“I thought those had gone extinct.”
“Covid masks?” he asked, nodding toward a rack of them in floral and leafy patterns.
She removed the huge glasses and said, “If we’re wearing these at night, we need lighter lenses. Ohhh, like these.” She picked up a pair with bright yellow lenses and a dangling “Night vision that darkens by day” tag. They were aviator-shaped and too big for her face, but she liked them.
“Done.”
She took off the baseball cap and put on a fishing hat instead. “More brim means less visibility.”
“I’ll keep this one,” he said. “Flatters my jawline. Besides.” He turned around and pulled his long dark hair right through the opening in the back of the hat. “Built-in hair band.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Shop’s closing, folks,” called a man with a bushy gray beard who was running the place from behind his counter.
“Guess not,” Camellia said, and they wore their purchases to the counter, peeling off the tags as they went.
“Hey, I have an idea,” Wolf said while the cashier rang up the tags they’d removed from their getup. “Let’s not take the road back. Let’s walk along the river’s edge. There’s a trail. I saw a sign.”
“You have flashlights?” the clerk asked, pointing to a display on the wall, no longer in such a hurry to close.
“No, but we’ll take two of those big ones that look like they could double as weapons in a pinch,” Camellia said. “Are a dozen D batteries included?”
The clerk’s frown was the same as if she’d asked whether he’d ever been abducted by aliens.
“And batteries,” she added quickly.
Wolf laughed softly beside her. She looked over at him, but he was well-hidden behind his sunglasses and baseball cap.
The trail was nice, lined in red sand, without pits or holes. It meandered with the river, only a few yards from its edge, but sometimes veering farther from the banks to go around trees or rock formations. The ground sloped downward toward the water, all earth and stone and scraggly grasses. They kept their flashlight beams aimed toward the water, and she knew he was looking for spots where his mother might’ve found him. She couldn’t stop envisioning him, a little baby lying in the water, cold and alone and in so much danger, after surviving who knew what hell?
Just as she thought it, her flashlight beam picked out a small brown face with water lapping over it.
She gulped back a shriek and ran down the slope and right into the cold water, through floating debris. She fell, submerged entirely, then got upright again and kept sloshing toward the face beneath the waves. Wolf came splashing up behind her as she reached for the drowned baby and picked it up out of the water.
Wolf waded closer and closed his hands around her shoulders as she touched the mildewed face and nearly went limp. “It’s a doll. Oh my God, it’s a doll. It’s just a doll.” She let the thing fall from her hands, turned, and wrapped her arms around Wolf. “I’m so sorry that happened to you, Wolf. I’m so damn sorry.” She didn’t mean to cry, but she did, and she felt stupid for crying because this wasn’t about her. The thought of him lying there with the water lapping over his beautiful face just gutted her every time it came into her mind. She hugged her arms tighter around his waist, her face pressed to his chest and soaking wet shirt.
He put his hands into her hair and tipped her head up. He had tears in his eyes, too. She lifted her chin ever so slightly, and he lowered his head. When their lips touched, they were salty and wet. They stood there kissing, all wrapped in each other, for a long time.
When they parted, his forehead rested against hers. He didn’t say anything, and she didn’t either. They stepped apart, arms still anchored though, as they waded up out of the shallow water. She moved her light around as they did. Wolf’s flashlight was on the path. She could see its beam where he’d dropped it.
“Look at all this stuff,” she said as the light’s beam picked out empty bottles, cans, cups, and litter of all sorts forming a foot-wide border between river and shore, but only in this one little spot.
“Garbage,” Wolf said. He steadied her as she got up onto dry land before joining her there. “The current dumps it here naturally.” He looked into her eyes.
“This might be where you wound up, Wolf, but it doesn’t make you garbage. Your mother found treasure here.Youwere a treasure to her,” she said, nearly quoting the words in his mother’s journal.
He looked at the water for a long moment before he started walking again. “Her first campsite would have been near here, then,” he said. “According to the diaries. We must’ve got pretty close to it when we chose ours.”
“Wait, look!” She pointed to a finger of ground that jutted into the river, forcing it to bend around, a few yards behind them. “That’s where the people were today. Remember? The ones we saw from the cliff? We walked right by it and didn’t realize. Come on.”
She grabbed his hand, and they hurried to the spot. Camellia shone the flashlight around, stopping immediately on a small pile of stones. “That’s not natural. Somebody put that there.” And as she ran closer, Wolf stayed behind.
She knelt near the stones. Wolf whispered, “Camellia, don’t.”
“There’s something underneath, I can see it.”
“Leave it alone. It might be sacred or something. And it’s none of our business.”
