“Find help,” Susan said.
“Right. So let’s go find it. We’re somewhere. Let’s find out where.”
Trees ringed the field on all sides. To the west, where a sheen of purple still glossed the sky, a herd of deer meandered from the wood and began to graze. Jean tapped Kate and pointed, and Susan raised an eyebrow. At least twenty soon ambled out, including several speckled fawns.
Just then a hawk screeched from the western wood, and Susan looked up to see it dive over the deer and yank a rabbit from the grass. Kate yelped as the herd bolted back into the trees.
“Well, not that way,” Max said, frowning. “Doesn’t seem like that many deer would be wandering around civilization.”
“Civilization?” Jean asked him. “That’s what we’re looking for?”
“Yup,” he said. “It’s got to be around here somewhere.”
He nodded eastward, as Jean and Kate retrieved their Barbies and Nell shouldered her blanket. “That way, then.”
They set out in the direction of the rising sun, scattering butterflies feeding on flowers and sending a surviving rabbit hurtling from a thicket of onion grass. Near the place where the clearing met the wood, the land dipped and they found a brook bubbling along through stones and moss. Overjoyed, Max said that water led to civilization — people, and commerce, and cities. Jean stooped to drink, but Susan pointed out that water could lead to typhoid, too, so Jean let it be and they walked along the bank, following the water as it flowed glibly over rocks and through small cracks, beneath a split tree, and on as the wood grew tangled and the heat rose.
Having read countless fairy tales, Susan looked for a forest trail, good for walking. But there were no mossy paths here, no faint track left by kind hunters or red-hooded girls who brought fresh bread to their grandmothers. There was no path at all. Nets of slim green vines, narrow as string, obscured rocks underfoot; tall stalks coated in sharp, translucent hairs grew knee- and waist-high; and bristling shrubs the dusty color of evergreens grew so wide and dense, they could not be pushed aside and had to be circumvented.
“This isn’t that much different from a hike I took with the Boy Scouts,” Max said reassuringly. “We’re okay.”
Susan rolled her eyes.
Nell pushed back her moist bangs. “Didn’t you come home with a concussion from one of those?” she asked him. “And poison ivy?”
Susan flicked her sister’s arm, trying to get her to be quiet, but like Max, Nell was immune to suggestion.
Instead, she told Susan not to be so annoying, and they stomped along in silence for a while as Susan counted the ways they irritated one another.
As far as annoyances went, from Susan’s point of view the long walk was full of them. Four times they had to stop when Jean or Kate lost her Barbie in the weeds. The fifth time Susan found herself fishing a doll out of a knot of prickly, looping vines, she jammed both Barbies into the backs of the girls’ waistbands and yanked their shirts over the offending dolls so their plastic hands and hair would stop catching in the undergrowth. Nell, meanwhile, had tied her blanket round her like a belt and kept snagging on broken twigs and low-hanging branches. Jean refused to use a tree for a bathroom until she was so desperate she was hopping, and Kate remembered suddenly that Nell had once told her your teeth fall out if you don’t brush them, which made her frantic until Susan explained hyperbole to her. Nell then marched ahead in a huff — “I never exaggerate!” And despite his Boy Scout comment, Max kept mentioning how strange some of the fauna was and surmising that this must be some kind of winter heat wave, because who falls out of a window into a new season?
And then, every once in a while, the underbrush would rustle as if something bigger than a rabbit was pushing through it and Susan would catch sight of a hulking dark shape streaking through the trees.
“You don’t think there are any dangerous animals around here, do you?” Nell whispered to her.
Susan shook her head. “Probably more deer. They’re fast like that, right?”
She said it as much to convince herself as Nell. She’d had only the briefest glimpses of the thing, but it had seemed far taller than a deer. Susan picked her way through a thorny patch, her winter shirt clinging to her damp skin, and tried to think what she’d read about being lost in the woods. Stay put — that was the rule. Make a lot of noise. That last she knew couldn’t apply here. Not with that flicker of darkness in the trees.
“I think there are bears here,” Jean said. “And bears eat people, right?”
Nell fanned herself with one hand.
“There aren’t any bears here.”
“But I think I saw one.”
“Shut up, Jean.”
“Max! Nell said shut up!”
“Shut up, Nell.”
The day wore on, and there seemed no end to the thick woods. Eventually the brook they were tracking branched in several directions, and then the trickle they followed dwindled until it was no more than a small gush of water over stones. Finally the earth took it, leaving only a shallow depression in the ground where rain might find its way. Still they walked on, keeping east, until Susan began to feel that she was full of holes — a gaping emptiness in her stomach and a hollow, fear-chewed spot in her chest. Every so often Kate took her hand, until their palms were so grubby they lost their grip on each other.
“We’re almost there, right, Susan? We’re going to find someone soon?” Kate asked her.
“Right,” Susan said, trying to make herself sound sure.
“Right really, or right, you think so?”
“Right really.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
But how could she be sure? She could only try to sound it, because as usual Kate heard every microsecond of hesitation in conversation, took note of the smallest wrinkle between her
