Madison held her hands over her eyes. They hid the scene from her: clearing, lake, forest, driveway. Behind her, the cabin, the old logging trails, and, farther away, her three competitors scurrying off to hiding places.
She hadn’t peeked, she could swear, but she had heard. Their footsteps had scuffed the gravel, hinting at the direction they had gone. Hearing wasn’t cheating. If it were, you’d have to cover your ears as well as your eyes, and that would be dumb. How could you do that with only two hands? Not even the best, fairest seeker could do such a thing. She couldn’t either.
The count had started at a hundred.
“And two, and one, and-“
She lifted her hands. Sunlight bounced off the water and into her eyes. It was dazzling.
—
Nicholas and Joshua ran down the path, brown leaves rustling beneath their feet. Together, they stopped. Between them, the breaths were short and thin.
Joshua broke off the trail and took to a tree a few steps away. He scrambled, trying to climb it.
“Come on, up the tree!” Called Joshua.
Nicholas watched. Joshua’s arms wrapped wide around the trunk, but the branches were high. He kicked at the bark, scraping up and sliding back. Brush lined the logging trail, which was hard to distinguish from the rest of the woods.
“What about the bushes?” Said Nicholas. “She won’t be able to see us in there.”
“Are you crazy? That’s the first place she’ll look! Climb up with me.”
Joshua was halfway up to the first branch. Nicholas imagined following after: the bark digging into his hand, his feet kicking loose at the tree trunk.
Nicholas decided to hide in the bush instead. It was better this way, he thought. They would be harder to find when split up.
—
Noah never wins, never! This time, he’ll win. He kept to the path, the other way. Not the way the other two took. Dad told him about this path. It goes one way, then the other. It winds and winds and winds, whichever way the loggers felt like that day, Dad says.
He’s loud, trampling down this road, but it’s okay because he’s getting further away. When you’re far away, people can’t hear you. It’s the woods, the forest. It’s like something else Dad says. It’s like- what was it? When a tree falls out here, is it loud? And Noah says it’s loud, and Dad says, “How do you know?” and Mom rolls her eyes and doesn’t say anything. Noah doesn’t know how he knows, and Dad says that it doesn’t matter because you can’t hear it. Mom says to ignore him, but Dad says it’s important or good to know. It’s a lesson. About observation. Noah doesn’t know what it means, but it sounds important when Dad says it.
Now, Noah thought it meant Madison couldn’t hear Noah all the way down the logging trail, no matter how much kicking or screaming Noah did. Noah is right.
—
In the cabin, the adults took their respective refuges. Ann and Michael split, Michael off to the crawlspace mumbling something about winterization, and Ann off to the supporting arms of Frankie, who took the farthest of the three bedrooms. This left the living room for Jess and David. Jess knew a blow-up when she saw one.
David sat in the easy chair, off to the side of Jess on the couch. It was a beige cabin, with unadorned wooden beadboard and fabric furniture on thin carpet. David filled the chair. A coffee table flanked the other furniture. He was quiet, fumbling with the little black device in his hands.
Hide-and-seek had been David’s idea. He could be quick like that. As soon as the couple had come storming up with Noah, he gathered the children and planted the idea in Madison’s mind. Thinking it hers, the rest of the children were soon convinced.
“Do you think the kids are alright playing hide and seek on their own?” Said Jess.
David kept his eyes down.
“They’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s good for them to be on their own every now and then. That’s how it was when I was growing up: not all supervised all the time. It’s healthy.
“Besides, Nicholas is a scout, and we’re right here. Isn’t Joshua a scout, too?”
Yes, yes, he was. It had been an obsession for him for about two months after Nicholas showed him his merit badges. That passion flamed out into a steady progression of fees, camps, ceremonies, and events piled onto an already expensive and crowded life.
Jess did not resent it. Joshua needed that kind of thing in his life: structure, good male role models, and all that. It was just hard.
Everything was hard now. Joshua seemed to take it well, at least on the outside, but Jess still worried. She thought about taking him to a therapist after the split, but Joshua himself didn’t think he was wrong (again, as far as Jess could tell), and what if a therapy visit subconsciously planted a suggestion that there was something wrong with him or his situation when kids are raised by single mothers all the time? There wasn’t any money for it, anyway. There was always the school counselor.
How good are school counselors? Are they the ones who weren’t good enough to cut it as private therapists, or is that backward, and it’s the private therapists who weren’t good enough to make it as school counselors? Not that she’s one to complain. Nobody would ever ask her if the reason she was a contractor’s secretary is that she wasn’t good enough to answer phones for an executive.
“God-damn thing,” David muttered.
Jess looked up.
“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t get the hang of this thing. This tiny little keyboard is terrible.”
David’s phone was new. Four rows of buttons stretched below the screen. Jess had known him and Frankie for years. The curse was not surprising with the kids out of the way, but the phone was.
“I never took you for a gadget guy.” Said Jess.
“I’m not. It’s for work.”
He shook his head.
“They send us messages for every little thing, and they want us to send messages right back, no matter what. Think of it. Twenty plumbers on a job site, all of us standing around on these things doing nothing!”
Jess didn’t say anything. David tossed the phone on the coffee table in front of them.
“Management says it’s the future. I don’t believe it, but if that’s the future, then phooey on the future!”
—
Nicholas buried himself in the bush. The branches and twigs dug into his T-shirt, and the leaves rustled as he sank to the ground. Joshua would have to make do on his own, up in the tree, but Nicholas liked his chances down here near the dirt.
He stared up, lying in wait. The ground was cold and unexciting, even though it was a great hiding spot.
Maybe he’d jump out when his sister came by, seeking. Madison would see Joshua first, obviously, and once Joshua came down, he’d get them both. Of course, Joshua knew where he was, or at least kind of where he was, but he could get got regardless, especially if he forgot.
Nicholas lay, waiting. The forest was quiet. Any minute now, he’d hear Madison running down the path, but no sound came yet. Even the birds were still.
Nicholas noticed something towards the top of the bush. It was, as the field guide would describe it, a sturdy cup of mud, grass, and twigs, 3-25’ above ground in a tree, dense shrub, or building. It was a robin’s nest on a branch of a tree between three and twenty-five feet high and in a dense shrub.
Nicholas waited some more. There were still no footsteps. He climbed out of the shrub, careful now of the noise and the delicate structure perched higher up.
A breeze blew against clothes dampened by the ground. He peeked into the nest. Three pale blue eggs sat within the sturdy cup.
Nicholas knew from the field guide that the eggs would be blue and that there would likely be three to four of them, but he didn’t know why they were blue. He wondered. They had to be some color, of course, but why not brown or speckled or something else less easy to see for predators? That was the problem with field guides. They were always saying the what but never the why.
Maybe it’s to protect against cowbirds, brood parasites, as the field guide would say. If an egg’s not hers, the robin can chuck it out.
The image struck Nicholas as cruel: the mother hen coming home to a fourth, speckled egg and spurring it out from the cup to break open on the forest floor below. It’s not hers, sure, but the egg was still a chick, or could be a chick. That must be the risk you take, a cowbird, laying eggs wherever and leaving to do cowbird things.
—
Noah kept running down the path until he was tired. Then, he walked.
There was a snake in the path.
“Whoa,” Noah whispered. He still tried to be sneaky, all the way out here, even if the story about the tree meant he didn’t need to be.
The snake stopped, stretched straight across the path. Its side-eye peered at Noah, who was fixed on the red, white and black scales.
Mom says most people kill snakes when they see them because they’re afraid of them, but that it’s not right because you shouldn’t hurt things just because you’re afraid of them, and most snakes can’t hurt people anyway. Noah wasn’t afraid of the snake, and he probably wasn’t going to kill it, but at the same time, the thought of killing it never would have occurred to him if Mom hadn’t said that.
Noah crouched down by the snake and petted the scales. The creature was still as a rope. He could kill it, if he wanted to. He didn’t want to, but he was out here in the forest. Nobody would observe it; it would not be heard. It wouldn’t matter.
Well, it would matter to the snake. The snake slithered off, disappearing into the leaves, and Noah didn’t think about it anymore.
—
Michael needed to winterize the cabin. Michael needed to get into the crawlspace. The crawlspace, with its narrow door entering a space that was a foot and a half tall at best, sat in front of him. In the crawlspace, he needs to do—something? He could crawl into the space, as one could do, and away from the layoff, the sale, the beer from the cooler, everything else that had gone to hell in the last month and a half, and Ann. (Actually, he’d take the beer. Only a fool would go without provisions.)
Michael did not crawl into the space. Winterization was just an excuse. Winter was months away, and with any luck, the cabin would be sold by then, and winterization would be someone else’s problem. They could take the money and use it until whatever was going to happen happens.
Michael sipped at the half-empty beer. The space didn’t look very comfortable.
The drive up had been four hours of suspicion. Noah slept in the back seat while he and Ann played the game up front. Michael focused on the road, knuckles bursting on the wheel. Ann was quiet. Michael would ask a question or say some inane thing, and the response would come back, sweet, short, fake, and paired with an overused look Michael knew the meaning of. Yes, Michael. Everything’s fine, Michael. I’m just perfectly content and happy as a clam!
Then they’d pass through some small town, and he’d stop for gas; cell service would return, and while Ann thought he was busy, he’d see the more subtle happiness on her face when the text came from whoever could only be her lover.
Michael knew he wasn’t subtle. When he knew, he knew that she knew that he knew. They didn’t say anything, not with Noah sleeping in the back. (And it was a miracle he slept through those gas stops, or was he just pretending?) What good would it do? He could get down and beg, just tell me who it was, just tell me who it was! It’d be useless.
He took another sip. The beer was warm. He’d held it too long. It was a disappointing sip; he crushed the can and threw it on the ground.
He’d been to a cabin like this back in college. Maybe that’s what compelled him to buy this thing in the first place. It was a waste of money, sure, but when times were good, it seemed okay.
He and a couple of the boys from the frat had gone in together on the rental. Michael forgot where, but back then, anything outside the cabin hadn’t mattered. They stayed inside and drank and talked about the stupid things they’d talk about back then, like Doc Bob.
Good old Professor Robert. Doc Bob’s wife had left him. That was one piece of the Doc Bob lore that Michael knew was true. That, and that he taught College Algebra. As for the rest, lurid rumors about dolls and freshmen, they were probably not. Still, they had a truthiness to those who knew Doc Bob, and that was enough.
Doc Bob was a has-been or a never-was, and he was running out of hair. Everything about him was wrong. There was his height, his voice, and the way he carried himself, teaching basic math to undergrads who didn’t care. If someone said he was nice, someone else would speak up to say he was just pretending. When Michael and the brothers drank, they’d try to impress each other by airing out their thoughts on the subject, what stories were real and fake, what topics were and weren’t a waste of time, before moving on to whatever else there was to talk about.
Professor Robert had seemed so old back then. Michael hadn’t thought about him in years. For all Michael knew, he could be dead.
Maybe he should burn the cabin, Michael thought. Then he could sell it for the land underneath.
—
“Got you!”
Madison got Nicholas near the shrub.
“I knew you’d be out here. I knew it, Boy Scout!”
Nicholas knew he had won, fair and square. He’d never crawled back into the brush after getting out, and he hadn’t climbed after Joshua either. Still, it was his responsibility to get got, now and again, as big brother to a little sister.
“You got me,” said Nicholas. “Let’s go back to the house.”
He put a hand on her shoulder and turned her around, their backs to an old tree. They went back down the trail.
—
Joshua breathed. Nicholas should have listened. Shrubs are hide-and-seek amateur hour! He’d admit that he was worried, not so much about getting caught up in the trees as about Nicholas ratting him out.
He shouldn’t have. To worry that Nicholas would do that was a kind of betrayal, but in the relief, Joshua forgave himself. Nicholas is a friend for life!
—
Ann and Frankie were in the bedroom, Ann lying on the bed and Frankie sitting beside her.
“Michael knows,” Ann said. “He hasn’t said anything, but I can tell.”
Frankie nodded. The room was painted a dull gray that had faded and cracked over the years. Frankie was quiet, but the simple features of her face reflected the unerring pity she always felt for Ann whenever things went wrong.
Ann didn’t deserve Frankie, she thought. She could never be like Frankie. Content little Frankie, her hips with a waist to match, and happy with a husband like David who’d come home every day to a meal, a beer, and a couch.
The cabin room had only one light, dead in the center. It cast harsh shadows, silhouettes of everything.
“I don’t know why I did it,” Ann said. “People will think it’s because he was laid off, but it wasn’t that.”
This was a half-truth, but Ann knew that Frankie was too kind to dispute it. It had been building for a long time, even if it was hard to put a finger on why and to what. She didn’t even like the other man, really. He’d just been there. If it hadn’t been him, it’d been someone else.
Frankie held her hand, her grip cool on Ann’s.
“Things happen,” Frankie said. “Things will work out.”
Ann knew Frankie would say something like that. The things Frankie thought, what she really thought, she was too kind to say. Ann knew them anyway. Why couldn’t you just be happy? Why couldn’t you leave the house intact?
Maybe she could’ve, but she wasn’t, and she didn’t. It wasn’t the way it was at all.
—
Madison stopped.
“Nicholas!”
She pointed off to the side of the trail. The snake was loosely coiled, its red, black, and white scales shining like a ribbon. Nicholas thought back to camp.
Red and yellow, kill a fellow. Red and black-
“It’s okay,” Nicholas said. “It’s just a milk snake. They’re not venomous.”
The snake’s jaw was unhinged, mouth wide around its prey. The eye was both shameful and shameless, caught in the act. Sticking out from the creature was a yellow beak, the last remnant of an unswallowed head.
Nicholas patted Madison.
“Let’s keep going.”
—
Noah had gone down the path until he came to a clearing. Trees gave way to grasses and thistles.
Somewhere past the clearing, there was a scream. It was like a woman’s scream, but also like a cat’s growl. The bumps rose on Noah’s arms, and he heard the scream again, distant and eerie.
The thoughts raced through Noah’s mind. What if someone were in trouble? What if he were in trouble? What if he’s gone too far? What if he’s won hide-and-seek but lost something else, something important? What if everything were different now, would keep getting different, and never be the same again?
Noah cried.
