Klickitat (11 page)

“How? Because you're in love or something?”

“You can call it that, if you want,” she said. “But it's more, bigger—he needs me, I need him, so we can take care of ourselves and each other without all these people telling us what to do, how to be.”

It was silent, then, for a moment. I remembered that Henry told me I was special, and I wondered if he had told that to Audra, too. I felt her hand along my arm; she gave me a gentle push so we rocked together, high in the trees. Closer together, farther apart, slowly settling.

“I was thinking of,” she said, “I was remembering that time in Colorado, at Grandma and Grandpa's, when their little dog, Sonny, got his paw caught on barbed wire. One of his pads was just dangling. Grandpa took a wire cutter and snipped it right off, part of that dog's body. I picked
it up and it was warm, rough on the side that had touched the ground.”

“I remember,” I said.

“He ran away, not long after that. Sonny did.”

“What made you think of that?” I said.

“I don't know.”

“I miss Mom and Dad.”

“We don't have time for that. It doesn't matter anymore.”

“But—”

Below, there was a low whistle, Henry's signal that it was time to go. We reached for the branches, we began unknotting our hammocks, then slid down, trying to land without making a sound.

The three of us moved silently out of the shadows, back down into the neighborhoods, the square windows of the houses shining against the night. Audra took Henry's hand, glanced back at me.

“You follow now, Vivian.”

I did, along the dark streets, looking into the warm, shining windows of the houses we passed. In that
moment, I wanted to be warm and dry, to walk through rooms. I wanted to open a refrigerator and have choices about what to eat. It had been so long since I had a glass of milk; I never thought I'd miss that. And there I was, cold, holding no one's hand.

Ahead, Henry and Audra were talking, but I couldn't even hear the sound of their voices. I felt very far away. I could tell that they were laughing, by the way their bodies moved.

I'd never seen Audra so happy; it made sense, her decision to be with him, to want to go away. She might not even have graduated from high school, if she'd stayed—even if she had graduated, the options weren't interesting to her. She wanted a new start, a different world. Me, I didn't know if the world I wanted was already hidden inside the one I knew.

FIFTEEN

The next morning, I lay listening to the
woman walking around her kitchen, the scrape of a chair as she sat down, probably to eat lunch. It was Tuesday, around noon, and her schedule written in the blue notebook said she'd be going out soon. I waited. I listened carefully. When I heard her front door slam, when I heard her car start, out on the street, rattling as it drove away, I sat up and reached for my shoes.

In the alley, I ducked low, careful of the other houses. No one could see me, and soon I was out in the neighborhood, and anyone who saw me wouldn't recognize me. I usually wore my hood up, but by then we'd dyed my hair black, and Audra had cut it short, so I looked like a boy.

It felt strange to be out in the day, the brightness, to see all the colors and the edges of everything. I walked across town, back toward my school, my house, though that was not where I was going.

The lights were bright inside the QFC, all the colors of things to buy, the long aisles. I was looking in every direction, searching. Then, down an aisle, I saw Henry, stocking boxes of raisin bran. He wore his blue apron, a name tag that flashed in the light but that I couldn't read from far away. He was sitting sideways and didn't look over. His hands were fast, stacking those purple boxes, fitting them in tight.

I stood halfway into the aisle, watching him, not wanting him to see me, but he wasn't even looking in my direction. He wore a leather holster on his belt, some kind of gun in it that printed price tags or read bar codes. It swung a little as he turned away, walked down the aisle in the other direction. I followed, carefully, shoppers and shopping carts between me and him.

Henry went past the meat, all red in its cold cases, under the lights, past the pharmacy and pharmacists in their white coats. He went through a door with an
EMPLOYEES
ONLY
sign on it, leaving me to wait behind a round rack that held a hundred pairs of sunglasses. I could see my reflection in the lenses, so many of me with my short hair and everything. I hardly recognized myself.

When Henry came out of those doors—his blue apron off, pulling his white shirt untucked—he didn't see me. Of course he wasn't expecting me, and I followed as he began walking. What I wanted was to talk with him, and then also to see where he was going. I liked that he didn't know that I was following.

He walked out of the store, down toward the highway, and I followed, at a distance, as he climbed the stairs up over the MAX tracks, down onto the platform. Henry didn't look back, and there were people all around, waiting. When the train came, he got on, and I hurried to get on, too, one car behind him where he couldn't see me.

We headed into the city, toward the river. The train was crowded, people with suitcases coming back from the airport. At every stop I leaned close to the window, squinting out to see if Henry got off. He did not. We crossed the river, into downtown, past Pioneer Square. The stop after that, Henry did get off, and so did I.

With all the people on the street, it was easier to stay hidden but it was also harder to keep track of Henry.

There he was, buying a hot dog from a cart; that was a kind of food that we'd agreed not to eat, but he ate it as he walked, and I followed. Up the streets—10th, 11th, 12th—and turning right, going north—Flanders, Glisan, Hoyt. I practiced all the stalking techniques Audra had taught me, that I'd read about in the books, all the different walks.

After a little while I could see that he was headed to Forest Park, toward the thick trees. Forest Park is more like a forest than a park. A gravel road cuts through it for miles and miles, up the middle, but away from that road it's all thick and overgrown. Joggers and people on mountain bikes rushed close by. Henry didn't look back at me, still a hundred feet behind him.

If he turned, if he saw me, what could I say? I could only laugh, say I saw him and I was trying to catch up, that I needed some fresh air, that no one could stay under the house every day, all day, day after day. I would say that I was curious about him, that I wanted him to talk to me, to tell me about where he was from and where we were
going, to talk about the messages in my notebook, to tell me why he needed me.

I almost called out to him; I waited, I followed.

Henry headed off on a side trail, into the shadows, and I had to hurry, to get closer. His white shirt flashed through the green leaves, his dark head rising and falling. The wind blew all through the branches up high and the trees groaned, rubbed against each other.

We climbed along a little ridge, across a steep slope. I kicked a stone by mistake and it clattered down through the ivy. I stopped, moved sideways, hid in the thicker bushes. Henry didn't turn. He was bent over, almost crawling now, heading off the path, up the slope. And then he stopped and bent down, and gradually—his legs, then his body, and then his head—he disappeared, down into the ground.

Slowly, carefully, I moved closer. When I reached the spot where he had been, I saw that there was a hole, there. Wide enough that a person could fit inside. I lay on my stomach, looking in. There was a candy wrapper in the shadowy bottom, but Henry was nowhere to be seen. I shielded my eyes with my hand, trying to understand.
Reaching into the hole, I felt all along the edge and realized that it was open along one side, a black tunnel slipping deeper underground. That was where he had gone.

I sat up and swung my legs around and slid over the edge, my feet hitting bottom, loose dirt falling and settling around me. Only my head stuck out of the ground, the rest in the hole, neck deep in the ground. Before I started down the tunnel, I turned slowly, checking in every direction, and that's when I saw him. Henry, again, heading off through the forest—he must have gone through the tunnel and come up from another hole. It wasn't easy for me to climb out, but I did, stumbling in the bushes after him, trying not to lose him.

I wasn't as quiet as I wanted to be, but still he didn't seem to hear me. He was looking up into the trees as he walked, and I was not far behind, carefully holding the bushes' branches out of my way.

I saw a ribbon, then, a blue ribbon, tied to one branch. I reached for it and at first I thought someone had grabbed my wrist—all at once my hand was jerked sideways, hard, up over my head. A thin cord ran from my wrist to the top of a tree, a sapling that had been bent
back, sprung. As I tried to get loose, to twist free, I heard laughter behind me.

Audra came out from where she'd been hiding, coming closer to help get me free.

“It worked!” she said. “I caught you, Vivian. I tracked you and I snared you, too.”

“You could have broken my arm,” I said, rubbing at the red circle around my wrist. “My shoulder hurts, too.”

“You'll be all right,” she said. “And I'm learning these skills for your own good.”

Audra wore a light green dress, like a polo shirt, only longer. Her blond hair was in two braids, and her skin was pale and smooth. It had been a long time since I'd really seen her in the daylight.

“What?” she said, turning around. “Why are you looking behind me?”

“Henry,” I said. “I was following him, but I can't see him anymore. Are you meeting him here?”

“Henry?” she said. “I don't think so. He's supposed to be at work. Did he say something to you?”

“I saw him go into a hole in the ground,” I said. “Into a tunnel.”

“Vivian,” she said. “You don't know what you're talking about. And if he's paying attention to you, that's because he wants
me
to be happy, to make you feel like he wants you along, too—”

“Okay,” I said.

“What did he tell you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I followed him.”

“You shouldn't follow him,” she said. “You shouldn't even be out here.”

“I had to,” I said. “I can't stay under the house all day, every day—”

“Come on,” she said, taking my arm like I'd done something wrong. “This way. I want to show you something.”

We walked along a small, overgrown path, Audra leading the way. She held one hand up in front of her face, clearing spiderwebs, and I could hear that we were closer to the main gravel road, the sound of distant voices through the leaves of the trees and bushes.

“A lot of people live here,” she said. “It's dangerous, it can be dangerous.”

“Isn't this where the girl lived?” I said. “The girl we tried to find, with her father.”

“Yes,” Audra said. “Their camp wasn't so far from here.”

“Did you ever find out where she went?”

“No,” she said.

We walked silently for a while, farther from the road, staying close together.

“Things are different,” I said. “The way we are together. It's not the same.”

“Of course not, Vivian.” Audra turned to face me. She put her hands on my shoulders, only for an instant. “It couldn't stay the same, now could it? And remember, the way things are now isn't how they'll be. We'll be able to talk anytime we want, and everything will be a lot better than now or before. You'll feel better.”

I felt like we were in an argument that I didn't understand, that we hadn't had before. We walked side by side, then single file when the way grew narrow.

“But we're living underneath a house,” I said. “I'm alone all the time, and you hurt my arm, and all we ever do is sneak around.”

“That's not all we do,” she said. “And it's just for a little while longer.” She touched my shoulders again, turned me around to face the same direction as her. “You see that broken tree, and that green rock, there? It's exactly between them. Here.”

We were standing right next to the blind she'd made—bent sticks with moss and leaves woven in—and it was almost impossible to see it.

“This is a safe place, in case anything happens.”

“Like what?” I said.

“A safe place to come and stay,” she said, almost whispering. “And there's a box buried inside, beneath it, with all the things in it we might need.”

“In case we have to leave underneath the house or something?”

“Right,” she said, “but it's not good to stay too close, too long, now, when we don't need it. Someone could see us, and wonder.”

That afternoon Audra talked about awareness being the most important skill to have, and relaxation being the most important part of awareness. She waved her hands down over the distant city and talked about robots,
about how unhappy people really were. She showed me some new things about tracking, and how to cup my hand around my ear, to make the shape of a deer's ear around my own, so I could direct my hearing better.