What’s wrong with you?
Mom gets in and hands the black something to me—it’s a basic cell phone—keys big enough for a giant to operate. Then she gives me another one, identical.
I am shaking. Nothing, I say. Nothing.
One for you, one for me, she says. Your job is: program my number into yours, and vice versa.
What? Why?
They’re prepaid. No contract. The cops don’t know we have them.
The COPS? What is this, TV?
Okay, the police, whatever. Just keep yours on you.
We’re together, I say.
We may get separated, she says.
I roll my eyes. I can’t believe you got us burners, like on The Wire, I say.
Mom shrugs. What can I say. I love that show. Charge the cell tonight and keep it safe.
So we’re on the run. And we have burner cells. It would be bitching if it wasn’t so totally weird and awful. In my mind’s eye, a flash, like firework-afterburn: Luke’s hand again, the knife sticking out of it like a flag.
Mom checks a big fold-out map she also got in the 7-Eleven, then opens her purse, takes out her old cell phone, and tosses it out the window. Then she pushes the lever from P to D and we pull out, pine needles crunching under the tires. At a fork, Mom takes another turn onto a smaller highway.
It’s not the same road we were on before, and we follow it for maybe an hour—I don’t know; I program the numbers into the cells, but then I think I fall asleep for a while.
Next I know, we’re turning onto another road, and then another. We’re in deep forest now, and I gasp.
There’s a canyon, I say.
What?
A canyon. I point—it’s not as big as the Grand Canyon, but it’s impressive, running alongside the road, a big gouge in the land, red rock descending to a ribbon of blue water. Pine trees hug the sides, and encompass us all around. We’re on little more than a dirt track, I realize.
A rabbit runs onto the track in front of us, startles, and dashes back into the bushes.
A little later, I see a deer flit through the trees beside us, on the forest side. It gives me a strange feeling to see them there. It’s getting harder and harder to remember what happened with Mark and the elks. And there were wolves, I think? But the dream has stuck with me, unsettling me, and now it’s as if it’s bleeding into reality, like newspaper print left behind on damp clothes.
Where are we going? I ask.
Judge Ricardo’s cabin, says Mom. He’s not there at all this week—his mom had a stroke. He had to fly back east. He got the call at the end of the day on Friday.
You know where Judge Ricardo’s cabin is?
I know everything. I’m the stenographer.
And sure enough, there’s another couple of turns, and then I see a log cabin in front of us, a little semicircle of gravel drive in front of it, all neat and tidy. It’s set into the side of a hill that rises up beside the canyon, and it looks down over it, over the river below and the trees and the rock.
And this river: it’s not like the creek we saw before, with Luke, slowly flowing, brown and green. This is swift, and foamy, and racing past—it is a true river.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a river before. I am entranced by it—by the way that it is always shifting, always moving, the ripple and the currents and the eddies, but at the same time it is one indivisible still thing. The effect is of something crumpled, but shining; tinfoil.
It’s beautiful. It feels like … like my dream, I realize, woozily. That same sense of no civilization, of just primal nature, like there would have been a million years ago, when people hadn’t messed everything up. Though of course here, there’s obviously rain, because it isn’t all dry and broken.
It’s lush, and green, and there is luxuriant undergrowth everywhere and many colors of leaves.
We’ll be safe here, says Mom as she gets out of the car.
She is wrong, but I don’t know that yet.