CHAPTER EIGHT

“There’s something not right here.”

I’d been staring into the fire, hypnotized by the flames. They twisted and leapt, then shrank back and scurried along an edge of log, then leapt again. We’d built the fire bigger than the last one and more out in the open. If Dad was out there, I hoped he’d see it. We didn’t want it so big that it was dangerous and we couldn’t sit close to it, but it needed to be seen. You’d think that even a small fire in the bush could be seen from far away, but that’s not true, as Ms. Fineday had shown us. If you’re in among the trees yourself, you could be within feet of a fire before you’d see it, and if the wind was blowing away from you, you wouldn’t hear it or smell it either.

Mom’s voice had drawn me out of my trance.

“Something’s not right here,” she said again.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, something.” She turned her head slowly and looked over her shoulder into the dark night. “I can feel it. I feel like we’re being watched.”

A shiver pricked up on my skin. The night had gone from pale orangey-blue to purple to thick blackness in the minutes we’d been sitting by the fire. We couldn’t even see the truck on the road twenty feet away. Part of that, I reminded myself, was because we’d been staring into the fire. Also, the moon hadn’t risen yet.

“I don’t want to scare you,” Mom said softly.

“I’m not scared,” I said. But I only said that to make us both feel better. If I let myself be scared, I wouldn’t be able to stop, and fear would lead to panic and panic was the enemy in the bush. Besides, what I was really afraid of was not the same as what Mom was afraid of. I wasn’t afraid of being watched, or beeping devices in the woods. I was afraid that Dad had not found his way, that he was alone and still out there. After she’d come for me where I’d been crying and sitting against the tree, she gave me two Scotch mints, took two herself, and we sat sucking on them and not speaking.

Now that we both knew that the road Dad had been on had disappeared, the things we couldn’t say grew thicker. Why had he not turned around? Why hadn’t he come back? Trust the technology; that’s what he always said. He trusted the GPS. He thought the highway was only fifteen miles away, and fifteen miles was a lot closer than the more than fifty we’d traveled the other way.

We’d made our way back to the truck where I worked on my map and Mom sat on the tailgate, thinking.

“What was that little neighbor girl’s name, the one with the dark curls, remember her? A pretty name. Eleanor? Penelope? Something old-fashioned.”

“Lucinda.”

“Lucinda, that’s right. And remember that time—you won’t remember, you were too young. Do you remember how she used to sit on our back step when we were eating dinner and one night Phoebe saved some of her supper for her and brought it out to her?”

“That was me.”

“What?”

“That was me.”

“No, it wasn’t, Francie. That was Phoebe. I clearly remember her balancing her plate so carefully as she carried it. You wouldn’t have been six yet, you wouldn’t remember.”

“It was spaghetti and meatballs.”

“Well, I know you two shared so many memories, but sweetie, you’re wrong about that one.”

Mom swung her legs and looked out at the road. Then she tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear and said, “That was so like Phoebe.”

“She asked for more,” I said. “And you called her inside and you gave her some in a bowl.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter, really,” Mom said. “I was only remembering because of the spaghetti. It was so good. Those meatballs Dad used to make. He hasn’t made them in years now.”

We both pretended not to be angry. But after a while Mom jumped down and went to the cab of the truck and sat with the door open, smoking again.

I knew that Mom smoked to calm down. She called it her medicine. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it didn’t and it only made her worry worse and then there could be what Dad called “episodes.” This started some time after Phoebe died. She would get caught on some little worry. I was going to say “silly worry,” but I’m not supposed to call them silly. She worried about things that were real, but so small I couldn’t understand how she could spend so much time on them. Once it was the furnace making an odd noise, and then Mom thought a strange smell was coming from the heating vents and she would walk around the house sniffing for what she called “poisons.” Or like the necklace she was afraid would choke me in the middle of the night. The worse she worried, the more she smoked. It could become a vicious circle.

I’d heard Dad and her argue about it and he’d said, “I’m going to take that stuff and flush it down the toilet, I swear to God,” and Mom had said, “Don’t you dare.”

Now, as we sat by the fire, I thought that I could wait until she fell asleep and then throw her tobacco into the fire. She’d be mad, but in a few hours, she’d come back to normal. Or it might take a few days.

“I think we need to walk out,” she said. “I think we need to walk out now.”

“We can’t walk out. Someone has to be here when Dad comes back.” I could feel my tears rising again. “I’m not leaving,” I said, and I knew I sounded like a baby.

“This is going to sound crazy,” Mom said, standing up and taking a few steps away from the fire.

I held my breath. Then don’t say it, I prayed. I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t want to hear it.

“I can’t see a thing.”

“Wait till your eyes get used to the dark.”

She walked a little farther from the fire and I could see her scanning the woods, for what, I didn’t know.

“Mom.”

“Listen.”

“Mom, come back to the fire.”

“No. I can’t hear anything when I’m sitting by the fire.”

“You don’t need to hear anything. If Dad comes back this way we’ll hear him coming. He’ll call our names.”

She stood there listening. The fire popped and spat a burning ember onto the dirt. I crushed it out with my foot. I could feel the fear bubbling up in my chest like a pot about to boil over. I took deep breaths to try to push it down.

I wanted to distract Mom from whatever crazy worry she’d been imagining. But before I could say anything her voice came out of the dark.

“It feels like we’re part of some kind of experiment.”

I waited for her to laugh, the way you do when you’ve let someone else hear the crazy thing you’ve been thinking about that you know is ridiculous. But she didn’t laugh. So I did instead.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe we’re in an A&W commercial and someone’s going to pop out of the woods any minute with two Teen Burgers.”

“Shh!” Mom’s sharp voice came from the dark. Then there was silence except for the crackle and hiss of the fire. Then, booming clear and close came the hoot of an owl—

Who cooks? Who cooks? Who cooks for you-all? Three times. It was the same kind of owl we heard at Grandma’s cabin at Gem Lake, and hearing it now was not scary, at least not to me, because it made me think of Grandma.

“Like that,” Mom whispered, so softly it was almost to herself. “Was that a real owl?”

I could almost hear Grandma’s voice, speaking softly in my ear. She would remind me that when Mom had her “episodes,” we could all be pulled in to her strange way of seeing things. But what was happening to Mom was not what was real. Remember that. I had to remember that if we were going to…if we were going to survive. And I thought that a hard thing—being out here, waiting—had just gotten even harder.