NOW
The trees around the bridge trail swallowed Mark, Angela and Xander. The wind was out of the southwest. It blustered through the trees and made the chickens nervous. Angela said animals knew when a storm was coming, which was why they needed to make an emergency drive to Cohut to buy sacks of feed for the hens and some hay for the goats, fill the propane tanks and deliver some goat cheese to the new owner of a nearby hunting lodge before the storm hit. Mark was going in order to help balance the big load on the small truck and drive the rutted track home so the vehicle’s springs didn’t break. He would stay hidden in the truck while they were in town. He wore a ball cap pulled low over his eyes and a sweatshirt hood tugged over his head. Angela said she’d pick up a set of winter clothes for Xander and a warmer jacket for me at the mobile pantry, which was supposed to be in town the next two days.
Diana had gone hunting. Who knew where Rudy was?
I was the only one who seemed to worry about Rudy. He reminded me of Mowgli in The Jungle Book, a wild child who walked the edges of the civilized world. His eyes were always watchful, his face always dirty, his words spare. Often, he disappeared into the forest for hours before he returned with his “treasures”: tiny white squirrel skulls or sharp-edged stones that resembled arrowheads, and once a small brown bottle embossed with the words Pete’s Liver and Kidney Tonic. Cincinnati, Ohio. Sometimes I’d find him perched high in a spruce tree, silently watching as if he were scouting for trouble or danger. However, he was kind and gentle with animals—and with Xander—and I appreciated how he’d helped Xander with his sometimes uncooperative feet and fingers, telling Xander to try to walk in his footprints, which Xander did, his feet straight and true for those few moments. I wondered why the therapist I’d paid hadn’t thought of that and what Rudy’s life must have been like with a mother who was so often on the road or living with men who abused him. Perhaps her parents had been right to want to take him away from her.
I waited until everyone was gone and then headed for the cabin. I’d scoured most of the house for my keys and wallet (I’d discovered the gate key on a nail under the sink), but it was hard to find an excuse to be in Mark’s room. I closed the cabin door behind me, looked once out the window and hurried in.
I was immediately struck by what I hadn’t noticed before: the tangible evidence of Diana and Angela, which was everywhere. The strange skull and horns above the bed and a deer-hide coat hanging from a nail on the wall for Diana. A woven throw tossed across the foot of the bed and a few pairs of earrings scattered on top of the chest of drawers for Angela. It felt a little like the way dogs marked their territory and I wondered if that was what each had done.
I went through the dresser drawers first. Nothing. I searched inside boots and dug through the clothes in the armoire. I looked under the bed and felt above the doorframe in case the Subaru key was there. I turned next to the cardboard boxes. The first was filled with clothes: moth-eaten T-shirts, worn jeans and a faded New Orleans Saints sweatshirt, size XL. The next held blankets, the other towels. The final box was filled with things like candlesticks, a dented kettle, a rusted hunting knife, a drill bow, and an Army canteen.
At the very bottom were a few photos: a serious-looking Alvin with a bunch of guys in dusty combat uniforms; Alvin jogging past colorfully dressed women in Africa somewhere; him as a teenager standing solemnly on the front porch of a run-down farmhouse. I hoped he had found happiness in Thailand with his girlfriend. He was a good man.
I put the photos away, shoved my hair out of my eyes and leaned my head back in exasperation, which is when I saw it: the corner of a wooden box on top of the tall armoire. It was too high for me to reach, so I opened the armoire’s doors, put a foot on one of the shelves and reached, praying the whole thing wouldn’t fall over and crush me.
I wanted to shout with relief when I opened the box. There were my keys and my wallet with my driver’s license, my credit card and Xander’s birth certificate, which I’d need if I wanted to cross the border. The phone and the charging cord were in there too. Somebody must have retrieved the cord from my car.
I stood for a moment and just stared at my salvation. “Thank you, universe,” I said.
I started to empty the box but thought better of it. If, for some reason, Mark or Angela opened the container tonight and found everything gone, they’d figure out what I was up to pretty fast. In the end, I climbed back up the armoire, shoved the box into the spot where I thought it had been and stepped down. I would retrieve it later when the time was right.
“Hey!” said a voice.
I whirled. “Rudy,” I said, and put a hand to my chest, “you scared me.”
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” he said.
I smiled and closed the armoire doors. “It’s fine, Rudy.”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “This is my dad’s room and we’re not supposed to come in unless he says we can. That means you too.”
His pale eyes bored into me.
“Why are you in here anyway?” he said. “Dad ain’t even home.”
I thought fast. “I was looking for a heavier jacket to borrow. It’s getting cold again.”
His face held something I couldn’t read. “I seen you in here before,” he said. “You was looking in the drawers. If I tell my dad you was looking through his stuff again, he won’t like it.”
He was right. Mark wouldn’t like it.
“I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I just need a jacket,” I told him.
He scowled and crossed his arms over his thin chest. “I think you was doing something,” he said.
Desperation rose and I said, “You know, Rudy, if you tell your dad and he gets mad, I won’t be able to read The Swiss Family Robinson to you anymore and then what will you do? You can’t read, can you?”
I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. He was just a boy.
He looked like he’d been slapped.
Before I could apologize, however, he turned and slipped away as quietly as he’d arrived. The click of the front door latch was the only notice of his leaving.
I tried to tell myself the threat was necessary, and yet my cruelty had come so easily it made me feel ill. Was meanness in my DNA after all, having come down the line on my mother’s side? The family story had it that after a neighbor had called my great-granny poor white trash, she’d taken a pair of shears to their clothesline, leaving ribbons of cloth writhing in the breeze like snakes.
Was I just like them?
The image of my mother lying dead on the barn floor flashed again and yet this time it was different. Instead of freezing to a single frame as it usually did, the scene played on: my mother’s hand twitching against the concrete barn floor, my dad’s voice faint in my ears. The room spun for a moment. Had my mother been alive when I helped my father bury her? Were her last moments spent trying to claw her way out of a mountain of waste?
The image faded, and even though I tried to get it back, it wouldn’t come. I know people say they’re haunted by their memories but I think not remembering is worse. If you don’t know what you did, how can you feel remorse or forgive yourself or absolve those who hurt you?
It seemed strange that the new memory had surfaced at that moment and I wondered whether the boy had sparked it or if it was somehow related to what had happened in the forest with Mark, the shame I felt.
A gust of wind rattled the cabin roof and I hurried outside to tell Rudy I was sorry.
He was nowhere in sight.
I went back to the woodpile and began splitting logs for the woodstove and hauling them into the cabin in advance of the weather that was coming. The sky had turned leaden and angry-looking and I tried not to think about what I’d done and instead began to plan my escape.
Mark and Angela came back just ahead of the storm. They lugged two full propane tanks and sacks of grain, and Xander wore a secondhand orange jacket and a pair of blue snow pants. He also carried a plastic pirate sword and swiped it across the air to show me its power, and he said he was going to use it to “kill bad guys.” Mark and Angela looked grim. On the drive back, the radio had announced warnings from the National Weather Service. The storm had intensified and turned our way. Wind gusts of a hundred miles per hour were expected over the mountain peaks and flash flooding was possible. Already, the wind had picked up, causing the spruce to sway like angry hula dancers.
The tempest unleashed its fury an hour later.
Angela was rushing to secure the chickens and goats and Mark was bringing in more armloads of firewood when Xander looked up from the little battery-powered radio that served as our chief contact with the outside world.
“Hey, where’s Rudy? This is his favorite song.”
The rain drummed against the front window.
“Didn’t he go with you?” Mark asked Diana.
She’d just come back from a hunt and was standing near the stove, drinking a cup of Angela’s tea.
“I needed to cover a lot of ground,” Diana answered, as if that were enough explanation. She glanced out the window. “He knows he’s supposed to get back before dark.”
“That’s only an hour away,” I said. I felt sick at the thought that I was the reason Rudy was out there. “What if he’s lost or he hurt himself?”
“He’ll be fine,” Diana said. “He’s been through storms before.”
“Christ, Diana. He’s a ten-year-old kid and this isn’t just a storm,” Mark said.
His voice was hard and a smile flitted across Angela’s lips at Mark’s anger toward Diana.
Mark went to the hooks by the door and shrugged back into his jacket. “Do you have any idea where he might be?”
“He’s not lost. He’s got Shadow,” Diana said.
It was the first time I’d noticed Shadow was gone too.
“It doesn’t matter if he has the dog,” Mark snapped. “He’s out there and I’m going to look for him. Christ.”
“I’ve seen him go up by the spring,” Angela said. “There’s a little cave there. Maybe he holed up when the rain started.”
Mark grabbed the rifle and a headlamp and opened the door. The rain slanted sideways, thrumming against the cabin walls.
“Try the river too. Under that big log,” Angela called after him.
“I can’t believe this,” he said, and slammed the door behind himself.
Outside, the light was fading.
I turned to Xander. “Where does Rudy like to go, Xan?”
He looked up. “He likes to be with the goats.”
“Where else?” I asked.
Xander shrugged. “Maybe the river. Maybe Flamiko March.”
It took me a moment to realize what he meant. Flamingo Marsh was the name the Swiss Family Robinson had given to a boggy spot where they cut their arrows.
“The meadow,” I said, and threw on the wool jacket Angela had brought for me from the charity shop. “I’m going to look for Rudy,” I told her. “I think I know where he might be.”
“He’ll be fine,” Diana said.
I almost didn’t find Rudy. I was slogging my way around the perimeter of the meadow, the hiking boots I wore sinking into the dark mud and the rain stinging my face when I caught a flash of white just where the grass met the edge of the forest.
“Rudy?” I yelled.
On the way here, I’d tripped over a fallen log and landed on one knee, the jolt sending a stab of pain up my leg and into my brain. Part of me wondered how badly I was bruised and another part said that I deserved whatever I got for hurting a child. I limped forward.
The glimpse of white turned out to be Shadow, who bounded into the grass before turning around and running back into the woods. As I got closer I could see a crude A-frame shelter a few yards into the forest. It was small, made of spruce branches and bark piled over a brown tarp. I squatted in front of the opening and peered into the dim interior.
“There you are,” I said.
A small fire flickered weakly in a grotto made of flat stones, the smoke filtering out through an opening in the back wall. Rudy sat cross-legged on the packed dirt in front of it. He was wet and trying not to shiver. “Go away,” he said.
He’d made a small bed out of spruce and cedar branches and constructed a shelf crowded with a half-burned candle, a dented pot, a cigar box and a mug I recognized as having come from the cabin, along with a row of his treasures: small stones and feathers and the old tonic bottle. The hunting knife he always wore hung in a sheath from the peak of the shelter.
I told him that everybody was looking for him, and he shook his head as if he recognized the lie. I asked if I could join him and he said, “No.” I squatted in front of the tiny hut and told him that I was sorry for what I’d said and that he was right that I shouldn’t have been in the room. I said if he came back to the cabin, I would read ten pages of The Swiss Family Robinson to him, twice what I normally did, and also help him learn to read if he wanted. Shadow came and looked over my shoulder. The rain drove itself against my back.
A shiver rumbled through Rudy and he turned to me. “But what was you doing in there?”
I started to lie but stopped myself. There was something in his eyes. Something that said he’d been lied to too many times. He was an innocent. A kid with a mother who wasn’t mean like mine had been, just indifferent. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
“I was looking for something I lost,” I said finally.
He stared at me. “Car keys?”
I couldn’t help the exhalation of breath that escaped me. “Rudy, you can’t tell,” I began.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You ain’t the only one who don’t want to be here.”