“Is that a—” I started. “Oh, please no.
That’s a skunk.”
“It’s a fox,” he said. “I think.” We backed away slowly, putting distance between us and it.
This might have been our only encounter of the night on that vacant campground if the wind hadn't shifted and let me know she was close.
“Do you smell that?” I asked. “Like something’s burning?” It drifted—the scent of fire—from an unknown source.
Faint and far-off, but familiar enough to remind me of the dream. Of her. Of how I felt sure they were tangled up together.
“No, I—” he started, but I didn’t give him the chance to say more, because I was moving faster now, searching now, the smoke-thick veil between my world and her world loosening enough to let me slip in.
At some point during this, I let go of Jamie’s hand.
— 6 — SHE’D been here.
Abby Sinclair walked this very path, I could sense it. She’d spent whole weeks of her summer in this place before she was gone. She’d raised the flag on this pole and counted out change for candy at that canteen.
The farther in we went, the more it came clear to me. What she saw here, what she felt and experienced and breathed. I sensed, in an abstract sort of way, Jamie following behind me, but I didn’t look back after him, I didn’t explain.
I could feel the sweaty air that hung thick inside the mosquito netting of the camp’s cabins. There was a dampness on my skin, the humidity that clings to this valley in summer clinging now to my clothes. I kept hearing flashes of activity through the trees, remembered noises echoing at me from the darkness. A series of splashes in the lake, the clatter of forks on plates in the mess hall, the satisfying thwack of an archery arrow into a target’s heart.
We kept walking. It felt like we did so without a word to each other, but Jamie could have been saying things and I could have not been responding to what he said.
We found the mess hall and the arts-and-crafts cabin and the sports field. On a raised hill, we could see the ring where fires had been built. There was a large circle of stones, and I imagined the campers gathering here on the hottest nights, here where the thick cluster of pines broke open and the air thinned and where, overhead, there was a clear view of the blanket of stars.
Nothing appeared to be burning, and the scent I thought I’d caught in the woods had drifted, but still I brushed off a stone and rested my weight on it, gazing up. Night had fallen enough by now that the stars had come out. The jagged ridge in the distance was only a fuzzy and faintly shimmering outline, as if not a part of the mountain at all. I tried to see this place the way Abby might have. She was a visitor to this area. Not from here. Not used to this. Maybe our sky looked different to her, outside the suburb she was from. Everything was so much darker up here, away from stores and streetlights. And in the dark, out of view
of
traffic
and
neighbors,
practically anything could happen.
Jamie cleared his throat. He was right next to me and I’d forgotten. Again.
“What are we . . . are we looking for something?” he asked.
He was occupying himself by throwing stones into the woods beside the fire pit. Sometimes a stone would hit a tree—I could hear the thump of impact, or a whistling rustle into a thicket of branches—but sometimes the stone found only air.
I stood up. She wanted me to keep looking.
“We’re exploring,” I said to Jamie.
“We’re just seeing what’s here.”