And so I had feigned being sick, I convinced Dad to run my race, I hid Scott at a friend’s. I planned and waited, and made certain everyone I cared about was safe, and then I had finished what I’d started. And then Helen’s voice spoke my name through the windstorm, her eyes found me in the blowing snow. Her blood blossomed red between her fingers.
Trace?
I cleared my throat. I’m sure, I said.
The wall I had been building all my life between us, this was the final brick. Cemented in place, I couldn’t never take it back. I had my own regret. My own horror at what I done. Worse, I had his confusion. His fear that something terrible had happened. It had, of course. There wasn’t no coming back from it.
He sighed. Okay, he said, his voice small in the dark. Good night, kiddo. Love you.
He did. Love like a wildfire, like a monsoon, like a tsunami, love that consumed him, that existed like a physical thing, something with breadth and depth and heft. I felt it when he was near, different from the way he loved Helen, or Mom. It was the love you have for something you have made, something that is still part of you. It was overwhelming, its endlessness, I couldn’t bear the weight of it. Yet I feared it would vanish if he knew what I done.
It is like this, life is just a greedy vulture. I have read about how vultures will eat and eat, no matter how full they are, they will keep gobbling up whatever’s in front of them. Life gobbles up one thing and that just makes it greedier, so it starts swallowing other things, too. It starts with Mom. She walks into the night and never comes back. The dogs are next, one by one they are taken. Then our way of life. Then Dad, the way things used to be between me and him. And if you think there’s a way to get used to that kind of loss, all you have to do is live long enough. Nothing stays.
I found it the next morning. Searching for the small knob of flint I needed to spark against my knife blade to make a fire, rummaging through the unfamiliar pockets of Jesse’s pack, thinking idly how I would have to mend my own pack when I returned home. I emptied it, then cursed. Held it upside down and shook it, and what fell on the ground wasn’t my lost flint, but a knife.
I had took out the tin cup and the bag of rice, everything inside the pack, left it all in my room. But the knife must of been wedged under a seam inside the bag this whole time. A nice pocketknife with a pretty burled handle. I frowned. Picked it up, turned it over in my hand.
And remembered spotting it among the cheap fluffy prizes lined up on the shelves of the Test Your Strength booth, Everyone walks away a winner, you there, you look like a strong man, step on over. The ringing bell, then Tom telling me to pick out my prize, he’d won it for me. I look with Jesse’s eyes past the stuffed bunnies and bears to the only object worth anything, a burl-handled pocketknife. And there’s a chorus of screams from one of the rides, and my stomach drops and soars at the same time as Tom leans over me, we kiss—
My nose running, I wiped it with the sleeve of my coat. Then opened the knife. The blade sharp but stained a rusty brown, he hadn’t bothered to wipe it clean, likely because he’d been in a hurry. The blade itself emblazoned with the name of the manufacturer, the blood would of been harder to clean from the engraved letters. goodwin knife co.
I dropped the knife, it made a hole in the snow.
I hadn’t let myself think about the day I’d stabbed Hatch more than I absolutely had to, but now I called it up. There was the chattering in my head from the squirrel as the life drained from it.
There was the bloody handprint on the trunk of the tree, and the grass, dewed with blood.
There was Hatch, his hands already on me when I turned.
And here, I always run into a wall, a blackness that descended upon me when Hatch tossed me aside and my head struck the hard root sticking out of the ground. I had tried to search for him inside me, some part of him that I had taken in, but I’d never found it.
Because it wasn’t there.
Instead of putting my effort into looking for Hatch, I put it into what I actually seen that day. Like the blood. It was already glistening on the blades of grass and smeared across the tree’s trunk before I spun round. On Hatch’s hand when he’d reached out for me. Hatch was already bleeding by the time he come to me. Already weak. Too weak to toss aside a girl who was small, sure, but muscular and heavy. He hadn’t lunged at me, he’d staggered. Hadn’t grabbed me, but clutched at me, needing help. Because he was already in trouble before we met.
I knelt, dug into the snow for the knife. Folded the blade back into the handle.
You about ready to head back? Dad asked as he emerged from the trees where he’d gone off to take a piss.
I nodded. My throat too dry to tell him yes. I was ready.
I pocketed the knife. Two knives on me now. Mine, and the one that had started everything.
21
We got home just before dusk, it wasn’t hard to busy myself with the dogs then claim I was awful tired and hide myself in my room the rest of the evening. At dinner, Jesse joined Dad and Scott, the three of them barely talking, Helen on their minds. The VSO had called with an update, not that there was much new. Nothing at her house to indicate she’d meant to do something permanent to herself or that she’d only set out to go on a drive. No sign anyone had forced her to leave her house. Jesse, Scott, and Dad chewed and stared at their plates and their thoughts shone up through the floorboards like beams of light. Scott worried he’d left his camera at Helen’s, and then cringed, ashamed to be worried over a little thing like that when Helen was missing. Dad’s head filled with gruesome pictures, Helen torn apart by wolves, frozen in the forest, murdered by a stranger, smeared on the side of a highway miles and miles from here. Sometimes it wasn’t Helen he thought of, but Mom, a painful sort of mirroring, a life full of tragedy, a tugging at the seams that held him together.
I closed my eyes and concentrated.
Seen myself in Jesse’s thoughts. The nights we’d spent together, the shadowy parts of me, questions he had about what I knew about him, what I could know. Impressions from his time on the road with Steve Inga, traveling from one checkpoint to the next by snow machine. He’d liked Steve, who had reminded him a little of Tom, his willingness to pitch in with any job, his ease with tools. At the center of Jesse, that same box, locked tight. Things he kept himself from thinking about, things he kept even from himself.
I could feel his thoughts, but I couldn’t make him think about the things he didn’t want to. It didn’t matter. There was other ways to learn what I needed to learn.
I sat with my knees drawn up in the rocking chair that used to belong to Mom, listening to the din that rose up out of the silence downstairs.
Dad poked his head into my room before he turned in, late, long past when he normally might of gone to bed. He was looking more and more like he done right after Mom died, eyes hollow and bloodshot.
Not too late, okay?
I could of reminded him then that I was eighteen and pretty far past needing someone to tell me when bedtime was. But I was comforted more than irritated by him checking in on me. From his perspective, it was his job to look out for me, and always would be.