The Timber Creek Vanishing

I should have told him to turn the truck around. I didn't. Derek just kept driving, music up too loud, talking like we were still 22, windows cracked even though it was cold. He was in the best mood I'd seen him in maybe two years, laughing at things that weren't that funny, talking fast the way he did when he was excited. He had a beer between his knees. The cab smelled like that beer and like the pine tree air freshener he'd had hanging from his mirror so long it had stopped smelling like anything. And the road kept winding and my stomach was turning and I had my hand pressed flat against the door panel without really thinking about it. My phone buzzed. It was Rachel. She was seven months along by then and she sent me a picture of the baby's room. She'd hung something on the wall, some little wooden thing with letters on it and I looked at it longer than I probably should have, given that the road kept curving. I typed back that it looked perfect and I meant it. Derek glanced over. He said, "She checking in already?" I said, "Yeah, just a picture." He made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and then he said, "One last weekend, man. That's all we're asking, like I was the one who needed to loosen up. Maybe I did. I put my phone in my jacket pocket and looked out at the trees coming in close on both sides of the road and didn't say anything back because the honest answer was that I wasn't sure this trip was what I needed and I wasn't ready to say that to him." Derek had been talking about this trip for months. A buddy of his had a parcel of land up in Manangahela, a couple hundred acres of private timber off a fire road, no neighbors, no check-in. I'd said yes before I really thought about it and every time I came close to backing out, I thought about how much I'd been cancelling on him lately and told myself it was just three days. "One last weekend," he kept saying. "One last weekend before your whole life changes. We stopped for gas about 20 minutes from where we were headed. One of those small mountain towns that only exists because of the highway, a gas station and a general store and a diner with a hand-painted sign. Derek went in to pay while I pumped and stretched because three hours in the truck had my lower back aching pretty bad and I stood there in the parking lot and looked up at the tree line and just breathed for a second. Inside the store there was a man talking to the cashier. Tall, lean, somewhere in his late 40s, wearing work clothes with close-cut gray hair and a face that had been outside in every kind of weather for a long time. Derek got to talking with him the way Derek always did with strangers, easy and loose and the man smiled a little and said something about deer season and Derek asked if the hunting was any good up on the ridge. The man said it used to be better but his son was up there scouting today so maybe the boy would have a better read on it by the time he got back. I wasn't really listening. I was looking at a rack of trail maps near the door and thinking about Rachel. I remember the man's voice being calm and steady, the kind of voice that doesn't need to push anything. We said thanks and got back in the truck. Derek pulled out of the lot and cracked another beer and said, "See, that's what I mean, that's exactly what I mean." I said what? He said, "People out here are just people. Nobody's trying to do anything to you. You can just be." I thought about that. He wasn't wrong exactly. I just wasn't sure it was that simple. We got to camp before dark, a flat clearing off a fire road, packed dirt and gravel and a ring of old firestones in the middle. We got the tent up, got the fire going, ate soup out of the can. By the time we sat down the sun was already gone behind the ridge and it was cold enough that the fire felt necessary and not just nice. And it was good. I want to say that. For a while it was actually good. The forest was quiet and I sat there by the fire and felt my shoulders come down for the first time in days. Derek talked the way he always talked when it was just the two of us, pulling up old stories, all of it specific and funny in hindsight even when it hadn't been at the time. I laughed when I was supposed to and I meant most of it. He said, "You're going to miss this. Miss what?" He spread his arm out at the fire, the trees, all of it, and said this. The ability to just go. His face went quiet when he said it. He looked tired in a way he hadn't looked all day. I told him I wasn't going anywhere. He said, "Yeah, you are. That's the whole thing. That's the thing you don't get yet." I should have said something back that I wasn't scared of what was coming, that I actually wanted it. But Derek had a way of saying things where disagreeing felt like starting a fight and I was tired and I let it sit. Derek was out fast the way he always was, sleeping bags zipped to his chin, breathing long and even before I'd gotten comfortable. The ground under the tent pad was harder than it looked and there was something pressing up at my hip, a rock or a root and I couldn't get away from it no matter how I shifted. The tent smelled like nylon and damp. My face was cold but the rest of me was too warm and I couldn't find the right position for any of it. I had my phone in my hand but there was no signal, just the time glowing, too bright in the dark. Outside, somewhere deep in the trees there was a gunshot, just one, clean and flat and then quiet. I lay still and listened. Nothing came after it, just the wind in the branches and something small moving through leaves somewhere off to the left and the fire outside ticking down to coals. Hunters, I thought. Early risers, someone up on a ridge with a good reason to be there. After two, the cold in the woods that morning was so sharp it made my teeth ache. I kept thinking about the gunshot. The fire had burned all the way down and the cold had come in through the tent walls, slow and thorough until it was inside everything. My face was stiff, my fingers were stiff and when I moved my sleeping bag crackled. I lay there listening to Derek breathe and listening to the woods wake up. Birds first, then wind, then the creek somewhere below the ridge. I'd been awake before him, which almost never happened. I made coffee on the camp stove and stood outside with my hands wrapped around the mug, the heat coming through the metal and I held on harder than I needed to and looked up at the ridge. The smoke from last night's fire was still in my jacket. I could smell it every time I moved. Derek woke up in the same good mood he'd had all day before. He ate fast and talked about the wind direction and drank two mugs of coffee and said we should push up toward the eastern tree line because the ground cover thinned out up there and we'd have better sight lines. He had his orange vest on before I'd even finished lacing my boots, already talking about what we might see and I fell in behind him as I always did. Not because I didn't have my own ideas but because it was easier and because when Derek was like that moving with that kind of energy it was actually nice to be in his wake. We went up through the timber under a flat gray sky. The cloud cover sat low over the ridge, the tops of the trees disappearing into it and the brush was thick and wet, grabbing at your jacket and your boots. You couldn't see more than 20 or 30 yards before something closed it off, dead fall, a stand of young furs growing into tight, the fog sitting in the low spots, everything was muffled. Sound didn't carry right. Derek spotted tracks around nine and we slowed and split maybe 40 yards apart as we used to do when we were younger. Me working the lower line and him taking the higher ground, moving slow and quiet and I was watching the tree line and not thinking about anything in particular. I heard movement, something big off to the right, further up the slope, pushing through brush, something heavy moving through stiff branches and I stopped and stood still. Derek had stopped too. I could feel it even though I couldn't see him, but stillness you learn when you've hunted with someone long enough. Then I heard Derek's rifle, just one shot, flat and hard, no echo, just the crack and then nothing, and then a scream, short and high and cut off, and then silence. I moved toward the sound through the brush. The branches were close and wet against my jacket and I was pushing through them, trying to figure out the angle. And then I came up over a little rise and Derek was already ahead of me, already moving toward whatever he'd hit and I came up behind him and stopped. It was a boy. He was wearing a blazer. orange cap and a camo jacket that was too big for him. The sleeves down over his hands, and he was on his side in the brush. The brush bent flat under him, not moving. The whole world went quiet, and then Derek said, "Oh God, and got down on his knees, and the boy made a sound, low and wet. Something I felt in my chest more than heard." And Derek said his name, even though we didn't know it, just said, "Hey, hey, and took the boy's shoulder. I couldn't move. The smell hit me then. Something copper and dark mixed with the pine and the wet leaves. And I don't know why I noticed that, but I did. And I don't know how long I stood there. Not long." Derek looked back at me, and his face was gray and sick, and he said, "Evan, call somebody, call somebody right now. And I already had my phone out, but there was no signal. There had never been any signal up there. And when I looked back down at the boy, he was still, and the sound had stopped. The blaze orange of his cap was the brightest thing in the whole forest. Derek sat back on his heels, and neither of us said anything for a long time. He was just a kid. Fourteen, maybe fifteen, in the brush moving through the timber, same as anything would in the fall, and Derek had heard movement, and he had shot. And it didn't matter, none of it mattered, because the boy was gone, and it had only taken maybe two minutes, and I was standing there with my phone in my hand, and no signal, and no way to make it different." Derek stood up. He was breathing hard and fast, his hands shaking, and he looked around the ridge like he was checking for someone, and then he turned to me and said, "Nobody saw. I said what?" And he said, "Nobody saw us come up here. Nobody knows where we are. Not a question. Something else." Him thinking out loud, already moving past the thing that had just happened. I said Derek, and he said, "Listen to me." He came over and put both hands on my arms, grip hard through the jacket, and said, "Evan, listen. I need you to actually listen to me right now." He said, "If we go back down there and tell them what happened, your life is over. My life is over. You've got a baby coming, man." And there's no version of this where we go in and explain an accident, and they just let us walk away, not up here, not like this, not with a kid. And I stood there and heard him, and I knew he wasn't right. I knew even then that he wasn't right, but I couldn't speak, and the boy was on the ground six feet away, and Derek's hands were on my arms, and the woods were just birds and wind, and I didn't say anything back. That was the moment, the moment I could have said no. I didn't say anything. Derek went back to the boy, and his hands were shaking badly enough that he kept stopping to press them flat against his thighs. He looked at the boy, and then looked away, and then looked back. And he went back toward camp, and came back with the folding shovel I hadn't even remembered we'd brought. He started toward a spot to dig, and then changed his mind, and went to a different one. He buried him up on the slope, back from where it happened, and a spot where the ground was soft, and there was cover. It took a long time. The dirt was rocky and full of roots, and the shovel made a grinding sound every time it hit one. A sound that went up through the handle and into my palms, and we had to stop and work around them, and neither of us spoke, except when Derek told me where to dig next. I did what he said because I didn't know what else to do, because my hands were moving, and my brain wasn't, because stopping would have meant thinking about what we were doing, and I couldn't do that yet, I couldn't do that at all. My hands were dirty past the wrists and cold, and I kept wiping them on my jeans without thinking, reflex, except it didn't help. When Derek said it was enough, neither of us could keep going. Derek smoothed the surface down with the flat of the shovel, moved some of the dead fall over it, and stood back and looked at it for a second. I didn't argue. We packed up camp in about 20 minutes, didn't talk, got everything in the bed of the truck and broke down the tent and drowned the fire pit, and the coals hissed when the water hit them and put out a thin, white steam that smelled like wet ash. Derek drove. He always drove. The fire road was rough, and the truck bounced, and every time it dropped into a rut, my teeth came together, and I kept my hand flat on the door panel the same as on the way up, except now I was pressing harder, and I didn't realize it until my arms started to ache. We were maybe a mile down when he reached back through the cab window into the truck bed, and came up with something in his hand. He looked at it for a second, then tossed it onto the dashboard without a word. It was the boy's orange cap. He must have pulled it out of the truck bed without knowing what it was, or he did know. It sat there on the dash, the hole drive down the mountain, and neither of us touched it. The dirt smell was still on my hands when I woke up, even after scrubbing them twice the night before. Once at the spigot outside, and once at the sink, with a bar of soap so small it kept slipping out of my grip. Long enough that the skin around my knuckles had gone raw and tight, it didn't matter. We'd stopped at the first motel off the county road, some roadside place with an ice machine that groaned all night and shook the wall behind my head, and a parking lot light that flickered and groaned just outside the window. And the gap in the curtains led in a strip of yellow light that shifted on the ceiling every time the sign kicked on. I'd laid there in the dark, listening to Derek breathe in the other bed and thinking about the drive down the mountain. How the cap had sat there on the dash and neither of us touched it. How the whole way down I'd kept waiting for something to happen. Some sound, some car coming the other way too fast, some sign that the world had already figured out what we'd done, and nothing happened. This guy went dark the same way it always does. I didn't sleep much, maybe two hours, maybe three, broken up into pieces that didn't feel like sleep so much as just losing time. Derek had already been down to the front office and come back with coffee and paper cups by the time I sat up, and he set one on the nightstand without saying anything. I held it and looked at the wall at a framed print of a barn hanging slightly crooked. The cup was thin and the heat came through fast, almost too hot to hold. My hands were shaking a little, just a small tremor I could see on the surface of the coffee, and I gripped tighter to stop it, same as I'd been pressing my hand flat against the truck door the whole drive down. Derek was moving around the room pulling on his jacket, sipping his bag, opening and closing the dresser drawer once for no reason I could figure. Like he'd slept well and had a plan and everything was just a problem we were working through together. And I hated him for it, because the moment he stopped moving the room went very quiet and my hands started up again and there was nothing to do with that. He said we were going to drive through town on our way out. Stop somewhere, get breakfast, be visible and normal, and I said I don't want to go into town. Evan, that's the whole point, we need to be normal, and I didn't argue because I didn't have the energy and because he wasn't wrong. And also because I'd already learned something the day before, that when I didn't push back, things kept moving, and when things kept moving I didn't have to think. The diner was on the main road through town, the kind of place with booths along the window and a pie case up front. One sad apple pie under the glass dome, and a woman behind the counter who'd probably worked there 20 years and knew everyone who came through. He smelled like fryer oil and burnt coffee, and the warmth hit you all at once coming in from the cold. We sat at a booth and ordered eggs and I ate about half of mine and pushed the rest around. The yoke had broken and gone cold and it all looked like nothing. And I watched the road outside, and that's when I first saw the flyers. A man walked by taping one to the telephone pole just outside the window. White paper, printed photo, the word missing in big letters across the top. And I watched him press the tape down with the flat of his hand and smooth it firm against the wood and move on to the next pole. His breath coming out in small clouds. I couldn't read the name from where I was sitting, but I already knew it. I already knew before I could see the letters. And my chest went tight and I looked away from the window and down at my plate. Derek had seen it, too. He hadn't moved. We paid and left and didn't say anything until we were back in the truck, the cab cold and smelling of dried mud and old coffee. And then Derek said they'll be organizing a search. How do you know? Because that's what happens up here. Everybody knows everybody and they'll have half the county out there by noon. Derek, we need to go back and he turned and looked at me in a way that wasn't angry exactly, but was something close to it, something controlled and careful. And he said go back and do what, Evan, because there's nothing to go back to. And I didn't answer, and we sat there for a minute, and then he started the truck. We were supposed to drive home. That was the plan. Get back on the highway, put the miles between us and the mountain. But by the time we got back to the main road, there was already a county vehicle parked at the trailhead turnoff with its lights going. Blue and white strobing off the wet asphalt, a deputy standing outside it with a radio pressed to his shoulder. Derek eased off the gas just a natural slow, and we went past and I kept my face forward and my eyes on the road and felt the back of my neck go hot. That was the first time I understood how big this was going to get. We pulled into the motel parking lot because we couldn't stay on the road, too many cars, too much activity. And two blocks down the volunteer fire hall had its side door propped open, people going in and out, a truck parked out front with the tailgate down and someone writing on a dry erase board through the window. Derek killed the engine and sat there and said we can't leave yet. It'll look wrong to leave in the middle of all this, and I said it'll look wrong to stay too. No, leaving draws attention, staying is just two hunters waiting it out, and I knew he was right. So we stayed. When that afternoon, a man came to our door, tall, late 40s, gray at the temples, wearing a county sheriff's jacket over a flannel shirt, and introduced himself as Tom Pike, said he was sorry to bother us. He asked if we'd been up on the ridge in the last day or so, said they had a boy missing and were just trying to get a picture of who'd been where. His voice was even, and there was no hurry in it. He stood in the doorway and looked at us. Derek said yeah, we'd been up there, came down yesterday evening, didn't see anything out of the ordinary, hoped they found the kid okay. Tom nodded and wrote something on a notepad and said he appreciated it. And then he looked at me for just a second before he thanked us again and left. But my hands were shaking when he walked away. Derek burned the cap that night in one of the standing ash trays out front, fed it in and held it down with a pen until it caught and then stepped back. And the smell that came off it was sharp and bitter, not like wood smoke, more like a plastic bag too close to a burner, something that got in the back of your throat and stayed. I watched it go and didn't stop him. And then he went inside and cleaned the truck bed with bleach wipes from a gas station. That sharp chemical smell carrying out through the open door into the cold. Out past the tree line I could hear the search teams moving through the dark, their voices fading in and out on the wind. Not words, just people calling to each other to stay in range. And I could see the lights, maybe a dozen of them, maybe more, white beams swinging slow through the tree trunks on the ridge, moving up the slope in a line. I stood there and watched them and I knew. I knew even then that we hadn't gone far enough up. That we'd been too tired and too scared and hadn't thought straight. And the spot we'd chosen wasn't far enough from the trail and wasn't deep enough in the ground. And those lights were going to keep moving up that ridge until they found exactly what we'd left there. I stood there until Derek came back out and told me to come inside and I didn't move right away and I watched the lights a little longer and then I went in. I lay there all night with the lights still moving in the trees behind my eyes and when they stopped moving, I knew it wasn't because they'd quit looking. The dogs woke me before it was light. Derek was awake too, already at the window with two fingers pulling the curtain back. The strip of parking lot light cutting across his face, jaw set, breath coming out slow and controlled. He let the curtain drop and didn't say anything, bowl conversation. I sat on the edge of the mattress and put my face in my hands. The carpet was stiff and smelled like a decade of cigarette smoke and the room had gone cold near the floor and along the window glass while the rest stayed stale and still. My head was thick from not sleeping. My mouth tasted like something chemical like whatever Derek had used on the truck bed had settled into the air overnight and I kept swallowing trying to clear it and it wouldn't. Outside the dogs went on further up the ridge now moving away but distance didn't help. The sound was the sound and what it meant didn't change just because they were a half-mile out instead of 200 yards. I said, "Derek, I need to tell you something." And he turned from the window before I got it out, he already knew. So I said, "I think we should go in, go to Tom Pike and just say what happened." And then I stopped because Derek had that look, the one where he goes very still and his jaw tightens just slightly at the back. Evan. And I waited and he said, "We are not doing that. And I said we can't just listen to me and I stopped." He sat down on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, springs giving a short creek and talked slow and measured the way he does when he's moving me toward something. He said what happened up there was an accident, both of us knew that, but the moment we buried him it wasn't an accident anymore. And going in now doesn't undo the burial, it just adds the burial on top and there's no version of that where we walk away with our lives. And then he looked at me and said, "You're about to have a kid, Evan. You understand what I'm saying to you." And I did understand, that was the problem. I understood it perfectly and still my chest stayed tight and Derek kept talking and the room was dark and close and the dogs were still moving up the ridge and I couldn't hold the thought together long enough to do anything with it. I said, "Okay," and he nodded once and stood up and we got dressed without much more said, the cold off the window working into my shirt by the time I'd gotten it buttoned. It was around nine when the fire hall radiotrafic started changing. I could tell from the parking lot a cluster of people near the prop open door, voices coming out with something urgent in them that wasn't there before and two volunteers standing outside looked at each other and went back in fast. The air had that raw early bite, cold enough to sting the inside of your nose and the sky was flat white from edge to edge. Derek was already watching. I kept my eyes on the ground and waited. We heard it from a woman walking past, crying and talking on her phone at the same time, just fragments coming through and one of those fragments was they found him up on the ridge. After that, something went out of the street. I watched a man in a hunting jacket take his hat off and press it against his face, eyes shut, then put it back on and start walking toward the fire hall. A truck door shut somewhere behind me and then it was quiet except for the radio noise from the hall. Derek said inside and I followed him. But I sat in the chair by the window, the vinyl tacky against my arms. Derek was pacing, short laps from the door to the bed and back. After a while, he said, "We have to get out now, today, we can't stay here another night." And I said, "They have the whole town locked down. There's county vehicles everywhere. How are we just going to drive out?" And he said, "We drive out like we were always going to. Check out, load the truck and go, because two guys staying on after they find the kid looks worse than two guys leaving. And I didn't know if he was right or wrong anymore. I didn't trust my own thinking enough to push back. We checked out around noon and loaded up. And I drove because Derek wanted to watch the road ahead and count vehicles. So I kept both hands on the wheel, speed limit exactly, trying not to look like a man with anything to think about. We got about six blocks before we hit the line. A deputy had the road flagged off at the intersection by the grain elevator. Just orange cones and a hand signal. And Derek said, "Don't stop. I have to stop." And he said, "Keep moving." And I stopped. The deputy came around to the driver's side, boot scraping on wet asphalt. And he said, "Sorry." Roads closed through the north end while they've got the rescue operation running, said if we were heading out, we'd want to go back south on county road 12 and pick up 219 there. He was young, maybe mid-20s, cheeks red from standing in the cold. And he wasn't looking at us like anything, just managing traffic, politely sending us the long way around. And I thanked him and rolled the window up and turned back and Derek said nothing for a full block. We ended up back at the motel lot because I didn't know where else to go. And my hands were shaking bad enough by then that I didn't trust myself on an unfamiliar road. I parked and killed the engine. The truck ticking as it cooled. And Derek was already on his phone and I didn't ask who he was looking up. Just sat there and breathed and watched a couple of starlings land on the ice machine cabinet, pick it something in the rubber seal along the lid and fly off when a car went past. was when I was. saw Tom. He was coming from the direction of the fire hall, still in the sheriff's jacket, no hat on even in the cold, breath coming out in short even puffs. His eyes were on the truck, and I knew some part of me had known since he'd looked at me in the doorway the day before, but now he was coming straight for us. He stopped about ten feet from the truck and waited for us to get out, and the gravel crunched when I stepped down and the cold hit the back of my neck, and he looked at me and said, we need to talk. Tom already knew. He didn't ask us to sit down, didn't pull a notepad or uncap a pen, or do any of the things you picture a cop doing when they're about to question somebody, and that's what got into me first, the absence of all that. He stood in the gravel with his hands in his jacket pockets and said, there's a cabin about a half mile up the service road, and I'd like you two to come with me while we wait for the county investigator to get here, and he said it like he was asking us to help him carry something. Derek said, are we being detained, and Tom looked at him for a second. Patient like he'd heard that before, said no, and started walking, and we followed him. I don't know why we followed him. By then neither of us had enough left to do anything else. The path was frozen hard and narrow, packed dirt with frost in the cracks and dead grass gone the color of straw on either side, and the cold got into your ears and dried the inside of your nose raw, and none of us said anything the whole walk up. Derek was breathing behind me, the rhythm of it off too fast for the grade, and I kept my eyes on my boots and didn't look back. The cabin was old, but solid. Log walls gone gray from weather, a rusted metal chimney pipe leaning off the pitched roof, and it smelled like pine resin and damp wood and old ash from a stove nobody had touched in months. Tom got the door open with a key on a ring with about 15 others, clicked on the bear bulb hanging from the center beam, and the light came down yellow and flat and made everybody look tired. He stood near the door with his back to the window and didn't sit. The log behind my shoulder was cold through my jacket. Derek stood closer to the middle of the room, arms crossed, jaw tight at the back, and I could feel him working himself up before anything even happened. Tom said he'd been up on that ridge since four in the morning, then stopped and let that sit. And something in my legs went loose and soft because I already knew where the sentence was going before it got there. He said the dogs found the site the night before, but it was too dark to work it carefully, so they came back at first light. He pulled a plastic evidence bag from his pocket, sealed a brass shell casing inside, and set it on the wobbly camp table between us without making a show of it, and I kept my eyes on it because looking at Tom was worse. "They were boot prints on the north-facing slope," he said. "Entire tracks on the old logging cut below the 12-road." And he said, "I know which truck because I saw it in this parking lot two days ago, and there was no heat in it at all. Just a man reading from a list, and that steadiness was worse than anger because it meant he'd already worked through the grief to get here." Then Derek said something I couldn't believe, he said. He said, "You can't prove anything in that voice. The controlled one he'd used his whole life to back people down, and some part of him still thought it could work, still thought he could find the angle, and I wanted to go straight through the wall behind me." Tom turned his head and looked at him and said, "I know you were up there, and I know you buried my boy, and I know that's your truck in that lot, flat and even, and then I'm not here to debate with you." There was nowhere to go, the door was behind Tom, and Tom was between us and it, and maybe Derek wasn't thinking at all anymore. Maybe the one thing he couldn't stand, being cornered with no move left, just took over, because he went fast and without any warning, and I heard myself say his name, but it was still in my mouth when Tom put him down. One shot. The sound inside that small cabin was deafening, enormous and then gone, and what was left was ringing and burnt powder in the back of your throat, and Derek on the floor, and I was against the wall and couldn't move, and I was certain I was next, and I just stood there and waited for it. He looked at me for a long time." Then he said, "You've got a baby coming, and I had nothing." He said, "You'll remember this longer than prison, and then he told me to help carry Derek out to the truck." Both of us took an end and did it without talking, and Derek was heavy, and my grip kept going, fingers slipping at the wrong moment, and the gravel crunched slow under our boots going down the steps, and the trees stood completely still around us, no wind, no birds, just our breath, and our feet. When we were done, Tom looked at me one more time and said, "You know which road goes south, and that was it. I stopped once in six hours, a rest stopped somewhere in Pennsylvania, the lot mostly empty in the dark, and I got out and stood next to the truck and couldn't make my hands do anything, just stood there until they stopped shaking enough to grip the wheel again. The radio stayed off the whole way. Somewhere past the Virginia line I thought about calling my wife, and then didn't, and kept going. The house smelled like the candle she always burned in the kitchen, vanilla, and something warm under it, and it hit me when I opened the door, and I stood in the doorway for a second. She was already asleep, and I watched her from the doorway and didn't go closer. Morning came, and I made coffee and stood at the kitchen window, and the yard looked exactly as it always did, saying loose fence board, same empty bird feeder, and I couldn't understand how that was possible. Nobody came, nobody called, no deputies, no investigators, nothing. I read about Mason Pike in a local paper online a few weeks later, hunting accident, official finding, no suspects, and I've been sitting with that ever since. My son was born six weeks later. He's four now with a laugh that starts before whatever's funny even happens. Last month he had a birthday. I stood behind him while he leaned over the cake, and he looked back at me over his shoulder to make sure I was watching. I told him to go ahead, he blew them all out at once. The room went dark, and the worst part is, to keep this life, I would bury that boy all over again.