I swallowed a lump rising in my throat and took a breath. I thought again about walking through the wreckage with Katie, reaching for the remains, realizing what they were, reaching out for her hand instead.
Four. THE WOODS
MALHEUR NATIONAL FOREST, OREGON
MAY 2, 2016
BABIES EVERYWHERE. This time of year is all eggs hatching and sprouting and slippery bald heads and blind eyes shoving themselves toward the light. Everywhere you step, a birth.
After Carey left for work, I saw one of those spiders that just weeks ago looked ragged and starved. It had survived the winter somewhere under the shitty couch and was hauling itself out of the darkness and making its way across the floor in the direction of the back door. I didn’t examine it before I reacted. The door was open, beckoning to the spider, I suppose, so I grabbed the broom and tried to sweep it out onto the porch. But with the first swipe hundreds of babies went tumbling off her back. They were so fast, the specks of them with their spotted translucent bodies like baby octopuses, almost not there at all. They raced off in all directions, spun their immature threads wildly at the broom straw, clung to it. I tried not to step on them, shaking them from the broom, trying still to usher them out the door. But their mother just kept running, all eight legs whirring, a few little ones still holding to her body and dangling off by weak strings.
“Don’t leave your babies!” I called after her, but she was faster now that she wasn’t carrying all her children. “What am I going to do with your babies?”
But she was out the door.
“Shit. Shit, shit!” I sounded just like my mother. I learned to swear by listening to her cooking dinner, cleaning out the cabinets, weeding the garden. Household chores pissed her off, especially after my dad was gone.
I watched the babies scatter, tried to create a breeze that would waft them after their mother, then tried gently sweeping, but I just smeared their delicate bodies across the linoleum tiles. I took the broom outside and thrashed it against a tree trunk to shake off any still clinging, any still alive.
It’s my birthday, again. I did the math when I woke up; it was my first conscious act. Thirty-five. I’m thirty-five. I’ve been losing track, adding years without thinking, or taking them away.
My mom called this morning, just after the baby spiders, but I didn’t pick up. She left a message on the old machine. The machine with Carey’s voice that says nothing about me, the way I requested it. She knows where I am; I always tell her now. But I don’t write or call much. It will be Mother’s Day in a few days and I’ll call then. She used to tell me that my birthday was her Mother’s Day, that she didn’t care about the holiday. I remembered this while she was talking through the machine. I’m still in trouble for taking off and almost dying on the same island that killed my dad. She would never put it that way, of course, but I can hear it in her voice. Yesterday was the anniversary of the quake and his death, so I was thinking about it. Every year, the anniversary comes hulking along, its shadow blotting me out.
I considered picking up the phone. But there are no direct conversations with my mom. Only questions underneath questions. No matter how I try to steer it, we seem to cover the same well-trod path around what we won’t talk about: that we both lost the first and best man we ever loved, the man who had tied the two of us together in a safe, tight knot.
“How’s Carey?” she starts, which is her way of asking if he has proposed or if I’ve proposed to him. If I don’t intend to marry him, if we’re not going to make babies, she can’t fathom why I would come out here. Why did I leave the city, where I was closer to her and my stepdad, my grandparents, a therapist? She thinks I’m undertaking some kind of self-concocted exposure therapy.
“I sleep better out here,” I told her once. It’s true: I sleep like there’s no earthquakes, I sleep like there’s no ocean.
I wiped minuscule spider parts from the linoleum, listening to her wish me a happy birthday. She was on her cell phone in the car, traffic under her voice.
Carey’s at work all day. He insisted we do something for my birthday, so when he comes home, we’ll make the drive to Prairie City and eat at the hotel restaurant. Some days, when he’s been out in the woods, he smells like lichen; a heady boreal sweetness you’d never guess would come from a plant that does not bloom. I smell him every time; I put my face right into the crook of his neck as soon as he walks through the door. After a while he asked me why I did that, and I told him. I want it, that smell. I want it in a way that I can’t explain, that goes all the way into my cells. I can’t tell if this desire is biological or emotional. The first time he went down on me, here in the woods, in the high mountain winter, he told me I tasted like the sea. I kissed him and tasted myself in his mouth, and it was true — it was like urchin or salmon roe. I had never noticed before, my own taste. I think about the things you cannot know about yourself until someone else shows you, and I wonder if this is how it starts, love, or if this is all it is.
I’m taking the old mining road to the lake today. I leave a note that says “I’ll be home soon” on the kitchen table. There’s only one note, I just keep leaving it over and over again, then pocketing it as soon as I get back. I always make it back before he finds it. It’s on the table today, just in case. If something happened to me out there, Carey would find a crumpled, weathered piece of my notebook paper with deep crease lines from the folding and unfolding. He would hold it in his hands carefully, barely touching it, like a suicide note. If I didn’t come back, he would be the one in charge of finding me.
I witnessed a rescue in my first days here, a backcountry skier who didn’t report back. Dogs, helicopter, volunteers in the snow with whistles. They let me volunteer, though I didn’t have the training. I learned as we went. It was the most exciting thing that happened all spring, the prospect of coming across a mauled, frozen outdoorsman. That was how Carey prepared me for the worst.
“Could’ve been a lynx,” he said. “They follow the sound of the skis from miles away. It’s like deer through the snow.”
I thought about this and concluded I would always root for the lynx, even if it meant I never cross-country skied again.
But the guy was just lost. He had a dozen protein bars and some emergency matches on him; he melted snow for water. He seemed irritated it took us so long.
Then the snow was gone, earlier than usual. There weren’t as many hard freezes, and snowfall averages all around the state were low, despite a late-season fall. When the pack isn’t as deep, it can melt completely in just a few warmer-than-average days. Spring arrived suddenly; now everything is blooming and hatching. The conversation around the ranger station is all almanac, all the time. Mosquito year. Blackfly year. Drought year. Fire year.
I asked if that meant the fire lookout would be staffed this year, and Carey said, “Yeah, maybe.” Which means I’ll have to find another place. My first choice is the lake, since there’s a one-room cabin there. Carey said Eagle Scouts built it in the nineties; it’s a miracle it’s still standing. I’ve seen it once, from a distance. It looked more like the setting for a horror movie than a place to relax, but I’m going to investigate. Get my scent in the air so the animals there start to know me. If they know me, if they recognize my scent, will they be less likely to want to eat me? Or more?