The sign was in my crosshairs when a fork split the sky, and my feet buzzed. I sprinted toward the intersection, gauging the interval between flash and boom as I pumped my arms. “One Mississippi, two—” Thunder detonated overhead. Not even a mile away. I was speeding into the storm’s teeth.
Lightning sliced a soggy cloud as I reversed course and raced back uphill. One second I was running fast along dry pavement, and the next I was sopped and splashing at a jog, with bolts and thunder exploding around me. Open fields lay on either side of the road, and my body vibrated with the charged air. Panicky, I sprinted again, this time for a tired old house ahead of me on the left, a few hundred yards away. I hoped someone would let me inside.
A car swam toward me with its headlights on high beam, its windshield wipers flailing against the deluge. The blue Camaro slowed as it approached, and I veered onto the grassy shoulder. The driver stopped and flung the passenger door wide.
“Get in!” he shouted. “Don’t touch the door!”
I squinted at the man inside, wondering whether I should race for that creepy house or jump in a car with someone I didn’t know.
But I recognized him. Cabot! That hot guy from the search. No mistaking him. I dove onto the front seat and he stepped on the gas. The door swung partway closed with the momentum. “Okay. You can shut it now. Didn’t want you electrocuted.”
“Thanks.” I pulled my dripping ponytail over my shoulder. “Sorry about your car.” Water puddled around my shoes.
“It’ll dry.” He grinned. “What are you doing out in this storm?”
I nearly told him I was running, but my saturated appearance compromised my eligibility to sass the man right out of the chute. He was far too good-looking. And he had just saved my life. Maybe.
“I miscalculated. What about you?”
“Heading home. I work up at Epping’s farm.”
“The dairy? I’m at the next place south of there. Bird Ridge Farm. Marta Burke’s my grandmother.”
“Mender. I’ve heard of her. Saw her for the first time last Monday, when we were looking for Aggie. Saw you, too.” He winked at me and smiled again. Winked. “I’m Cabot Dulcie, by the way. And you are?”
“Celia. Celia Burke. Here from Houston, while my d-dad’s on a job.” The man had me stuttering.
“Houston, huh? You’re a long way from Texas, Dorothy. Want me to show you around Oz? An old lady like Mender can’t be much of a tour guide.”
He clearly did not know my grandmother, but protecting her reputation was not foremost on my mind. “Yeah. I’d like a tour. I’d like that a lot.”
“Ever see Lake Whatcom?”
“Heard about it.”
Maybe the guy water-skied, too. I stood by the window after he dropped me off. My heart bounced like a kangaroo.
CHAPTER 18 ~ AGGIE
Itch
The poultice dried too fast. Though Aggie guarded it, without a bandage, the mash fell off in chunks by morning. The flesh along the edges had swollen like a sponge, sending jags of red lightning into the surrounding tissue. Uh-oh. Infected. She dabbed pus away with her pinky finger. You are hot, hot, hot. Cold bath coming right up. She stood to go, but swayed, so she braced herself, hands on knees, until the dizziness waned enough for her to plod to the pool.
The spring water stung; she ground her teeth and waited. Gradually the chill countered the pain that pulsed with her heartbeat’s rhythm. A few of the green flecks from the poultice and some white, rice-shaped particles floated free in the water, but the skin flap had adhered to the ragged tissue. Though she rubbed until she cried out, she could only access half the cut. The water clouded with the wound’s discharge.
By the time she finished, the prospect of gathering herbs for another poultice exhausted her. Couldn’t she bandage the cut without all that goo? Would it really help? The mash hadn’t worked yesterday. Maybe it made the infection worse.
Her fever, which was rising by the hour, decided for her. Her body ached as she struggled to refill her bottle at the pool. After she peed in the rain-drenched bushes, she lay on the cool, damp duff near her log for the rest of the day. That night she burrowed into her cave, where black possum dreams haunted her until they gave way to a detached euphoria, like she felt when her dad played his fiddle under the stars.
Her body burned for three days. Fever riddled her sporadic sleep with hallucinations, so that she hovered in a partial wakefulness that left her sapped and confused. Though her cattails lay in a heap by her head, she ate little, and rose only when she crawled outside to pee again and to stumble to the spring, where she forced herself to fill her bottle and drink.
After moonset on the fourth night, the itchiness plaguing her since the preceding day melded into fitful dreams of chicken pox and woke her. Sweat plastered her hair and clothes to her skin, and her arm itched so ferociously all she wanted to do was scratch.
She resisted. In the darkness she was blind. And so dirty. If she scratched with her filthy fingernails, she’d load the wound with even more bacteria, or tear away a good scab without realizing it. She forced her hands under her thighs and refused to touch her arm.
But apart from the itching, she felt better. Her fever had broken, and though weakened from lack of food, her mind was clear. Before dawn, she crawled outside and waited for enough visibility to see the wound. She wanted to claw it with the cougar’s savagery. Wanted to gouge out the itch. As light seeped over her, she saw why.
Maggots.
Little white larvae protruded from under the skin flap, and more wriggled and burrowed around raw islands of granulating flesh. She wasn’t itching because she was healing, but from these horrible creatures crawling inside her wound.
On wobbly legs, she jumped and shrieked, snapping her arm like a bullwhip. When only a few larvae fell to the ground, she rushed, stumbling, toward the spring. She flailed her arm against the clear surface, ignoring the pain until she saw grubs writhing in the water. With the flat of her hand, she rubbed the gash until more of the worms came free and floated off.
The itching subsided. Weak with shock and hunger, she crumpled onto the forest floor and inspected her injury in the growing light. A few white wigglers still squirmed inside the cut. From fly eggs, she remembered. Grimacing, she extracted the creatures one-by-one and flicked them to the ground.
Maggots eat dead things.
Maybe death had been closer than she thought.
She plucked the last grub and let her shoulders sag, her body and mind depleted. A great weariness came over her. Hiding took so much work. How long could she keep this up?
She forced herself to study the wound. The angry swelling along the sides of the cut had shrunk and paled. Red streaks shooting out from the gash had retreated, and a clear serum now wept from the wound, instead of that smelly green pus. She clenched her fist and opened it. No throbbing.
Wait a minute. Did those nasty squirmers heal her? Though the idea revolted her, she would face facts. The maggots had eaten away her infection. Without them … she shuddered, as the ground she counted on shifted, and her thinking took a turn.
Dad had made all of life in the forest one gigantic game. Even when they played Homing Pigeon out in the foothills, he spun her in both directions before she could take the scarf off her eyes. A game.
But this was no game.
That something horrible could happen to her if she refused Dad’s advice never occurred to her back then. That bad things could get her if she followed it? Unthinkable. But now? She made a list of things that had tried to kill her:
1. Cougar.
2. River.
3. Trees.
4. Plants.
5. Fire.
She surveyed the forest as if she had never seen it before. Rough, prickly spruce trees glowered at her. Branches proved untrustworthy. Hadn’t she stepped onto fat limbs only to have them snap off underfoot, weak and brittle? Liars!
Before the fire, death was something that happened to Brian Hatch in thos
e underwater tree roots. Not to her parents. And definitely not to her. Most of the time she had felt ridiculously safe, never imagined that anything would kill her.
Now her bug-bitten arms and legs stung with proof that even the smallest insects were out to get her. Only a stray maggot near her foot suggested otherwise.
CHAPTER 19 ~ CELIA
Kiss
The morning after the thunderstorm, I sat in an Adirondack chair on Gram’s patio with my heels propped on a watering can and a legal pad of equations for Mr. Maurer’s rain problem balanced on my lap. Under the heady influence of calculating the vertical component of rain falling in feet per second, the fragrance of Gram’s roses, and a long shower, I was entirely focused. My steady preoccupation with Aggie sat in my mental back seat. I wore no makeup, a baggy white T-shirt, and faded cutoffs shorter than my tan line. My hair was drying in the sunshine.
So when Cabot appeared at my elbow, I think he read my distraction as a rebuff. He stepped backwards.
“Uh, remember me? Your grandmother said you’d be out here.”
“Hey,” I stammered. I leaned away from him to lay my worksheets on the ground—and to hide the blush I felt climbing my neck. “What’s up?”
He set a matching chair at an angle and stretched sinewy arms down the armrests. Leaning back, he beamed at me, gap-toothed, tan; the corners of his eyes sent two sunbursts of lines down the sides of his cheeks. His heat bounced at me, pinning me in place.
“Day off. Want to climb a mountain?” He inclined his head toward the peak dominating the eastern skyline.
“Mt. Baker? Don’t I need some serious equipment? And training?”
“Not for Artist Point. Road opened yesterday, a good month early. Still snowy in places, but hiking boots will do.” He pitched forward, assessing my bare feet. “You got some?”
“Of course. A girl can’t come to Washington without boots.” I thought of the back country around Chelan—where I usually wore them. Hadn’t even pulled them out of my suitcase yet.
He settled back in the chair, grinning. “A nice little four-miler.”
I shaded my eyes and took in the mountain, stalling. The man didn’t waste any time. I needed to compose myself. And ask my grandmother.
“Maybe. If you can answer a riddle.”
He angled toward me. I smelled soap and something else. Something musky. Noticed a shaving nick on his chin.
“Ooo. The girl’s playing games. I like that.” His eyes danced. “Fire away.”
I handed him my yellow pad and pointed at the numbers. “It’s raining. I’m on foot and I have to get home. I also want to stay as dry as possible. Should I walk or should I run?”
He gave it back without looking at it. “You wouldn’t have to walk. I’d take you home.”
“I’m serious.”
He laughed. “You’d run.”
“How do you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I really, really needed to stay dry. If my life depended on it, and I was travelling on foot, are you sure I should run instead of walk?”
“Well, yeah. You’d get there faster.”
“What about other variables besides my speed?” I turned my calculations toward him. “Would droplet size matter?”
Cabot’s head tipped back, then upright, as if it were hinged. “Woman. You need a new hobby.” He took my wrist and pulled me to my feet, sending a surge of that heat into my arm. “Let’s go.”
So he didn’t like math.
He waited in his car while I went indoors to change and inform Gram of our plans. She glowered at me for a good five seconds. “You’re telling me?” Her mouth pursed, and she turned toward the door. “I’ll chat with that boy first.”
I followed her outside, mortified. She bent close to Cabot’s window, and he rolled it halfway down. Flashed me a grin.
“Hey, Mrs. B.”
“You be careful on that road, young man.” She rested her hands on the glass.
Cabot laughed. “You worried about me? Sunday driver here.”
I couldn’t see her face. “I mean it. Have her home by four. Without a scratch.”
He laughed again. Shifted in his seat.
“I ain’t got claws, Mrs. Burke.”
“Don’t grow any.” She patted him on the shoulder and stepped back to the sidewalk. Crossed her arms. Smiled at me. “Let me know what you think of the air up there, sweetie.”
“Whatever.”
Cabot got out and held the car door open, and I climbed in. I spied on Gram in the side mirror as we drove off. In a wide stance with her fists on her hips, she shrank to a dot in the mirror’s frame.
And just like that, I was alone with Cabot Dulcie. Oh, Meredith. I imagined her slow smile and slower inhale, her nostrils flaring at his complex scent. Animalic, she’d call it, before she shuddered with delight. Some kind of cologne. An air freshener shaped like a little green tree dangled from the mirror. Yeah. And that. He took a roll of Mentos from a pocket in his cargo shorts and held it toward me before he slipped one into his mouth, chewing and talking. Peppermint.
The car whined as Cabot punched the accelerator after every stop sign, testing the upper limits of each gear as we crossed the wide valley, flushing roadside birds as we sped by. His hand didn’t leave the shifter until we stopped in the foothills for sandwiches-to-go at a cramped little restaurant packed with broad-backed loggers leaning over their coffee and pie.
Then he aimed his car up the mountain. My senses reeled with trees and views whizzing past and the great-looking guy driving me through high-altitude curves in a low, blue Camaro, while Van Halen wailed out the open windows. Eruption. Jump. On Fire. Perfect accompaniment for a trip up an active volcano on a day that felt like one.
Cabot’s voice hummed and surged over the car’s engine. “… I did the bike leg of the Ski to Sea Race on this road last year… team took second … faster this time …”
Who cared? If he’d said he sold parakeets at the farmer’s market, I still would have hung on his cadence. He talked with an energy that leapt into the next moment, the next sentence, and I drank in every carbonated word.
Near a small lake, he pulled over. “Warm-up hike,” he said. He popped another mint onto his tongue and sprang from the car, his jaw working fast. “Mt. Shuksan.” He ticked his head toward a snowy, dentate peak that actually resembled a molar, its mirror image reflected in the lake’s shiny mouth. “Picture Lake. They named it right, yeah?”
“You think?” I said. Unbelievable. “Belongs in a magazine.”
“You ain’t seen nuthin’.” He looked like I felt. Edgy. Exhilarated. He shook his arms like a swimmer on a starting block and shifted side to side.
“Race ya,” I said. Without looking back, I dodged an elderly couple bent over a shrub and sprinted along the shore of the lake. Within seconds I heard him behind me, his breathing strong and even, his strides longer, gaining. We finished the loop in a dead heat. Not bad for hiking boots. Cabot slapped his cap on his thigh and reseated it over his forehead. He high-fived me and laughed. The sound rolled into me.
By the time we wound past the shuttered ski lodge, I couldn’t stop smiling. I thought of Meredith telling me about a guy she’d gone out with, and how she’d felt chin deep in a Jacuzzi with a view, leaning into the jets. Something like this, I guessed.
At the trailhead, he put our sandwiches in a pack, then led the way up a narrow path arrayed with alpine firs and boulders and, where the snow had melted, patches of greening meadow. A spicy scent rose from the warming conifers. We shaded our eyes against the snowfields’ glare and surveyed the nearby tree line. Above it, craggy peaks surrounded us like kings, conferring.
“Kulshan Cabin’s that way.” Cabot pointed into the distant trees. “I stayed there in seventy-nine, before I summited Baker.”
A mountain climber, this guy. I liked that. Liked him.
Along a hogback trail with wide views of the Cascades on both sides, he swung the pack to the
ground and sat on a log silvered with age. I breathed in the valley, my hands on my hips. “Queen of the World,” I whispered into the sky.
He patted the gnarled wood beside him. “You got that right.”
He heard me. I shrank and sat, lifting the pack between us. He dug for a sandwich and handed it to me, brushing my fingers with his, injecting my arm with a jolt of warmth; I recoiled reflexively.
He didn’t react. His eyes traveled quietly from the food in my hands to my face and rested there before he set the pack on the ground. Then he swiveled the bill of his cap like a baseball catcher’s and moved into the gap between us, pressing his thigh and shoulder against mine. I caught my breath and lowered my head, but he lifted my chin between two fingers and held it there until I raised my eyes to his.
Then he tilted, closed his eyes and kissed me. Just like that, his mouth slid over mine. No time for me to worry or wonder what to do or practice in a mirror. A small, warm sip. Minty.
Stunned, I didn’t pull away, so he took a longer drink of me, then kissed the tip of my nose and beamed. I think I smiled back, at least a little. I felt shy, even as I felt like a candle on that big old cake of a mountain, lit for the first time. My lips seemed connected to my every nerve, buzzing from my fingertips through my torso and down into the soles of my feet. Could he tell? My face burned. I bit into my sandwich, still tasting the sweetness of him.
I took another bite, then stood and rewrapped my food. “Lost my appetite.”
He was studying me, grinning. “For food, maybe.” I tugged the strings of my hoodie. I couldn’t look at him. “You’re smackin’ gorgeous, you know that?”
I shook my head and smiled weakly, tensing my shaky legs. “C’mon Cabot. Let’s go. You’re embarrassing me.”
He really laughed then. “Your wish, my command, Queen of the World.”
How did he mean that? I couldn’t read him.
He slid the pack over his shoulders and lead the way across a hillside and up a steep incline. My eyes dogged his calf muscles as they worked the grade, my mind replaying each kiss. At the base of a jagged boulder the size of a small cabin, he turned to me, holding his index finger against those lips. Islands of snow dotted the talus slope spilling down either side of the massive rock.
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