by Spencer Hyde
As we neared the sandy beach where the campfire was completely cooled, I saw a large black mass moving near our raft and considered darting back to my tent, but I didn’t want to be alone.
“It’s after the food,” said Wyatt, pointing at the bags and boxes strewn across the ground. “I knew it.” He looked at me as I bounced on my toes. “Don’t worry, they’re omnivores and don’t usually threaten humans. My bet is he’ll take to the river and swim across when I approach. I’m going to be super loud to make him run. Don’t be scared.”
“Hard not to be a little scared, Wyatt.”
“Fair enough.”
That was Wyatt’s catchall phrase—as if life was giving him just enough not to complain, but not enough to make things easy. Maybe I was more in that boat than I liked to let on. I hated platitudes, but with Wyatt it felt different, like he was using it as a way of explaining himself.
Maybe by saying things were fair enough, he meant that no amount of complaining would change his situation, so why not call it “enough”? He had plenty of reasons, but he was bigger than those reasons, it seemed, from what I knew of him. And that still wasn’t much.
I’d always struggled with recognizing the core in anybody else, like, what really drove them, what really motivated them. It was like I couldn’t see the combustion engine inside the heart, so I assumed that all it took to get a hold on somebody was to look at them and listen briefly. Not a good philosophy. Still, it felt nice to recognize something in Wyatt even while scared out of my mind about the bear.
“You stay here,” Wyatt said. “I’m going to sneak around that side and try to get it to run downstream.”
“Perfect,” I said. “We’ll just meet up with it tomorrow night, then. Can you make sure to tell it where Nash is sleeping? Why can’t I go with you? I don’t want to be alone.”
“The bear will wander somewhere else. He won’t come back this way. He will get distracted or bored. Don’t stress.”
“He will? How do you know it’s a ‘he’? Is it because of the way the bear bottles up its emotions and acts tough even though it just wants to forage and write poetry?”
Wyatt didn’t laugh, and I wasn’t sure why. Instead, he took off without me into the trees, and I was left wondering if I’d made a huge mistake not just in what I’d said but in getting out of my tent in the first place.
I considered returning to my tent, but what if the bear backtracked and found me alone? I squatted on my heels and listened, then scrambled closer to the tents of Shelby and Skye, thinking that even a warm body would be enough to drown out some of the fear roiling inside me.
I looked on as a giant mass in the distance nudged our raft and tore apart our food.
I began shaking their tents, whispering their names as loudly as possible, and telling them a bear was in our camp. I could hear Shelby and Skye moving around in their respective tents. Wyatt didn’t show. I didn’t hear him either.
The bear wandered from the raft to Nash’s tent, which was right next to the water and about twenty yards upstream. I wanted to shout for Wyatt, but I didn’t want to call any attention to myself. I also didn’t want the bear to rip open Nash’s tent and maul him. Well, maybe I did. Maybe a little.
But I knew that was wrong because whenever I thought of Mom, my moral compass knew exactly where to point. She was my lodestar. Justice would be done when Nash admitted to his wrongdoing, not with a life for a life. I knew that much, at least. But why not a small cut? Why not an injury just to remind him what he’d taken from me?
The bear was snorting and pawing at the ground near Nash’s tent, so I stepped out of the cover and into the open space near the firepit. I was scared and felt goose bumps all over my body, but I didn’t want anything to happen to Nash. And why not?
I still didn’t see or hear Wyatt. Where was he? I stepped within twenty yards of the bear just as Skye unzipped his tent door behind me. I lifted the hatchet shoulder-high. If Wyatt wasn’t going to scare it, I would have to. Just then, Wyatt started shouting, and I saw Nash’s tent door unzip.
The bear stood on its hind legs and growled, then immediately landed on all fours and snorted. It quickly made an about-face and lumbered downstream just like Wyatt had said it would—he would.
Wyatt continued to shout and wave his arms in the air as he ran toward Nash’s tent, and Nash turned on his headlamp and pointed it right at where I stood, the hatchet raised, my hands shaking.
I tended to present the illusion that I didn’t know my way around a hatchet or a gun or a fly rod or the outdoors in general. But I was a deadeye with a rifle—with anything, really. I could catch a twenty-two-inch brown on a dry fly in one arcing cast, and I could hit a nickel at three hundred yards with my Winchester. I knew I could throw the hatchet twenty yards and bury it into anything standing or sitting. I wondered why I felt like I had to hide that stuff from people. Like, did somehow focusing on journalism mean I had to give up the other part of who I was?
The headlamp beam obscured most of Nash’s body, but I knew he was staring right at me. Wyatt was five yards from Nash, breathing heavily after chasing the bear away. Nash kept whispering to me, as I stood with the hatchet raised, that the bear was gone, that we were safe, that we could—and should—get back to our tents, and that I only had to put down the hatchet.
Was all the fear finally catching up to me, unloading the adrenaline into my system in that moment, dropping the heavy cargo and leaving me motionless, speechless, in shock? Or did I really want Nash to feel that fear himself, for other reasons?
I thought of these things, but I also recognized I was only a few feet from the man who took my mother out of this world, and I had the power to seriously injure him with just one rotation of my arm and one flick of my wrist. Skye and Shelby walked up next to Wyatt, but didn’t say anything.
“It’s just me, Indie,” said Nash. “We’re all safe now. The bear is gone. It’s over. You can put the hatchet down.”
He held his hands out to his sides. I knew he was thinking exactly what I was in that moment because then he said, “She’d be so proud of you, Indie. You’re brave. Just like her.”
I dropped my arm and felt the weight of the hatchet pull at my wrist. I knew exactly how far it would have flown based on its weight. Just like I knew Nash hadn’t been trying to send my mom into the next life without me. I knew he hadn’t meant to do that. Scratch that—I wanted to know that he hadn’t meant it. But right then, all I knew was that it had happened and I was there and she wasn’t and the man responsible for all of it was a hatchet-throw away from me.
“Just like her,” I said.
What I didn’t say is that, just like her, I knew a coin flip had an expected probability of fifty percent. Why, then, did I feel my life had been all tails? Every outcome was equally likely, and yet my parents were gone, and I was on the river now with Nash. I’d flipped tails seventy-six times in a row, it seemed. Would this trip be seventy-seven?
The first law of probability—that one chance event has no effect on the next chance event and its result. Why, then, did I feel that by making the decision to continue with the river trip instead of running for any possible exit, I was changing the course of everything?
“That bear was freaking huge,” said Shelby, her hair disheveled and mussed.
I noticed Skye was standing next to her, but I didn’t care. I had way too much adrenaline.
“Couldn’t run very fast, either,” said Wyatt.
But, adrenaline or not, I couldn’t help myself when it came to double meanings, and I didn’t feel like letting Nash off the hook that easily.
Nash pointed the headlamp at his hand, and I set Wyatt’s hatchet into his wrinkled palm.
“Next one might be moving a little quicker,” I said.
FOUR
I’m prone to wander. I’m prone to outlandish claims and making poor decisions beca
use I’m compulsive. I’m prone to stay close to those I love and question others and never turn that gaze inward. I’m prone to seek after a certain individuality, yet I still look to belong. I want to belong. And I’m prone to loneliness. I need company, and it might be important to know why.
One winter, when I was seven years old, snow had piled up on the sagging roof of our first house, on the very land where our current trailer sits. The log bench out front had at least six inches coating the faded rings. The driveway was cleared of any snow, the shovels resting against the cold wood of the front porch, the kicked-over can of embers burning bright overhead—not to get too poetic or anything. I mean, it was only a memorable night because of what happened at 3:00 a.m. beneath the floorboards: the heating coils drove lines of sparks through the wood like some gigantic sciatic nerve—a malfunction of amazing proportions.
Flames gathered and sucked in the oxygen of our quiet house. Minutes later, Mom was running and yelling because she couldn’t find me and assumed I was already out of the blaze. The local fire department got there in time to witness the last moments of our little home.
But before it all went to ash, and before the firefighters could stop her, Mom ran back into the walls of heat. I was in my closet, huddled in the corner, a ball of curiosity and fear, choking on the smoke. I don’t remember much more of that night, but I know Mom returned from the burn unit a few weeks later with black lungs and scars all over her back and chest and legs. And I remember seeing the snow shovels in the heap of soaked ash, hissing in the aftermath, in the wetness.
All that to say I was a wonderful mess myself, and not without my own issues. And maybe I wasn’t the only one. I thought of that moment, of being huddled in a ball, of Mom’s black lungs and scars, as I stood in the campsite with adrenaline dripping off my body. The only other time in my life when I’d felt such a massive dump of energy.
Night. A five-letter word for “sunless,” “nocturnal,” “a period of affliction,” “opposite of day.” There is a difference between saying the word and reading it on a page. It’s like reading the word “soldering” and then hearing someone say it. That’s how it felt to be around Skye. Like people could tell me all day what he was like or what he was supposed to be like or how popular he was or what made him him, and yet, when I was next to him, he was something else entirely. Maybe everyone is like that.
You can’t separate the idea or the sound or the taste from the thing itself. It’s like hearing someone talk about love, say love, but never live it. It’s impossible to know it unless it becomes a river and carves into the rock and cuts deep canyons in your heart.
I was acutely aware of standing next to Skye as I surveyed the damage to our campsite.
The bear had completely ransacked our food. Our dry bin was torn to pieces—devoured. The cooler was still there, but all the bread and muffins and candy bars were demolished or gone entirely. What remained was torn or smooshed or half-eaten. We spent thirty minutes cleaning up what we could find while Nash repeated his safety speech about how we shouldn’t have food in our tents and how to shout if we heard a bear and how we should sleep closer to one another the next night.
The chilly bin, with all of our eggs and meat and fluids, was still locked. At least that much worked in our favor. I remembered Nash telling Skye and Shelby to close the coolers when they were done and make sure they locked properly, but I didn’t think it was because of bears. At least the bear only got one of the two.
As Nash droned on, I found myself standing next to Skye, waiting for everyone else to leave, and enjoying the fact a little when I realized he was also waiting.
I heard the various tents zip up in the distance, and neither of us said anything for a moment. That pause became interminable, like a person could live and grow and achieve all their hopes and dreams and then die having led a good life during that pause. That kind of pause. We were just standing there.
“So, did you used to work as a bodyguard for high-profile targets?” Skye said. “Or maybe you just practice throwing sharp things at night? Or both?”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I just listened to the river roll over itself, the waters dipping and curving in the starlight. Rivers never sleep. I wasn’t ready to either. I wasn’t even close to being tired. I was bouncing on my toes again without realizing it, because I had so much adrenaline flowing through me.
“Want to walk down this beach and see if we can get a good view of the sky? Too many trees near the campsite,” he said.
“I won’t mention that I already have a good view of the sky—with an e.”
“But you just mentioned it,” said Skye.
“Yeah, but I said I wouldn’t mention it, so it negated the rest of the sentence.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works. Like when people say ‘Needless to say’ and then continue to say something . . . needless. It’s ludicrous.”
“Are you saying I’m ludicrous?” I said.
“Nope. You can’t rap. I’m just saying that a construction of words that is really hiding the truth behind it is obnoxious. Are you a construction of words?”
“What else are we made of? We’re just big bags of words.”
“Maybe right over there is a good spot to stargaze?” said Skye. “I mean, I’d like to rest this bag of words for a while. Speaking of bags of words, you sure know how to carry your vowels.”
He nodded at my feet, and I realized I was bouncing on my toes again. I tried to settle down as we made our way to a nice stretch of near-white sand. I was impressed by his agility with the prosthetic; I’d thought it would slow him down, but it rarely did. I watched him touch it again. We both lay on our backs and stared upward at the stars.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“For credit in Wixom’s class, for starters,” he said.
“No. I mean, why are you with me right now, and not Shelby?”
“I’m interested in getting to know you.”
“But Shelby’s prettier,” I said.
“Wow. So, you must be on board with what Wyatt thinks of me.”
“Why did you mock Wyatt and not me? I live in the same kind of trailer as Wyatt. And my grandpa runs the mortuary, and people make fun of me all the time for that. Why not you?”
“I want to get to know you, like I said. Like I keep saying. People won’t give me a chance to be somebody different.”
We both stared upward and let the light show wash over us. I watched Skye touch his leg again, and tried to change the subject.
“There’s the Big Dipper,” I said. “Acting all big.”
“And dipping,” said Skye.
The stars were pinpricks of light, the Big Dipper tilting as if full of stars on the verge of flowing out, as if saying, “Drink me!”
We were quiet for another minute.
“Maybe it’s best if we don’t get to know each other too well,” I said, unable to stay away from the idea.
“Why not?”
“Because what happens in a few weeks when we’re back in school?”
He shifted in the sand, and we rested in silence for a beat.
“I don’t know. That’s part of the whole future thing. I have zero idea what it will be like,” he said.
“You sure you won’t just fall back in with your buddies and forget I exist?”
“I always knew you existed,” he said.
“Really? Then name one person I hang out with at school.”
He rested a beat and touched his leg again. “Wyatt?”
“That’s what I figured,” I said.
“C’mon, Indie, I just want to get to know you. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“So, you don’t want it to mean anything?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Skye said.
“Yes, it is. Words can mean anything, especially what
they’re intended to mean when you say them. But look, I’m not mad. It’s probably safer if we don’t get to know each other all that well. That way you don’t have to fake something you’re not. That way we can keep our secrets and move on and be just fine. Everybody leaves, anyway.”
“Great strategy,” he said.
“I know.”
“So, you’re going to go through life and not get to know anybody at all?” said Skye.
“Worked for me so far,” I said.
“Has it?”
Skye grabbed my hand, and I pulled mine away immediately.
I knew Skye as the soccer phenom, as the athlete with Division 1 potential, as the guy who planned on jetting from Idaho as soon as he got that first offer, as the guy all of Shelby’s friends were after.
I figured he had to hear how hard my heart was beating in that moment. I felt the beat in my chest, my neck, my arms, and down to my toes and back again. I felt like I had a separate heart for each limb, for each part of my body.
“You really are forward,” I said.
“It’s just holding hands. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Needless to say, you are smart and fiery, and I like that.”
“Yes, it does have to mean something. And those things are needless?”
“Just messing with you.”
Stars wheeled overhead. We watched for a few minutes as some stars threw themselves into the blackness, and some proceeded unmoved in their brilliant light.
I listened to the water and remembered where I was, and some of the magic of the moment slipped away into the sounds of the river. I’ve heard the horrible, haunting suck of the strainer for the last two years. The fallen logs and the sleeper boulder beneath the roaring waters—right where my mother was pulled under and drowned.
After we got word of what happened, Grandpa drove out to the spot and camped on the river. He wouldn’t let me go with him that first time. Said I was too young to see it, that she would be unrecognizable even if they could get her out. But it didn’t end up mattering. The water was so high and she was so deep that the search and rescue crews had to wait for the dam levels to drop in order to get her body out.