Abandon

SEVENTY-EIGHT

A

bigail opened her eyes and looked at her watch—3:48 A.M. It was still raining, still pitch-black inside the tent. The sound of Scott unzipping the sleeping bag had woken her, and now he was crawling out of it.

“What are you doing?” Abigail whispered.

“I put it off long as I could stand it. I gotta go like nobody’s business.”

“Here, take this with you.”

Abigail twisted the base of the glow stick. It lighted up and she tossed it to him.

“This is the worst part of camping,” he grumbled, slipping into his fleece pullover. “When you absolutely, positively have to get out of your warm tent in the middle of a cold, rainy night to take a shit.”

Abigail nestled back into the bag, asleep again before Scott got his boots on.

Abigail shot up in the sleeping bag. She’d been dreaming about wandering through an endless cave, room after room after room, and for a second, she thought she was still in that cave with her father, and that climbing up the chimney and finding Scott and being shot at had all been a dream.

The disorientation passed. She was tucked away in a thicket, somewhere in the lower reaches of that long valley, and, she realized, on the cusp of dawn, because she could just make out the tunnel-shaped walls of the tent and the bottles of water at her feet.

She rubbed her eyes, glanced at her watch again—4:58 A.M. A quiet voice in her head asked, Why isn’t Scott here? She vaguely remembered waking some time ago. Then her mind cleared and it all came back. It’s been over an hour since Scott went out there to shit in the woods.

Abigail put on her fleece jacket and her parka, found that her fleece pants and wool socks had mostly dried out. She dressed, unzipped the inner tent, and climbed through the vestibule, the door to which Scott had left open.

She poked her head outside—little to see in this first light, surrounded by chokecherry shrubs still holding on to most of their sunset-colored leaves.

Abigail pushed her way out of the thicket and emerged into the aspen grove.

The rain had stopped, the wind had stilled, and the light was so fragile that she couldn’t yet tell if the sky was clear or uniformly clouded. She made a careful scan of the trees. She whispered, “Scott!” The only audible sound was the distant babble of the stream. The woods smelled of dead leaves, which made a deafening crunch under her boots. Her feet were already freezing in the damp socks.

She followed an old wash down through the trees, thinking Scott might have come this way to put some distance between the campsite and where he squatted.

Every few steps, she whispered his name. Her legs and tailbone were so sore from yesterday’s trek, her knees gone to mush. She stopped. Listened. Looked back at the stain of the chokecherry thicket barely visible up the hill.

“Scott!” she whispered. “Scott!”

Fifty yards down the wash, something caught her eye—a shiver of blue light.

She jogged along the dry creekbed, came to the glow stick lying in the wet leaves.

She bent down and picked it up, trying to process what this meant and all the permutations of what might have happened.

When she looked up again, she saw Scott sitting against a whitewashed aspen covered in arborglyphs, his head drooped, Gramicci pants and thermal underwear still pulled down below his knees, and the front of his yellow fleece blacked with a half gallon of blood, spilled out from the dark slit that linked his earlobes.

She staggered back and collapsed on the bank, had to make herself breathe, her hands shaking, that voice now screaming in her head, Get out of here right now, Abby.

Somewhere nearby, leaves rustled. She stood up, looking from tree to tree to tree and at all the spaces between, misting now in the gray twilight, watched by all those aspen eyes.

Again, she heard the rustle of leaves. The noise had come from fifteen yards away, but there was no one there. This time, the sound of what she’d mistaken for footsteps originated a ways up the wash, and even as she stared in that direction, she realized they hadn’t been footsteps at all, but the impact of thrown rocks.

The smoke of a menthol cigarette scooted by on the first breeze of dawn.