I found the blanket. That’s when I filed the missing person report. A search party was sent out. They say the first forty-eight hours after a person goes missing are the most important. And if she went missing that night, or the day after, then I’d left her missing for a good 336 hours.
I could have walked that whole section of the woods before calling the authorities, but something in me knew. I didn’t want to find her body, not alone, so I filed the report, let the rangers find it for me in the last hut at the end of the peak. This one was built with special care. Most of the huts lean against a living pine, which acts as a center beam, but this one was built so well it didn’t need a pine on which to lean. The dead aspens crisscrossed each other, like a perfect thatched teepee. The walls were so thick you couldn’t see through them. A perfect home.
The dogs smelled her first. The rangers called me over. Wind blew through the trees, and gold leaves fell on my head. Someone had built a tunnel out of small dead trunks to form an extended entrance to this hut. I watched a ranger get on his hands and knees, and disappear into the wooden tunnel. Indistinguishable runes were etched into the small dead sticks at the threshold.
As the ranger disappeared, I followed him in. Others in the search party objected, but the sound of the wind through the aspens’ branches muted their voices into whispers.
The earth was pliant and damp beneath my palms. Grass didn’t grow in this tunnel — as if it had been tread many times. The musk of rot overpowered the scent of earth. After a few feet of crawling, the tunnel opened into the hut. The ranger and I stood above her body. Only small beams of light penetrated the hut’s thick walls, glinting on portions of Callie’s stiff face, illuminating the many gold leaves scattered over her corpse. The hut’s walls seemed to close in, the layers and layers of dead aspens, which crowded around her body, and us. The air was thin and dense at the same time. One of those impossible paradoxes that has to exist because it can’t possibly be. A small beam of light shone on Callie’s open eyes. I followed her gaze, up the aspen trunks. Their dark eyes looked back at me accusingly.
Disorientation and lack of food and water was what the medical investigator wrote in the report. But the last hut isn’t even that far from the Aspen Vista trail. You can walk there and back in an hour. And the section of woods hosting these huts drops off into valleys, forming it into a neat triangle. If Callie got to the last hut, or even one of them, how could she not find the trail a half hour hike away?
She left me alone for a week after the funeral. But then she started calling. My phone ringing every evening, sometimes four times a night. Her voice crackling and distant through sounds of the wind. I wanted to believe it was sleep paralysis or the aftereffects of drug use, but when your deceased loved one calls you this fucking often, and you were at the funeral, and you know her phone is long gone and disconnected, and every day is a shallow shadow of the life you had since finding her body, well, you start to take these calls seriously.
“Danny? Danny, I miss you. I’m here, and I think I’m close to the path, but I’m not sure. Can you bring a flashlight? I know I fucked up, and I’m sorry. Please, just come get me. For the love of Christ, I need you to get me out of these woods. Please. I love you.”
Holding the phone to my cheek, I began to cry into the receiver. She wouldn’t let me mourn. She just wouldn’t let me let her die.
“I love you too, babe. I’ll be there soon.”
It was so damn cold, my long-sleeve shirt and heavy winter jacket couldn’t keep the dry wind from cutting into my bones. As I walked up the trail in the dark, the wind scratched at my face like precise little claws. I pulled my scarf tight around my mouth as I trudged up the snowy path. The aspens loomed over me, leafless and naked. When I got to the turn in the trail where the mountain stretches into the section of huts, I took a deep breath. I raised my flashlight higher, stepped off the trail, and headed into the woods where we’d found Callie.
Hiking in snow, my muscles stiffened, and my body grew heavy. I descended down the slope of the mountain, deeper and deeper. My calves burned, and the light I carried shook as my limbs tremored. The aspens grew denser as I maneuvered between their skeletal bodies. I came to the hut that Callie had called her “home.” I looked out at the view from our make-believe porch, facing the opposing peak. The treetops were covered in snow. The wind hit my face too aggressively for me to register the view, or anything, as beautiful.
I looked behind me, into the doorway of the hut. I thought of going inside to rest, to cry, to gather myself from the abrasive wind, and maybe just let Callie’s death hit me for a moment as real, but as I looked, the darkness seemed to move within.
I didn’t feel afraid. I watched it for a moment, though I didn’t raise my flashlight to it. The shadows seemed to curl in on themselves. They looked... cozy.
I decided not to disturb them, whatever they were — these hallucinations that felt familiar, like friends I hadn’t seen for a very long time. I continued on. Through snow, and over fallen trunks, past the aspen with a carved smile. I stopped and gave it a wink. I thought maybe its smile grew, and I laughed at the trunk. I looked down at my boots. A sob choked in my throat, and a few tears rolled down my cheek, hot, then turned into cold trails where they’d slid.
“I miss her so much, you know?” I said to the face. “I didn’t mean to — you know? I didn’t mean for this — damn!” My teeth grinding against each other, I stared hard at the face in the tree. Its trunk was blunt white, the eyes dark, but somehow soft.
I began to sob, and stumbled toward it. I dropped the flashlight, wrapped my arms around the aspen, and pressed my face into its smooth bark. I held onto it tight, a poor substitute for holding her, but the only one I had. These trees were the only ones to witness my utter breakdown, to support me as I processed her death. My sobs built, then crescendoed, and as they diminished into heavy breaths, I pulled away from the aspen, keeping my open palms at its sides and my forehead pressed against its eyes.
The wind died down. The woods maintained an eerie silence, emphasized by the snow, like the silence of many people holding their tongues. I looked up at the aspen. Red sap leaked from the corners of its eyes. I chuckled, then kept walking.
I didn’t pick up the flashlight. I decided the light from the sliver of moon reflecting off the snow was enough. I stepped over fallen trunks without looking at them, as if I knew where each part of the forest was placed. I walked and walked. I passed hut after hut. An hour must have passed, then another, and another. The section of forest I knew so well in the day didn’t seem to have an end to it now. But I felt, in some way, that I knew it better than before. The darkness folded in on itself, the aspens tripled and multiplied. Their eyes followed. I never grew tired. The night fragmented and stretched. Their eyes anticipated. I was no longer cold.
I came to the last hut, but I knew it wasn’t the last. It was the first, and forever. My future and past. I kneeled at the entrance, drew in a breath. I fingered the small dead trunks that formed the threshold. The aspens held their breath. The wood held a carved heart. Within the jagged lines of the heart, Callie + Danny.