But even as she carted the scanning pulse detector along behind her mother toward the crashing Fable Falls, she felt a familiar niggling in the back of her heart, only this time it felt as uncomfortable as a splinter in her palm — something chewing a dime-size hole in all of her reasoning, small enough to keep out everything except for rats and doubt.
You can come, if you want.”
That’s how it all started with Emma. A sheepish invitation from Miranda, who had to check on the borer beetles in a neighborhood park for her science project, to the new girl with the bluebells for eyes. School had ended and the two girls were lingering at their lockers, which were across from each other in the hall. Miranda had things to do, but she didn’t want to walk away. Not now, not when it felt like this, like she and Emma were destined for something. Like they were about to move from being just study buddies in history to . . . more.
So she said it: “I have to go check on my science project.” A pause, a moment to gather herself, and then: “You can come, if you want.”
Emma could have said no, but she said yes, and that was the beginning.
Miranda was uncharacteristically shy on the walk over. Conversation usually came to her as easy and naturally as breathing; she was the type of girl who had an exuberance, who could always pluck things from the world around her to talk about — but with Emma beside her on this steep incline of the park, she panted and stammered. She was a well, all dried up.
She really liked Emma, who had moved into the red brick house across the street this year.
She really, really liked her.
She wanted to be best friends, but she didn’t know — you don’t know, do you, whether or not there’s such a spot for you in someone’s life — you can’t know until you ask.
And Miranda wasn’t about to ask.
“The ones I need to check are marked here.” Miranda showed Emma the map she’d drawn of the park, the one a few blocks from the school, a park built on an extinct volcano covered over with ponds and trees and grass.
Emma whistled. “Did you draw every single tree in the park?”
Miranda tried to shrug. “I like to be thorough.” She prayed this would be seen as a positive.
Emma found a sequoia on the map, pointed to its real-life, sturdy-trunked correspondent, and said, “That one.”
Miranda couldn’t stop a smile.
Wednesdays were vehicle-free days in the park, which meant the girls and other walkers and roller skaters and bikers and joggers were able to use the park roads freely, winding up to the top of the long-asleep volcano; they didn’t have to focus on anything but each other and the glory of the pleasant, neutral weather.
“White pitch on the bark,” Miranda said, referring to the small blobs of saplike substance coating the trunk. “That’s good. That means the tree is fighting back.”
“Now what?” Emma asked. “We spray it with bug killer?”
“Nope.” Miranda made a mark on her map with a yellow highlighter. “We’re here to observe only. See,” she explained to Emma, leaning toward her, shoulders touching as she pointed up at the branches. “When the beetles invade, the tips of the leaves turn red — or needles, if it’s a conifer. If the whole tree turns brown and dries out, then it’s lost.”
“Sad,” Emma said.
It was — though Miranda had never thought of it like that before. “Don’t worry — the trees usually win. There’s still plenty of green.”
She said “green” but she had fallen into blue — Emma’s happy eyes — blue, Miranda only knew blue.
They finished marking all of Miranda’s trees, then Emma ran to the playground, to the drawbridge, the monkey bars, all the toys they knew they were about to outgrow, and Miranda followed, light as a leaf on the breeze.
They chased each other around until their legs gave out, then they threw themselves onto the grass beneath a bush of icy purple hydrangeas and Miranda looked at the clouds, then back down at Emma, and then up again at the spinning sky.
And then they huddled in the turret above the big tube slide and talked about impending junior high, the rumors they’d heard about certain teachers, the warnings they’d collected about certain girls and boys; they spoke aloud their great high hopes and fears about the move into this new phase of their lives, and so they left the park buoyed — parched and sweating and grimy with that grit that was unique to the park, a place which was the closest thing the city had to wilderness.
But they also beamed in that way you do when you tell another person a secret about yourself, and you want to pull out hairs and chew on fingernails until they say, “Oh, me, too.”
When they reached their street, Emma turned to Miranda. “Want to come over?”
Miranda was so excited she didn’t think of the long-term effects. What this meant.
She didn’t think about reciprocity.
They were standing still on the curb outside Emma’s house — neutral ground — and so she didn’t consider what would happen when she went to Emma’s house that day.
She didn’t think about how eventually Emma would ask to come over to hers.
“Yes.”
And that was her answer, every time Emma asked her over.
Until the day — that inevitable day that Miranda should have smelled long before it arrived, here to ruin everything — the day weeks later when Emma said, “Let’s go to your house today.”
Miranda — trapped, frozen, a statue, utterly unprepared — managed to say, “We can’t, it’s being fumigated.”
Emma accepted this.
She accepted it the next week, when Miranda said, “Not today, my mom has a cold.”
And the next time, when Miranda said, “We have houseguests.”
“Mom just had the carpets washed.”
“I have a dentist appointment.”
“Spring cleaning.”
It scared her a little, how quickly the lies came out, but she was soothed every time Emma believed her. Soon Emma skipped over the question altogether, leading them right past Miranda’s house and to Emma’s front door. In the cold of the mornings, Miranda would brace herself on the way to school:
What if today it happens?
What if today it’s all over?
But she would come to her locker and Emma would be there, waiting, a grin on her face — the peaceful grin of friends.
Best friends, Miranda permitted herself to think.
And so Miranda was too distracted by a pair of blue eyes to watch out for the day, the inevitable day — the day when Emma didn’t ask and just showed up, without being invited.
Miranda angled her clipboard into the dying sunlight. “We must have passed it.”
The signal on her phone was blocked by either the trees or the drizzle, which meant she couldn’t use the GPS to navigate them back to camp. She had printed a map of the whole national park, but it wasn’t detailed enough to get them past a closed road, orange with construction signs that looked abandoned and edged in spores of licorice moss, and now darkness was falling, along with a discouraging rain and the ever-present mist. Their detour took them through an unknown part of the forest, miles away from Moon Creek, which Miranda now longed for as if it were home.
The darkness, it was turning out to be a funny thing. All day, as they worked and searched around the falls, the gloom had never completely lifted. Sunlight was muted because of the canopy, but with the low-hanging clouds and the clinging fog, it had been twilight-dark in the middle of the afternoon, making their search at the falls futile.
There hadn’t been many spots suitable for “evidence” at the falls, anyway — it had been a rocky area, the water crashing down white with a fury and a violence. “Much too sparse of vegetation for habitation here,” Kat had said, somewhat crestfallen. “The Bigfoot those hikers spotted must have been just passing through.”
Even in the dim overcast, Miranda wanted to keep looking, keep searching — the lack of proof at the falls was the perfect setup fo
r Kat to sail down the river of enlightenment, and Miranda wanted to push.
But now, as the night swooped upon them with only the glazed-over, beat-up headlights of the Critter Mobile to penetrate it, Miranda thought, This. This is true darkness.
The world in shadow.
Something darted into the road, a long-eared shape lit up white in the headlights’ beams.
“Mom!” Miranda cried.
Kat swerved just in time, and then the thing was gone, just a blur on the shoulder behind them. Miranda gulped down the lump of adrenaline in her throat like a pill.
“You have to watch the road!” The words came out of Miranda like angry burps, a reflex of her panic.
“I am!” Kat leaned forward slightly over the steering wheel, though even at her tallest she looked like a junior high schooler. She tipped the last of her Cheetos into her mouth, orange residue coating her chin.
Miranda felt like all the wrinkles meant for her mother were forming on her own skin instead. “Let’s just get back to camp in once piece, okay?”
The truth was Miranda had to concentrate to keep calm — to ignore how frightened she was.
What if we never find our way back?
What if we tumble off the road and the trees eat us?
What if we keep driving forever and the moss takes our car and buries us, and in a hundred years tourists come to see the huge, mysterious mound of green —
She pulled in a breath and pulled out a hair.
Her imagination was getting away from her, like an unleashed pet. The forest. It was the forest’s fault. The forest was making her imagine the impossible.
Miranda looked at her mother.
Kat hummed, bouncing in her seat as she steered to whatever song was playing in her head. Didn’t it scare her, too, that they hadn’t passed any other cars in so long? Didn’t it bother her, too, the way the edges of the road dropped off, like tiny cliffs? The way the trees sprang up right there on that edge, so close to them, she worried one might suddenly grow sentient and decide to smack them with a frilled branch.
And these weren’t just any trees — they were of the massive, archaic variety: Douglas firs, western red cedars, Sitka spruces so tall she couldn’t find the tops of them, all of them covered over with velveteen moss, their roots shaded by ferns — all these details illuminated by the Critter Mobile’s weak beams in a lighting scheme more befitting the opening sequence to a horror movie than a drive through a beloved national park.
Perhaps it was the trees, then, that had brought forth the memory of Emma at the park with the beetles — a memory that was supposed to be sunken like a stone to the bottom of Miranda’s mind. She had sunken it. Buried it. Let it lose itself among the to-do lists and what-ifs and the other memories.
But the trees had summoned it, and it had bloomed, vibrant, a wildflower in her mind until it wilted, quick as winter.
Emma, and the beetles, and the blue, blue eyes . . . it was a brief reminder of what Bigfoot had already cost her.
Out her window, she tried to see past the trunks and get a glimpse of something, anything — anything but leaf, anything but limb — anything recognizable, anything that might guide them back to camp, but it was only green and green and green . . .
Even the night, in the forest, was green.
She shivered, tried to focus past the sound of the windshield wipers, pushing away the gentle rain.
There could be anything hiding out there.
“You okay, Bean?”
“Just a little carsick,” Miranda fibbed.
“How about a distraction?” Her mother then launched into a one-sided debate about the topic du jour — the six-to eight-foot-tall bipedal humanoid himself — and Miranda ingested a sigh.
“So the number of reported wood knockings has almost tripled in the last year, but the number of actual Bigfoot sightings has decreased — why, do you think?”
Miranda had only been half listening; her attention was for the GPS dot on her phone, flickering like a dying star. She should keep trying, she figured, keep reloading it until she got something. “Uh, I don’t know . . . the weather?”
“The weather.” Kat blinked. “Huh. You might be onto something, Bean. Climate change would shorten winters in wooded areas, push back snowlines, decrease the amount of available standing water . . .”
A sharp, venomous barb hit Miranda, and she cut through her mother’s words. “That’s why he’s been so hard to find — maybe we should be baiting him with Popsicles.”
The silence wedged itself between them, an unwanted guest.
Miranda knew she owed her mother an apology — she should explain that only half of her meant what she said, a half that was exhausted and worried and wishing for the comfort of their campground, the reassurance of that muddied pup tent and the patched sleeping bag and the cold, hard ground and the side of the sky she had woken up beneath — but at that moment the GPS on her phone gave up its attempts to reload and crashed completely.
“We’re lost!” she proclaimed. “We’ve been driving around for almost an hour!”
“Relax, Bean.” Kat sacrificed a steering wheel hand to pat Miranda’s knee. “You still have your paper map.”
“We drove off that map two detours and five turns ago!” This is bad, this is bad, her brain chanted. She yanked out a hair. Another hair. Another. “Have you seen any signs?”
“I’ve seen lots of signs,” Kat said, cheerily. “Falling rocks. Rest stop ahead. Bear country.”
Miranda glared at her mother. “You’re not help —”
A terrible noise creaked from the underside of the Critter Mobile. The whole vehicle shuddered.
Then it shut off.
“Uh-oh.” Kat managed to steer it to the side of the twisting road, kissing its bumper against the foliage.
“What’s wrong?” Miranda said. “What happened?”
Kat turned the key — a series of maddening clicks, and then an even worse sound: quiet.
The sound of nothing.
“Probably ran out of gas,” Kat diagnosed.
Miranda leaned over to peek at the dashboard. “The light didn’t turn on.”
Kat snapped her fingers. “I forgot! At the last inspection back in . . . December, I think? They told me the light was broken.” She looked expectantly at Miranda, her eyes buglike behind her oversize glasses.
“Are you serious?” Miranda ran her fingers through her hair. She wanted, so badly, to grab a handful and pluck and pluck and pluck — plucking the petals from a daisy, one by one, dropping them into the grass. “Why wouldn’t you get it fixed?”
“Because.” Kat used this word, this single word, the way a child would — as a perfectly good defense. “I didn’t have time. We had to go to Texas, remember? The werewolf in Marfa.”
A single hair from her head — the bite of pain, the cold of relief . . .
“Okay, we should probably —” Miranda started, but the end of her sentence dangled, then landed and slid away on ice. There was only nightfall and roots and reaching branches, and those dark hills of green over rocks and dirt and dead tree trunks, looking more sinister in the rising tide of evening. The soft rain on the Critter Mobile sounded like laughter.
She had no idea, no idea how to fix this.
No idea what to do.
“Are you all right, Bean?” Kat angled herself sideways in the captain’s seat, facing Miranda. “You seem stressed.”
“Of course I’m stressed!” Miranda let her clipboard slide into the canyon between the windshield and the dashboard. “We’re stuck on the side of the road in the dark in the middle of a forest with no cell service, no clue where we are, and no one to —” she broke off, leaning around her mother.
A ranger’s lodge appeared on the opposite side of the road, on the crest of a long-grassed slope, the trees cloistered around it broken to let an amber glow blaze from its facade.
“Where did that come from?” Miranda was slack-jawed; had she slipped into the hall
ucinatory phase of desperation?
“They probably just turned on the porch light,” was Kat’s explanation. “Come on, Bean — let’s go see if they have a spare gas can.”
But Miranda wasn’t sure. She studied the lodge, the way its windows and door and porch resembled eyes, a nose, and a grin, a face leering at her. And the way it just appeared . . .
Kat reached behind her seat for a purse Miranda hadn’t seen before, a huge carpetbag printed with cats flying in outer space.
Miranda stared. “What is that?”
Kat ran a hand over it. “My cat bag.”
In Miranda’s wildest dreams, she could never have imagined an uglier purse. Yet somewhere, a company had brainstormed this bag, designed it, had it constructed and sent out to the stores, and they had done this with a specific customer in mind to buy it.
That customer was her mother.
“Let’s just go.” All her hesitation melted out of her; the sooner they could find some gasoline, the sooner they could finish this trip — and the sooner she could be done with Bigfoot forever.
She exited the Critter Mobile via the screechy passenger door. The rain was less than a drizzle, even — it was a liquid form of the mist, and it didn’t seem to fall from the sky; it seemed to come from the trees themselves. They waded through calf-deep thistle until they stepped onto solid ground — a trail, leading up to the rustic cabin.
Miranda felt unexpectedly warm, even with the chill and dampness of the night; she took off her windbreaker and tied it around her waist. Mosquitoes loitered along the naked skin of their arms; crane flies dove dangerously close to the porch light, casting strange shadows on the front door.
“Ranger Pat Bernard is on duty tonight,” Kat read from a nameplate. “Hopefully he can help us.”
The Bigfoot Files Page 10
