“She was here,” I’m saying, and my mother is protesting.
“How is that possible? When?”
“It’s not that far away,” I say. “It was… a few days ago. I can’t remember when exactly. She could have taken a bus… How did she do it?”
“What?”
“How did she kill herself?”
“Oh, Lucie. It was with her father’s handgun.”
“What? That can’t be right, Mom. Why?” But I know why. She didn’t want to be found, to be revived. Like I was. I go numb. I hardly hear my mother’s voice.
“Lucie, you can’t be alone right now. Call Carey. Is there anyone else you can call?”
The mail is spread out on the bed. The manila envelope is slipping out of the magazine. My fingers are wooden; my limbs are numb. I lift my hand, watch myself pull the envelope from the magazine. Inside there is a note from Sister Rose Gracemere, along with another envelope, addressed to me, care of Sister J., in Katie’s hand. The note explains that the letter came recently, dropped in the prayer box at the end of the driveway. I’m shaking and slice my finger across the paper as I open it, watching the blood appear in the crevice. I hear her voice.
Dear Lu,
I know this letter won’t be what you want it to be, but I don’t know how else to say goodbye. A letter seems so dramatic. And one that won’t find you until it’s too late — god! If there were a hell, I’d be going there for this letter alone. I’ve never given you what you wanted. I don’t know why. It just always seemed that if I did, we’d have nothing left between us. I was always a part of you, and you were always a part of me. No matter how far apart we were. But now you’re so far away that I don’t know how else to reach you. I know the sisters will get this to you, if I can get it to them. They’ll probably even throw in a prayer for us both, no questions asked.
I won’t drag it out: there are so many tumors they won’t be able to find them all. They want to take everything out of me — all the lady parts — but the cancer is everywhere. It’s so strange, that the body can look so normal when the insides are a cellular clusterfuck. But here’s the beautiful thing: when they showed me the scans, all lit up on the screen in the dark room before the surgery, the tumors looked like
Clavaria
— like coral fungi. They are growing in me, breaking me down, sending me back to the earth. I could feel them, then, so hungry, so efficient. I just stared at them thinking: I know you, I know you.
You know them, too. You’ve seen what they can do.
Life and death, they’re always together, hand in hand, like inseparable friends, like sisters. And the space between them is an endless cycle of growth and decay. This is nothing to mourn. The whole fucking thing is a celebration. Every moment of it.
I love you, Lucie. Always.
— K
The letter isn’t dated. I look to the postmark: it’s from over a week ago. I laugh. How is it possible? How did she make it to Spokane to leave the letter with the sisters? How did she make it back to Marrow? How did she travel over a thousand miles round trip, being eaten alive with cancer?
I remember the picture I took of her — Katie, sleeping in my cot at the fire lookout. I can see the picture if I close my eyes: it’s the whole of the lookout — the windows stretching round, the view of the mountains to the west, the conifers knit into the sides, the robin’s-egg sky and long streaks of cloud. And the plain cabin room, with the efficiency kitchen and the table with the two oatmeal bowls, crusting over in the dry high mountain heat. And in the lower left-hand corner, the shape of her body on the cot, under a sheet in shadow, hair falling into her face; the brightest point, her hand resting against the pillow in a patch of sunlight. The picture is on my phone. I search for my phone, through my backpack, my suitcase, my jacket pockets. When was the last time I saw it? — I can’t remember. I remember shutting it off completely. The battery is old, it needs charging constantly. I only turn it on for the clock and the camera. I could prove that she had come to me, somehow. I could prove that I’m not crazy. I know what happened. I just need to find the phone. We talked and she ate my food, and drank my beer, and bathed in my river. I touched her, smelled her, and tasted her. She was as real as Carey; she was as real as my reflection in the mirror. I see myself, red-cheeked, panting, tearing everything apart looking for my phone.
“How could you fucking leave your phone behind?” I ask my reflection. Everything from the cabin is strewn across the king-size bed and floor.
I decide to take a shower. I need to calm down and think. The water flows over my hair and face, over my skin. I start to feel my limbs again. I run my hands over my belly and wonder whether there’s something growing inside me, too. Maybe it all goes back to the earthquake, to the fire, the smoke in the air, the debris onshore, the oil in the water, the dispersants. Long before the Colony. That early exposure. We were there for months, waiting for Dad to come home, waiting to bury him. Katie and me, combing through junk on the beach, wading in the water. Maybe it’s in my brain, in my eyes. Fungi cells, burning across my corneas.
Wrapped in a towel, I drink a glass of water on the edge of the bed. It’s three o’clock. I try Carey but Darlene says he’s out in the field and she’ll have him call me when he gets back. I don’t let myself think about it. I grab my keys and walk out the door. The lobby is busy — with refugees or journalists or fire-watchers, I can’t tell. I slip out the door and to my car. It hasn’t been long enough. The fire will still be miles from the cabin. I just need to get up Highway 7 and hope they don’t have all of the Forest Service roads closed. If the first is blocked, I’ll be out of luck, but maybe I could get Carey to radio, to tell them to let me through, just to get back to the cabin and back. If the second is blocked, I could go past it and around the back by the logging road along the river. I’ve never been that way to the cabin, but when we came back from Baker City, I remember Carey pointing it out—“That’s the old logging road that circles round and meets up with Road 821.” I’m sure that’s what he said. I had drawn a map in my mind, like the maps you see sometimes at trailheads. I had done that. I have the wherewithal to draw maps in my head, so I’m fine. Fine.
In the car I keep the radio tuned to dispatch, listening for word coming through about the fire and where it is. I take the road out of town and up through the hills toward the mountains. In the rearview mirror, the deep green-gray clouds of a storm roll across the plain. The radio’s quiet for some time, just the crackle like a needle skimming the blank end of a record. I’m an hour from the cabin.
There’s nothing to listen to but my own thoughts, that storm getting closer behind me. Golden sunlight slashes through the trees ahead, but the air is hazy. There’s a wild breeze whipping up dust and smoke. What am I headed for? What am I running away from? These are the only questions that matter, but I refuse to answer them. Other voices creep into my head.
My mother saying, “They found Katie on Marrow.”
And Katie — or her ghost, or a figment of my hallucinations, my psychedelic sister-lover-other — her breath on my face, saying, “I never loved you more,” before she kissed me. And Sister, before she died, calling me Katie (her protégé, her daughter, her younger self). I kissed her, too. I did what Katie would have done.
Then my father’s, singing — but I can’t actually remember his voice (how is it that I can’t remember his voice, when did it slip away?), and it comes out like Carey’s — that same song I sing to the bears and the wildcats.