Leaving Blythe River: A Novel (5 page)

Chapter Five: Blythe River

Six weeks before his father disappeared

“None of this makes a damn bit of sense,” Ethan said.

“Oh, Ethan,” his mom said with a sigh. “We talked this to death on the plane.”

They were in a rental car, traveling along a narrow two-lane highway through what Ethan would have described as exactly nothing. They hadn’t seen a man-made structure in more miles than he could remember. If you didn’t count split-rail fences.

“Look,” she said. “Those are the mountains up ahead. The Blythe River Range. Aren’t they beautiful?”

Ethan had been looking at them already, before she pointed them out. He supposed they were beautiful. If you liked mountains. They were unusually shaped. Pointy, like photos he had seen of the Tetons, but with more high peaks, narrower, and more closely wedged together. Their tops were packed with heavy snow, the sky a deep navy behind them.

“I guess,” he said.

He reached into the backseat and stroked his dog’s ears. Rufus was still whacked out on tranquilizers from the plane trip in the baggage hold, and barely noticed. An awkward mix of pit bull and bloodhound, Rufus had loose brown skin that flapped whenever he ran, and massive ears currently trailing onto the seat.

Then, after hoping she’d say something for another mile or so, he added, “
Please
let me go to Grandma and Grandpa’s with you.”

She sighed again.

She had always been a beautiful woman, Ethan’s mother, but it had been an inside-out beauty. It shone out through her eyes, and in her smile. But that was missing now. Had been for weeks. Now she just looked older. And all too tired.

“I feel for your situation,” she said. “But it’s getting tedious, having the same conversation over and over. Besides, this place might be just the thing for you. It’ll be good for you to get out of the city. The air is clear out here. It’s safer. Might be great for your confidence.”

Which was yet another way of saying that Ethan’s constant fear since the incident was a problem for her. Another disappointment. She hadn’t said so out loud. She hadn’t needed to. Ethan knew her well enough to know.

A long silence. Ethan thought maybe the conversation had ended.

Then, finally, he said, “Do we ever get to go to Peru now? Or is that whole thing just over?”

“We’ll go. Sure we’ll go. I just need to tend to my mom. And everybody just needs time to settle.”

“See, this is where you’ll be going to school.”

They’d pulled into the tiny town of Avery. Not much more than a cluster of homes and businesses, turning the slightly wide spot on the highway into a Main Street of sorts. High-clearance pickups sat parked at an angle, something like perpendicular to the sidewalks. There were two churches. A school. A grocery. A tavern. A tack and feed store.

Ethan thought it looked like the set of a Western movie, except with trucks instead of horses.

“So we’re pretty much there, then,” he said.

“No.” A hint of apology in her voice. “It’s another twenty-seven miles.”

He felt his jaw drop.

“How the hell do I get to school? I don’t want to sit that long in a car with Dad every day.”

“You won’t have to. There’s a bus. A school bus comes around and gets all the kids from the outlying areas.”

Just that fast they were back on an empty highway again, the town in their rearview mirror.
Welcome to Avery. Don’t blink.

They drove toward the snowy mountains in silence for a time.

“I swear, Ethan,” she said. “I really did arrange this because I thought it would be the best thing for you.”

“Look,” she said. “There it is.”

Ethan looked out the window to see his dad walk out of a house a few hundred feet down the plowed road, swinging on a heavy winter parka. It was tiny, that house. An A-frame, its roof weighted with snow, framed by the snowy mountains behind it. It made Ethan feel as though he were in a commercial for hot cocoa mix. The house couldn’t have been much more than five hundred square feet.

“It’s so tiny,” he said as she swung the rental car into the freshly shoveled driveway.

“Why do you care about the size of the place, Ethan? You have the great outdoors for a backyard. Besides, it’s only for a while.”

“Yeah, but a while with
Dad
. Would you want to be pushed into a place that small with Dad?”

He thought he saw her jaw tighten.

“The answer to your question,” she said, “is no. I wouldn’t. But then again, it was me he betrayed. Not you.”

Ethan knew that wasn’t true. In fact, he was surprised by how thoughtless it was of her to think so. And he wanted to point that out. But he never got the chance. His father walked right up to the driver’s side window, and his mother powered it down, letting a blast of biting cold air into the car.

“Noah,” she said flatly.

Ethan couldn’t hear what his father said in return. It might have been her name, which was Emma. It might only have been a grunt. In any case, it ended Ethan’s chance to protest the statement that he had not been betrayed.

Though, truthfully, it was possible that he wouldn’t have said it out loud anyway.

Ethan held his phone in his lap, and, as inconspicuously as possible, texted to Glen:
This sucks
. But he couldn’t send it, because he had no reception.

Ethan walked his mom out to her rented car, Rufus wagging at their heels.

“I wish you’d stay,” he said.

“Stay?” she asked. As if Ethan had suggested she throw herself off a bridge. “Ethan. You know I’m not comfortable with him.”

“Oh, and I am?”

“Look. Honey.” She moved closer to him. Brushed his shaggy hair back behind his ear on one side. She was only five feet tall. And she didn’t have to reach up very far. Not for Ethan. “I could’ve just put you on a plane. You know that. You’re not a child. You’re seventeen. I could have driven you to JFK and said good-bye to you at security. Made your dad haul into Casper to meet your plane. I came this far with you for moral support. But now I have to go back. I know the thing with your dad is hard. I know this is hard for you in lots of ways. And I know this is not exactly your kind of place. But I only have one mother, and I’m about to not have her anymore. So please . . . this is not going to be a happy time for me, either. Please just get through this for me.”

“But I don’t know what to do out in the middle of the freaking
wilderness
.”

She kissed him on the forehead, her lips pressed against him for an extra beat or two. They felt warm. They were the only thing that had, for as long as he could remember. He didn’t want them to go away.

They went away.

“This is your chance to find out,” she said.

She gave the same forehead kiss to Rufus, except more briefly. Then she climbed into the rental car and drove away.

Ethan stood and watched until her car disappeared down the snowy road. Then he stood a bit longer. Only when he got too cold to stay outside did he go back inside with his father.

“Hey,” his father said, without even looking up from the kitchen counter. There was something too airy in the word, as though he thought he could make everything lighter with just the tone of his voice. “You hungry?”

Ethan stared at his three duffel bags. They sat in a triangle on the floor, right where he and his mother had dumped them.

“No.”

“Long plane ride.”

“I ate on the plane.”

“Since when is there food on planes these days?”

“We got something to go at the airport. We brought our own food onto the flight.”

“Oh,” his father said. There was a definite disappointment now to his tone. As if the offering of food was the only card he had to play.

Ethan still did not walk closer to him. Or sit. Or move.

Ethan looked around, hoping to see something that reminded him of home, but the furniture was all unfamiliar. The house must have been a furnished rental. The only thing Ethan recognized was the gun rack near his father’s bedroom door, a vestige of bragging rights that seemed to carry no purpose.

“Why do you even keep those?” he asked, indicating the rifle and shotgun with his chin. “Why did you even bring them up here? You planning to go out in the wilderness and kill a moose and drag it home?”

“They don’t have moose around here,” his father said. “So, look . . . we haven’t had much of a chance to talk.”

That was true enough. His father had gone to a hotel the day after the great disaster. Stayed respectfully away after that.

“Good,” Ethan said.

“Don’t be like that.”

“You could have called. If you’d wanted to talk.”

“I want to talk now.”

“Well,
I don’t
,” Ethan said.

“Sooner or later we’re going to have to. Ethan, listen. I know how you felt about her. Everybody did.”

Ethan’s eyes snapped shut. If only he could have done the same with his ears. He said nothing in reply.

“But it’s not like anything was going to happen with that. I mean, you didn’t think it would, did you?”

“No,” Ethan said, but it wasn’t an answer to the question. “No, no, no, I won’t listen to this.”

He turned abruptly back to the door. Reached it in two long strides. Threw the door open and stepped out into the cold afternoon, holding it open briefly for Rufus.

“Wait!” his father called. “Before you start walking around out here you need to—”

Ethan slammed the door.

He and his dog set off up the road together in the direction of the mountains.

The road turned to dirt in no time. Not graded dirt, either. Four-wheel-drive territory. Apparently they now lived as close to this national wilderness as it was possible to get without a 4x4 vehicle or a good pair of hiking boots.

He knew why his father would want to live in a place like this. Noah used to be a backpacker. He used to be a through-hiker. He had done the entire Appalachian Trail by the time he was twenty-one, and all at one time. The entire Pacific Crest Trail by twenty-three. At twenty-four he’d climbed Mount Everest, one of the typical moneyed Westerners who paid guides and Sherpas tens of thousands of dollars to get them to the top, sucking bottled oxygen all the way. Sure, this place was a magnet for Noah. But it meant nothing to Ethan.