CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I didn’t sleep too well that night. My lean-to was nice and cozy, but after the piano music, I kept waking up every hour or so, listening—what was that? A cracking branch? Or did I just dream that? The rustle in the leaves was real. But I knew that tiny birds made a lot of noise if you listened carefully. The third or fourth time I woke up, the moon was up, not quite three-quarters full. Silver light bathed the road. The truck windshield shone. My fire had burned down, but with three sleeping bags and a good bed of fir boughs as insulation, I wasn’t cold. The trees cast slender moon shadows.

Then a long, low whimper rose out of the night and grew to a high-pitched howl. The sound quavered in the air like violin strings vibrating. That cry came from the south. A few seconds later, from the north, came answering howls, a whole frantic chorus of them. It lasted maybe three minutes, the whole forest ringing with coyote voices, yipping and yowling like they were trying to outdo each other. After that one crazy burst of singing, the coyotes fell quiet, though I lay there in my lean-to listening for them and wondering if they were moving this way.

I’m not afraid of coyotes. We hear them at home out in the hills, singing their songs. I like the sound. Mom and I go out on the step to listen. We try to guess if they sound happy or lonely. If there’s a single voice crying, Mom says it sounds broken-hearted. I don’t like to think about that. Anyway, even though I’m not afraid of them normally, it was different lying in a sleeping bag under the stars with just a bunch of sticks covering me.

I had my fire-poking stick beside me. I used it to poke the embers back to life and I threw on a few small branches. The flames twisted, surging and ebbing, popping with a shower of sparks. I drifted, dreamed of Phoebe running across the grass, rising into the air like a dragonfly skimming across the green-glass surface of the lake.

I woke to the shrill pitch of the beeping bird, its steady annoying tone like an alarm clock. Barely light. I sat up and wrapped my sleeping bag closer. Other birds were awake, making noises I’d never heard before: coos and twerps and chatters and clacks. The Oregon jungle. An edge of my sleeping bag was wet with dew, but the rest of me had stayed dry. Except for a dent in my hip where a branch had poked through, I felt pretty good. My braids had twigs in them. I hadn’t brushed my teeth in days, and I hadn’t eaten enough to keep a bird alive, but still. I felt okay.

It was Day Seven. Mom left at first light on Day Five. That meant she’d had two solid days of walking. If it was about sixty miles to the highway, well, it’s possible she could have walked for ten hours each day, and possible she could have covered thirty miles on each of those days. Not likely, but possible. Let’s say she was only able to cover twenty miles a day, which is more reasonable. That meant another whole day at least before she’d reach the road. Plus the time to find someone to drive back down and get me. And that was all the time I was going to allow myself to spend thinking about rescue. It would probably not come today, so I needed to turn my attention to something else.

First, I had decided, just as I drifted back to sleep last night for the third time, that I would unhook the truck battery. There was a little juice left in it and I might as well save it, for what, I didn’t know. I popped the hood and got out a crescent wrench. The bolts loosened easily and I flipped the connections off the posts. Something seemed to be draining it, but besides the radio, I didn’t know what it was. It might make no difference whatsoever. But I knew that when Dad put his motorcycle away for the winter, he took the battery out.

I’d been trying to keep my mind off pancakes. It kept drifting there and lingering. Aunt Sissy couldn’t cook much, but she made the best pancakes I’ve ever had and she made them from scratch. Just for fun, and to torture myself, I tried to remember what was in them. Eggs, milk, flour. Baking soda? Or baking powder? I can never get those two straight.

Once, I tried to make carrot muffins and I used baking soda instead of baking powder. When they came out of the oven flat and hard, I stood in the middle of the kitchen and cried.

“What happened?” Mom asked.

“I…”

She crouched down to look in my face and waited as I struggled to get the words to roll off my tongue.

“I…”

Then she folded me in her soft powder-scented arms. I nestled in the warm crook of her neck and let myself blubber like a baby, and I knew, and she probably did too, that I wasn’t crying over spoiled muffins anymore.

“Chh, chh, that’s enough,” she said. Then she drew her fingers across my cheeks to wipe away my tears.

“That’s okay, Francie,” she said. “If everything turns out perfect the first time, how will you learn?” Then, even though we used the last egg and almost all of the flour, and even though I had to grate more carrots, Mom helped me make the muffins all over again. That second time, they did turn out perfectly. I iced them with vanilla sour cream frosting, which Dad said was his new favorite.

I tried to decide now which I wanted more: carrot muffins or pancakes? I still think I’d go for the pancakes. Aunt Sissy puts blueberries in them and cooks them just until they’re golden brown, a bit crispy on the edges. A pat of butter, and when that’s melted, a glop of maple syrup that spreads on the hot pancakes and puddles on the edge of the plate.

I bent over my firepit and tented some twigs around a clump of dry lichen. I set a match to it and watched it smoke and then, with a little puff, billow into flame. I added more sticks as those caught, bigger branches. Instead of pancakes, I’d be having fir needle tea, the last piece of granola bar and a few mints.

Once the fire was burning nicely, I went to the truck for the tea things, granola bar and mints. The bag of mints was still nearly half full. The mints had been Mom’s snack, what she’d bought for herself when we’d stopped early into our trip. She’d left them here for me. I don’t think she’d even taken any along for herself. That proved she loved me, didn’t it? If she didn’t love me, she would have taken them with her; she wouldn’t have cared about what I had left to eat. The Scotch mints and also the note. The only reason she’d gone alone and left the note telling me to wait was because she didn’t want to put me in danger. And that proved she loved me, too.

---

My task for Day Seven was to find more to eat. That meant retrieving as many of the deer bones as I could for more soup. I had the bucket and the cooler nearly full of water, so soup made sense. Also, hot soup felt comforting, like real food.

After my breakfast, I put on my backpack, slung my compass around my neck and slipped my jackknife in my pocket. I also remembered to bring my fluorescent orange T-shirt so I could hang it from the marker where my trail led back to the truck. Would bones go bad? I had no idea. But I figured that since they hadn’t hurt me so far, they’d last me another couple of days at least. Some kind of root would add some bulk to my diet, but I was less sure of roots than leaves and berries. I’d never eaten any roots from the wild, and I needed to be careful I didn’t poison myself.

I was starting to recognize my trail through the woods. A fallen tree caught in the crook of two standing trees pointed in the direction of the little hill. A big rock with its top covered in moss lay about twenty feet beyond that. It didn’t look like it had any handholds or footholds, but it would be the kind of thing I’d try to climb, normally.

A breeze whispered through the trees, wafting a soft warmth. The breeze came from the south. I could feel that the day would warm up, which made me think of Mom. I hoped she’d found water. She shouldn’t have done what she was doing; she shouldn’t be trying to walk out on her own. If she’d asked me, I’d have told her so. I could have convinced her we were better off to stay put. Maybe that was why she didn’t wake me up. Maybe she knew I’d try to talk her out of it.

What day was it? I counted them off on my fingers. Friday. Yesterday was the first of May. By now we should have been halfway through our Grand Canyon hike. Friday we had planned to be starting back up out of the canyon. Dad and I had planned it together, leaving lots of time for rests, since we weren’t used to hiking in heat. In early May, though, there could still be snow. It would have been a challenge, but we’d all have been together.

I’d been daydreaming again. Before I knew it, I was at the base of the hill and the rock cairn I’d made. I took out my orange T-shirt and tied it to the stick, then I headed south, watching for the clearing where I’d found the bones.

I didn’t have far to go. I recognized the slope where I’d found the branch for my lean-to frame. Sunlight lit up the grassy patch below it. I pushed through some low shrubs into the clearing. But the bones weren’t there. The rib cage was gone. The leg bones, the knotty spine pieces that I’d seen—all of them were gone.

I was confused. I was absolutely, positively sure this was the same spot. But it couldn’t be. There’d been most of a skeleton here, a big one. How could it be gone? I must have the wrong spot. Things could be deceiving in the forest; I knew that. One grassy clearing can easily look like another. I should have marked it with something. I should have thought of that.

I bent and had a closer look at the grass, thinking I might see my own footsteps, or some evidence that I’d been there before. As I crouched, combing my fingers through the grass, the sun heating my hair, a shiver crept over me. The roots of my hair tingled. Something had been here. Someone. Someone had dragged away what was left of the bones.

I stood up and shook myself. Don’t let your imagination get carried away, I told myself. This wasn’t the spot; that’s all there was to it. I thought it was, but I was wrong. I looked behind me. Leaves quivered in the breeze. My orange T-shirt stood like a beacon in the distance. A sudden whop-whop-whop above my head startled me, but it was just an eagle, his wings churning the air as he rose and circled. I took a few steps farther along the bottom of the slope. But to go any farther, I’d have to skirt the dense brush and scramble over deadfall. And I knew I hadn’t done that yesterday.

I started back to the truck slowly at first, with the sense of eyes on my back. I picked up speed until I was almost running. Then I was running, all out, my lungs burning like they’d explode. I burst out of the trees and ran down and up the ditch and onto the road. I got to the truck, yanked open the door and swept all the wood I’d stockpiled onto the ground. Don’t ask me why. People do stupid stuff when they’re scared and I was scared.

I sat in the truck with my head on the steering wheel and I sat that way for a long time, tears like a tangle of wet wool clogging my throat. I didn’t cry. Sad is too small a word for what I felt. I felt blown up. Like what you see in the news when a bomb’s gone off and everything is in unrecognizable pieces and the “victims,” as they call them, are wandering around like zombies in the wreckage. But you can’t really go around that way for long. It just doesn’t work.

Before long, thoughts began to push their way back in. Like that the truck was hot, the sun beating through the windshield. That the windows were electric and that that was a stupid design. What if your vehicle veered off the road and landed in the lake and you couldn’t get out because the windows were electric? Dad said a crank window had been a good idea in the first place. Who was so lazy that they couldn’t roll down their own window, and needed a motor to do it for them?

I sniffed and caught a gulp of air. I hadn’t noticed I’d been holding my breath. Not everything new that humans invent is better than the thing before it. Pencil sharpeners. The little tiny ones you can hold in the palm of your hand and they’re made of metal or plastic and can sharpen two or three different sizes of pencils. My grade-five teacher had a pencil sharpener on her desk that was the size of a brick and took batteries, I don’t know how many. Like it’s so hard to turn your pencil three times with your own hand to sharpen it.

Or coffee percolators. Well, I wouldn’t know since I didn’t drink coffee, but Mom said you couldn’t make a better cup of coffee than with the old percolators you put on the stove. We had one we brought camping and it was all black from the fire, and Mom said it was one of her favorite things about camping—the coffee. But we didn’t bring that percolator on this trip.

And Dad found a plastic Big Gulp cup on our front lawn one morning and he laughed about it and said he’d keep it for his painting projects since it was so huge. He said take-out cups used to be paper and they were about as high as your fist. And he said he didn’t remember being thirsty after drinking one of those Dixie cups of soda.

I opened the truck door to let some air in, then leaned back and looked out at the road.

GPS. GPS wasn’t better than a map. But I didn’t want to think about that.

What else? Cell phones? No, cell phones seemed like a good invention to me. A cell phone wouldn’t have helped us out here, Dad said. That was probably true. We wouldn’t have gotten a signal, and I read once about a woman who got turned around in the woods and went farther and farther off the trail, trying to find a cell signal until she was truly lost. They found all her unsent messages on the phone, and the little camp where she’d starved to death trying to get a cell phone signal. Still, I wouldn’t have minded having one. Mom and Dad said when I got my own job and could pay for it by myself, that’s when I could get one. For themselves, what did they need with a cell phone, is what they said. A regular phone was bad enough.

Record albums. What was wrong with them? Turntables. My neighbor, Duncan, said the sound was better than anything digital, though I couldn’t really tell the difference.

When I was eleven I was walking home from school one afternoon when I felt something hit me on the back of the head. I usually walked home from school alone, because I waited with Carly for her mother to pick her up. The bus didn’t run up there where they lived, and Carly’s mom had to work until 4:30, so we hung out at the school, fooling around with the recorders and xylophones and drums in the band room, or if it was nice out, hanging upside down on the monkey bars until our heads spun. Or we had swinging contests, seeing who could go the highest without chickening out. When we got braver, we jumped from the swing just as it reached its highest point and we rolled like parachute jumpers in the wood shavings.

Anyway, the hit to the back of my head wasn’t hard. It was like a bee had flown into my hair. I kept walking, and then I felt it again. I looked behind me and there were three boys walking down the sidewalk, but they were talking to each other and didn’t seem to notice me. Then I felt it again. This time, a balled-up piece of tinfoil from a chocolate bar landed on the sidewalk in front of me. One of the boys said, just loud enough for me to hear, “What’s red, white and peeling? A ginger trying to tan.”

“What’s the difference between a ginger and a vampire? One’s pale and blood-sucking and avoids the sun. The other is a vampire.”

I tried to walk faster, but the boys kept up to me. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that boys like that have this ability that horses are supposed to have—they can sense your fear. Anyway, these boys could, I think. Even though I didn’t turn around. Even though I kept walking. When I crossed the street, they crossed too.

One of them started to bark, like an angry little poodle. The other two started, too. I don’t know what kind of dogs they were supposed to sound like—bigger ones, anyway.

From my left side, I felt a moving shadow fall across the sidewalk. I jumped and turned and there was our neighbor, Duncan, on his bike. He didn’t say anything. He rode slowly along beside me for a couple minutes, standing on his pedals, until the boys, who were younger than him, stopped barking. Then he sped up and kept going. Our lane was just ahead. I always went down the back lane to get home and so did Duncan. When I turned, the boys didn’t follow.

At the house, I unlatched the gate.

“Hey!” Duncan called. He was standing in his garage, his backpack on the old couch they had in there, and his drumsticks in his hand. “What’re you doing?”

“Nothing. I’m going in the house.”

“Your folks home yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“C’mhere.”

So I went in the garage as he squeezed behind his drum kit and sat down.

“You can sit there if you want.” He gestured to the couch. I moved his backpack and sat down. He tapped his sticks together a few times, made a kind of jump on his stool and lit into his drums like he was on fire. He went on like that, lifting off his seat, his mouth twisting and his head going back and forth with the rhythm for about ten minutes.

“Holy! What was that?” I said when he stopped.

“ ‘Sing, Sing, Sing.’ I’ll play you the record. Drummer named Gene Krupa. Guy was a genius drummer.” He stood up and pulled a record down from a shelf, put it on a turntable set up on the workbench behind him.

“Where’d you get the records?” I asked.

“Th-th-th…th-th-th…” He closed his eyes. Sometimes when I asked Duncan something, I wished I hadn’t, because I didn’t want him to feel the way I did when I froze. Then he said, “They were my grandpa’s. He was a drummer, too.”

He put the needle down carefully and we listened to the song and every once in a while, Duncan mimicked the drum part in the air but didn’t play it. When it was done, he lifted the needle off the record and said, “I’m going to go in now.”

I took my backpack and crossed the lane to our house. I let myself in and as I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, I thought that that was the nicest thing a boy had ever done for me, except for Dad. I knew he had called me in there just to make sure I was okay, and I realized too that I was okay. I felt better, like I was someone other than just the scared skinny redheaded girl I’d been on the sidewalk with the boys barking at me.

Disadvantage to being a redhead: it gives jerks an easy thing to tease you about. Advantage to being a redhead: I’ll let you know when I think of something. Carly claims she wishes she had red hair, but that’s only because she doesn’t have red hair.

Since then, Duncan has called me into the garage a few times to listen to things. I would never catch up to him to walk home from school, or even say hi to him away from the garage, because he’s usually with a bunch of his band friends and I figure he wouldn’t appreciate being seen talking to a girl my age. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he saw me.