by Carrie Mac
“How about after?”
“Negotiable. Or maybe I should say, it depends. On how Gigi you’re going to be.”
“I do not have to Gigi,” I say.
“ ‘Gigi’ is not a verb,” he says.
“It can be. And you know it.”
“Well, then.” He smirks. “I can Annie.”
“Which is mostly inspired by Gigi.”
So maybe I won’t tell him about the last bottle of Gigi’s THC tincture. I’ll wait until Fire Camp, when Pete isn’t so obsessed with his Make Annie Better project. I also have seven mini bottles of vodka from Gigi’s stash, which I am definitely not telling him about. Gigi bought those by the box, preferring stashability to economy. She especially liked having half a dozen in her purse at any time. She said they were to give to the homeless guys who lived in the woods behind the Thrifty Mart, which was partially true. But that actually meant two for some guy, four for her. Daily.
Pete will want some of the vodka by the time we get to Fire Camp. We’ll mix it with lemonade. Ah, who am I kidding? I’ll share the tincture with him too. I love him, and besides, if I get to have it all, I’ll probably be sent home before the first week is over. Mind you, it’d be gone by then too.
“See any caramels in there? Probably melted by now.” He leans across me to get at the glove box and ends up lying in my lap. I feel that flush I don’t want to feel. The one that is so confusing to me, because I thought I sorted through those intrusive feelings last year, when we did kiss. And now there is Preet to think about, because no way am I going to be that girl. Those girls are an insult to all the other girls. It would be very, very helpful, universe, if you could show me the way on this one, because right now I just want to lean down, knock his unicorn hat off, take his face in my hands, and kiss him full on the lips.
“Ta-da.” He sits up and proudly displays a handful of caramels. He grabs his seven cards.
We play three games. He wins all of them. He wins at mostly everything. But I don’t mind.
Some of the cows wander off.
Most don’t.
And while we wait, I spend way too much time thinking about that one kiss that should’ve changed everything.
The sun is starting to set when the cows move enough to clear a path. Not much farther and we turn off the logging road and onto a rough track with just one set of ruts. If anyone wants to pass, one of us will have to reverse to a more open spot, or climb up onto the low berm that runs alongside the road. Not that you’d necessarily call it that.
“Where the hell are we?”
“Pasayten Wilderness, south of Devil’s Ridge.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“South of the Pacific Northwest Trail. Map seventy-three.”
I pull the papers out of the page protector and find the one.
“But these are for the PNT,” I say. “We’re not on the PNT.”
“No, we’re just below it,” Pete says as he slows to a stop. “The red line is the PNT. We’re going to do pretty much the same thing, except a few miles south. These are the best topo maps, and they were free. It’ll be close enough. Guaranteed.”
“This isn’t the route the dads approved, is it?”
“Most of the time, we’ll be so close that we can just shout if we want someone to hear us.”
“Why this way?” I say. “Why not the PNT?”
He shrugs.
“I know that shrug.”
“Then you know the answer.”
“Adventure.”
“Uncharted territory!” Pete shouts. “By us, anyway.”
He speeds up again while I follow the red line, taking note of the elevations. The jar of peaches rolls onto the floor. I put it back on the bench so it doesn’t roll under the gas pedal or, worse, the brake. There is a lot of elevation on this path. A serious amount of going up, then down, then repeat.
It’s dark enough now that he flips on the row of lights above the cab, on high, illuminating the forest on either side and making it look like something out of a horror movie. And there it is, suddenly bounding out of the bush and onto the road and then turning—
“Deer!” I grip the door handle as Pete cranks the wheel to miss it, and we start to spin out, only the track isn’t big enough to go in a complete circle. Pete overcorrects the other way, and for a moment, my heart starts slowing down. It’s all good. But then another deer bounces almost cheerfully out from the forest, and this time we ram right into it. The jar of peaches sails through the air and smashes against the windshield, syrup and bits of broken jar and perfect, slippery peach halves sliming up cracked glass. I can feel the impact in my bones. A horrible, deep thud. My arm aches all of a sudden, but the smell of the peaches is worse. I might vomit.
“Deer,” I say again, nearly breathless.
“Are you okay?” Pete reaches for me. I nod. He slides across the bench and pulls me into a tight, tight, too-tight hug. “Look at me.” His hands on my cheeks, turning my face to his. “Are you hurt? Is your arm okay? Did you hit your head on the dash? Anything?”
“Are you okay?” I say, my words choking my throat before I force them out.
“I’m okay. I’m okay.” He squeezes me again. “We’re okay. We’re not hurt. We’re good. You’re breathing too fast.”
I nod. I know it, but I can’t stop.
“Ants,” I say with one short breath. “There will be so many a-a-ants.”
“We can handle ants.” Pete presses his hand to my chest. “Just slow your breathing.”
“I—I—I can’t….”
He pushes harder. His hand there is almost as painful as the tightness in my chest.
“You’re breathing too fast too.” I put a hand on his chest.
“The deer,” he says. “Is it still there?”
I don’t want to look, but it’s my job to do the broken things, injuries, bloody stuff, small repairs. Sometimes big repairs. That’s always been my job. He has to sit down if he sees blood, no matter if it’s a cut that doesn’t even need a Band-Aid.
I glance out the window and see it right away, lying in the bright light from the truck, clearly still breathing, even though it’s otherwise motionless.
“What if it’s not dead?” Pete says.
“It’s definitely not dead.”
“Does it look okay?”
“It does not look okay.”
He groans, a sob catching in his throat.
“It can’t move, but it’s not dead?” Pete’s voice trembles.
Just now I realize that the truck is on a slight angle. Looking around, I see that we are halfway up the berm. All the peaches have slid over to the driver’s side.
“We need to go look,” I say.
“What if it gets up and goes into the forest and it’s hurt?”
It’s not going anywhere.
I put my hand on the door handle. “Stay here.”
I’ll do this. I’ll fix this. This is an Annie thing to take care of. Not a Pete thing. And not just because I eat meat and he doesn’t, because it would be stupid to pretend it was that simple. And not because we argue about guns sometimes, and unlike him, I’m not totally against them. At all. I go hunting with my dad, but I’ve never shot anything other than empty beer cans filled with water, and cardboard boxes stuck on the fence with targets drawn with marker. When I go hunting with my dad, we never go into the forest more than an hour from the truck. He doesn’t even bring a bottle of water for himself. Just a beer in each pocket, and a bottle of water and a chocolate bar for me in his pack. When he aims, he means it. He always kills in one shot. Every time. Military precision, because he was in the army.
The door is jammed shut. I stick my head out the window and see in the fading light that not only are we angled up the berm, but this side of the truc
k is sitting atop a wide, smooth boulder, and the door is crunched in at the bottom. Without a word, I climb over Pete and open his door, which swings away fast, wedging against the dirt with a crunch.
The truck is going to be a problem, but I don’t want to say that out loud yet.
First things first.
“You stay here.” I scramble out of the truck and up the little hill, out of the way of the truck.
* * *
—
The strip of dirt road and the forest on either side are shaded in dark blues, with the sky just a little lighter still. The air is cooler; there are no more shadows. The deer is lying in the middle of the road. Its front hooves move just the tiniest bit as I get closer, like that’s all it can muster to try to get away.
Its eyes are wide open, wet with fear. Its nostrils flare rhythmically. There is no blood, but it cannot even lift its head as I get closer. It’s so scared, but it can’t move.
Behind me, I hear Pete get out of the truck.
“Annie?” Pete doesn’t come any closer. “Is it going to be okay?”
I shake my head.
Pete vomits onto the dirt.
“Just stop breathing,” I whisper. “It’s okay to go.”
Suddenly a ringing in my ears blocks out all the other noise. The deer, the wind through the trees. The crickets. Pete. Those are the words I said to Gigi moments before she did stop breathing.
I remember thinking I should smother her. Take a pillow and press it over her face, like she had asked me to do jokingly a month before, then seriously just before she stopped talking altogether.
I could smother the deer.
The ringing quiets, and all those sounds come back, louder, it seems.
“Annie?” Pete’s beside me now. He kneels, reaching out, just about to touch the deer.
“Don’t,” I say. “You’ll scare it more.”
We should just go.
I turn my head and see that the truck is definitely not going anywhere. This deer is a problem, but the bigger problem is that we are here in the middle of nowhere, and the truck is screwed.
“We have to do something,” Pete whispers.
“Or we could let nature take its course.”
“The truck is not nature,” Pete says. “The truck did not take its course.”
It did, actually, with Pete driving. But I don’t say that out loud, because of course he didn’t mean to hit the deer.
* * *
—
I can’t smother it.
I can’t break its neck.
I can’t slit its throat.
I can’t bash it with a rock.
“I wish my dad was here,” I say.
“I wish he was too,” Pete says. “He would fix this.”
“But we can’t, Pete.” I take his hand and start backing away. I have to really pull to make him come with me. “We just have to go. We just have to leave it.”
Could I slit its throat?
I’m thinking about this and untangling our packs in the back of the truck when I realize something. The smell of smoke is worse up here than it was down in Sedro. Pete looks up at me from inside the cab, where he’s collecting our phones and water bottles and maps.
We stand at the back of the truck, the packs on the tailgate, stuffing everything where it belongs.
“There was a fire above Lake Shannon,” he says. “I bet it’s that one. And the wind just shifted or something.”
“Probably.”
There are already over a hundred wildfires burning in Washington, but while that sounds like a big number, it’s not really. There were over six hundred up in British Columbia last year by the end of the season. Even now there are fires burning all over, but regular people hear about them only when they get close to homes and people get evacuation orders.
At Fire Camp, we’ll get to go to one of those fires. Only a small one, like a lightning strike, before it has a chance to be much more than a little brush fire. But we’ll be the ones to stop it. Our field supervisor on the trail project went to Fire Camp, and he told us that they say they keep the minors away from the front line, but he managed to get right up to the flames and beat the shit out of them with his own bare hands. That’s what we’re going to do. Tell the fire off and then murder it. Payback for destroying our forests, year after year.
I will toast to that. And so will Pete. I’ll stick one vodka in his flame-retardant overalls and one in mine, or two, before we go to the fire, and when we kill it, we’ll clink that plastic and raise a toast: Take that, murderous beast of flaming doom.
When we walk away, we skirt into the forest on the right, our headlamps illuminating the fat tree trunks, the branches like black wings overhead.
That’s right, Annie. Think about wildfires.
Think about the smell of hot strawberries and smoke.
How those tiny red berries tasted when you pressed them against the roof of your mouth.
“Remember those strawberries?” I say.
“And the smoke.”
I take his hand, so thankful that it only takes three words and we can go back. To another crazy night, and its strange, sweet finish.
* * *
—
A few minutes later, we scramble off of the trail and back onto the road. The moon is only a crescent, so while it’s bright enough out here to turn off our headlamps and let our eyes adjust, it’s too dark to actually see anything beyond each other and the degrees of black and indigo blue that make up the wilderness on a dusky night.
“We’re about ten miles south of the trail,” Pete says.
“If we follow the road?”
He knows what I’m thinking. Why waste ten miles walking on a dirt road if we can cut in at an angle and follow our bearings northeast until we join the trail?
Neither of us wants to hike up a logging road.
Pete glances at his phone for the time. The screen is obnoxiously bright.
“It’s almost eleven,” he says. “How far do you want to go?”
“A couple hours?”
He nods.
I nod.
But neither of us moves in the direction of the forest.
Another long moment passes, and then we look at each other and know exactly what the other person is thinking. Without a word, we drop our packs and start running back down the road.
We see the truck first, and I think maybe the deer got up and walked into the forest, but no. As we get closer, I see it. Only now it’s not moving at all.
“It’s dead,” Pete says. I can hear the relief in his voice.
“It is dead.”
He takes the back legs, and I take the front legs. It’s still warm, and for one second, I worry that it’s not dead at all, and that we’ll be stuck trying to fix this again, with no way to fix it. But no, it’s dead, its head dragging, tongue lolling, as we pull it off to the side of the road and pile branches and rocks over it until it’s buried.
* * *
—
When we finally crawl into our sleeping bags, I want to talk, about anything other than the deer, but Pete—this is always his solution to hard things he doesn’t want to talk about—is asleep a minute later. I’m jealous that he can do this, if only because my not being able to leaves me with hours to overthink things. Which is another thing Pete doesn’t do.
Right now I cannot stop thinking about the deer. Wondering if we should’ve left it. Wondering why we hit it in the first place. That poor deer. Pete’s ruined truck. And we are in the middle of an unplanned nowhere because of it. And then I come back to the deer again, lying across the narrow track, illuminated by the high beams, its eyes searching for a way out that its legs couldn’t execute. If I squeeze my eyes shut to stop thinking about that deer, I only end up thinking about when my mom
hit a deer.
I hadn’t seen her for almost a year when she turned up one school night when I was twelve. Pete was sleeping over because his dad was leading an expedition up Mount Rainier. He tried to stay close after Pete’s mom died, but he was still away a lot. Pete was already asleep beside me, covers thrown off, his pajamas twisted around his scrawny torso. His earphones under his chin, and his audiobook playing along without him. I remember trying to guess how long he’d been asleep so I could put the book back about that much, because it mattered to me even if it didn’t to him. Pete can happily drop in and out of a story, but I have to read it or listen to it from start to finish, without missing a word. He was listening to the same book that I was reading, and I didn’t want him to miss any of it.
I piled my book and Pete’s iPod and earphones on my bedside table and headed to the bathroom. I was standing in front of the sink, brushing my teeth, and then suddenly she was in the doorway behind me, and I saw her in the mirror like a ghost, only I didn’t jump. I didn’t scream. I just held my toothbrush in midair, like a wand or a weapon, the white spit trickling down my wrist.
She put a finger to her lips and shook her head.
“They don’t know I’m here,” she whispered. “This is just a surprise for you.”
She came into the bathroom and shut the door behind her. And locked it. Even with the door closed, I could hear the movie from Gigi’s room. Dad was in the basement tying lures, with one of his political thriller audiobooks on.
She sat on the edge of the bathtub, patting the spot beside her.
I wiped the toothpaste spit off my face and put my toothbrush back into the ceramic mug with my name on it.
“You know your Gigi made that for you.”
Of course I did.
She stared at me for another moment and then patted the edge of the bathtub again.
“Sit, Annabella.”
“Annie.”
The outline of her was so stark against the pale green of the bathroom, it was like someone had carefully drawn around each contour of her with a black marker. She looked like a cutout from a magazine stuck onto a background of my house. Like a paper doll. Only, she was talking. Slow at first, and then faster.
