Red Fox Road

by Frances Greenslade

  I got out my jackknife and laid the fir needles out on a piece of bark that was lying on the road. Then I chopped the needles as best I could.

  * * *

  I think both Mom and I were thinking about, or trying not to think about, time. Like how much had passed, or not passed. The first time I looked at the clock in the truck, it was only 7:30 a.m. I figured if Dad normally walked four miles an hour at a regular pace, which is what he said, then he might only walk three miles an hour through the bush, or even less if it was tough going. So if it was fifteen miles to the road, that’s still over five hours of walking. If he’d left around six, and Mom knew exactly what time it was because I saw her check, then he might not get to the highway until eleven. Then he had to find a tow truck or whatever he was planning to do—he hadn’t talked about that part. And it had taken us quite a while to come down that road: How many hours were we on it? He probably wouldn’t be back here until after dark. I wondered if Mom knew that.

  Sitting in the truck with the snow landing on the windshield and sliding down the glass in lines, we drank the tea I’d made on the one-burner stove. Mom said the tea was good, and I thought it was, but a bit bland. If I made it again, I’d use more needles. I had used most of my water making it, but we still had Mom’s bottle. The tea was hot at least; the air, even in the truck, was chilly.

  We were each in our sleeping bags. I was crowded into the driver’s seat behind the wheel, but the seat could recline if I wanted. After Mom finished her tea, she said she was going to sleep for a bit more. I got my sketchbook out of the backseat and worked on a pencil drawing of her. I wasn’t good with eyes, so it was just as well hers were closed. I sketched her hair with long, smooth pencil strokes and I tried not to look at the clock.

  When I finally let myself look, it was nearly ten. I was stiff from sitting so long, and I was getting hungry. I wondered where Dad was and if he’d eaten his pepperoni yet and if he was moving fast enough to stay warm.

  The snow had changed back to rain again, a soft, steady patter on the truck roof. The windows had fogged up, and for a minute, it seemed as if we were on a boat, so far out to sea we couldn’t see the horizon.

  “Getting hungry?” Mom turned to me.

  “Yeah.”

  “What should we have?”

  “Split the pepperoni?”

  “And split the apple?”

  “We could save the apple for lunch.”

  “We’ve got a few barbecue chips.”

  So we sat in the truck and ate our breakfast of pepperoni and barbecue chips with a few sips of water and we tried not to look at the clock.

  “I wish it wasn’t raining,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  “Poor Dad will be getting pretty wet.”

  “I know.”

  I put on my raincoat and went out to pee. In the woods, the rain didn’t seem so bad; the trees were catching some of it. I breathed in the fresh, rich smell.

  Everything changes, Grandma used to say. She used to take me out to the woods, crouch down to show me the ants and beetles dragging grains of dirt and bits of stick and carrying them off somewhere. Sometimes I tried to follow them to see where they were going, but I always lost track of them. The wind blew leaves from the trees or they just died and dropped off and the sun coming through the branches made shadows that were always changing, and we changed, too, got too hot, or got chilled or hungry or tired, then we slept and ate and felt good again. She said it made her feel better knowing that nothing was permanent.

  Sometimes I catch a glimpse of what she meant, like when I lay on a blanket in the backyard looking up at the stars. The stars are always changing, even minute by minute, and the stars you see at 9 p.m. are in a different place in the sky by 11 p.m. In the summer, Orion’s Belt disappears, but in the winter it’s back again. I knew they were changing; I could be sure of it. But sometimes, like now, seeing the mist rise up from the forest floor and shift shapes among the trees, it scared me to think that nothing is permanent.

  “We can play hangman,” Mom said, when I got back to the truck.

  I knew she was trying to take our minds off the time.

  I came up with tundra, and I’d hanged Mom and even put hair and glasses on her before she guessed it. Her word was ridiculous. I followed with shipshape, which Mom said seemed like two words, but if I’d had my dictionary I could have proven it was only one. When I came up with cataclysm, Mom guessed four letters and then said she had a headache.

  “No coffee. That’s what addictions do for you,” she said.

  I looked at the clock. It was just before noon. I’ll give him another hour, I thought. When one o’clock came, I pictured Dad stumbling out of the bush and onto the shoulder of the road, checking his watch, knowing we’d be wondering, and he’d be sorry he’d said he’d be back by noon.

  Then it was quarter after, and twenty-five to two and Mom was asleep again. I got out and ran down the road as fast as I could, which wasn’t that fast because of all the rocks and because the rain had made them slippery, but I just needed to move.

  When I got back, it was 2:30.

  “I didn’t really expect him back by noon, did you?” I said.

  “No.”

  “All sorts of things could slow him down. He had to catch a ride on the highway. People might not want to pick up a soaking wet guy who just walked out of the bush.”

  She smiled at me. “He’ll get here. We just have to be patient.”

  “I know.”

  “Should we eat our apple now?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Me too. The first thing I’m going to do when we get back to civilization is have a big plate of fries and gravy,” Mom said.

  “I want bacon and eggs.”

  “Oh, don’t even talk about it. I want a good coffee. Even a bad coffee would be good.”

  We started to laugh. We laughed like crazy people until tears were running down our cheeks and then Mom stopped and said, “I need a couple of aspirin.”

  “Dad left the first aid kit. I put it in my pack.”

  As I was getting it out I thought that I should have given some first aid things to Dad just in case. But by now he was in some gas station somewhere, or at a restaurant calling a tow truck and getting my hot chocolate. The hot chocolate would be cold chocolate by the time he got here. I wonder if he’d thought of that. I didn’t care.

  We cut up the apple and ate it with some bread and cheese. I was still hungry. We got out of the truck and walked up the road. The rain had turned it muddy and slick.

  “Let’s turn around,” Mom said. “We don’t need one of us to break an ankle.”

  Beyond the edges of the road, lichen-hung trees and rocky forest floor with ferns growing from the deadfall winked at us in the soft, steady rain.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Francie!”

  I opened my eyes. It was dark. The warm fog of Mom’s breath hung in the cold air.

  “Is it night?”

  “Do you hear that?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Listen. I hear a vehicle coming. Do you hear it?”

  I listened. I could hear the gurgling of my empty stomach and Mom’s sharp breathing. Outside, a gusty wind spit freezing rain against the truck.

  “I don’t think I hear it, Mom.”

  “Well, I can hear it plain as day. I’ve been listening to it for almost half an hour now. I don’t know what’s taking them so long. Unless they’re taking a different road in.”

  I knew better than to argue with her. Earlier, I’d heard the truck door open and she’d gotten out. Then I smelled the skunky sour smell of her special tobacco. She stayed out there for a while and brought the scent of it back in with her. I had not opened my eyes then, just felt glad to have her back inside, close to me.

  The funny thing about
Mom’s special tobacco was that it made her feel better, but it made me feel worse.

  Mom sometimes said that when I got hungry and tired, I became “unreasonable.” That’s what I’d say about the way she became when she smoked. Like once when I was sleeping over at Carly’s place, Mom phoned at two in the morning and Carly’s mother came into the room to get me to take the phone call. Mom said then, in a whisper, as if she hadn’t already woken everybody up, “Francie, did you take your necklace off?”

  I was sleepy and confused. “My necklace?”

  “Yes, Grandma’s necklace, did you take it off?”

  “Yes.”

  “You took it off?”

  “I did. I took it off.”

  “Okay, good. Good. I just wanted to make sure you wouldn’t choke on it in your sleep. Go back to bed now. Good night.”

  In the morning when Carly’s mom asked if everything was okay, I said yes, that my mom had just forgotten to tell me something really important, which wasn’t really a lie, and Carly’s mom said, “Okay.”

  Nobody’s family is as perfect as it seems from the outside—that’s something I figured out. I used to think Carly’s family was perfect—one girl, one boy (her cute older brother, Nathan), and nice, normal parents. Her mom works in a bank and her dad works out of town on the oil rigs. They have a big house up in the pine woods with a view of the lake and the Okanagan Valley and they have a swimming pool and a hot tub where you can soak under the stars. You can see so many stars from up there where the lights of town don’t reach. Probably like here, if it wasn’t raining. Carly’s dad used to barbecue hotdogs and hamburgers when I went over there, which Carly couldn’t resist even though she’s trying to be vegetarian.

  I could smell that juicy grilling smell now, mixed with the chlorine-pool smell, fried onions, fresh sliced tomatoes and ketchup, mustard. In the summer, Carly’s mom made potato salad with crunchy radishes from their garden.

  Okay, I’m so hungry now I forgot for a minute what I was going to say, which is that a few months ago, Carly’s mom and dad got a divorce, and if that wasn’t bad enough, when her dad moved out, someone else moved in, a woman named Daphne who worked with Carly’s mom at the bank but then lost her job.

  Carly says she’s nice enough, but it’s weird anyway. She sleeps in the guest room and every morning sits at the kitchen table in her housecoat drinking her coffee, smelling like cigarettes, with a book of crossword puzzles she works on until noon, which bugs Carly and would bug me, too. Also, because she smokes, she goes out on the deck, and the smoke floats in Carly’s bedroom window. She can’t stand the smell, but her mom won’t say anything about it.

  Carly doesn’t know who exactly this woman is, except a “friend from the bank,” and her mom isn’t exactly telling them anything else, so they don’t know how long she’ll be staying or if they’re going to be able to keep living in their big house in the hills. And Nathan hates having her around, because he can’t walk out of the bathroom in just a towel—or that’s how he feels and I would feel that way, too.

  My point is that you might think other people’s families look more normal than your own, but it’s probably not true. All the kids Mom counsels at school probably think our family is perfect.

  “Francie!” Mom whispered. “Do you hear it now? Listen, listen.”

  I listened. I still couldn’t hear anything but the tapping of the freezing rain on the truck roof. “Not really. Maybe something.”

  “I can’t believe you can’t hear that. I think we should walk back on the road, the way we came in. They must be stuck.”

  I hoped that this was true. I wanted it to be true. I also wanted to do something. It was only eight o’clock at night and it was weird to have just woken up when it was dark but still early. Everything was upside down.

  “Get your rain gear on. I don’t need you getting hypo­thermia on top of everything.”

  Mom pulled our backpacks into the front and I turned on the flashlight. We didn’t want to use the truck’s interior light and run the battery dead, in case we needed it later. I pulled on my rain pants and my jacket, which was still wet, and Mom put on hers.

  Outside, it was pitch black and cold. I held the flashlight and shone a path through the sleet coming sideways into our faces. We had to pick our way carefully, because the stones were slick with ice. A crust of wet snow lay on the road.

  “It’s cold,” Mom said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” After a few minutes I said, “You?”

  “Me what?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, too. I hope I’m right about this. I don’t hear the engine noise now.”

  “It’s hard to hear anything with our hoods on.”

  “That’s true.” She stopped then and pushed her hood back. I did, too. The tinkle of sleet falling on leaves and hair and eyelashes and road rushed in my ears, and nothing else. I looked over at the woods on the side of the road. Creatures in there were hunkering against the weather, like we had been, hushed and listening and waiting for it to pass.

  We pulled our hoods back up and kept walking.

  We walked for about half an hour; I was starting to feel the cold in my face and fingers.

  “We still have to walk back,” Mom said. “We’d better not go too far.”

  She pulled off her hood again and listened. I scanned the road ahead and the woods on either side of us, but there was no break in the gloom, nothing out there except trees and the hiss of the freezing falling rain.

  “I’m sorry, Francie. It must have come from another direction. I could have sworn it came from this way, but sounds can play tricks on you out here.”

  “We could go a little farther.”

  “I don’t think so. We’d better walk back.”

  We walked back, trying not to stumble on the slippery rocks.

  “This truck never looked so good,” Mom said, when we reached the red Mazda. “Are you hungry?”

  “I can wait.”

  “Let’s have some water. We need to remember to drink water, even if we don’t feel like it. And next time we leave the truck, we should leave a note on the windshield. We don’t want someone finding it empty while we’re gone.”

  I wrote the note on my drawing paper in dark charcoal pencil: Please wait for us. We will be back in a few minutes.

  “Maybe you should write ‘stranded,’ ” said Mom. “In case it’s someone other than Dad who happens by.”

  So I wrote at the top, Stranded.

  That scared me a little. It made me feel as if Mom didn’t think Dad would be back any time soon. But he had to be back. He had the GPS and by now he would have had lots of time to get to the road and a gas station or a telephone.

  As if she’d read my mind, Mom said, “It could take time. It feels like it’s been a long time to us, but it may have taken him longer than he thought to get to the road. Remember that hike we did in Okanagan Mountain Park? That took us all day and it was only supposed to be seven miles.”

  “And we don’t really know what kind of terrain he was crossing.”

  “That’s right. And if he got to the road after five or six o’clock, it might have been hard to get anyone to take him out on this road. So we may have another night here, I think. Let’s hope I’m wrong.”

  Mom pulled her sleeping bag up over herself and leaned her head against the window. I propped up my flashlight so I could draw. But after a few minutes, when I heard Mom’s breathing change and I knew she was asleep again, I started to think about the kinds of things we might be able to find to eat in the bush in the spring. It would be too early for berries, I thought, except maybe dried-up ones. There could be dried rosehips left on the wild roses, too. Any of the leaves and buds of a wild rose could be eaten. It was late April. At home, the arrowleaf balsamroot was about to bloom; in school, we learned that t
he Okanagan people used all parts of it: the young shoots, the flowers, the roots. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize it without the yellow bloom that looks like a small sunflower, but I might. The leaves really do look kind of like an arrow. But they mostly grow on dry hillsides, and this area seemed wetter than that. There were lots of other plants I could probably find that I’d recognize.

  I wrote out a list of them on the bottom of my sketch: stinging nettle, devil’s club, cattails, lamb’s quarters, clover, dandelions, mint, tiger lily, pineapple weed. My mind drifted.

  Funny how a memory can fade in your mind for a long time and then something happens and it’s all you can think about. I listened to Mom sleeping and I wrote my list of plants and then I couldn’t stop thinking about Phoebe. Phoebe is—was—my twin sister. She was born first, by nineteen minutes, so technically she was my big sister. Phoebe was born with a hole in her heart, so there’s no way I should be jealous of her and how can you be jealous of someone who is dead, anyway? Sometimes I worry that I’m forgetting her face. I do still remember the smell of her—it’s hard to describe, but she smelled kind of sweet and milky, a bit like clover. That’s my strongest memory of her now. She had silky hair, curls, not as red as mine—strawberry blonde, people called it, which is nicer than red—and very green eyes and freckles across her nose. Well, we were twins, so she had a lot of the same features I have, obviously, but somehow they looked nicer on her, and even though I remember these things and I could just look in a mirror to see her face, I can’t really see her face anymore. I have to try hard to remember.

  She’s been dead for five and a half years. I hate saying that word, “dead,” because it sounds like she’s just a body or something, but what else do you say? Adults say “passed away,” which seems kind of a ridiculous thing to say, like you can’t quite admit the person really isn’t coming back, but “dead” is wrong, too; it doesn’t explain how alive she still is, to me, and especially to Mom.

  It wasn’t true that I hadn’t thought about Phoebe for a long time. I suppose I thought about her every single day. Whenever I heard something funny, I’d hear her laugh in my head, like the trill of a bird. Sometimes I thought of the way she imitated other people’s facial expressions or how she used to whisper jokes in my ear when we were supposed to be sleeping, and how Mom would come into our room and tell me to settle down and let my sister get some sleep.