Red Fox Road Read online

  I knew what Mom was trying to say. That Dad might not be coming for us. That he might not have made it back to the highway. What if the GPS was wrong again? What if the highway was not where he expected it to be? He should have taken my compass. I should have thought of that. You think you’re walking a straight line, but humans always go in circles. Why is that? Is it some kind of ancient adaptation so that we’ll always circle back to home? I stared out at the woods and pictured him hiking over logs and around rocks. I pictured his yellow rain jacket and his wet boots. I pictured him finishing the last of his pepperoni stick and I saw him turn and look to the sky, wondering. It had been cloudy for two days after he set out. The sun would not have appeared to help to keep him on track.

  It dawned on me slowly. If Dad had gotten lost, he’d eventually circle back and end up somewhere near here. I decided that I would make sure I was here to help him when he did.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “There’s something not right here.”

  I’d been staring into the fire, hypnotized by the flames. They twisted and leapt, then shrank back and scurried along an edge of log, then leapt again. We’d built the fire bigger than the last one and more out in the open. If Dad was out there, I hoped he’d see it. We didn’t want it so big that it was dangerous and we couldn’t sit close to it, but it needed to be seen. You’d think that even a small fire in the bush could be seen from far away, but that’s not true, as Ms. Fineday had shown us. If you’re in among the trees yourself, you could be within feet of a fire before you’d see it, and if the wind was blowing away from you, you wouldn’t hear it or smell it either.

  Mom’s voice had drawn me out of my trance.

  “Something’s not right here,” she said again.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, something.” She turned her head slowly and looked over her shoulder into the dark night. “I can feel it. I feel like we’re being watched.”

  A shiver pricked up on my skin. The night had gone from pale orangey-blue to purple to thick blackness in the minutes we’d been sitting by the fire. We couldn’t even see the truck on the road twenty feet away. Part of that, I reminded myself, was because we’d been staring into the fire. Also, the moon hadn’t risen yet.

  “I don’t want to scare you,” Mom said softly.

  “I’m not scared,” I said. But I only said that to make us both feel better. If I let myself be scared, I wouldn’t be able to stop, and fear would lead to panic and panic was the enemy in the bush. Besides, what I was really afraid of was not the same as what Mom was afraid of. I wasn’t afraid of being watched, or beeping devices in the woods. I was afraid that Dad had not found his way, that he was alone and still out there. After she’d come for me where I’d been crying and sitting against the tree, she gave me two Scotch mints, took two herself, and we sat sucking on them and not speaking.

  Now that we both knew that the road Dad had been on had disappeared, the things we couldn’t say grew thicker. Why had he not turned around? Why hadn’t he come back? Trust the technology; that’s what he always said. He trusted the GPS. He thought the highway was only fifteen miles away, and fifteen miles was a lot closer than the more than fifty we’d traveled the other way.

  We’d made our way back to the truck where I worked on my map and Mom sat on the tailgate, thinking.

  “What was that little neighbor girl’s name, the one with the dark curls, remember her? A pretty name. Eleanor? Penelope? Something old-fashioned.”

  “Lucinda.”

  “Lucinda, that’s right. And remember that time—you won’t remember, you were too young. Do you remember how she used to sit on our back step when we were eating dinner and one night Phoebe saved some of her supper for her and brought it out to her?”

  “That was me.”

  “What?”

  “That was me.”

  “No, it wasn’t, Francie. That was Phoebe. I clearly remember her balancing her plate so carefully as she carried it. You wouldn’t have been six yet, you wouldn’t remember.”

  “It was spaghetti and meatballs.”

  “Well, I know you two shared so many memories, but sweetie, you’re wrong about that one.”

  Mom swung her legs and looked out at the road. Then she tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear and said, “That was so like Phoebe.”

  “She asked for more,” I said. “And you called her inside and you gave her some in a bowl.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, really,” Mom said. “I was only remembering because of the spaghetti. It was so good. Those meatballs Dad used to make. He hasn’t made them in years now.”

  We both pretended not to be angry. But after a while Mom jumped down and went to the cab of the truck and sat with the door open, smoking again.

  I knew that Mom smoked to calm down. She called it her medicine. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it didn’t and it only made her worry worse and then there could be what Dad called “episodes.” This started some time after Phoebe died. She would get caught on some little worry. I was going to say “silly worry,” but I’m not supposed to call them silly. She worried about things that were real, but so small I couldn’t understand how she could spend so much time on them. Once it was the furnace making an odd noise, and then Mom thought a strange smell was coming from the heating vents and she would walk around the house sniffing for what she called “poisons.” Or like the necklace she was afraid would choke me in the middle of the night. The worse she worried, the more she smoked. It could become a vicious circle.

  I’d heard Dad and her argue about it and he’d said, “I’m going to take that stuff and flush it down the toilet, I swear to God,” and Mom had said, “Don’t you dare.”

  Now, as we sat by the fire, I thought that I could wait until she fell asleep and then throw her tobacco into the fire. She’d be mad, but in a few hours, she’d come back to normal. Or it might take a few days.

  “I think we need to walk out,” she said. “I think we need to walk out now.”

  “We can’t walk out. Someone has to be here when Dad comes back.” I could feel my tears rising again. “I’m not leaving,” I said, and I knew I sounded like a baby.

  “This is going to sound crazy,” Mom said, standing up and taking a few steps away from the fire.

  I held my breath. Then don’t say it, I prayed. I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t want to hear it.

  “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Wait till your eyes get used to the dark.”

  She walked a little farther from the fire and I could see her scanning the woods, for what, I didn’t know.

  “Mom.”

  “Listen.”

  “Mom, come back to the fire.”

  “No. I can’t hear anything when I’m sitting by the fire.”

  “You don’t need to hear anything. If Dad comes back this way we’ll hear him coming. He’ll call our names.”

  She stood there listening. The fire popped and spat a burning ember onto the dirt. I crushed it out with my foot. I could feel the fear bubbling up in my chest like a pot about to boil over. I took deep breaths to try to push it down.

  I wanted to distract Mom from whatever crazy worry she’d been imagining. But before I could say anything her voice came out of the dark.

  “It feels like we’re part of some kind of experiment.”

  I waited for her to laugh, the way you do when you’ve let someone else hear the crazy thing you’ve been thinking about that you know is ridiculous. But she didn’t laugh. So I did instead.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe we’re in an A&W commercial and someone’s going to pop out of the woods any minute with two Teen Burgers.”

  “Shh!” Mom’s sharp voice came from the dark. Then there was silence except for the crackle and hiss of the fire. Then, booming clear and close came the hoot of an owl—

&
nbsp; Who cooks? Who cooks? Who cooks for you-all? Three times. It was the same kind of owl we heard at Grandma’s cabin at Gem Lake, and hearing it now was not scary, at least not to me, because it made me think of Grandma.

  “Like that,” Mom whispered, so softly it was almost to herself. “Was that a real owl?”

  I could almost hear Grandma’s voice, speaking softly in my ear. She would remind me that when Mom had her “episodes,” we could all be pulled in to her strange way of seeing things. But what was happening to Mom was not what was real. Remember that. I had to remember that if we were going to…if we were going to survive. And I thought that a hard thing—being out here, waiting—had just gotten even harder.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The first time Mom was sick, I was eight years old. It was soon after Phoebe died. I don’t remember much, except that Aunt Sissy came to stay with us. Aunt Sissy’s real name is Cecilia; she’s a lawyer and she hates being called Sissy, which makes sense to me—who wants to be called Sissy?—but Mom said, “I can’t help it. You were Sissy all my life. You’d feel like a stranger if I started calling you Cecilia.” Which also made sense.

  I remember when Dad and I visited Mom in the hospital. All she’d done was lie there in bed, sometimes with her eyes open, sometimes closed. I couldn’t see anything wrong with her. She didn’t have a cast on her leg; nothing was bleeding or cut. She didn’t have a bandage on her head like you saw in the movies. Dad made a couple of attempts to talk to her.

  “I watered the garden this morning. Your yellow rose is still in bloom.”

  Then there’d been silence for a while and Dad squirmed in the chair, got up, and looked out the window. “They’re building a new apartment across the road. Looks nice,” he said.

  I felt sorry for him. Later, he tried to draw me into it. “Tell Mom about the birdhouse you made at school.”

  “I made a birdhouse,” I said. She didn’t answer. Dad gave me a look and I knew he wanted me to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

  * * *

  The second time Mom was sick, I was nine. Aunt Sissy came to stay again. The first night she sat on the stool in the kitchen in her navy-blue suit and matching pantyhose and high heels and she said, “I don’t cook and I won’t clean, but I can microwave like nobody’s business and I can hire a maid service to do the floors and laundry.”

  “We don’t need that,” Dad had said. “Thank you, but we’re a twentieth-century family.”

  “Great, you’re only a century behind then,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “I know how to cook and the laundry has always been my job. If you want anything ironed, though, you’re on your own,” Dad said.

  “I didn’t come here to have you do my laundry.”

  “Why did you come then?” Dad said. I knew by his voice that he was mad, but I didn’t know why.

  “Moral support. Company for Francie.”

  I was glad she was there, even if I only saw her in the evenings when Dad was at the hospital. We microwaved popcorn and watched movies and she told me about some of her funny court cases, like the couple who’d split up and fought over who would get their cat and when the husband got the cat, it scratched him in the face and he sued his ex-wife for turning the cat against him.

  “I like having Aunt Sissy here,” I told him one night.

  “I know you do,” he said.

  “But do you like having her here?”

  “Sure I do. Sure.” He looked at me sideways and I wasn’t sure he’d say any more. But then he added, “You know sisters. They can be a bit bossy. Mom doesn’t always appreciate it. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  That time, I was old enough to understand that the sickness Mom had was not in her body but her mind. It wasn’t just little worries anymore. She saw things all wrong. Sometimes she heard voices no one else heard. Back then, Mom was new to her job as a counselor at my school, and adults who saw me in the hallway would give me these kind of sad-puppy-face looks or they’d say, “How are you?” But they didn’t ask how she was, like they would have if she’d broken her leg or had the flu. It was all kind of hush-hush, like the time Ricky Maloney peed his pants on the field trip bus and the teachers frowned at us because we were all supposed to pretend like we didn’t notice. I don’t think I actually noticed this with the adults when I was nine, but when I think of it now it explains why I felt like punching my PE teacher or breaking Principal Vannar’s thick glasses in half.

  I did get in trouble once during that time, when I broke every single piece of chalk in a brand new box of it during lunch hour. And it wasn’t too smart since I was the only one in the classroom at the time so they knew it was me. But it felt satisfying to hear each one of them snap, so I kept it up until I’d snapped them all.

  Dad got called into Ms. Vannar’s office and Ms. Gretchen, our teacher, was there too, wearing the sad-puppy-face and occasionally smiling at me with a frown and a smile at the same time. I thought they were making a big deal about nothing. I didn’t think Ms. Gretchen was the type to mind using shorter chalk. But the tired and disappointed look on Dad’s face was too much for me, so I made sure never to do anything else that would get me into trouble.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was late by the time Mom and I finally climbed into the truck and zipped ourselves into our sleeping bags. I had wanted to keep the fire burning all night, but I was too tired. The reflection of the flames flickered on the truck windows. I think I fell asleep quickly.

  I know I woke at least once because I remember feeling that Mom wasn’t sleeping. I didn’t say anything and neither did she, so I don’t know how I knew. Maybe her breathing.

  I jerked awake at daylight with a gasp. Something had wakened me, a bad dream, or my sore neck, or a sound. Or was it too quiet? I turned to look for Mom. She wasn’t there. A muffled fog hung in the air. I craned my stiff neck to look out at the tailgate. She wasn’t there either. I was suddenly wide awake. I tried to tear myself out of my sleeping bag, but it was twisted around my legs and I couldn’t get out of it fast enough. I pushed open the door and yelled, “Mom!”

  I fought with the zipper of my sleeping bag. Tears were springing to my eyes and blurring my vision. I half fell out of the truck with the bag still around my legs, caught myself with the side-view mirror and pulled my feet from the tangle.

  “Mom!” I called again. “Where are you?”

  Something was wrong. I felt it.

  I ran up the road, stumbling over rocks, calling into the woods. She had stepped off the road before to go into the woods to pee. Maybe she’d done it again. I strained to see the blue of her jacket in among the trees. Could she be in there? Gray morning light seemed to swirl in a mist among the trunks and hanging beards of lichen. Nothing else moved. I ran down the road in the other direction, shouting for her. Then I stopped to listen. The stuttering drill of a woodpecker against a tree startled me.

  I ran back to the truck to check the fire. Had she been sitting beside it? My legs felt like they were struggling through deep water. Ghosts of fog shifted shape around me. But when I got to it, the fire was cold. When I poked it, the embers sent up a thin wisp of smoke. No wood had been added or piled nearby. There was no sign she’d been sitting out here after we’d left it for the night.

  Maybe she’d gone to look for water. I clambered onto the truck bed, cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled as loud as I could, “Mom! Come back!”

  I must have kept that up for half an hour, my mouth dry with fear and the bad feeling growing in my gut. I paused to listen, then yelled again. There was nothing. The woodpecker’s drill, the gray fog draping the still forest.

  Slowly, sun began to shred the fog and warm up the morning. I remembered the horn. I climbed back into the truck and leaned on the horn. It blared in the silence. Four or five times I blasted and held it. I was about to give the SOS signal when I noticed a folded piece of pape
r stuck under the windshield wipers. My heart leapt. How could I have missed it? How could I have been so stupid? Wherever she had gone, I’d probably frightened her now by blowing the horn. She would have heard it and worried that something had happened to me.

  I jumped out and pulled the note from the wipers. Mom’s handwriting on a torn piece of my drawing paper.

  Dear Francie,

  I’ll be back for you. Don’t go anywhere.

  I know you’ll be brave.

  Love, Mom

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I threw myself down in the back of the truck. Then I cried like a baby. Like a real baby, with my mouth open, making as much noise as possible. I cried that way until my throat hurt and my head ached, and then, little by little, I caught my breath and sat up.

  The folded-up tarp poked from beneath the toolbox. I pulled it out and opened it so I wouldn’t have to lie against the cold metal of the truck bed. Even as I did it, it struck me as stupid to be arranging things so I could have a more comfortable cry.

  When I really was a baby, maybe three or four, anyway, one of the times Phoebe was in the hospital, I remember crying hard so that Mom would hear and come to me. I remember stopping to listen for her footsteps on the stairs, and then starting again, louder, when I didn’t hear anything. Eventually, I gave up, because I knew she wasn’t coming. My crying in the back of the truck was a bit like that. If Mom was anywhere nearby, I thought for sure she would hear me, she’d be sorry for leaving me, and she’d come back. But after a while, I realized it wasn’t going to work. Crying wasn’t helping anything. She said she’d be back. Maybe she wouldn’t be long. Maybe she’d heard a vehicle and was walking to it. Maybe she was looking for water.