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At least I know how to shoot now. A little better, anyway.
I pick up the squirrel gingerly, avoiding touching the big, ragged hole just behind its front leg. I carry it by the tail and walk the rest of the way back to the rock. And there I stop and stare.
All my gear and clothes are scattered across the clearing. My jars have been rolled out of place. Even the tackle box is gnawed on and knocked over. And on the far side of the clearing stands the culprit: a big red fox. He has a pair of my underwear—my dirty underwear—hanging from his jaws.
“Hey!” I yell, and jerk the rifle up, dropping the squirrel. I squeeze off a shot, hardly aiming, my anger making me wild.
He takes off in a red-gold streak. With my underwear. Grumbling, I start to gather up my clothes. It doesn’t look like he’s actually gotten into anything, so I stack everything back up the way it was and sit down to munch on berries, leaving just a handful for the next day.
My stomach growls petulantly. I have the squirrel, I remember. Time to figure out how to cook it.
It doesn’t go well. I resort to hacking out pieces of meat and then picking tiny bones and bits of skin out of them. In the end there’s no way to cook it on a spit like I envisioned, so I stick it in a jar with some moose water and boil it right on the hot coals of the fire. Squirrel stew.
It’s disgusting. I almost wish Bo was back so he could steal some from me, but I know I need every calorie I can scrape out of the jar.
When I’ve choked down every bite and every drop of broth, I tuck myself into the space under the rock. Bo is nowhere to be seen, and the wind starts to pick up, along with a thin, cold rain. The wind howls through the trees—and straight into my face, carrying the rain with it.
I hunker in as far as I can, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. I shiver. I feel sick. The squirrel was disgusting, even as hungry as I am, and the way it sloshed around in the water was sickening. The water itself is greasy and gamy and coats my throat.
I’m in a poor mood to begin with without the sky spitting in my face.
I pull my duffel up to my chest and pull out my photographs. I hold them in front of my face, hands cupped to protect them from the rain, studying them as the sun sets and the fire glimmers.
Mom is looking at the camera, but you can tell her attention is on me. She was gone a lot. Left me with friends. But I always knew she would come back, and she always had some little present for me. She called me every day, and she always missed me, but she never offered to get a different job and I never wanted her to. Maybe she was more like Dad than I’d realized. She couldn’t sit still, and he couldn’t stay away from the wilderness. Both of them got pulled away from me.
But Mom always came back.
Not anymore. Now neither of them will ever come back to me. So they’re more alike than ever.
I fall asleep with that thought playing in my mind and the photos in my hand.
Mistake, mistake, mistake.
•••
I SNAP AWAKEas the wind gusts, blowing a spray of water into my face—and a second later I jerk as the hot remnants of my fire skitter across the ground toward me. A smoldering ember hits my cheek. I scramble back toward my clothes, yanking the duffel with me.
The rain is astounding, the sound of it striking, hissing, and rolling against the treetops. The wind has shifted. And as it rages, it catches the photographs that still lay on the ground where I’ve dropped them in my sleep.
They flutter wildly, the wind sliding under them. I lunge forward, but I’m too slow. The wind catches them and throws them out of the shelter.
“No!” I yell. I run after them. It’s pitch-black. The only light comes from the dying embers that have scorched my face, and I’m about two steps from the shelter when my foot catches something and I almost fall. I catch myself and stand, rain pelting my head and shoulders.
I can’t see the photos. I can barely see my own hands. It’s like a sack has been dropped over my head. The world seems suddenly impossibly huge. How can I find two little scraps of memory in all of that?
I can’t. I crawl under the overhang. I’m soaked. My clothes are wet all the way through. My fire is out. Most of the clothes I’ve folded so carefully are now wet as the wind blasts the rain right under the overhang, into my face.
They’re gone. The last picture I had of my mother, of my father. Gone. I already have trouble remembering her voice. How long until her face fades, too? Will I live long enough to forget her?
As I lie shivering, it seems impossible that I will. The wind will take me, too. Tear me free of my shelter. Of my body. Fling me up into the storm.
I huddle with my back to the storm, my face to the rock, my mouth tasting of rainwater. I don’t sleep but somehow I dream, I dream that the wind has taken me, that I am flying, buffeted on the storm. I know that my mother is here with me, somewhere just out of sight and out of reach. If I can find her, we’ll both be safe, but the night is too dark and the storm is too fierce.
And then I dream again of the road, of the man standing on the median line, of the gun. Griff looks at me, but it’s not Griff, it’s my dad, and he shakes his head, once, and he reaches out his hand and the gun cracks—squeeze the trigger—and I’m holding the rifle and there’s a hole through him and I’m still in the sky, in the storm, and in the car with Mom and in the woods with Dad, and I’m huddled against the rock alone because both of them are gone, gone forever, and I will always be alone.
