Alexis Smith - Marrow Island

I smell the pillow, but even her scent is gone.

I’ve been asleep for three hours. It’s unnaturally dark outside, clouds still hanging over the foothills, but the worst of the storm seems to have passed. Carey’s voice comes through on the radio.

I jump out of the cot and pick up. “Hey, I’m here.”

“Darlene said to check in with you about a female hiker?”

I hesitate.

“Lucie, are you there? Over.”

“I’m here.” I’m shaking; I don’t know what to tell him.

“I just wanted to check on conditions.”

Pause.

“Lots of lightning but no strikes that we know of, yet. What’s it look like up there?”

“Lit up like the Fourth of July, for a while. Quiet now.”

“Any strikes?”

“I don’t think so. I’ll keep watch.”

“Did you have a hiker?”

“I did,” I lie. I’m about to keep lying. “But I only saw her from a distance. Red bandanna. Tan pack. Headed down the mountain, toward the river. Not a backpacker. Day hiker. She didn’t have any gear.”

“Nobody like that has checked in with us, but day hikers usually don’t. There are campers out at Strawberry Wilderness, maybe they were checking out the trails. Strange not to go up to the lookout, though.”

“Yeah, I thought so, too,” I say. “Let me know if somebody checks in? She could’ve been caught in the storm.”

Twenty-four hours pass. At night I lie awake, forcing myself to imagine different scenarios in which she saves herself.

She makes her way out of the woods, meets another car full of Christians or hippies, hitches a ride to town — any town. She borrows a phone. She calls Jen and Elle. Or her parents. She turns herself in at the nearest sheriff’s office. Someone comes for her. Someone takes her home.

But I can’t help seeing the other possible scenes. Her foot stepping off the trail, her path into the unfamiliar wilderness. She hunts the site of an old fire — years old — scanning the felled trees, the rotting logs. She would find what I have seen there before: the Psilocybe, the wood-eaters. Like fireweed, they come back to the scenes of disasters; they thrive where others were destroyed; they make a place for another generation. She only needs a handful of the mushrooms. These would ease the discomfort. But she would need something else — something acutely toxic. She could have plucked many kinds from the woods of the Cascades, even in a drought year. She could have collected more than enough Amanita smithiana, the ones they fed me; she would know how much to ingest. Once I imagine it, it’s like a bad dream that can’t be undreamt: it infiltrates all the other scenes. There she is, choosing the place, taking off her pack, settling against a pine trunk, looking out at the bend in the river, drinking the last of her water while dog ticks climb up the leg of her shorts, mosquitoes drink until they’re heavy. It would happen to her like it happened to me: the immediate sickness, the hallucinations, abatement, then weakness, deterioration. She would feel how I felt, and she would understand. It would be her way of confessing to me. But of course, even if we found her, no one would be able to carry her out in time.

The fire breaks out five miles to the northwest. An hour away by foot, if I’m running, but I know fires can move faster than that, especially with the wind urging them. They’ve already started digging containment lines, redirecting some of the crews from the Ochoco fire, which is 90 percent contained. The men are exhausted.

“It’s the other side of the river, so you should be fine for now,” Carey says, “but you should come back down to the cabin tomorrow.”

“If I leave now, I can get back to the cabin before dark.” Or I could stay, I think, in case she comes back tonight. But instead, before signing off I say, “Carey: make sure everyone knows about the hiker. Just in case.”

I throw my books and clothes into my pack, leaving the food, the toilet paper and the hand sanitizer and all the other things I’ve brought.

As I close and lock the door, overhead one raven, then another, then another. They’re loud, calling out to each other. There are other birds on the move, too, a strange migration: Steller’s jays, in pairs, songbirds so fast I can’t tell them apart, a solitary magpie. They scatter, alight on high branches, call from tree to tree. Particles of ash drift by on the breeze.

I remember reading about the unusual movements of wild animals before earthquakes — this was long after our quake, in a geology class in college. Days, even weeks, before there are shifts in the earth’s plates, animals flee. Getting as far away from the center of the disaster as possible. The evidence is anecdotal, of course, but often cited to demonstrate the abject ignorance of the earth and its movements that humans live with, the utter divorce from the relationship with the environment that nurtured us through millions of years of evolution. The animals know what’s coming before we do; they heed the instinct to flee. But we humans, even when we know what’s coming, we do nothing. We watch the animals disappear.

I stop at the bottom of the path before I head off into the trees. I turn back to the lookout, for a last glance.

At the cabin I see the evidence of the early fire season, of nights Carey has spent at the field office in Prairie City: cold coffee in the pot, moldy oatmeal on the stove, dirty dishes, a stale smell — windows have been closed — a pile of unopened mail on the table. There’s a blanket and pillow on the couch. He sleeps there when he’s on call; it’s a horrible place to sleep, so it’s easier to wake up.

The light on the answering machine is blinking. There are three messages, and I can guess that at least one of them will be from my mother. Her voice comes out, as if from a can attached to a string, stretched along the five hundred miles between us.

“Lucie, it’s Mom. Please call me when you get this. I love you.” She sounds anxious. The cord of tension travels through my ear and into the back of my head, down my neck and spine. The message is from yesterday; they’re all from her. Each one is shorter, taut with anger, with worry.

I open a window and lie down on the unmade bed, press my face into the sheets to smell him. They’re cold. The scent of him makes him real to me, and I sink into the bed. But I smell someone else there, too. It takes a moment of shock for me to realize it’s not some other woman I’m smelling, but my own scent, from before the days at the lookout, bathing in the river. There’s a fermented odor to me now, an activity in the cells that wasn’t there before. I inhale the remnants of us on the sheets, and there’s a clarity to it, a certainty, if just for a moment. It’s the sanest I’ve felt in weeks. I need to bathe.

Cellar spiders have woven webs in the bathtub; he’s been showering at work. And I realize how alone I was all those nights at the lookout — how much farther he was from me than I realized. I wonder how Katie found me at all — how she would have known that I was up there, and not here, at the cabin. I grab the broom and collect the spiders, shake them off outside, let the water run in the tub until it’s only lukewarm and get in anyway. It feels like a hot tub compared to bathing in the river.

Night falls before Carey comes home. I heat some soup and cut the mold off a log of Tillamook cheddar, salvage what I can to eat with crackers. The radio is on, tuned to the only station that comes in out here, which favors old country and country-gospel. I fall asleep on the couch, waiting for the sound of his truck.

It’s almost ten when he comes in, dropping his overnight bag and gear by the door. I sit up sleepy-eyed, but I am anxious to see him.