by Alexandra Duncan
Alexandra Duncan lives in North Carolina and blogs at ashevilledillettante .blogspot.com, where she considers such matters as sexy astrophysicists, badasses with big white birds, and an arbitrary list of the best/worst of 2010. For her third F&SF story (after “Bad Matter” and “Amor Fugit”), she draws on her home state for inspiration in an unusual family drama.
* * * *
We had been driving west for hours, but I hadn’t seen the mountains coming. I’d expected to see them laid out crisp and blue, like something from a car ad or a beer commercial. We hit a steep, curving grade and the overhanging bank of trees on our left dropped away to nothing. To our right, a wall of rough granite shot up in place of the guard rail. The late sun slanted through the windshield, dusting the vast expanse of air and the far-off dip and sway of tree-covered land with gold. The arm of the Appalachians we were ascending rippled off, dusk blue, into the horizon.
It was so beautiful, my gaze wouldn’t stay on the curve of highway in front of me. The old station wagon’s tires made a thrumming, whumping noise as I strayed onto the shoulder.
“Ren,” my dad said, a hint of concern and why-did-I-let-my-nineteen-year-old-drive creeping into his voice.
“Sorry.” I tore my gaze from the panorama unfolding over my left shoulder. We had been driving since early afternoon, but Dad had only surrendered the wheel an hour ago when we stopped for gas and coffee in another nowhere town in the middle of North Carolina.
“You want me to take over?” Dad asked. “If you’re tired—”
“No, no, I’m good.” I adjusted my grip on the wheel. Ten and two, eyes straight ahead. The car’s engine whirred unhappily.
My brother Trey stuck his head through the gap between the two front seats, breathing fake cheese smell all over my neck. “Mom’s going to kill you if we die in a fiery crash.”
Like Mom would notice.
“Hey, are you wearing your seatbelt?” Dad craned his neck to check on Trey’s back-seat nest of comic books, Combos wrappers, and wires snaking out of his MP3 player.
“Yes,” Trey said, sitting back and pulling the shoulder strap out as far as it would go. “See?” He popped a pair of earbuds into his ears and settled himself against the seat.
“Maybe I should take over,” Dad said, worrying the edge of his close-trimmed, gray beard.
“I’m really okay.” I held up my right hand, Boy Scout style. “I swear I won’t kill us, all right?”
We crested the incline and the car’s engine sighed in relief. The road still wound and curved, but at least we weren’t climbing anymore. Highway signs claimed we were passing towns, but I couldn’t see anything beyond the sloping woods hemming in on the road’s shoulder.
“Look, Trey. More trees.” I cut my eyes to the rearview mirror, but my brother had fallen asleep with his earbuds in. His head was thrown back against his favorite bare, grimy pillow, his mouth open wide enough to catch spiders. If only sleeping were a professional sport. Trey could go pro.
“Watch it, Ren.” Dad frowned.
I lowered my voice so I wouldn’t wake Trey. “I don’t get why we’re going to visit her anyway. It’s been two years, and she suddenly wants to see us again?”
“Ren. Stop.”
“I wish you’d let me stay in Greensboro for the summer,” I said more softly. I could have kept working at the mini-golf course, handing out day-glo plastic spider rings to junior skate punks, playing free games of skee-ball, and making out with Corrine Watkins under the artificial, acid-green waterfall off hole twelve after closing. Me and Trey could have snuck Cheerwine and boxes of RedHots into a different movie matinee each week. Normal, normal. Instead, we were supposed to bond with our deadbeat, white mom and her new, white boyfriend in some cave those two had supposedly refitted into a house.
“You deserve some time to get reacquainted with your mom, don’t you think?” Dad asked.
I held tight to the wheel. This conversation was in serious danger of spiraling into another discussion of how my “year off” before college was turning into two and what kind of example I was setting for the kids at my dad’s high school if the vice principal’s own son didn’t even try for community college. I risked a glance in my dad’s direction.
Dad stared out the window, where the sun cut through the passing forest. Ahead, two thin smokestacks broke over the darkening treetops. Flumes of white smoke spilled up into the brassy sky. Dad drew his hand down his face. “I don’t know what it’s going to be like out there. I don’t know what she...what your mother’s going to be like. But your brother, he needs to see her. And I don’t want him out there alone.”
I shook my head. “You should have told her no.”
Dad didn’t answer, only watched the mountains growing dark around us. The highway shrank to two lanes, leaving sparse, peeling billboards and solitary gas stations to break the constant curve of the road. A battered pickup with a camper shell and a sun-faded Confederate flag sticker pulled around us in the oncoming traffic lane and shot ahead. I slowed as we passed a silent mill town, then picked up speed again through valleys carpeted with early corn. Memorial crosses wreathed in artificial flowers whipped by along the roadside, half-submerged in overgrown grass. The hills of conifers and oaks on either side of us gathered into one rolling black shadow against the sunset.
“There,” Dad said, pointing to a turnoff marked by a faded sign for what had once been Pisgah Ridge Missionary Baptist Church. The building itself stood back from the road, one whole side of the building engulfed in kudzu, the windows dark, the roof caved in under the weight of so much unchecked vegetative growth. Whitewash showed through in patches, phosphorescent in the half-light.
“Guess we won’t be going there Sunday,” I said.
The road turned to dirt half a mile in. It wound steeply through the narrow pass left by thick files of trees on either side.
I clicked on the headlights. “Hey, Trey, wake up. We’re almost there.” The wagon’s suspension rocked along the uneven road, kicking up stones against the undercarriage.
Trey lifted his head and stared blearily out into the blue twilight. “It got dark.” He sounded surprised and halfway cheated.
I slowed the car to a crawl. Below us, the road descended into a small hollow surrounded by forest on three sides, and a lichen-blotched rock face directly in front of us. A deep fissure ran down the length of the rock, widening into what must have once been the mouth of a cave. A brick and sheet metal structure jutted from the split, as if someone’s mobile home had been stuffed lengthwise into the cave mouth. Two plastic lawn chairs splayed beside a blackened fire pit. The last rays of the evening sun shot down into the hollow, catching in the cave house’s windows and the glass on the storm door.
“That’s where Mom lives?” Trey scooted forward again and hung over the front seats to get a better view.
I edged the wagon forward, down into the dirt circle at the base of the hollow. The storm door swung open. Yellow light spilled into the evening and a woman stepped out. At first she was only shadow, the contours of her shoulders and the wild curl of her hair lit from behind. But then I had the car door open and she was there in front of me.
Mom.
All the movement in my chest stopped. My eyes started itching like crazy. I could hear the crickets and the knocking of blood in my ears. I breathed out, slow and measured like Corrine showed me, and told my chest to unclench.
Mom. She had let gray salt her hair and grown it out in long, frizzy coils. Back home, she used to run ginger-blonde highlights over the gray, battle it straight with a flat iron. She and her hairdresser had given each other Christmas presents every year.
A small fringed scarf hung around her neck. Her shoulders were bare under a dirt-streaked tank top, and she had tied a sarong around her waist, over her jeans. She threw her arms around me and kissed the side of my head, not stopping to gauge the look on my face. She smelled different. I used to breathe in the soft mix of sweetened morning coffee and a dab of some flowery perfume or shampoo when she hugged me. Now I smelled smoke and sharp sweat and vegetable matter, with an undercurrent of diesel fumes.
She pulled back. Her eyes were wet. “You’re so tall!” she said. She put her hands to my cheeks. I wanted to step toward her and back at the same time, but my body wouldn’t move either way.
“And Trey!” Mom cried out. She released me abruptly and rounded the front of the car to throw her arms around my brother. “Oh, my sweet boy. Do you know how much I missed you?”
A man stepped into the lighted doorway. He lingered there a moment, then walked down into the yard, extending his hand first to me, and then my dad. “You must be Reynard and Mr. Merrick.” He shook my dad’s hand as if he were trying to pump life back into it. “I’m Ian. We’re so glad you let the boys come.”
He grinned earnestly, showing a broad row of bleached-white teeth against the wide, blond beard that covered the bottom half of his face. His thin hair stood up in a week’s worth of cowlicks. He looked much younger than Dad, but with the same solid, wiry build, like a distance runner. And the beard. Our mother had been the one who convinced Dad to grow a beard. My skin prickled and began to crawl.
“Well,” Dad said. “I’d better get back on the road.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay the night?” Ian’s brow wrinkled softly. “You’d be welcome.”
Dad glanced uncomfortably from my mother to her boyfriend.
“Thanks, but no.” He had his hand poised on the car door. “I’ve got reservations at a motel in Canton, back an hour that way.” He nodded toward the main road.
Ian looked like he was about to insist, but my mother put her hand on his arm. “Of course,” she said.
She and Dad locked eyes for several seconds, the way they had when me and Trey were little and one of us accidentally froze the goldfish or dared the neighbor kid to ride his bike with his eyes closed. Like they were having a whole conversation no one else could hear.
Mom looked away first, and Dad cleared his throat. “You look like you’re happy here, Laura.”
“Thanks.” Mom opened her mouth to say something else, but Ian interrupted.
“We call her Astra now,” he said. “She renamed herself when—”
My mother tightened her grip on Ian’s arm into a gentle, warning squeeze. He looked over and she smiled at him. He grinned back, lost and mooning in her face.
“Ass-tra?” my brother asked.
Dad opened the car door. “Come say good-bye, boys,” he called. I caught the hint of something tight in his voice.
Trey wrapped his arms around Dad’s chest and hung on, like an eleven-year-old boy-sized barnacle. Dad looked alarmed, then embarrassed, then patted Trey on the back. “All right. All right.”
He disentangled himself and held an arm out to me. “Three weeks,” he said as we leaned into a brief hug. “You call me if I need to come back sooner, okay?”
The cool plastic of my cell phone pressed against my skin through my jacket pocket. “Okay,” I agreed. I stepped back.
Dad got in the car, gunned the engine. We all raised our hands and waved as the station wagon’s taillights disappeared over the hill.
* * * *
The cave house was a mangled cross of construction site and indoor campground. Kerosene lamps burned in the windows, filling the room with dim, tallow light. Stacked cinder blocks and buckets of grout lurked in the corners. Our mother and Ian had laid down particle board floors in the manmade front of the house, still new enough to fill the room with the sharp, burnt smell of fresh-cut pine. Further in, the boards gave way to bare stone. Hanging bedsheets squared off the back corners of the cave into rooms.
“That’s your room, Trey. Yours and Ren’s.” Our mother pointed. A mishmash of thrift-store furniture and camping gear showed through gaps in the cloth: threadbare Oriental-print rugs slung across the floor, a hammock and a trundle bed, a greasy oil lantern.
“We’re going to put up walls, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet.” Mom peeked over Trey’s head at Ian and they smiled at each other.
“I thought maybe you guys could help me get it started,” Ian said.
“Sweet.” Trey looked up at me. “I call the hammock.”
“All yours, kid.” I smiled, seeing Trey excited, and ducked my head to hide it. I let my backpack and sleeping bag drop and jammed my hands in my pockets. Dad had said the mountain nights could be cool, but it was colder inside the cave than I expected.
“We wanted to build a yurt,” Ian said. “But my friend told us about this place.”
“What, did you buy it?” I asked.
Mom and Ian exchanged a look.
“No one really owns this place.” Mom spoke slowly, as if she were explaining something difficult to a small child. “It’s here for whoever needs it.”
“The Earth provides.” Ian clapped his hands together. “Who’s hungry?”
We ate on a table of loose planks laid across two paint-spattered sawhorses. Mom heated soup over a wood fire stove they had rigged to vent smoke out into the night air.
As we were clearing the dishes, Mom handed me an oil lamp and a matchbox. “It gets dark in here,” she said. “You and Trey will want that if you need the bathroom.” She pointed to a grimy plastic paint tub in the opposite corner.
I set the lamp and matches down on the table. “That’s all right.” I nodded to my backpack, with its fifteen-inch metal Maglite strapped into the side pocket. “I’ve got us covered.”
* * * *
I woke, clammy with sweat. Something had a grip on my ankles.
“Shit!” I croaked. I twisted and kicked, trying to find my way out of the sleeping bag. My flashlight fell to the floor with a sharp crack. I snatched it before it could roll under the bed, twisted it on, and raised it over my head like a bludgeon.
Light swept across my feet. Nothing there. Just my legs tangled in the sleeping bag.
I had been dreaming I was watching Trey. He was younger, four, maybe five, and we were in the grocery store. It was crowded. He kept slipping his hand from mine, darting ahead into the crush of people. One of them—but which one?—wanted to take him. I tried to run after him, but my arms and legs moved so slow, like the floor was made of river mud....
I put my hand out to the wall to steady myself. The rock was like ice, so cold I wondered if it was wet. I turned the flashlight on it. Beads of moisture glistened on the stone. I pulled my hand back and rubbed my fingers together under the sleeping bag.
Trey raised his head out of the hammock. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just a bad dream, that’s all.”
Trey dropped his head back into the netting. “I was dreaming about Toad,” he mumbled, and then the deep, soft breaths of sleep overtook him again.
Toad was our cat who died six months after Mom disappeared. Trey kept it together pretty well after our mother up and left, but when the cat died, Trey lost his shit. Crying non-stop, full five stages of grief and everything. I lay back on the trundle bed. The wire supports dug into my back through the thin mattress. I clicked the flashlight off and laid it across my chest. Having Toad there to guard the foot of the bed didn’t sound so bad about now.
I closed my eyes. Just as my head was getting soft, floating me off into another dream, a wash of freezing air spread across my neck. I sat up. Soft whispers trickled in from the other side of the hanging sheet, quiet like bare feet on stone or the almost imperceptible pat of water falling from the ceiling. I eased myself out of bed. Cold pressed through my socks. I clutched the flashlight and shivered.
“...clsser theokkm binethkk...”
I moved silently into the living room, pressing my tongue between my teeth to keep them from chattering.
“...frumundr tek grrn hik kraa...”
I lifted the sheet to the room where Ian and our mother lay side by side on a sagging futon. Ian had thrown one leg over her thigh in his sleep. I swept the flashlight across the room. Knapsacks against the wall, clothesline above the bed, guttered candles on the floor, two pairs of muddy boots, Ian, my mother, facedown on the bed, and—
The beam of light tripped over a break in the wall. I paused, then stepped back, letting the flashlight’s scope widen against the far side of the room. Squinting, I moved forward again. There was a black wood door built into the rock.
“...hak yhhh sttp clsser...”
I snapped the flashlight off. My heart tapped out a rapid beat against my breastbone. I would count to three and turn the light back on. The longer I stayed in the dark, the more I felt as if the door were moving closer in the blackness.
I tried to breathe in, hold, and breathe out, slowly, like Corrine had showed me that night under the waterfall, but instead, I heard myself drawing in hurried gasps.
“Fuck,” I whispered. I turned on the light.
The door was still there, slightly too narrow for its height, its round, metal doorknob mottled with tarnish. I glanced at my mother and Ian, deep asleep, unfazed by the diffuse circle of brightness the Maglite cast over the wall beside their bed. I inched forward, reached out my hand, and touched the door. The wood gave slightly, as if it were waterlogged or soft with termites.
“...sssyak lmos yeer...”
I drew back. The air around my head cleared, as if a transformer humming far in the distance had shut off. The pines and maples creaked outside the mouth of the cave. I angled the flashlight to the floor and walked backward, out of the room, back to the cold trundle bed.
* * * *
I hunched beside the sawhorse table, trying to drink a mug of wild chamomile tea Ian had brewed. Morning light pressed against the window glass, brilliant and silvery. My mother hovered near the stove. Every few minutes she stopped kneading her lump of bread dough to shove another log in the fire and warm her cracked palms by the stove’s open door.
“And on the way home, I can show you the apiary,” Ian said over his shoulder as he walked one of his big plastic water collection barrels through the front door.
Trey followed, skinny arms holding up the back side of a wheelbarrow piled with bags of cement mix. “What’s that?”
“Bees,” I cut in. “It’s a place where you keep bees.”
Trey’s eyes went wide. He looked at Ian. “You keep bees?”
“Yeah,” Ian said. He scooped up a bag of cement mix and dropped it on the floor beside our room. “They’re wonderful. Honey’s nature’s sweetener. We don’t have to gum up our systems with refined sugars or high fructose corn syrup anymore.” He made a face.
“Trey’s allergic to bees.” I put down my mug. I frowned into the murky tea at the bottom. If only my mother’s new lifestyle involved coffee. And sugar for coffee. My head hurt like I had chased a six-pack with one too many rum and Cokes and French-kissed someone with mono the night before. Trey acted like he’d spent the night at the Marriott.
“Oh. Well. You can still eat honey, right?” Ian asked, reaching for another bag.
Trey glanced at me. I looked up from my mug and nodded.
“Yeah, eating it’s okay,” Trey said. He lifted the last oversized bag of cement mix around its middle.
“Hold it there,” Ian said. He screwed a length of hose onto a valve at the bottom of the rain barrel. Water came bubbling out of the open end. He angled it down and let the water stream into the wheelbarrow, then pulled a fat-bladed hunting knife from his tool belt and slit the bottom of the cement bag.
“Okay, now shake,” Ian said.
Trey jerked the bag back and forth and cement powder spilled into the wheelbarrow. The bag lightened. Trey hopped up and down, sending a cloud of white dust into the air.
“Whoa, whoa.” Ian laughed. Powder clung to his beard. “That’s good.”
Trey hopped again. Another clump slid into the barrow. “Ren, guess what we’re making. A wall.”
I looked around at the scattering of trowels, rebar, and cinder blocks. “You need any help?”
“You can stir.” Trey looked at Ian. “Right?”
“Sure.” Ian shrugged.
I abandoned my tea and took the wooden paint stirrer he held out to me. I worked it through the thickening gritty sludge, while Mom baked bread and Ian and Trey laid out a line of cinder blocks where one of the hanging bed sheets had been. We positioned the rebar and slopped cement over the blocks. Ian told us about the years he had driven a taxi in Tempe, Arizona. He swore he had picked up Leonard Nimoy at an all-night bowling alley one time, and another time he had spent the small hours of the morning cruising through an industrial area while a state senator and a spray-tan blonde from a local escort service occupied the back seat.
“Crazy,” Trey said, sinking his trowel into the wet cement. “Who’d want to just drive around all night?”
I glared at Ian. “You explain it.”
Ian twisted the end of his beard, deep in thought. “Maybe Astra will make some honey biscuits for us tonight. We should have a big dinner to celebrate you boys being here, right, babe?”
Our mother laid a loaf of bread in the middle of the table, and then plunked a container of thick, oily peanut butter down next to it. “That sounds great.” She didn’t look up at us.
Ian wiped his chalky hands on his jeans. He sliced the bread and handed a piece to me, then one to Trey. The bread had a hard smokiness to it. The crust was blackened in spots, but thick and warm at the center.
“Did you make this?” I called into the kitchen. I wanted to add “Mom,” but I wasn’t sure if I should call her that, or Laura, or Astra, and anyway, it came out sounding harsh, not how I meant. I held the bread up to my nose again.
My mother squatted by one of the huge plastic bins of rice, corn flour, and recycling junk she and Ian had stacked along the northern wall of the cave. I thought she hadn’t heard me, but then she looked up and nodded. She leaned over the junk bin and started rummaging.
“We want to start grinding our own peanut butter, too.” Ian tapped the jar with a butter knife. He looked at it thoughtfully. “And maybe put in a forge someday. Make our own silverware.”
“Like Thor,” Trey said, his mouth full of peanut butter.
Mom straightened up suddenly. “Why don’t you boys go get your hiking gear together?”
Trey dropped his uneaten crusts on the table. “You coming, Ren?”
“Where are we going?” I rubbed my forehead.
“Down to the stream.”
I shook my head. “Maybe I’ll catch up.”
Trey and Ian headed for the back of the cave. I sat at the table, watching my mother sort through the recycling. She pulled out handfuls of empty bread bags and folded squares of used tinfoil, tossed them on the floor.
“Did you lose something?” I asked.
Mom shook her head. “I’m just...you know, organizing.”
I paused. “Are you eating breakfast?”
“Oh...I’m not hungry.” She leaned into the bin and raised a clanking-rattling of tin cans that drowned out all hope of conversation.
I stared at the nearly whole loaf of bread. I leaned my elbows on the table and ran my hands over my short hair.
“Hey, Mom?”
She raised her head and looked over her shoulder. Her eyes were small and naked without makeup.
I was going to ask if she was okay, if I could help her find whatever she needed from the bins, or organize them or whatever the hell she was up to, but the words bottlenecked in my throat. “Did you know there’s a door in your room?” I asked instead.
Her shoulders dropped. “Oh. Yeah.”
“What’s that about?”
“That? That’s just the cold cellar. We keep milk and stuff in there. It’s like a natural refrigerator.” She went back to her rummaging.
“Did you and Ian build it?” I frowned at her back.
“Oh, no. That was here when we got here. Ian’s friend says people have been living in this place off and on for, oh, three, four hundred years? Maybe more. Mountain settlers, and before them, the Cherokee.”
I picked at a hangnail on my thumb. Not that I would know, I guess, but the door hadn’t really looked Cherokee to me. I scraped the chair back from the table. “You know, I think I’ll go down to the river after all.”
* * * *
I let myself lag behind Trey and Ian as they cut a trail downhill through the bracken. Outside the cave house, the day had turned bright, sticky-hot, what I expected of summer. As we filed through the woods, the high sun began to thaw my muscles. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and flipped it open. The screen pulsed to life. Roaming...Roaming....
If I could just get a connection, I would call Corrine. I needed to hear her voice, have her remind me that every day here was another I wouldn’t have to do over again. Every day was bringing me back to the bearableness of routine.
I let myself pretend I was walking home across the miles of crinkling twigs and slick-leafed hillsides, like the Civil War deserter in that movie me and Corrine saw in her parents’ basement the time they went out of town and left her to watch their Pomeranians. At first, it had been an excuse, white noise and a glow to fill the room as we lay back on the couch. But we had ended up watching the movie all the way through, Corrine sprawled across me, the warmth of her breasts pooled on my bare chest.
Thin branches switched against my shins and upper arms. I folded the cell phone away and concentrated on pushing them aside, keeping Trey’s back in view. His yellow T-shirt bobbed through the breaks in the trees. I needed to make sure Ian didn’t let him wander into a ravine or get himself coated in bees.
We met up with a deer trail and followed the snake of it down the mountainside. Once I stopped when our path crossed an ancient, rabbit-eared television set with the screen blown out. My thoughts flashed to some mountain kids hauling it through the woods, leaning it against the tree, drinking beer, trying to shoot out the screen with a hunting rifle. I glanced behind me. The last thing I wanted was to run across some trigger-happy good ol’ boys.
The slope bottomed out several dozen feet from the riverside. Trey and Ian already stood calf-deep in the slow-moving stream, little eddies of water swirling around their legs. Ian was trying to fashion a fishing pole out of a thick reed and a length of twine. He tied an extra hook to the end of it and speared a chunk of dried-out peanut butter to the barb.
“Hey, Ren, are you gonna fish with us?” Trey called as I slithered down the last few feet of slope.
“I don’t have a pole,” I called back.
“Ian can make you one.” Trey jogged toward me, barefoot, the makeshift pole bobbing in his hand. “See? Check it out.”
I lifted the line to inspect it. “I think I’ll watch.”
“Ugh. Gay.” Trey rolled his eyes. He ran back to the river and splashed in next to Ian.
I sat on the grassy bank, watching Ian and Trey fish. They talked quietly, the conversation bubbling into laughter when they discovered they both loved Dungeons & Dragons and some comic about runaway teenagers with superpowers.
“See, that’s the only thing I miss about living on the grid,” Ian said. “Comic books, man.”
I got up and paced the bank. Bits and pieces of Trey and Ian’s conversation floated over the water.
“...was like, ‘critical failure,’ and he was like....”
“...and with the heirloom tomatoes, you can save the seeds....”
Clearly, Trey wasn’t going to get eaten by some mutant trout or swept away by a flash flood. I flipped open the phone again, checking for a signal. Still nothing. My chest tightened a little, even in the bath of warm afternoon sun.
“Hey, guys?” I pointed up the river. “I’m gonna take a walk. Go exploring. That okay?”
“Sure,” Ian said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Trey kept his eyes cast down.
“I’ll be back soon, okay? Okay, Trey?”
He nodded, his eyes still fixed on the spot where his line broke the water.
I took off in a jog. The afternoon was beautiful, golden, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of unease that clung to my skin. I needed a flat, open area, somewhere free of granite that would let my cell signal through. Ahead, the riverbank tapered away into a thick stand of trees. I jumped down into the shallows and plunged shin deep in the chill current.
“Mother—!” I bit my lip. Icy water seeped past my socks and filled my sneakers. I scrambled up onto a broad slab of river rock and scanned the water. Farther upstream, more slabs broke the surface, but none of them looked close enough that I could use them to jump across. I took a deep breath, then fished my cell out of my pocket, held it above my head, and slipped back into the river.
Cold bit at my ankles and toes, but after a few steps it faded away. Numb warmth flooded my feet. I waded further in. The river didn’t carry much current, but near the middle, up to my pockets in water, I could feel what little there was tugging at me, trying to upend me and pin me under one of the innocent-looking rock formations downriver. I turned back, but the bank behind me looked farther than the one ahead. I was pretty sure Ian had said something about water snakes on the way down, but I hadn’t really been listening, and it was too late now. I pushed forward, holding the cell phone high.
On the opposite bank, a short, red mud grade led up to a copse of trees overhanging the river. Their roots were exposed where high water had worn away the soil. I stuffed the cell phone back in my pocket, grabbed the roots, and pulled myself up into the warmth of the afternoon.
Ahead, the trees petered out to a thin, new-growth forest, dotted with wild blueberry bushes and downed, moss-coated oaks. I broke into a jog, trying to coax the blood back into my legs. I thrashed through a line of brambles and suddenly, the forest opened up into a field. I slowed to a stop. A sea of mountain laurel and waist-high grass, long gone to seed, spread out in front of me. Late-summer flies buzzed around my head.
I stepped forward. The silence of the field pressed in. I couldn’t hear the stream rushing behind me anymore, or the constant chirping and rustling of the forest. I pushed forward a few more steps and opened the phone. Connecting....
Finally, I thought. Corrine. But no, it was Dad I should call. He should know about the cold and the door and the bees. He could come get us, like he said.
I dialed. On the fourth ring, the phone went to voicemail. You have reached William Merrick. If this is an emergency, please call my home phone. Otherwise, leave a message and I’ll return your call as soon as possible. The phone beeped.
“Hey, Dad, it’s me,” I said. “I guess maybe you’re just getting back to Greensboro or whatever, but the reception around here’s really shi—uh, sketchy, and I, uh, didn’t know when I’d get to call you again. I thought you’d want to know Mom and Ian are keeping bees, and I know you packed Trey’s epi-pen and all, but I just had to walk, like, four miles to get to a place where I could call out.” I paused and took a breath, ran a hand over my hair. “Also, it’s really cold at night. Like, freezing, bad cold. And there’s this...No, that’s—you’d think that’s dumb—but it’s bad enough how cold everything is. Mom is...you know, Mom. And Ian, all he does is talk about high fructose corn syrup and sustainable agriculture....”
The phone cut me off with an extended beep. Mailbox full, an automated voice said in my ear.
“Ugh,” I groaned. Way to sound calm and mature, genius. High fructose corn syrup? I closed the cell and stuffed it back in my pocket. Tomorrow I could try to walk down to the road we drove in on, see if I could get a signal near the old church.
I trudged back through the undergrowth and down to the river again.
My brother waved when he saw me coming. He and Ian had laid out a small line of hand-sized, silvery fish on the riverbank. He was grinning like he’d been kissed for the first time. “Ren!” he shouted. He pointed to the fish. “Trout!”
I held up a hand for a high five. “Damn, kid. You’re like Daniel Boone or something.”
Ian caught my eye, and I nodded. I gave him a slight smile.
* * * *
Later that night, beside the flickering blaze of the outdoor fire pit, I watched my mother gutting and scaling the fish over a metal compost bucket. I waited to see if Trey would say something. Did he remember how Mom used to pay yearly dues to PETA and made us all volunteer at the animal shelter on Saturday afternoons? But Trey wouldn’t look my way. He fed another log to the fire, then straightened and grinned widely at Ian, wiping sweat from his forehead. I turned back to our mother. It wasn’t like the fish was a dog or a kitten or anything, but it was still unsettling to watch her calmly slitting open something’s belly.
“Hey, Ren?” Ian called across the fire. “Would you mind grabbing the can of lard from the cold cellar? It’s almost time to start cooking.”
A cold shock traveled across my stomach and touched my spine. I knew I should stand up or say something, but it was like my brain had stopped sending messages to the rest of my body. The cold room. The door.
Ian frowned at me, puzzled. “Or I’ll get it. No worries.”
Feeling returned to my limbs. “No, it’s okay.” No way did I want to sit around like a sad city kid while Ian the Supremely Capable single-handedly taught my brother to conquer nature. I gulped a lungful of air and scrambled up. “Can of lard, coming up.”
I jogged to the house and pushed open the front door without breaking stride. No slowing. No thinking. The screen door slammed shut at my back. Gloom and bare rock closed around me. I pulled the hanging bed sheet aside and kept my eyes on the uneven floor, dropped shoes, and crumpled laundry, the snarl of sheets and blankets on the unmade bed, anything but the door. I thought it might be better if I looked away until I was right in front of it, like trying not to catch sight of my own reflection in the bathroom mirror in the three a.m. dark. I slowed as I came up next to the door. Chill air wafted from the wood, and as I stood still, it seeped up from the stone floor, through the soles of my sneakers. I held my breath and listened. The whine of deep silence filled my ears.
I bit my tongue, grabbed the brass doorknob, and pulled. The door groaned open. It was heavier than I expected, heavier than wood should be, as if someone had filled it with lead. The cold of the door handle burned my palm. I let go and forced the door open with my shoulder, until it was flush with the rock wall. I stood back. Weak light trickling in from the front of the house faded to solid darkness two feet beyond the door. My pupils strained, dilated. Near my feet, I could make out a streaky glass container of yellow milk and several old coffee tins with pieces of duct tape covering their brand names, each marked “LARD” or “BUTTER” or “COMPOST.” Beyond that, a faint glisten on the wet walls, and then nothing.
I let out a breath. The sound echoed back from deep within the dark. Prickles danced across my scalp. I leaned down, grabbed the can marked “LARD,” and reached for the door. My fingers met air where the inner knob should have been. I looked down, heart pumping hard. No inner knob, no way to open the door, except from the outside. Soft taps sounded somewhere ahead. Like fingernails on stone. I stumbled back into the half-light of my mother and Ian’s bedroom. I dropped the lard, threw all my weight behind the door, and slammed it closed. My hands shook as I bent to pick up the can again.
Breathe, breathe, I reminded myself. I turned my back on the door and hurried toward the squares of dim sunlight shining through the windows at the front of the house.
* * * *
I opened my eyes in the dark. The cave’s silence shrilled in my ears. I groaned and pushed myself up in the camp bed, shivering.
“Trey.” I shook my brother’s shoulder. “Trey, I’m going to sleep outside.”
“Hmmnn,” my brother answered.
I pulled on my jeans and wrapped the sleeping bag around my shoulders, groped my way to the front door, unlocked it, and closed it quietly behind me. Crickets called to each other from the nearby wood and stars speckled the close circle of sky above the hollow. I wished I could make sense of them, identify the patterns and constellations like Trey could, but to me they were random pinholes in the sky. Something beautiful I couldn’t understand. I dropped into one of the lawn chairs. My limbs started to thaw in the balmy air. I closed my eyes for what felt like a few seconds and let the summer night leech the cold from my body.
The storm door cracked shut.
I opened my eyes. The sky had gone pink, cut with gleaming slivers of cirrus cloud. Below, fog wrapped around the hollow, thick as cotton down.
“Ren?” Mom came clomping across the yard in a bathrobe and a pair of rubber rain boots.
I rubbed at the corner of my eye and arched my back, letting the sleeping bag fall over the back of the lawn chair. “Hey.”
“What are you doing out here?” She hugged her arms over her chest.
“I got cold.”
She rolled her eyes skyward. “Jesus, Ren, don’t you know there are bears out here?”
I stared at her, half-awake. She actually sounded mad.
“You could have been eaten!”
For some reason, this struck me as funny. Mom, afraid I was going to be mauled by a bear. I pressed my lips closed, trying to keep it together. I couldn’t. I laughed.
“Damn it, Ren, this isn’t funny!” my mother said. “You may not care about your life, but I do.”
The laughter fizzled in my throat. I looked up at her. “Who said I don’t care about my life?”
Mom bugged her eyes out at me like she always had when she was annoyed. “Your dad says you’re still at home, working at a mini-golf course.”
“So?”
“You were always talking about going to UNC-Chapel Hill,” my mother said. “Biology. Veterinary school. What happened?”
“Oh, like I’m the only one who’s not allowed to fuck up my life?” My voice twisted and broke. “At least I’m not living in a cave with Hippie Cracker Ken.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I stayed silent, staring at the bank of fog ebbing near the clearing’s edge.
My mother’s voice sharpened. “This is my life now, Ren. Can’t you respect that?”
I snorted. The anger in my chest was burning away the thin layer of calm that had fallen over me in the night. “For how long?”
“Excuse me?”
“How long is this going to be your life?” I glared at her. “Is this one of those six-month deals like running for city council or the interior decorating business? Or is this a longer experiment, like, I don’t know, the whole marriage and kids thing?” I felt as though a sluice had opened in my chest. I didn’t notice my heart tapping frantically at my sternum until the words were out.
My mother froze, as if she’d stepped on a land mine. “Ren, honey, you were never an experiment.”
I laughed.
“And neither is this. Neither is Ian.” A sliver of indignation found its way back into her voice.
“I don’t give two shits about Ian,” I said. “All I care about is Trey. It’s bad enough he already likes your boyfriend. What happens when you get tired of playing frontier woman and take off again? Does Trey get to keep his new best pal?”
“I won’t.” Her voice turned hushed and raw. She squatted beside the ashes of the fire pit. “I’m not leaving. Ren, I was going through a bad time—”
“Stop,” I said. My eyes started to burn and something cramped in my chest.
She picked up a twig and swirled it in the ash. “When I was out west, I worked at this DSS summer camp for kids whose parents were, you know, drug addicts? And it made me realize how much I missed you. How much you needed me.”
“I said, stop.” I pushed myself up. All the horrible things I wanted to say pressed against the inside of my chest, threatening to crack it open. I stood, kicking the lawn chair over on its back. I couldn’t feel my legs, but they were moving me toward the trees, away from the fire pit and my mother, and that was all that mattered. The world blurred at the edges. I pushed my palms against my eyes and kept running.
I could hear my mother calling after me in the distance, “Ren! Come back! Ren!” and then nothing but blood pounding in my ears and the crash of my feet along the forest floor.
I careened down the mountainside, through a curtain of cattails, and came to a stop behind the abandoned church. I hunched over, breathing in gulps, my muscles shaking with unspent adrenaline. Deep breath. I tried to imagine myself back behind the artificial waterfall, the safety lights on the twelfth miniature golf hole magnified in the sheet of water separating me and Corrine from the muggy night. I could feel her warm, fine-boned hand on my chest, resting on the shallow indentation where my ribs met. Breathe deep, Ren. As much as you can hold. Good. Now out again. And when my breath moved as regular as a metronome, she’d leaned in and kissed me.
I fumbled in my pocket for the cell phone. I could call her. Just five minutes would be like taking a lungful of oxygen, enough to help me go under again. I opened the phone. The screen stayed dark. I pressed my thumb to the “on” button and held it down. I stared at the empty windows of the church, waiting for the familiar bell tone to sound in my hand. Nothing. I mashed harder. Still nothing. My heart froze. I must have left the phone on after our hike through the woods the day before.
I sank down on the wet grass. “Oh no. No, no,” I whispered. There was no way to charge it, unless Ian had some kind of coal-powered battery pump hidden out in the woods, along with his bees and God knew what else. What a dumbass, stupid kid thing to do, letting it roam all night and eat up the battery. I sat with my palms resting against my eyes as the morning sun began to burn away the fog and dew soaked the back of my jeans.
I blew out a lungful of air and made myself stand again. Ian, at least, didn’t seem stupid enough to camp out in the woods with no way of reaching civilization. He had to have a radio or maybe even an old truck hidden away in some cove. I started up the hill. The climb seemed much longer than the way down. I was beginning to worry I had gotten turned around in the woods, when I broke over the crest of the hill and found myself looking down on the cave house. My mother must have started up the small blaze in the fire pit again, but she was nowhere to be seen.
As I walked the last steps into the base of the hollow, Trey threw open the storm door. He sprinted across the yard into my arms. “Ren! Ren!”
“What’s wrong?” My muscles tensed around my brother’s shoulders. “Is it Mom?”
Trey shook his head. His face was ashen, like it had been the time he nearly fell off the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair.
Mom appeared in the doorway, still in her robe and rain boots. “Ren, did you see Ian this morning? Did he say he was going somewhere?” She pressed her lips thin.
“No.” I looked back and forth between the two of them. “I haven’t seen him. What is it? What’s wrong?”
Mom didn’t say anything, and finally Trey spoke. “He wasn’t here when Mom woke up. We think he’s missing.”
* * * *
“We could still hike to the nearest town and tell the police,” I said.
“You know we can’t,” my mother said. She sat slumped in a dingy, second-hand wingback chair by the front windows, one hand resting over her eyes and the other wrapped across her middle. Mud and grime caked the legs of her jeans and a thick, dark line of dried blood marked her upper arm where she had fallen on the rocks early in our search. The sun had disappeared below the tree line, but the sky still glowed neon orange in the window behind her head. “They’d just use it as an excuse to evict us.”
“He could be hurt.” I scooted forward until I was sitting on the very edge of the tatty couch across from her. “Listen, Mom, I know you like this place, but—”
“No.” My mother dropped her hand and glared at me. “Ian would want us to wait. Maybe he just got lost.”
“That doesn’t make sense. You said he always says something before he goes. And he didn’t take his fishing stuff or his Nalgene bottle or anything....”
We both stopped to listen for the sound of Trey calling outside.
“Ian!” Beat. “Iiiiiiii-an!” His voice strained and croaked.
The poor kid had been shouting all day, through the forest to Ian’s fishing spot, around the small, abandoned field where Ian kept his “apiary,” and the yellow quartz boulder above the cave where Mom said Ian went every morning to meditate. If only he’d really had a transistor radio or an old VW van nooked away in the woods.
“I’m gonna bring him inside,” I said.
“Let him be,” my mother said. “It can’t hurt.”
“He hasn’t eaten all day.”
Mom didn’t answer.
“Are you going to make him something?”
“Ren....” My mother’s voice trailed off. She raised her eyes to the window. A wet gleam of tears brimmed at her lashes.
“Fine.” I stood. “I’ll do it.”
I yanked open the front door. “Trey,” I called.
My brother whipped his head toward me, his face expectant and hopeful.
“Come on, kid. I need your help working the stove.”
Trey’s face dropped. “Okay.”
I stacked cords of firewood in the stove’s belly, and Trey showed me how to lean in and blow softly, enough to feed the small flames, not enough to snuff them out. Our mother watched, motionless, from her chair. When I finally had a pot of water boiling for rice, she unfolded herself and stood.
“I’m going to lie down.” Her shoulders hung limp and her eyes had swollen nearly shut. She lifted the curtain to her bedroom and let it fall behind her.
Trey stared at the pot of boiling water. “I don’t feel like eating.”
I poured the rice in anyway. “I know.” I put my hand on his back and patted his shoulder awkwardly.
The bottom of the rice came out burned. Trey didn’t want to eat it, but my hands were starting to shake from the lack of food. I swallowed what I could salvage from the pot and made Trey finish off a heel of Mom’s wheat bread, along with some chalky peanut butter left over from breakfast the morning before.
Trey and I sat by the windows as the last of the sun disappeared and the chill from the rocks all around us began rising through the house.
“You should call Dad,” Trey said.
“I tried,” I said. “The phone’s dead.”
“Dead?”
I nodded.
Trey narrowed his eyes at me. “Why’s it dead?”
I chewed on my bottom lip, trying to decide what to tell him.
“Did you use it?” Trey asked.
“Yeah.” I paused. Guilty heat flooded my face. “I tried to call Dad the other day, and I think maybe I left it on overnight.”
Trey pushed himself up off of the couch and walked over to me, his face set and even. He looked me in the eye, drew back his hand, and punched me in the stomach.
I doubled over. “Jesus, Trey.”
“Asshole,” Trey said. He flopped back on the couch.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really.”
Trey held up his hand. Don’t talk to me.
I eased myself out of the chair. Trey got quiet when he was angry, and he probably needed me out of his face so he would feel less like sucker-punching me again. I walked to the back of the cave and stood outside Mom’s room. Her lantern set the sheets aglow from the inside. For a second, I saw how Mom and Ian could like the cave, could enjoy being cocooned together with no one around for miles. If it had been just me and Corrine, I could have liked it, too, maybe.
I parted the sheets and peered inside. Mom lay bundled in their quilt with her face turned to the wall. She didn’t stir when I moved the curtain. Her boots rested beside Ian’s at the foot of the bed, and she had one of his shirts clutched to her face. I wondered if I should put my hand on her head, hug her, any of those things people did on television and in the movies. The black door nipped at the edge of my vision. All the warmth drained out of my chest. I let the curtain drop and backed away.
Trey was still sitting on the couch.
“You going to bed?” I asked the back of his head.
Trey shrugged. “Guess so. You?”
I rounded the couch and dropped down into the wingback chair again. “I think I’ll stay here a little.”
“Whatever.” Trey disappeared behind his own curtain. The hammock creaked as it took on his weight, mixing with the sound of his muffled coughs. He snorted and breathed deep, then silence lowered itself over everything.
* * * *
I woke to cold breath on my ear.
“...hhysss quuelikchh ahhnudkkrrr...”
The oil lamp had guttered out, leaving me adrift in the darkness. I groped for my flashlight. Not there. I ran my shaking hands over the nearby top of an upended pine crate Mom and Ian had been using as a side table. My fingers met the glass side of the oil lamp, and then a small, stiff cardboard square. A matchbook. I struck a match. Its flare blinded me at first, then died down to an orange flicker. I blinked away the spots on my retinas. No one in the room but me.
The flame grazed my finger. I dropped the spent match and lit a new one, then lifted the glass casing from the lantern to relight the wick. I rubbed the cold from my arms and picked up the lamp. First, Trey.
The light gleamed dully on the lengths of rebar studding the half-finished wall around our room. I leaned inside the curtain. Trey hung suspended in the hammock, inside layers of blankets and sleeping bags. His breath moved in and out, deep and slow.
I let myself breathe, too. Now for Mom.
I held the lantern overhead as I ducked into Mom’s room. Behind her curtains, the temperature dropped sharply, like I had walked into a pocket of cold water in the ocean. The flame shuddered inside the glass, shifting the shadows so it seemed there was something moving over the bed. I cupped my hand over the lantern’s open top. The flame quieted. Nothing was there but a lank twist of sheets and a shallow indentation where Mom’s body should have been.
I made myself bend down, made myself put a hand to the mattress. Cold. I staggered up and hurried to the kitchen, the common room, going over the last few hours in my head. Had I heard the front door open? No. But I had been there, right next to it, asleep in the chair. If she had gone out, it would have woken me. I lit each of the oil lamps and candles at the front of the house. Maybe she was hiding in the shadows, or under the table, playing some kind of game. I walked back to her room and yanked the curtain aside. Yellow light fell over the messy sheets, the repurposed apple crates, the matching pairs of hiking boots on their sides at the foot of the bed. I squinted. Hiking boots. Had Ian gone out barefoot, then, the day he disappeared?
The dark wood door pulled at the corner of my eye. I tried to look away, pretend it wasn’t there, but the draw was too strong. My eyes flitted up. It looked wider somehow, like it was bleeding itself onto the surrounding rock. Chill air brushed my skin and my arms prickled with gooseflesh. The door was ajar.
“Mom?” My voice sounded hoarse. I stepped closer to the door.
Nothing but silence. I reached out and pulled the knob toward me. Dense blackness welled up on the other side. I took a shaky breath.
I set my lantern on the floor, pushed the door open as wide as it would go, and shoved the futon frame against it, pinning it to the wall so it wouldn’t swing shut on me. I picked up the lantern again, and stepped into the cold room. The wick burned steadily, but its light clung to the glass, doing more to blind me than light my way. My feet knocked the collection of tins and bottles to the side. I cast my free hand out in front of me, into the darkness. Several steps in, the space narrowed and the slick walls brushed my arms. Any second, my fingers were sure to meet the back.
Without warning, the floor dropped away. My foot slipped. I let go of the lantern. It clattered down, rolling over the steep, water-worn stone slope that opened up below me. A narrow, shoulder-wide crawlhole worming its way down into the rock. The lantern smacked into a bend in the tunnel and wobbled to a stop. Its glass casing splintered, but the light didn’t go out. Below it, I could make out a steep grade leading deeper into the earth. I glanced behind me at the array of candles and lamps burning at the front of the house. Their light looked far away and dim.
I turned back to the cave. “Mom?” I called. The rocks swallowed my voice.
Slow and steady, Ren.
I eased myself into the hole, feet first. My shoes slipped over the damp stones. I landed hard on my tailbone and started to slide, but my jeans snagged on a rock, and I threw out my arms and legs to stop myself. I lay on my back, breathing hard, my limbs braced against the narrow walls.
Breathe, breathe.
I bent my knees and let myself creep downward, slowly this time. The air grew close and stale, the musty, mildewed smell of clogged drains and crawlspaces. It touched off a memory: finding Toad’s body among the drooping insulation and spider nests beneath our house two summers before, carrying him out to Trey to be buried. I blinked and kept myself moving, scraping the heels of my palms on the rock as I worked my way down. The lantern’s glow grew bright below my feet, and then it was beside me. Hairline fractures crisscrossed its well and casing. I couldn’t chance moving it, but at least it hadn’t burned out. The tunnel bent left. It still sloped downward, but the passageway widened enough that I could crawl on my hands and knees, rather than slide on my back.
“Mom?” I whispered again. “Ian?”
Nothing.
I rose to a crouch and inched forward. Icy water pooled in crannies and indentations in the rock. The lantern light slipped away behind me and the cave continued on. My arms shook with the deepening cold and the effort of keeping myself from slipping face forward onto the rocks. My fingers burned, then went numb.
I should go back, I thought. But any moment I could come to the end, find Mom.
I reached forward, blind in the near dark. My hand passed through empty space. I groped along the contours of the tunnel. Ahead, it began its sharp descent again, but the walls were too close for me to turn around and slide feet-first.
Just a few more yards, and then I’ll go back. If I don’t find her, I’ll go back.
I dragged myself by my elbows along the frozen floor. The light behind me wavered and abruptly, complete darkness clamped down. I panicked, picturing the walls collapsing, all the weight of the mountain above bearing on me. I couldn’t breathe. There was no air, only rock and wet and cold. I gasped. I tried to remember Corrine and the waterfall, but I couldn’t grab hold of it. I flailed forward again into the void and my hand came down in something wet and viscous, the consistency of seaweed. I thought of my foot breaking through the slick cake of mud at the bottom of High Rock Lake, where we sometimes went swimming in the summer.
I closed my fist around it. It separated into strands as it ran through my fingers, each section coated in slick. What the hell? I tugged on the strands netted in my fist, but they held fast to something. And suddenly I remembered the feel of Corrine’s hair after we passed under the waterfall, slicked back and heavy with moisture, how it slipped through my fingers. I jerked my hand back.
I wanted to scream, but my voice wouldn’t work.
A popping, tapping, the fingernail sound, clicked up from the dark ahead, only a few feet from my face.
“...hhhhuh stteppsssss...”
My body bucked in panic, and somehow I found myself squeezing around in the close confines of the tunnel, turning to face the other way. Granite ripped at my palms and the skin along my backbone as I scrabbled for handholds. I pushed myself up, slipping and kicking, toward the surface. A waft of spilled kerosene stung my nose and the tunnel angled up sharply. I dug my nails into the rock, not caring that it split them down the middle, only that I was heading upward. Blindness pressed on my eyes. Something skittered behind me in the dark.
I reached the sharp drop in the rock and heaved myself up, sending cans and tins clanging down into the abyss below. I heard my left wrist pop and pain shot through my arm like a hot steel rod. This time, I screamed. I rolled the rest of my body over the ledge into the cold room. Dark. Still too dark. Had the candles and lanterns gone out in the room ahead? I pushed myself to my feet and thrust my good hand toward the doorway. It came up against cold, damp wood. The door. It had closed, sealing me in.
I pounded my fist on the wood. “Trey!” I screamed. “Trey! Open the door, please. Open the door.”
The ticking sounded in the darkness below the ledge.
I tried to breathe, but it came out as a sob. I backed against the wall. Glass from a broken milk jar crunched under my feet like snow. “Oh, God. Mom? Ian? Trey, please!”
“...hhysstthskonn....”
Cold spread from the wall into my flesh, so deep it licked my skin like fire, burned away the pain in my wrist. A heaviness, an icy numbing, reached through my back, past the muscle and bone, and touched my lungs. I tried to cry out, but my chest and throat had gone rigid, the blood frozen in midstream.
Drowning, I thought. My heart pushed harder. Spots of light cartwheeled on my eyes.
“...ussshhlaa....”
And then, a rattling from the other side of the door, the sound of a metal latch disengaging. The door heaved open. Trey stood in the gap. He gripped my Maglite in his hand, and behind him, the array of lanterns and candles blazed bright as ever.
“Ren? What are you doing?”
I didn’t answer, only shoved past him and slammed the door closed behind me. I leaned against the wall, cradling my head in my hands and trying to breathe in something other than shaky gasps. My lungs ached with thaw.
“What happened?” Trey asked. “Where’s Mom?”
I tried to clear my throat. “Mom’s gone.” My voice cracked.
Trey wiped sleep from his eyes. “What?”
“I woke up and she was gone,” I said. “I know she didn’t go out the front, so I thought she went down there.” I looked at the door.
Trey stared at me. He looked from my ruined fingernails to my swollen wrist to the bloody grazes along my forearms.
“It’s really deep, Trey. And I found...I don’t know. Something else.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Trey’s voice trembled.
“I don’t know.” My gaze flicked around the house, lighting on the pairs of hiking boots, the lanterns, my useless cell phone, and finally, the wall me and Trey and Ian had begun to build. A stack of unused cinder blocks and several bags of cement mix waited outside our room.
I stood. “Come on. Get the wheelbarrow.”
“What are we doing?”
I looked back at the black door and felt the cold begin to crawl up my skin again. “Building a wall,” I said, and walked on unsteady legs to pick up the first