“According to my dad, fishing and camping trips are great ways to bond with your sons,” he says, and in what is no longer anywhere close to the darkest part of my mind, I feel relieved at least one of us might know some survival skills. “And these,” he says, gesturing at the docks, “are way better maintained than the one we anchored by.”
“So the only things missing from this equation are the people maintaining them,” says Emily, and we look at her but don’t respond, because we don’t want to think about what that means.
The docks are in this little rocky cove, hidden and jutting inward in such a way that it was impossible for us to have seen them when we were first circling the island to pull up to the other dock. Hiding them even more is another dense copse of those heavy, weird trees, their stubbornly drooping leaves making a canopy over part of them. The wind blows the snow around, like a smoke screen protecting a fort.
Stan taps me on the shoulder and points to a spot in the distance.
“See that spot of color?” he says. Emily and I shake our heads no, so we get out our phones and try the zoom function, but all I can see is a blur.
“You mean that red thing?” Emily says.
“No,” Stan says. “It’s yellow. Are you sure you don’t see it?”
“All I see are blurs. What do you think it is?” I say.
“I thought it might be a boat,” Stan says. “Forget it, though. It’s probably nothing. We need to keep going, or we’ll lose our way.”
“If it’s a boat, we need to find it! Otherwise . . .” And I just let the thought drift, because it’s terrifying.
“If it’s a boat, we will find it,” Stan says. “Right now we need to keep going. They’re somewhere up ahead, and we need to find them.”
I take some pictures and a few videos before we go, hoping that I captured enough of the peculiarities of this place so we can find our way back here later. “Hey, Bobby?” I call, wanting to ask him if I’ve captured enough angles for us to be able to use my footage as a map, but he doesn’t answer, and when I look for him, he’s not around.
“Hey, Stan,” I say. “Have you seen Bobby?”
“Nope,” says Stan. “Probably he’s up ahead? If anyone knows where they’re going, it’s Bobby.”
Someone calls out, “Yo! Is anyone maybe Hansel-and-Gretel-ing this place?”
Stan gives the guy a thumbs-up, and I hold out my phone and shout, “I’ve got your bread crumbs right here, champ.”
We keep walking the path until it opens up and the trees disappear, and all around us are these low hills. The tracks start to peter out here, though there’s still something of a path headed onward. An argument breaks out—some of the kids have had enough and don’t want to continue.
Some guy sits down and says, so loud and pouty it makes my frozen skin crawl, “It’s goddamn cold! I don’t even like my sister! I wanna go home.” A few other guys and girls who share this sentiment join the chorus and plant their asses down on the hostile ground, the definitive sign that this is indeed a collective temper tantrum.
But if it were that easy to just dismiss these kids as selfish whiners, then this would be a different story. People are tired. They’re cold. They’re hungry. Someone here has driven from Los Angeles, which seems insane to me. To imagine what I went through—what we went through—in a single day and just a bit of change, and stretch that out over days or maybe even a week or however long it takes to drive from L.A. . . . I don’t know.
“What if they are weapons?” someone—whether in the sitting group or the standing group, I don’t know—asks.
“They just ran. They left us. Alone. I never left Jennie alone. Not once in her life,” someone else sobs.
“So what?” asks someone, and when I see that it’s Jayson, a little happy chime rings in my head. Jayson’s here! “What, are you gonna swim home? Do you even know which way’s land? We’re stuck here,” he says.
“Just because those . . . things got me stuck here against my will,” says the boy who started all this, “doesn’t mean I have to participate in whatever’s going to happen. Because something’s going to happen, and you’re an idiot if you don’t know that too. It’s not like nobody knows we’re coming. It’s not like they would understand the idea of someone setting a trap for them to run into. It’s not like they’re gonna realize it and then stop themselves from doing whatever it is that’s so important they do. It’s not like they’d even understand what a trap is if we explained it.”
“We have to keep going,” says Stan. “We have to leave them and keep going.” He’s looking out at the Iceling tracks.
“What?” says Emily.
“He’s right,” I say. “We don’t know what’s out there or what’s waiting for them. And maybe we can’t do anything about it, but . . .”
“Yeah,” she says. “Right. Okay.” It’s not the resounding yes I was hoping for, but I know she understands that this is the only option. She puts one foot in front of the other, same as me, and I guide her onward as Stan turns to the seated shepherds.