Zen and Gone

by Emily France

  “Dry over there?” Oliver asked.

  “Close enough,” Essa said, stretching her arms above her head.

  Oliver stoked the fire with a stick, sending a spray of embers into the night sky. “We should get some sleep.”

  “I don’t think I can. Not until I get Puck out of here. I won’t be able to sleep a wink.”

  “You guys are pros,” Oliver said. “As soon as the sun comes up, we’ll just hike back to the car and be out of here.”

  Essa didn’t respond. She stared into the flames.

  “Right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Essa lied. “As soon as the sun comes up, we’ll head back.” She watched the fire dance in his eyes. He eased off the log and sat down next to her. She couldn’t believe they were up here like this. Stuck, maybe lost. “I bet you never imagined you’d be in the mountains like this when you were planning your summer out here.”

  Oliver grinned, but it faded quickly. “I didn’t exactly plan my summer. It was sort of . . . planned for me.”

  Far off, an owl pierced the night with a lonely hoot. It made Essa feel melancholy, inexplicably homesick for a home that was in total disarray. A home that was being invaded by a wannabe medicine man. A home that was being moved to Portland.

  “What do you mean?” Essa could feel a change come over Oliver. He seemed smaller, quieter, like he’d retreated inside a memory he didn’t want to have. “Tell me.” She whispered it.

  “The last time I was with Lilly in Chicago,” Oliver said, keeping his gaze at the fire. “She was just out of control, you know? In a delusion. Something about our dad being involved in a crime. A felony. My parents were in the kitchen arguing about the divorce, and I was back in Lilly’s room, trying to keep her calm. She said she’d been getting clues in the crossword puzzles from the Chicago Tribune about Dad’s crimes. That she was putting it all together. That’s how her mind works. She starts seeing clues everywhere. Like her whole life is a mystery novel.”

  The fire hissed loudly and spit a hot ember at Essa’s legs. She pulled them back just in time. A sound came from behind them in the woods. A crack. A snap. She looked over her shoulder but didn’t see anything in the darkness.

  Probably a raccoon.

  “Normally I just go with it,” Oliver continued. “I just act like I believe whatever Lilly is saying. Just to be wherever she is.” He stopped and stared up at the dark sky. He shook his head. “I should’ve just asked her to show me the crossword clues, to tell me what felony she thought Dad had committed. I should’ve acted like I was going to call the police on him, get to the bottom of it, take care of it . . .”

  Oliver stopped talking. He slumped like the memory was a heavy wet wool coat someone had just draped over his shoulders. Essa waited for him to continue. He didn’t.

  She looked at him, hoping he wouldn’t stop. “What did you say instead?”

  Oliver took a deep breath. “I said what our family therapists have always told us to say. You’re not supposed to tell a person with schizophrenia that their reality is wrong. But you’re not supposed to tell them it’s right, either. That just feeds the delusions. You’re supposed to say that you understand what they are thinking or seeing, but that you don’t see things the same way.” He worried a wet thread of his jeans between his thumb and forefinger. “You’re supposed to acknowledge that you’re in two different worlds. She has hers. And you have yours. Both valid.”

  “And that’s what you said?”

  He paused and stared into the flames. “Sort of. I said I understood that she thought Dad had committed some horrible crime, but that I didn’t.”

  Essa could tell Oliver was close to tears. “That’s not so bad,” she said. She sat up and scooted closer to him. She rubbed his back. “That’s what the doctors told you to do. You were just being honest—”

  “That’s not the end of it,” Oliver said. “She got so upset. So mad at me. I’d always been her advocate, you know? The one who got her. Who understood. She started screaming about how I’d betrayed her. And then I just lost it. I told her she was crazy. Completely nuts. And then I . . .” Oliver trailed off again. “I can’t really talk about it anymore. Hurts too much.”

  Essa didn’t give any thought about what to do next. She didn’t run through her options.

  She wrapped her arms around him.

  She meant to just breathe. In and out. To just be with him. To be with what was really happening. The crackle of the fire. The curling heat from the flames. The cool wind sliding through the trees. The animals they couldn’t see. The heartache nested in Oliver’s chest like a handful of baby birds squawking for attention.

  Memories are like clouds drifting by mountains.

  Watch them. Tend to them.

  But know

  You’re the mountain.

  “That must hurt,” Essa whispered. “So much. That she’s so sick.” As she held him, his warm cheek brushed against hers. The smell of his skin blocked out the scent of pine and wet leaves. Her eyes closed. She didn’t know if she reached for him or if he reached for her, but they found each other. She felt like she disappeared in his arms, like there was nothing left of her except the sensation of his lips, his arms around her waist, the gentle pressure of his chest against hers. The understanding between the two of that word: sister.

  A loud thud sounded near the shelter. Then she heard the mad rustling and footsteps.

  “Hell, yes!” It was Micah. Who had apparently raced out of the shelter. Essa pulled away from Oliver and squinted in the darkness. Micah started dancing. “Who’s eating mouse tonight?” He swung his hips to the left. Then the right. “This guy!”

  “The deadfall,” Essa said, smiling in the darkness. “It worked.”

  PART II

  THE SECOND NOBLE TRUTH:

  The Arising of Duhkha

  I want.

  I want her.

  I want to feel.

  I want to have fun.

  I don’t want to miss out.

  I want to hear a good story.

  I want things to be different.

  I want to be different.

  I want the good to stay good.

  I want the bad to stay gone.

  I want to live.

  But sometimes, I want to die.

  These desires. They’re inexhaustible. Unquenchable.

  The arising of duhkha.

  June 23

  3 a.m.

  25

  ESSA

  It was her job to keep Puck safe.

  It was Essa’s job to keep an ear out, an eye out, to be aware of any danger. It always had been. But it was especially true up here. Especially true tonight.

  She’d awakened, searched inside the shelter and out; Puck was gone. And so was Oliver. Micah was groggy and useless.

  “Puck! Oliver!” she called again into the dark woods. “If you’re hiding, come out. This isn’t funny!”

  Off to her right, she heard something. Footsteps. She was sure of it. Out of the blackness, she could barely make out a shadowy figure coming toward her. Tall. Long legs. Broad shoulders.

  “Hey.”

  It was Oliver. He put a cold hand on her arm.

  “Where were you?” Essa was nearly screaming. “Where’s Puck?”

  “I was taking a leak. Away from camp like you said, so we don’t attract bears. She’s not with you?”

  “No,” she said. “You didn’t see her? Did she come out after you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Oliver said. “I mean, not that I know of. I didn’t see her, I—”

  “Puck!” Essa called again into the nothingness, pulling away from Oliver’s cold grasp. She looked at his face, wanting to see his eyes, his expression. It was too dark. Then, like tripping over a tree root in the woods, seeing it snake out of the ground too late, like tu
mbling face first into the loam, something hit her:

  She’d fallen in love with him.

  And she hadn’t even known him a month.

  She stared at his face again, hidden by the night.

  Is he telling me the truth?

  She turned toward the gaping blackness of the woods behind her. “Puck! Where are you?”

  She pulled in a breath and held it as she waited to hear Puck’s tiny voice call back to her. She didn’t dare exhale, afraid her own breathing would obscure a sound. Her chest squeezed tight and then tighter still. She closed her eyes and willed her ears to hear better than they ever had before. She forced all her energy into them and for a moment felt like she could hear at superhuman levels. Like she could hear the tiny tinkling of insect footsteps as they crawled along the cold, dead leaves at her feet. Like she could somehow hear the silent flight of bats overhead, the turning of an owl’s head.

  She heard a rustling. Twenty yards off.

  She didn’t care if it was a bear. She didn’t care if it was a mountain lion. She didn’t care if it was the creepy guy from the woods standing in the darkness with an ax. She took off into the black, straight for the sound, holding her hands out in front of her, begging them to land on her little sister’s soft shoulders.

  “Puck!” Her feet hit the cold forest floor. Faster and faster. “Are you there?”

  She didn’t run into Puck. She ran into Micah. He was out of the shelter now, scraping for an ember that might have survived the night in the fire pan.

  “We need a light,” he said. She could barely make out his hands; they were digging in the remnant of last night’s fire with a stick. “Shit. It’s just ashes.”

  Oliver sidled up to them. “Don’t we have a lighter?”

  “Don’t have one, remember?” Micah said. “Which was my fault. We started it with the bow and drill.”

  “Right,” Oliver said. “Yeah. Bow and drill.” It was obvious from the sound of his voice that he hadn’t been watching and had no idea how a bow and drill worked.

  “Just make the bird’s nest,” Micah said.

  “The what?”

  “Dude, did you not see anything we did? The bird’s nest. That bunch of kindling I made to catch on fire.”

  “Right, right. Bird’s nest.”

  “Just grab dead pine needles. Feel around for the plank of cedar bark we had. Shred it into tiny pieces and put it all in a pile, like a nest.” Micah was already using the wooden bow and drill. Essa could hear him twisting the spindle against a block of wood as fast as he could, trying to get the friction to create a glowing ember. Starting a fire this way could take a long time.

  Oliver and Essa searched the ground for the chunk of cedar bark. They swept the ground all around them, first to the left, then the right. All they felt were prickly pine needles, leaves, roots. Then Essa felt something else. In the dim starlight, she could just make out a collection of sticks, put together in the shape of two mountains. A small circle made of stones was above them. Puck was hunched over here last night, playing with their kindling, making forest artwork. A mountain range with a stone sun.

  Essa felt a pang in her chest as she thought of her sister’s tiny frame hunched over this very spot just last night. Puck had been here. And she’d asked Essa to come look at her art project. Which Essa had failed to do. Essa had said she was busy getting the camp ready or the fire started or . . .

  What was I doing? Why didn’t I stop and look? That might have been the last of Puck’s art I’ll ever see.

  Essa tried to push the darkness of that last thought out of her mind. She went back to her gatha.

  Fears are like clouds drifting past a mountain.

  Watch them. Tend to them.

  But know

  You’re the mountain.

  She grabbed a handful of pine needles to take to Micah and stood up. “Puck!” she called into the darkness again. “If you can hear me, we’re making a light! We’re coming to find you!”

  “I think I’ve got it,” Oliver said. He handed Essa the small plank of cedar bark.

  “We have to shred it,” she said. “Small pieces.”

  Oliver started making a pile of needles and tiny bits of bark. The moon briefly peeked out from behind a cloud, and she could see Micah working the bow harder and harder, the spindle twisting like mad. The smell of the friction smoke from the drill snaked up her nose. Finally, she saw a tiny glow.

  “Dude,” Micah said, “hand me the nest! I’ve got an ember.”

  Oliver picked up his small nest of kindling, crouched next to Micah, and held it near the bow. Micah dumped the tiniest glowing spark on the pile. Essa dropped to all fours and blew on the ember. Luckily, enough of the kindling had dried out from the storm. The fire caught.

  “It’s starting,” Oliver said. “What now?”

  “Feed it,” Micah said. “Just tiny stuff. Don’t suffocate it.”

  Oliver and Micah worked over the tiny pile, and as the flames grew, Essa took off for the shelter. She crawled in, searching in the dark for her small backpack. Her hands hit the cold canvas and zippers, and she ripped open the bag, blindly feeling inside until she found what she was looking for: a small white candle. She always carried one.

  She scrambled out of the shelter and ran toward the fire. She knelt on the ground and pushed the candlewick against the flames. Oliver hunched next to her and blew on the fire to help the candle catch. The firelight tinged his chestnut eyes with a red-and-orange glow.

  “You sure you didn’t see Puck when you left the shelter?” Essa asked him as she pressed the candle closer to the flames. It wasn’t catching. The wick was so tiny. It had nearly broken off in her bag. “Did you hear anything in the woods when you were out there?”

  Oliver leaned back, took a deep breath, and then blew on the fire again. It jumped a few inches higher. “No,” he said. “I really didn’t hear anything.”

  Essa’s monkey mind took off again, and images flooded her brain. Puck being dragged off by a bear or a mountain lion. Puck getting turned around and walking for miles and miles in circles looking for camp. Then the scenes got worse: Puck being hurt. Puck being dragged along the ground, shoved off a nearby cliff. Puck buried under a nearby pile of pine needles and leaves.

  Essa looked again at Oliver’s beautiful face, his dark hair and eyes, lit by the flames. His long legs bent on the ground by the fire pan.

  Are you hiding something?

  He’d never finished the story of what happened with his sister in Chicago right before he came to Boulder. He’d said he’d lost it. He could barely talk about it. Did he . . . do something to her? It hadn’t occurred to Essa that maybe he’d hurt his own sister. Maybe he’d lost his temper. She just thought he’d meant . . .

  “There! It caught,” Oliver said.

  She heard a faint whooshing sound as the candle lit. She stood up, holding the tiny light in the darkness.

  Essa held it high and could see their brush shelter clearly now, the unruly pile of pine and bark and leaves sadly hanging on a pole tied to a tree. She swept the candle to her right, seeing nothing but the skinny white trunks of aspen in the flickering light, standing together like dried, cracked leg bones stuck in the dirt. She swept her arm to the left and saw nothing but the forest floor and the gaping blackness beyond.

  She ran ahead, first in one direction and then another, guarding the light with a cupped hand, desperately looking for a flash of blonde hair, straining to hear the sound of a little-girl giggle, squinting in hopes of seeing her sister’s bright eyes peering at her from the darkness. Essa wanted a million lights, a million hands, the magical ability to grasp for miles around her all at once, to pull Puck in from wherever she was, even if it was at some far end of the earth.

  Essa’s smallness came to her then. A desperate, powerless ache.

  “Puck! Are y
ou there?”

  She saw no movement. She heard no sound. She turned in a circle, sweeping the light around her, a dizzying array of trees and shrubs and nothingness swirling past. A cold breeze surrounded her and snuffed the candle out.

  Essa was plunged back into unrelenting blackness. And in this new darkness, she knew one thing. She hadn’t kept Puck safe. She had failed.

  26

  ESSA

  All they could do was wait for dawn.

  They’d searched as far as they could in the darkness, fanning out in all directions from the fire, never venturing so far that it was out of sight. To light their way, they’d fashioned torches out of large sticks, root cord, and dead pine.

  They hadn’t found Puck.

  Essa sat on the ground near the fire, her eyes trained straight ahead, watching the darkness like it was a solid and separate thing, a slumbering animal that would wake any moment, shake off the sleep, and move out of her way so she could see the woods around her.

  “We’ll find her,” she whispered over and over again as she hugged her knees to her chest and glared at the stubborn blackness. “We’ll find her.”

  And silently, her gatha:

  Breathing in, I know my breath is the wheel of the ship.

  Breathing out, I know the storm will pass.

  Out loud, to the vanishing night:

  “But maybe this one won’t.”

  Oliver sat on the ground next to her and reached an arm around her trembling shoulders.

  “Don’t,” she said sharply, shifting away.

  Oliver sighed. “Sorry. I don’t know what to do . . .”

  Essa didn’t respond.

  “The sun should be up any minute now,” Micah said, tossing another stick onto the flames. The sky was starting to turn a milky gray, like someone was adding drops of cream to the night. “We’ll set a compass bearing. Essa, you take east. I’ll take west. Oliver will take—”