Homer! I shouted but the wind snatched my voice away.
I started toward the driveway, hoping he wouldn’t suddenly decide to bolt. If he did, he was on his own. There wasn’t no searching for him in whiteout conditions.
Of course I should of known, even before I got to her, which dog it was. Should of known that if I tried to pet her fur my hand would go right through her.
When I reached Old Su, she looked up at me, barked, then trotted away, down the drive. I blinked and expected she would vanish, or at least be lost in the tumbling snow, but she was still visible, every now and then the snow let up and I would glimpse her, twenty feet away, forty, now nearly to the place where the driveway cut through the trees.
I run after her.
I got a break from the wind when I reached the trees, protected for about a quarter of a mile, till I reached the end of the drive and stood on the shoulder of the highway. The wind slicing through my coat.
Su was there, maybe a dozen yards away, walking south along the side of the road, toward the village. Except she wasn’t alone. Even in the dark, with no light or moon shining down and the snow flying, I could make out Mom’s red coat.
I followed her. A car trundled by, moving slow, and for a long moment its headlights lit the road. She paused on the shoulder, silhouetted, waited for the car to pass.
She never did talk much about how she’d hunted when she was a little girl. She’d told me about running wild in the woods, disappearing for hours or even days and coming home with tangled hair, covered in dirt. In blood, too, most likely, though she never mentioned that part. She’d only said she’d been a wild thing. Till she decided to tame herself.
She took a few more steps, then stopped short. Crouched down. Minutes had passed, or hours, I couldn’t tell. The evening had cinched tight, the snow had nowhere to go, it filled my eyes and blotted out everything but her.
All the questions I should of asked her but never did. All the ones I did ask, only for her to dodge a straight answer. Why hadn’t I insisted on answers, like how, exactly, she had stopped herself drinking? Or why people and animals was so different, and how she knew. What had happened to the boy who’d got lost in the woods when she was little. Why she wouldn’t go into the woods alone. Where she went when she snuck out at night. I remembered holding those questions back, afraid she would spook and scurry away, shut me out.
She knelt on the shoulder of the road. This far outside the village, in this weather, in the dark, she didn’t have to hide herself.
Why the trash bin in her bathroom was so often filled with scraps of tissue soaked red.
Why she was so often sick, and so quickly well again.
When I thought of how she died, I used to wonder what she was thinking when the truck hit her. If time had stretched out as she flew through the air, as flakes spun round her, like floating in a sea of snow. And I wondered what she was doing out, middle of the night, walking along the highway’s edge.
She hunched over the body. You’d find them flattened in the middle of the road or thrown to the shoulder, those that had met their end crossing the highway. Long dead. Long cold.
I had roamed the woods for days at a time with no catch. I knew what it was like to go without. How you become desperate enough you will take whatever you can get. How you look at your own arms, the cuts you’ve made, dizzy with the loss of blood, and realize you’ve already taken too much. All you want is something warm. And if there’s nothing warm, then you will settle for anything that will stop the ache inside you.
I didn’t know I was crying till a sob wrenched itself from me. I covered my face and wept, aching for her. Aching after her. She was just a few feet from me, close enough for me to ask her anything, but I didn’t have no more questions. I only wanted to tell her to stay. Not to hide.
But when I took my hands away, she was already gone.
No moon, no beams of light from cars driving toward me as I turned round and headed for home. Nothing but snow, thick as a wall. The driveway, soft with accumulation. If I hadn’t been blinded by the storm. If my own head hadn’t been filled with longing for her. If my eyes had seen what was in front of me instead of what was inside me, I might of noticed the fresh tire tracks, leading to the house.
Sometimes I think maybe she never did get hit by that truck. I went to her funeral so I know full well she is nothing but a pile of ashes that Dad scattered in the raised beds where she used to plant her garden. But sometimes I let myself believe she tricked us all, that whoever those ashes was, they wasn’t my mother. That my real mother had planned all along to take to the woods that night. She didn’t head for the highway like usual but down the trail, till she come to a clearing in the brush and boulders and snow, where she could see the rolling land and the mountains, and she let herself be pulled onward, into the wild. She descended then climbed, and every step took her farther from her old life. Closer to what she always knew she was. What she knew she’d always be. What she’d told me time and again I could run away from the moment I chose to, the moment I had a good enough reason, when all along she’d known what I know now, that you can’t run from the wild inside of you.
Taillights stopped me at the bend in the drive. Two red eyes that flickered in the dark, in the blowing snow, before they went out completely and I heard a car door open and close. I slipped and nearly fell as my feet found a new direction, away from the house and toward the kennel. I’d missed him on the road, the same snow that now hid me from him had blocked his headlights, or I’d been too distracted by ghosts to notice them. And now he was on my doorstep, or working his way round the corner of the house, searching for the shed. Quiet, grateful for the wail of the wind to mask his approach.
I reached the kennel and pulled the door closed behind me and the constant noise fell away, the whine of the wind muffled by the walls, and for a moment I felt like I’d gone deaf. I could hear my own heart, thudding hard in my chest.
I needed to move, but I was stuck. Pulled in so many directions at once, I couldn’t move at all. My mind like a moth inside a clutched fist. It’s contrary, the way some critters will go still when a predator is nearby, instead of running or hiding or fighting back. But I understood it now, the way every possibility can seem like a mistake, so you end up not making any decision at all.
I shook my head, like to clear it. That wasn’t me. I had the advantage, Hatch thought I was inside the house. I could come from behind, ambush him before he even knew what happened. But Dad’s gun was propped in the corner of the kitchen where I’d left it. My eyes darted round the barn. Dad’s workbench, with the big saw. Dozens of harnesses hung from nails. Axes, hammers, even the wrenches and screwdrivers in Dad’s toolbox, the whole kennel full of tools that could be used as weapons but none of them a sure thing. I was strong, I had pinned Jesse when I felt half dead, and now, after several days of hunting and drinking, I was better than well. But I was still a girl. Stronger than most, but I wasn’t sure I could kill a grown man if it come down to a hand-to-hand fight. I needed distance to kill Hatch, and certainty. I needed the shotgun.
The wind died all at once, a lull in the storm. I held still, my ears aching from listening so hard. Quiet outside. He could be inside the house by now, or in the shed. Anywhere.
I waited for a surge in the wind then opened the kennel door. A gale caught it, nearly wrenched the door from my hand. I gripped hard and pressed my whole body against it to get it shut. Then stood with the wind wrapping itself round me, bits of ice and snow biting at my face. I turned. Let instinct and memory lead me in the direction of the house, invisible in the flying snow. Everything invisible.