Some Kind of Animal

by Maria Romasco-Moore

  Savannah puts on the parking brake, kills the engine. We all tumble out of the car and I divvy up the bags.

  I switch on the lantern and start off toward the trees.

  “Where are we going?” asks Savannah from behind me.

  “Somewhere nobody can find us.”

  * * *

  —

  The lantern casts a weak light. It’s solar powered and I guess sitting in the harsh artificial light of the store was only enough to charge it a little. Still, I’m thankful that I thought to grab one at all. My sister and I are used to walking through the woods in the dark, but Savannah would probably be hopeless without the light. Even with it, she walks much slower than I do. And she makes an ungodly racket, shuffling through the leaves, her feet apparently intent on finding and snapping every dry twig and stick.

  Lee darts ahead of us and then doubles back. She runs in a circle around me and Savannah. She’s happy, back in her element, her steps bouncing. She waves the pine branch like a flag.

  “It’s cold,” says Savannah beside me. I think it must be well past midnight now, the deepest part of the night. The temperature has dipped, though it’s still only October. If we’re going to live out here, we’ll need to make provisions for the true cold. For winter.

  My sister runs up to us. She tries to start a game of tag, tapping each of us on the arm and darting away, but we ignore her. She tries to hand me the pine branch. I bat it away, too exhausted for games. Lee shoves it at me, yanks the lantern out of my hands, and runs off.

  “What the fuck?” says Savannah, stopping short.

  “She’s just playing,” I say. “She’ll bring it back.”

  The light of the lantern goes bobbing away through the trees.

  “Rude,” says Savannah.

  I laugh. I really do feel bad for yelling at Savannah in the car. She didn’t ask for this. She wouldn’t even be here if I hadn’t asked her for the impossible. We’d be lost if she hadn’t brought us a car. She saved us.

  “Come on,” I say. I reach out for her hand. She takes it and I pull her gently forward. She stumbles a little, but follows.

  After a minute or two, we see the lantern light bobbing back toward us, and then my sister bursts through the trees at a run, face shining.

  Savannah jumps back, startled. One of the bags she’s carrying catches on a branch and rips. The contents scatter.

  Savannah drops to her knees, frantically trying to gather up all the spilled items. My sister, chastened, sets the lantern on the ground. Savannah is swearing. But I feel calm for the first time in hours. We made it. We’re alone out here, far from Lester, from Ohio, from Walmart. Far from everything. We’re safe.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m tired,” says Savannah, for what seems like the fiftieth time. “My feet hurt.”

  “I just want to get a little farther from the road,” I say.

  “We must be miles away already. We’ve been walking for hours.”

  “Come on, there’s no way it’s been longer than twenty minutes.”

  “Let’s just stop for now,” says Savannah. She drops the bags she’s been carrying and sits right down on the ground. “We can go farther tomorrow.”

  “Okay, fine.” We’ve been going uphill for a while, and I have to admit my legs are getting tired too. “But not here.”

  I turn to Lee. After her initial burst of enthusiasm about being back in the woods, she settled down and has mostly been walking alongside us. “We need to find a place that’s flat,” I tell her. “For the tent.”

  I’m not entirely sure if my sister knows what a tent is. I can’t remember ever seeing one when I was with her, but maybe she’s spotted one from afar. Or maybe she and Mama had a tent. I don’t know. I should have asked Brandon. There’s so much I should have asked him. I thought there’d be time. I thought—

  I didn’t think.

  In any case, Lee seems to understand her mission. She runs ahead of us. Savannah begrudgingly gets back up and we do our best to follow my sister, though the path she takes is erratic. She’ll run for a few feet, stop, inspect her surroundings, then shoot off in a different direction.

  “She is crazy, though,” says Savannah, so quiet I almost don’t hear.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Never mind,” she says. “My feet hurt.”

  I decide to let it go.

  Maybe she’s right, anyway. I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy, too. The ground, to my relief, starts to level off and I think we’ve reached the crest of this particular ridge. Ahead, Lee stops again. She’s staring up at a tree.

  Trees in the deep forest tend to be packed together so tightly that they’re forced to grow straight up for fifty feet or more before they have room to branch out. This tree, though, like the one with the deer platform, is set apart from the trees around it. It had plenty of space to stretch its limbs, to reap the rewards of being alone.

  By the time we reach my sister, she’s already kicked off her shoes, dropped her plastic bags at the base of the tree, and heaved herself up into it, swinging onto the lowest branch and up to where the trunk splits in several directions.

  “There she goes again,” says Savannah.

  “This is a good spot, though,” I say. There’s a wide swath of ground around the tree that is relatively flat. I hang the lantern on a nearby thornbush and start uprooting everything I can.

  Within minutes my hands are cold and scratched and my left wrist is sore, but the effort of clearing the ground warms the rest of me more than walking did. I’m even sweating slightly by the time we’re done.

  With Savannah’s help, I stretch the limp body of the tent out on the ground. It is half surrender-flag white and half sunset orange, terrible for camouflage. The bag it came in was deep green, which seems misleading. I wish I could go back, spend more time in that Walmart aisle, pick more carefully.

  The ground here is hard, so we have to stomp on the stakes to get them into the dirt. Lee watches from her tree as we snap together the telescoping tent poles and poke them through some tabs. When we bend them, the tent springs to life, jumping up like a startled creature.

  The rain fly keeps flapping away in the wind, and when I finally get it staked and tied, it’s lopsided, covering more of one side of the tent than the other, but I’m too tired to fix it.

  The tent has two big mesh panels on either side, with no way to seal them. A summer tent, I guess, though it said no such thing on the package. I hope the rain fly will do something to keep the chilly wind out as well.

  Savannah is already crawling into the tent.

  “Take your shoes off!” I shout at her. “Put them in a corner or something.”

  “Fine, Mom!” she shouts back.

  I feel unreasonably proud of this dumb, lumpy-looking tent. A home I built myself. I remember the camper with its plywood bedroom. I try to image Brandon building it, all those years ago. I hope the searchers in the forest find it. I hope they feed the fish.

  I will build a home out here in the forest, too. Like I planned to do when I was older. The timeline has shifted, that’s all. I can do this. I can be strong.

  Savannah pokes her head out of the tent.

  “We should probably bring all those bags in here,” she says.

  “You’re not supposed to keep food in a tent,” I say. “Or else bears and raccoons and stuff will try to come in.”

  “Shit, are there bears here?”

  “I don’t know. Probably raccoons, though.”

  “If we leave the food outside, then raccoons will definitely get it.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I gather the bags, hand them to Savannah.

  “Is she coming in?” Savannah asks. My sister is still sitting in the tree.

  I shrug. “Are you coming in?” Savannah shouts up at her.
“It’s nicer in here.”

  In reply, Lee unzips her plastic heart purse and pulls out a big loop of dirty nylon rope. She ties one end of the rope around a branch. My sister has always been good at knots. I used to wonder where she learned that, because it certainly wasn’t from me. I tried to bring her a book on wilderness survival once when we were nine, but she had zero interest. I ended up reading it myself, dreaming of the day I could leave school behind and live in the woods full time like her. Well, here I am.

  I guess I know now where Lee learned all her skills. Mama or Brandon. Mother or father. Not our real father, of course. But he was there for her. Not Logan. Not the pastor. Our half-hearted, fair-weather fathers. They didn’t even know about her. Brandon was the only one.

  “Is she going to sleep up there?” Savannah asks. She’s kneeling at the entrance of the tent, watching my sister work.

  “She is.” She always has. Isn’t it wonderful? I almost say.

  My sister loops the rope around another branch and then around one of the trunks, weaving a funny little hammock like the one back at the Queen of Heaven sycamore.

  I fetch the lantern from the bush and climb into the tent. I pull off my shoes, set them beside Savannah’s.

  “She can’t just sleep in a tree,” Savannah says, frowning. “Is that even safe?”

  “Sure.” I’m unreasonably pleased to be back to the normal state of things. Savannah baffled by my sister. Me unruffled. “Zip that up, it’s cold.”

  Savannah reluctantly zips the tent shut, watching my sister until the last possible moment.

  “I still don’t get it,” she says, turning back around, settling cross-legged on the floor of the tent.

  “Get what?” I line the Walmart bags up against the far wall of the tent. The lantern is getting noticeably dimmer, barely brighter than a firefly. I think it’ll go out soon.

  “I don’t know. Everything. How did nobody know about her?”

  “Your family has secrets, too.” Myron’s dealing was a secret before he got caught. Another of Savannah’s uncles is raising a kid who everyone but him knows isn’t really his.

  “Not like this,” says Savannah.

  She’s right. Not like this. Nobody has a secret like this.

  It’s not even a secret, not anymore. Everyone must know, back in Lester. Everyone’s probably talking about me, about us. Maybe I’ve got my picture in the paper, as famous as Mama.

  I wonder if they’ve found Brandon yet.

  “I’m beat,” I say, avoiding her eyes, pulling out the sleeping bag.

  Savannah nods. “Me too. Are you sure she’s okay out there by herself?”

  “She’s fine.” More comfortable than us, probably.

  Savannah unzips the tent partway, sticks her head out. “Good night,” she calls up to Lee.

  I unroll the sleeping bag. It’s blue on the outside, gray inside. Has a faint chemical smell.

  “You only grabbed one?” Savannah asks.

  I shrug and pull the two sweaters out to use as pillows.

  We try unzipping the sleeping bag and draping it across the two of us like a blanket, but even through the tarp floor of the tent, through my jeans, through the puffy coat, the bitter cold of the ground seeps into my skin. I feel as cold as a corpse on a metal table.

  “Cold as a witch’s tit,” Savannah says, and I laugh at her because that’s the kind of thing I would expect to hear from the old drunks at Joe’s Bar.

  We flip the sleeping bag around and lie on top of it, which is better, but still cold. The wind whooshes right in the mesh on one side of the tent and out the other, the rain fly doing nothing to stop it.

  So we zip the sleeping bag back up and squeeze in together, sardined.

  Savannah shivers against me.

  “I’m cold,” she says.

  “Are you a witch?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Are your tits cold?”

  Savannah laughs.

  I put on my Uncle Myron voice. “Come ’ere, my little glass of sweet tea, let me warm those up for you.”

  I maneuver one hand up between us and onto her breast, which is, in fact, very warm.

  “Quit it,” she says, batting my hand away, but laughing.

  I used to imagine it, in history class. Running away, living in the woods. My daydreams came true, but different. Not Henry. Not even Brandon.

  Savannah.

  I reach out, switch off the lantern. The tent goes dark. So dark I can’t see my hand, can’t see the walls of the tent, can’t see Savannah. So dark it’s like we were suddenly erased from the world. I try to express this thought to Savannah.

  “You’re weird,” she says.

  The wind shakes the tent. I can’t see it, but I can hear the fabric rippling above us.

  “This is kind of scary,” whispers Savannah. Her mouth is inches from my ear, her voice so close it could almost be inside my own skull.

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head,” I say, in my Myron voice again. “I won’t let nobody, not even a bear, get their paws on you.”

  The truth is I’m scared too, but not for the same reasons as her. I don’t mind the night, the sounds of the forest, distant hooting and scrabbling, the orchestrations of insects.

  I’m scared because we did it. We got away. We’re absolutely free.

  Now what?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I wake before the break of dawn, open my eyes to a darkness barely distinguishable from the inside of my eyelids. My throat feels raw from the cold air. My nose is stuffed up. My neck is cricked. Savannah is warm beside me, though her elbow is sticking into my side

  As I lie there, the tent begins, slowly, to glow. It’s a weak glow at first, just enough to give shape to the darkness. I shift cautiously, trying not to wake Savannah, and stare up at the cathedral arch of the tent. I watch insects climbing on the underside of the rain fly, watch some kind of moth flutter against the mesh, trying to get in.

  Beyond the glowing skin of the tent, birds shout at each other in the treetops. They caw and hoot and trill and one makes a sound like an old smoker coughing. The glow of the tent grows brighter. I don’t think the air is getting any warmer, not yet, but the sunlight through the nylon takes away the sting, turns the air crisp and light as the inside of an apple.

  Slowly and with much wriggling, I extract myself from the sleeping bag and crawl over to the door. I unzip it cautiously.

  “Where are you going?”

  I turn. Savannah has pushed herself up onto one elbow. She blinks at me groggily.

  “Time to get up for school,” I say, grinning. Savannah snorts. I feel oddly ecstatic. Here we are, in another world. “Nah, I just have to pee, I’ll be right back.”

  I step out, rezip the tent, and approach the tree my sister made her nest in. The loops of rope are still there, but she’s gone.

  “Lee?” I call, but only the birds answer.

  I wander a little way from the campsite, relieve myself behind a tree.

  I seem to have sweated profusely in the night, despite the cold. My shirt feels clammy against my skin. I take off the puffy coat, drape it across a bush. Looking down at my shirt, I’m hit hard with a memory of last night. Of the wet darkness, spreading. Brandon’s body gone heavy. I pull my shirt off, feeling sick.

  The dried blood covering the front could just be dirt, just be rust.

  With my top half bare apart from a sports bra, chill morning air prickling my skin, I dig into the hard ground with a stick, heaving up clods of earth. I only manage a shallow hole, but I fold the shirt carefully and place it in the center, then shove the displaced dirt back. I drag a heavy rock over and lower it gently onto the turned earth.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, though I know he can’t hear it. “It won’t have been for nothing. I p
romise.”

  When I return to the tent, puffy coat clutched at my side, Savannah is still snugged into the sleeping bag. She frowns up at me. I pull on the purple sweater I’d been using as a pillow all night.

  “This is awful,” says Savannah. “I’m hungry and my back hurts.”

  “I’m starving,” I say, trying to sound cheerful. “Let’s see what’s on the menu this fine morning.”

  I scoot over to the pile of plastic bags in the corner, which survived the night unmolested by either bears or raccoons. I dump them out, sort the contents into separate piles of food and supplies. Savannah gets up and crawls over to help.

  “What the hell happened to the Pop-Tarts?” she asks, holding up the half-gnawed box. “Did an animal get in here?”

  “That was my sister,” I say.

  “Oh.” She looks horrified for a moment, and then laughs. “I guess that’s better.”

  Savannah unwraps a Pop-Tart for herself, offers one to me, which I gladly take.

  The piles, when I am finished sorting, are disappointing. Savannah got a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter like I said to. She also got one bunch of bananas, a jar of strawberry jelly, the aforementioned box of chocolate Pop-Tarts, one tube of Flaky Layers Butter Tastin’ Biscuits, and a jug of orange juice.

  It’s not a great selection, but in fairness I didn’t do much better. And I am infinitely thankful that she thought of the orange juice. I twist the cap off and take a glug. Savannah wrinkles her nose at me.

  “What?” I say. “We don’t have any cups.”

  We’ll need water. That is highest priority. When this jug is empty we can use it to collect rainwater, though a bucket would have been better. A purifier.

  I should have made a list before we went into the Walmart. Warm clothes. Better food. The rain ponchos I grabbed are probably of limited use. They were one dollar each and are made of thin see-through plastic. Maybe they can be repurposed for water collection. The frying pan was a good choice, seeing as our food supply is so woeful. We’ll need to supplement our diet with things we can scavenge. Things my sister can catch.