Lost at Running Brook Trail (13 page)

“I’m not defending her. I know how she is too, but her iPod is hers, and the contents. We only took it because we needed light.”

“She makes me so, so angry!”

“I’d say so. It’s more about you than her.”

“How’s this about me? She did something and it pissed me off.”

“There it is again—she pisses you off. You have excessive feelings of dislike for her. You’re impatient with everything she says and does, and it’s like you’re out to get her. Maybe it’s not about Kimberly. Maybe she’s just a convenient place for your anger.”

Miriam took a water bottle from her bag and drank. “You know nothing about my anger.” Her jaw was set like carved marble, and she struggled to find her breath. She felt the usual tightness in her chest and felt it like a vise around her head. The tightness threatened to overwhelm her.

“Maybe not the root of it, but I can see all the branches.”

Miriam felt like an implosion was going to take place inside her. She felt weak and hot. She drank more water to see if she could quell it. This wasn’t going right. Kimberly was the one who alienated others and apologized for nothing. Now Elaine was turning the tables on her and making it seem as if she was in the same boat with Kimberly.

“What root are you talking about?”

“I mean that I can see the effects of your anger, but I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

“Well, why do you hoard stuff; where does that come from?”

Elaine was aware that Miriam had deflected, but they all had questions to answer. She looked at the cave. It was the centrepiece of the place. When they had dared enter this dark place, they had unintentionally given up conscious control.

“I don’t know. It’s in my need to succeed. My parents expect a lot from me, and I want straight As.”

“It’s not just books, Elaine. We look for food, you scavenge some in your bag. You have a roll of tissue and you can barely share it, even though it’s not going to cost you anything or leave you without. I’m angry and you’re greedy, so you’d better understand your roots and stop picking on my branches.”

There it was again, the word greed. Apparently this was clear to everybody but Elaine. She didn’t see herself that way. She didn’t have an excessive desire for food or money. She just wanted to get ahead.

“I hoard stuff. I’m not greedy.”

“Listen to yourself. Out of the four of us, you seem the brightest. So I guess hoarding books does pay off. But now you don’t sound so smart. How is hoarding different from being greedy? Greed is excess and hoarding is excess. You keep books without regard for the rest of us. You’re disloyal to me and everyone in grade ten who needs those books you kept past the due date. You trick and manipulate our library system. That’s why you’re here, even if you don’t think you should be, because you’re so studious and don’t deserve the Alberta mountain treatment.”

“I’m forward thinking. I think about what I need and get it before it becomes unavailable. What’s wrong with that?”

“Absolutely nothing if it doesn’t affect anybody else.”

Elaine felt hollowed out. Something had fallen into ruins, but she didn’t know what it was. She felt highly charged yet drained all at once.

“This is pretty new to me,” Elaine said.

“No, I doubt it. You’re a pack rat but you’ve never heard it like that before.”

“I mean being out here, sleeping in a cave, being lost and really fending for myself. And you telling me all this.”

“I’ve never been here before. None of us has.”

Kimberly paced back and forth among the bushes and shrubs. She had walked away without thinking. She had felt a stab of fear when Miriam had called after her about bears, but she couldn’t turn back then. Miriam’s invasion of her privacy had overridden everything. She had no right to look at that stuff. But it was more than that; Miriam had seen her saying her father was a loser. Why had she taped and uploaded that video anyway? If Miriam had not seen this video, no one but herself and her mother would know the name they had given her father.

Now she plucked at plants, ripping them from their roots and flinging them to the ground. She wanted to vent, and the plants were a good place. They felt no pain. The man had left more than three years ago, and now here he was causing her more pain. But still, it was she who had made the recording of herself in frustration of a lack of answers, or maybe as a result of her mother’s answers. He used to tell her she was pretty, the most beautiful girl in the world. Now that he was gone, all she was left with was the desire to be prettier and more important than anybody else. Beautiful people were important; that was the impression she got from television and everybody else. She loved herself. What was wrong with that? If others were just as beautiful, where would that leave her?

Miriam and Elaine picked up shards of the broken mirror and held the pieces up to the sun, still hoping someone would see the signal. In the strips of broken glass, they tried to catch a reflection of their faces.

“If you hold it just right, you can actually see your entire face,” Elaine said.

“Yeah, yeah, I got it. Just goes to show you don’t have to have the entire thing to see yourself.” Miriam held the shard so she could see behind her. “I can see Susan.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Nothing really, just looking around.” Miriam held the shard up to the sun. She wondered how far away the light would travel. She looked at her face in the glass and confirmed that she was really here in the woods, lost. That was her face that looked back at her, bordered by the wilderness.

“I can’t see Kimberly; we should call her.” Elaine stood up and walked in the direction Kimberly had gone. Miriam followed Elaine, still with a piece of the broken mirror in her hand.

“Help me call,” Elaine said.

“Kimberly! Kimberly!” They both shouted with hands cupped over their mouths. They stood a little to the left of the cave and looked to the right. Above the cave was a slight incline, and they looked up as they called out. Kimberly slowly walked into view. Miriam turned away. She held up the shard again and watched Kimberly coming toward them. If she moved the mirror a little, she could see her own face, and when she moved it again, she could see Kimberly, her golden hair glimmering in the sun. Miriam wasn’t sure if she was the one looking in, or if it was someone else who was looking out. What she was certain of was at the slightest movement, the mirror displayed a different image; everything shifted with perspective. She kept the mirror trained on Kimberly. She was so much taller than Miriam. Miriam would stand on tiptoe to reach five feet, five inches. Kimberly had golden-blonde hair. The blonde in Miriam’s brown hair were highlights that her mother had allowed her to get as some sort of appeasement. But what else was different between them?

“We should all stay together,” Elaine said as Kimberly joined them. “We’re already lost as it is.”

“Good to see you’ve found a use for what you broke.”

Kimberly passed Miriam, who was still using the shard as a rear-view mirror. They all came back to the rocks. Sitting in the middle of a vast wilderness, they faced the mystery-shrouded carvings.

“I don’t want to sleep in there again,” Susan said.

“We don’t want to be out here right now, much less contemplate going back into the cave. But if nobody finds us, we’ll have to go back in. We have to do what we have to.” Elaine thought about the night in the cave. It was eerie inside and seemed so different from the outside world. Even their very presence out here in the forest seemed different and surreal.

“You know what that place reminds me of?” Miriam asked but didn’t wait for an answer. “A tomb.”

“Maybe that’s why they used them for burial. People long ago saw the same things that we see and had the same basic ideas,” Elaine said.

“But what about this one?” Kimberly asked. “You think they used this one for that?”

“They have drawings of all sorts of things in there. They could have used it for just about anything.”

“So we slept with death.” Susan looked away. Caves were secret places. She had imagined that monsters and demons lay within them. She had seen them carved on the walls and had seen them in her dreams. When she had entered the cave, she imagined going into a live womb, but as Elaine had said, she did have an active imagination. But as dark and dangerous as it was, it had provided protection against the things outside.

“I don’t feel so good,” Susan said.

“I don’t think any of us feel good right now.” Elaine too would much rather be at home. It was summer, a very short period in Canada, and while some people might like hanging out in the woods of Alberta, she didn’t. There were much more interesting things to do in Toronto.

“No, I mean inside. I feel really sick.”

“You really don’t look good. What wrong with you?” Miriam asked Susan.

Susan was doubled over, both hands to her abdomen. “My stomach hurts.”

“Your belly or your stomach?” Elaine asked. “You’re holding your lower belly.”

Susan’s face was invisible to them. It was covered by her pulled-up knees. “I don’t know which. Everything hurts.”

Before they knew what happened, Susan rushed toward the cave and released a gush of purple liquid. Her jet-black hair was tied in a ponytail with a few strands tucked behind her ears. This was a good thing because vomit trailed along her face, even reaching to her ears.

“That’s really purple.” Kimberly stood near the site of the vomit. She looked away. It wasn’t so much the colour but the consistency and the idea that it was coming up from some dark, tumultuous place inside. It was the body’s revolt against something that it didn’t want. The vomit was dense, but there was a creamy liquidity about it that caused Kimberly’s throat to constrict.

“What did you eat that looked like this?” Elaine asked.

“It might be those blackberries. We might all get sick,” Miriam said.

Susan was bent over. Her hands hung at her sides.

Elaine looked at Susan’s palms and noted that they were stained a deep, heavy reddish purple. She looked at her own hands and saw that the stains from the blackberry hunt were quite faded, but given her darker complexion she thought that might be deceptive.

“Kimberly or Miriam, let me see your palms.”

“Why?” Kimberly asked.

“Just hold them up!”

They both held their palms up and Elaine saw that the stains on their hands were just as faded as hers.

“You’ve got to be kidding me! Did you eat anything else that we didn’t eat? Like wild berries that we weren’t sure of?”

Susan, still stooped, was silent. She pointed one violet hand toward the berries behind them. Then she vomited again. Purple liquid trailed from her mouth. “They looked like grapes,” she managed to say. She sat on the ground, succumbing to the weakness in her legs. The pain in her belly was getting more and more excruciating.

“You probably poisoned yourself.” Elaine wondered what they were going to do. They had no kind of first aid, and she wasn’t even sure what Susan had eaten.

“Why did you have to eat anything? We ate blackberries and were all fine. I didn’t think you were that hungry.”

“I told you,” Susan said, “they looked like grapes, and I needed to feel full.”

“We’re not going to get full out here. We take what we can get and what we take has to be edible.”

“They looked like grapes.”

They left Susan on the ground to look at the tree.

“They do look like grapes,” Miriam said.

“But they aren’t.” Elaine looked at the weed. It was about eight to nine feet tall with thick pink-to-purple stems. “Too small and flat for grapes. They aren’t even in a bunch.”

The berries grew in a sort of cluster but were scattered, each separate on its own purple stem.

“I told her to just drink water, but no she had to eat berries,” Kimberly said. “She ate fifty different chocolate bars yesterday, and now this?”

The root of the weed looked like a cone, large and fleshy, and was covered by brown bark.

“I just can’t understand why she ate these things.”

“Impulse.” Miriam figured she knew about the irresistible compulsion to act or say something without regard for the consequences.