by Sonja Yoerg
While Iris worked, Suzanne searched for the database on endangered species. Plant populations weren’t mapped on the small scale they needed to find the cabin, but she was hoping information about habitat might restrict their search.
Iris finished drawing. Suzanne compared the sketch of the watershed around Iris’s cabin with Google Earth images, turning the paper this way and that. It was no use because neither the satellite nor the map view showed the minor waterways. “Maybe we can get a detailed map, a topo map, in town later. For now, let’s talk plants.” She knew that endangered and threatened plant populations were usually listed by county and hoped that information might help. She typed “Virginia trillium” into the search bar and quickly found the flower related to the red trillium they had seen at the railroad tracks.
“Looks just like I remember,” Iris said softly.
“Virginia least trillium.” She explained about endangered and threatened species. The trillium was endangered in North Carolina but not in Virginia, so the county-by-county listings Suzanne had hoped for were not available. She made notes about the flower’s habitat, then opened a tab for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Together they went through the list of Virginia’s threatened or endangered plants, more than a dozen. Iris pointed to a daisylike flower with drooping pink petals.
“I’ve seen that one. Mama used ones like it for keeping us healthy, especially in the winter. Echinacea, she called it, but she didn’t harvest this one. Too special, she said.”
“Smooth coneflower,” Suzanne said. “Federally endangered.” She clicked open the list of counties where the flower was known to exist and compared it to a county map. “It hasn’t been seen in any of the counties north of Route 60, the road we drove down yesterday, and only on the west side of Bedford and Amherst Counties.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Nothing for certain. The flower could be growing where it hasn’t been noticed.” Suzanne closed the laptop. “Let’s get that topo, hopefully narrow it down some more.”
“Then what?”
“Exploring.”
Iris sat in the car, holding a list of three places: two that had rivers and streams closely matching her sketch and one that was a partial match. Who knew how accurate her memory was, especially for distances? They’d left midmorning and now had almost arrived at the first one. The easiest, Suzanne had said last night, because it was the only one they could get to through public land—the Jefferson National Forest. The idea that one of these places held her home made Iris’s stomach churn. She’d never been so excited and so afraid at the same time.
Suzanne used her phone to find the way until she lost reception and asked Iris to guide her using the map. Suzanne had circled the closest access point. Road signs for Cave Mountain Lake appeared, and they turned onto a narrow dirt road running alongside a stream. Iris suspected the area they were looking for was too close to popular hiking trails to be the right place but didn’t say anything. She could be wrong. Disappearing was easy if no one was looking for you.
They parked in a tiny lot and gathered their stuff. Suzanne had insisted on buying all sorts of clothing and gear in Lexington—enough for a monthlong trip, the way Iris saw it. But her boots were comfortable and the backpack was a big improvement on the old one, which had belonged to her father. Suzanne and Iris didn’t plan to stay out overnight, but Suzanne wanted to be prepared. For this first stop, though, they left the sleeping bags, tarp, and stove in the car since their destination was only four or five miles away and they could follow a trail for most of it.
Suzanne hoisted her pack and clipped the belt. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
At first Iris led, but she kept having to wait for Suzanne and decided to let her set the pace. A half hour in, a young couple passed them going the other way, smiling and saying hello. Iris and Suzanne continued for another hour and a half, climbing steadily through a world of green. The trail wound around to the west, ringing a big mountain, then angled to its steeper north side. Here the trees were narrower, leaning close to strain toward the sky, today a featureless gray mat. There was not a breath of wind. Birds trilled out overhead—phoebes, wrens, a lone oriole—and squirrels skittered across the ground and gave chase up tree trunks. Spring was offering up its promise of bounty. Out of habit, Iris scanned the forest floor as she walked, searching among last year’s decaying leaves and the emerging ephemerals for mushrooms. It felt like morel time.
Suzanne stopped in the trail and consulted the map. “I think we turn left off the trail pretty soon.” She pointed into the woods. “One of your streams should be over there.”
Iris considered the terrain. “How far?”
“Maybe a half mile? Or a little farther?” Suzanne looked uneasily into the densely packed woods. “You want to go first?”
Iris slid past Suzanne and continued up the path until she found a gap in the undergrowth. She checked to make sure Suzanne was close behind and picked her way among the trees, holding aside branches for Suzanne. They were traversing the slope now, heading toward a notch between two distant hills, which made sense to Iris if they were trying to get to a stream. But she paid less attention to the geography and her memory of the map than she did to her innate expectation of what lay ahead. Landscapes, varied as they were, were logical and predictable: the types of trees, the plants blooming at her feet, the way the sunlight fell, the eddies in which dawn’s moisture might be trapped. Iris read all that and more. She wasn’t surprised when a patch of bluebells appeared, or when they walked past a deer yard, grasses folded flat beneath a pair of red cedars. She just nodded and moved on.
In a short while, Iris heard the stream she already knew was there. Suzanne would insist on seeing it, to be sure, so Iris led her for another ten minutes to its edge.
Suzanne looked at the stream, two steps across, burbling gently. She said, “Does this look familiar?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Iris sighed. There was no way to explain. It’d be like getting a fish to teach you to swim. “I’m sure.”
Suzanne nodded, and Iris was grateful not to have to say more.
They returned to the car, drove to Buchanan, the nearest town, and checked into a hotel made from a railcar. After they’d been outdoors most of the day, the low-ceilinged room felt too small. Iris waited at a picnic table on the lawn behind the railcar while Suzanne went across the street to get dinner.
Suzanne unwrapped the sandwiches, handed Iris hers, and checked her cell phone. “I can’t get reception.”
“Who were you going to call?”
“No one.” Suzanne put the phone in her pocket as if she could tuck her whole family away in there. It seemed like she could, at least for now. “Are you disappointed about today?”
“Not really.”
“Don’t you want to find your house?”
Iris stopped chewing, the bread suddenly dry in her mouth. She took a sip from her water bottle. “I don’t know. It was your idea to look for it.”
“And you don’t want to?”
“I don’t think I ever spent a lot of time thinking about wanting things I can’t have. If I ever did before, I’ve stopped now.”
“But we might find it.”
“I don’t want my house. I left it, remember? I left it and never went back. I left it empty.”
Suzanne put a hand on Iris’s arm. “We don’t have to search anymore, Iris, not if you don’t want to.”
Iris shrugged. “I don’t know what I want right now.”
Suzanne nodded and went back to eating.
In the yard next door, two boys kicked a ball back and forth, the bigger one yelling at the smaller one to stop using his hands to steady the ball. On a wire above their heads, a mockingbird eyed them for a few moments before launching into song, repeating each call several times: cardinal, wren, titmouse, jay, bluebird, red-tailed hawk, and back to the cardinal, but a different song. Iris wondered whether, if the m
ockingbird learned too many other songs, it might forget what sort of bird it was.
That night, Iris lay awake long after Suzanne had fallen asleep in the other bed. The hotel was quiet compared with Charlottesville. Even the mockingbird had found a roost and gone quiet. Iris pictured the drawing she’d made of the strands of water around the cabin and tried to conjure up different places in the drawing. The cabin porch with the oak bench; the clearing straight out front; the little bend in the stream where she washed her face in the mornings, took a drink; the patch of sang on the north side of Turkey Hill—what she and Ash called it anyway. Each place she thought of, she dwelled on, concentrating, focusing. She reached into the dark edges of each memory, seeing if she might rake another detail into the light. What was beside the bench? How many steps could she take in that clearing? Were there brambles at the edge? Did Ash sink a fishhook into his shin at that spot in the stream or farther up?
The questions kept coming, and the images spun and swirled like dried leaves kicked up by a stiff autumn wind. Where were the faces, her family? She searched her memory, riffling through the scenes, catching only glimpses of what she wanted most to see: the flash of bare feet disappearing ahead of her into the brush, a head with long brown hair turning away, a figure appearing in the doorway of the cabin and dissolving into the shadows. She pursued the running child, the woman beside her, the person in the doorway, but they all had retreated and disappeared.
Iris pulled the cold, scratchy bedcover up to her chin. The unnatural sound it made and the greenish-yellow light leaking in from around the curtains reminded her of where she was, of where she was not. And doubt crept up over the end of the bed and settled alongside her legs, heavy and wet. Iris feared that these memories, frail as they were, were not memories at all but inventions, wishes for what she used to have and nightmares of what she had lost. What did she know, really know, to be true? Where was everyone?
Maybe this was why she wasn’t sure about finding the cabin. Maybe it was like the detective said: there wasn’t much to go on and nothing to confirm what she thought was true. She hadn’t told anyone about Ash, who had been more real to her than any oak bench on a porch in a clearing somewhere in the woods. Iris hadn’t wanted to look too closely at why she kept Ash a secret. She just wanted to keep him that way. Maybe there was no bench, no porch, no cabin. Maybe Mama hadn’t fallen down a hole. Maybe Iris was truly lost, far more lost than she ever could have imagined, living inside a vanished world of her own making.
Maybe the real secret was she had invented everything. Maybe there was no Ash. Maybe there never had been.
CHAPTER 37
The dirt road kept with the river for a long time before heading toward the rising sun blinking through the trees. Iris shielded her eyes with her hand. They hadn’t passed a house for about a mile, but someone had to live out here. There wouldn’t be a road otherwise.
Suzanne drained her coffee and placed it in the holder between the seats. “Should be soon.” She searched the left side of the road, maybe hoping for a turnout.
They crossed a narrow wooden bridge and bounced out of a deep rut on the far side. The road swept right. The woods had been hugging the roadside, but now they fell away, revealing a large field, flat and empty. At the far end were a two-story brick house, a dilapidated barn, and a couple of smaller buildings, all shaded by huge walnuts and maples. Beside the barn stood a tower, almost as high as the house, with thin legs and a wheel on top.
A strange feeling settled over Iris. “I think I’ve been here before.”
Suzanne slowed the car. “You recognize the house?”
She shook her head. “The tower. Whatever that is.”
“It’s a windmill,” Suzanne said. “Did you live here?”
“I don’t know.” Iris recalled her thoughts from the night before, the idea that her memories weren’t the solid things she had believed them to be.
Suzanne pulled the car off the road onto a level patch of field. “Maybe you lived here before you moved into the woods.”
Iris looked at the windmill again, and at the house and the barn, waiting for a detail to spring out at her. None did. “Maybe.”
Suzanne consulted the map and pointed ahead to where the woods rose gently out of the field. “We’ll start somewhere there, okay?”
Iris pointed to a sign on a tree. POSTED . NO HUNTING, FISHING, OR TRESPASSING . “What about that?”
Suzanne folded the map and opened the door. “Ignore it.”
They put on their backpacks, locked the car, and skirted the edge of the woods, searching for a path. Iris glanced over her shoulder several times, getting a different view of the house and the windmill, wondering why it felt so familiar yet failed to conjure any specific memory. Suzanne looked behind her, too, as if she expected someone to appear out of nowhere. A pair of crows swooped in and landed on the roof without circling first, a clear indication no one was around. From where she stood, Iris sensed the emptiness. The place was like a skeleton with no blood or flesh or soul inside.
They couldn’t find an obvious path, so Iris chose a deer trail pointing in the general direction of the location on the map. The topo map wasn’t detailed—one inch covered one mile of reality—but it didn’t matter. These mountains were rugged. Even with a better map they couldn’t just walk straight from one place to another. The woods were so dense it could seem like dusk in the middle of the day, and what seemed like an easy path could stop dead at the bottom of the sheer cliff. Iris followed her instincts, and the deer.
As they walked, Suzanne asked her about the windmill again. Iris answered by hiking faster. She didn’t want to talk. She felt a tug in the center of her chest, and in the center of her forehead, too, a soft pull, a yearning. Iris let herself be led, but she was also under her own guidance, mindful of her surroundings: the contours, the appearance and disappearance of certain plants and trees, the sighing of a breeze in the crowns at the top of the tall, straight trunks. As she breathed in, she tasted the changing scents and touched the leaves and branches as she passed, feeling her way.
“Iris!” Far below, Suzanne had stopped to lean on a cedar. She took a drink of water and caught up to Iris. Suzanne was breathing hard as she pulled the topo map out of the side pocket of her pants. “Don’t you want to check this?”
Iris shook her head.
Suzanne looked around. It was only trees and shrubs and flowers and sky to her. “Do you recognize this?”
Iris wasn’t sure how to answer. If she said yes, Suzanne would ask more questions. But denying what she felt would be a lie.
She shrugged and walked on.
Deer trails appeared and disappeared. Iris chose the ones leading mostly west toward the larger mountain she intuited lay beyond her view. They crossed a small stream, but the sounds it made spoke an unfamiliar story, and Iris did not turn to hike alongside it. At the top of the hill, the trees were spaced farther apart. Crowded between them were blackberry bushes, white with blossoms. The sun had climbed with them and showered the understory with light. Iris paused.
Suzanne offered her water. While Iris drank, Suzanne was silent. Perhaps she sensed what Iris now felt with certainty and dread. Her woods—her home—were near. Iris passed the bottle to Suzanne, avoiding her gaze, and set off again, more slowly now, not for Suzanne, but for herself.
Iris picked her way across the hilltop and down the gentle western slope into a shallow crease between this hill and the one to the south, then continued along the next rise, tracing the contour of the large mountain she had been heading toward all morning. Suzanne kept pace with her. The birds had quieted in their midday roosts. Suzanne and Iris’s footfalls in the damp mulch and the occasional frantic rustling of a squirrel were the only sounds. They skirted a tangle of downed tree limbs overgrown with brambles. On the far side stood an enormous boulder and, beyond, a lightly forested area filled with dappled light and blanketed in delicate white flowers.
Iris stopped.
Su
zanne came up beside her. “Look at that.” She crouched and lifted the petals of a flower with two fingers. “Least trillium. The one you talked about, Iris.”
Iris nodded. She adjusted the backpack on her shoulders and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, trying to account for the sliding sensation in her belly. She scanned the area. There, near the boulder, was a wooden sign, half-hidden by the flowers that had grown up around it. She approached the sign, placing her feet with care among the flowers, and squatted in front of it.
“What is it?” Suzanne said.
The sign was two feet square and made of hickory, the streaky grain running horizontally. A name had been carved in the wood. Iris held her breath and touched the grooves of the letters.
Ash.
The edges of her vision darkened and she blinked hard. She ran her fingers down the board, pushing aside the flowers.
Numbers. Dates.
APRIL 1, 2002–JULY 27, 2011
Iris placed her hands on the ground to steady herself. Her heart beat loudly in her ears. Her lungs squeezed and she winced in pain.
July 2011? Six years ago. When Daddy left.
She pictured him, his face hard and broken, going out the door, stepping off the porch with long strides. Sweat stains down the back of his shirt. Thin, bare legs dangling from his right side. Ash.
Iris ran after them, shouting, crying.
Mama caught her, scooped her up, and held her, the way Daddy was holding Ash. Wouldn’t let her go no matter how she tried to wrestle her way out of Mama’s grip.
Daddy passing the wood pile, the sang patch, disappearing down the hill. Gone.
April fools, Ash. April fools.
A hand on her shoulder.
Suzanne talking. Questions.