Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember

by Luzzader, Amanda

  “I’m sorry,” I cut in, smiling. “We’re being impolite. We haven’t even met you, and we don’t know your name.”

  “Peter,” he said.

  “Peter,” I said, “it’s a pleasure. My name is—”

  “Alison, yes,” said Peter, “I heard you. And that is Chase. Hello. Nice to meet you both. Nice day, don’t you think?”

  “Oh!” I said. “Yes. Well, it’s rather cold. But yes, lovely, I suppose.”

  Peter nodded, surveyed the sky that shone through the trees. He stood barefoot in the snow with no apparent discomfort.

  “Al!” grumbled Chase.

  I shushed him. “So, Peter. Is it true? Can you restore our memories?”

  “Restore your memories?” he said, furrowing his brow. He seemed bemused. “No. I can’t do that.” He turned and ducked through a canvas flap into the tee-pee.

  Chase picked up his pack again. “I don’t think that’s the Guide,” said Chase.

  I put my hand on Chase’s arm. “Hold on,” I said. “Look at this place. If this guy isn’t the Guide, then there is no Guide. We’ve come so far. We can’t just leave. Maybe he’s not the Guide. Maybe he tells us where the Guide is. The guide that leads us to the Guide?”

  “I really feel like we need to talk to him. Let’s give him a day or two.”

  Chase shrugged and then let out a sigh.

  We picked up our packs and approached the tee-pee.

  “Uhm, Peter?”

  “Yes, come in,” he said.

  We pushed aside the canvas door and went in. The interior of the tee-pee wasn’t what I figured it would be. It was roomy and tidy, with a clean floor of tarpaulins and animal furs. On one side was a bed. On the other side there stood a small table. There was a fire in the center of the floor, and it was comfortably warm inside, but it wasn’t at all smoky. A little smoke came from the coals of the fire, but it was drawn up through a vent at the top of the tee-pee, which also let in plenty of light. Peter sat near the fire, a small book in his hands.

  “Take off your boots, please,” said Peter politely, “and then join me. I was going to do a little reading, but I enjoy company, too.”

  We took off our boots and sat at the fire across from Peter.

  “Peter,” I said, “we don’t want to keep disrupting your routine, so we won’t stay long, but, may we camp here for a while?”

  “I don’t see why not,” he said. “There is good water nearby. I don’t have much food, but if you help with chores, I’ll share what I can.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Chase sat stony-faced next to me, watching Peter as if conducting an assessment.

  “Can I offer you something to drink?” asked Peter. “The tea should be ready by now. It’s quite lovely.”

  “Oh, you read my mind,” I said. “I would love some tea. Thank you. We’ll just have a cup, and then we’ll go see about our tent and such.”

  “How about you, Chase?” said Peter, getting to his feet. “It’ll warm you right up.”

  “No thanks,” mumbled Chase.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Peter stooped at the fire and lifted an iron teapot. He moved somewhat slowly but smoothly and deliberately, without wasted effort. A plume of steam rose from the spout of the pot. Peter took the pot to the table and from it he poured two cups of the tea. I stood and met him halfway across the floor of the tee-pee. He handed a cup to me, smiled, and bowed slightly to me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re most welcome.”

  The tea was in a China teacup with matching saucer. Both showed signs of wear but were of very find quality, decorated by intricate and beautiful vines and flowers. I put my nose to the vapor that rose from the tea.

  It smelled awful. It smelled like mud.

  I sat down and, setting the saucer aside, cradled the little China cup in my hands, letting the warmth radiate up into my wrists and arms.

  “So, Peter,” I said, blowing uncertainly on the tea. “How long have you been here?”

  “Here?” he said, sipping from his own cup, “like what exactly do you mean?”

  I chuckled. “Well,” I said, “I guess I mean how long have you been camping here? Here in the mountains. In this area.”

  “Oooh,” he said, elongating the word as though he’d thought I meant something completely different. “Here. You mean like here.” He gestured broadly at the tee-pee.

  Chase scoffed quietly.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You know,” said Peter, “that reminds me. I went to the river one night this past autumn. It was in the evening, not too long after it got dark. Night of the full moon. Harvest moon. I went down to the river, and there’s a place there where I like to sit. It’s where the river makes a bend, and there’s a rock there that’s good for sitting. I go there a lot. I went there to watch the full moon come up. So I sat there, and the moon came up, and I had this, like, thought.”

  Peter took a sip of his tea. Then he set the cup down and gazed at the fire as if maybe he had only just then realized it was there. There was a small pile of firewood nearby, and he took a few sticks and laid it on the coals.

  I sat waiting for him to continue, but a minute went by, and then another. I looked at Chase. He rolled his eyes and shrugged. I looked back at Peter. He was staring at the rekindled fire now as though it were an old friend of his who was getting ready to leave him on a long journey.

  “So—you had a thought?” I prompted.

  “Hm?” Peter returned his gaze to me. “Oh, right! I did have a thought. At the river on the night of the harvest moon. It was a thought about here. And there. And being somewhere.”

  “I’d love to hear it,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Peter. He looked up at the vent at the top of the tee-pee. “Let me see if I can explain it.” He pursed his lips in concentration.

  I took a little sip of the tea—and nearly spit it right back out again. It was bitter, like brackish water, but it tasted like soil, like rotten mud. No amount of honey or sugar could have improved it. I couldn’t imagine that this was how Peter meant it to taste. I held it in my mouth, trying to swallow it, but my throat reflexively constricted at the bitterness. I looked over at Peter. He was still contemplating the roof of the tee-pee, so I doubled over, pretended to cough, and spit the tea onto the canvas floor.

  “All right,” said Peter. “I’ve got it.”

  I sat up again.

  “How wide is the universe?” asked Peter, holding his arms out questioningly.

  “I have no idea,” I answered.

  “No, of course not,” said Peter. “No one does, I suppose. It might be, like, infinity. It might be only approaching infinity. But if we just pick like an arbitrary distance, for the sake of argument, it’d have to be, like, big, right? Like a hundred-billion light-years? Right?”

  “Sure,” I said, trying not to sound patronizing. “Works for me.”

  “Okay. Good. Now, if the universe is a hundred-billion light-years across, then smaller distances mean essentially nothing, right? Like, say, two-hundred thousand miles is nothing in comparison, right? Doesn’t even count.”

  I thought about this. “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Okay. Good,” he said, holding up his palms. “Now, follow me down this rabbit hole. Two-hundred thousand miles is how far away the moon is from Earth. That’s the distance between me sitting on that rock and the moon itself. But, within the greater universe, which we have decided for our purposes is a hundred-billion miles wide, I am basically at the moon. Aren’t I? Like if you go to the store and you’re outside in the parking lot, you’d still say, ‘I’m at the store,’ even though you’re not, like, at the aisle where the breakfast cereal is, right? So, on a cosmic scale, I’m practically as close to the moon as I am to you or the continent of Africa. See? So, my thought was, what is the point of saying I’m here or there or anywhere? Because what if the universe in reality is so massive that even a hundred-billion light-yea
rs is a minuscule distance in comparison? Then what?”

  He waited, as if I might give an answer. All I could do was blink a few times.

  “I’m a point in space, Alison,” he said, putting a hand on his chest. “That’s all I can really say for sure. How long have I been here?” He shrugged. “This whole time, I guess.”

  Chase said, “Huh.”

  I looked at Chase, and instead of another eye-roll, he wore a thoughtful half-grin.

  Then I looked back across the fire at Peter, and said, “Huh.”

  Peter smiled back at us.

  CHAPTER 54

  It went on that way for days. We’d ask Peter a question and he would answer with a rambling riddle that rarely answered the question but nevertheless made a certain kind of sense. And not just existential or philosophical questions, but practical questions.

  Chase asked: “Hey, Peter, you think the fishing’s any good down below that big waterfall?”

  Peter answered: “A wise man once said that the charm of catching fish is that it’s elusive but attainable. It’s an endless series of occasions for hope.”

  Chase replied: “So, yes?”

  I followed Peter around his camp, helped him with various tasks. Even now that there was snow on the ground, Peter was still harvesting tree bark, pine needles, and the roots of certain herbs and plants. These he dried over his fire in the tee-pee. He made a very strong liquor from juniper berries and wild grain. On the far end of the camp, Peter had built a sort of wigwam, a dome of stout, arched branches. This was covered with sod and formed a hump in the forest floor the size of a small car. On one side there was a small opening, covered by a door of densely woven willow shoots. Inside this mound it was completely dark, and the floor was covered with a fragrant black compost that was always slightly warm and steamy. A garden of mushrooms grew there—boletes, morels, and others I’d never seen. He lovingly tended the little fungi farm, harvesting only a few each day.

  As I assisted Peter with these bucolic chores, I questioned him gently and obliquely about memories, about the Agency, about his life in the mountains. He didn’t exactly ignore these questions, but he’d never answer them straightforwardly. Sometimes he’d only smile at my questions, sometimes he’d just give me one of his existential answers.

  “I don’t know anything about this Agency you’re always talking about,” said Peter, “but you sure seem to hate them.”

  “I want to be free of the Agency,” I said.

  “Ahhh,” he replied, holding up a finger, “well, you remember what Buddha said about hatred and freedom, don’t you?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Oh,” said Peter. “I don’t either. I was hoping you did. It’s a really good quote. Something about chains and hatred. Oh, that’s it—hate is the ultimate chain, the ultimate enslavement.”

  One day we were hiking a trail along the river where a swampy area of slow water had formed. Peter brought along an old rusty machete and a five-gallon bucket.

  “I’ll show you how to harvest cattail roots,” Peter said. “They’re delicious in the fall, but you gotta get ’em before the water freezes over.”

  I nodded and followed him, much less interested in cattail roots than in something, anything, he could tell us about his possible role as the Guide. He sat on the trail and shucked his boots and socks, and then rolled up his trouser legs to wade into the frigid, slow-moving water.

  “How do you feel about memories, Peter?” I asked him. “Do you think memories are important?”

  Peter pulled up one stalk and then another. “Well, Alison, life is just a series of moments, right? Like one moment followed by another, followed by another after that. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you can only actually, like, live in one moment at a time, right? The same way I can pull up only one of these roots at a time. Once I pull up this root, I can’t pull it up again, and I can only pull up the next root after I’ve finished with this one. I pull up the roots one at a time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” he continued, “so, do you agree that you can only really live in one moment at a time, the present moment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well then, try doing that.”

  When he’d collected a few armfuls of the cattails, he hacked away the stalks with the machete and tossed the starchy, potato-like roots (”rhizomes,” he called them) into the bucket. I said I’d carry the bucket and Peter thanked me and put his socks and boots back on. We were walking back toward camp when Peter paused and gazed with a pleased expression at a large aspen tree that grew at the side of the trail. It was nearly as big around as me. I stopped behind him with the bucket full of muddy roots.

  Peter stood there for a long moment, staring at the tree trunk and smiling. Then he patted the tree, nodded, and went on. I stepped up to the aspen tree and examined it. The white bark shone in the mid-morning sunshine, contrasting with its own coarse, black markings. There didn’t seem to be anything special about the tree, and I was almost ready to interpret the incident as part of Peter’s love for just about everything around us—trees, rocks, birds, small twigs, dirt—when I noticed something.

  In the convolutions of the white and black aspen bark, there was the shape of a heart, a valentine heart. At first I figured it was just a large, heart-shaped knot, a happenstance of how the tree bark had formed, but then I saw that within the heart there were letters, words. They were only barely legible, but they spelled out:

  PETER

  +

  MARY

  It looked as if the folds and ridges of bark had grown the letters, but my mouth fell slowly opened and I blinked in amazement as I realized the more astonishing truth: Peter had carved the heart and the names into the smooth white bark long, long ago, and the bark had healed around the carving until the scar looked like it had grown there naturally.

  But how long ago must his have been? More than a decade. Maybe more than two.

  I hurried down the trail. “Peter!” I cried.

  He slowed on the trail and turned his head to smile at me.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked, gesturing vaguely back at the tree.

  Peter laughed, waggled a finger at me, and said, “You’ve asked me that before.”

  Chase and I doubled our efforts, questioning Peter to see what he knew—if anything. We asked him directly and indirectly. We pleaded with him sincerely, and we acted utterly unconcerned. But it didn’t seem to matter. I thought Peter might be toying with us. Or maybe he didn’t take us seriously. Or maybe it was that he didn’t know how seriously we took him.

  “Why are you here?” I asked Peter forcefully. “Why here? Why you, here with all these tents, where other people have obviously come and gone? What is your role?”

  “You say you were looking for me,” said Peter. He said it slowly, as though explaining something to a small child. “Seems like you should know the answers to all these questions.”

  After a week, the riddles, the non-sequiturs, the evasiveness—they began to weigh on me.

  “Come down to the river,” Peter said one day. “Sit with me. It’s warming up. It’s peaceful. I’ll bring some tea.”

  “I don’t want tea, Peter,” I said, without hiding my mounting bitterness. “I want answers.”

  He looked at me with an impassive expression. He wasn’t surprised or amused or hurt or moved in any way at my annoyance, my unconcealed resentment.

  “Suit yourself,” he said with a wan smile. Then he filled a dented-up old thermos with the disgusting dirt-flavored tea and disappeared down the path to the bend in the river, the place where the sitting rock was.

  I knew he’d sit down there for hours, sitting on the rock, his eyes mere slits, neither asleep nor awake. And if I followed him and pressed him with more questions, he wouldn’t say a word in answer.

  That night Chase and I lay in our tent.

  “I had so much hope coming here, Chase.”

&nbs
p; “I know, Al. Me, too.”

  “We had a good thing going back in our little camp,” I complained. “Tea by the fire. Our little cabin tent. Snuggling down in bed with a few coals in the stove.”

  “The fishing was way better there, too.”

  “Chase, I’m freezing.”

  He drew me close, placed his stomach against mine. I pressed into him and wrapped my legs around one of his.

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  “Not much we can do,” said Chase. “The guy is a sphinx. An enigma.”

  “Isn’t there some way we could force him to tell us something?” I asked.

  “What—you mean like break his legs?”

  I sighed. “No. We can’t do that. Maybe we can find something to barter with. Figure out what it is he wants or needs.”

  And so in the morning, we offered him things. Everything we had with us and more. Vehicles. Food. Supplies. Weapons. Labor. Anything. Everything.

  Peter held his arms apart and gestured expansively to the trees around us. “Take care of the earth, and the earth takes care of you.” He turned in a circle. “The answers you’re looking for are all right here.”

  “He’s crazy,” Chase said to me when we lay down again in our tent that night. “We can’t crack this nut.”

  I cried a little. “This has all been a big waste of time.”

  “I’m sorry, Al,” said Chase softly. “I really hoped it would work out.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “It was a dead end.”

  When we awoke, we packed our things and took down our tent. It was much like the day we set out for the mountain of the bear. We didn’t have to speak or make a decision. We simply began packing.

  When we were ready to leave, we went to Peter’s tee-pee. We announced ourselves and Peter invited us in.

  He was just laying on a brew of his tea. Always the tea, I thought, shaking my head.

  “Hey, pal,” said Chase, “just wanted to let you know we’re gonna get outta your hair. We’re moving on.”

  Peter looked up. “Already?”