Klickitat (14 page)

The knots I knew, I'd practiced them so often in the darkness under the house. Tying them, I told myself that they would hold me, that they could hold a lot more weight than me.

I swung there, fifty feet from the ground in the hammock's braided strings, wrapped in the thin emergency
blanket that held all my heat in. I was so frightened, up there alone without Audra swinging next to me, explaining how things worked, how they would be. My shoes hung from their laces, closer to the tree's trunk, and my pack was hooked there, too, still within arm's reach. I heard dogs somewhere, barking, then crashing through the brush, below, the sound of them slowly fading away. An owl, not too close. The creaking and settling of the forest.

EIGHTEEN

The sound of birds, that's what woke me, and
the pink glow through my eyelids, the coming daylight. I opened my eyes slowly, and turned my head, squinting down between the strings of the hammock, the thick green of the leaves. I wouldn't have seen the blind if I didn't know it was there. If someone was inside it I wouldn't be able to see them from where I was.

Would they be able to see me? No, unless the sun came over the ridge and lit on my silver blanket, lit me up to reflect like a mirror. I pulled the blanket loose, crinkled it up in my hands as quietly as I could, shoved it into my pack.

It took me a while to get down, my hands shaking on the tree branches, the ground so far below. Once I'd done it, I stayed barefoot. I circled around the blind, came in from the other side, but there was no one there to surprise, no one there to sneak up on.

I dug out the box, sorted through the things it held. The headlamp, the food. Maps of Forest Park, and of the United States. Iodine tablets for water. A green bandana. A compass and a knife that I'd seen Audra use before. Toothpaste, a green toothbrush still in its package. A pair of jeans and a fleece shirt with a plastic thermometer on its zipper. Those were both my size. Socks and underwear, also for me, no clothes for anyone else. They must have already been here, I decided, Audra and Henry have already taken their things.

I'm here
, I wrote on a scrap of paper.
Back soon. V.

I left that note in the box, buried the box again, then put on my shoes and began to circle, spiraling out from the blind, moving slowly. I found animal holes, even one
small enough for a snake, but the tunnel I'd seen Henry go into was not so easy to find. I pulled branches aside. I waited for the sounds I made to settle.

It was in one of those moments, those pauses, that I heard the voices. Not too close, and no words that I could understand, but a sound that was more than two people, more than three. I took off my shoes and crept closer, using the Fox Walk that I'd learned from Audra, that she'd learned from the books.

When I got close, I could see into a clearing where four men sat next to a fire, passing a loaf of sliced white bread, each holding a piece in each hand. A rope was tied around a dog's neck, who sniffed at the ground, close to two skinny men and a woman who were sorting out scraps of shredded paper. There were tents made from blue tarps, and a bicycle resting on its handlebars and seat, its wheels in the air. Two shopping carts, piled high, covered with blue tarps. And near them I saw her, a girl I recognized, her ragged black hair and black makeup around her eyes that made them look huge, from where I was, like holes instead of eyes.

I eased backward, went all around the edge of the
clearing, keeping my distance and then coming up close behind her. What she was sitting on was like a bench, a seat taken out of a truck and dragged into the forest. She was eating an apple and not really looking at anything. It's hard to hear when you're eating, and I got close, ten feet away, watching her, trying to see if she seemed worried or scared, if this was an unsafe place for a girl to be.

I slipped out of the bushes and sat down next to her. She looked at me like she really wasn't that surprised.

“There you are,” she said. “People are all looking for you.”

“Who?” I said.

“Officer,” she said. “Asking all the kids if you're around.”

“You didn't say anything?”

“Of course not,” she said. “And I haven't seen you for a while, anyway. You want a bite of apple?”

I did.

“It's a little sour,” she said, watching me chew. “How'd you find me?”

“By accident,” I said.

“You're barefoot.”

I put my shoes on. The men at the fire looked over, but they didn't come closer or say anything. The other people, sorting the paper scraps, looked familiar. I think they were the ones who sold Henry my new Social Security number, my new name and age.

“Your name's Taffy,” I said. “Right?”

She wore the same rubber sandals, now with no socks. Leaning forward, she scratched at a scab on her ankle.

“I know your name,” she said. “It's Vivian.”

“I don't care if you know my name. That doesn't matter.”

“These people aren't anyone.” She pointed into the clearing. “I'm not with them. I'm looking for someone to go with, but I'm doing all right by myself, right now.”

“In the forest?”

“I wouldn't stay here at night,” she said. “I have to be careful, in case someone's looking for me.”

“Who's looking for you?” I said.

“I just have to be careful.” She looked away, into the trees. “Last night, I slept in a parked car, in the back,
and when I woke up it was driving. The lady never noticed me, but I had to walk all the way here from Lake Oswego.”

When she leaned back, our shoulders were close together. She smelled like a fire, smoke, and some sweet deodorant. Her fingernails had red polish on them that was mostly scratched away.

“What about you?” she said.

“What?”

“Where's your sister? Where's Henry?”

“They're meeting me around here,” I said. “Soon.”

A gust of wind shook the branches, all around the clearing. The spotted dog barked, looking in every direction, then settled down again, tried to eat a hamburger wrapper. Taffy took back the apple and ate it all, the whole core, the stem, and the seeds.

“Have you seen her?” I said. “Have you seen Henry?”

“Not lately,” she said. “I heard a lot about him, and then I saw him around. He talked to me, that one time.” She leaned forward, back again, her shoulder against mine, then inches away. “I remember when I first saw
your sister with him, so tall and beautiful with that hair and those clothes. They hardly looked like they could know each other.”

“Well, they do,” I said.

“A lot of people didn't like your sister,” she said. “Just because of Henry and all his attention going to her and none to anyone else. People said she'd take him away.”

She turned, so close, and stared at me like she was remembering my face. Her eyes, circled by that eyeliner and mascara, were pale blue, bloodshot. A pimple on the side of her nose. Her teeth were crooked, yellowish. She smiled all at once when she could tell I was looking at her.

“Sisters,” she said, after a minute. “My sister Valerie, I only knew her about a year, and now I can hardly remember what her face looked like, you know?”

“I remember Audra's face,” I said. “And she was my real sister. We had the same mom and dad, and we grew up in the same house. We were a
real
family. So I would never forget her face.”

“Okay,” she said. “I was only saying.”

“I need to go.” I stood up, swung my pack up over my shoulders. “I know what to do in the woods because I've
been practicing. I've read a lot of books. There's a lot of things about how things work that we've just forgotten, living the way we do.”

“I'll come along with you, then,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Then why'd you come and sit next to me?” she said.

“I wanted to see if you were all right,” I said.

“Really?”

“Good-bye,” I said, and slipped back into the bushes, back the way I'd come.

After a short time I doubled back, in case she'd tried to follow, but she was still sitting there in just the same way. Still, I was careful. Barefoot again, I walked only on stones and roots, leaving no footprints as I went deeper into the forest.

I practiced Fox-Walking under the trees, trying to be aware of everything, all the sounds and movements around me.

I leapt a stream. I climbed a tree, moved from its branches to another's. It was then I saw something in the branches of a farther tree. A platform of old boards and branches, a kind of tree house high in the air. It even had
old vines and brush attached to its bottom, to make it harder to see. At first I thought the tree house might be Audra's, but when I climbed closer I saw it was different than one she would make, more broken-down.

I climbed up there, onto the platform. I took off my pack, and rested. It felt so much closer to the sky, and through the trees I could see the river, the bridge, the boats. I didn't sing the barges song. Instead, I opened my pack and took out my water bottle.

I noticed the words, then. Words were carved into the boards I was sitting on.

friend

friend

friend

For some reason, reading that, I knew all at once that this tree house had belonged to the lost girl, the girl who lived in this forest with her father. I knew that she had carved those words, that word. Caroline. Caroline. Caroline.

I unzipped my pack's front pocket and took out the
knife Audra had given me. It was sharp, because I sharpened its blade every morning. In the tree house I lay flat on my stomach and held that knife like a pen as I slowly carved my word.

KLICKITAT

NINETEEN

I kept thinking over what had happened, why
Audra and Henry had gone, and where, all the possibilities. It was possible that they had been found out, caught, and taken somewhere. With all the planning and precautions, that seemed almost impossible, but it was still a possibility. If they were caught somewhere, they would get out, and then they would come for me. They could not leave me. But I knew that, at the same time, they had no clothes hidden in the blind for themselves, they had left nothing of their own behind. That was hard to understand.

I imagined what I would say to Audra if she were next to me, swinging in the hammock. I don't think I would
have told her about sneaking into our house, about her bedroom painted blue. I would have just reminded her how we are sisters, how she could help me calm down and settle, how when she got hurt she didn't want anyone else around her. I thought about the sunny corral at my grandparents' ranch in Colorado, the round metal water trough with a dent in one side. Two thick orange fish always swam in it. The trough was dented because Audra once climbed onto Duke, the old blind horse, and he'd bucked and kicked the trough as he threw her off. She didn't break her leg, but she hurt it. She didn't have stitches in her forehead, where they thought she might. She had a concussion, though, and headaches, and I was the only person she wanted around. She wanted to sleep with me in one of the twin beds in my dad's old room from when he was a boy. We stayed in there and my grandma brought us burnt toast and chicken noodle soup. This little dog they had—he ran away, later, but when Audra was hurt he'd sit on the other twin bed, watching us, wagging his tail if we said his name.

It also seemed possible to me, swinging in the hammock in the tree's branches, that Audra was still angry,
that she and Henry had a disagreement about me. Was she jealous of me? Did she not want to share Henry, or to share me? Had he told her about the messages, my notebook, and she was jealous of that?

If she was angry with me, that anger would pass. When she'd left me before, she'd returned; she couldn't really leave me behind. Still, I worried. If I was left behind, alone, what did I have? Maps, my yellow notebook, iodine, books of survival skills.