CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
That night I slept with one eye on the sky. I found the Big Dipper and followed its curved handle to bright Arcturus, at the bottom of Boötes. Next to it, I picked out the seven stars in the necklace of the Corona Borealis. I could be in my own yard at home, looking at these same stars. Once in a while my eye caught the streaking of a meteor and by the time I registered what it was, it had melted into the throng of stars.
The red and white lights of an aircraft blinked across the sky. I watched them and sometimes the sound carried all the way down to me by my fire in the fir-branch lean-to. I was thinking how impossible it was that anybody on one of those airplanes could be thinking about me, or someone like me, or someplace like the place where I was, when they were up there, surrounded by artificial light and TV screens and little plastic trays of food. I was on an airplane once with Mom and Phoebe, to go to Ontario when Grandpa Fox died. That was Dad’s dad; he was already there. Mom said I could sit beside Phoebe, who was in the seat by the window, but Phoebe said, “No. I don’t want her here.” Mom tried to argue with her, but there were people in the aisle waiting to get past and so Mom sat down beside Phoebe and I sat in a seat next to a stranger. She was nice anyway, a pretty girl who smelled like oranges and who gave me a little bag of grapefruit jellybeans.
Midway through the flight, Phoebe decided she wanted to switch seats with me, so she got the pretty girl and I got the window and Mom. I’d looked down and seen the shimmer of towns tucked into mountain passes and trails of car lights moving like ant highways and sometimes a lonely point of light in a sea of dark. Maybe someone did look down from that airplane window and see the glow of light my fire cast in all the darkness and maybe they wondered who was there.
The disappearing deer bones kept me awake for a while. A coyote or a wolf or a cougar could have carried them off. Maybe a different animal than the one that killed the deer in the first place. Maybe an eagle or ravens. There was no meanness to it. Whatever it was, I realized, it wasn’t trying to scare me. It wasn’t going to chase me down just for fun. Whatever it was, it was just like me, trying to survive.
Eventually, I closed both eyes and slept.
I didn’t want it to be the first thing in my head when I woke up. It’d been a thing I’d kept to the back of my mind, hovering like a mosquito in my room at night that I try to ignore, but that keeps ending up right by my ear no matter how much I swat at it. But there it was, smack in the front of my mind, first thing: Day Eight is Rescue Day. I know I said I had a rule—no more dreaming of rescue. And I know I hadn’t been very good at obeying it. Well, a rule is more of a goal, was the way I saw it. Something to aim for. And now it didn’t matter anyway because Day Eight was Rescue Day. Today, instead, the rule was to not think about not-rescue.
I didn’t need to rush to get up. Strangely, I was still not very hungry. I looked forward to my breakfast, but only because the tea would be hot and soothing. My Scotch mints were not going anywhere and also, it was still cold. It had been a clear night and the morning dew lay frosty on the grass and road and truck. I dug my matches from my pocket where I kept them to stay dry. I still had plenty, but I would not need plenty. Today, I could stop thinking that way.
What if she walked right out and never turned back?
Once, when we were camping, when Phoebe was still alive, we’d gone to bed in the tent in our usual way—Dad, who was snoring already, and next to him, Mom, then Phoebe next to her, also snoring in her light, bird-whistle way, then me. It was always me on the outside next to the tent wall. It had been deep dark and I’d been lying there listening to the night noises when a twig snapped loudly, close to the tent.
“Why does Phoebe always get to sleep beside you?” I whispered to Mom.
“I don’t have to worry about you,” Mom said. “You’re never afraid.”
“Yes I am,” I said.
“Oh, Francie. You should be proud of that.”
At first I was angry. But after a while I’d started to cry because it wasn’t fair I should be punished for not being afraid. I half-hoped Mom would hear me.
She didn’t. She was already asleep.
She could walk out to the road and she would never have to worry about me again.
I gave my head a shake. This was not the kind of thought to have on Rescue Day. It was what I’d just said I would not think. Instead, I worked on building my morning fire.
When the sun came over the treetops and began to warm up the day, I shrugged off my sleeping bag, gave my hands one more warming turn at the fire and went to gather more fir needles for my tea. That done, I chopped the needles with my jackknife and put the water on the little burner to boil. It would be another warm day; I could feel it coming in the air.
I didn’t like to just gobble down my breakfast of Scotch mints like I was swallowing vitamins. I made a little ritual of it, setting them out on a bark plate. I took a sip of tea and let it warm my insides. Then I took a mint off the plate and placed it on my tongue. It dissolved slowly. When the last of the sweetness had disappeared, I took a couple more sips of tea. A bald eagle wheeled overhead, tightening his circle. I was sure he saw me, was coming in for a closer look. I took another mint, placed it on my tongue.
Normally, I didn’t even like Scotch mints. I used to think they tasted like chalk, or what chalk would taste like if I had ever eaten it, which I hadn’t. I’d wondered how they could be Mom’s favorite candy. She also likes Rockets, the ones you get in rolls at Halloween. She buys a big bag and eats them for months afterward. Also chalky.
But now, I couldn’t believe how delicious the mints were, and how I’d never noticed. The way they melted softly with a tiny sweet fizz and the sugar became almost like icing.
I ate another one. Then another, right from the bag, skipping the ritual. I think I had six or seven before I started to feel a little bit sick. As I twisted the bag closed, I realized something. Just because Mom had left the Scotch mints behind didn’t mean she’d left them for me. It didn’t mean anything. She’d also left the flashlight behind, her backpack, her sleeping bag, her warm clothes. She’d left everything behind.
What about her purse? Mom had brought her purse with her on this trip. She’d planned to leave it at home, because she said she’d just need to leave it in the truck for the hike, but at the last minute, she’d grabbed it. It was a black, soft-leather satchel like a horse’s feed bag. She sometimes called it the Black Hole, because when she put something in there, it was like dropping it into outer space. Even she didn’t know what was in there.
I took the bag of mints back to the truck and put them on the dashboard where they wouldn’t get accidentally spilled or eaten by mice. I checked the floor and the backseat and under the seats. Mom’s purse wasn’t there. I’d last seen it—when? It’d been on her shoulder when we went in the gas station to use the bathroom. I bent and stuck my hand under the passenger seat and my fingers touched something soft. It was wedged under there, stuck. I had to use both hands to pull it free.
I unzipped it, the leathery, dried-orange-peel, spearmint-gum smell wafting out. Her wallet, balled up Kleenex, several tubes of lip balm, different flavors, pens and pencils, sticky with lint, twelve of them altogether, two lipsticks, safety pins, bobby pins, hair elastics, a Cover Girl compact smudged with orange powder, a pair of sunglasses, another pair of sunglasses with one of the arms broken, several crinkled and faded receipts, a piece of gum, out of the wrapper and also sticky with lint, which I put in my pocket, a Midas Muffler keychain with no keys on it, a yellow sticky note with a list in her handwriting that said milk carrots toothpaste tea, three loose keys, one of those pocket calendars with a picture of a kitten on it. Dad and I had given it to her in her stocking two Christmases ago. The pages were all empty. And three plastic pill bottles, all empty.
I looked at the labels. The prescriptions had Mom’s name on them, Adele Fox, but on each one, part of the label had been neatly crossed out with a black felt marker. Who would have done that? And why?
That made me think of her special tobacco, and I knew. I knew like I knew the whining in my gut that Mom had taken her special tobacco with her. She had not taken her flashlight or her Scotch mints or her sleeping bag. She had not taken me. But she’d taken her tobacco.
My mind went down and down in a deep black hole like Mom’s purse and it took all my effort to pull it back up to the light of day.
Rescue Day. I had to keep busy.
I left Mom’s purse on the floor of the truck. It was warm enough to put on a T-shirt, so I got mine from my pack, and then I hiked into the woods looking for the perfect stick. I wanted a souvenir of this place, a walking stick I’d carve my initials into and someday when I was grown up, I’d give it to my child and tell him or her the story of my seven days on this road to nowhere.
I picked my way along through the trees, leaves crunching under my footsteps, sun on my shoulders. Every once in a while, I stopped to listen. Once I heard an airplane, lower than a jet, but not that low. Not low enough. No other engine sounds. Just birds peeping and the woodpecker drilling and the crunch of my own feet in the leaves. The day went slowly like that.
I watched some ants soldier along the base of a tree. I watched one drag a stick three times her size across the rusty fir needles. Worker ants are always female; I knew that from my grade-six ant project.
I tried not to, but I heard Mom’s scream.
I saw her there in the laundry room standing with the good tablecloth opened out in her two hands and a diamond-shaped hole the size of a paperback book cut out of it.
“Why would you do something like that?”
“I didn’t.”
“Of course you did—don’t lie to me on top of it.”
She was right. Of course I did it. I’d been doing my ant project at the dining room table, and I’d cut out the cardboard ant with scissors. I must have done it, but I’d pushed aside the tablecloth like she’d told me to and I didn’t understand how it happened, so I said again, “I didn’t.”
Her fingers gripped my arm as she pulled me down the hallway. She held me so hard she shook with it. She didn’t mean for it to hurt. It was the only family heirloom we had, the tablecloth. From Ireland, I think. It had been Grandma’s. We had the cabin too—that was an heirloom—but we didn’t go there anymore and that was my fault, too.
Now I see how my mind went from the ants to the ant project to the tablecloth to the hallway, and I wish I could have stopped it right there, but it was like an ant on its trail back to the nest—it would go over anything to get there. My mind scurried back to my room, always back to my room in the dying-down day, the house silent and breathing with Mom’s anger.
“You’re going to stay here and give some thought to your actions. That’s your problem, Francie. You just don’t think about your actions—you’re lost in your own dream world.”
Which wasn’t true at all; I did nothing but think about my actions.
Mom’s anger seeped through the vents and filled my room, pinning me to the floor where I lay listening for a peep, a creak, a sign. The sound that came was Dad’s boots on the front step, and my heart bubbled a little. Then the front door squeaked open.
“Del! Francie? I’m home.”
I sat up, but didn’t dare call out. Water running in the bathroom, the toilet flushing. The silence tried to smother these normal sounds; it rushed back in, heavy, thick.
Then low voices. After a while, the smell of onions frying and a clink of silverware. Then voices in the hall:
“Don’t you dare go in there.” Mom’s voice.
“I just want to check on her.” Dad’s.
“She needs to learn there’s consequences.”
“It’s just a tablecloth, Del. I’m sure it was a mistake.”
“Sure. To you it’s nothing. Let her blunder through life thinking there is no price to pay. God knows I paid the price.”
“So did she. So did she, Del.”
And I knew they weren’t talking about tablecloths anymore. I didn’t hear what Dad said next, but I knew from the soft tone of his voice that he would not be coming to check on me. It would get dark, and it did, and I refused to turn on the light as I lay there on the hard floor listening to the rattle of supper dishes. I pulled my pillow and blanket to the floor, only allowing myself to move that much from where I’d dropped in my despair. When they peeked in at me later, they would see me there and feel sorry.
Then a deep TV voice said, “This is the National” and I knew it was time for the ten o’clock news. Dad and the news reporter went on with their routines, not knowing or caring about me lying on the cold floor in the dark. That’s when I turned on the light, gathered my blanket and pillow and got into bed. I picked up the book I had been reading, The Amazing Universe, and read about Chinese astronomer Yang Wei-Te, who on July 4, 1054, recorded the appearance of a “guest star,” a new star so bright he could see it in the daytime for twenty-three days. Today, I read, we can still see the Crab Nebula, which is a cloud of light left over from that exploding star. I turned off my light and looked out my window. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there.
A faint, faraway rumble brought me back to the stick I’d begun whittling. I looked at my watch. Four o’clock in the afternoon. I stood to listen to the rumble. It came from the west, the same area where I’d heard the engine rumble the other day. I ran to the truck and hopped up on the tailgate to see if I could spot anything. The sound grew a little louder and then I recognized the whomp-whomp-whomp of helicopter blades. I climbed onto the toolbox and used it to boost myself onto the roof.
“Hey!” I yelled, waving my arms madly.
That was useless and I knew it, since the helicopter was nowhere near me yet, but I was so excited that I couldn’t help it. It would be just like my fantasy: Mom and Dad jumping down, ducking and running toward me. They knew where I was; they couldn’t miss me. A road would not be a hard thing to find in a wilderness of trees.
I hurried to my fire, poked it to life and put on some green boughs, not too many this time. Blue-gray smoke twisted and billowed from it. I climbed back onto the roof of the truck.
The whomp of blades drifted into and out of earshot, like a dream that wouldn’t quite become real. At first I stood and waited for it to get closer. I’d wave my arms when it did. After a while, I sat on the roof with my arms around my knees and watched the sun disappear below the trees. As soon as it did, the chill dropped over me.
At six o’clock, I admitted to myself that the sound had faded altogether. At 6:30 I went and built up the fire again. I couldn’t make myself eat, if you could call it eating. I knew I’d feel better if I at least had a cup of tea, but I couldn’t make myself leave the heat and brightness of the fire and walk into that cold, shadowed dusk.
Where was she? What if she’d gone into the woods to find water, or to pee, and got lost? Where was Dad? Had he ever made it back to the road? If he hadn’t, where was he?
Then I had the kind of thought that comes to me at dusk when the sky is the color of dirty dishwater. When Dad was experimenting with the GPS at home, he went through two sets of batteries in one day. He thought he’d figured out why, but he hadn’t had a chance to test his theory yet. What if he’d run out of batteries out there? What if he was still walking? If there was one thing Dad was good at, he always said, it was walking.
Leaves crinkled in the undergrowth to the left of me. Something was stepping softly. I felt my heart catch, waiting, and then something let go. All the holding back, all the efforts to keep my mind from rushing to the dark places—it all just let go.
What if Mom was still walking? What if she had not found water? What if she got too tired and stopped walking? What if she had never walked down that road in the first place? What if they were not coming back for me?
Night fell, mild and full of noises. I didn’t expect to sleep at all. I forgot to lock the door. I needed to get up and do it. Mom held out the key. I wanted to tell her I didn’t need a key to lock the door from the inside, but the words wouldn’t come. All the lights had been left on in the living room.
“Look at this place,” Dad said. “It’s like the Milky Way in here.”
I had to lock the door and turn off the lights but I couldn’t wake up. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle in the hall outside my room. I struggled to open my eyes. Hands brushing the wall, the fall of heavy footsteps on the carpet, a snap of twigs.
My eyes blinked open. The buzz of deep sleep fogged my brain. Again the snap and crunch of twigs. I held my breath. Something big was moving in the brush not ten feet away. The fire had died out. My fingers searched for the flashlight and closed around it. I switched it on and shone the light toward the brush.
A flashlight! Someone was shining a light back at me.
“Mom!”
Two of them. Two lights.
“Dad? Mom? Who is it?”
My heart lifted, then thudded into my throat. My flashlight beam illuminated a silhouette and I understood. They were not lights. They were eyes. It was a bear. The two eyes caught in my light gazed back at me.
We stared at each other. The bear raised its head and sniffed the air. My mouth was so dry, my heartbeat a wild roar filling my head.
“No,” I croaked out.
“No.” A little louder. I stood up and made a shooing motion.
“No, bear. Off you go. Off you go, bear.” She turned, and in the light I saw that she wasn’t big.
“This is my spot,” I said, waving again. “Go on now. Leave me alone.”
She exhaled a little puff of air and then ducked her head away. With the arc of light from the flashlight, I followed her shape running away from me through the trees. She made a wide circle around me and up onto the road.
Fear fizzed in my ears. I sank back to the ground, my legs quivering. I took deep breaths. I’d done the right thing. I’d stayed calm and talked to her in a low voice. She’d run away, probably as scared as I was. You might think that the first thing I’d do would be to race to the truck with my sleeping bags and shut myself in to spend the rest of the night in there. I admit it was the first thing I thought of. But I made myself stop.
There are bears out here, I told myself, of course there are. This is the wilderness. This is their home. I’d surprised the bear by being here. I doubted she would come back. I did not want to get back in that cold, uncomfortable truck. The truth was, I was afraid of the truck. If I got back in the truck, I knew I would not get back out. If no one found me, I’d die of fear in there. Out here, I had my fire, and I could hear if anything was coming.
I dug out my matches and quickly put together a pile of kindling, then lit it. The fire threw comforting heat and light. But also, I thought I’d make sure the bear knew that this was my spot now. Maybe I’d built my camp on one of her usual paths. Maybe she’d seen me and gotten curious. Or maybe she was like me, lost and blundering her way along.
My hand found my water bottle, which I’d stowed beside my sleeping bag. I uncapped it and guzzled most of the water. My mouth was so dry.
What time was it anyway? The broad band of the Milky Way blazed across the sky. The Big Dipper poured the sky from its ladle. I guessed it was about two or three in the morning. What was the bear doing wandering at that time? She was a black bear, I was pretty sure of that, and black bears aren’t normally nocturnal.
The last time I saw a bear was in Wild Horse Canyon, and that time, I barely saw it. That was the year I was nine, the second time things went bad for Mom. I’d been waiting for Mom after school because we were supposed to drive up to Kelowna together, have dinner, and then go to an outdoor store that had backpacks for children. The backpack was my birthday present. It wasn’t cheap—it was more money than Mom and Dad usually spent for birthdays—so Grandpa and Aunt Sissy had pitched in.
While I waited for Mom, I sat on the school step reading a library book, The Railway Children. I guess I’ll always remember that as a sad book, because of that day. Maybe it is or maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. I’ll never read it again.
I’d just noticed that I was starting to get cold. It was spring, a nice afternoon, the buds starting to show on the maples and poplars, but I’d been sitting on the concrete step for over an hour. Ms. Fineday came out, just strapping on her bike helmet.
“Hi, Francie!” she said, sounding surprised to see me sitting there. “Good book?”
“Yeah. I’m just waiting for my mom. We’re going to Kelowna.”
“I saw your mom leaving through the north doors. She was walking.”
“Walking? The car’s parked out here.”
“Maybe she forgot she drove. I do that sometimes.”
I had a bad feeling, the kind I get when I’m almost certain something has gone wrong. I kept my voice calm. “I just saw her after class. We said we’d meet here.”
Ms. Fineday frowned a little. She wasn’t the type who always pretended to know everything. “Maybe she had to run an errand first?”
Tears welled up and clouded my eyes.
“What can I do to help?” Ms. Fineday said kindly.
“I don’t know. I think I better wait a little longer.”
“Can I wait with you?”
“Sure.”
She told me about the climbing she was planning to do at Skaha Bluffs, how she’d been dreaming about a route she’d failed at many times before and she couldn’t wait to try it again. She said the hike up to the bluffs was part of the fun, the views were so beautiful, and she said once, she’d nearly sat on a snake.
After about an hour, we went inside and I called home. Mom wasn’t there but Dad was. He’d said he’d come and get me and to stay put. Ms. Fineday waited with me until Dad arrived, then Dad and I drove around looking for Mom. We stopped at her favorite cafés and the Indian restaurant where we went for samosas. We drove by the creek where there was a bench she liked to sit on. But she wasn’t in any of those places. At about seven o’clock we went home and Dad called the police.
They asked Dad a lot of questions and when he got off the phone, he said, “They said they’ll keep their eyes open and to call if she comes home.”
At ten o’clock, the phone rang. Dad answered it. It was a teacher from my school, not one of my teachers. He’d seen Mom while he was driving home from badminton and he’d been curious because he noticed her feet were bare. She wouldn’t accept a ride, but he told Dad where he’d seen her.
“There you are,” she said when we pulled up beside her on Government Street, as if she’d been the one looking for us.
“Where are your shoes?” I said.
“Well, I had to leave the shoes,” she said, just in her normal voice, like nothing was weird at all. “I realized the shoes were part of the problem.”
“What problem?” I said, but my voice was not normal; it was quivering with all the tears I’d been holding back.
“Never mind, Francie,” Dad said. “Let’s go home. You must be freezing.”
“I’m not too bad,” Mom said, even though she was only wearing a jean jacket and no socks or shoes.
It wasn’t until the next day that Dad took her to the hospital. She stayed there for the next four months.
I put another branch on the fire. After a few minutes, it caught and flared with warmth. I’d relaxed enough to lie back down, but I kept the sleeping bag away from my face so I could keep my ears open. The sky had begun to lighten a little; I could make out shapes around me, the truck on the road and the trees in the woods on the other side.
My mind had wandered. I’d started to remember the last time I’d seen a bear. Ms. Fineday did an overnight hiking trip every June with ten kids who were twelve and older. At the last minute one of the kids had to cancel and Ms. Fineday managed to convince the principal that I’d be able to keep up with the older kids. Mom was in the hospital then and I knew Ms. Fineday was trying to help out.
It was June and the little creeks were still running. When we crossed the first one, Ms. Fineday said, “We’ll cross a couple more of these on our trail and we can fill our water bottles then. That’s why we didn’t have to carry so much water from home. A liter of water weighs one kilo. Two liters, you’re adding two kilos of weight to your pack. That’s over four pounds.”
The Wild Horse Canyon trail crossed a burned-over area, so it was mostly open, and hot, not a lot of shade. Most of us would go through almost a liter of water in an hour. Even though the temperature was in the high seventies, it felt much hotter out there, with the remains of charred, twisted pines baking in the morning sun.
Another thing I liked about Ms. Fineday was that she didn’t pepper me with pointless questions the way other adults did. You know: How are you doing? How are things at home? Are you and your dad managing okay? (As if we were both babies who didn’t know how to look after ourselves.) And school? How’s school?
Anyhow, Ms. Fineday—whose first name, I found out, is Mary-Jane, not that I’d ever call her that, but that’s what Laila, the other adult on our trip, called her—Ms. Fineday didn’t stare at me with a sad, disappointed face, as if I’d done something embarrassing.
By the time we reached the campsite on the lake, all of the kids, not just me, were worn out and hungry. Some kids dropped their packs and walked right into the lake with their clothes on. Some of the boys stripped down to their underwear; they didn’t care who saw. We were all laughing crazily, so relieved to dive under the silky cool water.
The air, heavy with the smells of sage and pine, stayed warm and inviting even as the sun set. We swam while Ms. Fineday and Laila made the fire. Then those who wanted to sleep in tents set them up. I hadn’t brought a tent, because I didn’t have one small enough to carry.
“You can sleep in my tent,” Ms. Fineday said. “I don’t snore.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I want to sleep under the stars.”
“It’s a sleep-under-the-stars kind of night,” she agreed.
I had never slept out in the open, without a tent. It felt wonderful to lie there looking out at the moon on the lake. The warm earth soothed my tired muscles.
Sometime near morning, I heard one of the boys call out, “Ms. Fineday!” Not shouting, but short and sharp.
She unzipped her tent. “What’s up, Jeremy?”
“There’s something down by the lake. It’s something big. It just came through here a minute ago.”
My eyes opened. The other kids sleeping outside sat up.
“Yes, I see it. Not to worry. It’s a bear getting a drink. She won’t bother us.”
“There’s a cub, too,” one of the girls said.
From where I was, I could just see through the trees the dark head of the mother bent to the water.
“I’ll just make sure she sees us,” Ms. Fineday said, getting out of her tent. “Hey, bear!” she called, in a calm voice. “See us over here? Get your drink and move along.”
The bear looked over at her. She didn’t seem concerned at all. Laila poked her head out of her tent. “Should I make some noise?”
“We’ll give her a minute. She sees us.”
A minute or two later, the cub galloped off, heading up the hill, away from us. The mother bear turned and followed.
“Nice morning,” Ms. Fineday said. “You can all get some more sleep if you like. I’m going to make coffee.”
I stayed in my sleeping bag, listening to Ms. Fineday and Laila by the fire.
Laila said, “I was worried when I saw that cub. You were as cool as a cucumber.”
“It’s a myth that a black bear with a cub is dangerous,” Ms. Fineday said. “A grizzly, yes. But black bear cubs can climb trees, so the mums don’t worry too much about them. If she feels threatened, she’ll just send her cub up a tree.”
“I didn’t know that,” Laila said.
“There are a lot of myths about bears that people just pass on without knowing if they’re true or not. They’re not cuddly teddy bears, but they’re not vicious killers either. A bear usually wants to stay out of your way as much as you want to stay out of hers.”
The smell of coffee had drifted on the fresh morning air. I don’t even like coffee, but lying by my own fire now, I remembered that smell as rich and delicious. Another thing Ms. Fineday had told us kids later was that bears don’t normally roam the woods at night. Their habits are much like humans, getting up at dawn and bedding down at dusk, unless there are a lot of humans or other disturbances around during the day, which forces them to change their habits. Then they may become nocturnal, looking for food, mostly plants and insects, at night.
That’s why I wondered about this little bear. Did it mean there were humans active nearby? Or could it be that she was trying to avoid an older, bigger bear? I decided she was on her own, and scared, and thinking of her that way let me fall asleep again.