Chapter 9 Above
Above
I leave Emily’s with my mind swirling, my thoughts thick with darkness. The car is suffocating on the drive, and at home the walls are too close.
At the house, I dash off a message to Len, asking if he’s found anything yet about Meghan. I get back a reminder that it’s his day off and to cool my heels, along with an invitation to board game night with Kenny.
I like Kenny. He’s a biologist, teaches at the college.
He’s whip--smart and sweet and can talk your ear off for three hours about bird facts, and he likes me, which is not a given.
He also has a tendency to treat me like a wounded fledgling that needs to be gently put in a quiet dark box and provided a steady supply of food.
Right now, I’m not in the mood to be doted on.
I pass on the invite and spend the next few hours banging around the house. I send some emails, try to find anything more on Meghan—
-a complete dead end—-and scrub the bathroom. Earbuds in, I start my podcast back at the beginning, listen to a man explain women’s anger to me, explain how all that rage and hurt was poured into the mold of a folktale and emerged with hands dipped in blood.
It’s never been vengeance that I want. Anger isn’t the right word for the heat in my chest. At times like these, I need to move, to do something. I want to be out with the team, but my phone is silent. No tourists determined to wander off-trail to give purpose to this trapped feeling in my chest.
No hint of where Meghan Vale might have gone, no way to look for her.
I’m no investigator. I’ve only ever searched for someone through the physical medium of the world.
My own five senses, a perimeter, progress assessed by distance covered.
My only tool is my own body, and I might fail, but I know what to do.
This, though—-peering not through underbrush but the strange web of how people move around each other, the murk of the past, the way that we collide with people, prey on them, become entangled with them—-these things, I’ve never really understood.
As afternoon shadows lengthen and I haven’t clawed my way free of the gloom, I throw my pack in the car, whistle for Barry, and head back out.
The audio system kicks on automatically.
On the podcast, a folk band sings a mediocre ballad about Jenny Red--Hands, giving her a faithless husband and a cleaver.
The basis of this Jenny, the host tells me, is real, but was incorporated into the story long after it had already started being passed around.
I wonder how many women have had their faces and their names stolen and handed off to our invented monster.
As much as Jenny is a way of giving us power, it’s a way of taking it, too.
The real woman is forgotten, and so is her anger; Jenny consumes it, and Jenny, not real, can be dismissed.
I stop at a familiar trailhead. I park away from the road, out of sight.
The lot is fairly full now, but even later, when it thins out, no one driving by will be able to spot my car from the road.
I tell myself I’m just here for a hike, to let the movement drum through me and chase this trapped feeling away, but I know I’m lying to myself.
“Let’s go,” I tell Barry. He hops out and lets me clip his lead to his harness, dress him up in his oversized yellow rain slicker. Before we leave, I use the scrap of signal here to schedule an email, and then I strap on my pack and get moving.
There are a few easy loops and one longer trek here.
I take the long trail that winds up the hillside.
The elevation gain deters the more casual hikers, though a few families with kids scramble past me in mud--spattered rain gear.
I keep close to the side of the trail and keep my body between them and Barry, who knows to weld himself to my thigh when we’re passing.
The point of Barry is to be intimidating, so I can’t exactly blame people for getting skittish around him when he could fit their kid’s whole head in his jaws.
An untrained Aussie barks and lunges as we pass.
Barry doesn’t so much as twitch. When I got him, he was a disaster.
Too big and too wild to even walk on a leash, and after weeks of work, I was beginning to think he was untrainable.
Matsuda gave me the number of a trainer—-a giant Norwegian man who was constantly surrounded by a pack of dogs of every conceivable breed, all of them eerily calm and alert.
He asked me to let Barry stay with him for a month.
At the end of it, he held my hand in both of his and said, “My work is done. This dog, he is beautiful, and precious, and he will be always loyal to you.”
He’s proven right on all counts so far.
My legs are burning by the time I reach the top of the hill.
It’s not much to look at—-you emerge from the woods to a bald hump of earth that’s always reminded me of a scabbed knee sticking out of a pair of shorts.
There’s a flat boulder that seems made to sit on.
It offers the perfect view of the hillside sweeping away to the flatter land beyond.
There are no official trails down the back side of the hill, but you can trace the path with your eye—-down the flank, among the trees, across the creek.
A mile before you hit a road, miles more along it to reach the highway. And from there, you could go anywhere.
I can’t imagine a place that feels more open than this. There is nowhere less constrained. Even the pull of gravity urges you only toward freedom.
We used to sit up here, Janie and me, before everything that went wrong.
She would cross her legs and point in one direction or another, and invent the lives we would have over there.
They had absolutely no relation to reality, of course.
She didn’t care which towns were eclipsed by her pointing finger, where the roads really led.
We would be queens there; we would join a rock band over there; follow the bend in the creek and we’d travel the country in a van.
If we just started walking now, we’d get there, she would say, and I pretended not to hear the hunger in her voice.
The rain hasn’t let up. Barry doesn’t mind, nose to the wind, eyes half closed. The rain against the hood of my jacket makes a cocoon of sound around me, and I sink into it.
Meghan’s voice plays in my ears. The podcast, looping again. How many times have I listened to it now? Enough that I can almost imagine I remember the sound of her voice. But she was invisible to me. Not one of mine to tend.
She says she saw the witch. What does that mean? A woman in the woods? Like Emily, in her witch’s cottage of a house. But a woman in paint--splattered overalls would hardly be mistaken for a murderous witch.
Melinda said Emily was—-what word did she use? Unstable?
I hunch forward, watching the movement of the clouds. A lone man arrives, stands ten feet from me to appreciate the same gray vista. After a while, he departs, our momentary fellowship broken.
The sun is setting. The cloud cover affords no blaze of color, only a gradual gathering of the dark. The rain has let up, though, and by the time twilight recedes, the stars have emerged. It might as well have been night all along, behind those clouds. I’ve been alone for a long time now.
“We should go,” I tell Barry, but we don’t. He sits against my legs. After a while, I get out a towel, lay it down for him. It’s cold, but I have the right gear, and Barry’s stayed dry, is suited for lower temperatures than these. I’ll stay another hour, I tell myself; one hour, and then we’ll go.
Up here, in these moments—-after everyone else is sensibly gone, everyone home who knows how to find it—-I can hear that hum the clearest. The sound and sensation that isn’t real, can’t be real, but that I have utter faith in nonetheless. The one that draws me to where I need to be.
Lucky.
I’ve done the math. I’m no luckier, no more successful, than anyone else on the team. I’ve disproved myself thoroughly, and yet I still chase it.
Where are you? I ask silently. Not just Meghan Vale, but all of them.
All the way back to Janie. I imagine her with her hair cut short, her cherubic face gone thinner with age, sitting at the table across from a man with a kind smile, planning their day.
I imagine her at a bus stop, a cigarette clamped between her lips, skin pitted from years of hard living.
I imagine her buried shallow in a field with worms in her rib cage, and they all feel true.
Where are you?
There’s nothing but the hum. The call onward. Keep looking.
But I don’t know how. And I am less and less sure, each time I follow that sound, that I will find my way back again.
By the time the sun rises, the sky is clear, the morning chilly but not cold. I ache in ways that I know will make me pay later. Barry thumps his tail as I gather our things. He’s used to this. Part of me wonders if he knows why I come out here, and why he comes with me.
On the way back down the trail, I pass just one hiker, an older woman with a walking stick and a baseball cap, who gives me a bright greeting as we edge past each other on the trail. With Barry’s rain gear in my bag, we probably look like just another pair of early risers.
Down at the base of the trail, I cancel the email I had scheduled, the one I always set telling Len where I’ve gone.
He hates that I do this. Camping is one thing.
This is something else, and we both know it.
That dream I have, of walking far enough that I find them—-all the missing, all at once—-it’s a feeling I never shake.
It feels like lost is a place as much as a state of being, that maybe someday I can pierce the threshold.