FSF, September-October 2010 Page 19

  I trudged back through the undergrowth and down to the river again.

  My brother waved when he saw me coming. He and Ian had laid out a small line of hand-sized, silvery fish on the riverbank. He was grinning like he'd been kissed for the first time. “Ren!” he shouted. He pointed to the fish. “Trout!"

  I held up a hand for a high five. “Damn, kid. You're like Daniel Boone or something."

  Ian caught my eye, and I nodded. I gave him a slight smile.

  * * * *

  Later that night, beside the flickering blaze of the outdoor fire pit, I watched my mother gutting and scaling the fish over a metal compost bucket. I waited to see if Trey would say something. Did he remember how Mom used to pay yearly dues to PETA and made us all volunteer at the animal shelter on Saturday afternoons? But Trey wouldn't look my way. He fed another log to the fire, then straightened and grinned widely at Ian, wiping sweat from his forehead. I turned back to our mother. It wasn't like the fish was a dog or a kitten or anything, but it was still unsettling to watch her calmly slitting open something's belly.

  "Hey, Ren?” Ian called across the fire. “Would you mind grabbing the can of lard from the cold cellar? It's almost time to start cooking."

  A cold shock traveled across my stomach and touched my spine. I knew I should stand up or say something, but it was like my brain had stopped sending messages to the rest of my body. The cold room. The door.

  Ian frowned at me, puzzled. “Or I'll get it. No worries."

  Feeling returned to my limbs. “No, it's okay.” No way did I want to sit around like a sad city kid while Ian the Supremely Capable single-handedly taught my brother to conquer nature. I gulped a lungful of air and scrambled up. “Can of lard, coming up."

  I jogged to the house and pushed open the front door without breaking stride. No slowing. No thinking. The screen door slammed shut at my back. Gloom and bare rock closed around me. I pulled the hanging bed sheet aside and kept my eyes on the uneven floor, dropped shoes, and crumpled laundry, the snarl of sheets and blankets on the unmade bed, anything but the door. I thought it might be better if I looked away until I was right in front of it, like trying not to catch sight of my own reflection in the bathroom mirror in the three a.m. dark. I slowed as I came up next to the door. Chill air wafted from the wood, and as I stood still, it seeped up from the stone floor, through the soles of my sneakers. I held my breath and listened. The whine of deep silence filled my ears.

  I bit my tongue, grabbed the brass doorknob, and pulled. The door groaned open. It was heavier than I expected, heavier than wood should be, as if someone had filled it with lead. The cold of the door handle burned my palm. I let go and forced the door open with my shoulder, until it was flush with the rock wall. I stood back. Weak light trickling in from the front of the house faded to solid darkness two feet beyond the door. My pupils strained, dilated. Near my feet, I could make out a streaky glass container of yellow milk and several old coffee tins with pieces of duct tape covering their brand names, each marked “LARD” or “BUTTER” or “COMPOST.” Beyond that, a faint glisten on the wet walls, and then nothing.

  I let out a breath. The sound echoed back from deep within the dark. Prickles danced across my scalp. I leaned down, grabbed the can marked “LARD,” and reached for the door. My fingers met air where the inner knob should have been. I looked down, heart pumping hard. No inner knob, no way to open the door, except from the outside. Soft taps sounded somewhere ahead. Like fingernails on stone. I stumbled back into the half-light of my mother and Ian's bedroom. I dropped the lard, threw all my weight behind the door, and slammed it closed. My hands shook as I bent to pick up the can again.

  Breathe, breathe, I reminded myself. I turned my back on the door and hurried toward the squares of dim sunlight shining through the windows at the front of the house.

  * * * *

  I opened my eyes in the dark. The cave's silence shrilled in my ears. I groaned and pushed myself up in the camp bed, shivering.

  "Trey.” I shook my brother's shoulder. “Trey, I'm going to sleep outside."

  "Hmmnn,” my brother answered.

  I pulled on my jeans and wrapped the sleeping bag around my shoulders, groped my way to the front door, unlocked it, and closed it quietly behind me. Crickets called to each other from the nearby wood and stars speckled the close circle of sky above the hollow. I wished I could make sense of them, identify the patterns and constellations like Trey could, but to me they were random pinholes in the sky. Something beautiful I couldn't understand. I dropped into one of the lawn chairs. My limbs started to thaw in the balmy air. I closed my eyes for what felt like a few seconds and let the summer night leech the cold from my body.

  The storm door cracked shut.

  I opened my eyes. The sky had gone pink, cut with gleaming slivers of cirrus cloud. Below, fog wrapped around the hollow, thick as cotton down.

  "Ren?” Mom came clomping across the yard in a bathrobe and a pair of rubber rain boots.

  I rubbed at the corner of my eye and arched my back, letting the sleeping bag fall over the back of the lawn chair. “Hey."

  "What are you doing out here?” She hugged her arms over her chest.

  "I got cold."

  She rolled her eyes skyward. “Jesus, Ren, don't you know there are bears out here?"

  I stared at her, half-awake. She actually sounded mad.

  "You could have been eaten!"

  For some reason, this struck me as funny. Mom, afraid I was going to be mauled by a bear. I pressed my lips closed, trying to keep it together. I couldn't. I laughed.

  "Damn it, Ren, this isn't funny!” my mother said. “You may not care about your life, but I do."

  The laughter fizzled in my throat. I looked up at her. “Who said I don't care about my life?"

  Mom bugged her eyes out at me like she always had when she was annoyed. “Your dad says you're still at home, working at a mini-golf course."

  "So?"

  "You were always talking about going to UNC-Chapel Hill,” my mother said. “Biology. Veterinary school. What happened?"

  "Oh, like I'm the only one who's not allowed to fuck up my life?” My voice twisted and broke. “At least I'm not living in a cave with Hippie Cracker Ken."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  I stayed silent, staring at the bank of fog ebbing near the clearing's edge.

  My mother's voice sharpened. “This is my life now, Ren. Can't you respect that?"

  I snorted. The anger in my chest was burning away the thin layer of calm that had fallen over me in the night. “For how long?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "How long is this going to be your life?” I glared at her. “Is this one of those six-month deals like running for city council or the interior decorating business? Or is this a longer experiment, like, I don't know, the whole marriage and kids thing?” I felt as though a sluice had opened in my chest. I didn't notice my heart tapping frantically at my sternum until the words were out.

  My mother froze, as if she'd stepped on a land mine. “Ren, honey, you were never an experiment."

  I laughed.

  "And neither is this. Neither is Ian.” A sliver of indignation found its way back into her voice.

  "I don't give two shits about Ian,” I said. “All I care about is Trey. It's bad enough he already likes your boyfriend. What happens when you get tired of playing frontier woman and take off again? Does Trey get to keep his new best pal?"

  "I won't.” Her voice turned hushed and raw. She squatted beside the ashes of the fire pit. “I'm not leaving. Ren, I was going through a bad time—"

  "Stop,” I said. My eyes started to burn and something cramped in my chest.

  She picked up a twig and swirled it in the ash. “When I was out west, I worked at this DSS summer camp for kids whose parents were, you know, drug addicts? And it made me realize how much I missed you. How much you needed me."

  "I said, stop.” I pushed myself up. All the horrible things I
wanted to say pressed against the inside of my chest, threatening to crack it open. I stood, kicking the lawn chair over on its back. I couldn't feel my legs, but they were moving me toward the trees, away from the fire pit and my mother, and that was all that mattered. The world blurred at the edges. I pushed my palms against my eyes and kept running.

  I could hear my mother calling after me in the distance, “Ren! Come back! Ren!” and then nothing but blood pounding in my ears and the crash of my feet along the forest floor.

  I careened down the mountainside, through a curtain of cattails, and came to a stop behind the abandoned church. I hunched over, breathing in gulps, my muscles shaking with unspent adrenaline. Deep breath. I tried to imagine myself back behind the artificial waterfall, the safety lights on the twelfth miniature golf hole magnified in the sheet of water separating me and Corrine from the muggy night. I could feel her warm, fine-boned hand on my chest, resting on the shallow indentation where my ribs met. Breathe deep, Ren. As much as you can hold. Good. Now out again. And when my breath moved as regular as a metronome, she'd leaned in and kissed me.

  I fumbled in my pocket for the cell phone. I could call her. Just five minutes would be like taking a lungful of oxygen, enough to help me go under again. I opened the phone. The screen stayed dark. I pressed my thumb to the “on” button and held it down. I stared at the empty windows of the church, waiting for the familiar bell tone to sound in my hand. Nothing. I mashed harder. Still nothing. My heart froze. I must have left the phone on after our hike through the woods the day before.

  I sank down on the wet grass. “Oh no. No, no,” I whispered. There was no way to charge it, unless Ian had some kind of coal-powered battery pump hidden out in the woods, along with his bees and God knew what else. What a dumbass, stupid kid thing to do, letting it roam all night and eat up the battery. I sat with my palms resting against my eyes as the morning sun began to burn away the fog and dew soaked the back of my jeans.

  I blew out a lungful of air and made myself stand again. Ian, at least, didn't seem stupid enough to camp out in the woods with no way of reaching civilization. He had to have a radio or maybe even an old truck hidden away in some cove. I started up the hill. The climb seemed much longer than the way down. I was beginning to worry I had gotten turned around in the woods, when I broke over the crest of the hill and found myself looking down on the cave house. My mother must have started up the small blaze in the fire pit again, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  As I walked the last steps into the base of the hollow, Trey threw open the storm door. He sprinted across the yard into my arms. “Ren! Ren!"

  "What's wrong?” My muscles tensed around my brother's shoulders. “Is it Mom?"

  Trey shook his head. His face was ashen, like it had been the time he nearly fell off the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair.

  Mom appeared in the doorway, still in her robe and rain boots. “Ren, did you see Ian this morning? Did he say he was going somewhere?” She pressed her lips thin.

  "No.” I looked back and forth between the two of them. “I haven't seen him. What is it? What's wrong?"

  Mom didn't say anything, and finally Trey spoke. “He wasn't here when Mom woke up. We think he's missing."

  * * * *

  "We could still hike to the nearest town and tell the police,” I said.

  "You know we can't,” my mother said. She sat slumped in a dingy, second-hand wingback chair by the front windows, one hand resting over her eyes and the other wrapped across her middle. Mud and grime caked the legs of her jeans and a thick, dark line of dried blood marked her upper arm where she had fallen on the rocks early in our search. The sun had disappeared below the tree line, but the sky still glowed neon orange in the window behind her head. “They'd just use it as an excuse to evict us."

  "He could be hurt.” I scooted forward until I was sitting on the very edge of the tatty couch across from her. “Listen, Mom, I know you like this place, but—"

  "No.” My mother dropped her hand and glared at me. “Ian would want us to wait. Maybe he just got lost."

  "That doesn't make sense. You said he always says something before he goes. And he didn't take his fishing stuff or his Nalgene bottle or anything...."

  We both stopped to listen for the sound of Trey calling outside.

  "Ian!” Beat. “Iiiiiiii-an!” His voice strained and croaked.

  The poor kid had been shouting all day, through the forest to Ian's fishing spot, around the small, abandoned field where Ian kept his “apiary,” and the yellow quartz boulder above the cave where Mom said Ian went every morning to meditate. If only he'd really had a transistor radio or an old VW van nooked away in the woods.

  "I'm gonna bring him inside,” I said.

  "Let him be,” my mother said. “It can't hurt."

  "He hasn't eaten all day."

  Mom didn't answer.

  "Are you going to make him something?"

  "Ren....” My mother's voice trailed off. She raised her eyes to the window. A wet gleam of tears brimmed at her lashes.

  "Fine.” I stood. “I'll do it."

  I yanked open the front door. “Trey,” I called.

  My brother whipped his head toward me, his face expectant and hopeful.

  "Come on, kid. I need your help working the stove."

  Trey's face dropped. “Okay."

  I stacked cords of firewood in the stove's belly, and Trey showed me how to lean in and blow softly, enough to feed the small flames, not enough to snuff them out. Our mother watched, motionless, from her chair. When I finally had a pot of water boiling for rice, she unfolded herself and stood.

  "I'm going to lie down.” Her shoulders hung limp and her eyes had swollen nearly shut. She lifted the curtain to her bedroom and let it fall behind her.

  Trey stared at the pot of boiling water. “I don't feel like eating."

  I poured the rice in anyway. “I know.” I put my hand on his back and patted his shoulder awkwardly.

  The bottom of the rice came out burned. Trey didn't want to eat it, but my hands were starting to shake from the lack of food. I swallowed what I could salvage from the pot and made Trey finish off a heel of Mom's wheat bread, along with some chalky peanut butter left over from breakfast the morning before.

  Trey and I sat by the windows as the last of the sun disappeared and the chill from the rocks all around us began rising through the house.

  "You should call Dad,” Trey said.

  "I tried,” I said. “The phone's dead."

  "Dead?"

  I nodded.

  Trey narrowed his eyes at me. “Why's it dead?"

  I chewed on my bottom lip, trying to decide what to tell him.

  "Did you use it?” Trey asked.

  "Yeah.” I paused. Guilty heat flooded my face. “I tried to call Dad the other day, and I think maybe I left it on overnight."

  Trey pushed himself up off of the couch and walked over to me, his face set and even. He looked me in the eye, drew back his hand, and punched me in the stomach.

  I doubled over. “Jesus, Trey."

  "Asshole,” Trey said. He flopped back on the couch.

  "I'm sorry,” I said. “Really."

  Trey held up his hand. Don't talk to me.

  I eased myself out of the chair. Trey got quiet when he was angry, and he probably needed me out of his face so he would feel less like sucker-punching me again. I walked to the back of the cave and stood outside Mom's room. Her lantern set the sheets aglow from the inside. For a second, I saw how Mom and Ian could like the cave, could enjoy being cocooned together with no one around for miles. If it had been just me and Corrine, I could have liked it, too, maybe.

  I parted the sheets and peered inside. Mom lay bundled in their quilt with her face turned to the wall. She didn't stir when I moved the curtain. Her boots rested beside Ian's at the foot of the bed, and she had one of his shirts clutched to her face. I wondered if I should put my hand on her head, hug her, any of those things people did
on television and in the movies. The black door nipped at the edge of my vision. All the warmth drained out of my chest. I let the curtain drop and backed away.

  Trey was still sitting on the couch.

  "You going to bed?” I asked the back of his head.

  Trey shrugged. “Guess so. You?"

  I rounded the couch and dropped down into the wingback chair again. “I think I'll stay here a little."

  "Whatever.” Trey disappeared behind his own curtain. The hammock creaked as it took on his weight, mixing with the sound of his muffled coughs. He snorted and breathed deep, then silence lowered itself over everything.

  * * * *

  I woke to cold breath on my ear.

  "...hhysss quuelikchh ahhnudkkrrr..."

  The oil lamp had guttered out, leaving me adrift in the darkness. I groped for my flashlight. Not there. I ran my shaking hands over the nearby top of an upended pine crate Mom and Ian had been using as a side table. My fingers met the glass side of the oil lamp, and then a small, stiff cardboard square. A matchbook. I struck a match. Its flare blinded me at first, then died down to an orange flicker. I blinked away the spots on my retinas. No one in the room but me.

  The flame grazed my finger. I dropped the spent match and lit a new one, then lifted the glass casing from the lantern to relight the wick. I rubbed the cold from my arms and picked up the lamp. First, Trey.

  The light gleamed dully on the lengths of rebar studding the half-finished wall around our room. I leaned inside the curtain. Trey hung suspended in the hammock, inside layers of blankets and sleeping bags. His breath moved in and out, deep and slow.

  I let myself breathe, too. Now for Mom.

  I held the lantern overhead as I ducked into Mom's room. Behind her curtains, the temperature dropped sharply, like I had walked into a pocket of cold water in the ocean. The flame shuddered inside the glass, shifting the shadows so it seemed there was something moving over the bed. I cupped my hand over the lantern's open top. The flame quieted. Nothing was there but a lank twist of sheets and a shallow indentation where Mom's body should have been.