“You’re fine, look at you. You’re still here.” She runs her hand down my waist and back.
“I’m not fine. I see the filaments everywhere.”
“What filaments?” Her hand stops.
“Like threads on fire.”
“Oh, those.” She relaxes. Her voice is soft; her hand resumes.
“You see them, too?”
“No. But I’ve heard about them. Only some people get them after the mushrooms. You’re lucky.”
“What are they? Will they go away?” I’m drifting off. It’s harder to speak. There are unnatural pauses. We used to talk ourselves to sleep like this; we used to confess our deepest thoughts and secrets, then pretend it was all a dream.
“Saint Lucy tore out her eyes and God restored her sight, but ever after her eyes were made of light.”
“Why did you do this to me?”
“I wanted you to see.”
“See what?”
“How your dad became part of the island, the millions of particles of him, his ashes. How they were in the air, in the trees, in the soil. Couldn’t you feel him?”
“You didn’t have to kill me to show me.”
“I only meant to show you how close you could be to him.”
“I never loved you,” I say.
“I never loved you more,” she says.
She winds her fingers into my hair and kisses me, mouth open just enough to taste her. I fall asleep to her slow exhale.
When I wake, dawn is streaking through the clouds and she’s gone. Her bag is gone. Her shoes are gone. There’s a note on the table, paper pulled from my journal. There’s a pen next to it, but the page is blank. I hold it up to the light, looking for impressions, but all I see are the ghosts of my own words.
I run outside, looking for her footprints, stopping to listen. I hear nothing. I find nothing. There’s no trace of her down the path to the fire lane and the cabin. I run a mile down the trail, two, knowing she can’t be moving quickly, but she’s not there. Has she heard me coming? Is she hiding in the trees? I call her name once. Then again. Nothing.
She took nothing with her from my stores. Maybe some water from my tank. No food. She had nothing for shelter, no warm clothing. She left nothing behind. Not even tracks. It was as if she hadn’t been here at all.
I call down to the ranger station on the radio to see if anyone has come across a female hiker recently. I get Darlene, who says she doesn’t think so. No lone female hikers. Not with the closures to the west and the northeast for the fires burning.
“Were you expecting somebody to check in with us?” Darlene asks.
“Maybe,” I told her. “Can you have Carey check in with me when he can?”
“Sure thing.”
I think about what Carey will do, if he knows she was out here—that she’s out here still, somewhere. He would send out search and rescue. He would call the sheriff.
I set out myself, not the way she came—up the trail from the logging road and the highway, where she must have hiked past our cabin, or hitched past it, maybe with other hikers, with campers or fishermen. I set out the other way, up along the ridge and down the other side toward Cougar Lake. The trails there aren’t marked well. They open up into dry forests, some still coming back after fires. Without a map or guide, it would be easy to wander off the trail and become disoriented. If it’s your intention to get lost, the landscape will only help you.
I hike the trail for an hour, then two, calling Katie’s name until I’m hoarse. Not a footprint, not a scuff. When I start the descent down to the lake, I hear thunder in the distance. It’s early afternoon. The storms are coming down over the mountains to the west, just like the radio said. I make my way down to the lake, its shores muddy, the film of algae thicker, like a velour blanket. I can feel it—the change in the troposphere—the pressure descending, the hairs on my arms rising, that weight on the lungs, like when a plane lifts off the ground, the first ascent. At this altitude the body has its own barometry. The hum of insects amplified by the charge in the air. The birds keep up their calls, the pitch increasing, ready for the rain that will not come, that will evaporate before it reaches the ground, sucked right back into the wreckage of storm clouds. It’ll take me another forty minutes to circle the lake, but I try, calling her name less now. The panic I felt earlier was gone; replaced by a sinking. I look for her red bandanna, listen for the sound of another human, the way our movements are different in the woods than any other creature’s; I close my eyes and feel with my skin—I am sure I will feel her, if she’s close, if she knows I am close.
I climb the ridge back and come up out of the trees to the sight of lightning flashing across the opposite ridge. The sun is completely hidden, trees thrashing. And there they are again, the filaments, wriggling up to the tops of a pine thirty feet away. There’s a spark and a flash, and I close my eyes. I’m breathing hard from the climb. I sit on a log, but it gives way under me, and I slide on my rear back to the trail, the log hitting my back. I keep my eyes closed. I breathe slowly and dump the last of my water over my face. I’m a mile from the lookout. If I jog I can make it in fifteen minutes. When I open my eyes again, the filaments are gone. The clouds are lumbering in and it’s darker, so I get up and run, walk, run, until I’m back at the lookout. From the deck I watch the storm rolling through, feeling sick to my stomach. When the lightning flashes, the filaments follow. Red, gold, white. It goes on like this. The thunder shatters the air, and I count. One . . . two . . . three . . . four. Lightning streaks, my retinas fill with tiny flames. It’s getting closer and closer, the thunder breaking right on top of my mountain, and I go inside. There’s a hammering in my head. I lay down for just a minute, on the cot.
I smell the pillow, but even her scent is gone.
I’ve been asleep for three hours. It’s unnaturally dark outside, clouds still hanging over the foothills, but the worst of the storm seems to have passed. Carey’s voice comes through on the radio.
I jump out of the cot and pick up. “Hey, I’m here.”
“Darlene said to check in with you about a female hiker?”
I hesitate.
“Lucie, are you there? Over.”
“I’m here.” I’m shaking; I don’t know what to tell him.
“I just wanted to check on conditions.”
Pause.
“Lots of lightning but no strikes that we know of, yet. What’s it look like up there?”
“Lit up like the Fourth of July, for a while. Quiet now.”
“Any strikes?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll keep watch.”
“Did you have a hiker?”
“I did,” I lie. I’m about to keep lying. “But I only saw her from a distance. Red bandanna. Tan pack. Headed down the mountain, toward the river. Not a backpacker. Day hiker. She didn’t have any gear.”
“Nobody like that has checked in with us, but day hikers usually don’t. There are campers out at Strawberry Wilderness, maybe they were checking out the trails. Strange not to go up to the lookout, though.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” I say. “Let me know if somebody checks in? She could’ve been caught in the storm.”
Twenty-four hours pass. At night I lie awake, forcing myself to imagine different scenarios in which she saves herself.
She makes her way out of the woods, meets another car full of Christians or hippies, hitches a ride to town—any town. She borrows a phone. She calls Jen and Elle. Or her parents. She turns herself in at the nearest sheriff’s office. Someone comes for her. Someone takes her home.
But I can’t help seeing the other possible scenes. Her foot stepping off the trail, her path into the unfamiliar wilderness. She hunts the site of an old fire—years old—scanning the felled trees, the rotting logs. She would find what I have seen there before: the Psilocybe, the wood-eaters. Like fireweed, they come back to the scenes of disasters; they thrive where others were destroyed; they make a place for another generation. She only needs a handful
of the mushrooms. These would ease the discomfort. But she would need something else—something acutely toxic. She could have plucked many kinds from the woods of the Cascades, even in a drought year. She could have collected more than enough Amanita smithiana, the ones they fed me; she would know how much to ingest. Once I imagine it, it’s like a bad dream that can’t be undreamt: it infiltrates all the other scenes. There she is, choosing the place, taking off her pack, settling against a pine trunk, looking out at the bend in the river, drinking the last of her water while dog ticks climb up the leg of her shorts, mosquitoes drink until they’re heavy. It would happen to her like it happened to me: the immediate sickness, the hallucinations, abatement, then weakness, deterioration. She would feel how I felt, and she would understand. It would be her way of confessing to me. But of course, even if we found her, no one would be able to carry her out in time.
The fire breaks out five miles to the northwest. An hour away by foot, if I’m running, but I know fires can move faster than that, especially with the wind urging them. They’ve already started digging containment lines, redirecting some of the crews from the Ochoco fire, which is 90 percent contained. The men are exhausted.
“It’s the other side of the river, so you should be fine for now,” Carey says, “but you should come back down to the cabin tomorrow.”
“If I leave now, I can get back to the cabin before dark.” Or I could stay, I think, in case she comes back tonight. But instead, before signing off I say, “Carey: make sure everyone knows about the hiker. Just in case.”
I throw my books and clothes into my pack, leaving the food, the toilet paper and the hand sanitizer and all the other things I’ve brought.
As I close and lock the door, overhead one raven, then another, then another. They’re loud, calling out to each other. There are other birds on the move, too, a strange migration: Steller’s jays, in pairs, songbirds so fast I can’t tell them apart, a solitary magpie. They scatter, alight on high branches, call from tree to tree. Particles of ash drift by on the breeze.
I remember reading about the unusual movements of wild animals before earthquakes—this was long after our quake, in a geology class in college. Days, even weeks, before there are shifts in the earth’s plates, animals flee. Getting as far away from the center of the disaster as possible. The evidence is anecdotal, of course, but often cited to demonstrate the abject ignorance of the earth and its movements that humans live with, the utter divorce from the relationship with the environment that nurtured us through millions of years of evolution. The animals know what’s coming before we do; they heed the instinct to flee. But we humans, even when we know what’s coming, we do nothing. We watch the animals disappear.
I stop at the bottom of the path before I head off into the trees. I turn back to the lookout, for a last glance.
At the cabin I see the evidence of the early fire season, of nights Carey has spent at the field office in Prairie City: cold coffee in the pot, moldy oatmeal on the stove, dirty dishes, a stale smell—windows have been closed—a pile of unopened mail on the table. There’s a blanket and pillow on the couch. He sleeps there when he’s on call; it’s a horrible place to sleep, so it’s easier to wake up.
The light on the answering machine is blinking. There are three messages, and I can guess that at least one of them will be from my mother. Her voice comes out, as if from a can attached to a string, stretched along the five hundred miles between us.
“Lucie, it’s Mom. Please call me when you get this. I love you.” She sounds anxious. The cord of tension travels through my ear and into the back of my head, down my neck and spine. The message is from yesterday; they’re all from her. Each one is shorter, taut with anger, with worry.
I open a window and lie down on the unmade bed, press my face into the sheets to smell him. They’re cold. The scent of him makes him real to me, and I sink into the bed. But I smell someone else there, too. It takes a moment of shock for me to realize it’s not some other woman I’m smelling, but my own scent, from before the days at the lookout, bathing in the river. There’s a fermented odor to me now, an activity in the cells that wasn’t there before. I inhale the remnants of us on the sheets, and there’s a clarity to it, a certainty, if just for a moment. It’s the sanest I’ve felt in weeks. I need to bathe.
Cellar spiders have woven webs in the bathtub; he’s been showering at work. And I realize how alone I was all those nights at the lookout—how much farther he was from me than I realized. I wonder how Katie found me at all—how she would have known that I was up there, and not here, at the cabin. I grab the broom and collect the spiders, shake them off outside, let the water run in the tub until it’s only lukewarm and get in anyway. It feels like a hot tub compared to bathing in the river.
Night falls before Carey comes home. I heat some soup and cut the mold off a log of Tillamook cheddar, salvage what I can to eat with crackers. The radio is on, tuned to the only station that comes in out here, which favors old country and country-gospel. I fall asleep on the couch, waiting for the sound of his truck.
It’s almost ten when he comes in, dropping his overnight bag and gear by the door. I sit up sleepy-eyed, but I am anxious to see him.
“Don’t get up,” he says. He comes over and picks me up, carries me to the bedroom, lays me on the bed, and sits next to me.
“You smell like a campfire,” I say.
“Biggest campfire you’ll ever see,” he says, kissing my knees open. I’m wearing underwear and one of his T-shirts and nothing else. He puts his face in my crotch and inhales.
“The hell?” I say, laughing.
“I’ve been spent the last twelve hours running interference between a raging fire and the BLM, state and federal forestry, and the fire chiefs of three counties.”
“That’s quite the weenie roast.”
“You smell amazing.”
“I took a bath.”
He crawls up next to me and kisses me, closes his eyes and falls back on the pillows. I unbutton his shirt, loosen his belt. He grunts as I undress him down to his undershirt and briefs.
“Oh, hey,” he says as I’m pulling his shirt off.
“Yes?”
“Before I forget: that hiker you saw.”
I drop his shirt to the floor.
“Yeah?” My heart pounds in my chest.
“I think I found her when I was evacuating the campground.”
“You did?”
“Brown hair, red bandanna. Mid-twenties. I didn’t talk to her, but somebody else in the group said they had all been out hiking near Cougar Lake.”
“You saw her up close?”
“So that mystery’s solved,” he says.
“Maybe . . .”
He turns around and kisses me.
“Are you still worried?”
I look into his eyes and wonder if it’s too late. Even if I tell him, what could he do? She’s gone two days now.
I nod.
“Did she look like Katie?”
“What?” He pulls back.
“She looked like Katie.”
He looks confused, then there’s pity in his eyes, his voice.
“No, not really. Not up close, Luce.” He wraps his arms around me. “Is that why you’ve been acting so weird? You thought you saw Katie?”
“I really did see her.”
“I’m sure you did—in your mind. You wanted to see her, so you did. From a distance, with the dark hair, her height . . . this woman could’ve looked like Katie.”
We lay down and he holds me for a while.
I say, “Do you want a beer?”
And he says, “Sure.” Eyes closed.
When I get to the kitchen, I take deep breaths, open a bottle, and take a swig. Back in the bedroom, he’s asleep on his side, facing the room. He falls asleep like that—instantly—like a giant knocked out by a clever village boy. I stand there drinking the beer in the rim of lamplight, an owl marking the hour out in the trees somewhere.
In the night the fire slows down, the containment lines on the west side are holding. We decide I should go to Prairie City, though. Carey wants me to take his truck, but I refuse.
“Your car is falling apart, Lu.”
“It’s falling apart, but it runs. I drove it to Spokane, didn’t I?”
“And you haven’t driven it five miles since. It’s fifty miles to Prairie City. These roads are dangerous, especially during a fire. I just want to know that you’re safe.”
“You need your truck more than I do. I’ll stay on the paved roads. I’ll be careful.”
He pulls on his jacket and kisses me, heads out the door. I don’t hear his truck starting up, so I open the front door again. He’s fussing around with something in my car. He sees me in the doorway and sticks his head out.
“CB radio,” he shouts.
I walk out to the car. He’s duct-taping the radio to the top of the dashboard.
“I worry about you, too, you know,” I say, staring him down.
“I’m a pencil-pusher now, not a fire jumper.” He steps out of the car and looks back at me, hard.
“I am not going to die.”
I bring his hand to my face, resting my cheek in his palm. I am sure my father believed the same thing every time he left for work. I should tell him I’ve missed two periods, but it seems so dramatic.
“Call me when you can, so I can hear your voice.”
Carey warned me that the roadside motel in Prairie City was booked with Missoula hotshots, so I end up reserving the same room we stayed in for my birthday, at the inn. I think about calling my mom back but decide I’ll do it from the hotel.
I find my suitcase in the closet and throw it open on the bed. Stand over it, bewildered, not remembering what I filled it with when I came out here. I look around the room. My dirty laundry is in the canvas bag and ready to go. I have two drawers of the dresser, so I pull them out and dump them over the suitcase. A hairbrush in the bathroom. A small, cluttered bag of makeup and toiletries. A few books. I take everything, right? I pack it all, just in case? In case I never come back. In case there’s not a cabin to come back to.
Marrow Island Page 20
