The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

  What would they do without Glen to translate?

  Agnes leaned to kiss Glen on the forehead.

  “My darling daughter,” he said. His lips were dry and his smile disappeared into his skin, but his eyes were wet and beaming up at her. “I couldn’t be prouder of you,” he said.

  Her mother put her hand on Agnes’s shoulder and drew her back to her feet, turned her around, and with an outstretched arm firmly directed her toward camp.

  Agnes walked away slowly. Then she stopped.

  “Agnes,” her mother warned.

  She started walking again, stopping every few steps to wait until her mother ordered her forward again. When she stopped receiving orders, perhaps because she was obscured from view, or simply because they were done with her, she stopped and just listened.

  Their voices were soft, unintelligible except for a few words here and there. Please. Never. Soon. It was just like when she was a small girl in her small bedroom in her small pink bed, listening to them be the adults in the kitchen, making a meal they didn’t share with her, a much more special meal than she had been given. The clink of glasses and the thunk of a wine bottle. Some music playing lightly, their laughter happy, or their voices concerned if they were talking about something important. Piecing it all together without seeing it, just staring into the darkness of her room, the City outside dark after curfew. She always felt safe.

  Now it wasn’t so much what they were saying. In fact, like then, she couldn’t decipher the content. It was more the feeling, what lay in the bottom tones of their voices. A kind of comfort, ease. It was the same tone as back then. It was familiar. How people felt about one another was always in the voice. In the way they talked to one another when they thought they were alone.

  Agnes returned to camp and, without waiting for dark, slid into the bed of skins she had shared with her parents at one time in the past. Jake arrived and slipped under the covers. He tried to hold her, but she pushed him away. This was her family’s bed. He tried to crawl back in, as though he knew what Agnes needed better than she did, and so she kicked him. He yelped in surprise and scooted away. Agnes shivered half awake until the sun set and rose again. In the morning, Jake brought her food she didn’t eat. She watched the ants overtake the bowl and thought of all the food Glen had passed along to her. Food he hadn’t eaten himself, that had led him to get weak and die. And how she had happily accepted that food, thoughtlessly, because she was the child and that is just what people did for children. She thought she could carry more weight during their treks and that was all she had needed to do to help him, to protect him. There were so many more things he had needed.

  The next day, just as they were lining up for dinner, her mother walked out of the darkness and back into camp. She was wearing her coat again. A streak of Glen’s blood was painted across its left arm.

  She did not walk up to Agnes first. Instead she went to Carl. He put his hand on her shoulder and she shrugged it off. They exchanged some words, serious at first, angry even, in low voices. Then less so. Then just quiet. And then they laughed. Bea tossed her head back as she laughed, as though she was carefree. Agnes saw furious stars.

  After dinner, Bea finally approached Agnes by the fire. She put her arms around her and kissed her forehead.

  “Glen loved you so much,” she said.

  Agnes stood rigid and still as though her mother were a predator and she were prey. She wanted to run away. She wanted to fling her arms around her mother’s neck and sob. She didn’t move a muscle.

  Bea squeezed her harder. “Agnes, it’s okay if you want to cry.”

  Agnes mumbled, “Okay.”

  Her mother took her by the shoulders and peered at her face, but Agnes averted her eyes. Looked at the brown bugs crawling from the wood, trying to escape the fire that was probably ravaging their home. Seeing her mother laughing with Carl. Seeing her mother running for that truck. Remembering holding Glen’s hand on all the walks they had to do without her mother.

  Her mother said, “I’ll move my bedding and we’ll share again. I think that would be nice. Would you like that?”

  “No,” said Agnes. “I’m fine by myself.”

  “Are you sure?” her mother said.

  She sounded disappointed, so Agnes’s heart leapt, then plummeted. “Yes,” Agnes said.

  “Okay,” her mother said, and tried to hug her again.

  “Is he dead?” Agnes asked, her eyes still peering hard at the ground. Of course he was. But she wanted her mother to say it.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Did you have to kill him, or did he die on his own?” Agnes’s mouth was taut, bitter; her stomach churned. Her voice was steady.

  Her mother’s knees wobbled at Agnes’s question. She looked like she might stumble into the fire. “Agnes,” she gasped. But then she choked out, “He died.”

  “Did you do the ritual? Did you stay for the buzzards? And the coyotes?” She wanted to barrage her like a gale would. She wanted to be relentless.

  Agnes looked up at her mother for the first time. She wanted to see her damage. To see her hurt as much as Agnes had been hurt. As much as Glen had been hurt.

  Her mother’s face was a dark cloud. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the skin around her eyes welted red as though she’d been pummeled. Her face was streaked almost clean from dried tears. She looked like she’d been crying, and crying hard, for days. Then how had she been laughing with Carl? Agnes choked on her breaths. Panicking. She had invited a new kind of hardness between them when, she now realized, before there had only been simple grief. Something they could have shared. Agnes felt a wave of shame, an impulse to drop to her knees, erase what she’d just said. But there was no going back from it. It was too late. Why did her mother insist on being so many people at once when Agnes only needed her to be the one? Her mother’s face stormed, seeming at odds with even itself. She looked like a deer might look when Agnes was about to cut its throat. There was a current of despair there, but also a bolt that went through it. She knew to hold tight then, to lean on the legs. Because that bolt was its last defense.

  Her mother turned to the fire, now standing shoulder to shoulder with her daughter. Not looking at her, she said, “There are some things you don’t understand. You think you do. But you don’t. I hope you never have to.”

  For the first time Agnes believed her mother was right about this. Agnes looked at her mother’s profile in the firelight. It was dreadful.

  “I love you,” her mother seethed. “I know you love me.”

  Agnes’s eyes filled with hot remorseful tears. She reached out, but her mother flinched angrily, and Agnes froze.

  Her mother continued in the slowest, hardest voice Agnes had heard come from her. “But if you don’t like what you’re seeing, Agnes Day—” Her mother spit into the fire. It hissed in the coal’s red core. “Then you’d better cover your fucking eyes.”

  All the light of the night was snuffed out.

  Her mother turned away from her and joined Carl in bed.

  • • •

  It was obvious when they had arrived at the top of the Caldera because the winds shifted from blowing at their backs to blowing in their faces. The land across seemed flat, but only because they’d been on the side of a mountain for so long. They hadn’t had a vantage in a long time. But at the top here, the highest thing around, they could see where they’d come from. They saw the extent of their up-and-down trekking over the past seasons. The Caldera had wide, swelling foothills. They saw how many cinder cones popped up from the tree-covered landscape. Some were bare-topped. But others were pint-sized volcanoes, thick black cauldron bubbles covered almost to the top now with trees.

  In the further distance they saw plumes of smoke, and hazy skies at the horizon in each direction. Fires in the sage sea. Fires in the mountains. The air was singed. It made the top look like an aged photograph of a place that no longer existed.

  As they approached the middle, they walked downhill aga
in. They were walking into the Caldera proper, the volcano’s pock. Its wound. It was eerily quiet, as though nothing lived there. It was unlike any landscape they’d been to, barren and full all at once.

  Around a bend the lakes emerged. One black and one blue. The closer they got, the more the black one evolved into a deep murky green and the blue one became white like the clouded sky above it.

  The lakes were bordered by tall pines, with the greenest needles Agnes had seen in a long time and tall rusty-orange trunks. Healthy trees. Not thirsty like what they’d seen lately. They were watered well by the lakes and snowmelt. So much vibrancy in a landscape marred by lava. The obsidian flows were glassy fingers reaching for the lakes. Elsewhere, those fingers were rough, the rock sharp, reddened, and treacherous. Pumice cliffs and peaks surrounded the lakes and the Caldera rim. Between the lakes lay a flow that had hardened as it had swirled, molten, like a hurricane around its own eye.

  “We are swimming in those lakes,” said Debra in a reverent whisper. “I don’t care how cold they are.”

  They quickened their pace.

  Their feet crunched, and that sound ricocheted back from what they were descending into. They walked over hardened lava rather than pick their way among the trees, even though the understory was clean. Dead, even. The path clear. But they wanted to have clear views. They didn’t know who else was here. It was likely they were alone. It certainly felt like they were alone. They’d never found Adam’s track again. But it was also possible he was lurking close by. And maybe other Trespassers were with him.

  Overhead, birds of prey soared, but Agnes didn’t hear songbirds or insects, the cautious chattering of the squirrels. But there had to be something alive here. If for no other reason than to feed the circling raptors. Then she watched a large eagle swoop down, dip its talons into the lake, and bound up with a sizable fish. The lakes had been stocked at some point.

  “Finally, some decent fishing,” Carl said.

  They descended and found a structure, what was supposed to be the Caldera Post. It was boarded up, and looked to have been that way for a while. It was ramshackle and boards covered some windows. It reminded Agnes of something she might have seen in a book or magazine from long ago. A log lodge. On a mountain lake. A great room with great windows soaring three stories. Two wings spreading from it, full of what must be guest rooms. Something built for enjoyment. It was clearly the Ranger’s Lodge.

  They halfheartedly tried doors, but none of them really wanted inside. Outside, a breeze blew; the sun twinkled over the lake surface. In front of the Lodge was a stretch of sandy beach. Dramatic cliffs rose on either side. It was beautiful. Their unease from earlier dissipated as they set up camp on the shore. Carl sent the children to find sticks, and he set about making poles for fishing. He pulled out a fly and line he’d kept in his bag since they’d first arrived. It was possibly the only thing that had survived since the very beginning. Besides the Manual. And some of the books and knives.

  That night they camped in a semicircle around the fire on the shore of the lake. The stars felt closer than ever before. They twinkled big and dangled from the sky like hanging lights. The wind blew the smell of fires away. The smog lifted. For the first time they noticed the heavy scent of water and hot rock cooling under the evening sky. Their bellies were full of flame-cooked fish. Their fingers were sticky with the fish’s oils. They picked scales from their teeth and burned the fine bones in the fire.

  They woke in the morning and stood around. There was enough fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Camp was set up; firewood was gathered and plentiful.

  “Isn’t there something we should be doing?” asked Dr. Harold.

  “What do we usually do with our time?” asked Linda.

  “Hunt, skin, tan, smoke, sew, gather—” Carl said.

  “But there’s nothing started right now, and we have plenty,” said Linda. “So we have—”

  “The morning off?” Debra asked.

  Before anyone could reply, Debra was running toward the lake, pulling her smock over her head.

  Linda and Dr. Harold followed. Then Val with Baby Egret and Carl. Then Frank and Patty’s mom. Soon everyone was stripped down and in the water.

  Only the adults had ever really learned to swim. The rest of them had figured it out in the deeper parts of the bigger streams. Once or twice in very slow parts of a rare wide river.

  The children splashed around near the beach. The teenagers paddled sloppily out to where their feet could just touch. The adults took smooth strokes and popped underwater, flicked their feet like fishtails.

  Her mother had taught Agnes how to swim at the first river they’d camped at. And before that, back in the City, she’d made Agnes practice holding her breath in the bathtub. When Agnes would snort in water, flail up gasping, her mother would be there with a towel to wipe off her face.

  “See,” she would say. “You panicked, but you’re fine. Water won’t hurt you if you know how to behave around it.”

  In the rivers during those earliest days, her mother would hold her around the waist and have Agnes put her face in the slow-moving current. Agnes would flail until she calmed down and began to paddle, her mother’s arms never unwrapping from around her.

  Agnes had seen how Debra taught Pinecone to swim. And how Sister and Brother had learned from Juan. All by nearly drowning. They learned fast. But they didn’t like the water now. They all stayed close to the beach, only going in up to their navels.

  Agnes paddled up to Jake and the Twins. They hopped on their tiptoes in a circle, looking up into the sky, then down into the clear water.

  Agnes could see all their toes scraping the sand. The water felt oily, but when she lifted her hand out, it slipped off cleanly and left nothing behind but her cold taut skin. No silt. No slime. Pure. She swam a few strokes to where the bottom dropped away and dunked her head and looked down. Far, far, far below, the lake-bottom dunes looked as though they shifted with every kick of her feet. Above her head a sheer rock wall sloped as vertically as a slope could and still be considered a slope.

  Agnes scanned the water’s surface and spied her mother doing somersaults farther out. Just her head, then the curve of her upper back, her bottom, then crossed ankles and feet. It was graceless. It looked fun. Her mother looked like the little girl she probably was the last time she did a somersault underwater. She came up, spouting water from her mouth and grinning.

  Once, back in the City, after one of the breathing lessons her mother had given her in the tub, her mother had gotten into the tub with her.

  “Okay, sit like this,” her mother had said, crossing her legs, sitting up very straight. “We used to do this when I was a kid. It’s stupid. But funny. I don’t know if it will be as funny in the tub. But let’s try.”

  “Okay,” Agnes had said in her reedy, high voice. Her mother seemed hulking across from her in the tub. There was so much more of her. So much more skin, so much more face and leg. So much more hair. Agnes remembered feeling like ten Agneses could fit inside her mother. And then she was reminded that she had come from there. That she’d lived there, breathing water in her mother’s guts.

  “Just imagine we’re underwater,” her mother said. “Our hair is floating all around, like it does when you lie on the bottom of the tub.” Her mother tussled her own hair so it was wild and looked like it could be lilting in water. She tussled Agnes’s hair.

  “Imagine that we’re holding our breath,” her mother said, bulging her cheeks out and widening her eyes. “And then,” she said, “hold your hand like this,” and she put her left hand out flat, palm up. “And your other hand like this.” She pinched all her fingers together except for her pinkie, which jabbed out. “It’s like you’re holding a teacup,” she said. “And now you drink your tea like this.” She lifted her pinched fingers to her puckered mouth. “It’s an underwater tea party,” her mother said, sipping imaginary tea from the imaginary teacup, the bathwater barely to her hips.

&nbs
p; It was a ridiculous game because neither one of them was underwater. The absurdity made them giggle, and whatever Agnes was doing with her face—she was only trying to imitate her mother—made her mother laugh until she had tears in her eyes.

  Agnes smiled at the memory of such an easy time between them and tentatively paddled her way over to where Bea was tumbling.

  When she reached her mother, Bea stopped flipping and treaded water cautiously. Her eyes countered Agnes warily. Agnes had avoided her since Glen. She thought her mother had avoided her too. She didn’t know what to say to make anything better. To be sorry. To be forgiven. So she had said nothing at all. But for the first time in a long time, the thought of her mother had made her happy. She had to do something with that.

  “Do you want to have a tea party?” she asked shyly.

  Her mother spit water out of her mouth like a fountain. She smiled, looking relieved. “Do I ever!” she said. “Do you remember how?”

  “I think so,” Agnes said, and placed her hand out flat and pinched her fingers and rounded her lips to sip, treading frantically.

  Her mother laughed. “You have to sit cross-legged too.”

  Agnes pulled her legs up into a knot. She toppled, sank, laughed. She splashed her hands to right herself.

  “Okay, now try it underwater.”

  Agnes dropped below the surface.

  Her mother dropped too and looked at Agnes trying hard to stay upright with the teacup in her hand. She smiled and pointed down, down, down and launched herself deeper. Agnes surfaced to get more air and then followed her mother.

  The weight from the water above and around her kept Agnes upright and allowed her occasional moments to sit and sip without needing her arms to stay under.

  Her mother’s sit-and-sip was effortless. Her hands slid up and down to her lips. Her cheeks were not puffed out with air, but rather she kept all the air deep inside. Her mother’s eyes were glassy like the water around her. She looked like she was sitting at their table at home. Except for her hair. Her hair curled like sage branches. Her mother was more beautiful than the mermaids in the fable from her favorite lost book.