—
Sometime in the night Amy Raye awoke to the chugging of an engine in the distance and arose in a panic. Though the fire had died down, it was still burning. She grabbed one of the boughs beside it and lit the needles that had begun to dry, and all the while she was yelling, “I’m here, I’m here!” Surely this was the search crew that had come looking for her, and already she wanted to say she was sorry for causing such a commotion, wanted to apologize for not having been more careful, but that would come later. “Yes, I’m here!” she screamed, and she scrambled out of the cave, dragged her broken leg behind her, waved the burning bough above her. “Help!” she shouted. The sound of an engine was indeed drawing closer. She sat in a foot of snow, waved the bough, waved her other arm, looked to the sky. And why had she refused to wear orange, why had she left the orange cap back at the truck, and if only they could see the smoke, and yes, there it was, a helicopter flying above her. “Over here! Over here!” The helicopter continued past her. Surely someone had seen her, seen the smoke, would recognize the smoke as a signal. Surely the helicopter was simply turning around. It would pass over her again. She continued to yell. She continued to wave the bough and her arms, and the sound drifted farther away. She waited. It did not return. “I’m here! I’m here! Come back!” Why hadn’t they seen her? But she knew; the fire she’d built was hidden inside the cave. And whatever smoke might have been seen from the helicopter would have appeared as no more than a cloud of vapor. And she wasn’t wearing orange. She blended seamlessly into the terrain. If she could go unnoticed by an elk grazing within thirty yards of her, why would she think someone in a helicopter that was flying more than a thousand feet above her would be able to spot her on the side of this bluff? Yet the helicopter would return. Surely it would return. She waited until she began to feel too cold. She reentered the cave but remained close to its entrance. She wrapped her arms around one of the rocks that lay just outside the cave’s opening, pressed the side of her face against the rock’s smooth wet surface. Dear God, please let them find me. She would wait for the helicopter to circle back. People were looking for her. That was a good sign. She would stay awake. She would be ready when the helicopter returned. She looked to the sky, noticed how clear it was. There were so many stars, and she thought about that, thought about just how many stars there were.
“We think we are seeing too many to count. But we could count them,” she had told Farrell one night. “We could map out the stars and count each one.”
They had gone camping in Red Rock Canyon. Julia and Trevor were already asleep in the tent. Amy Raye and Farrell had remained by the fire.
“I love that about you,” Farrell had said. “I love how you know all these weird things that others rarely think about.”
“Knowing about stars isn’t weird,” Amy Raye said.
“Knowing how many there are is kind of weird. Weird in a good way. I probably have your mom to thank for that,” Farrell said.
Amy Raye had already told Farrell about her mother’s job at the library, and how when Amy Raye was young, she’d wait for her mother there after school. And during the summer, if Amy Raye wasn’t at the farm, she’d accompany her mother to work. It was there that Amy Raye had fallen in love with books. If she wasn’t reading, she was finding answers to the questions her mom would ask her: How are the clouds formed? How cold is the top of Mount Everest? How many stars are in the sky? Amy Raye would get paid a quarter for each answer that she found.
Farrell pulled Amy Raye against him and lay down so that they were looking directly up at the sky. “Tell me about her,” he said. “What was she like?”
Amy Raye lay quiet for a moment as Farrell’s fingers rubbed circles over her shoulders and gently traced the strands of her hair.
“She was pretty,” Amy Raye said. “She had light brown hair and these brilliant blue eyes. Kind of like people who wear colored contacts, only she never wore contacts or glasses.”
“What else?” Farrell said.
“She could be funny. I thought she was funny. She made me laugh.”