When the sun was mid-sky, Nora went to the river for a bath. It was a short hike from camp, the ground cold and damp on her bare feet from morning dew. She gripped branches for balance when the trees parted to the mouth of Numa Creek, the water murky and still like day-old black coffee. It rippled once when a pond skater whirred past. In the water, Nora pulled her feet from the riverbed, her hair fanned around her shoulders, her stomach covered in goosebumps. The sun was warm on her face and the world was quiet. Floating, she imagined wide, unhinged jaws beneath her. Something leathery and ancient, each ripple the slice of white teeth through the water, inches from her fingers. There was something exhilarating about the possibility.

Nora ran out of shampoo last week, but she worked her fingers through her hair to undo knots and scrub out oil. She rinsed the dust away the best she could, but it always seemed to linger in the space between her shoulder blades, the backs of her knees. Today it seemed to linger everywhere.

She’d woken up that morning to her phone vibrating through a pocket deep in her knapsack. She’d almost forgotten it was there. Without checking, she knew it was her mother calling. She pictured her mother in Palo Alto sitting in that old wicker chair on Paul’s back porch, the patio littered with dead butterflies and cigarette ash that caught the breeze. Her fingers would be bonier, now, like claws around the phone. Her hair would be longer and frayed, but still the same dull brown as Nora’s. Nora imagined the cracks in the patio. The black mold that had found home in them and spread, reaching toward her mother’s chair as the days passed. Waiting, the sun beating down on her sun-cracked skin.

She let the phone vibrate until it stopped. Everything felt quieter than before.

Nora dipped her head back into the water and a rush of cold bit her cheeks. She rubbed her eyes until she saw static. When she resurfaced, there was a slight rustle in the bushes near the bank. Nora froze, her ears burning hot the way they do when the coats on the back of her door look a little too human in half-sleep, or when the small voice in her head says it’s not just a headache, but cancer.

A second later she saw the lizard drop from the bush to the earth. She let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. The lizard tilted his head at her moment before scuttling back into the trees.

Before heading back to camp, Nora sucked water through her teeth. It tasted like earth and old pennies.

 

At camp, Nora boiled water over a fire. She tore open a pack of dehydrated beef stroganoff and poured the water inside. The noodles swelled and softened. Steam eddied from the bag and warmed her face. She sat on pine needles and watched the sun sink slowly behind the trees, the hills. There had been a brush fire in ’03, and parts of the ground were still singed gray beneath the grass like fine hairs. She imagined she could still smell the smoke though it had lifted more than a decade ago. She’d seen photos of the burning sky, murky and orange, the colour of the sea under a setting sun. Online there were donation links with photos of wide-eyed animals peering from the trees, their backs dusted with white ash like snowflakes. She wanted to see what life could be like after something like that. She wanted to see if the place ever actually recovered.

Her nose burned with dust and altitude, but she’d gotten used to it. Two weeks in Kootenay and she’d gotten used to a lot of things—mosquitos at dusk, marmots scuttling at dawn, goat shit in the grip of her boots always.

She tilted her head back to drink the broth as a woodpecker wacked into a tree above her, unseen. The constant drumming used to annoy her, but she’d started to enjoy the company. She named the bird Pickles, and he was more consistent than most people. Nora closed her eyes and saw the tuft of red feathers on Pickles’ head like a curl of fire, his crowbar beak prodding around inside the tree and slurping out grubs. Soon he’d hollow out a snug, dry space. Raise some young. With hungry mouths, they’d suck up all the sap, eat all the bugs, outgrow the walls. Older and in open air, the nestlings would forget about the way the bark smelled or how to find their way back in the dark.

She wondered if Pickles would stay or go with them.

On the backcountry trail ahead, two hikers moved through the trees. When they were close enough, Nora waved, her mouth full of noodles. She didn’t expect them to come toward her. The man and the girl wore the same faded blue “Stanley’s Olde Maple Lane Farm” shirts and khaki shorts, but the man’s shirt was sweat-soaked around the neckline. His face was ruddy like he was breathless from the hike and even more breathless from trying to hide it. The girl’s blonde curls were pulled into two springy pigtails.

“Evening!” the man said. He stumbled over an exposed root as they pushed through the trees. He clutched a hiking stick in one hand and the handle of the girl’s backpack in the other. The man was short and twiggy, but managed to block the sun with his frame.

“Hello,” Nora said. Her fork scraped against the Styrofoam cup.

“We’re staying over at Marble Canyon.”

Nora nodded and popped a noodle into her mouth.

“You been up there?” the man asked.

“I haven’t.”

“Well,” he looked at the girl, “We wanted to check out the creek. Heard great things on TripAdvisor.” A bead of sweat rolled off his temple and fell to the dirt.

Nora crossed her arms over her chest.

“It took us longer to get down here than expected,” the man said and chuckled. His teeth looked pale yellow in the fading light. He glanced around the trees, rocking on his heels. “Probably shouldn’t go too much farther tonight.”

“It’s just that way,” Nora said, pointing to the trail behind her tent and returning to her dinner.

“Ah, nothing good happens past sundown. Ain’t that right?” He turned to the girl, but she stared past Nora’s shoulder like she was somewhere else entirely.

“Nice setup,” the man said. He looked around at Nora’s camp, at the lime-green two-person tent that sank in on itself from the night’s wind, at the wiry lawn chair, two bulky knapsacks, and the dinner pot that still had bits of noodle inside.

“Not really,” Nora said.

She hadn’t spoken to many people since she first headed East three years ago, except for the occasional backpacker on their way up the trail. Even then, there was a silent language between people who traded comfort and convenience for privacy and the open sky. They communicated in waves and nods. In grins and belly-sighs at a shared sunset.

“You must’ve had help from the bears carrying all this out here,” the man said. “Small thing like yourself.”

Nora forced a smile. “My car’s parked at Numa Falls. Short hike from there.” She squinted at the mountains in the distance and let the chirp of cicadas fill in for conversation. The man leaned on his hiking stick and watched the last sliver of sun sink below the horizon. Nora watched his silver Sketchers turn dark gray with the sky. When the sun was hidden behind the trees, the man and the girl waved.

“Safe night,” the man said as they headed in the direction they came.

Nora watched them go, the girl’s pigtails bouncing with every step, the man swinging his hiking stick like it was an extension of his arm.

Nora wrapped her dinner cup in an odour-proof bear bag. She’d always been careful to keep a clean campsite. Bears could smell food from a mile away, even the thinnest scent of noodles and salt, the leftover steam etched into her sweatshirt. She scrubbed the pot clean with an old church-camp T-shirt and wrapped that in the bag, too. From the tent, she grabbed a kerosene lamp and her sleeping bag. It was a warm night—she’d sleep outside.

The fire had died out but the smell of burning wood and pine remained. Nora lit the lamp and set it on the ground next to her sleeping bag. Warm light flickered through the dusty glass just enough to see the edges of her pocket of the forest. She wiped her kerosene-oiled fingers on her sweatpants, but still felt the residue under her nails like butter.

Under the tree where she lay, the sky seemed darker, pale moonlight barely reaching her through the thick canopy of leaves. She reached in the knapsack next to her and felt the smooth, sleek aluminum, the rounded edges, the buttons on the sides. She pulled the phone out and tucked it in her pillowcase. She’d call her mother tomorrow.

 

Nora moved to Paul’s when she was twelve and her mother worked two jobs. Moving never felt like the right word. Moving is a wave in open ocean, a kickball in the grass. This felt more like being dragged through dirt, nails scratching, gravel in her teeth. She feigned an interest in swimming to stay out of the house. Some days, her mother felt too overwhelmed to pick her up from the rec center, so she’d send Paul instead. He was usually late.

In the dead of summer, Paul’s hands were calloused and caked with dirt around the steering wheel. The car didn’t smell like Nora’s mother’s anymore. It smelled like old beer and dirty boots and fish rot after Paul spent the day at Schilling Lake.

Windows down, Nora’s hair whipped around her cheeks and stung her eyes. “Where are we going?” she asked when Paul didn’t make the left at the intersection. The sun had set. Still in her one-piece, a towel wrapped around her shoulders, the wind made the water on her bathing suit feel like shards of glass.

“We’re taking the long way home.”

Paul’s cotton-ball hair caught the wind and revealed his shiny, oiled scalp. The lines in his face were deepened by the unforgiving streetlamps that pinged light from the thin, gold band around his fourth finger. His worm-chewed flannel hung from his shoulders like it was heavy on his bones, but his stomach tested the buttons where beer had made him fat.

Nora squeezed her eyes shut against the wind. Paul squeezed her shoulder.

He slowly rolled the car up the drive to the Pepto-Bismol-colored house. The idling rumbled the seats. He took a deep breath, one that stretched the fabric of his shirt tight, and stared at the steering wheel. “Fun day at the pool?”

Nora nodded her head.

“Good,” he said. “Good.”

Nora tried to open the door, but it was locked.

“You swim with the other girls?”

“Yes.”

Paul twisted his ring. “You weren’t waiting outside when I picked you up,” he said. He seemed to struggle to keep his eyes open. In the thick summer heat, the smell of his sweat and aftershave felt like water in Nora’s throat. “You swim with the boys?”

Nora tried the door again. “Mom’s waiting.”

Paul took another breath. Nora wondered whether he felt as if he was suffocating, too. She stared out the window at the ceramic birdbath in the yard that had a crack in the bowl like a thick vein. Above it sat a statue of a girl Nora’s age with flowing hair to her waist and a mermaid’s tail. Her palms were open, white. The girl gazed down at the empty bowl, her marble eyes sadder than Nora remembered. Paul’s chin was beginning to slump to his chest and made his neck look fatter than usual. He looked at Nora lazily, not by turning his head, but by letting it roll to his shoulder. His eyes were dark like the backs of beetles. He wrapped a strand of her wet hair around his fingers. A drop of water fell to her lap, cold. It felt like minutes passed before the porch light clicked on and her mother stepped halfway out the door. Always halfway with her. She squinted into the headlights with a hand to her forehead. Paul’s hands were back in his lap.

“Go on,” he said, unlocking the door. “Go get dressed.”

Nora stepped into the driveway as the headlights dimmed and shut off. The air smelled like fresh-cut grass, and her plastic flipflops squeaked as she walked. She ducked under her mother’s arm into the doorway and watched as Paul sat in the driver’s seat, shoulders slumped forward like a curling leaf. The breeze brushed her mother’s hair from her face.

“Fun day, honey?” she asked, but didn’t smile.

“Yes,” Nora said. “Very fun.”

 

Nora woke to the sound of cracking pine needles. In the soft light of morning, the world was fuzzy around the edges. The air was fresh and thin and wet. She rolled onto her back, then lay still. The twigs snapping in the woods were slow, deliberate. Listening, Nora reached for her knapsack. In the inner zippered pocket, she kept a Swiss Army knife she bought when she was sixteen after she came home one afternoon and saw Paul in her bedroom. He touched her sheets like a gloved inspector. Moved on to her dresser. Her drawers.

Nora heard the heavy huff of breath first. The two elk in the trees were larger than she’d imagined. Their antlers spiralled up and brushed against low-hanging moss as they walked. They grazed on tufts of grass that sprouted through the dirt. Heads high, chewing lazily. Nora lay the knife on the ground next to her. The elk’s eyes were dark and round like walnuts. Their hooves flattened coneflowers as they walked, and Nora smelled their musk as they came closer to her campsite. She envied the way they moved through the woods so surely, like an egret cuts through the sky.

When they were too far to notice her, Nora slipped a sweatshirt over her head. The lamp had gone out sometime in the night. She ducked into the tent and grabbed a canister of oatmeal and a bag of coffee grounds. As the water boiled, she pulled her hair into two braids at her neck. The sun floated higher but was diffused by thin clouds. Sandpipers flew overhead lazily like paper planes in the breeze. Nora thought of the birdbath, broken to the point of uselessness. There were a lot of broken things in Palo Alto.

Nora tucked her phone into the waistband of her sweatpants. It felt foreign against her skin.

“She’s not here?”

Nora turned around, startled, to the man from the night before. He wore the same clothes. His skin was clammy, his eyes feverish.

“Sorry?”

“Jill—she isn’t here?”

Nora set the filter of coffee grounds into the pot. “Just me.”

The man hunched over, hands on his knees. Even in the cool morning, he was sweating. There was a balding spot on his head Nora hadn’t noticed before. It was pink like newborn skin.

“We’re on our way to Vermilion, just back there. And she just ran—thought she’d head to the creek—not sure how she’d know the way—”

He stopped to catch his breath.

“Nobody came by.”

The man looked around as if he’d find the girl perched in a tree or catching bugs in the dirt. His eyes flicked past Nora to her tent, and she hid a grin behind her coffee cup. It felt silly for a man to be so distrusting of her. “You’re welcome to look around.”

“I don’t feel right about it.”

“No, really.”

The man took a few steps toward her. When he walked, she noticed his shoes seemed a size too big, the fronts catching the dirt. He opened his mouth as if to speak but didn’t say anything. Nora knew he wanted to ask for help. They looked at each other a moment before she set down her cup. “Let’s look around,” she said.

They followed a wide circle around Nora’s camp, sticking to the flatter parts of the trail, hoping Jill had done the same. The man’s head jerked back and forth every time a twig snapped. The first few times, he’d say, “Thought that coulda been her.” After the fourth, he didn’t say anything.

The sun blazed white and made them both squint. Nora watched the grass as they walked, green and waxy. The little black bugs moving under it. The dried-out tips, tan and curling toward the earth. After half an hour, they saw a wake of buzzards crowded around a mound of brown fur. Their feathers were thin and patchy, lifting with the breeze. Their heads were red and bald like sunburnt skin. One had a yellowed bone hanging from its beak. Maybe a rib. A rabbit’s femur. The man said he was going to be sick and stumbled into the trees. When he came back, his face was paler than before. His hands grew more jittery as time passed.

“I ran away once,” Nora said, abruptly. “To the woods.”

The man didn’t look up from the ground.

“I ate nothing but berries for two days.”

She didn’t mention the part where her tongue swelled to her teeth, and her arms broke out in hives. Ivy berries looked a lot like blueberries. She didn’t mention the part where she couldn’t sleep, not even for an hour, because the first time she lay in the dirt, a worm wriggled across her lip. “I cheated though, the afternoon of the second day.”

“That right?”

“I got thirsty, so I snuck back to the house, saw that the car was gone. Mom was sleeping on the couch. The doors were locked but I found a Coors tallboy on the porch.”

The man rubbed his hands together.

“It tasted like shit. Like hot, rotten bread.”

“Why?” the man said.

“Why what?”

She knew what he was asking, but she wasn’t prepared to answer. Her tongue felt thick all over again.

“Why’d you run off?”

Nora looked at a cluster of horse mushrooms, their caps white and bloated like fat moons. They swayed in the breeze. “I think we already went this way.”

“You think?”

“Not really.” She stopped walking. Suddenly she wondered why she was here, digging further into the sprawl of trees and sky. Who was she to find a runway child when she knew how easy it could be to stay hidden? She swatted a gnat from her arm.

“Why don’t we split up?” the man said.

“Yeah, okay.”

“You got a phone?”

Suddenly aware of the rectangle against her waist, no longer cold or warm, just there, pushed against her, she shook her head.

“You go on that way. We’ll meet at your camp.”

“You’ll remember the way?” Nora asked.

“Should.”

“All right.”

The man turned to head left. She split right.

 

It’s not that she didn’t want to find the girl. But the park, in all its 350 thousand acres, just didn’t seem big enough for two people playing hide-and-seek. It was the girl’s turn, now.

When Nora passed the spot where they’d seen the buzzards, all that was left was the body of a bloated marmot. Half-decayed, insides spilled out like an unzipped suitcase. Nora kicked some dead leaves over it and kept walking. Ahead, the trail opened into a glade. The trees at its edges were a stark outline against the sky, and bright purple fireweed peppered the ground. There was movement. She couldn’t see it, but she could hear it—lizards in the brush, skittering rabbit feet. In the wind, the fragile leaves on the trees shimmered, delicate and brown like moth wings. It seemed like a good place to say goodbye—something about growth after decay.

On her way back to camp, buzzards circled the sky.

 

Nora heard them before she could see them. Crinkling wrappers, the zipping tent. Clouds gathered low and washed the world gray. They hadn’t bothered to walk in the grass to hide their footprints. No, they walked right up in the dirt, as if through a friend’s open door. It wouldn’t matter, they’d think. They’d be gone before she came back.

She watched the man and the girl pick up her things, inspect them with one eye shut, decide what was worth taking. The man’s hiking stick leaned against her lawn chair and glowed with a patchwork of metal medallions—places he’d conquered. Nora wanted to run to it, to smash it over the man’s head and again into his teeth. She saw his toes wiggle under the fabric of his too-big sneakers. The girl’s face was dirty. She smiled as she licked sugar from a packet Nora had left out for coffee. Her teeth looked bright against her shadowed face, and her lips were sticky with melted sugar. Her backpack was open and stuffed with Nora’s lamp and packs of dehydrated food. Nora saw her wallet splayed open in the dirt, contents picked out with precision, like the marmot on the trail.

“What are you doing?” Nora said. Her voice was both quieter and louder than she expected.

The man and the girl jerked around to look at her. A vein on the man’s temple pushed against his red skin, like something trying to hatch. She glanced for her knife but knew she wouldn’t use it. She’d never been able to. Not even when she stood over Paul sleeping on the couch that summer, four times, feet propped on the ottoman and head lolled to the side like a limp ragdoll. How close she’d drawn the blade to the blubbery skin around his neck. How strange it felt standing over him instead of curling under him. Now, her shoulders slumped inward toward her chest and she took a step back. Lowered her eyes. She knew how to make herself small. How to say without words, I’m not a threat.

The man grabbed the girl’s arm and the hiking stick, coming closer to Nora. She pressed herself against a tree, bark digging into the back of her head like nails. She heard Pickles drumming away in the tree above, blissfully unaware of anything but his task. Nora suddenly realized the depth of her isolation. She was just a girl very far from home.

“You’re gonna let it be,” the man said.

Even an inch shorter than Nora, his breath was hot on her face and smelled like decay. Nora’s stomach went cold. He was close enough for her to see each pore on his nose. The dark freckle in his eye. The raw skin on his top lip where he’d chewed off the dead part. His eyes raked over her chest, then. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she spit.

It landed on his cheek.

The girl looked up at Nora, still sucking on the sugar packet, fingertips in her mouth. Her eyes were wide but not with concern. With curiosity. Like she’d seen this happen before, only to someone else. Someone else’s reaction. Their belongings. Their fear.

“Bitch,” the man hissed. His hand was like ice across Nora’s face.

Nora sat at the base of the tree as she watched them go. Mosquitos swarmed her legs, thirstier than ever, it seemed. She closed her eyes and imagined she was a half-dead rodent, the mosquitos a wake of buzzards already beginning to pick her apart.

 

That night, on the road, Nora called her mother. It rang twice.

“Hello?” Her mother’s voice was like gravel.

Nora held her breath.

“Hello?” her mother said again. “Elenora?”

“Mom,” Nora breathed.

“Hey, honey. It’s nice to hear from you.”

“Who is it?” Paul asked in the background. Nora heard dishes clashing in the sink. A can opening. The hiss of new beer.

“Where are you?” her mother asked.

Nora glanced at Highway 93 in the rearview mirror. It wound into Kootenay like a never-ending river. “I’m headed East, mom.”

“That the insurance again?” Paul slurred. Nora could see him leaning over her mother, his belly hanging to her thighs.

“It’s Nora, dear,” her mother said. There was rustling as her mother got up to move. Nora heard the creaking of her childhood bedroom door, the ceiling fan ticking with every warbled rotation. Her mother exhaled in that heavy way that sounded like she was deflating. Nora pictured her in the wooden rocking chair by the window. In the darkness of the room, her body would be an outline of sharp edges. “Nora? I can talk now.”

“I was just calling,” Nora said, her voice trailing off.

Her mother asked, so quietly Nora almost didn’t hear, “Are you in trouble?”

Nora drove past an exit that led nowhere, with only a flickering gas station and plumes of steam swirling from a manhole at the end of it. Her tent in the backseat still smelled like mud. She looked at the glowing orange ticks of the fuel gauge behind the steering wheel. The needle rested just below a quarter tank.

“Why didn’t you look for me?” Nora asked. She felt sixteen again, small and pressed in the corner of her mother’s bedroom. She could almost feel the thick pool of shame on her mother’s tongue. Still, she kept going. “In the woods.”

“I did, honey. I did look for you.”

“You would have found me. I didn’t go very far.”

“Jesus, Nora,” her mother whispered. Nora thought she heard the hiss of a cigarette, a sharp inhale like sandpaper. “Is that what this’s all about? Three years not enough to lick your wounds?”

Nora heard the door open on her mother’s end. Her mother whispered, “It’s nothing, it’s nothing.”

Paul’s breath was in Nora’s hair. It’s nothing.

Nora lay the phone in the passenger seat.

“Nora? Honey? I’m sorry—Are you there?” And then, quieter, almost a mumble. “Fuck’s sake.”

Nora wondered how she would pay for dinner. She’d get another job at a breakfast joint, save a few months then hit another campground. But tonight, she was alone. A tunnel opened ahead like a dark mouth.

“He’s worried about you, too,” her mother said. Almost a whine. A plea.

A row of dim-white lights lined the tunnel’s arch like teeth. Nora knew the call would drop once inside. Her mother whispered her name, kept whispering it, and Nora listened for a moment longer to her mother’s voice cutting through the night.