Whatever the reason that things are the way they are, I don’t care right now because if they report him and he’s caught, at least I’ll see him again and I’ll know where he is.
God, how can you think such a cruel thing! How can I wish that someone would lock him in a cell with no windows so that he’d be thrown back into the blackness of his childhood? In a tight space he can’t escape from. In which it gets dark at the push of a button.
God, yes, I should get up and throw myself into the creek so I’ll stop thinking things like that! I must be crazy.
However, I’m selfish and a whiff of desire lingers, even when I finally lie stark naked in the freezing water and the cold begins to burn my skin, and I begin to physically feel something again for the first time after many days and nights. I just have to believe that one day, I’ll see Bren again because if this is goodbye forever, I want to die. That is all I know. I can only continue breathing when there is hope.
Midsummer flies by even though I don’t know how to continue or where I belong. The shock of Bren’s disappearance still holds me in a state of emergency. I know I can’t stay with the Navapaki forever, although Amarok would certainly like that. John has had strong words with him, so he holds back when it comes to me.
If only Amarok had done that sooner. But the truth is, he wasn’t the reason Bren left me, that becomes clearer to me as the summer draws to a close.
Bren knew back at the RV that we didn’t stand a chance. However, our love was too wonderful to give up and he gave it a try, maybe for my sake. Maybe he thought he owed me something.
I miss him more and more. He is in the stillness between my breaths, in every thought, and in every breath. A place inside me is empty as if something had been cut out of me. I vomit from morning to night and can hardly eat.
It’s not lovesickness, it’s worse. Everything inside me is broken, like last year. But this time it’s different. I can’t simply return to my old life this time. Everything will be different. Me, my brothers, my life.
Today is the seventeenth of August and I have decided to leave the camp. I’m done dreaming. Amarok hasn’t spoken to me all day, but many Navapaki welcome my decision. They want their camp back to normal. They fear Bren might be caught and their village exposed if I’m still here. Besides, I’m healthy now, at least on the outside. The pain in my ankle has almost subsided and the massive bruise that traveled from my temple down my face is now a small yellow-green butterfly on my cheek. There’s no reason to stay anymore.
I pack the few things I have left: my cell phone with the photos of Bren, which I haven’t been able to look at to this day. I wear my jeans and T-shirt the day I decide to leave. Thea urges me to take the dress and moccasins, but they remind me too much of my last night with Bren, so I leave them there. He took the pocketknife with him when he left as well as the solar power bank. At the bottom of the trunk, under Liam’s scarf, I discover Henry Cunningham’s missing person notice. It is carefully placed in the plastic bag as if Bren didn’t want anything to happen to it. I should hang it up like we’d planned and I make up my mind to do just that.
I knot the scarf and tie it around my waist. Amarok and Darrow will escort me to the nearest town where I will call Jay. I hope Ethan returned his phone after he took what he wanted.
As I walk through the Navapaki camp for the last time, saying goodbye and thanking everyone, I feel more homeless than ever. I almost envy them, this spot of earth. There is no place in the world where I want to be right now. I don’t feel at home anywhere without Bren. Yoomee cries a little and I hug her but don’t feel anything. I’m hollow inside, burned out by the pain. Then I go to Darrow and Amarok, who are waiting for me at the edge of the forest.
We travel by canoe for a long time through the labyrinthine waterways, across lakes, and along rivers from which poplars and oaks drink their fill along the banks. I feel a bit like I did after the kidnapping when I took the bus to Ash Springs. Back then, however, I felt like a stranger, not like myself. Today, I know who I am. I just don’t know what’s happening to me. On the endless, sweaty trek back through the wilderness, I hardly speak but my gaze repeatedly slides to the undergrowth, searching for Bren, the shadows and the light of the past, but I can’t spot him. Maybe he’s actually around, watching me like he used to, or maybe he’s long gone, somewhere in the woods, lonely, lost in himself.
I can’t think about how he’s doing right now or else I’ll go completely insane. Some things are still too much to handle. I must stay focused on myself, on breathing, drinking, and eating. On not throwing up continuously. On keeping up my strength.
Again and again, guilt catches up with me. I should have told him what I know about his mom right from the start because now he will never know and will always feel like the unloved boy who was abandoned. Is that why he left? So I wouldn’t leave him first? Did he honestly have so little trust? Why didn’t I tell him what I know? I had several opportunities to do so in the camp, but at first, I didn’t want to upset him because he was so sick, and then I thought it best to postpone it until a more favorable time.
Exhausted because I rarely sleep anymore, I peer into the thicket of passing trees. We travel the last section again in the canoe, of course another one, which was in a second bay. I keep imagining I’ll spot Bren among the leaves and low-hanging branches. His dark eyes, with which he just had to look at me in that special way—making me feel like the most precious, most loved girl in the whole world. But of course, I don’t see him. There is only emptiness, a void where I wish he would hold me again, kiss me again, love me again. Be jealous again, hold me as a possession, but at least he would be with me then.
Yet there is nothing.
After five and a half days, we reach the city—actually, it’s a village since it consists of only a few houses and farms. Cormorant. It’s the only settlement Amarok knows of in the world, and for some reason, that makes me even more sad, knowing what he’s missing out on in life. When he hugs me goodbye, tears well up in my eyes, but I can’t cry. Tears don’t help, not for me, Bren once said.
“Take care of yourself,” Amarok says unhappily after letting go of me. “Konoronhkwa.” I love you in Mohawk.
I know how hard this farewell must be for him and I nod as Amarok pulls out a knife.
I flinch at the sight.
“Just a piece.” He looks at me pleadingly and points the knife at my hair.
This is crazier than anything else. He wants my hair, like Bren. At first, I want to deny him, but then I recall how he carried Bren without complaining even though he was afraid of me.
I hold out a strand of hair to him and close my eyes as he cuts it, only to notice he puts it in his medicine pouch, the little leather pouch he always wears around his neck under his shirt. He thanks me in Navapaki, then cuts a strand of his waist-length hair.
“For your sacred pouch,” he says in his broken accent that I enjoy so much, pointing to Liam’s knotted scarf.
I swallow hard, shake my head, and then nod. I haven’t had my necklace for a long time—if anything, it was sacred to me. Still, I tuck his sturdy lock of hair into Liam’s scarf. Why shouldn’t I?
“You mustn’t show this bag. To nobody,” he says seriously, almost sternly, like Bren.
“Why not?” I ask, puzzled.
“Guard dreams in the heart. Otherwise, things have no power. Not dreams, not sacred things.”
