She turned onto a new highway. For two weeks, she’d been gradually moving eastward, camping along the way. She had to leave the west, at least for a while. She didn’t want to get too used to any one place. “Forever alive, forever forward,” as Caleb had quoted.
She was eager to see the woodlands of her childhood and college years. A conversation with hikers she’d met in Colorado had given her the idea to hike the Appalachian Mountains during spring bloom. Spring beauty, woodland phlox, trillium, lady’s slipper, bluebell. She hadn’t seen eastern wildflowers for a long time. For almost two years, since the day Viola was abducted.
But she wouldn’t think about that. She was about to cross the Mississippi River. She saw the bridge ahead.
She had her foot on the brake. She didn’t know why. She wanted to turn the car around. Go back west. All the ghosts were still there, waiting for her on the other side of the Mississippi.
She felt them coming closer as the bridge neared. The sweet smell of a baby cuddled in a towel after a bath. Jasper climbing into her lap to sleep. The softness of the boys’ hair. The weight of Viola’s body as she nursed. The two freckles next to River’s nose. “Heckle and Jeckle, my favorite freckles,” Ellis used to say, dabbing her finger on each.
No, she wouldn’t let a trajectory, the simple act of heading east, do this to her. She was better. So much better. She’d been sober for three months, the longest she’d ever maintained sobriety. She was strong from climbing mountains. She could go east if she wanted. Nothing would stop her.
“Check out this bridge,” she said to Gep. “Pretty cool, isn’t it?”
The blue pony had been riding on her dashboard since last summer. Ellis had worried she might lose him every time she packed camp. She’d stuck him to the dashboard with little pieces of duct tape under each hoof. Exposure to the sun was fading his blue plastic, but nothing could erase his tireless smile.
Ellis took a deep breath as she arrived on the eastern side of the river.
“These are your old stomping grounds,” she told the pony.
Gep’s smile suggested he felt better about that than she did.
She was talking to the pony too much. Like she used to before she got better. She needed rest. She’d been up at dawn, hiked for four hours, and been on the road longer than expected because of a traffic jam. She was heading for a campground in a nearby national forest. It had a stream where she could bathe.
She found it at twilight, relieved to see it was empty. Navigating the winding gravel roads to find it was difficult, and people rarely camped on weekdays in cold weather. She’d been worried turkey hunters might be there. She didn’t mistrust hunters per se, but she avoided men with weapons and alcohol when she was in an isolated campground. She’d gotten a bad feeling a few times in the past.
She put up the smaller of her two tents and went to bed with a book. Reading at night had replaced drinking. She couldn’t sleep unless she read at least a few pages. If she was too tired to get into a book, she read poetry.
She’d been asleep for several hours when she was awakened by the slams of car doors. A man swore about how cold it was. “Go get a room at the Hilton,” another man said.
She looked outside. The men, probably hunters, were only a few campsites down from hers.
The noise gradually abated, and she went back to sleep. She woke as the sun came up, ate, then put her bathing supplies in her backpack and headed to the trail.
Billows of clouds in every shade of gray hung low over the forest. The forest stream was beautiful with the stone bluffs rising over it. Its rocky pools were clear and deep. When she was far from camp, she bathed with vegetable soap so she didn’t harm the water ecosystem. She cleaned and changed into fresh clothes with practiced quickness. Then she washed her soiled clothes and put them in a plastic bag that she stuffed into her backpack.
She rubbed leave-in detangler into her hair and sat on a rock to pick the knots out. Her unruly curls were long past her shoulders now. Her hair hadn’t been that long for years. Since Zane used to call her Lion Queen and chase her around growling. Since Mick used to say he’d seen a bird fly out of it.
Ellis had cut off her hair in the fall of her senior year at Cornell. She thought it would make her look more professional. More adult. But what she’d seen when she looked at her shorn head in the salon mirror was a man. She’d been insecure about her small breasts and lack of curves since high school, and the short hair made her feel more lacking. She’d cried when she got back to her dorm. Dani had insisted she looked great, said her eyes and cheekbones were all WOW without her hair hiding them.
Maybe the haircut had changed her life, possibly brought her to this very rock in this forest, because the next day, Dani had dragged Ellis to a Halloween party to try to cheer her up. The party she’d nearly refused to attend was where she’d met Jonah.
Ellis was dressed as a cloud, a costume she’d made in a half hour by gluing pillow stuffing to a short white dress Dani was giving to Goodwill. Jonah was Zeus in toga, sandals, and beard, a costume from a rental store. Every time he was near her, he’d poke his plastic lightning bolt into her cloud billows. “I’m trying to make thunder,” he said.
“This symbolism is a bit obvious, isn’t it?” she said.
“No, explain what you
