Summer 2013
THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY is a blur of greens and grays. I start fiddling with the focus on Linda, pointing her lens out the window and seeing the passing landscape from her perspective.
Mr. Jakes probably shouldn’t have loaned his precious camera to me. I’m sure it crosses some ethical boundary or another. Except that Mr. Jakes doesn’t have the emotional capacity to cross any sort of boundary.
“So what, does this make me your protégé or something?” I’d asked him as I held the camera the wrong way as usual. He looked like he might faint as he watched my fingers edge closer to the lens.
“No. You’re absolutely not my protégé. You’re not good enough to be anyone’s protégé.”
“Awesome. So . . . I guess I’ll just sell your precious Linda on Craigslist or something.” I started swinging it around by its strap.
“Don’t you dare. Don’t even joke about that.” He leaned toward the camera, hands flinching.
“The point is—the idea I have—is that you’ll take Linda—temporarily, and I mean that—and get better. And when I make it to my third mojito on my next night out with my friends, and we’re all lamenting how we’ve exhausted every last hope of ever making a difference in a fraction of the lives we’re supposedly helping to mold, I can tell them that I loaned one promising student a camera and a knapsack packed with bundles of photography lessons, and maybe, just maybe, that’ll buy me a few more years of this miserable teaching existence.”
I blinked and considered Mr. Jakes’s prematurely graying hair and sloped shoulders. He wasn’t the first teacher I’d ever heard speak bluntly about his apathy toward teaching. But he was the first one whose act I didn’t fully believe.
“You drink mojitos?” I said.
He sighed genuine exasperation. “I called you promising.”
“I caught that.”
“So don’t blow it,” he said. “And treat Linda like the queen she is. She and I have been through some things together.”
As I started to walk out of his classroom he said, “And re-enroll in my class when you come back. You know absolutely nothing about photography yet.”
“I’m not a psychologist,” he said.
“Right, I gathered that,” I said.
“I enjoy photography. That’s why I teach photography.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m tracking.” He shifted in his chair behind his desk of faux wood, looking as uncomfortable in this spontaneous heart-to-heart as I felt.
“So I’m going to say this quickly, and after that, I’m not going to say another word. And frankly, I’d prefer it if you didn’t say anything after I say this, because that’s only going to make it that much more awkward for us both.”
“I’m getting the impression I should have left about two minutes ago,” I said.
“You need this,” he said, and I knew what he meant immediately, so I couldn’t have said anything in response even if he’d allowed me to. “You need this in order to get past whatever you keep trying and failing to capture in a picture. It’s why you’re no good at it. Not yet. You need to start thinking about the story you’re going to create for yourself. Think of it as your folklore. You have the ability to write your own legend, starting with whatever you see behind that lens. So you’d be stupid to give up that opportunity. Don’t be stupid, Penny.”
“Penny?”
Now I turn the camera lens to April, the events of yesterday already growing stale, the sheen of photo paper adorning the walls only a trace memory. April’s peachy skin is here now, bright against the blurring green-gray backdrop of the passing landscape. She eyes the phone I’ve abandoned in her Jeep Grand Cherokee’s cup holder.
“Oh, right. You’re on I-5 for, like, eight thousand miles,” I say.
“Sarcasm is a shortcut for saying what you really want to say,” she says, and I know from the way she says it that she recently read that somewhere.
“Sarcasm is my native tongue,” I say. “English is my second language.”
This at least gets a smile out of her, so I know she’ll lay off long enough for us to maybe enjoy a playlist I’ve put together, one full of the Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Grouplove and enough Flaming Lips to make her say her head will explode if she hears one more screeching voice crackle in that way that gives me goose bumps.
We make it exactly three songs in before April declares her veto right.
“But we’re five miles north of Tacoma!”
“But Point Finney’s south of that, then west, then north, and no, Penny, I can’t make it through one more song. No,” she says, eyes laser-focused on the road.
My phone vibrates, and my mom’s face invades the screen.
, her text says.
I type and launch it back to her before I can reconsider. I shove my phone deep into my pocket.
“You’re not going to believe the trees around this place,” April says. “The woods border practically the entire peninsula around there and then some.” It’s her way of dangling something sparkly in front of me as a distraction. Which is why it pisses me off even more when it works.
“What kind of natural light does it have?” I ask before I feel ready.
“Perfect for photography,” she says.
The sign says POINT FINNEY 5 MILES, but I’m way more interested in the sign that follows: REST STOP 1 MILE.
“I have to go.”
“Can’t you hold it? We’re practically there.” April has been going over the architectural details specific to the Carver House, a home built in 1844 by none other than the Carver family, a little known threesome of two parents and a child who fell in love with the woods and built a house there, a house that became known by their name because the address would mean nothing to anyone who asked. If the Carvers were ever hoping to have neighbors, it sounds like they would’ve been disappointed.
April’s rambling on about original cedar flooring and a nonoriginal wood-burning stove she’d like to have removed. And from what she’s seen in the photographs of the kitchen, it’ll likely have an original Stewart, otherwise known as an older-than-dirt, unusable contraption masquerading as an oven. It’s only now I realize that she hasn’t ever seen the house in person. And now it’s hers.
But right now, I don’t care much about that, and I couldn’t possibly care less about the architecture of this house. I’m having this feeling like I’m rising to the top of a deep pool and I’ve forgotten how to breathe on land, which is the same feeling I stopped getting when I was taking the little white pills the doctor gave me after the shit hit the fan back in Phoenix. I thought maybe I was through feeling this way. And then, suddenly, April was talking about nineteenth-century furnishings and I remembered that time Rae pronounced century like “cent-tree,” and for some reason that was the most hysterical thing either of us had ever heard, and we laughed so hard tears cut a path through the powder on my cheeks, and now I can’t feel my hands and I think I might throw up, and April’s going on and on about inspections and resale potential.
Which is how I know she would never understand. She believes I could take even the slightest interest in a fucking house when I know Rae will never mispronounce another word again. Because of me.
I just shake my head—no, I can’t hold it. I’m sure April thinks I’m sulking because she sighs and pulls off at the next opportunity.
“Just hurry, okay?” she says. “I want to get there before dark. Apparently it’s hard to find even in the daytime.”
A wave of nausea threatens to crush me, and I keep myself from barrel-rolling out of the jeep, but only barely. Once the cool, damp air hits my face, I feel the claustrophobia from the car begin to dissipate. A pretty terrible smell takes its place.
The rest stop is one of the grungier I’ve seen. Not one of those sparkly new stops with vending machines on the outside and folded maps courtesy of the state tourism office.
Fat black flies hover low around the cement wall shielding the door to the ladies’ room, which is conveniently locked.
“Hey, Penny!”
I come back around the corner to find April holding her phone far above her head.
“I can’t get any reception out here, and I need to let the agent know we’re on our way so she can meet us at the house. I’m going to try moving toward the road. Just wait for me in the car when you’re done. I’ll let your dad know we’re almost there, too. Any messages for him?”
“Gosh, not a single one,” I say.
Her lips pinch over her teeth, but she turns without a word and heads for the road.
I consider telling her that the reception was pretty spotty on the highway, too, but the thought of a few minutes alone in the jeep with some of my own music and not much else is too good to pass up, so I nod before moving on to the other side of the rest stop.
The men’s room door was clearly locked at some point, but it appears to have been jimmied open by force. The door’s bolt is hanging by a screw, and the frame is gashed deeply by what might have been a crowbar. I’m starting to hear that warning voice in my head, the same one that tells you to lace your keys through your fingers like metal claws when you walk to your car at night. I turn back to the gravel parking lot, the two-lane highway just beyond. Not a person in sight, not a single car besides our jeep. It’s strange to go from the company of so many cars on a highway to sudden isolation on the side of the road. The forest around the rest area encroaches on the restroom as though resentful of its intrusion, and when I nudge the bathroom door open and cringe against its groan, I see that I’m not altogether wrong.
Vines have begun to twist through the tiny openings where the walls meet the ceiling. I think those spaces are meant to create some ventilation in the bathroom, but they’re doing a horrible job. It doesn’t just smell like waste. It smells like old waste. I clench my jaw to keep from heaving.
Welcome back, nausea.
A clouded mirror above a bone-dry sink distorts my reflection, bulging my forehead and midsection. Someone’s scrawled in blue letters across the glass “Tami B Sucks Great Dick,” to which someone responded below in red “I heard you couldn’t even get it up!,” to which someone else wrote “That’s not what your girlfriend said!!”
I instinctively think of poor Amanda Zeigler, Str8 Up Slut.
On the wall beside the mirror, a flyer just starting to yellow with age clings to the wall for dear life, the masking tape holding it to the slick tiles nearly giving up.
Bold letters in all caps across the top read HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
Beneath an overly photocopied picture of a face so grainy no one could possibly answer that question, a girl’s shoulders slope under the loose straps of a light sundress. The starkest of descriptions reads:
Age 12
4'6'' 89 lbs.
Help us find Brianna, last seen on July 13 at Her Lady of Grace Home for Children. Call tips in to Pierce County Sheriff’s Dept: 555-273-TIPS.
I shake my head, wondering who looks for a girl nobody wanted in the first place. I bury the voice that asks me why I didn’t go looking for Rae that night.
Now that I’m standing in here, I realize I actually do have to go. Two stalls stand behind me, one tiny and one larger for disabled users. The bigger one doesn’t have a door, so I reluctantly turn to the tiny stall. Not that I think anyone’s going to come in, but the thought of some guy charging through the door after five hours in a car with nothing but the company of a Big Gulp and catching me with my pants around my ankles mortifies me enough to close myself into the only remaining stall.
“Don’t look,” I tell myself. “Leave your body.” But as I prepare to hover over the seat and get this over with immediately, a snapping from overhead breaks my already failing meditation.
When I look up, I see that the sound didn’t come from overhead, but traveled through the ventilation hole where a vine is hugging the edge. Another snapping, this time closer, and I can tell it’s the sound of a twig breaking. Footsteps from outside. Someone is walking around the rest stop.
“April?”
Nothing.
“Guess I was smart to close the door,” I mumble.
I finish quickly and try to wash my hands, but my suspicions about the sink were right. Bone-dry because there probably hasn’t been running water in this place for a year. I say a silent thank-you to myself for remembering to slip hand sanitizer in my bag and sail out of the bathroom and into the thick wooded air, pulling in a deep breath to try to erase the memory of the stench from inside the men’s room.
But when I emerge, I’m surprised to still see only April’s jeep in the gravel parking lot. No car to go with the footsteps I heard a second ago.
I peer over my shoulder, then scold myself immediately for being so jumpy. Too many slasher movies. It was just a squirrel for all I know. All that cement just amplified the sound.
But just as I turn back toward the car, I hear a girl’s voice.
“Don’t leave.”
The voice isn’t close, but it’s clear enough. Almost as if the sound traveled along the branches, pinging off the leaves and needles.
My heart is thrumming enough to make my chest ache.
Probably just some hiker yelling to someone on a path up the way.
After another minute of examining the sea of green and brown in front of me, I’ve pretty much convinced myself that’s true when I hear her again.
“Don’t leave me here!”
I whip around, because this time the voice sounds much closer.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
I strain my eyes to detect any movement underneath the shadow of the dense tree canopy overhead. But I can’t even see leaves moving. I can’t hear birds. The air is stiff with silence.
“Is someone out there?”
Still nothing.
“Look, this isn’t funny. Do you need help or not?”
I might have sounded pretty tough saying that last bit if my voice hadn’t cracked under the strain of my breathing, which seems to have gotten more shallow in the last few seconds.
The wall of vegetation gnarled around itself is blocking visibility into the woods. There might actually be a hiking path behind there, and someone really is in trouble. Maybe she fell and twisted her ankle or something. But a quick scan of the grounds surrounding the bathroom reveals no path. Still, that doesn’t always keep people from stumbling around in the woods looking for a nature fix. Or a nice secluded place to get high.
Then, almost too faint to hear, “Please.”
I look back toward the jeep. Still no sign of April.
I take a few steps toward the wall of foliage.
“This is so stupid.”
I pull in a deep breath and fill my lungs, which slows my breathing sufficiently to do what I do next. Mom always said I got Dad’s sense of social responsibility, which never seemed to make her as proud as I think it should have.
And maybe just to spite the memory of her in this moment, I take a few more steps.
I’m officially in the woods. I look back toward the jeep and, after dodging a few low-hanging branches, I can hardly see the parking area at all. I pull my phone from my pocket. One bar.
“Awesome. So basically if I find this chick, I’m going to be no help to her.”
I will April to come back around the corner to keep me from what I’m about to do.
“Five minutes,” I say. “Spend five minutes looking. If you don’t find her, get back to the jeep and wait for April.”
I look around and examine the tree trunks, all the same shade of deep brown, like mirror images of one original tree. I look up at their leaves, identical in their clustered greens. These woods are unlike any I’ve seen in Seattle. Under the right circumstances—and with maybe even a sliver of natural light—it could make a beautiful photo. Maybe April was right about that.
I fish around in my pocket and pull out my tube of That’s So Cherry lipstick. With a heavy sigh as I grieve for its loss, I draw a jagged red X across the bark of the tree closest to me, marking the edge of the wooded area nearest to the parking lot.
It seemed like the voice came from somewhere off to the left, so I pick my way through the squishy ground, where, thankfully, a bed of pine needles has blanketed most of it, keeping my boots from sinking.
“Hey, are you out there?” I yell. “Call out if you can hear me, okay?”
Nothing. I’m more convinced with every step that it was just someone’s idea of a joke.
Still, I’ve already sacrificed a brand new tube of lipstick, so I mark another X on the tree beside me and delve a little deeper into the woods. I check my phone again. No bars this time.
I’ve traveled a little farther before I notice that I can see my breath between the cracks of gray light that have managed to slip through the canopy. But that’s about all I can see. I pull my flannel closer around my body and mark another cherry X on the tree beside me.
I scan the ground for safe footing, but I can barely see my boots. I’d turn back the way I came, but now I can’t seem to figure out which way that was. There’s a tree trunk close to my right side, and one immediately behind me, and another to my left.
But didn’t I just come from the left?
The dank trunks feel like they’re encroaching, and I pick my way faster through the forest until I finally spot a beam of light ahead, clouded from the sky and dim with dusk, but enough to see that a small clearing lies ahead.
I emerge into a bare spot of land maybe ten feet across, the only empty space before the trees crowd the ground once again. I turn around immediately and peer through the dark tunnel I just came from, feeling oddly paranoid that something might have followed me out. But when I turn, I see nothing but darkness. And even though I know it’s useless, I check my phone anyway. Still no signal.
And now I’m way farther from the parking lot than I ever meant to be.
“Hey, are you there or not?” I yell, more pissed than frightened by this point. Not only am I going to have to make my way back through Ye Olde Freaky Woods once this is over, April’s probably going to get back to the car before me, and when she can’t find me, the inevitable panic will ensue, quickly followed by a lecture from her I’m already resenting.
“Great, thanks for wasting my time!” I holler.
“You’re it.”
I whirl around. The voice is close, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from. And this time it sounds younger, almost childlike.
A twig snaps somewhere behind me. I spin to find the source of the noise, but all I see is dense darkness under heavy foliage in every direction.
My hands are trembling, and I want desperately to believe it’s from the cold. But when my phone slips from my clammy palm to the forest floor, I can’t fool myself anymore.
“Shit.” Of course it would land in the one place that pine needles aren’t covering the ground. I crouch to rescue it from the mud and begin to wipe the face. But as I stand up, I see the faintest flicker of movement deep in the thatched trees to my left.
“Hello?”
All at once, my lungs start to ache. Like something thick is filing them up, caking the walls of my chest.
I try to take a deep breath, but panic flutters through me when I can only manage a shallow inhale.
I push my palm to my sternum and try to rub some life back into my lungs. Because that’s exactly it—it feels like something in my chest is . . . dying.
Arms outstretched to stave off stray branches, I launch back into the dense trees from the direction I’m pretty sure I came. I stumble twice, and the second time lands me on my hands and knees, sharp needles piercing my palms.
As I start to rise, I feel the closeness of the tree trunks once again pressing on me. A low-hanging branch drags its way across my shoulder and catches my flannel, yanking me back with enough force to make me bite my tongue. The forest in front of me is darker than ever, and I’m starting to get dizzy from lack of oxygen.
Full panic is at the corner of my brain when just ahead and to the right, I catch sight of a bright red X slashed across the wet bark of a nearby tree, capturing maybe the only snatch of light the woods have to offer.
I lunge forward and hold on to the tree for stability, the dizziness claiming my eyesight momentarily. But as I cling to the bark, its coldness welcomes the ache back into my bones, and the thickness in my chest begins to spread to my limbs.
Then I feel the unmistakable sensation of four fingers and a thumb lace through my own hand on the tree trunk.
I try to scream, but the erosion in my lungs stifles the sound. I push away from the tree so hard I fall backward into another trunk. I peer into the darkness, but I can no longer see anything, the meager light that illuminated my red X only seconds before now completely extinguished.
“Who’s there?” I try to shout, but my chest is about to collapse.
Sit here and find out or get the fuck back to the car!
I push myself from the tree to a stumbling run. I’m practically on top of the next tree before I see it, dismiss it, and move to the next, going mostly by touch now while I search for another red X. I try three more trees before I find the one I’m looking for. A few more steps, and I find the last one.
I take off the rest of the way like I’m on fire, breaking through the thick foliage with so much force, I’m halfway to the cement enclosure by the bathroom wall before I notice that I’m sobbing.
I stop, pull in a lungful of air, my throat burning, and cough out a rasping exhale. Only then do I dare to look behind me, backing all the way toward the jeep, my shaking hands searching out the door handle. I breathe again, and each time I do, it gets a little easier, the pressure on my chest mercifully lifting.
The orange light illuminating the restroom hums at the effort, flickers a few times, threatens to go out, buzzes back to its half-life. I find the door handle and hear it clack against something plastic and look down to find my phone practically cemented to my hand. I must have gripped the life out of it while I was running. I don’t even remember holding it.
All I remember is . . . a hand holding mine. Grabbing mine.
I yank the jeep’s door open and lock it behind me as soon as I’m inside.
“It was a joke. Someone playing a joke. They were messing with me. That’s all.”
I say it maybe a thousand times more. I believe it a little more each time. But I can’t keep my hands from shaking, and finally I have to start the car with the keys April left in the ignition and hold my fingers against the vents, hoping the heat will melt the chill, and maybe exhaustion will take care of the rest of the trembling before she gets back.
I hear footsteps on the gravel outside and my breath catches.
April’s face is pressed against the window, one finger pointing to the side of the door.
“I heard the car start and came back,” she says.
Of course she did. She probably thought I’d try to make a break for it while she was gone. She should know that I don’t exactly have anywhere else to go.
“I got cold,” I say, which is about five percent truth.
“Got the Realtor. No luck with your dad,” she says, holding her phone up. I say nothing.
“You look pale,” she says, eyeing me. “Are you sweating?”
“Carsick,” I say.
She stares at me for another minute, and I discretely move my hand to cover the smudge of dirt marring the knee of my jeans.
Believe me. Just believe me and get us the hell out of here.
“Do you need to take a second?”
“No!”
Her eyes travel toward the woods, and I follow her gaze reluctantly.
“I mean, I just want to get there. I’m tired of being on the road,” I say, fumbling to find a frequency for my voice that she’ll hear.
“Amen to that,” April says, shifting gears and checking her side mirror as she backs out and turns us around, rolling us too slowly out of the parking lot while I keep my eyes locked to my own side mirror. The deep green of the woods is all I see, and I close my eyes hard against whatever just happened, convincing myself it was just a joke, it was just my imagination, it was just my mutinous brain trying its hardest to crack under the pressure. Soon, all I hear is the dueling sounds of highway traffic and April’s voice as she resumes her monologue of big plans for the house.
“Oh, well that’s just wonderful,” April says, the change in her tone launching me from fresh comfort.
“How is it that I’ve been driving for this long and still can’t ever remember to check the gas gauge?”
I lean over and see that the needle is well past empty. My hands start shaking all over again at the thought of stopping the car this close to whatever just happened.
“I’m sure a few more miles won’t make a difference,” I say, doing a bad job of keeping my voice from quivering.
“Relax, you’ll be out of your cage soon enough,” April says. “Besides, we’re meeting the agent in town now. That’ll buy us a little time. And there’s a gas station at this next exit.” She’s pulling off the road before I can think of a reason not to—a reason that wouldn’t force me to explain what couldn’t have just happened.
The gas station is surrounded by cement. Not a tree in sight, which makes me feel only a little better.
Even past the closed door, I can hear music playing through the speakers at the station. It sounds tinny and hollow, a melody that runs like an undertow through the mind. You don’t know it’s there, but it grabs you every couple of seconds if you stop to consider it. I don’t know how the attendant doesn’t want to run screaming through the place every day just to block the sound of that bland, festering tune.
I survey the pumps under the awning. We’re the only car parked in this giant station, but we’re not the only ones here. A kid sits hunched by the door of the market, sitting so still his khaki coat practically camouflages him to the wall he leans against. If not for the way his knees knock together to the rhythm of that insidious melody, I might not have seen him at all. He’s dirty and he looks tired, but his eyes are wide and he’s staring at me.
I pull out my phone, determined to banish the outside via a wall of my own sound.
When I illuminate my screen, it’s not on the home menu. The camera app is open.
Did I open that while I was holding the phone?
Confusion slips away along with my breath when I scroll to the last picture taken. Because it’s of the woods. And a face is staring at me from the tangle of trees, not more than five feet away from where I stood in the clearing.
To someone else, it would be a tree, the face just a distorted twisting of bark and moss. But the whites of the drooping eyes and the yawning mouth are unmistakable, the arms by the sides of a sinewy body in muddy rags, limbs unnaturally long and curled around the neighboring tree.
And those white, gaping eyes are looking directly at me.