Klickitat (15 page)

Nothing was as easy as the books made it seem. I couldn't find the plants I read about, or the berries to eat. I dug up roots and washed them in the stream and then I wasn't sure if I should boil them, or what I should do. Mostly I was eating the dried ramen noodles and jerky, the bars and nuts, left in the plastic box. I didn't know how long it would all last.

It was harder not to think of Mom and Dad and my bed, of all the food in the refrigerator, when I was alone. I knew that a good attitude was important in a survival situation. I knew not to panic. I knew it was best to keep myself busy, to believe that Audra and Henry would return very soon. I set out on long walks. I practiced my
stalking and my other skills, climbed from tree to tree, tried to find plant fibers to braid into cords and ropes.

The first tunnel I found, I heard it before I saw it. A low kind of whistle coming out of the ground. I crawled closer, to a spot beneath a bush, deep in a thicket, and felt the cool wind on the skin of my face. It was gentle. It smelled like dirt and stone.

This was on the second day.

The mouth of the tunnel was just a jagged black opening, big enough to fit my hands inside, to pull rocks away, to push them until I heard them rattle below. It took a little while—I set my pack to one side to dig, and I didn't have any tools to dig with—but at last it was wide enough to stick my head inside, to shine the headlamp down. I stretched one hand deeper, too, and felt that it wasn't only a hole, or an animal's den. It opened, on one side, and that's where the wind was coming from. A tunnel.

I lowered myself inside, feet first. Only my head was above the ground, and I pulled my pack in after me, ducked my head, and started into the tunnel, deeper.

It slanted down, and soon I could stand up, the ceiling
still close, cold water dripping on my head, puddles beneath my feet. The walls were close, too. I couldn't stretch my arms all the way out.

How far did I go? I thought of the story we read in school, about the man in the labyrinth and the ball of string that kept him from getting lost. I had no string, but in this cave, this tunnel, there was only one passage, no others forking away in the darkness. I checked. I kept turning my head from side to side, the headlamp's beam sliding across roots and stone, crumbling black walls of dirt.

The floor sloped up or the ceiling sloped down. I hit my head. Bending lower, I had to crawl again, had to switch my pack around to the front, on my chest, since it kept snagging on the ceiling. The stones were sharp against my hands and knees. I didn't care. And the wind, I was still heading into it, started to blow a little harder, to smell different. Not so thick with dirt and rocks, but cleaner, like trees and sky.

I switched off the headlamp and squinted ahead. After a little while I saw light, a jagged greenish opening, and I kept crawling toward it.

I had to dig my way out, a little, and when I stuck my head into the light it was too bright at first and I couldn't see at all. I coughed, breathed in as much air as I could, just sitting there in the tunnel's other mouth.

Slowly, I checked around myself. A bird, just at the side of where I could see, fluttered away through the green trees. I recognized where I was, which part of Forest Park. Far from where I'd gone into the tunnel, near where I'd been searching, earlier in the day, where I'd sprung one of Audra's old snares—a snap, a whistling sound, a loop of rope suddenly jerking empty through the air.

I quietly made my way toward the blind. I kept my eyes to the ground, checked the branches of the trees. Blackberry vines scratched the skin of my arms, my hands, and all at once there were voices, close by. I crouched in a bush, slowed my breathing. I waited until the air was silent again.

Sitting in the blind, I ate a dry square of ramen, drank from my water bottle. And then I began to cry. First only tears, and then more, all curled up on my side in the leaves and dirt. Even if I knew they'd be back, that Audra
and Henry would come for me, I was lonely, and being left behind this time was worse—the first time, Audra was also getting away from our parents. This time, she was only getting away from me. I tried not to make noise, to stop crying or to teach myself to cry silently.

I found the yellow notebook, opened it; I paged in from the back, through the blank pages, into new words:

It will be a bad winter if the crows gather

and squirrels build their nests low in the

trees. Hello hello hello. Nothing stands

still, weather guides us. If worms are

bending up and going into people's houses

and abandoned buildings in October, the

winter will be hard. Don't forget me, sister
,

believe I'm with you always. The number of

days old the moon is at the first snow tells

how many snows there will be that winter
.

A blanket of deep snow can keep you

warm. Depths can be sounded by bouncing

signals along the ocean floor
.

These words didn't help, they only frustrated me. I put the notebook away and rubbed my eyes to get the tears out, so I could see. I couldn't let myself get sad like that. I had to believe that Henry would come back and take me to his people, so I could understand the words in the notebook better, and then I'd be helpful to everyone. But now the sky was turning dark.

While I climbed to the hammock, I realized that I had hardly said a word all day. If the days went on like that, would I lose my voice, be unable to talk to Audra? How many days would it be before they came? I thought of how I used to sing, how I liked to sing. At school, singing all together where I could hear my voice small and close to me and then blending into the noise that was everyone's voice, pushing back on me in a comforting way.

The hammock, it held me tight, it calmed me. There was a way to double the rope that was knotted to the tree, to double it back and lace it through the braided strings, to pull it tighter around me, to hold me.

Here I was, high in the trees, swinging gently against the black sky.

Radio waves travel farther at night, without so much
interference—Dad told me that, one time down in the basement. I was folding laundry and he was sitting at his radio, turning dials and knobs. I didn't want to think about him, didn't want to start crying again.

I rested there, not quite asleep, listening to the trees all around me. I twisted to look down at the ground, almost expecting the darker shadows of Henry and Audra, sliding along, coming back. I knew I wouldn't be able to hear them coming.

TWENTY

Crawling in the tunnel, I pushed my pack
ahead until I had to turn back. I could not find a way out, not as quickly as I liked, but I didn't feel like I'd be trapped. I'd left a note behind, too, buried in the blind, in case Audra and Henry returned for me. And even if I was underground when they came back, Henry would be able to find me.

The tunnel slanted down, then up. Smaller tunnels opened in the walls—animal tunnels. I heard the squeak of mice; I thought I put my hand on a snake, slipping away in the darkness. I imagined how soft a fox might be, sliding around me, racing toward the light. I heard scratching and imagined possums, moles, badgers as surprised
to find me there as I would be to be so close to them, in that tight space. I remembered a lot of things from
Journey to the Center of the Earth
: the trilobites and the giant gray plants, the mastodon. The dark tunnel floors that felt covered in bones, and the winds, and the way the underground air could suddenly be full of electricity.

The underground winds picked up, they died down. They switched directions, went from warm to cold and from cold to hot. I listened, I thought I heard voices. My dad's voice, just counting numbers. Children singing. Chimes. Audra, crying or laughing. Static. I thought I heard footsteps on the ground above my head. I heard dogs barking, outside, the sound funneled through the tunnel's mouth, echoing around me. The dogs' feet sounded like rain or hail as they ran in a pack across my ceiling.

I felt comfortable, safe down there. When I surfaced, I raised my head very gradually, slowly, into the air, the world. I reached out and pulled vines and brush toward me, to cover the tunnel's mouth.

The third day in Forest Park, I lay in the tunnel, beneath the surface where the air was good, underground
where no one knew where I was. It was afternoon; I could smell and taste the dirt beneath the leaves where I rested my head. I must have fallen asleep—I woke up and I couldn't tell what time it was because of the way the light filtered down, and the sound of birds singing. I sat up, put on my shoes, shook the dirt from my hair. Slowly, carefully I raised my head up inside the tree branch I'd dragged across the tunnel's mouth. That way I was still hidden, and I could look in every direction. Trees and snags and bushes, all overgrown.

I pushed the branch aside, stretched my arms above my head. It felt good to stand up straight.

“Vivian. Do you even know how dirty you are?”

I turned around—the voice didn't sound right, not like Audra's, and it took a moment to see where it was coming from.

Taffy stood ten feet away, smiling at me.

“I didn't hear you,” I said. “I mean, I didn't know where you were.”

“I know,” she said. “I've been following you. I know what you do.”

I climbed out of the hole, sat down, and unzipped
my pack. As I drank from my water bottle I felt her come closer, her shadow on me.

“You don't know what I do,” I said.

I felt her hand touch my water bottle, and I let her take it, watched as she drank, water spilling in white lines down her neck, alongside the long white scar that cut down from behind her ear. She had a scab on her forehead and her dark hair was much longer on one side, full of knots. Her shoes didn't match. One blue sneaker, one white one. On the white one it said TAF in black marker.

“I saw the posters with you on them.” She sat down next to me, close, our knees almost touching. “Your picture and your name, and your sister's picture and her name. Your hair was longer and you looked different, but still I knew it was you.”

I took out a hard, round rice cake from my pack and took a bite. When she reached out, I handed it to her and got another for myself. It made me feel good to know there were posters, that Mom and Dad had made them.

“How far does that scar go,” I said, “under your shirt?”

“You want to see?”

“No,” I said.

“Far,” she said.

I looked across the little clearing where a yellow rhododendron was starting to bloom.

“I thought you didn't really have parents,” she said. “I thought you were like me, but then I saw that poster.”

“Everyone has parents,” I said.

“But yours are looking for you. You could go back there and live with them, even without your sister.”

“She's coming for me,” I said.

“What did your parents do to you?” Taffy said.

“Nothing.” I twisted the lid back onto my water bottle.

Taffy leaned forward, then, and pulled up the back of her shirt. Scars showed white against her pale skin, knots that were raised just a little. Reaching out, I touched her skin, rested my hand there. I was afraid, for a moment, that I'd take hold of her and not let go, that I'd scare her, but then I was able to pull my hand back to myself, to rest it in my lap.

“They're on my legs, too,” she said.

“From the electricity?”

“Some,” she said. “But mostly from my foster parents, back in Spokane.”

The sound of her voice made me think she might be crying, so I leaned forward, to see her face. She was staring straight ahead, her expression serious, but she wasn't crying. She pulled her shirt back down, over her scars.

“This is an okay place to stay for a little while,” she said, “but not for a long time, not really a place to live.”

“People do live here,” I said. “A girl lived here with her dad for four years.”

Taffy laughed. She took a stick in her hand like a sword and started tapping on every stone that she could reach.

“They got caught,” she said. “I knew her, that girl. We were locked up at the same police station, after that time they caught her. And then I saw her again, later, with her father on the street. They were running away.”

“You didn't really know her,” I said.

“Her name was Caroline,” Taffy said. “She wasn't really that nice.”

“Maybe she was just shy,” I said.

“Maybe. They even tried to come back here to live, but that didn't work. They didn't fit.”

“Where did they go?”

“Somewhere. Anyway, I'm just saying this isn't an easy place to stay.”

“I can wait,” I said. “I can live here until my sister comes back for me.”

“Your sister?” Taffy looked away, into the trees, back again. “Your sister, I don't think she's coming back here.”