Brave in the Woods

by Tracy Holczer

  She drew that connectedness into her antlers as best she could so she would always remember.

  When Juni finished, she adjusted her seat belt, ready to read more of Anya’s story. “Moon River” played in the background. Luca turned off the stereo.

  “‘It took me a couple days to come up with a leaving plan . . .’”

  WHERE THE STORY ENDS

  Summer 1960

  It took me a couple days to come up with a leaving plan. First, I had to make some money. Since it would take forever to save for a Greyhound ticket, I figured I’d stick out my thumb and offer gas money to the driver. I was an experienced hitchhiker, what with me and Will having to get back and forth to the hospital when Mama was sick. I knew to look for loaded pickup trucks and friendly-looking people. Will taught me to have a good story about why we were traveling alone, to keep a pocketknife handy, and, if I was ever in doubt, run.

  Earning money and hitchhiking to Tahoe were the easy parts, though. The hard part was figuring out where to go once I got there. If I went to Mr. Halloran, he’d just bring me to Mrs. Deakins and we’d have to start all over again. The only option was living in the fishing shack Daddy used in the woods near the lake. It was deserted years ago and half falling down, but it would be a roof over my head. It would be tricky to feed myself and keep warm, but as far as bedding and cooking utensils went, I figured Teddy and Abigail wouldn’t miss a piece of silverware here and there. Maybe a saucepan and a lid. I felt bad thieving. That’s how this whole thing started with the curse. But I was desperate, and desperate times called for desperate measures. I had to be alone so the curse couldn’t ruin anyone else.

  I also made myself a promise. I wouldn’t talk about my other life, much as I wanted to. The curse had wrapped itself tight around my family for months, and knew our stories as well as I did. I figured if I kept quiet, I wouldn’t draw its attention. It could be anywhere. Floating on a breeze close by, maybe, tracking my scent.

  A week after settling in, I asked Teddy how I could make a little spending money. I made up a story about liking sweets and saving for a sewing machine. As he scratched at his beard at lunch one afternoon, Abigail offered to pay me a penny for every weed I pulled out of her vegetable garden.

  I pointed at her and shouted “Sold!” before thinking properly. Just the way Daddy used to shout at Mama when she offered him a pickle from the fridge. Or a cold can of soda. “Sold!” he’d shout, and Mama would roll her eyes and smile.

  Teddy and Abigail both jumped a little when I shouted, and stared at me like they didn’t know who I was. Which, of course, they didn’t. That was when the lonesomeness walloped me again good and hard. I had twelve years’ worth of habits and inside jokes and words that meant something only to me now. I didn’t realize how much keeping it to myself felt like shoving a lid down on something too big for its box.

  I realized too late that I had broken my own rule about hiding from the curse, so I slapped both hands over my mouth and ran out the door.

  I ran straight into the ricegrass meadow, sending little white bugs into orbit around my ankles, and turned right. I figured I’d run along the lake path until I wore out. But as I crossed into the neighbor’s woodsy property, looking over my shoulder to make sure Teddy and Abigail weren’t following me into the trees, I tripped over a boy sitting against a large stone and nearly fell into his lap.

  Then I noticed it wasn’t just a large stone. It was a headstone. In the middle of the woods.

  “Shoot! You scared me!” the boy said, nearly dropping his book. “Are you okay?”

  “How could you not have heard me coming?” I shouted.

  I was on the small side, and stick thin from lack of eating, but I must have made a racket flying through the dead leaves, thumping the ground as I went. I bent over at the waist to catch my breath.

  “I was reading. Everything sort of disappears when I read. Mom says it’s an affliction.”

  He held a worn paperback of The Call of the Wild.

  “Is it good?”

  “It’s my favorite. I’ve read it eight times. Mom says that’s an affliction, too. My name’s Mason. You must be Anya.”

  “I am.” I wondered how much they’d told him. Then figured it didn’t really matter since I wouldn’t be here long. He stood up, brushing dirt from the seat of his shorts.

  The headstone had a carving of a dog collar with a tag, and the name on the tag said Izzy. Underneath were years marking her birth and death: April 1, 1955 to June 13, 1960. Just a few weeks earlier.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

  “She was a good dog. She saved my life,” Mason said. He brushed a clump of pine needles off the top of the headstone.

  I recognized the look on his face from my own in the mirror each day. He didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Anya!” It was Abigail off in the distance. She sounded worried.

  “I should go.”

  “I’ll see you around,” Mason said, and gave me a salute.

  There are many points along this story that have made me stop and think about destiny. The stories Mama used to tell about the Grimm family curse made it seem as though some of us were doomed. The curse would find us, no matter how or where we tried to hide. But she’d also talked about the miracles in our family. The way the antler bone necklace was made of powerful luck and kept us safe. It didn’t make sense to me how there could be room for both a curse and miracles, but I was only twelve years old, and figured I was years away from understanding such things.

  Whether my story is one of destiny or one of my own making, I suppose I’ll never really know for sure. But Mason was meant to be part of it, and for that, I am truly grateful.

  I didn’t see him again for about a week. In the meantime, the lost antler bone necklace haunted my sleep. Almost every night, I’d wake up in twisted sweaty sheets, not sure if I’d yelled out, until Abigail would come—frantic at first, calm after a few nights—and try to console me.

  I’m not sure if it was Abigail who asked or Mason who took it upon himself, but he began to show up in the vegetable garden to help me pull weeds. I didn’t see him doing the usual things boys do, like carrying on outside, throwing a ball or walking to the dime store in a group to pick up a taffy or a chocolate bar. He didn’t even swim in the lake, which was right in his own backyard.

  He kept to himself, reading. He liked to sit in trees. His favorite place in all the world was his very own room. It was round, like a turret in a castle, and sat at the tippy-top of the Wheelers’ old house. It was filled with books and magic tricks and a piggy bank full of quarters.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to take his money. Just like I didn’t want to take the Scotts’ fork, spoon, butter knife and the cracked plate. I didn’t want the old saucepan that had been shoved to the back of the cabinet with the lid missing its knob handle. I didn’t want the dusty sleeping bag from the attic or the canvas rucksack I’d found that was much bigger than my little suitcase. I didn’t want the cans of pork and beans or Spam or sealed packages of crackers.

  I didn’t want any of it, but at the time, I considered it my destiny.

  My one solace was the cedar-tree carving Teddy had given me. I kept it tucked under my pillow and prayed for the strength to do what I had to do, resting in the calm-water solace it gave me. And because I wasn’t deserving of that solace, I decided that when I left, I would take the little carving back to Hickory’s Miracle Café. I had to remove every trace of myself so the curse would leave the Scotts in peace.

  The last morning at the Scotts’, before it all went wrong, Teddy had launched into a story, like he did every other morning before he left for his shift at the timber mill. Now, I wouldn’t say he was the worst storyteller I’d ever heard, but he was up there, even though you’d never know by the way Abigail laughed. She also had this habit of taking
hold of his arm and saying, “Oh, Teddy.” Like he was the funniest, most special person on this earth.

  Which was especially generous of her, because even though Teddy wasn’t the very worst, most of his stories didn’t have all the proper working parts, the way Daddy’s did. His stories were just a bunch of beginnings.

  “You’ll never guess what George Kaplan did this time!” he said that morning. “He accidentally took his five-year-old son’s lunch to work with him instead of his own! Isn’t that funny?”

  Abigail laughed. I did not.

  Because I’d become a professional at keeping the lid on my own stories, I’m not sure what came over me that morning. Maybe it was because I’d been listening to twenty-seven days’ worth of “You’ll never guess whats!” Or because, with the help of Mason’s quarters, I was nearing fifteen dollars in my Folger’s can and was planning to leave any day. Whatever the reason, I finally burst.

  “What was in the lunch?”

  “What?”

  “What was in George Kaplan’s son’s lunch?”

  Teddy squinched one eye and rubbed his beard. “I do believe it was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a chocolate milk and a Ho Ho.” He chuckled.

  “See? That’s what makes it funny. George Kaplan is huge, and a man of that size holding a silly little lunch pail and eating a PB&J, probably cut into triangles, with a chocolate milk to wash it all down is what makes the story funny.

  “I don’t mean to be insulting, Mr. Scott, but you might want to think about the middle the next time you tell a story.”

  And for reasons I will never understand, seeing as how I’d just insulted him, Teddy burst out laughing. He even smacked his hand down on the wobbly Formica table for emphasis.

  I went on. “For example: my daddy? Well, he loved to read books. Any old book. Westerns. Science fiction. Romance. He wasn’t picky. They were as much a part of him as his elbows or the hair on his head. He always had a paperback squished into the back pocket of his pants, and this one time, when he’d been walking on a log down by the lake, he tripped and fell backward, straight onto a sharp nail. He waddled all the way home just so he could show everyone how Animal Farm had saved him from a rusty nail right in the behind . . .”

  Teddy and Abigail smiled in that sad way people had when they looked at me, and while I was trying to fight off the mist in my eyes, Abigail got up to do the breakfast dishes. As she took my plate, she put her hand on my arm and said, “Oh, Anya,” as though I was the funniest, most special person on this earth.

  A flash of lightning lit up the kitchen. About thirty seconds later, thunder rumbled in the distance, and I knew I had to get out of there soon. The longer I stayed, the more I put the Scotts in danger. So, after Teddy left for work, and Abigail went to her sewing room to hem a new dress, I went outside to take an inventory of what I had in my rucksack.

  I’d kept it hidden in the stone gardening shed. There was a perfect spot under a small table piled with clay pots and a bag of mulch. I dragged it from under the table and unzipped the canvas bag.

  As I was counting my change, thunder rumbled again and the light from the doorway dimmed.

  “What are you doing?”

  I turned. It was Mason watching me count his quarters. He looked at everything else I’d set on the shed floor. The silverware and the cracked dish and the pot and the food. The sleeping bag and wool sweater I’d taken from Teddy’s closet that very morning.

  “Nothing. Just helping Abigail get rid of some old stuff.”

  Mason crossed his arms.

  “I know you took my money,” he said. “I’m thinking you must have a good reason for it, though, and I’ll need to hear what that reason is before I decide what to do.”

  For all the storytelling that lived in my bones, I couldn’t think of a single word to explain what I was doing sitting on the dirt floor of a gardening shed with a pile of stuff that didn’t belong to me. The truth was all I had left.

  “I have to run away,” I told him. “I have to. Or the Scotts might be in danger.”

  Mason frowned. He sat just inside the shed door. “What did you do to put them in danger?”

  “I didn’t do anything. It just so happens that my family is cursed, Mason, and it’s all my fault.”

  As though proving that point, the sky let loose a lightning bolt, which struck a pine beside the Scotts’ house, breaking off a limb. That broken limb fell straight down into the sewing room roof with a crack and boom.

  That’s when I knew I’d run out of time. The curse was upon me, and I had to leave right then and there, whether I was ready or not.

  TRAIL MAGIC

  “THAT IS THE worst story I’ve ever heard!” Gabby said. “Why did Anya want us to read it now, anyway? We need to be thinking happy thoughts. Positive thoughts. We’re on our way to get Elsie! That’s a good thing!”

  Then she burst into tears.

  Luca pulled into a small asphalt parking lot, bright white lines marking the spaces, and turned the car to face a pasture on the other side of the highway. He set a hand on Gabby’s shoulder while she struggled to get herself under control. Juni looked past them to a black-and-white cow standing at a split-rail fence, chewing grass.

  “I miss him, too,” Gabby whispered.

  It was unbearable, and Juni suddenly wanted to go home. Fear, swift and sure, wrapped cold fingers around her heart and squeezed.

  “Anya wouldn’t have given it to us without a good reason,” Juni said, leaning her head against the window, even if she didn’t know what that reason might be. Maybe Anya was encouraging her to be brave. Or simply sharing her whole heart, all the little secrets she’d kept hidden for so long.

  Maybe it was meant to show Juni that loving a Wheeler was in her very blood, passed down to her like eye color and the texture of her wiry hair.

  Little bursts of sadness was about all Juni could take. She knew how Anya’s story ended, not in miracles, but in real life. And Juni’s worst fear was how her own story, how Connor’s, might end.

  Doubt moved through Juni like a swift river current.

  “I wish I’d known my grandpa,” Mason said. “I don’t remember anything about him except the smell of pipe tobacco. Sometimes, I swear I can smell it in the turret room.”

  “I think now is a good time to stop for a minute and eat some lunch,” Luca said. He pushed open the car door, which gave a small squeak, and got out. But he didn’t walk around to the back. He just stood there, perfectly still.

  Mason leaned out his open window. “What is it?”

  “You guys have to see this.”

  Juni gasped as she climbed out of the station wagon, not because her breathing had gone wonky again, but because an airplane had crash-landed into the back of the building’s roof, the tail end sticking straight up into the endless blue sky.

  It was Hickory’s Miracle Café. Right out of Anya’s story.

  HICKORY’S MIRACLE CAFÉ

  THE FOUR OF them stood side by side by side by side, staring at the airplane in the roof. Juni wasn’t the only one with her mouth hanging slightly open.

  A short man in a red San Francisco 49ers cap turned ribs on an oil-drum-sized barbecue under a pop-up tent. A handmade sign propped against a chair announced BBQ RIB THURSDAYS 11–2. There were five or so folding tables under the trees where several people enjoyed their ribs, what looked like potato salad and baked beans on paper plates.

  “Mmm, smell that barbecue,” Mason said, apparently losing his mind momentarily.

  “With cow farts ruining the atmosphere, it’s mystifying to me how you can still eat red meat. Not only is it contributing to the global warming crisis, but it’s terrible for your intestinal tract,” Gabby said, rubbing her eyes. “You should be worried for your future colon, Mason Harold Wheeler the Fourth.”

  “I am worried for the
future of my colon,” Mason said, licking his lips. “No lie.”

  “We’ve got to go inside,” Juni said, pulling the sleeve of Mason’s alien shirt so he would follow her. Maybe there was a reason they’d found this place, a piece of her quest waiting inside.

  Hickory’s Miracle Café was a wide barn of a building, and after giving a salute to Barbecue Man, Luca opened the large knotty-pine door. Just inside to the left was the topographical map Great-Grandpa Teddy must have brought Anya to see.

  Juni marveled over the tiny cows along I-5, which runs up the middle of the state, Half Dome in Yosemite, and the farmland in central California. She found Lake Almanor and Mammoth Lakes. There was even a thin yellow line from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada. The Pacific Crest Trail.

  “Hello there! Four for lunch?”

  An older woman stepped from behind a glass case filled with pies. She was maybe Anya’s age and as tall as Luca, straight-up-and-down tall, like a mop handle, with fuzzy orange hair, gray at the roots. Her name tag said Winona.

  They were an hour outside South Lake Tahoe, and still about two hours ahead of Dad. “We’re kind of in a hurry,” Juni said, but she had to see what was here.

  “You can’t leave without an ice cream sundae. That would be like visiting Fisherman’s Wharf and not eating the clam chowder!” Winona proclaimed.

  Winona sat them at a wooden farm table tucked under a window. She handed them menus and told them they had buffalo burgers on special, and then she hurried off to yell at the fry cook.

  “Buffalo! These people are barbarians,” Gabby said. “I bet they have tons of Neanderthal in their DNA.”