Nora Jane (25 page)

“He’s your best friend,” Lydia giggled, half whispering. “It’s so great. You just love each other.”

T
AMMILI AND LYDIA
were supposed to be cleaning up the loft. Their father was working on the well. Their mother was cooking breakfast and it
was their job to make the beds and straighten up the loft and clean the windows with vinegar and water.

“Why can’t we clean them with Windex like we do at home?” Lydia complained. “Just because we come to Willits for spring vacation
they go environmental and we have to use vinegar for the windows. The windows are okay. I’m not cleaning them.”

“You shouldn’t have come then. You could have stayed with Grandmother. You didn’t have to come if you’re just going to complain.”

“Why can’t we have a ski lodge or something? Why do we have to have a solar house? We can’t bring anybody. It’s too little
to even bring the dogs.”

“It’s a solar-powered house, not a solar house, and I don’t want to take dogs everywhere I go. There’re wolves and panthers
in these woods. Those dogs wouldn’t last a week up here. Dooley is so friendly he’d let a wolf carry him off in his teeth.”

“You clean the windows and I’ll get all this stuff out from under the bed. Everyone’s always sticking stuff under here. I
hate piles of junk like this.” Lydia was pulling boxes and clothes out from underneath the bed where she and Tammili had been
sleeping. It was the bed on which they had been born, in the middle of the night, ten and a half years before.

“What are you thinking about?” Tammili asked, but she knew. She and Lydia always thought about things at the same time. It
was the curse and blessing of being twins. You were never lonely, not even in your thoughts. On the other hand there was no
place to hide.

“Who put this here?” Lydia dragged a long brown cloak out from underneath the bed. It had a cowl and a twisted cord for the
waist and it was very thick, as thick as a blanket. It smelled heavenly, like some wonderful mixture of wildflowers and mist.
She pulled it out and spread it on the bed. Then she wrapped it around her shoulders.

“I’ve never seen this before.” Tammili drew near the cape and touched it. “It smells like violet. I bet it belongs to Nieman.
No one but Nieman would leave a cape here. Let me wear it too, will you?” She moved into one half of the cape. They wrapped
it around themselves like a cocoon and fell down on the bed and started laughing.

“Once upon a time,” Lydia began, “there were two little girls and they were so poor they didn’t have any firewood for the
fireplace. All the trees had been cut down by ruthless land developers and there weren’t any twigs left to gather to make
a fire. They only had one thing left and that was their bed. We better cut up the bed and burn it, one of them said, or else
we won’t live until the morning. We will freeze to death in this weather. Okay, the other one said. Pull that bed over here
and let’s burn it up. Then they saw something under the bed. It was a long warm cape that their father had left for them when
he went away to war. There was a note on it. ‘This is for my darling daughters in case they run out of firewood. Love, your
dad.’”

“Tammili.” It was their mother calling. “You girls come on down. I want you to help me with the eggs.” Tammili and Lydia put
their faces very close together. They giggled again, smothering the sound.

“We’re coming,” Lydia called. “We’ll be down in a minute.” They folded the cape and laid it on the bed by Tammili’s backpack.
Then they climbed down the ladder to help their mother with the meal.

* * *

That was Wednesday morning. On Wednesday night their father decided they should go on an expedition. “To where?” their mother
asked. “You know I have to study while I’m here. I can’t go off for days down a river or in the mountains. One-day trips.
That’s all I’m good for this week.”

“I thought we might overnight up in the pass by Red River,” Freddy Harwood said. “Nieman and I used to camp there every spring.
It might be cold but we’ll take the bedrolls and I’ll have the mobile phone. You can’t go for one night?”

“I should stay here. Do you need me?”

“We don’t need you,” Tammili said. “We can take care of things. I want to go, Dad. We’ve been hearing about Red River for
years but no one ever takes us. We’re almost eleven. We can do anything.”

“Get another adult,” Nora Jane insisted. “Don’t go off with both of them and no one to help.”

“We are help,” Lydia said. “Is it a steep climb, Daddy? Is it steep?”

“No. It’s long but it’s not that steep. Nieman and I used to do the trail to the top in three hours. Two and a half coming
down. There’s a bower up there under thousand-year-old pine trees. You don’t need a sleeping bag. We’ll take them but we could
sleep on the ground. I haven’t been up there to camp in years. Not since I met your mother. So, we’ll go. It’s decided.”

“Tomorrow,” they both screamed.

“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Friday. Let me think about it.” They jumped on top of him and started giving him one of their famous
hug attacks. They grabbed pillows and hugged him with them until he screamed for mercy. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” they
kept saying. “Don’t make us wait.”

“Then we have to get everything ready tonight because we have to leave at sunup. It takes an hour to drive to the trail. Then
three hours to climb. I want to have camp set up by afternoon.”

“What do we need?”

“Tent, food, clothes, extra socks. Vaseline for blisters, ankle packs for sprains, snakebite kit, Mag Lites, sleeping bags.”

“We’re going to carry all that?”

“Whatever we want we have to carry. We’ll have extra water in the car. We’ll take small canteens and the purifying kit. Go
start pumping at the well, Tammili. Fill two water bags.”

“Can’t I fill them at the sink?”

“No, the idea is to know how to survive without a sink. That’s what Willits is for, sweeties.”

“We know.” They gave each other a look. “So no matter what happens your DNA is safe.” They started giggling and their mother
put down the dish she was drying and started giggling too.

Freddy Harwood was an equipment freak. He had spent the summers of his youth in wilderness camps in Montana and western Canada.
When he graduated to camping on his own, he took up equipment as a cause. If he was going camping he had every state-of-the-art
device that could be ordered on winter nights from catalogs. He had Mag Lites on headbands and Bull Frog sunblock. He had
wrist compasses and Ray-Ban sunglasses and Power Bars and dehydrated food. He had two lightweight tents, a Stretch Dome and
a Lookout. The Lookout was the lightest. It weighed five pounds, fifteen ounces with the poles. He had Patagonia synchilla
blankets and official referee whistles and a Pur water purifier and drinking water tablets in case the purifier broke. He
had two-bladed knives for the girls and a six-bladed knife for himself. He had stainless-steel pans and waterproofing spray
and tent repair kits and first aid kits of every kind.

“Bring everything we think we need and put it on the table,” Freddy said. “Then we’ll decide what to take and what to leave.
Bring everything. Your boots and the clothes you’re going to wear. It’s eight o’clock. We have to be packed and in bed by
ten if we’re going in the morning.”

The girls went upstairs and picked out clothes to wear. “I’m taking this cape,” Tammili said. “I’ve got a feeling about this
cape. I think it’s supposed to go to Red River with us.”

“Nieman saw baby panthers up there once,” Lydia added. “The mother didn’t kill him for looking at them, she was so weak with
hunger because there had been a drought and a forest fire. Nieman left them all his food. He got to within twenty feet of
their burrow and put the food where she could get it. Dad was there. He knows it’s true. Nieman’s so cool. I wish he was going
with us.”

“He has to study. He’s going for a Nobel prize in biochemistry. That’s what Dad told Grandmother. He said Nieman wouldn’t
rest until he won a Nobel.”

The girls brought their clothes and backpacks down from the loft and spread the things out on the table. “What’s this?” Freddy
asked, picking up the cloak.

“Something we found underneath the bed. We think it’s Nieman’s. I was going to take it instead of a sleeping bag. Look how
warm it is.”

“I wouldn’t carry it if I were you. You have to think of every ounce.” Tammili went over and took the cape from him and folded
it and laid it on the hearth. Later, when they had finished packing all three of the backpacks and set them by the kitchen
door, she picked up the cape and pushed it into her pack. I’m taking it, she decided. I like it. It looks like the luckiest
thing you could wear.

In a small, neat condominium in Berkeley, the girls’ godfather, Nieman Gluuk, was finishing the last of twenty algebra problems
he had set himself for the day. His phone was off the hook. His flower gardens were going wild. His cupboards were bare. His
sink was full of dishes. His bed was unmade.

He put the last notation onto the last problem and stood up and began to rub his neck with his hand. He was lonely. His house
felt like a tomb. “I’m going to Willits to see the kids,” he said out loud. “I’m going crazy all alone in this house. Starting
to talk to myself. They are my family and I need them and it’s spring vacation and they won’t be ten forever.”

He went into his bedroom and began to throw clothes into a suitcase. It was three o’clock in the morning. He had been working
on the algebra problems for fourteen hours. When Nieman Gluuk set out to conquer a body of knowledge, he did it right. When
he had studied philosophy he had learned German and French and Greek. Now he was studying biochemistry and he was learning
math. “If my eyes hold out I will learn this stuff,” he muttered. “If my eyes give out, I’ll learn it with my ears.” He pushed
the half-filled suitcase onto the floor and turned off the lights and pulled off his shirt and pants and fell into his bed
in his underpants. It would be ten in the morning before he woke. Since he had quit his job at the newspaper he had been sleeping
nine and ten hours a night. The day he canceled his subscription he slept twelve hours that night.

“The destination,” Freddy was saying to his daughters, “is the high caves above Red River. They aren’t on this map but you
can see the cliff face in these old photographs. Nieman and I took these when we were about twenty years old. We developed
them in my old darkroom in Grandmother Ann’s house. See all the smudges? We were experimenting with developers.” He held the
photograph up. “Anyway, we follow the riverbed for a few miles, then up and around the mountain to this pass. Four rivers
rise on this mountain. All running west except this one. Red River runs east and north. It’s an anomaly, probably left behind
from some cataclysm when the earth cooled or else created by an earthquake eons ago. It’s unique in every way. If there was
enough snow last winter the falls will be spectacular this time of year. Some years they are spectacular and sometimes just
a trickle. We won’t know until we get there. Even in dry years the sound is great. Where we are camping we will be surrounded
by water and the sound of water. It’s the best sleeping spot in the world. I’ll put it up against any place you can name.
I wish your mother was going with us. She doesn’t know what she’s missing.” He took the plate of pancakes Nora Jane handed
him and began to eat, lifting each mouthful delicately and dramatically, meeting her violet-blue eyes and saying secrets to
her about the night that had passed and the one she was going to be missing.

Tammili and Lydia played with their food. Neither of them could eat when they were excited and they were excited now.

“Is this enough?” Lydia asked her mother. “I really don’t want any more.”

“Whatever you like. It’s a long way to go and the easy way to carry food is in your stomach.”

“It weighs the same inside or out,” Tammili said. “We’re only taking dehydrated packs. In your stomach it’s mixed with water
so it really weighs less if you carry it in the pack.”

Lydia giggled and got up and put her plate by the sink. Tammili followed her. “Let’s go,” they both said. “Come on, let’s
get going.”

“I wish you had a weather report,” Nora Jane put in. “If it turns colder you just come on back.”

“Look at that sky. It’s as clear as summer. There’s nothing moving in today. I’ve been coming up here for twenty years. I
can read this weather like the back of my hand. It’s perfect for camping out.”

“I know. The world is magic and there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” Nora Jane went to her husband and held him in her
arms. “Go on and sleep by a waterfall. I wish I could go but I have to finish this paper. That’s it. I want to turn it in
next week.”

“Let’s go,” Tammili called out. “What’s keeping you, Dad? Let’s get going.” Freddy kissed his wife and went out and got into
the driver’s seat of the Jeep Cherokee and the girls strapped themselves into the seats behind him and plugged their Walkmans
into their ears.

Nora Jane went back into the house and stacked the rest of the dishes by the sink and sat down at the table and got her papers
out. She was writing a paper on Dylan Thomas. “’The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green
age;’” she read, —that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer…. ’”

Freddy took a right at the main road to Willits, then turned onto an old gold-mining trail that had been worn down by a hundred
years of rain. “Hold on,” he told the girls. “This is only for four miles, then we’ll be on a better road. It will save us
hours if we use this shortcut.” The girls took the plugs out of their ears and held on to the seats in front of them. The
mobile phone fell from its holder and rattled around on the floor. Tammili captured it and turned it on to see if it was working.
“It’s broken,” she said. “You broke the phone, Dad. It wasn’t put back in right.”

“Good,” he said. “One less hook to civilization. When we get rid of the Jeep we’ll be really free. The wilderness doesn’t
want you to bring a bunch of junk along. It wants you to trust it to provide for you.”