A History of Wild Places(10)

I put the truck in reverse and the tires spin briefly before finding traction. The truck lurches backward, the rear bumper nudging against a small tree, and when I crank the wheel, the headlights swing wide, illuminating the tall pines.

… there’s something there.

My foot slams the brake, and I squint through the falling snow. Etched into the bark, are three gashes. The same ones I saw back at the burnt-out house. A marker, a roadmap. Maggie turned left here. She followed the marks on the trees: This is how she knew where she was going.

I put the truck back in gear and fishtail up this new, narrower road. Five more times I come to a fork in the road or an intersecting route—a decision to be made. And each time, I find the three marks.

Maggie didn’t wander aimlessly into this dark forest, just out for an afternoon hike, she followed marks made by someone else.

I travel like this for another two hours—cresting the top of steep hills, then inching through a maze of low-hanging branches—until I reach an abrupt end: a mammoth pine tree fallen across the path, limbs splintered and broken, blocking the road. But there is a thin opening through the trees to the left, and I steer the truck toward the gap.

The engine whines as I accelerate, the truck bounces over something—a large rock or a tree stump—and then I hear the sound: the squeal of the engine, followed by the whoosh of tires spinning in the snow.

I’m stuck.

I climb out of the truck, and after several attempts at packing down the snow in front of each tire, then trying to accelerate slowly out of the deep snow, but listening to the tires just spin in place, I realize the entire truck is high-centered, resting atop the packed snow.

Without a winch or a tow truck, I’m fully fucked.

I kill the engine and the headlights fall dark. I check my cell phone, but there’s not even a blip of a signal, no way to call Ben, or that little tow truck company I passed back in town. I’m too deep into the wilderness now. I’m on my own. I grab the backpack on the seat beside me, filled with mostly convenience store snacks, a flashlight, and a notebook for jotting down the things I will relay to the family or police later. I cinch the pack closed, slip the small silver book-charm into my pocket, along with the truck keys, and step out into the snow.

I will follow Maggie on foot.

And in some strange way, walking away from this shitty old truck feels like the full demise of my life. Rock bottom.

I have nothing more to lose.



* * *




Tree limbs sag overhead like carcasses of the dead. But the snow has stopped falling and the clouds have separated enough to see the quarter moon. Space Donut Hole, my sister Ruth called it when we were little. She’d pretend to reach up into the sky and pluck it down with her grubby, lollipop-sticky fingertips, then pantomime taking a big bite out of it while rolling her eyes in exaggerated delight. My little sister loved to make me laugh.

This is the memory of Ruth I prefer.

Not the one that came later.

When I found her crumpled in the corner of a shitty motel room outside Duluth, Minnesota, right along the shore of Lake Superior. She’d been missing for a month when I finally decided to go look for her. A whole wasted month. But she’d gone missing before—chasing bad boyfriends and dead-end jobs serving drinks at dusty, cigarette-clouded bars. She’d call every few months, promise that she was fine, then slip off the map again. The last time I saw her before she vanished, she looked strung out, on more than just booze, and I was worried about her. A ticking in my ears that wouldn’t go away, telling me that something wasn’t right this time—that she was worse than usual.

I don’t know where things went wrong for my sister. She’d always been tough, thick-skinned and thick-skulled, even as a kid. And after our parents died only a few months apart—colon cancer, then lung cancer—she decided everything was fucked anyway. She was only twenty when they passed away, and my sister became a don’t-piss-her-off-or-she’ll-pop-you-right-in-the-face kind of girl. It’s also what I loved about her. Her sturdiness—she was built to last. Her I-can-take-care-of-myself attitude. But it also made it difficult for her to ask for help, to admit when she needed her big brother.

I tracked her afterimage for a week and a half, using a broken seashell I found in the box of her belongings she’d asked to keep at my apartment months earlier. When I dug through the cardboard box, looking for something of hers to use, I recognized the shell from a trip we took to Pacific City, Oregon, when I was twelve and she was seven. She’d held on to it after all those years—tucked away in that box. A piece of our childhood. Broken, just like she was.

I had the shell clutched in my hand when I tracked her to that motel room and pushed open the door, left ajar. It was four in the morning, and when I saw her, I stood stock-still in that doorway. I knew the slack look on her face, the drooped shoulders, the strange half-closed eyelids. I’d seen the look before.

I knew my sister was gone.

I crossed the room and knelt beside her and held her in my arms like she was seven years old again. Like when we were kids and she’d wake from a nightmare and crawl into my bed. I wept, too, an awful heaving of my rib cage, like some brittle place inside me was trying to crack open. It was the cold, hard realization that I’d found her too late. My parents were long buried in the ground, and now my only sister was dead too. I was painfully, sickeningly alone.