The Nature of Disappearing

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

SMOKE tinges the world white. It swallows the spired treetops and narrows the canyon ahead. It erases altogether the majestic gray faces of the Obsidians, shrouds the valley, slips up the ravines.

Osprey. Emlyn looks at the client, clambering ahead and sloshing upstream, and wonders if he sees it. Some people, they feel the trout in these waters belong to them and not the birds, and Emlyn has a feeling the client is such a person.

Some have never held a fly rod and, enamored with all those gorgeous descriptions in books like A River Runs Through It and The River Why, want to give it a whirl.

Sometimes, though, there are John Thomases: entitled jerks who are simply checking off a locale from a list someone posted on the internet. People who don’t really love that feeling, how the rest of the world can blur and disappear when you are on the water, but who are after something else, something less. And today is one of those days.

Always layers in the mountains, where the temperature, even in the summer, could range a good fifty degrees in a day.

It’s strange, she realizes as she closes Tyler’s laptop, how you can read two articles, browse someone’s social media pages, watch a video, and, in less than an hour’s time, feel like you know a person. What they stand for, what they love, how their relationship works. Who they are.

“Come on,” Janessa pleads. “We have more adventures ahead.” She grabs Emlyn by the shoulders. “Diana Barry and Anne Shirley aren’t done yet.”

Drambuie,

Janessa plans everything, and Emlyn is happy to go along.

Emlyn hates to be a killjoy—she has tried so hard to free herself from that quiet, reluctant girl she was before meeting Janessa—

Emlyn nods, happy at the thought. “Bosom friends,” she whispers to Janessa.

“You’re always the first person I want to call.”

She takes the phone and looks at the white screen. A playlist. The title: “Emlyn.” She reads through the songs. An anthology of their time together, a memory book. The songs she’d heard and connected, but others, too.

Don’t get lost to begin with, always tell someone else where you are, and, if something goes awry, stay calm.

That eighty-five percent of people who go missing in the wilderness are found in the first twelve hours. Ninety-seven percent in the first twenty-four. That when a person goes missing for longer than that—well, it’s because they are going to be very hard to find.

Rev prays in that odd, musical way of hers, the prayer almost a song, hands raised.

THE THING IS to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, HOW CAN A BODY WITHSTAND THIS? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. —Ellen Bass

She walks to the window on unsteady legs and looks out as Varden climbs into his white Forest Service Jeep.

By Christmas, the heaviness that made Emlyn want to stay in bed and never get up begins a slow and reluctant lift. By spring she’ll have come up with a word to describe what it is that Varden and Rev gave her that winter, as the snow spun and twirled like ghosts off the Obsidians and Borahs. The sense that maybe she could love and be loved. That maybe Varden was right about the wilderness, that her story goes on. A tiny word, four letters, no frills. “Hope.”

THE terrain grows more difficult. Emlyn and Janessa scramble over rocks, struggling with their packs, which they must take off frequently to pull themselves up and over the boulders that line the lake’s edge.

Little by little, they continue making their way across the crag. Backpack, body. Body, backpack. Up and up and then down.

By the time they make it, the two of them are out of breath. Emlyn points to the trees, where they can find shade, and each of them slumps against a pine tree, relieved to be off the crag.

Remnants of last winter’s snow still dot the black faces of the mountains beyond, deep pockets that only melt in the hottest of summers. Such bright colors, such beauty.

She remembers the first time she met Janessa, all those years ago, at Bumpy’s Diner: Janessa slamming the canister onto the Formica tabletop, confessing to Emlyn that she’d always wanted to bear spray a dirtbag in the face. “I guess you can check that off your bucket list.”

She shivers and cries some more, because she is realizing—for Varden to have caught up with them by now, he would’ve already been on his way, this morning.

With Janessa safe and back in her life, and with Varden on the water and the Idaho sky stretching overhead, she feels inexplicably serene. At peace.

There is a strange, marvelous liberty in seeing a person for who they really are.

And right now, even though she’s exhausted and much of her body still ripples with pain, she doesn’t feel pathetic. Not at all. She feels brave and resilient and loved and chosen and expectant and enough and also—well, decent. Maybe even radiant? All of those things at once, somehow. The words seem to tumble at her, an avalanche of new, glittering possibilities.

The bird rises from the water, defeated, empty-handed. Emlyn knows it will try and try again. One more word cartwheels her way, and maybe this is the most unexpected and gorgeous one of all. “Free.”