We crept closer, Kara smoothly shouldering her shotgun and aiming it at the driver’s-side door, which was coming into view. The window was iced up on the inside.
Kara stopped several feet away.
I felt a pit in my stomach, and a premonition that I was walking into a trap.
Again.
Kara glanced back at me and motioned to the door. “Pull it open,” she whispered.
“You sure about that?”
“Got a better idea?”
“Yeah. Leave and come back with hazmat suits.”
She rolled her eyes and moved to the truck and jerked open the driver’s-side door.
There was a person lying across the bench seat.
Kara said, “Oh god.”
She stepped back as the waft of putrefaction hit. I’d encountered my share of dead bodies during the course of my work as a GPA agent, and while I’d certainly experienced worse, this was wildly unpleasant.
Kara leaned her shotgun against the tree and pulled her parka up over her nose. I moved closer, taking a quick glance into the bed of the truck. It was filled with old, dirty snow covering the remnants of a load of firewood.
I walked around to the passenger door.
It made a grinding screech as I wrenched it open.
I was breathing through my mouth now; my eyes watered from whatever decomp gases had been accumulating in the cab of the truck.
Kara came up behind me.
The corpse wore a blue fleece jacket, black jeans, and hiking boots.
A tangle of silver hair spilled over the seat, and the head rested in the crook of the right arm. The only visible skin was the hand, where I saw evidence of slippage and dark wells where blood and liquefied internal matter had settled.
The face was hidden under the splay of hair.
In the passenger-seat floorboard, I saw an empty syringe and an empty glass bottle. I used the Garmin to roll it over so I could see the label.
“Morphine,” I said.
I looked at the body again—there was something so peaceful and desperate in its final repose. For the moment, I had forgotten why we’d come here. I was outside of myself, purely in the moment. I wondered what state of mind a person would have to be in to drive into the middle of nowhere and inject a lethal dose of morphine into their veins.
Reaching down, I carefully swept the hair back from the face.
The skin was desiccated, deep purple, and split in places, as if it had undergone periods of freezing and thawing. The eyes were closed, the blued lips parted.
A necklace hung from the neck, draping over the white vinyl seat.
I leaned in to see the pendant hanging from it.
It was a platinum double helix—the structure of DNA.
I see wrapping paper scattered around the tree. I’m opening my new Lego set. Max is lying on the couch, already weary from the early stages of the illness that will take his life next year. Kara is trying out her new tablet, and there’s the warm, sweet smell of the scones Mom made every Christmas morning baking in the oven. I hear Mom say, “Oh, Haz, it’s beautiful,” and I watch her lifting a necklace with a double helix pendant out of a small, burgundy box.
“I had it custom-made by a jeweler in Philadelphia,” my father says. “Here, let me.” And then he comes around behind her and delicately lifts it over her head and fastens the clasp as my mother holds her hair off her neck.
I staggered back from the truck.
Mouth running dry.
I pointed into the cab.
Croaked, “I think it’s Mom.”
Kara leaned into the cab, examined the corpse’s face.
“How can you tell?”
“The necklace.”
I watched the recognition hit.
Watched Kara brace against the tidal wave of emotion, watched it tear through her defenses, her face flashing through confusion, horror, anger, heartbreak, shock.
I walked a little ways into the woods.
The wind chilled the tears on my face.
I sat down on the forest floor in a patch of sun.
Behind me, Kara scream-shouted at the corpse, “Fuck you!”
I broke down.
My mother was dead.
Again.
* * *
—
When I finally struggled back onto my feet, the light had changed. The sun was higher. Kara was sitting on the ground, leaning back against the wheel of the pickup truck, staring into nothing.
I walked over, eased down across from her.
There were tear streaks across her face.
Anger radiating off her.
I didn’t say anything.
She finally looked at me.
Holding back tears.
Chin trembling.
“What kind of person does this to their children?”
“What should we do with her?” I asked. “Notify someone? Bury her?”
“Who do you think gives a fuck that Miriam Ramsay is dead? Again. And if you think I’m going to spend all day putting her in the ground…I say we forget this ever happened. Go back to Santa Fe—we still have the hotel room—and get wasted. Fuck this day. Fuck every single part of it.”
“I’m on board with that,” I said, “but there is one thing.” Kara looked at me. I held up the Garmin. “According to this, we’re still 1,250 feet from our destination.”
Kara took the Garmin from me and stared at it.
She said, “Isn’t it obvious this is what we were supposed to find?”
“Maybe. But we’ve come this far. What’s another quarter mile?”
I gave her a hand and helped her onto her feet, then we trudged up the hillside.
I felt weak.
Every step was arduous.
Between the adrenaline rush of finding the body and the emotional crash of realizing who it was, I had nothing left.
We passed into a small glade.
The woods grew dense on the other side.
A darker, cooler forest of spruce trees.
We were climbing into snow.
The Garmin vibrated in my hand. I looked down at the screen.
You have arrived at your destination.
“Says we’re here,” I said.
I looked up and around. The woods on our destination grid were unremarkable. Engelmann spruce, a few boulders, a crust of old snow on everything. The trees grew too closely together for sunlight to reach the forest floor.
It was impossible to tell exactly where we were in relation to the 36°33′45″N, 106°13′04″W grid.
I set the Garmin on the ground to mark the perimeter.
Kara looked at me.
I said, “GPS is only accurate to within five meters, so we should expand our canvassing to a ninety-six by one hundred seventeen–foot square.”
“I’ll start over here.”
She headed off through the trees.
I started walking.
Slow, methodical steps crunching in the snow.
I looked at the ground.
At every tree.
Each boulder I passed.
The more ground I covered, the more I began to suspect that Kara was right. We had found what we were meant to find. A final fuck you from Mom for reasons we would probably never know.
As I finished my fourth traverse of the grid and started back in the opposite direction, I heard Kara say, “Logan.”
She was fifty or sixty feet away, hidden in the trees.
I took off through the snow, following the direction of her voice. When I finally glimpsed her, Kara was standing beside the stump of what had once been a ponderosa pine. The tree had toppled long ago, apparently struck down by lightning. There was a burn scar across half of the enormous stump.