“Mom,” was all Miranda could say, but her mother stood, her boot pressing right into the giant hole where Miranda had ruined the footprint the night before.
“Come on,” Kat said. “Maybe if we hurry we can get ahead of the storm.”
Miranda’s new golden hair hadn’t grown to cover the bald patch, but she couldn’t stop her hands from pulling out hair after hair after hair. Enough to spin into thread. Enough to make everything go away for a moment. And then another moment. And then another.
She walked behind her mother, gold hair sopping against her face and forehead. There had to be some logical explanation. Her hair had been bleached by the sun, she reasoned, but even she knew this was far-fetched. An entire head of jet black hair, made golden in a day by the famous Washington sunshine?
The lights . . . they were tricks on her eyes, distortions of the fog in the night — so many tricks this forest wanted to play on the unsuspecting humans, so many things that seemed to be one thing but were actually something else. But even as she thought it, she knew there was no fog on earth that could produce such color, such movement, such tiny little people with wings —
Why couldn’t she admit the truth to her mom?
Why couldn’t she admit it to herself?
Why was it so hard for her to believe?
Miranda’s lips hurt.
They were chapped, and sunburned, and every raindrop that fell on her face slid down into the cracks and stung.
Her body hurt.
Her calves screamed for a hot bath, her feet were blistered and chafed in her boots, her back ached as if she’d hung a thousand streamers for the Fall Fling in the school gym.
The Fall Fling.
What if she didn’t make it back in time to finish preparations?
What if she let everyone down?
What if she was remembered as the worst student body president in the history of the school?
Her head hurt.
The walking, and the worrying, and the wondering if they would ever make it back to safety — those thoughts, combined with the tension between her and her mother — it made her temples pound and her brain want to snooze.
To go back to sleep, and dream through these difficult hours.
They hiked. For hours, they hiked — Miranda had no idea where they were, but the colors around them changed — from autumn’s bold, gilded spectrum to a gray, bleak, dead area where the trees spiked black against the sky and the ground was littered with dusty old twigs zapped of color, and now, back into the green.
“Look!” Kat opened her arms wide. “Moss! We’re back on the right track now.”
Yes, the moss, the moss — Miranda felt dizzy as she searched the forest for any space that wasn’t grown over with, dangling with, infected with green.
It bunched on tree branches and felled logs once, twice, three times over, making the world look blurry. It hung over ponds, brushing the still water like a maiden’s hair.
It’s only moss, she had to tell herself more than once. Still, she flicked her head over her shoulders, back and forth, watching for movement in the shadows.
At a bend in a tea-colored stream, Kat filled the bottle and passed it to Miranda; Miranda knelt in the mud and caught her reflection in the water — the golden hair made her glow. The human incarnation of a butterfly, a sunbeam.
She caught her mother peering down at her; Kat looked away, her eyelids fluttering like wounded birds.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miranda thought. The second she got home, she would buy a box of hair dye.
Then Kat would stop looking at her like that.
Then Miranda could forget any of this ever happened.
“Bean! Bean!” Kat jumped to her feet and pointed, farther down the stream. “Look!”
Miranda looked — and immediately wished she hadn’t. Not one, but four footprints this time, giant ones, sunk into the muddy bank, filled with rain. Five toes the size of sausages, a curved heel, a series of ridges and valleys like humanoid skin.
Not an animal.
Something else.
They stepped in procession; she could follow the path where they led, if she wanted to. She didn’t want to. She wanted to stomp and twist and writhe until they were erased — but Kat had already seen them.
“Oh, yes! Yes, yes, yes!” Kat jumped up, punching the wet air with grimy fists. “A succession — this is it, Bean, this is it! These prints are fresh — within the hour. There’s a Bigfoot nearby!”
Miranda’s stomach curdled.
Kat placed a gentle hand on her back. “Are you okay?”
“No,” Miranda answered honestly, nearly laughing at how easy it was to say it, even with the heat of panic and fear curling down into her toes. “No, I’m not — what made this? Who has a foot this big?”
“Who do you think? Big —”
“No,” Miranda said. “No. There’s no such thing as Bigfoot.”
“Wow, Bean.” Kat shook her head. “You held a giant owl feather. You rode on the back of a river fish the size of a Volkswagen. You saw the thrum trees — you touched the bark. You touched it. You heard the moon dog howling — you saw a fairy and now your hair is gold! How are we supposed to find Bigfoot if you can’t even believe your own eyes?”
“We’re not supposed to find Bigfoot!” Miranda shouted. “We’re supposed to waste three days camping, and hiking, and working through the steps of the scientific method — and then we’re supposed to fail! You’re supposed to give it all up! You’re supposed to admit it’s all nonsense!”
A peal of thunder struck, and then there was a great silence. Like the wind was gathering itself, and the trees were holding their breath.
Kat removed her glasses, cleaning them free of mud smears and smudges, and looked at Miranda, unblinking, her eyes naked and gleaming without the lenses to shield them.
Miranda knew she was unhinged. Knew she was coming unspooled. But it was time. She had practiced saying this for days, now. Practiced the right combination of gentleness and firmness, the right words. But now that the moment was here, she went for blunt: “I found the bills.”
Her mother frowned. “What bills?” She seemed genuinely puzzled, which annoyed Miranda to Pluto and back — of course Kat had already forgotten. Of course she’d put them out of her mind.
“The bills in the silverware drawer, Mom — the stacks and stacks of unpaid bills — how could you let them pile up like that?”
“Those are nothing,” Kat said.
“So the red stamps across the front of the envelopes are nothing?” Miranda wished she had them here to hold up, like a mirror, for her mother — how could Kat remain so cool, so calm? Not a hint of shame that someone had found her secret stash of ignored responsibilities. No shame at all that she’d been caught being a terrible adult.
“Relax,” Kat said, and Miranda tried not to boil. “They use that red ink to scare you. We’re fine.”
“You should be scared!” Flames stoked Miranda’s insides, threatening to devour. “You didn’t even read them — do you know what they say? They will kick us out of our house unless we pay them. Do you understand? We will be homeless!”
“Hey, Bean?” Kat broke a cranberry-and-chocolate granola bar in half. “I’ve got it taken care of.”
A mother saying, “I’ve got it taken care of” to her daughter should be a source of comfort, should be the final words needed for a daughter to push a situation out of her mind, flop onto the couch, turn on the television, and escape from the problems of the grown-up world — but Kat had said she would “take care of the lawn,” and when the blades of grass got tall enough to house a family of raccoons, Miranda had to beg the neighbors to borrow their lawn mower.
Kat had promised to “take care of the library books,” and six weeks later, Miranda went to the library to do homework and the librarian took away her card in front of everyone because the books were still in the back of the Critter Mobile.
Kat had promised, at the beginning of
every trip, that they’d find something. “We’re close, Bean, I can feel it”— how many times had she said this exact thing, and then they’d come home with nothing?
The granola bar still waited in Kat’s outstretched hand; Miranda pushed it back toward her mother. “You got a loan?” She was suspicious. “Or you talked to the credit card companies? The bank?”
“I told you, I’m taking care of it.” Kat tried to hand her the granola bar again. “Will you eat this, please?”
“With a grant, or what?” Miranda wanted specifics.
Kat sighed and dropped her hand before the granola bar got soggy in the rain. “I know our trip got derailed, but we’re close, Bean! Look at these footprints — this is the closest we’ve ever been, and when we do find Bigfoot, we’ll have the money to —”
“How?” Miranda’s voice was shredded, corroded from the weekend of shouting and crying and hiking. “How will you do this? You think the world will pay you for some stray hairs? A plaster of another footprint? You have a house payment. You have bills. You have me.” She had tipped over the abundance of things she felt about her mom, things she wanted to say — that Kat was irresponsible, that Miranda felt like her childhood was taken over by her need to be the adult in the house.
How could you let it get this far?
How could you choose Bigfoot over me?
“You have to find a new job,” she said to her mother. “When we get home, you have to give up all this — this make-believe — and act like a real grown-up!”
“How can you say that?” Kat said. “After all these years — how can you call it make-believe?”
Miranda set her jaw. “Because it’s true! Bigfoot isn’t real! Every qualified scientist says so.”
“Scientists don’t know everything, Bean!” Kat said.
“How would you know?” Miranda spat. “You dropped out before you got your degree!”
Kat was calm as she replied. “Some things you don’t have to go to school to know. Some things are true whether your professors say so or not — why can’t you trust me on this?”
“Why can’t I trust you? You’re really asking me that?” Miranda was a loosed arrow, a boulder rolling down a hill and gaining momentum. “What about our bills, Mom? What about the foreclosure notice? Can I trust you to take care of those? Or maybe you believe they’ll just magically go away —”
“Hey!” Kat snapped, and the sound echoed off the pines. “You don’t get to lecture me on how I do things.”
“Doing things like shoving unpaid bills into a silverware drawer to forget about them?” Miranda forgot about being lost in a forest; she forgot all they had endured in the last two days. The only thing that mattered now was firing shots.
Being right.
Winning.
“Have you ever once gone without food?” Kat said. “Or clean water?”
Miranda paused. “No.”
“Have you ever started a school year without new shoes, and new clothes, and a new backpack, if you wanted it?”
“No, but —”
“I have kept a roof over your head your entire life, Bean. I’ve busted my butt to make sure you never go without a thing.” Kat’s voice was sharp enough to fell a tree. “To make sure you have the kind of life I want my daughter to have. And what I’m hearing from you now is you don’t trust me to take care of this situation?” She clicked her tongue. “You think this situation is bad? I have been through much worse, and I’ve made it to the other side kicking and punching. So show a little respect, huh?”
“I’ve gone without things.” Somehow Miranda kept her hands to her side, though her head itched, every little hair volunteering to be pulled in a chorus. “I’ve gone without Grandma. I’ve gone without friends. And I’ve gone without Dad.”
Gutted. Open and raw and out of words.
“Oh, Miranda.” Kat placed her hands on Miranda’s shoulders; Miranda was shaking too hard to push her away.
“He left, and now he’s off in California with his start-up, and I’m stuck here with a mom who thinks if you shake a forest hard enough, Bigfoot will fall out.”
As soon as she said it, she knew it was a mistake. She’d said too much.
Too many tentacles.
Kat closed her eyes. “How? How did he find you?”
“I found him.” The rain fell, and Miranda explained how she searched for him online — how she’s been searching, and writing to him, every week for years.
She didn’t explain how she searched for him all the time — in spare moments, in spaces after midnight and before dawn, whenever she felt rootless and weightless, whenever she felt less than perfect . . .
Her face burned when she admitted she’d sent him e-mails.
Kat, who been listening patiently, cleared her throat. “What did you say? In your e-mails?”
“Just — I just told him who I am. Told him about my camp. About school. About me.” A lone tear rolled down her cheek. “I just thought — that if he knew me, if he knew what I was like — maybe he’d want to come back.”
There it was. The stupidest thing she believed.
And then she let herself cry, and her mom let her cry, and the rain fell harder.
“And what did he say, Bean?”
There it was, at last — the splitting of her heart in two: “He’s never written back.”
Kat brushed Miranda’s cheeks clean of rain, clean of tears. “Bean, I — I have to tell you something.” She lifted a fingernail to her mouth, about to chew it, then gained control and dropped it back to her side. “I got a phone call from him. Six months ago.”
“He called you?” Was Miranda hearing her correctly, or was the rain distorting her mother’s voice?
“His marketers for the start-up quit his account. Investors were dropping like flies. He needed money.”
“Dad asked you for money?” Miranda’s stomach opened wide enough to sink a ship.
Kat nodded. “He had to pull out of his partnership. He sold his spot and his fancy apartment and his car, and he moved —”
“Where?” The word burst from Miranda like a gunshot. “Where’d he move?”
Kat paused.
And Miranda felt as teeny as a fairy, as insignificant as a pebble.
“Oh, he’s about an hour away from us,” Kat said. “He was going to try to get a job at the hardware plant.”
“And he didn’t ask — he didn’t want —”
The last thing Miranda saw before she fell into her mom was those star-eyes, shining with pity, and then she was pressed against Kat, and she lost the forest; all that existed was this shoulder, this arm, the place where they connected. A shoulder that would never leave her.
Miranda’s mind spun through the new information — her father was not a business tycoon; he was making parts for flash drives and cell phone batteries, and was an hour’s drive from those stupid gnomes on their front porch.
An hour away. One hour.
Less time than a movie, less time than first period.
A single stone on her back, heavy enough to drown her.
“I’m so sorry,” Kat whispered, her lips pressing the words against Miranda’s golden hair. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” That was the kind of thing you said in moments like this, wasn’t it?
“Bean, I want to tell you —”
A growl.
The most terrifying sound Miranda had ever heard.
The sound of a black bear, a monster, snarling its satisfaction over finding its long-lost prey. The smell of it behind them, that stink of wild animal, its musk and its fur, damp in the rain.
They didn’t wait for it to tear out of the bushes, they didn’t argue about what to do next.
They ran.
Stand your ground, stand your ground, stand your ground.
Miranda’s own words rang through her ears, but even she was too terrified to do anything but go. You’re not supposed to run from bears; you’re supposed to stand your ground, make
yourself tall, shout and scream and kick to make them realize you’re a fighter — but Miranda ran.
This doesn’t mean anything, she told herself as she scrambled around the spiking branches of a downed fir. This is pure instinct, to flee a predator. This doesn’t mean I think — it doesn’t mean I believe —
The river! There it was again, a sure sign that they were headed the right way. They followed it upstream this time — running, running — and then there were the falls, and the reservoir with the strange things shaped like feathers and there, near the water’s edge, Kat yanked Miranda behind a row of boulders.
“Shhh,” she whispered — as if Miranda needed the prompt to remain silent. She would have stopped breathing, stopped her heartbeat altogether, if it meant they would be safe.
She strained for any sound of the bear, but heard nothing over the noise of the falls. Her legs began cramping, her heart beat a drumline.
Kat pulled Miranda into her side, her arm a surprisingly heavy comfort — Miranda’s nose caught the last vestiges of her cotton-candy lotion scent, buried beneath layers of sweat and dirt.
Her pulse slowed.
Is that why she really ran? Out of instinct?
Or was there a teensy-tiny part of her that still wanted to believe?
“Mom —” she whispered, and Kat held up one finger, lifting her head above the boulders to peek around.
An angry roar sounded above the crash of the waterfall, and Kat grabbed Miranda’s hand. “Come on!” she cried, and around the lake they ran, through the swampy shore, their feet squishing in the mud. The bear chased them through the hazy rain, and Miranda’s brain shook out the final panicked questions —
What if this is it?
What if we survived the last two days in the woods only to be torn to shreds by this bear?
What if this is how we go?
“Follow me!” Kat did not bolt into the trees, but scrambled up the wet, mossy rocks of the falls, next to the rushing water, hiking to the top.
“The Internet said bears are supposed to be good climbers!” Miranda said. She couldn’t help it — this was how her brain operated. See a problem, make a list, find a solution.
The Bigfoot Files Page 21