Instead I say, “Yeah, so random.” “Random” used to be his favorite word, but I don’t think people say it anymore.
And he snorts. “Sorry. This is so bizarre. Last I remember, you couldn’t even cook your own dinner, and now you suddenly drive up the coast and get a job at a guest ranch? No offense, but this is like one of those psycho-podcast things you’re obsessed with. Like, I’m wondering if you’ve been kidnapped or snapped.”
“It is just like one of those podcasts.”
“Oh. Okay.”
My voice is hushed, rushed. I don’t hear your mother’s ATV, so I think (know?) I’m here alone, but I don’t feel alone. There is something in the topography of this place that throws everything together, so every sound is an echo, so every light is refracted, and I’m trying to curb myself but I can’t; it all comes rushing out of me in a wave of nervous delight. “I’m in the middle of nowhere. The town used to be called Murderer’s Bar and it’s— There’s no cell service for two and a half hours in any direction. There’s no police. It’s only accessible by these windy roads on the edge of cliffs following a river, this big river, the Klamath River, and it moves so fast that bodies don’t even wash up until they hit the ocean.”
Long pause. “What the fuck, Sera?”
“It’s amazing. Seriously, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It sounds dangerous.” A pause. “Especially for you.” His voice has turned over, gone soft, and now I remember why we were more than a one-night stand gone wrong.
He doesn’t love me—or he doesn’t want to love me—but he does care about me, and I say, “It’s a job. I have a job. This is a good thing.” I don’t ask him what other choice I have. I don’t tell him I already feel more real here, more important looking for you than I ever did with him, losing myself. I don’t tell him about you at all. I can tell that it would be too much. The chance that there might be a Murder, Missing, Conspiracy, that I might be walking willingly into a crime scene.
“You know, when people talk about changing their life, it’s not supposed to happen overnight.”
I want to tell him that he doesn’t understand. I want to tell him this is something I’m supposed to do. This is something you would understand, but he doesn’t. I can see now that last year, all that time when I couldn’t leave the house, when I was lying in bed, listening to you, that was just preparation. You were preparing me, and it all means something—all that time I thought I was lost—it means something now because now I am here, and everything is coming together perfectly and it’s like a dream; it’s like the dreams I had when I fell asleep listening to your podcasts. It’s a Murder, Missing, Conspiracy, and I’m the hero. I’m following the clues, and I’m going to find you. And I’m going to prove to him and to everyone that I am somebody, that all that time when I seemed like nobody and I felt like nothing, it was just preparation for this.
But I pull myself in. I don’t tell him and I won’t tell him, not yet. He doesn’t trust me enough. He’ll think I’m crazy, the crazy old lady getting in over her head, so I just pull myself in and I focus on the details. “I got to ride a horse today. And now I’m cleaning windows. I’m doing something. This is good.”
The pause breeds many pauses. I can see them all lined up in a row. He sighs. “Well, you could have cleaned our windows.” I don’t know why it stings, but it does. I chose a selfish man to love, and I asked him not to be selfish. And even now I want him to help me, to think about me, to understand what being a woman is when he’s always and only ever been a man.
“I’ll call you in a week,” I say. “If I don’t call you in a week . . .” I want to say something will have happened. I want to say to call the police. But it feels like I am manipulating him, like I am holding myself hostage to make him care. I have called the wrong person. So instead I just say, “I’m at Fountain Creek Ranch near Happy Camp.” And hope he will remember, if I disappear.
* * *
—
My parents are less demanding. They don’t really do phone calls. They are the kind of people nothing ever happens to. The world could erupt and bombs could go off and the four horsemen could quiver into motion and they would be the same. My dad would watch Hallmark and my mom would watch Dateline. I end the call as I always do, wondering what kind of psychosis, what kind of to-the-core perversion, makes people that constant and ordinary.
I explore the lodge for a bit, unwilling to go back to my cabin but nervous about continuing my search in the daylight. Maybe it would be better if I wait until the sun goes down. The mountains are high around us, and it will touch down early here. In another twenty minutes, I will be able to look for your house in the dark.
There is a bookshelf in the lobby, and I search for something to read: a few books on horseback riding, a lot of books about fishing and topography and four copies of Dear Mad’m. I take one and I put it in the box with my food and I carry it out.
Before I head back to my cabin, I circle the lodge. There is an old gift shop; T-shirts and zip-ups with the Fountain Creek emblem hang on wall racks, speckled with fly shit. Beyond it is a small greenhouse pulsing with the dying light.
I put the box down on the patio and walk toward it. I open the door and am hit with a wall of heat that burns my eyes. As the door shuts behind me, I realize it’s not the heat. The shelves are stacked with potions in thick glass bottles. They carry no labels but are arranged neatly on the shelves, some threaded with ferns and flowers. In one, I spy a fish bone. My eyes sizzle around the edges and my nostrils sting. I can taste the earth at the back of my throat.
I grab the doorknob but the door sticks, making a strange sucking sound like it’s sealed. My heart swells in my chest. My shoulders tense. I dig in my heels and throw all my weight behind me. The glass door flies back and I bump the shelf, setting off a chorus of rattling glass.
I try to shake the shivers from my shoulders. I pick up my box. But I can still taste the dirt. My eyes still burn.
I walk back to the staff cabin, the darkness like a salve as I blink the sting away. I use a worn, almost bristleless broom to attempt to clean, but I bring up so much dust and rat shit from under the furniture that my eyes flare up again.
I settle for clearing a circle around my bed. Then I go to the closet and pull another quilt from the top shelf. It flops to the floor and a book falls with it, a thin volume in a cream cloth cover. My nerves pop.
I pick the book up off the floor and bring it and the quilt to the swept circle around my bed. The spine cracks as I open it. I see the name Lizzie scrawled inside the cover with the year 2007. I am surprised her journal has survived this long in the closet, and then I start to read.
The first few passages are obviously Lizzie’s. They maintain the same lyrical scrawl. They start with how beautiful the ranch is, how free, how secret. And then a new passage begins.