Post No. 9

June Oakcrest  ·Wednesday night — kitchen table, coat on, not sleeping

Dear Mom,

I've been sitting here for two hours trying to write this letter and deleting it and starting again. So I'm just going to write it the way it actually is tonight, which is not tidy.

I did the spreadsheets today. Three hours of numbers, clients, invoices, the ordinary machinery of my ordinary life humming along as if I hadn't spent yesterday in a forest clearing being told that three people who fought for this hill have disappeared and one of them is you.

And somewhere between the second and third client I let myself think the thing I haven't let myself think since I arrived.

Not that you're traveling. Not that you're somewhere without signal, following a plant tradition to its source, being gloriously unreachable the way you sometimes are. But the other thing. The thing that fits the locked drawer and the unfinished sentence and Edmund looking back down the path and the way Miss Dahlia's face went when she saw your journal.

I got as far as thinking about it and then I put it down. I'm not ready to write it in a sentence yet. I don't think I can. Not tonight.

Instead I made a list. It's what I do when I'm frightened. I make a list and I do the first thing on it and then the next and I don't look at the whole thing at once because the whole thing is too much.

1. Find the key. Get into that drawer. Protect whatever is inside before anything else.

2. Tell someone where I am and why. Not nobody. Someone who will notice if I go quiet.

3. Call Luke. Not to worry him — just so someone knows.

4. Go to Mat. I trust him. I don't entirely know why yet but I do.

5. Find the local newspaper. Find out what the journalist was writing. Find out if anyone picked up the story after she disappeared.

6. The police — but carefully. Edmund said the town is afraid. I need to understand who is safe before I walk into a station and say your name out loud to a stranger.

7. Edmund. He needs to know I'm staying. He needs to know someone is finishing the paperwork.

Seven things. I can do seven things.

✦ ✦ ✦

I was writing number seven when I heard it.

Headlights on the lane.

Slow. Not rushing. The sound of a car moving carefully up a path that's barely wide enough, where nobody comes unless they're meant to be here.

I looked up from the list. My pen stopped moving.

The car didn't stop at the house. It just slowed as it passed. I could see the light moving across the kitchen wall — sweep of brightness, then dark, then brightness again as it moved past the windows.

Then it kept going. Didn't turn around. Just kept moving slowly up the lane, away from the house.

But my feet were already moving.

I stood up without deciding to stand and walked to the window and looked out into the dark and there was nothing there. Just the road below, the gate, the darkness of the forest beyond. No car lights. No sound.

I stood at the window for a long time.

My hand was cold on the glass. My breath fogged it. I waited for the lights to come back. Waited for the car to turn around and come back down toward the house.

It didn't.

But it also didn't feel like it was gone. It felt like it was just — waiting. Somewhere up the lane, engine off, lights off, parked and patient.

I stood there long enough that my chest started aching. Long enough that I couldn't feel my fingers anymore. Long enough that I understood, in the way you understand things without proof or words, that someone had come to see if I was here.

Someone had come to mark the location. To know.

✦ ✦ ✦

I came back to the kitchen table and I locked the door. And then I locked it again for good measure.

Both locks.

I sat back down at the list and I looked at it for a long time and everything on it felt suddenly, sharply, urgently real.

Not abstract. Not theoretical. Real.

What I cannot do — what I will not do — is leave this hill the way the others left it. Quietly, without trace, mid-sentence. I have a son who needs his mother and clients who need their spreadsheets and a forest that apparently chose me and I intend to be findable at all times by all of the above.

Mom — I don't know if you can hear these letters. I don't know what form you're in right now or where. I don't know if the distance between us is miles or something else entirely.

But I know the house is still warm. I know the squirrel is still on the windowsill. I know the oak at the end of the garden is still standing and so am I.

I'm not going anywhere.

The list is on the table in front of me. Seven things. I can do seven things.

Someone came up the lane tonight. Someone wanted to know if I was here.

Now they know.

List made. Both locks checked. Not sleeping —

June

P.S. The squirrel was on the windowsill at midnight. I left a piece of apple on the sill for it. It's still there. We're in this together now, apparently.