“Maybe it wasn’t our window that did it at all. Maybe something hit our window and took us through. Do you think that’s it?”
Susan shrugged. “It didn’t feel like that.”
They jumped at the sound of an animal howling in the distance.
“What was that? A wolf?” Kate asked. “Are there wolves here?”
They hadn’t seen any. Max had thought the barren ground responsible for keeping away the foxes and deer he’d seen on the way to the city. He hadn’t considered wolves.
“There’s nothing for them to hunt here,” he said, as much to reassure himself as her.
“Maybe we should find a better place to camp,” Susan said. “Maybe we should keep walking.”
Nell looked sweaty and red faced when they woke her. The imprint of her arms had left a long pink stripe across her forehead.
“I didn’t hear anything,” she grumbled. “You sure you didn’t imagine it?”
Max rolled his eyes. “Trust me,” he said.
“I think wolves would have woken me,” she said.
“Well, they didn’t.”
They returned the peaches to the blanket sack. Jean wrinkled her nose at it.
“Can’t we make something else?” she asked. “I’m sick of peaches.”
“Then think of something,” Nell told her. “Complaining about it won’t help.”
“Grouch,” Jean muttered.
They trudged along for a while, looking for a good cave or an outcropping that gave them a better view of their surroundings.
“Stop dragging your feet,” Susan said to Jean.
Jean glared at her. “I can drag them if I want to.”
She dragged them loudly for several minutes, driving Max nearly insane. He swallowed the things he wanted to say and instead forced himself to fall back and walk beside her. He picked up a stick and handed it to her.
“If you’re tired, this will help.”
She took it and continued walking, still dragging her feet. But now she used the stick to stab at the ground, too, making a sharp thwack with each step. In her free hand, she held her Barbie by its ankles, swinging it beside her so its grubby hair came up as the stick came down. She glowered at him, daring him to complain.
Max sighed. He wasn’t used to getting the worst of Jean’s stubbornness. But he’d seen her slump when the windows failed to let them through, and now she bristled at everything. He missed the cheerful faith she usually had in him. He missed her in general. Jean didn’t wake with nightmares the way Kate did, but she was growing silent and irritable, playing solitary games and brooding.
“Dear Jean,” he said to her suddenly in his letter-writing voice. “When we find a good camp, we’ll figure out how to make bread. Then you can have a peach sandwich. Your brother, Max.”
Jean shrugged. He tried again.
“Dear Jean, Won’t you like that? Bread and peaches? Peaches and bread?”
But she didn’t even bother to play the game. “No. I’ll hate it. I hate everything here. It stinks.”
Dismayed, he watched her swing her doll, letting its dirty hair flap.
“Don’t you like doing the things we can do here?”
Jean shook her head. “I can’t do them. They’re too hard.”
“You can! It just takes a little practice!”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t. I hate this stinky forest with its stupid brown ground. I hated that bad city. I hate the people. I just want to go home.”
He had no answer for that. She might be only seven years old, but Jean knew what was what. She was only saying what they all felt. Max looked around at the wood. The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows on the ground.
He felt a peculiar tightness in his chest. It seemed to him suddenly that all his life he’d been thinking about the day he’d leave home. There were so many things to do out there! Home was just the place you waited in between doing them. While Susan had to be coaxed outside, away from her books, he woke each morning thinking about where he’d go, what he’d do, the people he’d meet when he got there. If he thought about home at all, it was usually in terms of the day he’d be saying good-bye to it. He had big adventures planned — to the Arctic, maybe even the moon. It occurred to him that he hadn’t wanted to get home so badly since before he could think, since he was a baby, stuck in that glass box.
But it was different now. The forest might stretch for miles; he could walk forever and every sight would be new. He was farther than the Arctic, than even the moon. And yet for all that, he was inside a box again. He trudged up the rising ground beside Jean and felt as if someone had taken everything away, erasing the bright glow of tomorrow and maybe and what if? There was nothing left.
It made it hard to breathe.
They spotted the cave a little while later, when they’d wandered into a rocky section of the wood. Gray boulders flecked with white broke through the earth and jutted up among the trees, and where the ground rose steeply, a series of rock steps led to a wide-mouthed cave.
“Perfect!” Nell said. She slung the blanket sack over her shoulder. “From up there, we can see everything!”
They took the shortest way up, climbing the rocks to get to the cave. Nell reached it first and ducked inside.
“Does it look good?” Susan called after her. “How big is it?”
She didn’t answer.
“Hey! Nell!” Max yelled.
He reached the opening next. The cave was tall enough to stand in, and once he’d ducked inside, he could see it was even wider than he’d thought. Nell stood in the center of it, her back to him, the blanket full of peaches still resting on her shoulder.
“Didn’t you hear us calling you?” he asked her.
She was backing
