Alexis Smith - Marrow Island

“I did. Or I was pretty sure I did. I hiked every day, hunting for them.” Katie opens her eyes wide at me, delighted.

“I lost my way, wandering off the trail, looking for the right fallen tree, the right pile of bark. I looked for bear scat and tracks and followed them to trees with the bark clawed off. I couldn’t find them anywhere. I found other kinds, I found them and picked them and brought them back and dried them, but they were never the right ones. I thought about bringing them anyway. I thought, She’s dying anyway, what does it matter? ”

“But you found them?”

“I went to visit Carey at the ranger station one day, and getting out of the truck in the parking lot, I saw them. Wavy caps, in the landscaping around the building. They had mulched with wood chips in the fall. When I was sure no one was around, I picked them all, wrapped them in a bandanna, and kept them until I could get back here. I knew they were the right ones because they turned blue when I pinched them, like the ones we picked off the graves on Marrow. I remembered what you said to me, when we were high in that field. That the best ones grew on the babies’ graves.”

She smiles at this.

“I went to see her after that.”

“How far gone was she?”

“I was almost too late, I think. She wasn’t eating. I didn’t know how to give them to her.”

“How did you do it?”

I swallow, feel the burn on my tongue from the oatmeal. Katie’s pupils are large and deep, her eyelids droopy, but she keeps her gaze on me. I look out the window at the cloudless sky.

I tell her how I waited until she was somewhat lucid, not really lucid, but almost awake. About how she reached for them or for me. About how I broke down the bitter, gritty caps with my teeth, mixed them with my saliva. About the strangest kiss I’ve ever given.

I look back to Katie. She is grinning.

“You’re an angel of mercy, Luce,” she says. “And a badass.”

She closes her eyes.

“And she went peacefully?”

“I saw the life leave her like sparks from a roaring blaze.”

There’s nothing to do but watch her sleep in my cot, in my lookout. The breeze blowing through the window screens, the way they wave with it. The light on the leaves outside like the day of the earthquake, pure and unredeemable, the gift of the moment. She came back to me. And I wonder what this means, because I realize — it’s written all over her— I cannot keep her . I find my phone and take a picture of her sleeping.

I cook bacon and eggs for dinner — using up more than I had rationed for myself, but knowing I could go down to the cabin for more if I needed. Every so often a transmission comes through on the radio — I keep it on to hear the weather. In the strange mechanical voice of emergencies, the robotic man declares that the National Weather Service has issued an alert for the area. Storms are expected tomorrow morning through early evening. The possibility of dry lightning. I’m waiting to hear from Carey, too. And anxious. I don’t know if he’ll believe me, if I tell him that Katie is here. Or if I should tell him. He never trusted her — he seemed relieved to hear she had taken off.

Katie wakes up to the smells of cooking. She’s been living off trail mix. She’s been shitting it for days, she says. Every squat in the woods is like giving birth to a little granola bar. A Christian family who picked her up gave her a tuna sandwich and some potato chips, she said. And a generic cola. It was her first drink of soda in several years, and she said her eyes teared up from the syrup, and they thought she was so grateful she was crying. They prayed for her: the mom, the dad — who was driving — and the two kids in the back of the minivan, who were seven and ten. She swallows the eggs in under a minute, then takes her time with the bacon.

“I never would have eaten bacon before,” she says.

“But now that you’re dead, you can eat what you want.”

I open two cans of beer and hand her one. She smiles for the first time.

I let her borrow my extra shoes, and we walk down to the river. She’s used to walking on her sore feet, but she’s not used to resting. Her body protests being back in motion after the rest in the lookout. We walk slowly, and I take her arm or hand for the steeper parts. It’s only a mile to the creek, but it’s not always easy climbing.

This part of the river is wide and shallow; the sun heats it, but there’s shade at the edges. I haven’t showered in a few days, so I strip off everything but my bra and underwear and wade in. Katie keeps to the bank and soaks her legs, watching me.

“I can’t remember my last period,” she says.

I sit on a rock in the middle of the stream, water just covering my crotch. I look down to my thighs, half expecting to see blood in the water.

“I can’t remember mine, either. Maybe we’re both pregnant.”

She looks at me and smiles.

“Dead women can’t have babies, Lu.”

“Oh, right.” We’re still pretending. But it’s making me uncomfortable.

“You must have had at least one period since you left Bellingham, right?”

She gives me an indifferent grunt.

I count the days in my head, but I am counting my own. Thinking back to the Palouse, to Prairie City on my birthday, to the month before that. April. Washing bloodstains out of my panties in the morning, hanging them outside to dry in the sun.

“I can’t be pregnant,” I say. “I don’t feel pregnant.”

“How do you know?”

“I was, once. With Matt.”

“You were?” she asks, like it doesn’t surprise her at all, her face blank.

“We hadn’t been together long. I was in love with him, but I couldn’t tell him.” I’m staring at her body, her bony frame that carried a dead baby for weeks.

“You couldn’t tell him you were in love? Or that you were pregnant?”

“Either.”

“What happened?”

I remember it, the quiet but certain knowledge I felt. That it wasn’t right. It wasn’t time.

“Motherhood seems like a dangerous experiment, in this world. How can you love someone and leave them with the mess you’ve made?”

She watches me, then looks up to the trees.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she says, finally.

There’s a washcloth and a little chunk of soap tucked in the front of my bra. I wash my underarms in the cool water, my feet, between my legs. A trout nibbles at my toe, and I kick it away, lose my balance, slipping off my rock perch and landing in the stream, sharp rocks on my ass and hip. I come up coughing, soap lost to the current. Katie laughs. I stay there, dunk my face and head and rinse the soap from my body. When I look up, Katie is still smiling. She looks content, calm. I try to understand how this can be: she ran away; she found me. But for once, I don’t want to question the joy I feel. She was my first love.

“Come in,” I say.

She wades in farther down, where the rocks dip, creating a small waterfall. Her back is to me, and she’s saying something, but her voice is lost downstream. I can’t see her face, her expression.

“I can’t hear you.”

She says it again. I can hear parts of the stressed syllables. I think she says, “I’m trying to save you.” But maybe it’s “The fire will save you.”

“I can’t hear you when your back’s to me.”

She turns, just to look over her shoulder.

“I didn’t say anything,” she says.

“You said something, just now. I heard you.”

She shakes her head no, wades deeper into the current, up to her hips, sweeping her arms against it to stay upright.

“It’s like limbo,” she says. I hear her this time, see her lips move.

That night we lie in the cot side by side, and I tell her about the cougar I hear sometimes, how I think I can smell him marking the area around the lookout — sometimes the heady odor of cat piss wafts through the trees.