I Let My Sister Answer One More Call

Chapter 4 The Trail

In my first life, the trail near the cave had been closed for two years before Hannah was taken. There had been a rockslide, then a smaller slide, then a series of budget cuts that kept the county from sending anyone out to clear it. The trail had a sign at the trailhead that said CLOSED, and the sign was covered in graffiti, and that was as much as any of us had ever known about it.

But the county did send someone out, eventually. A park ranger named Elliot Marsh. He hiked the trail in the fall after Hannah disappeared, checking the condition of the closures, and he wrote a report that mentioned a small opening in the hillside just past mile marker four. He described it as a "seep" and recommended that it be sealed before the rainy season, because it was a safety hazard for hikers who ignored the closure signs.

The county had done nothing about it. Six months later, the hillside came down, and the seep became a cave, and the cave became a grave, and ten years after that, Hannah was found.

Elliot Marsh was still a park ranger. He was in his late thirties. He had a mustache and a bad knee and a habit of writing long, careful reports. He was on the county payroll in this life just like he had been in the other one.

I found his name in the phone book, which in that year was still a real book on the shelf beside the kitchen phone. I found the county parks office, and I found the number for the trail maintenance division, and I wrote it all down in my head.

I could not call. A six-year-old's voice on a county phone line asking about a seep at mile marker four was going to get me a lecture and a hang-up.

But Hannah could call.

Hannah was a paramedic. She responded to calls in those hills every summer, hikers who broke their ankles and tourists who wandered off the trail without water. She had a professional reason to be interested in trail conditions. She had a professional relationship with the county. If she called and asked about closures near the Cuyamaca trail, nobody would think anything of it.

The trouble was that Hannah was not speaking to me.

She had gone quiet in the week after our conversation in the garage. She ate dinner with us and went to work and came home and went to her room, and the pills in her duffel bag were gone, which I did not know how to read. I had saved her life, and I had lost some piece of her that I did not have a name for, and I did not know whether that was because of Dave Kessler or because of me.

On a Tuesday evening, I knocked on her door.

"Come in."

She was on her bed with her boots off and a bowl of cereal balanced on her knees. She looked tired. She had the TV on for the light.

"Annie," she said. "It's eight."

"I want to ask you something."

She set the cereal down. "Okay."

"Have you ever been up the Cuyamaca trail? The one past the ranger station?"

She frowned. "Why?"

"Because the sign says closed but the rangers never go up there. And if a kid got lost up there, you would go look. Right?"

She went very still. "Annie, where is this coming from?"

"I'm just asking."

She watched me for a long time. Then she said, "Yes. I've been up there. Once. Before they closed it."

"Did you see anything weird?"

"Like what?"

"Like a hole in the hill. Past mile marker four."

Hannah sat up. She put her feet on the floor. "Why do you keep doing this?"

"Doing what?"

"Knowing things." She was not angry. She sounded almost frightened. "The night of the call. What you said. And now this. How do you know about mile marker four?"

I did not have an answer that she could use. So I told the truth, which in my experience is the safest lie.

"Dreams," I said. "I dream things."

She let out a breath. Then she laughed, one short, sad note. "Okay. Okay, you dream things. And in the dream, there's a hole in the hill."

"Yes."

"Annie."

"The ranger wrote a report about it," I said. "In my dream. His name is Elliot Marsh. He says it's a seep. He says it should be sealed before the rain."

Hannah stared at me.

"Hannah," I said. "Please call him."

"Annie."

"Please."

She did not say yes. But she did not say no, either. She sat there on the edge of her bed with her cereal going soggy and her TV throwing blue light on the wall, and I could see her thinking about Dave Kessler, about the call she did not take, about the thing I had said in the break room that she could not explain and could not stop turning over.

The next morning, when I came down for breakfast, she was on the kitchen phone with a cup of coffee in her hand.

"Yes, Mr. Marsh," she said. "I'm a paramedic out of Bayview. I've had a couple of hiker responses near mile marker four and I wanted to check the closure status. I heard there might be a seep."

A pause. She listened. Her eyes found me across the kitchen.

"That's the thing," she said. "A kid in my family keeps telling me about it. She says she dreamed it."

Another pause. She laughed, but it was a real laugh this time, almost surprised.

"Six," she said. "Yeah. She's a strange kid."

She hung up and looked at me for a long moment.

"He said he'd hike it Saturday," she said. "He said he remembered the seep. He said nobody ever asked him about it before."

I nodded. I did not smile. I had learned in my first life that the moments that matter do not feel like triumphs. They feel like the sidewalk before the fall.