The bus kept going, taking us out of the city. There were fields, and barbed-wire fences, and groups of cows and horses out in the fields. I watched, feeling Audra next to me and not wanting to share her. I tried to imagine how it would feel if there were three of us.
"Here." Audra pulled the cord that rang the bell and the bus slowed down. "We're getting off here."
We walked on the side of the road, the dirty gravel. Audra took off her black Chuck Taylors; she tied the laces together and put them around her neck, her socks pushed inside.
"Is that the Fox Walk?" I said.
"You know," she said, "people never wore shoes until there were roads and sidewalks."
"What are we doing with this girl?" I said. "What do you have planned?"
She didn't answer, like she didn't hear me.
"Audra," I said. "What are we going to do?"
"I don't know that, yet." She walked so balanced, like the sharp rocks didn't hurt her. She was always the fastest person in her class, even faster than the boys. When she got to high school she stopped running. She said it was boring, that it was showing off.
After a little while we came to a yellow house with a peeling fence in front. The house had cardboard in one window. One of the rain gutters was broken and hanging down toward the ground. A dog started barking.
"Chainsaw!" a boy said, coming out the front door.
Another boy with the same white blond hair was behind him. The dog was still barking, running along the other side of the fence like it was trying to find a place to get through, to get at us.
"She's old," the boy said. "She can't hear anything at all." Now he had a hold of the dog's collar, and was watching us. "Who are you?" he said.
"Travelers," Audra said.
The boy was maybe ten or eleven. His brother was younger, and wasn't wearing a shirt.
"She's friendly," the first boy said. "Don't worry."
"We're not," I said.
"Where are you guys going?" the boy said, but we were already walking away, farther down the road.
Horses came toward us, following along the fence line, on the other side. Their long necks stretched over, with white stripes down their faces. Behind them were cows, and I couldn't tell if they were all separated by a fence or if the cows just stayed with the cows and the horses with the horses.
"Everything will be fine," Audra said.
"I didn't say anything," I said.
We came to a gate where there was a dented gray mailbox on top of a post. Gold stickers on the mailbox said 323.
"Here we are," Audra said.
She opened the mailbox; it was empty; she slapped it shut. I followed her through the gate, up a long gravel driveway, toward a tall house. We passed two red barns, and a smaller building, down a slope from the house. When we got to the house, we climbed up on the wooden porch. Audra's feet made almost no sound on the porch. Mine in their sneakers did.
"Is she here?" I said.
Audra knocked on the door, and we waited. It was quiet, and I leaned close to a window so I could see inside. A grandfather clock, a stack of books that looked like it was about to tip over. Hanging on a wall was something that might have been a trap for a bear.
"Hello!" A man suddenly came around the side of the house, out around the porch, behind us. "What can I do for you?"
He just stood there, squinting up at us. He was kind of old, his head shiny bald. He wore red suspenders, and also a belt.
"We're friends of the girl," Audra said. "Is she here?"
"The girl?" he said.
"Caroline," she said. "She's a friend of ours, from school, we came to visit her. Maybe she's not home yet?"
"I think you don't understand," he said. "Listen—"
"Does she live in that little house down there?" Audra pointed.
"You're barefoot," he said.
"I know that," she said. "Her name is Caroline. Is Caroline here?"
The man stepped a little closer and put out a hand so he could lean on the railing of the porch. He wore yellow felt gloves and licked his lips before he said anything.
"Yes," he said. "She lived down there, with her father. But that was last summer. That was months ago."
"Where is she now?" Audra said.
"I'd be interested to know that myself," he said. "It seems like you've seen her, if she's your friend. You see her at school?"
"Why did she leave?" Audra said. "What did you do?"
"What did I do? I did a lot for them, everything I could. I wanted to help, but they were suspicious people. Her father, he just got a little paranoid, you know? He was used to another way of living."
Now the man stepped closer to us, and we both stepped backward. He opened the door and looked at us like we might want to follow him, come inside.
"Sorry I can't help you." The man nodded and stepped into his house, then closed the door.
"Liar," Audra said, low so he couldn't hear it, the door already closed. Then she touched my shoulder and we went down the steps off the porch.
"You said you knew her," I said.
"I never said that," she said. "Quiet. Stay close to me."
We hurried down the slope, toward a line of old tractors and cars, vehicles that had no tires, not even wheels, that had long grass growing up through them. Audra had a hold of my arm and pulled me back between them, staying low.
"What are we doing?" I said.
Audra tucked her hair behind her ear, and her ear was bare, just the row of dimples where the holes were, where the studs and rings usually were. I looked at the side of her face and noticed, then, that she wasn't wearing the black eyeliner she usually did, that Mom said made her look like a raccoon. Today her brown eyes looked plain and clear, not angry.
"You look pretty," I said.
"Get ready." Audra had her finger to her lips. She peeked over the top of the car. "When I go, you follow me close. Stay low. Do what I do."
Then we were out in the open again, rushing through the ragged grass, up to the door of the smaller house, at the bottom of the slope. There was a lock on the door but Audra did something with her hands and the lock came off. She set it carefully down on the wooden stairs and then pushed the door open.
When we stepped inside it was colder, even quieter than it was outside. She closed the door behind us and we just stood there for a moment.
There was a stove, a picnic table, a refrigerator with its plug pulled out and its cord on the floor. I heard a scratching in the ceiling, mice up there. A poster on the wall showed the planet Earth, floating in space, all the oceans and the continents, America and Oregon, all the cities and forests, all the people invisible, too small to see.
"This is where she was," Audra said.
"What if he finds us in here?" I said. "That man."
We were whispering, but still our voices echoed, a little.
"I don't know," she said. "What's he really going to do? He probably wouldn't even care. Here, this way …"
We went through the room and it was so dusty I could see Audra's bare footprints on the wooden floor. Through a door, through a narrow room with one single bed in it, then into another bedroom that was a little bigger.
"This is her room," Audra said, her arms out wide. "Can you feel it?" She began to pull out the drawers of a dresser. They were all empty.
The room had one window and through it I could see part of a rust-colored horse. It was rubbing its long neck along the side of an old outhouse. Standing there, watching Audra, I was so happy, so relieved that the girl was gone, that she wasn't there. It was only the two of us, whatever we were doing.
"It's different, if she lived with her dad," I said. "She had help, I mean. You said she lived by herself, all those years."
"What?" Audra got down on her hands and knees, looking for something.
"You said you knew her. That she told you things—"
"I did not say that," she said. "Vivian—"
"You said you met someone," I said. "Someone different than everyone else."
Audra whirled on me, still on her knees, her voice breaking from its whisper: "That wasn't her. That was someone else. Someone very important."
"Who?" I said.
"He's gone," she said, her voice soft again. "He went somewhere for a little while. I'm waiting for him to come back. I thought, while he's gone, I could still prepare. That's why we need to talk to the girl, so when he comes back he'll know I'm learning things, that I'm the one."
Audra got down on her hands and knees, her ear to the floor, peeking under the bed. Then she reached out and I saw it, a long, dark-colored hair snagged on a rough part of the wooden wall. She held it up in the light and we both looked at it, without having to say that it was hers, the girl's. Audra wound it around and around her finger, into a tiny coil, so small, and put it in the breast pocket of her shirt. She buttoned the pocket.
The bed was covered by a stained wool blanket, and next Audra pulled that back and underneath was only a bare striped mattress with its buttons worn down so the metal showed. She pushed at the edge of the mattress with her knee, lifted up the edge. A piece of paper fell out, down onto the floor.
After she read it, she handed it to me:
A conversation is a spoken
exchange of thoughts, opinions
and feelings. A feeling is a
tender emotion. An emotion is
a state of mental agitation or
disturbance, a feeling.
Caroline
Caroline
Caroline
I handed the scrap of paper back to Audra, but later at home I asked and she let me keep it. I compared it to the writing in my yellow notebook, but it wasn't close to the same. The girl's writing was even and perfect. Every a was the same as every other a, every t like every other t.
"Are you feeling okay?" Audra said, that day when we went to see the girl who wasn't there. We were about to run back out of that little house, across the field, past the empty mailbox, back toward the bus and home.
"I think so," I said.
"I love you, Vivian," Audra said. "You know that, right? I'll always take care of you. No one else knows how."
