“Maybe it’s a new species.” Kat slipped off her capelette and wrung an entire lake out of it. “A fish disguised as garbage — some kind of survival tactic, now that humans are so prevalent in the park . . .” She flapped on about twenty-first-century evolution and urban camouflage as Miranda’s cold dread was replaced by annoyance.
Miranda, who had read practically the entire Internet’s offerings on made-up animals, and who had spent her whole life with her mother, hearing her stories, dragged along on Kat’s searches, and still — she’d never heard of such a thing.
Such a fish.
Miranda shook her head to empty it of the last dregs of river water and absurdity.
No such thing.
No giant river fish made of trash and mud, swimming through the stream systems of Washington state.
No monsters. No Bigfoot.
Animals and insects and plants that had been discovered through the proper channels, living things with places in the animal kingdom, with scientific names, and labels, and photographic evidence — those were acceptable.
Everything else was complete hooey. Fodder for people who had to invent things in order to make life livable. People who couldn’t live in reality the way it was, who needed to paint it over in make-believe and bubbles and barbed tails and unicorn horns.
People who couldn’t face facts, because the facts hurt.
People like her mother.
Kat peeled herself off the bank and extended a hand to Miranda. “Well, Bean, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news? I know where we are.”
Miranda ignored her mother’s hand and pushed herself onto shaking legs. The barking ache of her limbs; the pounding of her head from the sunlight, so blinding after the darkness of the cavern; the scrunched-up, empty feeling of her gut, emptier than the school halls in those early mornings — all of that was nothing, lost against the new worry resting on her shoulders as she surveyed her mother. “What’s the bad news?”
“We’ve got about two days of walking until we’re back to the car.”
Was it her heart, hitting her chest bone so hard that the sound ricocheted through her insides? Or was that droning the sound of the forest, alive and whispering and breathing —
“Two days! But I can’t miss any more school! I’m going to lose my credit, my grades — I’ll have to make it all up at summer school, and then I’ll have to give up my camp —”
What if we run —
What if we find —
What if we —
What if —
Her mind whirred, but couldn’t produce a finished thought.
“I’m so sorry, Bean.” Kat brushed the dried sand off her bare legs. “I didn’t know the river would push us along so quickly — or maybe it was the fish —”
“It wasn’t a fish!” Miranda focused on this, hung all her fury on this detail. Whatever she had seen, or thought that she had seen — it wasn’t real. “Human minds put faces on things. If there are hints of eye sockets or noses or smiles, we think it’s a face — it’s called anthrop — anthromo —” The word slid around in her mouth like bald tires on a snowy road.
“Come on, Bean. You saw it yourself,” Kat said. “There were fins —”
“Our own minds put a fishy face on that glob of garbage,” Miranda said. “Anthropomorphization!” She spat the word out with relish. “It’s called anthropomorphization!”
Kat snorted. “You sound like an encyclopedia.”
“Better than sounding like an episode of Bigfoot Bozos.”
Her mother looked like Miranda had shrunk her down to three inches tall, but Miranda didn’t care — she was right. It was a childish impulse that came over her, but she wanted to hit, or stomp, or run right for the trees — run until she had outrun reality itself.
Two days of walking — that meant they wouldn’t drive home until Tuesday, or even Wednesday — and then she’d have more absences on her record. No other way to make up those suspended grades except summer school.
Her heart wobbled.
The leadership camp.
Ms. Palmer . . .
She was going to be so disappointed.
Miranda would explain it to her as best as she could — no. She’d demand that Kat go in and apologize. Explain. Tell the counselor that Miranda would now miss out on her dream because she wasn’t willing to give up on hers.
Make Kat tell the counselor that she was the one who had made a huge mess of everything.
Not Mom’s mess, a voice hissed from deep within. You did this. You’re responsible. You agreed to let Mom follow the river; you hopped on the raft and jostled it loose; in fact, you’re the one who insisted on coming in the first place, remember? Mom was perfectly willing to let you stay home, but you had to butt in and fix everything . . . and now it’s all ruined.
Your fault, your fault, your fault . . .
“Bean, listen to me: If we get moving and cover as much ground as we can in the daylight, we might be able to make it back by Tuesday morning.”
“So?” Miranda launched the word at her like a dart. “I can’t even miss my first class. I have to be there when school starts at eight o’clock, on the dot.”
Kat scrunched her eyebrows. “I thought school started at seven thirty.”
“Who cares?” Miranda burst, though her stomach lurched when she realized Mom had nearly caught her lie. “There’s no way I’ll get back in time.”
“We will if I drive all night tomorrow.” Kat reached into her cat bag and passed her daughter the bottle of orange soda. “I can get you there, Bean. You’re going to have to trust me. Now drink this — don’t think about how it tastes, just drink.”
Miranda considered her mother as she chugged the soda and nearly gagged — cloyingly sweet and flat.
But she did feel a little better.
Kat took the bottle from Miranda and refilled it from the stream. “I know most of the gear you packed is back in the Critter Mobile, but did you put any iodine tablets in your vest?”
Miranda clutched her vest with both hands. “No.”
“A filter?”
Again, Miranda said, “No.”
“What do you have, then?”
Miranda zipped it up, defensive. “Just . . . some survival stuff.”
“Space blanket?” Kat asked. “Steel wool? A lighter?”
A space blanket would have been useful. And a lighter — of course! Why hadn’t she put that on her list?
Your fault, your fault, your fault . . .
“What’s wrong?” Kat said. “You have homework face.”
“I — I’m just realizing,” Miranda said, concentrating to keep the words from bumbling out in a hysterical swarm, “there’s a couple of things I forgot.”
Kat reached down to pull a burr from the laces of her boots, and Miranda’s chest clamped tight.
“We’re not going to make it, are we,” Miranda whispered. Not a question — a premonition.
“I told you, Bean, if I drive through the night —”
“Not that,” Miranda said.
“Then what?”
“I mean we’re not going to make it. We’re going to die.” Miranda’s hands shook. Her legs shook. She couldn’t breathe correctly. The leadership camp, their bills, Bigfoot — forget all of them. They weren’t even going to survive the trees.
The moss.
The green, the green, the green —
“Bean!” Kat scolded. “Don’t talk like that.”
“How can we possibly make it out of here alive, Mom? I didn’t bring iodine tablets. I didn’t even think of them.” Her throat was dry as sawdust, her entire body wrung of all moisture. Every inhale was a labor.
Kat gripped Miranda’s shoulders. “We are not going to die,” Kat said. “In fact, I don’t want you to say that word again.”
“But —”
“We’ll probably be a little dehydrated when we get to the car, and we’ll definitely be hungry,” Kat went on, “but there are ot
her ways to purify water than boiling or iodine tablets.”
Something lightened the tops of Miranda’s shoulders, like a great bird had swooped down and clutched some of her fears and flew away to drop them in the river. “There are?” That’s right — there were. A light came on in her brain, shining on the Internet research she’d done on how to find water in the wilderness.
Kat dug around in her cat bag and found a large steel tube. “Yes! I knew I left it in here. My filter straw — it will filter water while we drink.”
Miranda nearly laughed. There was actually something useful in that disgusting bag.
Kat plopped the oversized straw into the orange soda bottle and drank. “Refreshing! Now you.”
Miranda studied her mother as she sipped. Kat looked, for a moment, so certain, so sturdy — wise, even, the way the sun cut across her face, highlighting her crow’s feet, the new lines in her skin that she hadn’t seen the other night when she hovered over her mother’s bed. There were years in her eyes, something Miranda had never noticed before. Years of experience, years of the ups and downs of living. A few scars from old wounds, and the patience garnered from tending those wounds.
This was what a mom was supposed to look like, Miranda thought. This was what a mom was supposed to feel like. Like Miranda could topple over a cliff, right now, and Kat would somehow defy the laws of physics and be at the bottom to catch her.
“Stop worrying.” Kat spoke tenderly. “We’re going to be just fine.”
Belligerence warmed Miranda like a fever. “I’m not worrying —”
“You are.” Kat’s face grew serious. She pointed at Miranda’s right hand, which was buried in her hair just behind her ear. “You’ve pulled out six hairs already.”
Miranda lowered her hand. She hadn’t even noticed that her hand was in her hair.
She’d done the dance so many times, her fingers knew the steps by heart.
“I wasn’t — I was just —”
“We should make an appointment to talk to Ms. Palmer about this when we get home. It’s starting to show — right here.” Kat reached out, running her fingers along Miranda’s hair as tenderly as if she were stroking the fine down of a newborn’s cap. Miranda pulled back and touched the spot herself —
And she recoiled.
Her fingertips found scalp. Bare scalp.
Had she really pulled out that much hair?
Deep inside, something was sinking fast.
A rock thrown into a lake, a sparrow shot in the wing.
“Bean.” Kat held her daughter’s chin. “It’s going . . . to be . . . okay.” Then she let Miranda go, and forged ahead through the bushes, taking the lead that belonged to her.
Here was the impossible, unimaginable creature — this version of Miranda that wanted to fly into her mother’s arms, and unwind, and cry. That wanted to let Kat stroke her back and pat her head and tell her, over and over, that everything would be okay.
This version of Miranda that could believe her.
“Coming?” Kat said, about twenty paces ahead. “We don’t want to waste the sunlight while we have it.”
The strangeness that filled Miranda, making her light, was one she didn’t easily recognize without the bite of pain that usually preceded it.
Relief.
Relief that her mother was here.
Miranda shoved her hands into the pockets of her vest — hands that were squirming, itching to reach up and yank out hairs — and followed her mother away from the river, away from the mountain, away from the shingled shoreline, and out into wild forest, where the trees grew as thick as they were tall, wrinkled and old, and where the very idea of trails or paths was as unthinkable as the idea of an eight-foot-tall biped, hiding in plain sight.
Here in the old growth, more colors joined the green, and the expansion into a jeweled world made Miranda’s head spin. The woods teetered in that space between the seasons, beginning the display of the autumnal gamut — pinks and crimsons, pale oranges, electric yellows.
Miranda gathered the details greedily, hungry for the variety: the salmon leaping from the streams, the way the chanterelles glistened between roots of hemlocks, the salt collecting on the lichen of a logjam.
White freckles on a deer and her almost-grown baby, their red coats browning for winter. The cool, frosted gray of dogwood berries, ripe for harvest.
And the black of shadows, which belonged to all seasons.
The chill had already leached many branches, making them stark outlines against the watery sky. Minimalist versions of themselves.
A nip in the air bit the end of Miranda’s nose and ears and fingertips.
The world tumbling through fall and then into winter.
Her favorite and least favorite time of year, this time of transitions.
Her favorite, because fall was the transition into a new school year, the season of fresh starts and new classes and crisp boots and new jeans. A chance to level up. A chance to be a new, improved Miranda.
But the details of her fall weren’t cider or pumpkin flavored; they were tinged with memory. Hard memories.
Memories that were not green, or russet and gold and scarlet, but colorless.
The concrete of the driveway, cold even through her boots as he knelt in front of her. Yesterday’s rain still staining the sidewalks. The plaid pattern of his tweed luggage. Their lawn, crisp on the edges, strewn with dead leaves curled over on themselves.
A season of good-byes.
But this was dangerous, to balance on the edge of such a memory as this — the forest was already too eager to push her backward into them. And there were some memories that would gladly have her, were she to fall into them.
Some that would take her.
Some she would not survive.
She thought instead of how they’d cruised so far downriver, through a whole mountain, and how they now had to hike back up through the old growth, circling back to where they’d started — stranded on the side of the road in a van dressed as a panting, doggish creature.
Two days, Kat had said.
That meant they’d have to spend at least one more night out here.
They had no tent. No sleeping bags. No matches, or blankets, or cocoa — Kat didn’t even have long pants. The weather was fine now, the cold only leaving teeth marks. But as soon as that sun went down, it would no doubt draw blood.
Miranda stopped walking. She could hear something, faint and hissing beneath the crunch of the floor.
Like the woods were speaking to her.
Not the whispering of soon, soon, soon.
But something . . . off.
Something crooked.
A warning.
“Hey, Bean.” Kat cut through the silence. “Remember that poem I used to read to you, the one about the leaves?”
Before Miranda could halt it, the lines scrolled through her mind —
“Come, little leaves,” said the wind one day
“Come over the meadows with me and play
Put on your dresses of red and gold
Summer is gone and the days grow cold.”
The illustrations were as clear as if she had the book before her now — a knobbly brown tree carved with an old man’s kindly face, reaching across a meadow where tiny fairies wearing dresses made of veiny autumn leaves twirled and danced in curlicues of wind. Even before she could read, she’d study those illustrations, and then her dreams would be hand drawn in pen and ink, painted with pale, delicate watercolor strokes . . .
“Kind of,” Miranda told her mother.
When Kat tried to recite the poem, she got stuck on the second line; Miranda stayed quiet.
“You used to love fairies,” her mother said.
As if Miranda could forget. Oh, how she had wanted to see one! To catch one. To be one.
“You wore those damn fairy wings everywhere — to the store, to kindergarten, to bed — until the tulle fell off the wire. And you were always drawing fairies, cutting wings o
ut of paper for your dolls and stuffed animals.”
An ache hit Miranda’s chest as her mother talked.
“You would leave little notes for them,” Kat said, her smile wistful.
“With a saucer of milk,” Miranda piped up, halfsurprised she had a voice at all, “because you told me that fairies wouldn’t come without an offering.”
“That’s right. They bathe in milk to keep their skin clean and fresh.” Kat said this with the same cadence as Mrs. Howard reciting facts about the solar system, and Miranda’s spine stiffened to hear it.
“I waited for them to come every night,” Miranda said. “Every single night.” A golden leaf fell in her path, sun shining through and highlighting its lines. “I can’t believe it took me so long to admit the truth.”
“What truth?”
Miranda dodged the leaf before it could brush against her. “Fairies aren’t real.”
“Oh, Bean.” Kat reached for her; she dodged this touch, too. “I know it seems like we need to see things in order to believe in them —”
“If we could see things, it would be easier to believe in them.” Miranda didn’t know why, but tears stung the corners of her eyes.
“But that’s not how it works,” Kat said. “Belief doesn’t follow our rules. It’s bigger than us —”
“Why is it so ridiculous to want hard evidence of things?” Miranda said. “Not a footprint, or a folktale, or another sighting from some backwoods farmer who makes his own moonshine? Real proof.”
Kat walked a few loamy steps before she answered. “Sometimes we’re lucky and we catch a glimpse of the magical.” As she turned her head to meet Miranda’s eyes, her onyx hair, dried now, and fluffy as goose feathers, caught the light and held it, casting a golden halo above her. “Most of the time, though, we’re just flailing in the shadows, stumbling around, trying to find the light switch.”
Miranda’s mind fixed itself on the last time she ever poured milk, in their best dusty blue dish. The last time she ever carried it up to her windowsill. The last time she fell asleep with her feet on her pillow so she could keep one eye on the night.
The last time she realized that being stupidly hopeful was a choice.
There is no light switch. What you see is what there is. That’s what she would have said, if only she’d been brave enough.
The Bigfoot Files Page 16
