Chapter 1 Riley #5
Or maybe it was Cousin stumbling towards them on the trail, arms swinging, white face crawling with flies, red strawberry spilling from the corner of his mouth.
No.
Riley knows that she must never think about that part. People carry their thoughts in their eyes.
Riley and Oliver roll out their packs. The canvas is waxy-smelling, good as new. Cousin talked about being a survival expert and close to nature. But he never left the city in all the time Riley and Oliver stayed with him. The packs stayed in the store cupboard.
‘Oliver Olive,’ Riley says, ‘come over and share.’
Oliver crawls into her arms and she zips them both up. He wriggles until his body fits her contours. He’s trembling. Riley breathes, draws the air down deep, so he can take the relaxation from her body.
‘Remember how I tickled your toes when you were born?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’ He always says he remembers things that happened just after he was born.
‘I was sitting with you both in the hospital room. Mom was sleeping. You were awake, though. You were looking right at me. And you were confused.’
‘I didn’t understand how I was outside when I’d been inside.’
‘I could see that. It was all too much new stuff. You thought maybe everyone was an enemy. How could you know different? So I grabbed your feet—’ Riley reaches down and grabs his socked toes. Oliver squeals with delight.
‘Yes, that’s the noise you made! Just like that. Then I tried to eat your head …’ she snarls and gnashes her teeth on his dark hair. ‘And you just laughed and laughed.’ They are both giggling now, it’s so stupid. ‘Mom woke up, she was mad, but we were just laughing.’
‘We were laughing and laughing,’ he says, drowsy. She strokes his head, slowly, slowly, until his breath follows suit, and he sleeps. Despite it all he trusts her. He doesn’t know any better.
It didn’t really happen like that. Babies that little don’t laugh. But he loves the story and it’s become part of their history.
Riley doesn’t sleep much. She keeps her arms free, one hand on the gun. Every now and again she thinks she hears soft breath, as though a large muzzle is pressed to the crack under the door. But either it goes away or it was just the wind.
What really happened is that Riley sat in that hospital room next to Mom, who was passed out, and she watched Oliver as he lay in his crib.
He stared around, barely able to see with his little dark-blue new eyes, barely able to wave his little hands and feet, unable to move his little perfect head.
She was seven. People don’t think kids that young can feel things so deeply, but that’s not true.
Something woke in her, painful like a tear in the world.
Maybe that’s always how love is, Riley doesn’t know. She only loves Oliver.
Riley touched the little baby’s hand, his silken head. I’ll never leave you, she told him. I’ll always be here.
Dawn brings a freezing mist. They climbed pretty high overnight and are now at over six thousand feet.
She watches Oliver’s still face – his closed lids, long lashes soft and dark on round cheeks.
She hopes he’ll be ok. His breath seems to come a little short in his sleep.
They are both hungry and tired and everything seems less and less real the higher they go.
She strokes the locket where it sits under her shirt. Her skin doesn’t warm it, somehow. It rests there like a cold secret on her chest.
There was only ever one photo of her father in the house, and Riley has never seen it.
It’s around her neck right now. The clasp has been broken ever since she can remember.
Mom wore it all the time anyway. Sometimes she would stop while she was doing the dishes or in the supermarket or on the phone, and she would just hold it in her fist, like it was warm or gave her strength.
After she went to hospital the last time Riley sat with it a while on the front step, tried to slide her nail into it, pry it open.
She couldn’t. Riley thought about hitting it with a hammer to open it but she didn’t want to do that either.
She didn’t give it to the funeral home, like Mom asked in the note.
Riley pretended she couldn’t find it. She put it under her mattress.
Cousin took it on one of his bedroom searches. But now Riley has taken it back.
Maybe it’s a picture of a model or a dog or a rainbow or something. Maybe there’s nothing in it at all. She may never know. Riley has never seen the inside of the locket, just as she has never met her father.
They come to a stand of lilacs at around noon. Oliver is slowing, his breathing laboured. It troubles Riley. The hoarse sound, in and out. The sight of his thin legs makes her want to cry.
Riley catches the sweet mineral lick on the air.
The lilacs send their perfume ahead of them.
There’s a buzzing in the air like machinery or a headache.
A pool of purple against the green. It’s a lilac tree in full bloom, clinging to the rocky side of the peak.
Clouds of gnats and flies move over it. On the purple blooms butterflies open and close slow drunk wings.
Riley looks around. It can’t be right, there is no trail here. But she takes a deep breath anyway and pushes into the lilac. The scent is overwhelming, almost stinging her nostrils. Behind, she hears Oliver sneeze.
On the other side she comes out coughing. At first she doesn’t see it, it’s so narrow and faint among the new green growth. A deer trail which cuts directly up into the mountains, into the wild.
‘Ok,’ Riley says. ‘Ok. Lilac is the door.’
‘I want to go home,’ Oliver says.
‘That place we came from – Cousin’s place – it’s not your home,’ she says. ‘You and me, we’re each other’s home.’
His mouth crumples and he pushes past her. The set of his jaw as he struggles away up the narrow trail – it makes her heart catch. He looks so small. Riley jogs to catch up.
‘Let’s carry on talking about how you were born. Do you remember the story Mom told?’
Oliver shakes his head, silent. But she sees his shoulders unhunch a little.
‘Ok,’ Riley says. ‘I’ll remind you. Once upon a time, there was a woman who wanted a baby so much, it filled her every moment and thought.
She wanted a little boy with green eyes like this.
’ Riley circles Oliver’s eyes with a gentle finger.
‘She imagined him so clearly. A little boy with green eyes who loved to be tickled.’
She tickles his ribs and Oliver screams.
‘She wished for him so hard, every morning as she walked in her garden, waiting for the roses to open.’ Riley tickles harder, harder.
‘The most beautiful rose of all was a blood-red bud, right in the centre. The woman was crying one morning, when the blood-red rose opened and in the centre was a little boy, a perfect little boy with eyes as green as the grass beneath her feet.’ Riley pokes him in the stomach and Oliver screams with delight. He takes her hand.
‘Mom and your dad were so happy to have you,’ Riley says. Oliver’s dad was a bartender in Ault. He even sent Mom money for child support before he died. Oliver’s dad was an ok guy.
Oliver swings on her hand. ‘What about your dad, Riley?’
‘I don’t have one. I was hatched from an egg like a chicken.’
‘No,’ he says, delighted. ‘You weren’t!’
‘Swear to god. Mom was just about to make me into an omelette for breakfast, when tap tap tap, the egg cracked open and out I came.’
Truth is often overrated, Riley thinks. Oliver has enough bad stuff in his head for one small person.
Riley checks the directions. There’s nothing to do but go ahead. Overhead, white magnolia blossom nods against distant snow. Summer comes later the higher you go in the mountains.
The path winds through blossom and everything smells new and green.
Their spirits lift. Oliver bounces along the path.
He sees a hummingbird and yells. He’s only seven and there is sunlight everywhere.
Riley feels a great release. She did the right thing.
She knows it now. ‘We would have died if we’d stayed with Cousin,’ she says gently to the mountain. ‘Sooner or later.’
Cousin isn’t speaking into Riley’s ear anymore. She doesn’t believe in such things, but she has a thought she can’t get rid of – that it means Cousin is dead.
A lone cedar towers ahead. Its branches form the shape of a ship with sails, rippling in the breeze.
Beneath the tree’s shelter in the dusk, Riley builds a fire. She feeds kindling carefully into its small red burning heart. She rinses out Oliver’s weird Nana dog socks in a puddle and lays them out to dry on a rock.
The warmth is comforting, as are the flames’ crackling remarks.
She feels protected here, as the sails of the ship – no, she reminds herself, the leaves of the tree – rustle above.
Tall trees take care of you, everyone knows that.
Riley tries to keep watch, but her eyes keep closing.
The world winks out again and again. She wonders if the lion was even real.
The mountains light up old wild parts of the mind.
Riley gathers Oliver into her arms and thinks, a nap. Just ten minutes.
She wakes completely in an instant. The moon casts long stark light and shadow everywhere. The scent of bitterness and dried grass is strong in her nostrils. The mountain lion is close. No, it’s already here.
The fire has burnt down to grey coal but the moon is high and bright.
It shows the shape of the man crouching beside the embers.
He is tall. In the flickering light he looks lean and lined with weather.
He reaches into Riley’s pack, going through it with expert fingers.
Her mind takes a second to make sense of it – when did mountain lions learn to walk upright?
Then she sees. Oh right – it was never a lion at all, was it.
‘You been following us,’ she says.