Marrow Island (26 page)

“I can’t be pregnant,” I say. “I don’t feel pregnant.”

“How do you know?”

“I was, once. With Matt.”

“You were?” she asks, like it doesn’t surprise her at all, her face blank.

“We hadn’t been together long. I was in love with him, but I couldn’t tell him.” I’m staring at her body, her bony frame that carried a dead baby for weeks.

“You couldn’t tell him you were in love? Or that you were pregnant?”

“Either.”

“What happened?”

I remember it, the quiet but certain knowledge I felt. That it wasn’t right. It wasn’t time.

“Motherhood seems like a dangerous experiment, in this world. How can you love someone and leave them with the mess you’ve made?”

She watches me, then looks up to the trees.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she says, finally.

There’s a washcloth and a little chunk of soap tucked in the front of my bra. I wash my underarms in the cool water, my feet, between my legs. A trout nibbles at my toe, and I kick it away, lose my balance, slipping off my rock perch and landing in the stream, sharp rocks on my ass and hip. I come up coughing, soap lost to the current. Katie laughs. I stay there, dunk my face and head and rinse the soap from my body. When I look up, Katie is still smiling. She looks content, calm. I try to understand how this can be: she ran away; she found me. But for once, I don’t want to question the joy I feel. She was my first love.

“Come in,” I say.

She wades in farther down, where the rocks dip, creating a small waterfall. Her back is to me, and she’s saying something, but her voice is lost downstream. I can’t see her face, her expression.

“I can’t hear you.”

She says it again. I can hear parts of the stressed syllables. I think she says, “I’m trying to save you.” But maybe it’s “The fire will save you.”

“I can’t hear you when your back’s to me.”

She turns, just to look over her shoulder.

“I didn’t say anything,” she says.

“You said something, just now. I heard you.”

She shakes her head no, wades deeper into the current, up to her hips, sweeping her arms against it to stay upright.

“It’s like limbo,” she says. I hear her this time, see her lips move.

That night we lie in the cot side by side, and I tell her about the cougar I hear sometimes, how I think I can smell him marking the area around the lookout—sometimes the heady odor of cat piss wafts through the trees.

“I talk to him a lot.”

“What do you say?”

“I sing him songs. I tell him stories.”

“Which stories?”

“About the islands, mostly. About what it was like before the quake and after. My dad going out in his boat, chasing me around with live crabs. ‘Crab hands! Crab hands!’ Remember? I tell it about the sound of the quake, the shapes it made, the geometry of it. Looking out the classroom window and seeing the earth rolling in, the trees tipping sideways. I tell it how I thought:
I am going to die
. Then I looked into your eyes and saw you were thinking the same thing.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be writing all of this down in a story?”

“Yes. But I’m not sure I want to write it down.”

“Does it help, telling the lynx?”

“It’s a cougar.”

“The cougar, does he respond?”

“No. Wherever he is, he’s probably just thinking about eating.”

“That’s bleak.”

“I had a therapist in Seattle. I used to tell her these things, thinking it would help. But she responded by asking if I was having suicidal thoughts.”

“Were you?”

“If I wanted to die, I’d be dead already.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Carey thinks I’m here writing it all down. My mom thinks I left the city to write. I go day by day, starting with the day I arrived on Orwell after twenty years. I write a page and it takes me all day, and then evening comes and I burn it up and bury the ashes.”

“How many pages have you burned?” She is drifting off. My arm lays parallel with her arm, and she traces my index finger over and over with hers.

“I’m not counting.”

“Where are you in the story?”

“Lost.”

“Lost?”

“Yes.”

It’s dark but I can feel her tense. She’s looking at me. The whites of her eyes glow.

“I went looking for you,” she says.

“You disappeared and I found Jacob in the barn.”

“That was an accident,” she says, kissing my temple.

“That I found him or that he was in the barn?”

“Both. You were both accidents. He fell down the stairs; you had some bad mushrooms.”

“That was not an accident.
You
didn’t take them—the
Amanita,
” I say, pleading. “No one else could have had that kind—only me. Why, Katie?” I just want to hear her say that she knew, that she gave them to me.

“You’re fine, look at you. You’re still here.” She runs her hand down my waist and back.

“I’m not fine. I see the filaments everywhere.”

“What filaments?” Her hand stops.

“Like threads on fire.”

“Oh, those.” She relaxes. Her voice is soft; her hand resumes.

“You see them, too?”

“No. But I’ve heard about them. Only some people get them after the mushrooms. You’re lucky.”

“What are they? Will they go away?” I’m drifting off. It’s harder to speak. There are unnatural pauses. We used to talk ourselves to sleep like this; we used to confess our deepest thoughts and secrets, then pretend it was all a dream.

“Saint Lucy tore out her eyes and God restored her sight, but ever after her eyes were made of light.”

“Why did you do this to me?”

“I wanted you to see.”

“See what?”

“How your dad became part of the island, the millions of particles of him, his ashes. How they were in the air, in the trees, in the soil. Couldn’t you feel him?”

“You didn’t have to kill me to show me.”

“I only meant to show you how close you could be to him.”

“I never loved you,” I say.

“I never loved you more,” she says.

She winds her fingers into my hair and kisses me, mouth open just enough to taste her. I fall asleep to her slow exhale.

When I wake, dawn is streaking through the clouds and she’s gone. Her bag is gone. Her shoes are gone. There’s a note on the table, paper pulled from my journal. There’s a pen next to it, but the page is blank. I hold it up to the light, looking for impressions, but all I see are the ghosts of my own words.

I run outside, looking for her footprints, stopping to listen. I hear nothing. I find nothing. There’s no trace of her down the path to the fire lane and the cabin. I run a mile down the trail, two, knowing she can’t be moving quickly, but she’s not there. Has she heard me coming? Is she hiding in the trees? I call her name once. Then again. Nothing.

She took nothing with her from my stores. Maybe some water from my tank. No food. She had nothing for shelter, no warm clothing. She left nothing behind. Not even tracks. It was as if she hadn’t been here at all.

I call down to the ranger station on the radio to see if anyone has come across a female hiker recently. I get Darlene, who says she doesn’t think so. No lone female hikers. Not with the closures to the west and the northeast for the fires burning.

“Were you expecting somebody to check in with us?” Darlene asks.

“Maybe,” I told her. “Can you have Carey check in with me when he can?”

“Sure thing.”

I think about what Carey will do, if he knows she was out here—that she’s out here still, somewhere. He would send out search and rescue. He would call the sheriff.

I set out myself, not the way she came—up the trail from the logging road and the highway, where she must have hiked past our cabin, or hitched past it, maybe with other hikers, with campers or fishermen. I set out the other way, up along the ridge and down the other side toward Cougar Lake. The trails there aren’t marked well. They open up into dry forests, some still coming back after fires. Without a map or guide, it would be easy to wander off the trail and become disoriented. If it’s your intention to get lost, the landscape will only help you.

I hike the trail for an hour, then two, calling Katie’s name until I’m hoarse. Not a footprint, not a scuff. When I start the descent down to the lake, I hear thunder in the distance. It’s early afternoon. The storms are coming down over the mountains to the west, just like the radio said. I make my way down to the lake, its shores muddy, the film of algae thicker, like a velour blanket. I can feel it—the change in the troposphere—the pressure descending, the hairs on my arms rising, that weight on the lungs, like when a plane lifts off the ground, the first ascent. At this altitude the body has its own barometry. The hum of insects amplified by the charge in the air. The birds keep up their calls, the pitch increasing, ready for the rain that will not come, that will evaporate before it reaches the ground, sucked right back into the wreckage of storm clouds. It’ll take me another forty minutes to circle the lake, but I try, calling her name less now. The panic I felt earlier was gone; replaced by a sinking. I look for her red bandanna, listen for the sound of another human, the way our movements are different in the woods than any other creature’s; I close my eyes and feel with my skin—I am sure I will feel her, if she’s close, if she knows I am close.

I climb the ridge back and come up out of the trees to the sight of lightning flashing across the opposite ridge. The sun is completely hidden, trees thrashing. And there they are again, the filaments, wriggling up to the tops of a pine thirty feet away. There’s a spark and a flash, and I close my eyes. I’m breathing hard from the climb. I sit on a log, but it gives way under me, and I slide on my rear back to the trail, the log hitting my back. I keep my eyes closed. I breathe slowly and dump the last of my water over my face. I’m a mile from the lookout. If I jog I can make it in fifteen minutes. When I open my eyes again, the filaments are gone. The clouds are lumbering in and it’s darker, so I get up and run, walk, run, until I’m back at the lookout. From the deck I watch the storm rolling through, feeling sick to my stomach. When the lightning flashes, the filaments follow. Red, gold, white. It goes on like this. The thunder shatters the air, and I count. One . . . two . . . three . . . four. Lightning streaks, my retinas fill with tiny flames. It’s getting closer and closer, the thunder breaking right on top of my mountain, and I go inside. There’s a hammering in my head. I lay down for just a minute, on the cot.

I smell the pillow, but even her scent is gone.

I’ve been asleep for three hours. It’s unnaturally dark outside, clouds still hanging over the foothills, but the worst of the storm seems to have passed. Carey’s voice comes through on the radio.

I jump out of the cot and pick up. “Hey, I’m here.”

“Darlene said to check in with you about a female hiker?”

I hesitate.

“Lucie, are you there? Over.”

“I’m here.” I’m shaking; I don’t know what to tell him.

“I just wanted to check on conditions.”

Pause.

“Lots of lightning but no strikes that we know of, yet. What’s it look like up there?”

“Lit up like the Fourth of July, for a while. Quiet now.”

“Any strikes?”

“I don’t think so. I’ll keep watch.”

“Did you have a hiker?”

“I did,” I lie. I’m about to keep lying. “But I only saw her from a distance. Red bandanna. Tan pack. Headed down the mountain, toward the river. Not a backpacker. Day hiker. She didn’t have any gear.”

“Nobody like that has checked in with us, but day hikers usually don’t. There are campers out at Strawberry Wilderness, maybe they were checking out the trails. Strange not to go up to the lookout, though.”

“Yeah, I thought so, too,” I say. “Let me know if somebody checks in? She could’ve been caught in the storm.”

Twenty-four hours pass. At night I lie awake, forcing myself to imagine different scenarios in which she saves herself.

She makes her way out of the woods, meets another car full of Christians or hippies, hitches a ride to town—any town. She borrows a phone. She calls Jen and Elle. Or her parents. She turns herself in at the nearest sheriff’s office. Someone comes for her. Someone takes her home.

But I can’t help seeing the other possible scenes. Her foot stepping off the trail, her path into the unfamiliar wilderness. She hunts the site of an old fire—years old—scanning the felled trees, the rotting logs. She would find what I have seen there before: the
Psilocybe,
the wood-eaters. Like fireweed, they come back to the scenes of disasters; they thrive where others were destroyed; they make a place for another generation. She only needs a handful of the mushrooms. These would ease the discomfort. But she would need something else—something acutely toxic. She could have plucked many kinds from the woods of the Cascades, even in a drought year. She could have collected more than enough
Amanita smithiana,
the ones they fed me; she would know how much to ingest. Once I imagine it, it’s like a bad dream that can’t be undreamt: it infiltrates all the other scenes. There she is, choosing the place, taking off her pack, settling against a pine trunk, looking out at the bend in the river, drinking the last of her water while dog ticks climb up the leg of her shorts, mosquitoes drink until they’re heavy. It would happen to her like it happened to me: the immediate sickness, the hallucinations, abatement, then weakness, deterioration. She would feel how I felt, and she would understand. It would be her way of confessing to me. But of course, even if we found her, no one would be able to carry her out in time.

The fire breaks out five miles to the northwest. An hour away by foot, if I’m running, but I know fires can move faster than that, especially with the wind urging them. They’ve already started digging containment lines, redirecting some of the crews from the Ochoco fire, which is 90 percent contained. The men are exhausted.

“It’s the other side of the river, so you should be fine for now,” Carey says, “but you should come back down to the cabin tomorrow.”