He Started It

We all knew the trip up to Kirwin was long and treacherous and the drive down wasn’t any better, but we also knew we had to do it. We worked under the assumption that our whole trip was being tracked.

The reality was we had no idea, we just assumed, and no one wanted to chance breaking the rules just in case we lost our inheritance. For all we knew, there was a camera in the car.

There were other reasons to go back, though. The first was the air. Nothing like it, at least not that I’ve experienced. This is pure clean air, high up enough to avoid any smog, exhaust, or any other sign of the modern world. If you’ve never smelled that kind of air, believe me when I say it’s different.

However. I sure as hell didn’t risk falling off a cliff just to inhale air. We have a more interesting reason to be here.

I point to a squat log cabin, the first one on the right. ‘Behind it. Fourth to the left, five back.’ It was all in the journal. Every place we visited was marked on a hand-drawn map inside the back cover.

Eddie and Portia started walking. Felix looked at me and said, ‘What’s that?’

‘The tree.’

‘The tree?’ he says.

I nod but don’t explain.

It was Nikki’s idea. When we got tired of running around the abandoned town and started complaining about the lack of ghosts, she said we needed to leave our mark. ‘People will know we were here,’ she said. ‘Forever.’

Eddie suggested carving our names on one of the buildings, but Nikki said whoever was in charge of Kirwin would get rid of that. This was a clean place – no garbage or graffiti – so we had to pick something that wouldn’t get erased. The best we came up with was a tree, in part because they were everywhere. The whole town was surrounded by giant evergreens that had to be twenty feet tall and a hundred years old. We went with the odds. Kirwin was in a national forest and you couldn’t just walk up and cut down a tree. We bet the tree, and our carving, would be here forever.

‘What did you say?’ Portia yelled. ‘Fourth to the left?’

‘And five back,’ I said.

Before we carved anything, we all argued back and forth, like that old seesaw, about how big the carving should be, what the carving should say, where on the tree it should go. We wanted to be able to find it again, and to have others see it, but it couldn’t be so ridiculous that the park rangers would get mad about it. Maybe they’d scratch it out or change it. Then we’d disappear forever.

‘This is how we’re going to live forever,’ Nikki said. ‘It’s important to get it right.’

No bad words, no weird pictures, nothing that looked offensive. The people in charge would get rid of anything like that.

She made the rules.

I had to give her credit, though. We were no longer thinking about ghosts; we were obsessed with living forever.

‘Think about it,’ Nikki said. ‘In thirty years, if you bring your kids here, what do you want them to see?’

Not the symbol of some cartoon superhero. Not a slang phrase at the height of its popularity. Not a song lyric. One by one, we eliminated all the things we wouldn’t want our kids to see, even though it felt like lifetimes would pass before any of us had kids.

Simplicity won the argument. We picked a tree, noted the location, and decided to put the carving at our eye level. Our initials, in order of our ages, in a straight line down the tree. Nikki started, then Eddie, me, and finally Portia. Nikki carved hers and ran off, back to Grandpa. He hadn’t been out of the van since we got to the top because he was still so nauseous.

Below Nikki’s initials, we each carved ours. Deep, too. That’s what took so long – we had to carve everything deep enough to last forever.

When we were done, I went back to the van to get Nikki. All the doors of the car were open to air it out, and Grandpa was sitting up in the back eating a box of crackers. Those pills made him do everything slow, even chewing looked difficult.

Nikki sat beside him, and she was whispering in his ear.

She looked up at me and said, ‘What?’ It sounded like a demand.

‘We’re done,’ I said.

‘Oh. Cool.’

Nikki grabbed the camera and followed me, leaving Grandpa where he was. I hesitated at first, wondering if Grandpa would try to leave. But then, where would he go on top of a mountain?

Nikki took a picture of the tree with the disposable camera, but I don’t have that photo. We split all those pictures up after the film was developed, and no one gave them to the police when Nikki was reported missing. We were the only ones who knew the cameras existed.

It takes a while to find the original tree. Maybe because more have grown. Maybe because they aren’t in straight lines so counting four over and five back isn’t as easy as it sounds. Anyone who claims all trees are unique needs glasses.

‘We carved our initials on a tree,’ I tell Felix.

He smiles. ‘That’s cute.’

When he says things like that, I’m convinced I wouldn’t miss him.

Eddie finds it first. The leaves and branches crunch under our feet as we all make our way through to where he’s standing. Or kneeling, because we were a lot shorter when we made that carving.

Portia kneels down beside him. I come up behind the tree, so I can’t see the carving yet. I can only see Portia’s face.

‘What?’ I say.

She looks up at me, points at the tree. I walk around and look at it.

The carving is just how we left it, though it’s weathered. Discolored. Nikki’s initials at the top, followed by the others, and the year at the bottom.

NM

EM

BM

PM

1999

That should’ve been it.

The last carving on the list is this year, 2019. It’s fresh and deep. Like it was added yesterday.

‘It was just some kids, I’m sure,’ Eddie says. ‘We’re near Yellowstone. Millions of people come through here.’

We are on our way back down the hill because we have to make the drive before it gets dark. It’s September, still daylight savings, so we’ve got the time. In another month or two, it would be dark by now.

‘Oh, I’m sure,’ Felix says. ‘That carving could’ve been done a week ago. Probably a month ago. The place is probably swarming with kids in the summer.’

‘Obviously,’ Portia says.

‘Has to be,’ I say.

Lie. Not for one second do I believe this is a coincidence. This is pure Nikki, just like the missing ashes. She’s playing with us.

But I can’t say that in front of Felix.

We let him believe the NM initials belonged to our grandfather. It hasn’t occurred to him that this was our maternal grandfather and his last name was not Morgan. And he’s not concerned at all about the extra carving.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says.

But that’s Felix, always looking the wrong way. He continues to do this all the way down the mountain and even at the Barney’s Steakhouse, where we stop for dinner. The steaks are too big to eat in one sitting, the baked potatoes are saturated with butter, and the vegetables are scarce. We have big mugs of beer and we don’t talk at all.

Felix is too busy checking the news or his e-mails or looking for the black truck outside.