. Editor in chief: Agathe Silverman. Frequency: Monthly. First issue: September 2009. Final issue: January 2016.
That couldn’t be right. January 2016 was four months before Charles had died. I had seen Ally in March of that year and she hadn’t said a thing about it.
My daughter was a cipher. I needed to talk to someone who knew something about her. I yanked open the drawer that held the old clothbound address book, stuffed full of scraps of paper and business cards and the names of people I hadn’t seen in years and probably never would again. I pulled it down from the shelf and flicked to the page. There it was, the number for Allison’s apartment, written in Charles’s blocky handwriting. I hadn’t dialed it for over two years.
What was her roommate’s name? Sara? Tara. Tara. I dialed the number. I wasn’t relishing telling her about the crash, but I needed answers.
“Hello?” The voice that answered was familiar, but it wasn’t Ally’s. My treacherous heart sank. It was the same traitor who’d kept Charles’s wedding ring and kept the phone plugged in, that part that whispered, What if it’s all a mistake? What if she is there, has been home the whole time? What if she is padding around her apartment in her sweatpants, safe and sound?
“Is that Tara?”
“Speaking.”
“Tara, it’s Maggie Carpenter. Ally’s mom.”
She gasped. “Mrs. Carpenter! Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. I just heard on the news, and I couldn’t believe it . . .” I could picture Tara on the other end of the phone, blond hair tugged into a ponytail, thin shoulders shuddering. I’d met her only once, on that trip down to San Diego, but she was a sweet girl, the kind you wanted to wrap your arms around and take for a sandwich or an ice cream.
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