That could be years. I’ll be working on the grow for years.
I feel as if I’ve swallowed a pine cone and it’s lodged in my throat. But I can’t see any other option.
When I reach Judith’s place, sweaty and exhausted, it’s Garrett who answers the door. Turquoise briefs and a surprisingly furry chest.
“I think you’d better sleep it off somewhere and come back in the morning,” he says.
“Sweetheart?” Judith’s voice calls from the dark. She’s made it back from the mountain, obviously.
“I need to talk to her,” I say, my breath still ragged.
“Are you high?” he asks.
That’s not an excuse.
He leans against the doorframe as if he owns the place, but that’s not a good excuse, either.
I really have no excuse for what I do next.
I haul him out, drag him over the plastic step and press him against the metal side of the bus. I’m so angry that I barely know what I’m doing, yet somehow I have time to be surprised that I’m this much bigger and stronger than Judith’s weasel.
It feels good to grind my forearms into his chest.
“What the hell?” When Judith pokes her bed head outside, Garrett has both arms in the air, surrendering to a crazy person.
“I need help,” I tell her.
“This is an interesting way to ask for it.”
I love my sister. Nothing riles her.
“I tried other ways.”
She’s already gone back inside. I hear her rummaging around, presumably getting dressed. Slowly, I loosen my grip on Garrett.
“Fuck, man,” he says, rubbing his neck.
I don’t feel like apologizing. Instead I walk to Judith’s car and shift from foot to foot beside the door, waiting for her to emerge.
Garrett, after glaring at me for a few more minutes, bangs his way back into the bus.
“No way you’re going with him.” I hear his voice through the thin walls, as clearly as if he were standing beside me.
“He’s my brother, baby.”
Since when does Judith call anyone “baby”?
“Fuck that. He’s high as a kite, and whatever trouble he’s in, it’s not your problem.” The wall shudders with the smack of his hand. I take a step toward the door.
But then…
“I have to go. I’ll make it up to you.” Judith emerges, hopping down the stairs and over the grass toward me. And if I loved her before, I love her double now for the way she leaves everything she has, without a moment’s hesitation, because I need her.
•
I sit in the silence of Judith’s car in the middle of the police parking lot, shivering. A big part of me wants to push through the glass doors and demand to know where Lucas and Sam are, what’s going on, what’s taking so long. They must both be in there. If they had gotten away, Judith would be back by now.
I press my fingers into my forehead, trying to squeeze out all the stupid things I’ve done tonight.
There’s a moth beside me, perfectly still on a brown blanket that Judith has thrown over her console. He’s like a visitor from home. I lean closer. It’s shocking how perfect something so tiny can be. He has double wings — the outer ones speckled brown on brown and the inner ones in a minuscule pattern of waves. On his head there are antennae thinner than the hairs on my arm.
I wonder what he keeps in that pin-sized brain. Does he know only want? Need? Does a moth have dreams? Is he purely survival instinct, or does he make choices?
I move my hand closer, wanting to brush my finger along the edge of his perfect wing, but I startle him and he’s up, flapping and zigzagging like an out-of-control fighter pilot.
I crack open the door and he darts at the car’s overhead light. That’s a choice made in the pressure of a moment that’s obviously not the right one. Which only leaves the question of whether my brain is better equipped than a moth’s.
I scoop him toward the door and finally he’s outside. He can fly all the way back up the mountain if his little wings can carry him that far. But they don’t. Even as I watch, he’s distracted by the light beside the police station door. He flaps in erratic circles around the bulb.
I’m about to draw final conclusions on my own life, when the door swings open and Judith emerges, Lucas in tow.
“I couldn’t get Sam,” Judith says as she climbs into the driver’s side. “She’s with her dad.”
Lucas folds himself into the back seat. His teeth are chattering. There’s something heartbreaking about a big guy with chattering teeth. I throw him the moth’s blanket.
“Sorry,” he says.
“What are you sorry for? We both climbed into that truck.”
He shrugs. His eyes look shiny in the dark.
“Let’s blow this pop stand.” Judith is actually grinning as she starts the car. Lucas gives her directions to his house.
“Did they call your dad?” I ask Lucas, turning back to peer at him again.
Lucas nods for a minute, then shakes his head. The guy is obviously traumatized.
“Really?”
He shrugs. “Judith said my parents were out of town. Said she was my cousin.”
“It’s all in the eyelashes,” Judith says.
“She’s good in a crisis,” I say. My sister just walked straight into a police station for me — something that must have gone against every ounce of her upbringing. I look at her with a new admiration. “That was heroic, breaking this guy out.”
“Sam must have told them I wasn’t driving,” Lucas says.
“Did you see her? Before you left?”
They both shake their heads.
I shouldn’t see her, either. I should walk away. After watching her drive that truck, every moment of our past few weeks seems skewed. When we were in the hot tub, was she hoping we’d get caught? Did she ask me to pick her up for breakfast knowing her dad would be home, and knowing he’d call me a shitrat? How many times did she mention me just to see if he’d take the bait?
The questions make my gut clench.
Yet I still want to see her. I suppose I want to look in her eyes and know if the worst is true.
Judith pulls up to the curb outside Lucas’s house.
“Text me later,” I tell him.
He gives me a twisted sort of smile, like he’s in pain.
Judith takes me to her place after that. It’s thankfully free of Garrett, though not of the stench of Garrett’s cologne.
“Hey,” I say, before we fall asleep. “Thanks.”
“Anytime,” she says.
•
I stare into blackness for the rest of the night, until birds start chirping in the orchard trees.
Gradually the silhouettes of kitchen cupboards take shape above me.
It’s finally morning.
Judith snores softly, a pillow half over her head.
When I climb to my feet, my knees are wobbly. My eyes feel as if someone’s poured acid into them. My head aches. But mostly I feel weighted down. There’s a mix of sad and angry churning around in my gut.
I feel terrible about Lucas. I hope his dad was asleep when we dropped him off last night.
But it’s more than that. I’m mad at myself for leaving the cabin yesterday and going to the grad ceremony. I’m even more angry that I climbed into that pickup. And I’m furious at Sam for intentionally landing us in trouble. She barreled straight toward disaster and dragged Lucas and me along with her.
Judith hasn’t stirred. As quietly as possible in a place that shakes when I breathe, I pull on my crumpled suit pants, tuck my jacket and my art book into a bundle under my arm and let myself out.
The cool air feels like a slap, in a good way. I take a few gulps, then start to walk, heading for the school parking lot and my truck.
<
br /> •
I park down the street from Sam’s house and text her. Then I wait. I must doze off, eventually, because my phone startles me when it buzzes.
Sam’s home. She’s going to sneak out and meet me at the playground down the street.
When she arrives, I’m standing in the trees at the far edge of the park, half-hidden in the shade. I wave, and she joins me. She’s dressed in the most conventional outfit I’ve ever seen her wear: jeans and a black T-shirt. She looks like a twelve-year-old kid.
“Hey.” She doesn’t meet my eyes.
Somehow, I thought she’d apologize.
“You okay?”
She nods.
“That was scary,” I say, careful to keep my voice level. “What the hell, Sam?”
She kicks at the gravel with the toe of her sneaker.
“I guess I want to know if you had it all planned. This whole spring, was I supposed to be bait? A shitrat to drive your dad nuts?”
She winces then and mumbles something.
“What?”
“Side benefit.”
I feel as if I could reach back and rip out one of these trees.
“So you were using me.” A picture flashes into my head of her holding a huckleberry blossom in her hand. It was all fake.
“I wasn’t using you!” Her voice cracks. “I liked you. You were different. And you could do anything you wanted, if you didn’t have your head up your ass.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Maybe you’re the one who was using me!”
“For what? How would I be using you?” I’m yelling now, but there’s a voice inside my head telling me she’s right. What was my entire “temporary leave of absence” plan, if it didn’t include her?
I grit my teeth. “I’m not the one with the spotlight personality, looking for attention all the time. Did it work? Are you happy now?”
“Yeah. I’m fucking ecstatic, Zac. Can’t you tell?”
Walt would really love this girl.
“I don’t think we can see each other anymore.”
She laughs, an angry, bitter laugh that doesn’t match at all with her new makeup-free face. “Thanks for clarifying.”
So I leave. I hear chains rattle behind me, and when I glance back, she’s sitting on one of the swings, watching me. She doesn’t look angry anymore. She looks…guilty.
I set my jaw and force myself to climb into the truck, close the door and drive away.
•
When I cut the engine on the ATV, in that moment before the birds start singing again, there’s a perfect stillness. I want to burrow inside it the way I used to dive into piles of leaves when I was small.
A crow is the first, his loud caw echoing through the trees. A squirrel natters at me from high above. As my ears adjust, I hear small rustlings and brushings. Fur against branch, leaf against leaf.
I make my way up the trail, feeling the town fade behind me. Oil and gas replaced by the thick, dusky smell of the woods. A faint rumble below as a big truck passes on the highway, then nothing but wind again, rattling branches.
It’s entirely peaceful here, yet I feel as if I’ve been mauled by wild animals and left to die.
At the crunch of a branch, I look uphill.
It’s Hazel. She’s snuffling her big cinnamon-brown snout in welcome. I drop to my butt in the middle of the trail, wait for her to plod toward me, then wrap my arms around her massive neck and press my forehead into her shoulder. My chest cracks open and suddenly my whole body’s shaking.
Hazel lets out a long, slow sigh and butts my head gently with hers.
“You should be happy,” I tell her, once I regain some control. “You have no competition now.”
15
I throw myself into work, adding hours of chores onto the daily watering. At first I split cedar into kindling. Dad has a mallet and an L-shaped tool called a froe. It’s strangely satisfying to bang the froe into the wood and split the cedar along the grain. Sheets of it pile up around me. But after a while, it’s too repetitive. There’s a rhythm to the work and my hands begin to operate automatically, leaving me too much time to think. Too much time to remember Sam’s lips, or the arc of her eyebrow.
I switch to painting the cabin logs. Dad bought stain a few years ago, but he never got around to using it. The half-rusted cans are stacked in the shadow of the drying shed. I pry the lid from the first one, dig up an old brush and go to work.
It takes me three days, half of that time balanced on a homemade ladder. I try to focus on the line between the old wood and the shiny stained version, the signs of progress, the constant up and down the ladder, back and forth along the beams.
But I can’t stay focused all the time. I find myself picturing Sam’s swing on the rope into the river. Or the way she dips both ends of each French fry in ketchup.
When Big Bugger knocks over my paint tray and plods off, leaving cedar-stain paw prints, I immediately imagine telling the story to Sam.
Then I remember we’re not together and I could never tell her stories about bears, anyway. My insides echo like the blackened center of a lightning-struck tree.
Whenever Dad walks by, I try to gather the courage to tell him.
This is what I need to say: I’ve broken up with Sam, and my art school option didn’t work out, but staying here is going to crush me.
•
Mom sees footprints while she’s picking dandelion leaves near the logging road early one morning. She says there might have been fresh tire tracks on the road — it was hard to tell.
“Gotta move,” Walt says. “Fucking prick.”
“Probably nothing. Hikers,” Dad says.
Which seems entirely unlike Dad. And how would hikers get a vehicle past the gate?
I follow Mom to a huckleberry patch after breakfast. There are still beads of moisture clinging to the leaves, and my legs are both slick and sliced by the time we’ve picked our way there. Big Bugger and Queenie have beaten us to it, but they’re in a sugar stupor and barely glance in our direction. Hazel, on the other hand, would rather eat berries from my bucket than from the bushes.
“Don’t be so lazy,” I say, pushing her head away.
Mom efficiently pops the big orbs from their branches. They’re dark blue-purple — almost black, plump and wide like blueberries on steroids. Soon our hands are stained with berry juice. When I look over at Mom, she has a purple streak on her chin.
“You’re supposed to pick them, not eat them.”
She tosses a berry at my head.
With her hair swinging in a ponytail, she could still be the teenager who met Dad at the counter of Sunset Seed Supply. She could still be the young mom who used to chase me through the woods. Or the mom who quizzed me on my times tables while balanced on a tree branch, because I’d refused to do my schoolwork inside that day.
“What?” she asks now.
I realize I’ve stopped picking. I’ve been staring at her.
“What do you think about Walt’s other property? Does it exist?”
“Oh, it exists,” she says. “This grow makes good money. He’s probably got a few properties stashed away.”
I let this sink in.
“So…do you think it’s possible? To get Walt there and get set up again?” I ask finally.
“We’d manage. He says there’s a cabin of some sort.”
She’s willing to risk the unknown. I suppose it’s the same thing she did when she left town and followed Dad to their first grow. Then followed him to this property a few years later. Maybe the real risk-taker in my family is my herb-picking, tea-making mother.
“Do you think it’s time to go?” I ask her.
“We left the old place without nearly so many signs of trouble.”
“Laws have changed since then,�
�� I say.
“Not enough.”
“So why isn’t he packing?” Because it’s Dad who seems stuck here like an old rootball.
“Lots of reasons,” she says.
I stare at her until she elaborates.
“You. Judith. The bears.”
“Judith and I can take care of ourselves.”
But the bears. As I think about them, I see the problems. We can’t load them into the pickup and drive them through town on our way to some other plot. They’re habituated.
“We can’t leave the bears behind, can we?”
“They’ll go looking for food at the campground, or they’ll turn up at someone’s lake house,” she says. “And bears are territorial. If we managed to take them, they’d cause trouble at the new place.”
Hazel chooses that moment to push her head beneath my arm, almost upsetting the berry bucket.
“You’re a problem,” I tell her, scratching behind her ear the way she likes.
A big problem. To leave the grow, Dad will have to abandon the bears. And though he doesn’t know it, he’ll have to go without me. It seems like a rough one-two punch to lay on a guy.
I look back at Mom, who’s still eating as many berries as she’s picking.
“If I ever left, I’d miss your huckleberry pancakes.”
The words slip out. When I realize what I’ve said, I glance at her quickly.
She stares back at me, her hands stilled.
“Oh,” she says. She turns her head away slightly, but I can still see her eyelashes blinking fast.
I wait. I want to reach for her, to touch her arm. I want to make everything okay. But it doesn’t seem possible to make everything okay for everyone.
“Well, it’s a big world out there,” she says finally.
I don’t know whether that’s a warning or a blessing.
•
Within a few more days, I’m going crazy. I’ve split enough kindling to last us a year. The cabin’s stained. I’ve greased each of Dad’s traps. I even extracted a mangled squirrel from one and tossed it to the nearest bear. I’ve checked each water line and hose for leaks and replaced a rusty connection.
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