“Right out here.” Kat directed the girls through the sliding glass door and into the backyard, where she had several white paper sacks on the patio table. “I need your noses.”
As soon as Miranda saw the sacks, she went pale.
Those were the sacks from the freezer.
“Here,” Kat said, unfolding one sack and holding it under Emma’s face. “Smell this.”
“You don’t have to —” Miranda started, but to her horror, Emma, anxious to make a good impression on her best friend’s mother, took a whiff.
“That stinks!” Emma gagged, fanning the air beneath her nose. “What is that?”
“Scat.” Kat opened another sack and smelled it, then offered it to Emma. “Does this one smell any different to you? A little sweeter?”
“Scat,” Emma repeated, frowning. “You mean, like —”
“Poop. Dung. Doo-doo. I’m trying to figure out if both of these are from the same animal.”
The world seemed to stop turning, the very leaves in the willow trees bordering their yard holding still as Emma stared — first at Kat, and then at Miranda.
Miranda was ready to save Emma — the excuse was on the tip of her tongue, she was about to fling it out like a shield, but Emma saved herself.
“Miranda? Um, I — I think I’ll see if my dad can help. With the geometry homework, I mean.” The smile on Emma’s face was hollow, made of glass.
“Okay. I left my math book at school anyway.” It was a lie — Miranda’s math book was on her desk in her room, beneath a scorpion fossil paperweight, but it was all she could offer Emma.
A lie, and an escape, and an apology.
She followed her friend back through their house, their museum of weird, listening to every gentle step Emma took, the whisper of the door closing, the scuff of her footfalls past the gnomes and down the porch steps, and then she was gone. Miranda focused on this, burning it into her memory, everything about it — the falling, the darkening. Something inside had crossed over to shadow; something inside had forever collapsed.
Then she stomped on their floors, making the things on the living room walls rattle, and out the sliding door she flew. “What is wrong with you?” she cried to her mother. “Why did you do that?”
“I’ve been analyzing these all day! I needed objective noses,” Kat answered. “These are the scat samples from last time we went to Parley’s, earlier this year, remember? The mystery bush? One of these piles is from a cougar; I can see the rabbit fur it ingested. But does this other one smell like berries, or nuts? Because that could be the difference between this being scat from a bear or an herbivorous Bigfoot.”
Kat held out the bag, and Miranda had to stop herself from smacking it, from setting the furry, fruity scats flying onto the grass, or onto the house, or even onto Kat herself.
Instead, Miranda’s hands drifted up into her hair. She scratched at her scalp, and three hairs were pulled free in the motion. “I have homework.”
But she couldn’t bear the thought of going back into her room; she finished her homework at the kitchen counter as Kat divided her scat and prepared the equipment. Uncle Bob finally called right before dinner.
“Parley’s is a go!” Kat cheered, and Miranda entered a sort of fugue state as she numbly gathered her things and helped her mother pack up the car.
As the Critter Mobile rumbled out of their driveway, Miranda wondered if Kat had always talked like this, like she was trying to fill the spaces and would panic if there weren’t words for every breath?
Had Kat always been so much?
Maybe it required Miranda being quiet to notice.
She ducked down as they passed Emma’s house, and even though she wanted to look back in the rearview mirror so badly, she didn’t. Instead she rolled down her window and smelled the fresh air.
It smelled like an ending.
Miranda cracked open one eye.
How late had she stayed up studying? She’d left her lamp on, and the sunlight streamed past her curtains, bathing her room in a soft, early morning wisteria light . . .
She closed the eye, pressed the heels of her hands into the sockets of her skull; she hadn’t had such a vivid dream in ages. And it had been months since she’d dreamed about Emma.
Something fluttered near Miranda’s head and with a jolt, she was wide awake.
A fat, gray partridge was flying straight at her; it veered away at the last second.
“Mom!” Miranda screamed. Her nails dug into the flesh of the tree for balance; the dampness made her fingertips slide, so she grasped for leaves, pine needles, flowers, anything.
“Bean?” Kat ran through the ferns, her hair freshly twisted into two knobs above her ears. “What’s wrong?”
“Help!” The bird dove for Miranda again, and she shrieked. Scaly talons gouged at her hair, the beat of wings against her ears. “I’m being attacked!”
Kat circled around the trunk. “I see her nest! You’re blocking it.”
Miranda scampered away from the territorial bird, down the branch, and into a clump of dogwood. A squirrel darted past her, chittering angrily as it climbed up the Sitka’s mottled trunk.
“Where were you?” she demanded of Kat, her head still as foggy as the morning air around her. “Why weren’t you there when I woke up?”
“I had to pee, Bean, I’m sorry — I was bursting.” Kat extended a hand, but Miranda ignored the offer and got to her feet alone.
“Well, would it have killed you to tell me first?” She stepped out of the bushes and attempted to brush the smudge of mud off her clothes, arching her sore, stiff back.
Kat was studying her, and for a moment Miranda was startled; her mother looked so much like an actual zoologist carefully observing a new species. Then she realized that made her the animal under inspection, and she glared. “What?”
“Did I do something wrong? I mean, other than leave you alone in the tree for one minute?” Kat’s eyes, behind her glasses, projected hope the color of sunshine.
You made my best friend smell poop — Miranda couldn’t say it, because how ridiculous was it for her to be mad at Kat for something that had happened months ago?
“Sorry,” she muttered, “just tired.”
Miranda closed her eyes and inhaled, and tried to push the dregs of the dream out with her exhale. Was it the forest that had done it? Seized the memory from her brain and pulled until it was taut enough to pluck and vibrate and course through her entire body?
In a final gasp she saw it again, the look on Emma’s face when Kat had waved the open bags of scat in front of them — and the pinprick of anger expanded within her. She couldn’t wait until they got to the Critter Mobile and drove back to Moon Creek to pack their things. It was Sunday, and they’d done what they came for — they’d searched the area for evidence, and they’d found nothing. For the first time she was excited to watch Kat admit there was no Bigfoot — not just to save them, their house, their lives, but also for vindication.
She couldn’t wait to see Kat lose something.
Something important to her.
Above them, the branches of the black cottonwoods and the red alders crissed and crossed their leaves, overlapping each other in a strange crown; a pop of clear sky broke through the dappled green, and Miranda inhaled again as she saw it.
“No more clouds,” she whispered. The brilliant white sun seemed farther away than it did back home, which made the morning light in the forest watery, thin as broth. “We can go back to the ranger. Hopefully he’ll still gas up the Critter Mobile.”
Kat found a granola bar in her cat bag and split it in two, giving Miranda the bigger piece. “Hopefully he’s shifted back by now.”
Miranda bit into the granola bar with some ferocity — it was too early for monster talk — and recoiled. “What is this?”
Her mother held up the wrapper. “Blueberry cheesecake.”
“Blueberry cheese —” Miranda choked down the rest of it, aware that she was gl
aring, but honestly — was her mother incapable of eating anything that wasn’t coated in sugar?
When she was finished puckering, Miranda glanced up at the sky. In which direction did the sun rise again?
Every tree looked identical, none of them familiar, all of them thick and boundless as giants’ calves from a fairyland. The sky had, for a moment, felt open, within reach, just beyond the canopy — now Miranda saw the forest again for what it was. A tunnel of green, a claustrophobic, lushly green labyrinth — was that its heartbeat she heard now? Or the throbbing of panic in her brain?
She tried to make sense of the patterns of the understory — the lady ferns, the liverwort, the mushrooms — of the scuff marks below her in the soft dirt — which footprints were hers, and which were her mother’s?
And which belonged to the forest’s own mothers and daughters? Its critters, its crawlers? This trail here, this long dust line between the roots of a Sitka spruce — was this marking a snake’s path, or the scratching of a field mouse’s tail?
Miranda was surrounded by small details — her favorite — but she couldn’t make any sense of them.
“Let me show you, Bean.” Kat knelt beside her, grabbing a stick. She sketched the geography of the area in the dirt — a pair of squiggly lines for Fable Falls, an upside-down V for the distant mountain, which stuck its lavender, snowcapped peak up out of the canopy like a snuffing nose, a wide circle to show the Fable Forest’s perimeter, a few curves for the various rivers and tributaries. Miranda cocked her head — it was semirecognizable.
“Here’s the ranger’s cabin.” Kat drew a square. “Here’s the road.” She traced an X through the thickest of the meandering lines. “And here’s where we are.” The spot was far from the cabin and the road, but not as far as Miranda had dreaded. “We need to head west. The sun rises in the east —”
“I know,” Miranda butted in. “So we go that way.”
Kat reached over and gently shifted Miranda’s outstretched arm. “That way.”
A flash through Miranda’s mind — the stack of unopened bills in the silverware drawer, the Critter Mobile’s gas light cold and dark against the dashboard — a montage of her mother’s most recent failures. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was so dark out here last night. What if we ran in circles? We could be anywhere. Your map could be dead wrong.”
“Emphasis on dead,” Kat joked, and a white hot spark of rage zipped up Miranda’s spine.
“It’s not funny,” she informed Kat. “Do you not understand how bad this is?” The more she thought about their situation, the more terrified she became. “We’re lost in a forest. Not just a forest — one of the largest national parks in America. No phone. No GPS. No food or water.” She looked down at herself; the dried mud and torn bits of fern and sticks and pods crusted on her boots sending her heart into palpitations. “Everything is back at camp. The equipment, the coolers. My notebook, my research — we don’t even have a hatchet!”
She looked up at her mother and she felt like she had been slapped — she knew that face of Kat’s, knew the pursing of Kat’s lips into a rosebud, the dimple in her left cheek depressing in a crater. Her mother was holding back a snicker. “A hatchet?”
“I don’t know!” Miranda said. “All the articles I read told me to bring a hatchet. To hack up stuff — firewood or something.” She refused to feel stupid — what research had Kat done? What did she know about any of this?
“Don’t worry about hatchets.” Kat stood and stuffed her capelette into her cat bag.
“You’re positive this is the right way?” Miranda asked again — she would ask it a thousand more times, or until she was sure her mother was suggesting the right direction.
“Yes, Bean!” Kat called over her shoulder, already walking into the uncurling green.
We’re going to be fine, Miranda told herself, almost scolding. We’ll find our way back to the road, and we’ll make our way home, and by the time we get there, Mom will have realized what a stupid, dangerous waste of a trip this was.
A waste of a weekend. A waste of a career, of a life.
Kat only had a moment’s head start, but that’s all the forest needed to gobble her up.
Miranda practically swam through the branches wearing sweaters of moss and the fronds of ferns, her insides flustering, ready to fly away — where was her mother?— but then she spotted the head, the two knobs of hair bobbing against the kelly and the emerald and the willow greens. “Come on, Bean!”
And so Miranda closed the gap between them, leaving only a few inches of space for their feet to fall and rise and fall again, and she tried to focus on something else.
It was already Sunday. What would she be doing on Sunday if she were back in the safety of home, the routine? She let the list fill her mind:
To-do list:
Study for history test
Reschedule student council meeting
Finalize all Fall Fling plans: parent chaperones, helium tank delivery, student volunteers to decorate gym . . .
“Shh!” Kat stopped, and Miranda nearly collided with her.
“What?” Miranda’s blood froze. “It’s back?” She waited for black fur, the scent of musk, the flash of claws in the bushes.
“No.” Kat climbed onto a jutting tree root, scoping out the path ahead like a turn-of-the-century explorer. “A river,” she said, “just ahead. Can you hear it?”
A river? Alarms clanged in Miranda’s brain. “Mom!” she cried. “We’re going the wrong way!”
“Not necessarily —”
“I’m pretty sure I would have noticed crossing a river last night!” Miranda had woken up chilled but now felt warm, her toes sweaty in her boots — so they really were lost.
As if Kat could read her mind, she said, “We’re not lost. We must have gone farther north than I realized — but this is perfect.” She put her hands on Miranda’s shoulders, at just the right angle to keep her daughter facing her, to keep her daughter from drowning in her own worry. “The river intersects the road eventually, remember? We can follow the water upstream to the road, then follow the road to the Critter Mobile.”
Miranda tried to picture the map — not the one Kat had drawn, but the real map. Was this right? Miranda had studied every river and tributary in Olympic National Park — she knew how many miles long they all were, knew which direction they flowed, but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly which river this was and when, if ever, it truly bisected the road, which meant she had to rely on her mother’s memory.
She had to rely on her mother.
And it felt about as comfortable as lying on a mattress filled with twigs.
“All right,” Miranda finally said, when she had scoured her mind of any other option. “If you’re really sure, we’ll try it your way.”
The river was a wild, rushing, uneven thing, lined in muddy rocks, yellow algae gummed onto the banks. It crashed downstream with a tremendous clamor, crooked in the landscape — and this asymmetry bothered Miranda, like an untrimmed tag in a new shirt, the way the water angled into the western hemlocks that cluttered the embankments.
She knew what her mother would say, if Miranda commented on it: “That’s nature, Bean. It has its own reasons for carving a river this way.”
Didn’t it want to be perfect, to run straight and true?
“Which river is this supposed to be?” She tried to track its course, but she couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t recognize it as any of the rivers she’d seen on the map. Unbelievable! Three straight days with her mother, away from home, and her brain had been reduced to a grainy, black-and-white screen.
Except for those memories, she thought darkly. Except for those random flickers of her former best friend, which the forest seemed to fish from her mind — why couldn’t it be useful and retrieve directions back to the Critter Mobile instead?
Miranda surveyed the edges of the river as they approached, watching for signs of day campers or anglers, anyone who could rescue them o
r at least reassure Miranda that her mother had pointed them in the right direction. That the river flowed back toward civilization.
But they were alone.
Meanwhile, Kat moved along the river like a hyperactive five-year-old, stabbing the mud with a stick, writing her name in the grime on the bank, tossing pebbles near the distant mallards preening their feathers and giggling at the splash and subsequent fluttering of waterfowl.
“Bean, look!” Kat tiptoed down the sloping shore to a long, arrowhead-shaped rock, which jutted out over the river like a miniature cliff. “A mermaid rock.”
Miranda sighed — she was not in the mood to play pretend. Not with her neck still cricked from the restless night in the tree; not with her legs now cramped from their sprint through the dark; not when she still had a thousand other things to worry about.
Kat pressed her foot against the rock; a leaf from her boot tumbled over its edge and into the water, swept away. “That’s what you used to call rocks like this, when you were younger. You’d jump on every one you saw. And you’d curl up your legs, like a little tail —” She knelt down and demonstrated.
Despite herself, Miranda softened. “I kind of remember.”
“And then you’d sing your mermaid song.” Kat hummed a wistful tune, then disintegrated into laughter — but when she looked up at Miranda again, there was such profound sadness in her star-eyes. As if Kat had seen, in an instant, that old mermaid Miranda and the current Miranda, standing side by side, and compared the two, and found the current Miranda to be wanting.
And no wonder, Miranda thought. Mermaid Miranda believed every one of her mother’s crazy stories. Mermaid Miranda didn’t know any better.
But something wrapped itself around her heart as she thought this — a second skin, scaly and armored — and squeezed.
“Ew.” Kat hopped off the mermaid rock and nudged the jutting bank below it with her toe. Miranda could see now that it was garbage — wrappers and old rusted cans and bits of twine and fishing line, all stuck together in the mud, pressing out into the river, almost reaching the other side. A bridge of trash.
The Bigfoot Files Page 13
