Callie stands up.
“Cal. What are you doing? I know that look. I don’t like this look on your face. I’m supposed to be taking care of you.”
“I’m going. I’ll be back.”
She leans over and kisses Jane on top of her head and takes the front steps in a leap.
The hiker’s blogpost gives instructions on where to park, warns about the difficulty of finding the hollow and how easy it is to losethe trail.Don’t mess with the woods out there. You’ll never find your way out if you wander off.
She takes a long breath in when she pulls into the little clearing alongside the road where the trail starts. Callie’s brought her water bottle and a granola bar that had been in her glove compartment, takes screenshots of the hiker’s instructions for finding Hauser Hollow in case she loses service.
The sugar sand trail had once been a carriage route through the pines, but now it’s choked with understory, dense and inhospitable. It’s only five miles to the cabin from where she parked her Jeep, but progress is slow, despite feeling like a furnace is blazing in her chest.
She stops to look for her first landmark, the hull of a wooden boat that had been hauled out of the river, dragged here for who knows what reason. It feels like it’s taking too long, that she should have passed it by now. She starts to feel dizzy, panicked. Would she know the way back if she wanted to? She spins in a circle and can’t remember if the fallen tree had been on her left or her right when she came out. She turns back slowly, squinting until—there!—she finds the blurred shape that she hopes is the hull. Her feet are aching and blistered, her mouth feels dry despite the water she drank, and yet she plunges forward, because that’s all there’s left to do. She needs to keep moving or else the sweat against her skin will start to go cold.
She marches most of the way with her head down, looking for roots or rocks that could trip her, but when she lifts her face to the sky now she sees a slight widening of the trees. Open space ahead. And then she smells it: chimney smoke, cutting through the scent of wind-chilled pine.
One of the reasons Callie never believed the stories about this place was that it seemed too lovely to be true. Too much like a fairytale. A secret house tucked deep into the woods.
The hunting cabin looks more weathered in person than it did in the photos, the logs battered and bleached, but the door is painted a bright, glossy red that looks fresh—the same color as the front door to Jenna’s house. She stands on the porch and inhales. Knocks once,softly, worried all of the sudden that she is wrong. That someone is here but it isn’t her mother.
But then the door swings open and Jenna stands in front of her, wearing an old wool sweater. Her eyes are clear and bright and alert, her pupils normal. Not the dark holes of someone lost to drugs. Not the bleary look of someone on a bender.
“You don’t have to knock. This is yours, too.” Jenna’s voice is wry but Callie sees something tender, gentle, in her face. “Come on. If you’ve found me here it probably means we’ve got a lot of shit to work through.”
The door swings open wide and Callie follows her mother in.
Inside the cabinis tidy and spare, with a single stone fireplace and worn but comfortable-looking armchairs, a sofa, a sliver of a kitchenette.
“I started coming out here when I first got sober. Walk like that makes it pretty hard to get booze out here.”
“Does Steve know that?” Seems like he would have mentioned it to Callie if he did.
“You talked to Steve? I owe him a call. Poor guy probably thinks I fell off the wagon.”
“Well…”
Jenna waves her hand. “I haven’t touched anything since that night, I want you to know.”
“What is this place?”
“It’s been in our family a long time. My mother used to take me out here, before she got sick. Almost every weekend. This land has been ours for hundreds of years, on her side.”
“I know. But I didn’t believe you until today.”
“Looks like you figured it out okay.”
“I figured out a few things. A little late.”
Jenna watches her, and when Callie realizes she’s not going to say anything she continues.
“Your bag was found on the Batona Trail. That’s twenty miles from here.”
“Well I probably walked twenty miles here, but not from there. Damien knocking on my door, saying he wanted to talk to me about something. I know what that means in that family. Nothing good ever came from a Caputo telling you they wanted a talk.”
“How did you get away from him?” Callie can’t picture it. Jenna fresh off a bender outpacing Damien the woodsman? Doesn’t make sense.
“That boy thinks he knows the woods. Maybe he does. But not like me. I knew as long as I was here I was safe from them.”
