Leave No Trace, page 13
I want to hold out my hands and say “you know shit about making maps and here’s how you really make a map” but then I remember I maybe can’t use Gil’s words anymore and then I see the map. His paper shows just where his base is and where we slept last night and even where the chopper is going to pick them up.
I shrug like Daddy would. We weren’t lying to them. It’s just how we do things. Most times we walk clients from the hot water place with the flag and just wander ’em around and nobody notices but really Daddy never goes more than 10,000 steps from there. I think that’s five miles. But now I can add another thing to my Tony list:
5. He’s really really smart even if I don’t know what klicks are.
“See, we don’t get something today, I can come back here anytime,” he tells me. “You know, in case we don’t find what we’re lookin’ for.”
That sounds like a promise and it makes me uncomfortable. I look out over the field, see some shifting in the trees on one side. “There.”
He sits up. Two does nose their way into the field a little, then back off. “Shit,” he says when they vanish. “You sure this ain’t a dead spot?”
I tell him I’m sure. That we come here all the time. Only, if the deer aren’t running it might be because they’re hiding. And if they’re hiding, that might mean T.J. is gonna get his wish. Which is not a good idea, no way. Artie could show up.
“Nobody wants to face Artie,” I say.
“Artie?” He laughs. “Jesus, you got a name for every wild thing out here.”
“It’s not a made-up name. It’s her real name. Jim just knew it.” Then I hear what I just blabbed. I keep doing this when he asks me questions, and I want to stop it.
He looks sideways at me. There’s a long quiet part and my face is getting red again like it did last night. I messed up. When I steal a look at him, he’s got a funny half smile on his face. “Shit, I gotta know,” he says, and with a flick he knocks my baseball cap off. It goes down, down, down into the bushes. My hair’s kinda long right now and it waves all over the place.
“Yeah,” he says, chuckling. “A girl. Somehow that’s not a surprise.”
I jump up and my hand’s at my waist. Something’s gonna die here today, might as well be him.
“Christ, please,” he says, patting the ground next to him. “Get hold of yourself. You’re just a kid.”
“I’m not.”
He gives me a long look. “Well, you’re mostly a kid.” He pauses. “Look, I am not here to hurt you. Unless you make me hurt you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Don’t even try.”
It would be a long way down, but I could bring him with me.
We were here two Christmases and three summers when I heard Daddy and Jim talking. They were outside splitting wood, putting it into the shed and I was reading a book in the cabin, stretched out over Daddy’s bed.
Dad, seriously, Jim was saying. Are we?
No. Daddy wasn’t even angry, just positive. You know my answer. We can’t and we won’t.
Ever? Jim’s voice cracked a lot back then. It would start normal and then go up a bit in the middle of the word. Made him mad when it happened. Like, we’ll both still be here when we’re all middle-aged and you’re, what, ancient? That kind of forever?
Doubtful, Daddy allowed. Once you’re eighteen, things are different.
Different how?
Just different. You’ll be a man. Can make your own decisions.
I’m a man now. Jim was getting mad, I heard it in his voice.
That’s what you think.
Jim stomped into the cabin a couple minutes later. You heard that, he told me. We are never going home.
We are home, I said, and I meant it.
But it wasn’t ever home for Jim. Another year went by and I was almost twelve and he was better than me at everything in the woods. He stopped talking about leaving and just became xpert in hunting and hiding and making things and he read every book we had and I thought maybe he was okay with it now. His voice stopped making funny noises. We were always busy: Jim chopped and built and tanned hides and repaired the leaky roof. I did gardening and preserving and cooking and keeping the inside and the outside of the cabin all neat and no bugs and no holes for mice or anything.
Daddy would go away sometimes. I think he was starting to track for people but we didn’t know it then. He’d go for a day, two, three sometimes and always left us jobs to do. Jim was boss while he was gone and sometimes he acted like Daddy, telling me what to do. Whenever Daddy came back it wasn’t nice between them. Jim didn’t go hug him, say he missed him like I did.
Then came fall and Jim told me in secret: I’m taking off again.
I got all scared for him. You just want to leave me and Daddy forever.
Not you, he said.
We live here.
No, he told me. We survive here. Dad stole us and didn’t ask what we wanted. It’s been four years. I can find a way out now, I know it. And there’s somebody who’s gonna help me.
Who?
Secret. Tell you once I’m sure. I want you coming with me. But we gotta pick the right time.
I like it here, I said, but a small piece of me wondered what the world looked like now.
Great. When you’re older you can go camp all the hell you want. But this ain’t where people should live. It’s hard. There are tons of things we can’t fix and Dad doesn’t know about everything. He doesn’t even know about … he took a long pause. Girl things. I’m not sure I do either.
I didn’t argue that point. I got real scared when I started bleeding between my legs that summer and my stomach hurt a lot. I didn’t say anything because maybe it was sickness and Daddy would take steps. But then he figured it out I guess when he looked at the trash and I woke up with Our Bodies Our Selves next to me with this special rubbery cup I had to learn how to work and wash and use again. The book told me things about bodies and something called puberty but Daddy never said anything. Jim pulled me to one side and said it was normal and not a sickness and it would happen once a month but I really should read the whole book.
When Daddy left the next time, we followed him. We got our supplies together superfast and tracked him good for an hour or two and then we came to this big open field. We stood at the treeline while Daddy walked into the middle of the field, turned around and wagged a finger back and forth. No. He was smiling like he’d been playing a game with us.
Jim walked forward anyway, and Daddy headed back to us. They kept doing it until they were nose to nose and shouting and then—then Jim put up his fist like he was punching Daddy, but Daddy caught it and pushed him away. They shouted some more and Jim spat on the ground and turned to come back to me.
We didn’t go anywhere but back to the cabin.
Daddy came home after his regular three days, late at night when we were up in the loft in our sleeping bags. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. But then a sound woke me. I wiggled my toes like I always did to alert Jim but there was nobody there. I sat up and thought he better not have run off again.
A creak on the floor made me look down. There was Jim, passing through a bit of moonbeam, holding Daddy’s hunting knife by the handle with the point to the ground. He was taking his last steps to where Daddy was sleeping and looked like he was ready to gut a deer.
I yelped, then covered my mouth.
Jim froze in his moonbeam and looked up at me, unhappy. But Daddy didn’t wake up. In a minute he started walking again. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to shout but my brain got stuck. Nothing would come out.
Jim stood over Daddy what felt like a long time. Eight, nine, ten breaths. His hand was shaky on the knife. Daddy’s eyes opened up. He stared at Jim.
Well, son, if you’re gonna try, time’s a-wastin’, said Daddy.
I took in a big breath and Jim’s shoulders twitched. He crumpled and sagged and then in a flash Daddy had the knife and threw it against the cabin wall where it stuck and wobbled. In another second he cracked Jim in the face with the flat of his hand and it was like a piece of cooking firewood had popped. Jim didn’t step back. He just stared at Daddy.
So that’s how it is, said Daddy.
Yeah, said Jim, all tight and mean. That’s how it is.
Daddy nodded slow. Get the hell back to bed. Don’t wake your sister. You and me will sort this out in the daylight.
Xcept in the morning when I woke up, Daddy and Jim were gone. The knife was out of the cabin wall. A note told me they were coming back in a day or two.
But I never saw Jim anymore after that.
Because he ran away.
That’s what Daddy said.
Betwixt and Between
“Stef, you up?”
T.J., outside her tent. Stef is very much awake; a half hour ago Tony unceremoniously unzipped her tent and thrust Gillie inside, barking orders not to let the creature escape and to stay mum about their discovery. After that, there was no chance of her going back to sleep.
“Mmmph,” she mutters, as if just aroused. “Go without me. Got … cramps.”
Gillie, wearing her blanket like a cowl, gives Stef a glance.
“Aww,” says T.J. “Figures.”
“Come on,” growls Samuel. “Get that bow and let’s get moving. You sleep in like you did yest’day and you’ll miss the day.”
Stef waits until their footsteps fade and the only sound in the camp is the crackle of the bonfire. Then she dresses quickly and grabs a book, slipping out. Gillie does not move, so she zips her inside and heads to the fire. After giving the low flames a poke Stef leafs through the same page of her book eight times, drinks some coffee, and chews on cereal with canned milk. Nothing has any taste. She feels electric, anticipatory, tuned in somehow—but at the same time numbed.
Magic is real, she thinks. Or unseen. Or the soul. Whatever you want to call it. Maybe that means unicorns and dragons and witches are, too. Her thoughts feel crazy and wild, and because she can’t be sure, everything around her feels alien.
She tries the book one more time, then glances over at the tent as if it might explode. At last her eyes fix on the text and she gets through a page or two—and glances up again. Gillie is standing there, hooded by the blanket but coated in a green moss that looks like a soft velvet onesie. Her legs have grown pale, shining bark.
“Lass,” says Gillie in greeting.
Stef looks her over a long while without replying. It isn’t often she gets to stare at a walking, talking impossibility; seeing her in the daylight is even more startling than at night. Gillie is beautiful in an off-center manner—not like a streaming PoppyStar or a Hollywood film hero, where all that matters is an angular face and chiseled body. Instead, Gillie is breathtaking in the way a silvery still lake is, or a blossoming field of flowers, or the crystal blue sky itself. Gillie is of the forest in all ways possible, and Stef can muster no words to describe how.
She gestures for her to take a seat. Gillie folds her legs on the ground. “Coffee?” Stef asks, offering her a mug.
Gillie sniffs at the lukewarm brew, then dips her tongue into it once and drops the mug on the ground, where it spills and rolls to one side. She brushes at her tongue, then realizes she’s being stared at and stops, sitting up straight.
“I say thanks but nae,” she says.
Picking up the mug, Stef wonders again if what she did the night before was the right thing. She said what she had to keep Tony from burning the sìthean up right there and then, but in his own brutal way he had been convincing. In theory it was all well and good that little make-believe creatures were actually real and hanging out with humans, but as Stef knew from personal experience, this world had enough trouble getting along with its human inhabitants. People didn’t need another thing to get worked up about, not when they got upset over basically nothing at all. Yet killing something living, something intelligent like Gillie, was wrong on its face.
“Want breakfast?” she asks Gillie.
“D’ye have apples?” Gillie perks up.
She roots around in Tony’s backpack and comes up with two, handing them both to the sìthean. Gillie takes long deep smells of each and sets them on the ground in front of her, then picks up the larger of the two and makes half the fruit disappear at once. Juice dribbles down her chin.
“Why are you here?” Stef asks her.
After much chewing and swallowing, Gillie answers. “Ye knows why. Yer friend—”
“Tony’s not my friend.”
Gillie takes another bite.
“I mean, why are you here at all? In this world? Didn’t Lexi say you have a whole other place to be? Why bother us here?”
Gillie finishes the first apple and glances longingly at the second. She is already growing fresh leaf-and-bark armor, and grass shoots unfurl like graceful dancers on her head. “Ye’s in a special place,” she said. “Tha woods ’round here are worn-up. So this place is more ours than yours, truly.”
“Worn-up?”
“Aye. Means a thin place between here,” she pats the forest floor, “an’ there.” Her fingers twirl into the air. “My home.”
“I see. And a person can pass between if they find a worn-up place.”
“Aye, mostly,” she says. “But. Worn-up places are tha cause of trouble nowawhens. Becoming too big, so I hear tell. An’ our home grows small in turn.”
It’s not making much sense to Stef, but she gets the basic idea: The apertures are widening, and for some reason that’s erasing The Green Place Lexi rhapsodized about. “But you folk just come and go when you feel like it.”
“When tha trees are with me I can. Time to time, others come on their ownsome. Artio, say. Morrigan maybe. I am the caretaker o’ the forest, if ye will.”
“Artio’s one of you?”
“In a manner o’ speakin’, aye. She’s a bear, true, but contains many.”
Stef shakes her head; they’re veering off course. “What’s wrong with your place, though? Why leave?”
“ ’ Tis wrong to be curious?”
“Suppose not.” Stef is feeling a bit sulky about the whole matter. “But last I heard, it’s not reciprocal. Not like I can go check out your—home.”
“Nay, ’tis not wise.”
“Why?”
Gillie picks up the second apple and strokes it, smells it. Sets it aside. “Was a time when thee and me—was from tha same tree. Same kind o’ being. D’ye ken?”
Stef shook her head. No way were they related. “We don’t get that particular lesson in history class. Y’all are make-believe stories for kids.”
Gillie holds her hands out, palms up. “D’ye believe the make-believing to be true now?”
Stef chuckles. “Either you’re a pretty excellent shared hallucination or yeah, you’re real. But you’re not all that … human looking.”
“Nae,” says Gillie, and begins storytelling.
In a time before time, humans and fey were one. Everyone had magic. Everyone created in the physical world. But over many centuries there were those who naturally gravitated toward one kind of creation—that of tools, machines, cookery (Gillie calls it “food manipulation”), construction—and those who applied magic to enhance ephemeral creations. They might take the concrete fashionings of one person and elevate them with magic—vessels that never emptied, wheels that did not break, gold that turned to leaves, bandages that healed wounds at a touch. Then they went further—trees could whisper, songs could hold a listener in thrall, souls might be transferred into animals when the body died, a warrior who could warp into an unstoppable beast-man.
Over time there came a split—a divide beyond which one half could only make with their hands, and the other half only could make with their magic … and as the divide grew, the fear of the other increased. Battles broke out. In the end an invisible barrier became necessary to separate the fey from the humans. On one side, fey might live in their forever green country of magic and maybes and semi-immortality; on the other, humans would exist in a more substantial world of absolutes, constants, and rules. Each had magic, but only one used it. The other feared it.
In time, each became the other’s myth.
“We cannae do tha clockworks and fashioning,” says Gillie, “tho’ we dae know how to make a shoe, funny thing. An’ ye’s people rarely access tha true unseen, save for a few. We have come an’ gone betwixt an’ between for ever and ever, an’ some of times ye have come our way through tha worn-up places of tha world. But. Nae without price.”
At last, something tweaks in Stef’s memory—a story she read of a handsome musician, taken to the fairy world, brought back many years later. “Time bends on your side; for us, doesn’t it,” she says slowly.
“Aye,” says Gillie. “So, ’tis not good for travel an’ visits an’ the like for yer kind. Ye lose time an’ desire only to stay. Too long over here, my folk have a loss of mind—of remembering.”
“You forget?”
She nods. “The longer we remain on this side, the harder to recall why to return. Or who we are. Or the things we do. An’ so we are lost.”
Stef pictures it, a lonely endless displacement—to know you don’t fit but also not know where you are supposed to be. Or even who you once were. “So is that what has everybody so worked up? Y’all are curious, so you come over and forget to go back?”
“Nae,” says Gillie. “My home turns dark an’ cold, an’ we fear ’tis maybe the barrier is dying. ’Tis a mystery why. My world is narrow. Trees fare terrible in war, so we stay clear. But—we need help, from some such as yerself. An’ Lexi. An’ even … T.J.” She sighs. “But things move so fast in this world, lass. A blink to us, an’ all changes.”
Stef thinks about this. They know something is going wrong, but time on their side moves so slowly that the answer is always out of their reach. “Don’t know how I can help.”
