Leaving Blythe River: A Novel Read online

  So he had actually elevated his opinion of the mountains in the time he’d lived here. But they still didn’t mean much.

  Rufus was up on the bed with him, thumping his tail on the quilt.

  Ethan scratched behind the dog’s droopy ears.

  “Let’s see if there’s time to catch him. Talk him into taking you with him on his run.”

  He threw the covers back and stepped out of the bedroom, Rufus bounding ahead into the A-frame’s more or less one big room. No Dad. He looked to his father’s bedroom. Its door stood wide open, making it clear that the bedroom was empty. The house was empty.

  “Damn it,” Ethan said. “He ditched you again.”

  Meanwhile he was half aware of the message machine beeping. Someone must have called without waking him up.

  He stumbled to the machine and hit “Play.”

  “Dude.”

  Glen.

  “Wish I’d gotten to talk to you before I go. Let’s trade places. I’ll sit in that tiny house with your dad all summer, and you go out and probably drown on a sailboat with my dad for three weeks.”

  A pause.

  “Oh, well. Wish me luck.”

  Ethan felt a pang of regret at having missed the call.

  He stumbled into the kitchen area, divided from the rest of the house only by a tile counter, and looked, blinking, into the cupboards. Maybe for cereal. Maybe for kibble. He wasn’t even sure which.

  “It’s such a dirty trick,” he told Rufus. “Who likes to go running more than a dog?”

  Then again, Ethan thought, not all dogs are suited to a run over twenty miles long, which was a possibility on any given day.

  Giving up on looking for anything, and half asleep, Ethan sat down at the table with a surprising thump.

  “I’ll have to take you out,” he said.

  Without that holster of bear spray it was not a happy thought. Except to Rufus, who swung his tail with renewed vigor.

  “No. I can’t take you till he gets back. He has the bear spray. Unless I can find the spare can. He keeps saying there’s a spare can. But I haven’t seen it.”

  He stared at the mountains for a moment in an unfocused way. His eyes were focused, but his brain was not. So when the thought came into his head, it surprised him. He hadn’t seen any thoughts coming.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do all summer?” he asked the dog. “I mean, if I’m here all summer?”

  It seemed to disturb Rufus to be asked a question. He seemed to feel he should attempt to answer, or otherwise help, but ended up just wiggling uncomfortably.

  “At least at school I dared to go outside. At least I was in town. But out here in the middle of nothing and nowhere? With the wolves and the bears?”

  He realized he’d been so focused on getting away from the young cowboys and cowgirls who found him so funny that he hadn’t really thought about the downside. All that time to kill. Right in the foothills of the wilderness.

  He looked around the one big room they now called home.

  “We should get this over with.”

  He began to rummage around the house for the spare can of bear spray. He found it fairly quickly in the kitchen pantry. Because his father had the holster, Ethan would just have to carry it in his hand. That was okay. That was not the problem. The problem was, when he checked the expiration date on the bottom as he’d been taught to do, it had passed.

  “It’s expired,” he told the dog.

  For a moment Ethan wondered how a product that’s made to last for a year and a half had expired in less than three months. It must have been old when his father bought it. He must not have looked at the date when he chose it. That sounded about right for his father.

  “Sure,” he said out loud. “It’s only life or death.”

  Rufus slithered over to the door and wagged desperately, and Ethan realized his father probably hadn’t even let him out to pee before running. The poor dog had probably been holding it since bedtime the night before.

  Ethan sighed, and opened the door for him.

  “Don’t go far!” he shouted as the dog bolted past him.

  His worst fear was always that Rufus would disappear, led astray by some wonderful scent. And then Ethan would have to go out there alone to find him.

  “Great,” Ethan said. “Great place to be all summer. Let’s get Ethan out of the city. It’ll be good for him. Nothing to be scared of out here. No thieves or muggers or murderers. Just eight- or nine-hundred-pound grizzly bears. Who murder people. But we’ll give you this nice can of expired bear spray. See? Nothing to worry about.”

  To his relief, Rufus came wagging back.

  “Okay,” he said, closing them back into the safety of the house. “We’ll go for a real walk when he gets home.”

  Ethan’s father never got home.

  For most of the day Ethan felt dissatisfied and angry at the inconsideration of it all. It wasn’t until the sun began to set that he realized it might be time to be afraid.

  Of something new for a change.

  Ethan tried to call Ranger Dave after dark, using a general number for the Blythe River Ranger District. He got only a recording stating the office hours, and suggesting 911 for an emergency.

  But it didn’t feel like an emergency. Well, that’s not entirely true. It felt like one. But Ethan didn’t figure it would seem like one to anybody else. He couldn’t imagine convincing a 911 dispatcher that a father out late was an emergency, especially when a person had to be gone for something like forty-eight hours before being reported as a missing person.

  But gone into the wilderness . . . didn’t that make a difference?

  What if he told the dispatcher that his father had been out running in a wilderness area full of wild animals, a place freezing cold at night, and better not faced in the dark?

  Still, Ethan couldn’t imagine a search party going out to look for anybody in the pitch blackness. He would have to wait and call the rangers in the morning. Assuming his father wasn’t back in the morning. Which he still might be.

  And what if Noah wasn’t even out in the wilderness? Lately he’d been making vague excuses, like “Ethan, I’m going into town to buy groceries,” before disappearing for eight hours or more. Ethan had been so happy to have the house to himself that he’d asked no questions. Even the couple of times he’d come back close to dark. Maybe Noah had finished his run hours ago and had gone into town for a drink. Or a few drinks.

  Maybe he was seeing somebody in town.

  Ethan went to bed and tried to sleep. He failed miserably.

  Shortly before midnight he got up and let himself into his father’s room, where he had never trespassed before. He began plowing through Noah’s things. Dresser drawers. Desk drawers. Closet.

  If someone had asked him why—if his father had walked in and demanded an explanation—Ethan would have been hard-pressed to justify his actions. But somewhere in the back of his head he felt there must be something to find. Some reason for this sudden abandonment.

  Maybe there was something Ethan didn’t know. God knows there had been in the past.

  And now he felt it was his right to know. So much so that he didn’t even try to cover over the fact that he’d been in each drawer, each cubby. Quite the opposite. He pulled clothes out onto the Persian rug and left them there. Pulled socks and briefs out onto the dresser and didn’t put them back. Other than a box of condoms, which did seem to indicate something Ethan hadn’t been told, he found nothing to help explain the situation.

  In fact, he did not find anything related to the disappearance.

  But he did find something.

  He opened a wooden box on his father’s dresser. He’d expected it to contain some kind of male jewelry. Watches and rings, maybe. In it was one single lollipop. The kind with the wrapper that twisted around the white paper stick, and the caramel fudge in the middle of the hard candy sphere.

  It hit him hard. It was sudden and unexpected. If he had walked into the
living room and found Jennifer sitting on the couch as if she lived there he would only have been marginally more shocked.

  He stared at it for a long time, a kind of buzzy static setting up in his chest. Trying to think of nothing. Trying not to remember.

  Then he picked it up from its box and carried it to the front door, Rufus wagging behind. He opened the door, holding the dog’s collar so he wouldn’t dash out into the night, and threw the candy as far and as hard as he could. Which wasn’t far. He vaguely pictured all the kids from school smirking at his latest inability. He could almost hear them adding “throws like a girl” to their ever-growing list.

  Ethan slammed the door and went back to bed.

  Twenty sleepless minutes later he got up, left Rufus closed into the bedroom, and found the big flashlight in the pantry. He let himself out into the cold night, searching a grid in the A-frame’s front yard.

  A minute or two into his search he realized he didn’t have bear spray, and almost ran back inside. But just then the beam of his flashlight landed on the lollipop, its red wrapper bright and obvious against a thin dusting of snow.

  He scooped it up and carried it back to his room, where he hid it in a balled-up pair of socks in his own dresser drawer.

  He wished he could tell Glen about it.

  He still never got to sleep.

  Chapter Nine: Search

  The day after his father disappeared

  It wasn’t until Ethan was standing in front of Sam’s whitewashed board gate, wondering if it was too early to yell out to his neighbor, that he realized the weather felt strangely warm.

  That nasty mule, Rebar, caught sight of Ethan and his dog from the far corral and laid his ears back. Ethan grabbed his dog’s collar. Just in case.

  Right around the time Ethan was thinking he should wake Sam up if necessary, that his own situation was dire enough to warrant it, he saw the older man emerge from the tumbledown barn.

  Ethan waved desperately, windmilling with both arms.

  A smile broke onto old Sam’s face, and he approached the gate.

  “Ethan,” he said, as though this were merely a pleasant visit. Then, when he got close enough to see Ethan’s face, “Uh-oh. You look pretty upset. Everything okay?”

  “My father went out for a run yesterday morning and he’s still not back.”

  “Damn. That’s not good, is it? You call anybody?”

  “I tried to call Ranger Dave. But I only got a recording.”

  “Where does your dad run?”

  “He goes up into the mountains. Into the Blythe River Wilderness.”

  “How far?”

  “Farther than you’d think. He does twenty miles sometimes. Sometimes even more.”

  “Damn. He training for a marathon or something?”

  “Not exactly. He just does his own personal marathons as often as he can. The older he gets the harder he pushes.”

  “That’s pretty extreme. Running on those steep mountain passes in the snow?”

  “Well, that’s my dad for you.”

  Sam shook his head and appeared to lose himself in thought for a moment.

  “You sure he’s up there, though? You sure he didn’t go somewhere else after the run?”

  “I can’t really be positive about much of anything,” Ethan said, feeling the panic buzz again. Feeling his utter lack of sleep. “But his truck is sitting right by the side of the house. Last time he tried to go into town it wouldn’t start. He was supposed to call for a tow into the repair shop in town when he got back from his run. So he couldn’t have just gone off to do errands or something. I really think something might’ve happened to him out there.”

  “Yeah. That’s a worry,” Sam said, scratching one cheek through his rough, untrimmed beard. “Tell you what. You go back home. In case he calls or shows up. I’ll go get the rangers on this.”

  “It’s only seven, though,” Ethan said. He glanced at his cheap plastic watch. It always hurt his stomach to look at that watch. He’d bought it quietly out of his allowance after the good one was stolen. His subconscious mind had never stopped associating one watch with the other. “Will their office even be open?”

  “No, but you leave this to me. Dave’s an early riser. I know where he goes for coffee and breakfast in town.”

  Then Sam turned and walked away, disappearing into the house, and Ethan didn’t know why. And he didn’t know if he was supposed to wait there at the gate. He stood frozen, wishing somebody would give him better directions. Or that he could be the kind of person who handles things correctly on his own. In moments of panic, frozen always seemed to be Ethan’s go-to status.

  A moment later Sam reappeared, a ring of keys jingling in his hand.

  “Well, go,” he called to Ethan as he headed for his battered pickup truck. It was one of those trucks with the huge, knobby tires, like tractor tires, and a suspension so high above the ground that Ethan would practically have needed a stepladder to get in. “I’ll take care of getting a search going.”

  “Thanks!” Ethan called, feeling an easing in his belly. A moment of warmth, like the reaction to the word “help” on that awful night. Sam was going to help. Ethan was not in this moment alone.

  He walked back up the steep road with Rufus, panting with his exertion. He actually felt a few beads of sweat break out on his forehead with the effort. Which was weird. It must have been nearly sixty already.

  His neighbor’s huge cat tried to follow, but Ethan gave his dog permission to chase the cat away. He had enough problems without another run-in with Jone.

  Halfway back to the A-frame, the feeling of inner warmth abandoned him. Partly because he realized he’d gone out without bear spray. But there was more. Sure, he had Sam to contact the rangers for him. To help launch a search party. But his father was lost. And the fact that somebody was about to search for him didn’t alleviate all the fear. In some ways it made it worse. Something could have happened to Noah out there. Now Ethan was in danger of finding out what it was.

  When he got home, Ethan went through his father’s closet and took a quick inventory of his shoes. His father had brought five pairs with him to Blythe River. Which for a clotheshorse like Noah was quite a sacrifice.

  The only ones missing were the trail runners.

  Ethan called his mother in New York, where it was later. Still, even if he had been about to wake her up with the call, this felt plenty serious enough.

  “Hi, honey,” she said when she picked up the phone. She’d obviously seen Ethan come up on the caller ID. “Early out there. Why not sleep in since it’s summer vacation? Everything okay?”

  “No,” he said flatly.

  “What’s up, Ethan?”

  “Dad went out for a run yesterday morning and he’s still not back.”

  Long silence.

  “Did you call somebody?”

  “My neighbor down the road is off finding the ranger. They’re going to get a search going, I guess.”

  Another silence.

  “Are you freaking out, Ethan?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Good. Good boy. Because if you were all alone out there and freaking out, I’m not sure what I’d do. I’d be pretty desperate, being so far from you and all. I’m really glad you’re holding it together.”

  “I did want to ask you a question, though. My neighbor asked if maybe he might’ve finished his run and then gone somewhere. You know. Maybe gone into town or something. I said he would’ve called me if he was going to be out all night.”

  Another long silence, which Ethan hoped his mother would fill. She didn’t.

  “He would. Right?”

  “I would think so. Yeah. Yeah! Of course he would. He’s not that bad.” A brief pause that felt weighted to Ethan. “Then again, he does surprise you sometimes. You know. In the badness department.”

  “So you’re not sure?”

  “I don’t know how you can ever be a hundred percent sure about things like that. Things
like . . . what people will do.”

  Ethan pulled a deep breath. Brought out the big guns. The important information.

  “You know that secondhand truck he bought? Well, the starter went out, or the battery died or something. So it’s stuck right here beside the house. So how would he have gotten into town? And the only shoes that are missing are his trail runners. So if he went into town some other way—and I have no idea how he could have done that—it means he didn’t even come home to change into better clothes. Into nice shoes.”

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  She didn’t go on to say more. But she didn’t really need to. Now she knew, too. She knew that Noah really was out there in the wilderness alone. And that Ethan was alone in the foothills. Waiting.

  Ranger Dave showed up a few minutes later. How many minutes, Ethan found it impossible to judge.

  The ranger took off his wide-brimmed hat at the door, as if feeling conciliatory for some unknown reason, and asked if he could come in. Ethan swung the door wide, his heart pounding.

  They sat together at the tiny house’s only table.

  “I have a lot of questions I need to ask,” Ranger Dave said.

  “I hope I know the answers, but I’m not sure. I just know I woke up yesterday morning and he wasn’t here. He left a note on the table saying he’d gone running. He always does that. Leaves a note. That’s really all I know.”

  “And you didn’t get concerned until after the sun went down?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Didn’t that strike you as a long run?”

  “Not really. I mean, yes. I guess. When you think about it. But you have no idea how far he runs. Sometimes he does this combination of walking and running. And it can be more than twenty miles. It takes hours. So, yeah. It seemed long. He’s not usually gone literally all day. But he always says he’ll be hours and not to worry until the sun goes down.”