Wildfire

by Carrie Mac

  I shrug. “Still not a peregrine.”

  “Do you know what a group of kestrels is called?”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No. For real.”

  I think of the other collective nouns that I know for birds. A murder of crows, of course. A flamboyance of flamingos, a parliament of owls. My favorite: a shimmer of hummingbirds.

  “A congress?”

  “That’s eagles.” Pete tucks the binoculars back into my pack and lifts it to help me get it onto my shoulders. When he turns with the extra weight, I see him grimace. I forgot about his cut and how terrible it looked yesterday. It cleaned up nicely, which gave me permission to forget all about it, apparently.

  “Put it down, Pete.”

  “It’s okay.” He lifts my pack onto my shoulders. “I just turned funny and it pulled at it a bit.”

  “That’s kind of gross.”

  “Kind of is.”

  “When we stop, we can put a clean bandage on it.”

  “Hover.”

  “A group of kestrels?”

  Pete yanks my hat off and tousles my hair, which he loves to do now that he’s tall enough to be confused for my dad from a distance. Or a dad, because my dad is not that tall.

  “Let’s head into the woods.” Pete checks the compass. “We can get out of the sun for a while.” He wedges my hat on top of his and takes off at a run. “Looks like you’ll need some shade, seeing as some asshole stole your butt-ugly hat.”

  “Lucky fishing hat!” It used to be my dad’s, and it shows. Greasy around the rim inside, stained so much that it looks like it could be camouflage on purpose—coffee, sweat, beer, fish guts, chocolate—and decorated with fly lures he made that are so colorful and expert that birds sometimes swoop way too close to get a look.

  That hat is like my backcountry teddy bear.

  “Give it back!” I run after him and tackle him to the ground, which is a soft alpine carpet sprinkled with tiny purple flowers and wild strawberries that aren’t ripe yet.

  “Not so fast!” He keeps the hat just out of reach.

  I straddle him, which is made very awkward because his pack is still on his back. He’s like a turtle.

  “Get off!” he hollers.

  “Give me my hat.”

  “Not until you promise me that you’ll graduate.”

  “Really?” I scramble off. “Forget it, Pete. My dad put you up to that, didn’t he?”

  “Not the hat part.” Pete gets onto all fours and looks even more like a turtle. He hobbles a bit when he stands up to follow me as I walk away in a huff.

  “You’ll give it back,” I say. “You know what it means to me.”

  “And I know what you mean to your dad.”

  “My dad, who used to trust me.”

  “Your dad, who you’ve been lying to this whole time,” Pete says. “And me too.”

  “I’ll get sunburned and feverish,” I say. “Maybe I’ll throw up all over you, and you’ll have to give me rehydration salts and cut the hike short. All because of keeping my hat. As what, some kind of punishment for me telling you that my dad was fine with me not finishing the year, and telling my dad that you were bringing me schoolwork to do? Gigi was dying. I stand by what I did.”

  Something suddenly hits me square in the head. My hat. I glance back to see Pete standing in the middle of the vast alpine beauty, his hands on his hips like a superhero with a pack for a cape.

  “You tell me when you’ve got it figured out, then, Annie.” He starts walking toward me, limping a little. He sees me staring at his leg. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. We want you to worry about you for once.”

  “You and Preet?”

  “Me, and your dad, and Gigi, and my dad, and Preet. And Principal Hazan.”

  “Okay, okay.” I raise my hands in a truce. “Let’s just pretend the stupid hat thing didn’t happen.”

  Pete bites his lip. He literally bites his lip so he doesn’t say the thing that I walked right into. Sure, Banana, let’s just pretend it didn’t happen. As usual.

  * * *

  —

  The woods are cool and dim, with slices of smoky sunlight angling through the trees and making a patchwork on the forest floor. There is hardly any wind, so the trees are quiet and still, and we can hear so much birdsong that it starts to sound like that is what the world sounds like. Birdsong, and rushing water when we end up alongside a small creek.

  “If I’m right,” Pete says as he checks the maps on his phone, “I’m going to give you a surprise in about half an hour.”

  “I am not accepting surprises at this time,” I say. “Please check back later.”

  “You’ll want it when you see it.”

  A tall bluff of rock rises up to our left, and soon we are walking along a narrow ledge, with the creek far below us. There is a lot that I’d like to say about this part of the forest. But I’m not in a talking mood.

  I hear it before I see it.

  “A waterfall?”

  “I don’t know how big,” Pete says. “But it was on the map.”

  The bluff rises even higher, and the trail widens, and then we see it. It’s not big at all, but it is a bright, rushing promise of something in the middle of the quiet, sleepy forest.

  “It’s beautiful!” I drop my pack and kick off my shoes and make my way over the icy, slippery rocks to get close to the falls. The mist is a gift of cold perfection on my hot, sweaty face. “Coming?”

  Pete shakes his head. “I’m going to sit for a minute.”

  “Not me!” I start peeling off my clothes until I’m absolutely naked. I don’t care if Pete looks. If we’re going to be together, then we keep our underwear on—an unspoken rule—but it doesn’t matter if it’s just one of us.

  “It’s colder than it looks!” Pete shouts over the noise.

  I gingerly step toward the curtain of water, my arms over my breasts. As much as I don’t mind him seeing me from behind, I don’t want him to see me from the front. Somehow that’s more intimate. Not somehow. It is more intimate. Everyone has a bum, but out of the two of us, I’m the only one with breasts and a vagina. “Vulva,” Gigi always corrected. “You see your vulva. You birth children and menstruate from your vagina.”

  I step under the water, and it’s like a million shards of ice are raining down on my shoulders. I scream and leap out.

  “Oh my god!”

  “Probably comes from the glacier.” Pete takes a handful of trail mix out of the bag and stuffs it into his mouth. “Cold, huh?”

  “You didn’t mention a glacier!”

  He stares at me and chews through a big grin.

  I’m shivering.

  “Throw me my towel?”

  He throws me my hat instead, and then my towel.

  * * *

  —

  By the time I’m back in my clothes and eating my share of trail mix, the sun is starting to set, but we can’t camp by the waterfall. There is too much mist, and all of our gear would get wet. So we hike another hour, feeling pretty proud of ourselves for making up some of the lost time even with Pete’s bad leg, and then set up at the edge of another alpine meadow, by a party of hemlock trees that should give us some shade in the morning.

  The smoke is as thick as fog and, as the moon rises, makes the perfect backdrop for ghost stories. But it is also perfect for the kind of quiet that you get only when you’re so far from civilization. So we do that instead. Quiet. We make supper quietly. We play two games of Uno quietly. Pete heads off into the woods with the orange plastic shovel quietly.

  While he’s gone, I look in his pack for his precious unicorn trucker hat. I’m going to keep it for a while as payback. Before I find his hat, I find an envelope sticking out of a book. I pull it out. It has my name on it, in handwriting t
hat I don’t recognize at first. The letter is sealed and very worn. Two of the corners are torn.

  “Why are you looking in my pack?” Pete is suddenly behind me. “Do I need to defend my property with the little orange poo shovel?”

  I stand, envelope in hand.

  When Pete sees me with it, his face falls. That’s what turns some very old gears in my head. All of a sudden I know whose handwriting it is.

  “This is from my mother.” All at once I want to rip it open and read what is inside and also tear it up or set it on fire and toss it into the hemlocks, no matter if it starts another wildfire.

  Read it.

  Burn it.

  “Why is it here?” My breath catches in my throat. “Why do you have this, Pete?” He doesn’t say anything, just has that disturbing look on his face. I know all of his expressions! “What is that face? What is that look on your face?”

  “I didn’t mean for you to just find it. I was going to give it to you.”

  “When? When were you ever going to give me this? That is mine! It’s always been mine!”

  “Gigi told me—”

  “Gigi knew? No.” I shake my head. “I don’t want to have one single negative thought about her right now. Where did you get it?”

  “I don’t remember,” he says. “Maybe I found it. It doesn’t matter. I kept it for you. Gigi knew I had it, and she said to wait. And now she’s not here to tell me to wait anymore, and she said I’d know when to give it to you—”

  “It’s still sealed! How did either of you know what’s inside?”

  “It’s from your mom,” Pete says.

  “I know it is! You had no right,” I say. “Neither did Gigi. It’s not like this says ‘Do not open until Christmas morning’ or anything.”

  I rip it open. Just like that.

  I know the look on Pete’s face now. Absolute shock.

  “See?” I unfold several thin, lined sheets of paper, the three holes on the wrong side when I turn it rightways to read it. The paper is covered in my mother’s tiny printing. “Not hard.”

  In the dark, the cramped writing looks like a pattern on the paper, like it came from the factory that way. I’m not sure that I want to be able to read it, but Pete knows, and so he angles my headlamp down, focusing it on the paper.

  Dear Annabella Georgia,

  If you are reading this, then I did get to see you one last time.

  I’m going to apologize, but first let me tell you a story.

  Once upon a time, there was a mama unicorn with shimmering wings and a mane that threw off glitter whenever she shook it. That unicorn had a daughter, who was smart and funny, but whose wings were not strong enough to fly yet, no matter how badly she wanted to. So the mama unicorn carried her everywhere, showing her all of the beautiful things in the world. Rainbows, of course, and the aurora borealis. Music as glorious as the galaxy itself, and sunny days with blue skies, and campfires under the stars. Gazing up at the moon in all its predictable phases on warm summer nights, on a soft blanket, in a meadow, by a lake, at the foot of a majestic mountain. Swimming underwater in the ocean, in lakes, drifting down slow rivers on rafts made of lily pads. Jumping in piles of autumn leaves. Waking up in the morning to the smell of cinnamon raisin toast with cream cheese.

  I can smell it again, right now, just as all those beautiful things in the world kick my memory, trying to make it remember, whether I want to or not. It goes on like this, a long, long, long list of the things my mother loved. Page after page after page of things that she did share with me, before she stopped taking her medication that last time. High tea, dogs with three legs, red licorice, funny typos, pretty dresses with skirts that spread way out when you spin around and around, bunnies twitching their noses, dark chocolate. Old movies.

  Just like her mother, Gigi. Which was the only thing they had in common. Besides me.

  Until one day, after a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful sunset of blushes and roses and lavenders and periwinkles, the mother unicorn and the daughter unicorn waited for the moon to rise up over the mountaintop. They waited and waited, until at last the daughter jumped up and pointed.

  “There it is, Mama! So big and round and silvery bright!”

  The mama unicorn looked where the daughter was pointing, but it was not there.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  It simply was not there, but because she didn’t want to say so, she nodded. “It is so beautiful.” Which she remembered to be true. But the night was dark and cold and scary and long for the mama unicorn, and worse, the sun did not come up for her either. She could see her daughter and everyone else living in warm, sunny days and cool, delicious nights. Light and dark, balanced and natural. As it should be.

  But not for her.

  The sun did not rise.

  The moon did not rise.

  The world stayed impossibly dark. So dark that there was no way to tell where the black sky ended and the blacker ocean began.

  The mama unicorn knew it was absolutely true that if she stayed in the beautiful valley, this darkness unique to her would spread. She would get it on everything and everyone that she loved more than life itself. So she made the hardest decision of her life, to protect the small, bright heart of her daughter, who would never grow if there was no sun and no moon.

  She would leap off the highest cliff and simply not open her wings. And in that manner, the world would be right and bright and dark in turns again, as it should be.

  A cook who worked at the ecology center found her body pushed up against the dam three days after she jumped from the cliff along Highway 2, a two-hour drive away from our house, where I was asleep at the time, and so was Pete, whose dad still wasn’t back from Mount Rainier.

  For three days, I didn’t know that she was dead.

  That note was in the diary when she gave it to me in the car that night she took me. If I’d read it then, would I have understood? Would I have known what to do? I felt a surge of rage. How was I supposed to know what to do? I was just a kid who wasn’t sure how much she loved her mother versus hated her.

  “Are you mad?” Pete puts an arm across my shoulder. “I just didn’t want you to hurt anymore, because I know how hard it is to have your heart smashed. When I showed it to Gigi, she said the same thing. We didn’t want you to hurt more than you already were.”

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  Later, Pete falls asleep and I lie awake, thinking about my mother. I read the letter twenty times. I try to be mad at Pete and Gigi. My dad would’ve wanted to see the letter too. They kept it from us! But even as I try to be upset with him and Gigi, I’m not. I would’ve done the same thing.

  I think I will dream about my mom, what with the letter tucked under my head and having read it over and over. Instead, I dream about the cabin I went to for the three summers when my dad was dating Naomi. It was her cabin, on Lake Shannon, near Concrete. It’s not so much that I dream of the cabin, but of just one night over and over.

  Gigi had already gone to bed, and my dad and Naomi sat on the beach, by the fire pit, the flames blinding them from seeing us as we slipped out into the water. We wore life jackets, but only to shove them down to wear like skirts when we got out to the middle of the lake so we could float sitting up. This was our greatest discovery of that summer.

  The moon was just a sliver, hardly there at all.

  Perfect for shooting stars.

  We saw just two. Pete gave me the first wish. He took the second.

  And then, as if just two shooting stars were all we had been waiting for, we both started to shiver. The shore was impossibly far away. We could see the fire. We could hear Dad and Naomi laughing. We could’ve shouted for help, and any number of people on the beach would’ve come for us. But we didn’t want to get caught.

  “Never go in the water w
ithout an adult,” Naomi told us every single time we arrived at the cabin. “Or you won’t be setting foot in it for the rest of the trip.”

  We wriggled the life jackets to where they should be and started to swim.

  Swimming was my strength, not Pete’s. I could’ve cleared half the distance in just a few minutes by myself.

  Finally, Pete stopped, flipping on his back for a rest. I flipped onto my back too and held his hand, like two otters not wanting to drift apart. That’s when we saw the shooting stars. Three in quick succession. He closed his eyes, but he wasn’t wishing.

  “Swim!” I splashed his face. “Swim!”

  When he didn’t respond, I grabbed his head with both hands and pushed him under the water. I held him there while he thrashed and fought, and when I let him up, he was ready to swim. We sang “99 Bottles of Pop on the Wall” and were down to twenty-three by the time the shore was close enough. We stopped singing so my dad and Naomi wouldn’t hear.

  My dad still doesn’t know about that night. He and Naomi stopped in our doorway on their way to bed. There were bunks, but Pete and I were both on the bottom, legs entwined, pajamas twisted. I woke when I heard their voices.

  “So sweet,” my dad said.

  “Until she gets pregnant.”

  “It’s not like that,” he said. “These two are soul mates. That’s different.”

  * * *

  —

  The way that we’re sardined together in this tent, our necklaces read Mate Soul. I always sleep on the right. When the dream wakes me up, I can’t shake how wrong it is that our bodies are in the wrong order, so I actually get out of my bag—no small feat, considering the tight mummy fit—climb over him, shove him over, and resettle on the left.

  Now our necklaces look right. Soul Mate.

  That’s better.

  Dreaming of the night Pete and I almost drowned makes me think of my mom, of course. She was alone. No soul mate.

  She never had one. She couldn’t. Her mind wouldn’t settle into the calm a person needs to have the closest friends.