My Absolute Darling: The Sunday Times bestseller. Gabriel Tallent
Brett says, and they shake.
Jacob says, “What are you doing here?”
“I live near here,” she says.
“So we’re near a road?”
“No,” she says, “I don’t think so.”
Brett looks wonderingly up at the hillside. “People live near here?”
“Sure.”
Jacob looks back at her, and she is blinded with the blue light again. “Sorry,” he says, angling the light away. “Can you lead us down to the river?”
Turtle looks away into the dark.
Brett says, “What happened? Is she still there?”
“She’s thinking,” Jacob says.
“Did we make her mad?”
“She’s speculative.”
“She’s still not talking.”
“Okay: She’s really speculative.”
“This way,” Turtle says, leading them in a muddy traverse along the hillside, looking for a clear place farther out.
“Holy shit,” Brett says, “holy shit. Look at her go.”
“Hey!” Jacob says. “Wait up.”
Turtle leads them across fallen redwoods and then descends to the river among grand firs on a low, sloping ridge, Jacob’s light casting her shadow out ahead of her, the boys crashing behind.
The river has flooded its banks and Turtle comes down into a great tangle of alders hip-deep in water, long whips of stinging nettle bent in the current and swinging like seaweed, submerged skunk cabbages nosing out of the torrent, rafts of dead leaves scummed up against every nook and cranny, eddies circling blackly with huge dollops of foam.
“Holy shit on a shitty, shitty shingle,” Brett says, and whistles.
“There’s no road,” Jacob says.
“We’re fine without it,” Turtle says.
“Maybe you are,” Brett says.
Jacob stands there, sheathed to the waist in mud, and laughs and says, “Man,” drawing it out into a long syllable, his voice giving it somehow a richness of humor and a depth of optimism that she is unused to, running his tongue along muddied lips with pleasure and saying again, “Oh man,” like he can’t believe the incredible good fortune of being so entirely lost beside a river so flooded, and Turtle has never seen anyone confront misfortune this way.
Brett says, “Oh man,” and he says it differently, and then he says, “We are fucked.”
Turtle looks from one to the other.
“We are fucked,” Brett says. “We will never, ever get home. We are fucked.”
“Yes,” Jacob says in hushed awe, weighting his words with relish. “Yes.”
Brett says, “It’s ironic, because we were fine before, we had the perfect campsite before, but nooooo, we needed water.”
“And look,” Jacob says. “Hashtag success! Hashtag winning!”
“We need somewhere to hole up,” Brett says, then, to Turtle, “Do you know where we are? Is there somewhere we could sleep? It’s all mud, isn’t it? There’s nowhere not covered in mud.”
It is still raining hard, and everyone, including Turtle, is cold, and there is nowhere level here, not with the river flooded, and to find a campsite, they would need to climb the ridge again, and though Turtle could, she doesn’t know about the boys.
“I’m so cold,” Brett says, “dude, so incredibly goddamn cold.”
“It’s chilly,” Jacob agrees with deep humor, trying to wipe the mud out of his eye sockets. He stands stiffly, in the way of people whose clothes are cold and for whom every movement brings new flesh into contact with gritty wet fabric. He looks at Turtle, and something occurs to him. “How did you find us?”
“Just ran into you,” she says.
The boys look at each other, shrug, as if to indicate they’ve heard stranger things.
“Can you help us?” Brett asks. He hunches shivering under his backpack. Rain sleets around him. Jacob finds a poison oak leaf stuck to his cheek, flings it disgustedly away into the dark. Turtle chews her fingers in consideration.
“Jesus,” Brett says, “you don’t feel any urgent need to fill the gaps in conversation, do you?”
“What does that mean?” Turtle says.
“Nothing,” Brett says.
“You seem very patient,” Jacob says.
“You move at your own pace,” Brett says.
“Speculative,” Jacob says.
“Speculative, that’s right, thoughtful,” Brett agrees.
“Like, where did you study Zen Buddhism?”
“And was your Zen master the ancient, slow-moving reptile on whose shell rests the entire universe, known and unknown, fathomed and unfathomed?”
“Is that what your name means?”
“Is this a koan? Can you help us? To which the reply is, and can only ever be: silence.”
“Dark, dude.”
Turtle is surprised that they would go on like this in a cold downpour and then she thinks, they’re waiting on you, Turtle. They’re waiting on you and the talking helps them. “This way,” she says, and leads them back into the forest.
In the dark, she circles the largest trees, Jacob shining his light on them. She leaves the boys huddled together and ventures out in every direction, cutting back to them when she doesn’t find what she’s looking for. She is hoping for a burned-out redwood with a hollow chamber, but the best she finds is a stump, crosscut long ago, with axe-cut notches in the sides where the scaffold was pegged to the trunk.
She looks up at the stump’s hidden crown and Jacob watches her, shading his eyes from the rain, and then follows her gaze. Lightning strikes on Albion Ridge across the river, and Turtle counts it, two miles before the thunder comes, rolling with the distance.
She climbs up the bark, hooks the top with a long reach, and drops into a deep, circular pit where the heartwood has rotted out. The hollow crown is ten feet across and tall enough to sit in without being able to see over the sides. A single huckleberry grows up through the middle in a rough circle of punky wood that drains the water. She wraps her fist around its base and rips it out and pitches it into the dark. She helps Brett and Jacob up, and they begin digging out leaf litter. She opens Brett’s backpack, finds a hundred feet of parachute cord still in its tight store-bought bundle, teases the bundle apart, quarters the line, and passes her knife through the loops to make four twenty-five-foot lengths.
They unfold the blue tarp and Turtle bowlines the parachute cord to the corner grommets. Then she drops off the stump, and Jacob after her, while Brett holds the tarp. She pitches Brett a center pole, and he holds it in place. She wraps the first line around a stob, passes the bitter end back to the standing line, and ties a tautline hitch, a slide-and-grip knot that can be cinched up the wet line, though she wonders, even as she is tying it, if a tarbuck knot would be better. She guys out each line in turn. When she comes to the last, she finds that Jacob has already guyed it out and tied the tautline hitch. Water runs down the line, gathers just above the knot, and streams off in a single ribbon. The blue light from the headlamp follows the water on the parachute cord. She runs the knot between thumb and forefinger, finds it tight and well dressed. Jacob stands beside her.
She says, “You knew this knot already?”