The Other Side of the River

The girl sat very still in the passenger’s seat of the car. She wasn’t sure why he had stopped here. She looked down at her fingernails and saw that the nail on her right index finger was torn and close to breaking. There was no sound coming through the car window, which was rolled down about a quarter of the way. No wind stirred the pine trees in the forest surrounding the car. She looked up and through the windshield, where the one lane dirt road stretched out ahead of them. There was nothing around but trees.

She didn’t know exactly where they were. Somewhere in the forest past the Yellow Dog River. The plains by the river where wild blueberries grew were no longer in view. She had gone there picking blueberries one time with her brother. They had been sitting on the ground near the bushes, eating the little, sweet berries, when they heard grunting sounds. “What is that?” she asked her brother. “Bears,” he said. They sat and listened to the noises. It was hard to tell exactly where they were coming from. She imagined a circle of bears around them, angry because their berries were being stolen.

The noise from the bears had scared her. But she felt worse now, in the total silence, not even a whisper of wind. She wasn’t even sure she could hear herself breathing. They had taken several turns since he picked her up down the road from her school. “Do you mind if I take a detour?” he had said. “I need to do something. Then I’ll drive you all the way home.” “Okay,” she said. She had missed the bus. They drove off the highway and crossed the river. There was a network of little dirt roads and paths through the forest that branched off from each other; like a spider’s web, except you couldn’t see the web and how to get out of it. The only thing visible was the area immediately around them. Car, road, trees.

In fact, she hadn’t even seen any animals on the way, except for a turtle crawling to the middle of the sandy road. It had narrowly missed being crushed by one of the car tires. She had seen turtles in the middle of the road before, dead; the female turtles liked the sand and wanted to dig a nest and lay eggs there. They never realized that they were choosing the most dangerous place imaginable. They didn’t know that cars existed, probably, and what those cars could do to them.

The floorboards beneath her feet were rusted out in places and she could look down through the holes and see the sand. She remembered running down one of these roads last year, down to the lake. When she came up to the shore of the lake, she saw a bald eagle circling overhead, and it came closer and started diving at her. It must have been a mother protecting her nest. Maybe she had run too close to the tree where the nest was. She looked up at the sky now above the car and wished for that bird to appear.

There was nothing in the sky, though. Not even any clouds. It looked blank, colorless. The handle on the inside of the car door was black plastic. She reached her hand out tentatively and touched it. She looked over at the man who was in the driver’s seat. He was looking at her sideways. His eyes and his face reflected the blank sky.

“I thought you were going to give me a ride home,” she said.