Wednesday, 4:31 p.m.
Two hundred and twelve steps from the water to the split cedar. Jo had counted them on the second morning and every time since, and they came out the same unless she stumbled, and she hadn’t stumbled since day four, when a root took her down onto both knees and she stayed there awhile because it was easier than getting up.
She stopped at the cedar. She always stopped. Lightning or a chainsaw had gone at it a long time ago, and the trunk forked at the height of her chest into two gray halves that leaned away from each other and kept growing anyway. She put her palm flat in the crotch of the fork, where a hundred years of hikers’ hands had worn the wood smooth, and she didn’t turn around to look down the slope at the shore. She counted to thirty. Then she took her hand off the tree and went on.
Three hundred and forty steps from the cedar to the campground. There was a loop road that was shorter and paved, and for the first week the volunteers had used it, going up and down in their orange vests with clipboards and energy bars and the terrible cheerfulness of people who had driven in from Bend to help. Jo never took the road. The path was hers. Twice a day, eight in the morning and four in the afternoon, down to the water and back, and on the way down she looked at the lake and on the way up she looked at her feet.
The path came out at the bulletin board by the host site, a sheet of plywood under a little shingled roof, and she read everything on it the way she read it every time, as if it might have changed.
FIRE DANGER TODAY: HIGH. PACK IT IN, PACK IT OUT. A flyer for a potluck at First Lutheran in Calder, three Sundays gone. And Toby.
MISSING. TOBIAS “TOBY” VOSS. AGE 8. 4’2″, 58 LBS. BROWN HAIR, GRAY EYES. LAST SEEN SAT. AUG. 22, TWO SISTERS LAKE CAMPGROUND. MAY BE CARRYING A RED FLASHLIGHT.
Dee had picked the school picture because it was the most recent, and Jo had hated it for eleven days, because he was doing his camera smile, the one that showed the gap on the upper left where a tooth had never come in. He’d been self-conscious about it that spring. A kid named Brecken had called him Jack-o’-Lantern for a week. Jo had told him it was the most distinguished tooth in Calder, and the only one in his head that could never get a cavity, and he’d said that wasn’t how it worked, and he was right.
Somebody had laminated the poster. Somebody else had pinned it next to an older one that nobody had laminated: LOST DOG. BISCUIT. A yellow dog grinning in the bed of a pickup, the photo faded almost to white. LOST ON WHISTLER TRAIL MAY 19. FRIENDLY. RED COLLAR W/ TAG. PLEASE CALL, and a 541 number on the tear-off tabs. Every tab was still there.
When Toby was four they’d lost him for six minutes at the county fair, between the goat barn and the funnel cakes, and afterward she had crouched on the sawdust and held his face in both hands and made him say it back to her. If you get lost, stay put. Somebody comes. I’ll come. He’d said it back. He’d been looking past her at the goats.
“Jo.”
Walt Ober was coming across from his site with a rake he wasn’t using. He was seventy-something, with a vest that said CAMP HOST over the heart and a bristle of white hair under a feed-store cap, and he had brought her a Styrofoam cup of coffee every morning and stood the same distance away every time, about ten feet, like she was a horse he didn’t know.
“County called again,” he said.
“Did they.”
“They want the site clear by Labor Day. That’s Monday.” He examined the tines of the rake. “It’s not me, Jo.”
“I know it’s not you.”
“Folks want you home.” He said it the way everybody said it, as if home were a place that would do something for her. “Rob called the office this morning. Asked how you were doing.”
She looked at the yellow dog.
“I told him you were walking,” Walt said.
“That’s what I’m doing.”
He nodded at that, and then he went back to his site and leaned the rake against his picnic table and sat down beside it.
◆
The camper was Dee’s, a nineteen-foot Rockwood that Dee and Marcus had towed up on day two and backed into site 9 in a single try while Jo stood in the road and watched them do it. It smelled of propane and lemon Pledge and, faintly now, of Jo. There were water jugs under the dinette, gallon jugs that volunteers had carried in by the case and left when they left. She counted them. Nineteen. There had been nineteen yesterday. She hadn’t been drinking much.
The refrigerator held a tamale pie from the Lutherans and a lasagna from someone at Dr. Lindqvist’s office and a tuna thing she didn’t want to know about. She shut it. She was still wearing Toby’s Oregon Ducks hoodie, which had been too small for her on day one and was now too small in a different way, stretched at the cuffs where she kept pulling them over her fists.
Her phone had caught one of its drifting bars of signal and let three texts in at once.
Pip wants to know if you’re coming for dinner.
Backpack’s packed. She put the otter in it. I took the otter out. She put it back.
Jo. First day is tomorrow. You promised.
She typed I know and deleted it. She typed Tonight and looked at it, and deleted that too, and put the phone face down on the counter beside the sink.
At 4:51 by the microwave, someone knocked.
Three knocks, spaced out, not loud. Walt knocked like a man banging the side of a stock trailer. The deputies knocked with the whole flat of a fist. The podcast girl didn’t knock at all; she said Jo? through the screen in her gentle Portland voice, as if she were a friend who’d let herself in.
Jo opened the inside door and looked out through the screen.
He was standing back from the step, down on the gravel, so she wouldn’t have to open the screen all the way. An old man. Seventy, she thought, or a hard sixty-five. He was thin in the way that showed at the neck, the tendons standing out under a white beard cut short and square, and his white hair was pulled back in a braid as short and thick as her thumb. He wore a long coat of some dark waxed cloth, cracked pale at the elbows and the pocket edges, the kind of coat nobody sold anymore, and a leather bag slung across his chest. There was dried blood in his mustache under the left nostril, gone the brown of rust.
“Could I have a glass of water,” he said.
His vowels had gone somewhere else. She couldn’t have said where.
He was a hiker, she thought, or one of the ones who came up to look. They came up most afternoons, the ones who’d heard the podcast, and walked slowly past site 9 to see what the mother looked like.
Jo filled Pip’s plastic cup from the jug on the counter, the one with the tooth marks in the rim, and handed it out through the gap. He drank it all. His hands were big-knuckled and brown, and the tip of the left ring finger was gone, healed over smooth as a bean. When he gave the cup back he didn’t let go of it right away, and she didn’t pull, and they stood like that with the cup between them while a Steller’s jay screamed at nothing in the pines.
Then he let go, and instead of leaving he sat down on her step.
He did it with a hand on the rail first, lowering himself in stages. She knew the color he was under the brown. She’d seen it on Mr. Albers, who had gone exactly that gray in her chair at Calder Family Dental in the middle of a six-month cleaning, and who was fine now, with a stent, and still sent her a card at Christmas. The old man’s lips were the color of the underside of a mushroom.
He bent forward and began to unlace his boots.
They were tall and soft and pale brown, some kind of hide, laced with thongs up the shin, and the stitching on the outside was tiny and dense and even. He worked the laces loose with his thumbs and pulled off one boot and then the other, and he set them side by side on the gravel below the step, toes pointed at her door, heels together. His socks were gray wool. Both heels had been darned in a different gray.
“Sir,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I walked down,” he said. “I’m slow.” He was breathing through his mouth. “What time is it?”
She reached for the phone on the counter behind her. When she turned it over the lock screen lit up, the picture of Toby and Pip in the sprinkler, and the time, and the date. His eyes went to it through the screen and stayed there.
“Four fifty-four,” she said.
“Could I come in? Just to sit somewhere that isn’t the sun.”
She was alone at a campsite with a stranger and a phone with no bars. There was a can of bear spray on the hook by the door, and she took it down and put it on the counter by her hip, and then she held the screen open with her foot.
He came up the step in his socks and ducked his head going through the door, though he didn’t need to, as if he were used to doorways lower than this one. He sat down at the dinette before he did anything else. Then he reached into the pocket of his coat and took out a flashlight and set it on the table between them, on its side, carefully.
It was a two-cell Maglite. It had been red. It was still red down in the knurling and around the switch, but the barrel had been handled down to bare aluminum, and the head was dented in two places, and scratched into the metal below the switch in square capitals were the letters TOBY V. Rob had done it with the scribe off his tool belt the night before the birthday, at the kitchen table, and Jo had said he’d ruin it, and he’d said, It’s a Maglite, Jo. You can’t ruin a Maglite. The letters were shallow now. She could have covered them with her thumb.
“Where did you find that,” she said.
He looked at the flashlight, and then up at her, and he smiled. It was an apologetic smile, the kind a person makes before they disappoint you, and it showed his teeth, and Jo looked at his teeth, because she always looked at teeth.
The upper left lateral incisor wasn’t there.
It hadn’t been pulled. There was no ridge of healed socket, no bridge, no partial, nothing. It had never been there. The canine beside the space had wandered into it the way they do when nobody puts anything in to hold them apart, and the central incisor had tipped a few degrees to meet it. She had seen that film. She had seen it clipped to the light box in operatory two, the ghost of his whole skull, the baby teeth in their rows and the adult teeth stacked above them like people waiting on a stair, and on the upper left one step with nobody standing on it. Hal Lindqvist had tapped the place with his pen. Congenitally missing. Two percent of people. We’ll fix it with a bridge when he’s grown.
She found she was holding the edge of the counter.
Two percent of people. In a state of four million people that was—she didn’t finish that. Her hands were cold to the wrist.
“What time is it now?” he said.
“You asked me that.”
“I’ll keep asking.”
“Four fifty-six.”
He nodded, as if it was about what he’d figured. He put both hands on the table on either side of the flashlight.
“I have forty minutes, Mom,” he said. “Let me use them well.”
Pip had been calling her Mommy again since the lake, a thing she had given up at four. Nobody had called her Mom in eleven days.
Jo picked up the bear spray.
“Get out,” she said. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you people think you’re doing. I’ve had a psychic from Idaho who said he was in a well. I’ve had a man from Klamath Falls who said he’d tell me where he was for eight hundred dollars in a Walmart gift card. I will spray you. It’s bear spray. It’s for grizzlies.”
“There aren’t grizzlies in Oregon,” he said. “You told me that. Just black bears, and they’re more scared than we are.”
She had said it in the tent at site 9, on the first night, before there was a camper or a search or a poster, to a boy who couldn’t sleep because of a noise outside that turned out to be Rob.
“Does Pip have Captain Otter?” he said. “She’d have taken him. She always wanted him. His left eye’s a button off your green coat.”
The otter’s eye had come off in the dryer when Toby was five, and he had cried in a way that frightened her, a flat hopeless crying, and she had cut a button off her green peacoat from Ross at ten o’clock at night and sewn it on at the kitchen table while he watched, and the coat had gone to Goodwill a year later with a gap in its row of buttons. The otter was on the posters. The otter was in the Facebook group. The button wasn’t anywhere.
“Anybody could—” she said, and stopped, because anybody couldn’t.
He lifted his chin. He put two fingers into his beard and parted it, the way you’d part grass to show someone a nest, and there under the white hair along the jaw was the scar. A short pale ridge, shiny, shaped like a comma, a quarter inch left of center.
“You told the doctor I fell off my bike,” he said. “I didn’t have a bike.”
The resident at St. Anne’s had been young and tired and kind. He’d typed it into the computer while she held Toby on her lap with a wad of gauze under his chin. Fell from bicycle. She had watched him type it.
Jo sat down on the step up to the bunk, because it was behind her.
The old man let his beard go. He looked at her with Rob’s eyes, gray, with the darker ring around the iris that Rob had and Toby had and Pip didn’t, and he didn’t say anything else. He waited. He was good at waiting. His breath was going in and out of him with a small catch at the top.
“Is there a bathroom?” he said after a minute. “I have to go really bad.”
She pointed. It was a folding door two feet from his elbow. He got up and went in and shut it, and the camper shifted on its springs under his weight, and she heard him stand there. Then she heard the foot pedal, and the rush and gulp of the flush, and then—she didn’t know what she’d expected—he laughed. It was a boy’s laugh coming out of an old chest, a high surprised bark. He flushed it again. He flushed it a third time.
Jo stood up.
She put the bear spray in the pocket of the hoodie, and she opened the screen door and went down the step onto the gravel.
The boots were where he’d left them, side by side. She picked them up. They were heavier than they looked and still warm inside from his feet, and they smelled of woodsmoke and some animal fat and under that something sour and green, like a crushed stem. The soles had been stitched on by hand. The heels were worn down on the outside edges exactly the way Rob wore his down, and she had bought Rob’s boots for the better part of ten years.
The Subaru was parked nose-in beside the camper. She opened the hatch and lifted the cargo floor, and under it in the well was the donut spare and the jack and a bag of Pip’s sand toys from Memorial Day. She pushed the sand toys to the side. She put the boots in around the spare, the left one curled against the rim, the right one folded on top of it, and when she pushed the left one down into the well her thumb caught on something inside it, a ridge along the lining, thick and hard. Stitching. Rows of it, tight as braille. She took her thumb out.
She put the cargo floor down and the hatch down, and it shut with the soft expensive thunk that had been the only reason Rob agreed to buy this car.
Across the loop Walt was sitting at his picnic table, looking at the lake. The jay was still going. She stood with her hand on the hatch until her breathing sounded like somebody else’s, and then she went back up the step.
He had come out of the bathroom. He was standing by the folding door drying his hands on the front of his trousers, and when she came in he looked at her, and then past her at the screen and the gravel beyond it, and then at her again. He didn’t ask her anything. He went back to the dinette and lowered himself onto the bench and put his hands on the table beside the flashlight.
Jo slid in across from him.
The microwave said 5:14. She had always been good at subtraction; she’d done Toby’s math homework with him standing up at the counter while the pasta boiled. Seventeen minutes.
She put her hands in her lap under the table, where he couldn’t see what they were doing, and she looked at him, and he looked back.