Leave No Trace, page 33
“Think of a song Dad likes,” she says.
Her mother closes her eyes briefly. The device starts to sing a long-ago tune about farewells and goodbyes, of new beginnings and love. It’s the song Dad always says was playing the first time he asked her mother out on a date.
Dad turns and eyes the device, and the tune changes—this time it’s Louis Armstrong and his brassy ways. “Stop,” he says, and the device quiets. He reaches out to Stef. “Let me see my mother’s watch.”
She slides it from her wrist. He knows the story now; she told him about Gillie and the rebirth of the watch. He presses the side and light bursts into the room—only there’s more to it here than in the woods. Here, the light reaches the ceiling and draws designs, words in a language Stef does not know, sentences and concepts all made of pure light. They weave together and form the image of a woman’s head, then her body, on the ceiling. She is sitting astride a motorcycle, a scarf at her neck and the wind in her hair.
Stef knows this woman. She’s Grandma. Or, she was.
“Yumma,” her father whispers. And as he says it the woman guns the motorcycle and it shoots off into the light. They all turn away from the ceiling and he stares at his lap. He hands Stef the watch and walks out of the room and out of the house.
Stef jumps up to follow.
“I’ll go,” says T.J. “Let me.” He jogs after their father and soon Stef can see them walking past the big bay window of the B&B.
She slips the watch back on her wrist and meets her mother’s eyes. “Mom,” Stef says.
“Shh,” says her mother. “Of course I believe you. And so will he.”
“There is one more thing,” she says, then explains what they have to do next. What she has only just now decided.
Their parents leave the next day. Stef slips a letter into her mother’s luggage that she will find once they reach Maryland again. It is much of what they spoke about when T.J. was out with Dad, but she felt she had to underscore it: We’ll come back when we can. Please don’t tell anyone. But that wasn’t all. Stef also wrote in the note where Tony’s body was located, so they could anonymously inform the authorities later on.
T.J. finishes a talk with their father outside, after which Dad seems to be, if not entirely on board with their story, at least believing that they believe it. Something extraordinary happened to his kids out in the forest, something that will take everyone time to digest, but their father no longer believes it is imminently dangerous.
Back upstairs, T.J. disappears into his room. Stef gives him some time, then goes down the hall, pausing outside the door. I’m taking steps, she thinks. Just different ones than Samuel did. Rapping quietly, her knocks push the door open a crack. “I’m here,” he says, and she slips inside, prepared for anything.
But she’s not surprised at all to find him packed and ready to leave.
There are many things Stephanie Holliday and Thomas Furey have not thought through clearly. They have food. They have a tent. They have matches. Beyond that are question marks. They don’t know where they’re going, only where they have to start.
You start where you ended, Stef thinks, and gives Ginny instructions on where to drop them off, about twenty minutes outside of town.
It’s not about being awake, T.J. said when Stef came into his room. It’s about being alive.
She can’t agree more.
It is simply what has to be done, and done now. If they wait, their old life will envelop them again. Today’s memories will be the experiences of different people. Everything will fade and become an anecdote, then a feeling, then ancient history. It will be a thing that once happened—not a thing that is still happening.
Neither of them want to lose everything they have discovered.
Ginny drives until Stef pokes at the car window and says, “There.” She recognizes the trailhead immediately; you don’t forget such things. It’s possible any trailhead will do, but she wants to pick up the thread exactly where they dropped it. Ginny swerves the car around to make a U-turn back into town, then pulls off the road. The woman has been quiet through the entire ride, but now as they prepare to hop out, she speaks up.
“ ’Gonna snow tonight, I reckon,” says Ginny, idling the truck.
“That time of year,” says T.J., squinting at the heavens.
“You’ll be okay out there?” Ginny wonders.
Stef stares out the window, eyes tracing the path back in. It has flurried here recently and a light dusty layer of snow marks where they emerged. “Don’t know,” she says, and thinks of Lexi. “Prolly.” She smiles.
“Not good ‘prolly’ weather.”
“It’ll do,” says T.J.
They climb out of the cab, hoisting spare backpacks Ginny turned up in her attic. “We’re meeting someone, anyway,” she says.
“Here,” says Ginny, handing her a flashlight. “Think y’ll be needin’ this, though the batteries are gonna be dead soon, I reckon.”
Stef turns over the heavy thing in her hands, then gives it back. She’ll have all the light she needs now from grandma’s “fixed” watch. “Thanks anyway, Ginny.”
“Don’t mention,” says the older woman, holding up a hand. T.J. and Stef give back the same signal and turn to face the trees. There’s a low bank of fog rolling out of the forest that gives it a haunted quality. A moment later, tires on the gravel shoulder start up and the car drives off.
Silence scoops them up again.
“We’ll find Lexi,” says Stef. “Or maybe she’ll find us. “
“I’m counting on Artio,” says T.J. “I’d like to see what it’s like to ride a bear.”
“As if Tony would ever let you do that.”
He looks at her with a half smile. He’s still got that sadness in his eyes, but apparently knowing a part of Tony still lives is comforting.
“We got this,” says T.J. “We totally got this.”
They begin ascending the path. One foot forward, then the next. Keep moving, keep an eye on the horizon. Step by step, they crunch through the snow. The image of Artio breaching the lake surface comes to Stef, and in retrospect it is a glorious memory to have. She thinks about the bear falling under the surface and imagines she has an inkling of what it is like to die just enough to do anything to keep on living.
T.J. points far ahead. “Are those birch trees?”
They keep walking as Stef counts: One, two, three …
Soon, the forest wraps them in its embrace, and they are gone from sight.
Without a trace.
Glossary
Tha an t-slighe soilleir
The way is clear
Toirmisgte
Forbidden
Sìthiche (plural), sìthean (singular)
One of many versions of “folk of the fairy mounds.” In Irish, it’s sídhe.
Dofheicthe
Invisible, unseen (Irish)
Lorgaire
Tracker, seeker, finder
Fuasglaiche
Fixer
Lighiche
Healer
Uilebheist
Great monster
Geas
Unusual restriction or taboo in folklore
Tír nan Óg
The country of the young, home of the sìthean. In Irish, spelled Tír-na-nÓg.
Acknowledgements
For a long time, camping was traumatizing to me. When I was about ten, our entire sixth grade class went on the annual “outdoor bound” trip in which we spent multiple days living in cabins by a lake and doing camp type things. But to start everything off, the school bus dropped us off by a trailhead on the side of a road, drove off with our packed suitcases, and we were given our marching orders. As in, march.
At ten, you have no sense of anything, especially distance or time. That hike felt like the Bataan Death March to me: endless, hard, uphill and did I say endless? Also, we had no cell phones or internet—this was the before times. It must have ended, because I eventually came home after the whole ordeal.
(To be fair, I had a great time during my visit. I got a lot of reading done, made crafts, learned to read trail signs, ate Rice Krispies and met the boy I’d eventually get my first kiss from. Hi, Danny!)
Hiking and camping have become more … enjoyable to me these days, but the thing is, everything in the woods wants a piece of me. If there’s a mosquito in the vicinity, I am dinner. Don’t even get me started about waking up in the middle of the night and having to find the latrine in the dark and the cold with little rocks and dirt under your feet.
Despite all that, I managed to go all in on wanting to be good at The Woods. I camped with the Girl Scouts, spent time in a sleep away camp in the woods on Maryland’s border with Pennsylvania. We had our privations, but I learned what the quiet of the woods sounded like, and that sun streaming through trees towering into the sky got my heart racing. I wanted to be self-sufficient so badly in those adolescent years, and the woods tossed up every challenge imaginable.
The Woods stayed with me. It’s primeval. It taps into our uncivilized selves. Trees hide secrets even as they reveal sunlight. The forest knows what time really means, and how humans are just another animal briefly passing through.
Leave No Trace is a book that also understands time. It’s always been about the woods and a version of me (though definitely not me) who was forced to live there. Lexi began as a classic “what if” character, born after I watched (at a too-young age) Roger Donaldson’s 1980s indie film Smash Palace. Amid a New Zealand couple’s disintegrating marriage, the father kidnaps his daughter and plans to hide out with her in the bush. (“Bush” in New Zealand terms meaning a lush near jungle of trees, plants and breathtaking scenery.) Spoiler alert: This part of the movie doesn’t last long. Daughter gets a cold, father leaves to get her medicine, and they’re caught at the pharmacy. But I saw that movie and asked, What would’ve happened if they never left?
That question started the story and decades of research about what it meant to survive in the forest, to live without people, and then to face the incursion of the outside world—by musicians, no less. I didn’t start with a fantasy element, but once I learned of the Ghillie Dhu (the Green Man of the forest), I knew everything was going to head in a new, more exciting, direction. Lexi would no longer be a victim of her father’s terrible decisions—she’d be a survivor, and find her own way out. If she chose to.
It amazes me how many elements are the same in this finished version from the one I originally dreamed up in middle school. Leave No Trace has been a long journey, and undergone as many trials and challenges as Lexi herself. So let me at least attempt to remember everyone who’s had a hand in helping make it all happen. Undying thanks and love to Alexis, Rebecca, Valerie and Julia, all of whom were my earliest readers. I passed handwritten chapters of the first drafts to them between classes, and sometimes they even tolerated me reading a chapter over the phone to them in the evenings.
Julia especially (who I’ve dedicated the book to) helped me choose “Alexa” from a list she had of what names went. We went through the alphabet in this book she owned—pre-internet days, that’s how you did this!—and settled on Alexa, which comes from Alexander (as in, The Great) and means “leader of men.” Lexi leads people. She knows the way. She takes them where they need to go, and then she finds out where she herself needs to go.
Muchas gracias to Señora Brown, who never noticed me writing the first drafts in my notebooks in Spanish class. To the generous high school librarian who let me transcribe the hand-written pages onto her Macintosh. To the librarian’s husband who rescued the document after the computer crashed, and gave me a chewed-up version that required another rewrite. To everyone who volunteered to read these versions over the years and offer feedback, including my agent Bridget Smith at JABberwocky, Lezli Robyn and Shahid Mahmud at Arc Manor. Thank you to Fiverr’s Marsaili, who helped me with my Scots Gaelic translations (though all errors are mine). I mix Scots and Irish folklore and the occasional word in this story intentionally, and hope to cause no offense in doing so.
More thanks to Roger Donaldson, whose Smash Palace short-circuited and then rebooted my imagination. To the musicians whose lives I paid very, very close attention to at a remove and then, later as a music journalist, up close. To all the survival experts out there who I also paid very, very close attention to, reading their books and making notes about how a person might survive or even thrive in the woods, which is so much harder to do than anyone imagines. And a big special extra thanks to fellow author and total mensch L.J. Cohen, who brainstormed with me over a weekend how to make the second half of the story come together. I couldn’t have done this without any of you, and you have my heart.
Many thanks and so much love as well to my brilliant, funny husband Maury, who supports me in every way possible and insists he’s ready to be known as “Mr. Randee Dawn.” He has enjoyed my other books but thinks Leave No Trace is my best work, which is yet another reason I love him. To my mom, my brother Craig, and all of my families—found and otherwise. The way hasn’t always been clear, but that doesn’t mean we stop looking. If you can’t find the path, you make it for yourself. But to learn a lesson from the forest, it’s best to take the long view about time. Have patience. The trees wait for you.
Be sure to let me know what you think! Find me at RandeeDawn.com, and I hope you’ll join my mailing list.
Randee Dawn, Leave No Trace
