by Jeremy Bates
“Hello?” Vanessa answered on the second ring.
“Hello, sweetie,” Tabitha said.
“Mom!”
“What?” she said innocuously.
“Who’s phone are you using?”
“I just called you from my phone less than a minute ago. No answer.”
“I didn’t get to it in time.”
“I’m glad that’s the case and you simply didn’t want to talk to me.”
“So who’s phone are you using?”
“Rex’s,” she said.
“I should have known,” Vanessa quipped. Vanessa, like many teenagers, could be at times selfish, rude, rebellious, and most of all, emotionally fragile. When Tabitha had first begun dating Rex, Vanessa had acted as if he were the devil incarnate and had done her best to make him uncomfortable whenever the two of them came face to face. Rex, to his credit, took the insults and snide remarks with remarkable poise, and he could usually turn the awkward situations into merely uncomfortable situations with self-deprecating wit. Eventually this humor won Vanessa over, and she was now on the record as admitting he was “an okay guy.” Having said this, Rex was still the “boyfriend,” and Vanessa could often and easily fall back into the I’m-not-supposed-to like-him mindset.
“Anyway, sweetie,” Tabitha said, “I’m just checking in to make sure everything is okay.”
“It’s like six o’clock. Why wouldn’t everything be okay?”
“It’s a little past seven.”
“Is it? So?”
“What time does the party start?”
Silence. Then: “What? What are you talking about?” A bit panicky.
“Ellie thinks you’re having a party.”
“Tell Ellie to mind her own damn business—and change her diapers while she’s at it.”
Tabitha glanced at Ellie, who was bent over a wildflower, sniffing it, perfectly content in the moment, and Tabitha felt a pang of sadness. Vanessa had once been equally innocent. When had she changed? When would Ellie change? When would she stop being “her little girl?”
“I was serious when I told you no parties,” Tabitha said. “You know the rules when I’m away.”
“Dad would let me!”
A dial tone.
Sighing, Tabitha handed the phone back to Rex.
“Sounded all right,” he said.
“You only heard my end of the conversation.”
“She wasn’t happy?”
“She hung up on me.”
“Is Ness having a party?” Ellie asked.
“That doesn’t concern you, honey.”
“I bet she is.”
“She’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“Ellie, enough.”
When all the electronics were deposited in the Mazda, Tabitha grabbed her shoulder bag, which contained the toiletries, while Rex retrieved four bags of groceries, leaving the heavier two bags behind. They would come back for them and the remaining backpack tomorrow morning. Then he locked the car with the remote key.
“Are we all ready then?” he asked.
“Why are there so many holes in the road, Daddy?” Bobby asked.
“It hasn’t been taken care of.”
“Why not?”
Rex shrugged. “When I used to come up here as a kid, your grandparents paid a fee to keep the road serviceable. All the families with cabins along the road did. But it seems everybody’s stopped paying that fee. So the rain and snow have caused all that damage.”
“Why did everyone stop paying? Did they run out of money?”
“That I don’t know,” he said.
“Ow!” Tabitha said, and swatted her bare left bicep with her right hand. “Mosquito.”
“Unfortunately, they don’t go away until first freeze.”
“Ow!” Ellie said. “One got me too!”
“Ow!” Bobby said. “Me too!”
“We better get moving then,” Rex said, “or we’re going to be eaten alive.”
***
Following a little distance behind T-Rex and her mom, Ellie was trying to figure out what she was going to do for two whole days without her iPad. All her stuff was on her iPad: her songs, her movies, Peek-a-Zoo, Elmo’s Monster Maker, Hungry Caterpillar. All the pictures her mom let her download from the internet. Her sticker album. Everything. She might only be five, but she had collected a lot of stuff in her life so far, and it wasn’t fair for her mom to not let her play with that stuff.
“I hate fishing,” she told Bobby, who was trudging along beside her.
“Huh?” he said.
“I’m not going fishing with you tomorrow.”
“So?”
“Your dad’s going to make me.”
“No, he’s not.”’
“He will, and I hate fish.”
“You can help me catch bugs.”
That sounded sort of fun. “What kind of bugs?”
“I dunno yet. Whatever I find. Probably a lot of ants.”
“I like butterflies.”
“They won’t fit.”
“Fit where?”
Bobby dug an empty Tic Tac container from his pocket. “My dad gave it to me. He brought it all the way back from Gurmamy.”
Ellie frowned. “Where am I going to put my butterflies?”
“Dunno. But you can’t use my case. They won’t fit.”
“Mommy!”
Her mom glanced back over her shoulder. “Yes, honey?”
“Where am I going to put my butterflies?”
“What butterflies?”
“That I’m going to catch.”
“Oh…well, we can figure something out. We’ll have a look around the cabin for something when we get there.”
“It has to be big so they have room.”
“Okay. We’ll have a look.”
“My mom’s going to help me find something better than your case,” Ellie told Bobby happily.
He shrugged. “Your mom sounded mad before.”
“When?”
“When she was talking on the phone.”
“That’s because my sister is having a party, and she’s not allowed to have parties.” Ellie thought of something. “Why don’t you like my mom?”
Bobby shrugged again. “I never said that.”
“But you never say anything to her.”
“So?”
“So…why don’t you like her?”
“I never said that.”
“You already said that.”
“Stop talking to me.”
“I can talk if I want to.”
“I’m not listening anymore.”
“You’re a stupid sad head.”
“I’m not sad.”
“You’re going to cry, and your tears are going to drown us.”
“Dad!”
Rex turned around. “What’s going on, guys?”
“She’s teasing me!” he complained.
“No, I’m not!” Ellie protested.
“You two are going to have to start to learn to get along better—”
“But Bobby’s a stupid head—”
“I know I am but what are you?”
“You’re a stupid head!”
“I know I am but what are you?”
“A stupid head!”
“Ha! You’re a stupid head!”
“Am not!”
“Am too—!”
“Guys!” Rex bellowed.
Ellie clamped her mouth shut. She knew when she “went too far,” something her mom would often tell her she’d done, and by the angry look on T-Rex’s face, this was one of those times.
***
Bobby knew his dad wasn’t really mad at them. He was just pretending to be so Bobby and Ellie would stop arguing. Still, he lowered his eyes to the ground and tried to look like he was sorry, which he was. He didn’t like making his dad angry, regardless of whether it was real anger or make-believe.
When his dad and Ellie’s mom started walking agai
n, Bobby followed, though he kept his distance. He even let Ellie get a little bit ahead of him, so they wouldn’t have to walk side by side, and so she wouldn’t call him any more names.
He hated her. She was so mean to him all the time. He wasn’t sad. Well, that wasn’t true. He was sad inside his head sometimes. He was sad that his mom was gone. She’d been gone for so long now he almost didn’t remember what she looked like unless he looked at one of his pictures of her. But he still missed her.
His dad told him that she was only going to be away for a short time. She wasn’t dead, which was good, so he would be able to see her again. But the “short time” seemed like a real long time. Bobby had been in preschool when his mom left, and he was in kindergarten now.
Why didn’t she come home for a visit? Why didn’t she Facetime him?
Did she not love him anymore? Did he do something wrong? He might have. He was just a baby when he was in preschool, and his memory wasn’t as good as it was now. So he might have done something to scare her away. But what?
He asked God every night when he said his prayers to send his mommy back. But God was really busy, and he never replied to Bobby’s prayers. Bobby was probably at the bottom of his list, just like Chris Zukowski was always at the bottom of Mrs. Janet’s list at school when she called out everybody’s name.
And maybe Ellie’s mom was praying to God too, asking him not to send back Bobby’s real mom so she could stay around as his fake mom forever. She probably was, because she liked Bobby’s dad. This was why Bobby didn’t like her. She was blocking his real mom from coming back.
Bobby would be really happy if everything was like it had been when he was in preschool. His mom and dad loving each other and living together. Ellie and her mom going back to their house on Mercy Island or whatever their island was called and never coming back to Newcastle, where his house was. That would be rad, a word that Dylan from school had taught him. Then he would have his mommy back, and he wouldn’t have to listen to Ellie making fun of him all the time either.
God, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut as tight as possible to make the wish stronger, if You’re still listening, can you please do that? Make everything go back to how it was? I promise I’ll be really good. I promise I’ll love my mommy and daddy as best as I can. Just please send my mommy back.
“Bobby?”
Bobby opened his eyes. It was his dad calling his name. Bobby must have been walking slowly, because everybody was way ahead of him now.
“Yeah?” he called back.
“You’re dawdling, bud! Let’s pick up the pace a bit.”
“Coming!” he said, and began to run, all thoughts of his moms, both real and fake, forgotten.
***
When Bobby caught up to them, Rex dropped to his knees and told his son to climb on his back. Bobby latched on, and Rex stood.
“How’s the view from up there, bud?” he asked.
“Go faster, Daddy!”
“No can do. This is my top speed. The groceries are heavy. You don’t want me to slip and fall. I might land on top of you. And you know what that would make you, don’t you?”
“A pancake?”
“A squashed pancake.”
“Am I next?” Ellie asked, tugging at Rex’s pant leg. “I want to be next!”
“You let Bobby have his ride, sweetie,” Tabitha said, taking her daughter’s hand and leading her away. “You’re doing a good job walking on your own.”
“But I want a piggyback too!”
“You heard me.”
“Poop head,” she mumbled.
“Excuse me, young lady?” Tabitha said sternly. “What did you call me?”
“Poop’s not a bad word.”
“As a matter of fact, it is a bad word when you use it as an insult, like you just did.”
“I didn’t. I said… snoop head… Like Snoopy.”
“Now you’re fibbing, and that’s getting you in even deeper trouble.”
“I’m not fibbing!”
“She’s going to cry,” Bobby said into Rex’s ear.
“Stay out of this, bud,” he replied.
“You’re fibbing about not fibbing,” Tabitha continued. “That means there’s no dessert for you tonight—”
“No!” And now the tears came.
“You know better than to tell fibs.”
“I didn’t!” she wailed.
“Keep it up, Ellie, and you can go to bed early too.”
Ellie’s face had gone red, and her wet eyes simmered with indecision: remain combative or submit to her mother’s authority.
Reason prevailed. She sniffed resignedly and wiped an arm across her eyes.
“That’s better,” Tabitha said.
Ellie took off ahead of them.
Tabitha sighed and followed. Rex did a couple of circles, making Bobby squeal in fear and delight, and joined her.
The road wound into the dense rainforest, pushing deeper and deeper into the thick vegetation rife with moss, lichen, ferns, and epiphytes. They passed a towering cedar twice as thick as the other cedar and spruce and hemlock around it, and Rex was amazed to discover he had a childhood memory of it, of asking his father why it was so big. He didn’t recall what his father’s answer had been, but the tree remained as impressive now as it had been then.
All around them warblers, finch, and sparrows sang their late afternoon songs, and Rex inhaled the mountain air deeply. He felt good. The best he had in a while, and that was saying a lot, as he was currently experiencing one of the most trying periods of his life.
Last month Rex had caught the flu and had called in sick to work on the morning of September 14. It proved to be a fateful decision that would save his life, because on that same evening, at 11:36 p.m., nine hours into Flight 2026’s journey from New York to Frankfurt, Frederick Johnson, his First Officer of five years, began an unscheduled ten-minute descent that concluded with the Airbus A320 colliding into a mountainside in the French Alps, killing Frederick and all one hundred and fifty-nine souls on board. When crash investigators recovered the cockpit voice recordings, a chilling suicide speech by Frederick blamed depression for his final and barbaric act.
Investigators uncovered email correspondence between Frederick and the airline’s Flight Training Pilot School a number of years earlier in which Frederick had requested time off due to an episode of severe depression. Per protocol, the flight school should have kicked Frederick out of the program. Instead, they allowed him to resume his training to obtain his pilot’s license, eventually issuing him a medical certificate confirming his fitness to fly.
Consequently, the airline was now facing charges of criminal gross negligence, which could result in criminal prosecution. To save their asses, the top brass went looking for a fall guy, and that guy turned out to be Rex. The argument was that Rex, having worked with Frederick for so many years, had been derelict in his duty as Captain for not observing and reporting any suicidal tendencies that his First Officer, in light of the magnitude of his depression, must have surely exhibited at one point or another.
In any event, while the investigation and litigation played out, Rex had been grounded, and his distinguished twenty-five-year career was now at best tarnished with a stain that could never be completely cleansed, and at worst in jeopardy of being irrevocably destroyed in one fell swoop.
To get away from all the bullshit, Rex had decided to come up to Canada for the week, to visit the old family cabin he hadn’t been to since his childhood, even if it meant confronting an entirely different closetful of ghosts. He had originally planned to bring only Bobby with him, but Tabitha had the weekend off and insisted she and Ellie come as well, to which he happily agreed.
His back and arms starting to ache, Rex set Bobby down on the ground. “Looks like Ellie has found something, bud,” he said, referring to the fact she was kneeling in the middle of the road thirty feet ahead of them. “Why don’t you go find out what it is?”
Bobby obeyed, r
unning in that silly, uncoordinated way kids do.
“Hope it’s not some animal’s…poop,” Rex said lightly, and laughed.
Tabitha frowned at him. “You think I was too hard on her?”
“Nope. I think you did exactly the right thing.”
“She’s not like Bobby, you know. He’s so well-behaved. Ellie’s like a female version of Dennis the Menace sometimes.”
He shrugged. “She’s just mature for her age.”
“You know her school sent me a letter the other week informing me she said poop in class?”
He arched an eyebrow. “She called someone a poop head?”
“The letter didn’t specify the context. When I asked Ellie, she said she used the word when she asked the teacher if she could go to the bathroom.”
“What does the school expect her to say? I need to defecate, Miss.”
“That’s what I thought. Her teacher was just being hyper-liberal. But now…maybe Ellie did direct the word at another student. That would better justify the letter. So what concerns me is not Ellie’s language, exactly, but whether she’s lying to me. She’s five. Do other five year olds lie? Vanessa never did. She had been an angel—well, until she reached her teens, that is.”
“Like I said, Ellie’s mature for her age. That means typical five-year-old rules don’t apply to her. She thinks she can get away with things others her age couldn’t. That includes manipulating others.”
“Great, so she’s not just a liar, she’s a manipulative liar.”
“All liars are manipulative, by definition. But what I mean is, look, it’s not a bad thing. Not at her age. She’s just…smart, I guess is what I’m saying.”
“That definitely has a better ring to it than manipulative liar.”
When they approached the kids, Ellie spun around and said, “Mommy, look! A baby squirrel.”
Rex and Tabitha bent over for a better look. It was a chipmunk, Rex noted, not a squirrel, and it was just lying there, barely moving.
“What happened to it?” Tabitha asked.
Rex glanced at the branches crisscrossing the sky above them. “It must have fallen out of a tree,” he said.
“Can I keep it?” Ellie asked.
“Definitely not,” Tabitha said. “It’s a wild animal. It might bite you.”