Leaving Blythe River: A Novel Read online

  “Could he have gone somewhere else instead of the run? Or after the run?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s really proud about clothes. He wears his trail running shoes out on a run, but he wouldn’t be caught dead in town with them. Besides. His truck won’t start. It’s broken down.”

  Ranger Dave’s face warped into a frown.

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “He can afford to get it fixed.”

  “That’s not what I mean. What I mean is, the truck is the most compelling reason to mount a search. The fact that it’s parked close to the trailhead. As opposed to someplace else. That usually indicates where a person started out on foot. But if it doesn’t start up and run . . .”

  “If it doesn’t start up and run, how could he have gotten someplace else?”

  “People get places without their own cars all the time.”

  Ethan’s head felt a little swimmy. He groped around inside a sensation he couldn’t quite describe. There was some subtext in the conversation that he wasn’t properly decoding yet.

  “Let me ask you a really important question,” Ranger Dave said. “Can you search this house right now and find me his wallet?”

  Ethan’s heart fell. Because he already knew the answer. “No, sir. I can’t.”

  “You know it isn’t here?”

  “I know I can’t find it.”

  “That doesn’t bode well for launching a search,” he said. Then, as if backing up in his head and listening to Ethan’s words again, he added, “What’s the difference? Why would you think not being able to find it is any different from its not being here?”

  Ethan sighed, and said nothing for an embarrassing length of time. But the question wouldn’t go away. And the silence got too crushing.

  “I heard him promise my mom on the phone that he would either hide his credit cards or take them with him every time he left me in the house alone. They think if they give me a moment’s chance I’ll try to jump on a plane and go home.”

  Ranger Dave scowled, an exaggerated gesture. “That really doesn’t help us. The location of a person’s car is supposed to be a clue. The location of their wallet is supposed to be a clue. Everything’s in doubt here. I just don’t know what to make of this one.”

  “Are you saying you won’t go out there and search for him?”

  “No. Not at all. He could be out in the wilderness. So we’ll search there. He could also be somewhere else. So we’ll search everywhere else. Not because he needs to be found if he’s in civilization. So we can stop searching the Blythes if he’s not out there. It’s a big deal, mounting a wilderness search. It costs a lot of money. We’ll need to bring in search-and-rescue people, and dogs. We’ll need a plane or a helicopter. If the weather conditions turn bad, searchers’ lives are at risk. Then again, the weather is taking a turn all right, but it’s turning unseasonably warm.”

  “That’s good, though,” Ethan said. “Right?”

  “It is and it isn’t. If he’s lost or hurt out there, sure. It’s not even forecast to go down to freezing tonight, and that could save his life. But the snow is melting fast up there, and it’s only going to get warmer. So if he left tracks in the snow . . . if he left a scent trail in the snow . . . and the snow melts and runs down the mountain, and more snow melts above the trail and pours down like a river and washes the trail clean . . . I think you get the picture.”

  “The dogs won’t be able to follow him.”

  “And neither will we.”

  “So what do we do?” Ethan asked, feeling a slight tremble in the words. Then he realized his use of the word “we” wasn’t quite right. Ethan would not be any part of the search-and-rescue team. “I mean, what will you guys do?”

  “We’ll just have to do our best,” Ranger Dave said.

  It struck Ethan that this was perhaps no more meaningful a statement than the pronouncement that Ethan should do his best not to release bear spray into the wind and so into his own face. In both cases it seemed to mean “We’re screwed and there’s nothing much we can do but make vague statements.”

  Ranger Dave startled him by speaking again. “We have to balance our plans, though. He might be out there, which is a big priority. Or he might just be gone, which is a big waste of our efforts. Somehow we have to walk a line with that.”

  “How?” Ethan asked, more trembly now. But then he knew. “No, never mind. I get it. You’ll just have to do your best.”

  Ranger Dave stood, swung on his wide-brimmed hat, and promised to keep Ethan posted.

  And that was that.

  Much later in the morning a loud pounding on the door made Ethan jump. Because it must have meant they knew something. Somebody had come to tell him what had happened. It meant his father wasn’t still missing—he was either okay or he was hurt. Or dead.

  “How come you never bark?” he asked Rufus on their way to the door. Ethan was surprised by how unsteady his own voice sounded, even for him.

  It really hadn’t been a lighthearted question. He was alone now except for the dog, which made him wish the dog could be a better protector.

  He opened the door.

  On his porch stood Jone, holding a covered casserole dish, her orange cat blinking on the porch behind her feet.

  “Oh,” Ethan said. “I thought you were a ranger.” He felt a great rush of relief, because he didn’t have to hear the news yet. Sure, Jone was scary. But not scary like that.

  “I brought you some chicken stew,” she said. Her words sounded flat and dense, as if she found the subject of chicken stew uninteresting.

  “Oh,” he said. Stupidly, he thought.

  “With dumplings.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s homemade.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  “I heard you were up here by yourself, and I didn’t know if you had plenty of food in the house. You know. While they’re searching.”

  “Do these searches take a long time usually?”

  “Depends,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “On when they find the person. What do you think? Usually a couple days at least.”

  Ethan felt around inside himself for a reaction, but apparently the inside of him had gone numb. Head and body both. Numb.

  “You should come in,” he said, stepping back from the door.

  “Maybe just for a minute. I’ll just put this in the fridge.”

  “Let me put it in a different dish, so you can have yours back.”

  “Don’t worry about that. You can bring me back the dish anytime.”

  But Ethan didn’t like the feeling of a visit to his scary neighbor hanging over his head. He wanted nothing to think about except what was right ahead of him, which was already too much to think about.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” he said.

  She came in. The cat did not.

  She stood by the table, her big tanned hands on the back of a chair, watching him take down a mixing bowl. He couldn’t find anything better to hold stew. Not on this kind of notice, and with his head so swimmy and his hands shaking.

  “I saw your cat one more time,” he said. “I didn’t let her follow me home.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t,” she said in that deep, throaty voice of hers.

  “How did you know that?”

  “I can tell when I’ve scared somebody good. I scare most everybody. Even people who don’t scare so easy. You, though, you looked like you’d be scared of just about anybody or anything. No offense. So I didn’t figure you’d chance another run-in with me. Most people don’t. Only person outside my own kin ever tried to get closer to me on purpose is that fool Sam. But you know that, I guess. Because he told you all about me.”

  “He didn’t tell me much of anything,” Ethan said. He was spooning stew with a serving spoon from one dish to another. But that was taking too long, he realized. So he began to pour it instead. “He just asked me if I’d met you.”


  “And he told you how old I am.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Right. I guess he did.”

  “And he told you to say nice things about him if you ever did.”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “Ha!” she shouted, startling Ethan, and causing him to spill some stew onto the counter. “I knew it. That fool.”

  “I don’t know if liking you and thinking you’re pretty makes him a fool.”

  “He told you I was pretty?”

  “Beautiful, I think he said.”

  “And you still don’t think he’s a fool?”

  Ethan didn’t answer. He’d gotten too tangled up in the conversation. And he had too deep a feeling that he could never get anywhere in a conversation with Jone. Never win.

  Instead he just rinsed out her serving dish in the sink, and dried it with a clean dish towel, all the time feeling her gaze burn onto him from behind.

  “It was very nice of you to come by and bring me something to eat,” he said.

  “You got food here?”

  “Yes, ma’am. But nothing that looks as good as this.”

  “You don’t have to call me ma’am. Jone is fine. It’s my name. J-o-n-e. Not the usual spelling. Not that it matters when you’re calling me by it. But sooner or later somebody writes it out, and then I realize they had it wrong in their head the whole time.”

  “Why do you spell it like that?” Ethan asked, surprised at how different the name felt in his head now that he knew.

  “Because that’s how it is on my birth certificate, that’s why.”

  “I just wondered why—”

  “I didn’t ask,” she said, cutting him off. “Maybe my mom didn’t know how to spell the name. Maybe she was still woozy from the drugs when the nurses handed her those forms. Or maybe that’s how she wanted it spelled. I don’t know. I just know it’s my name. What’s the point of asking questions?”

  Ethan didn’t answer. He just handed her the dish and shrugged.

  “You okay up here by yourself for now?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Jone.”

  She stared at him for a long time. It made his face burn, and forced his gaze down to the rug.

  “I hope this turns out okay for you,” she said at last.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Me, too.”

  Then he walked her to the door, and she stepped out. And Ethan closed the door behind her and breathed out his relief.

  He stood at the window and watched her walk away down the road, empty dish trailing from one big hand, Mirabelle the cat trotting along behind.

  He found himself wondering. What would “turn out okay” mean in this situation? What would be the best way for this to turn out? It seemed like an obvious question. But it wasn’t. It was a complex one. He just hadn’t realized it yet.

  Would it be best if his father came walking through the door right now? And they struggled on together like this all summer without the benefit of school to separate them? And Ethan had to stay in the land of the giant killer bears? Wouldn’t it be a tremendous relief to be sent home to crowd his poor mother and grandparents or stay alone in New York?

  But he felt too guilty even entertaining that thought. Noah was well short of father of the year, but he was the only father Ethan had.

  He tried to let go of any thoughts about the outcome. It’s not like there was a damn thing he could do about any of it anyway.

  It was fully dark by the time Ranger Dave pulled up in front of Ethan’s house again, so Ethan didn’t assume the ranger knew anything, and his heart didn’t pound to see the SUV. He figured Dave had just come to say they were giving up for the day.

  He opened the door.

  The ranger pulled off his hat and held it in front of himself as he came up onto the porch. “No luck today,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “Didn’t want you having to wonder all night.”

  “Thanks.”

  “One question.”

  Ethan knew he wouldn’t like it. He could tell by the ranger’s tone. He said nothing.

  “Did you know your father was seeing a young woman in town?”

  “Was seeing? Past tense?”

  “Yeah. Past tense. She broke it off with him the day before he disappeared. Because he had a seventeen-year-old son. She’s not so much older than that herself, just a handful of years, and she wasn’t exactly in the market for a readymade family.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said.

  It filled him with a horribly familiar feeling. It was that ugly moment when you had to back up through time inside your head, and reframe everything you thought you knew about somebody. You had to revise reality after the fact. At least the reality you thought you knew.

  Again.

  “You still didn’t answer the question,” Ranger Dave said.

  “Question?”

  “Did you know about that?”

  “Does it really matter whether I knew it?”

  “Yes,” the ranger said, and his voice sounded hard. It made Ethan want to back up a step. “Yes, it matters quite a bit or I wouldn’t be asking. Because the fact that he just went through a breakup, along with the details of that breakup, seem to add up to his going away somewhere. You know. Purposely as opposed to accidentally. But you think he wouldn’t do that without telling you. So I’m curious as to how much he tells you. I think you can follow my line of reasoning here.”

  Ethan held on to the door frame with both hands, leaning his chest against it.

  “He would tell me he was going into town,” he said, his voice heavy with shame. “I didn’t ask for any details.”

  “Got it,” the ranger said. As if that was the end of the mystery. As if that was the last bit of information he needed.

  “Does this mean you won’t look for him anymore?”

  “No,” Ranger Dave said. “It means I really don’t think he’s out there. But I don’t know for a fact that he’s not. And it’s life or death if he is. So we’ll search again tomorrow. But frankly I think we’re wasting our time. I’m sorry to say all this to you, because he’s your dad, and I know it must be hard to hear. But it’s the truth. We’ll look until there’s no place else to look, but I’ve got to be honest and say we think he took off and left you. You might want to get your stuff together, because we’ll probably make an arrangement for your mom to fly you home. She says it’s okay for you to stay alone here in the meantime. We’ll put the plane up tomorrow and look for him all the same. Because that’s what we do.”

  Then he set his hat back on his head and turned away. Walked to his big ranger’s vehicle.

  It struck Ethan that the ranger was angry with his father, and some of that anger had just spilled off onto him.

  He thought about flying home to his mother. It should have been a comforting thought. It always had been before. This time it wasn’t.

  Chapter Ten: Help

  Two days after his father disappeared

  The following evening, just as the sun hit a long slant on its way to going down, Ethan heard a rhythmic sound out front on the dirt driveway. Then it stopped, and he couldn’t decide if he should ignore it or go find out who—or what—was there.

  He walked to the window and pulled back the curtain.

  His neighbor Sam was sitting on the back of a saddled mule in Ethan’s driveway. It wasn’t Rebar he was riding. It was a shorter, stockier mule. Sam’s cowboy boots didn’t seem to hang far enough above the ground in their stirrups, and the mule’s front end took up a bizarre amount of space between those jean-clad legs.

  Sam must not have seen Ethan pull back the curtain, because he just sat his mule, a few yards from the front porch, staring off into space. Actually, they both looked off in the same direction, man and mule, as if thinking the same deep thoughts.

  Sam wore an old cowboy hat, which he took off and hooked over the saddle horn. Then he scratched his bare scalp as he stared.

  It seemed strange to Ethan that Sam had chosen to ride down his driveway before turning into
a statue. Behind his neighbor, Ethan could see the sun nearly touch the horizon, off to the west where the land was flat and there was a proper horizon for the sun to touch.

  He walked to the front door and opened it.

  Sam looked over at him, but nothing more. He didn’t dismount his mule. He didn’t squeeze its sides and ride closer. Ethan thought the older man looked hurt somehow. Not on the outside. Not injured. He looked as though he might be nursing an insult or a slight, or just couldn’t reconcile himself to the world in that moment.

  Ethan walked closer.

  “Is it okay to get near this mule?”

  “This one, yeah,” Sam said. “Dora’s like a kitten.”

  “What brings you up here?”

  “Down here, actually,” Sam said. “I been up riding the Blythe Range all day. Thought I could help with this search thing. Not sure if I did any good or not. Probably not.”

  It was dawning on Ethan, gradually, that Sam had not come here for no reason. Also that whatever was weighing the man down was about to be delivered to Ethan, who likely would have the same look on his face afterwards.

  “Still wondering why—” Ethan began.

  “Dave didn’t want to come.”

  “Why not?”

  “He didn’t want to be the one to tell you.”

  Ethan felt as though something struck his chest, something sharp. As though an arrow pierced him there.

  “He’s dead? My dad?”

  “No. Not as we know of. But . . . I guess . . . compared to that, what I got to say might not seem like such bad news. The search is called off.”

  “Because . . .”

  “They just don’t think he’s out there. They were never sure that damn wilderness was the last place he’d gone anyway. Now that they’ve combed it for two days, they don’t believe they’re doing anybody any good. They think he just ran off without you, guy.”

  “I know that.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. The ranger told me so. More or less. But he said they’d keep looking. Because it’s life or death if he is out there.”

  “Well, there’s one more piece of the puzzle, Ethan. Something about a recent cash withdrawal your dad made from the bank. More than just normal walking-around money. I think they said it was five hundred bucks. That was the last straw, I think. Now they figure they did their due diligence. Dave said to tell you to get your stuff together. He’s gonna ask your mom to make some arrangements to fly you home.”