The Marsh King's Daughter(48)

But I was struggling, too. I had no friends. I’d dropped out of school. My grandparents hated me, or at least they acted like they did, and I definitely hated them for how they treated me. I hated the way my mother stayed in her bedroom all day, and I hated my father for whatever he did to her that made her afraid to come out. I thought about my father every day. Missed him. Loved him. Wanted more than anything for things to go back to the way they were before we left the marsh. Not the chaotic days immediately preceding our escape, but back to when I was little, to the only time in my life when I was truly happy.

I knew my mother was never going to be the kind of mother I desperately needed the day I found a man in her bed. I don’t know how long she’d been seeing him. This could have been the first night he spent with her or the hundredth. Maybe he loved her. Maybe she loved him back. Maybe she was ready to put her past behind her at last. If so, I guess I put an end to that.

I’d gotten dressed and gone upstairs to use the bathroom. There were two twin beds in my mother’s room, but after weeks of sharing her childhood bedroom, I’d had all the togetherness I could stand and moved to the couch in the basement.

The bathroom door was closed. I figured my mother was using it, so I went to her bedroom to get something to read while I waited for her to come out. My mother used to spend a lot of time in the outhouse when I was growing up, so I expected her to be a while. I used to think it was because she was so often sick, but in hindsight I think it was because the outhouse was the only place on our ridge where she was guaranteed to be left alone.

I stopped in the doorway when I saw a man lying on his side in my mother’s bed. The covers were thrown back to expose his nakedness and his head was propped on his elbow. I knew what they’d been doing. Most fourteen-year-olds would. When you live with your mother and father in a tiny cabin and regularly hang out with them in a sweat lodge without any clothes on and have scores of National Geographic pictures of naked primitive people to peruse, you’d have to be pretty stupid not to figure out eventually what those squeaking bedspring noises meant.

The man stopped grinning when he saw it was me and not my mother. He sat up quickly and pulled the covers over his lap. I put a finger to my lips and pulled my knife and sat down on the bed opposite him with my knife pointing at his privates. The man bolted upright and threw his hands over his head so fast, I almost laughed. I waved my knife at the pile of clothes on the floor. He sorted through them, put on his shirt and undershorts and socks and pants, picked up his boots, and tiptoed out without either of us saying a word. The whole thing took less than a minute. My mother started crying when she saw that he was gone. As far as I know, he never came back.

After that, I started making plans to run away. I’d been staying in the woods overnight whenever I felt like it since I’d left the marsh, but this time was different. More calculated. Permanent. I filled a gunnysack with everything I’d need to spend the summer at the cabin and maybe longer and snuck down to the Tahquamenon and stole a canoe. I figured I’d do a little fishing and hunting, maybe look for my father, and just generally enjoy being by myself for a change. The sheriff’s deputy caught up to me the next day in a patrol boat. I should have realized that a missing canoe and a missing wilderness girl would lead straight to our cabin.

That was the first of many times I ran away. And in a way, you could say I’ve never stopped since.

—

A FLASH OF LIGHTNING, a crack of thunder, and the drizzle turns to rain. I drop my phone in my pocket and run up the driveway for the truck. Rambo is uncharacteristically silent. Normally he’d be barking to let me know he wants to get inside—never mind that I told him to lie down in the back and stay quiet. Rambo is as well-trained as it’s possible for a Plott hound to be, but every breed has its limits.

I step off the driveway and take cover behind the biggest jack pine I can find, which isn’t saying much. The tree is maybe ten inches in diameter, tops. I stand absolutely still. A hunter wearing camouflage with her back to a tree to break up her outline is all but invisible as long as she stays quiet. I’m not wearing camo, but when it comes to blending in and becoming one with the forest, I’ve had more practice than most. I also have excellent hearing—far better than anyone I’ve hunted with, with the possible exception of my father—which used to surprise me until I realized that this, too, was a consequence of the way I grew up. Without radio and television and traffic and the thousand other noises people are subjected to every day, I learned to discern the slightest of sounds. A mouse foraging through pine needles. A single leaf falling in the forest. The nearly inaudible wing beats of a snowy owl.

I wait. There’s no whining coming from the back of the truck, no scrabble of claws against metal. I whistle one long note followed by three short ones. The first low-pitched, the next three slightly higher. The whistle I’ve trained my dog to answer won’t fool a chickadee, but if my father is within hearing distance, the fact that it’s been thirteen years since he’s heard a chickadee whistle should work in my favor.

Still nothing. I take the Magnum from the back of my jeans and belly-crawl through the underbrush. The truck seems to be sitting low. I move in closer. Both tires on the driver’s side have been slashed.

I stand up and steel myself and go over and look in the back. The truck bed is empty. Rambo is gone.

I let out my breath. Rambo’s leash has been cut—no doubt with the same knife my father took from the cabin to slash my tires. I curse my lack of foresight. I should have known my father wouldn’t lead me to this cabin simply because he wanted to see me again. This is a test. He wants to play our old tracking game one last time to prove once and for all that he is better at hunting and tracking than I am. I taught you everything you know. Now let’s see how well you learned.