Maybe I needed to do this. Maybe if I walked up to where she’d told me the site was, I’d know it. Maybe then it would all make sense. Maybe then I’d finally know why it happened. Why I’d lived.
I got out of the truck.
I walked up the hill. The wind blew, the trees rustled, and the ground was uneven, rocky. But it still didn’t look familiar.
Then I reached the top of the hill.
It was there. The rocks, the ground, the trees I’d fled into, terrified of looking back. It was all there.
But it wasn’t like I remembered.
I remembered an endless expanse of torn, burning ground. I remembered fire and debris and death. It wasn’t like that. There was a small clearing, a patch of dirt and stubborn rock that had shoved its way up out of the ground and pushed back the trees. There were black marks on some of the rocks, dark like they had been burned. I knew that was from the plane.
I knew this place.
I had to sit down then. I covered my face with my hands and closed my eyes. This was it. I’d been here. A part of me would always be here.
After a while, the wind blew again, and I heard a sound I knew too well. I opened my eyes and looked at the trees. They were smaller than I remembered, and sparser. Some of them had been burnt, leaving behind only withered black skeletons. The fire had done that. It must have happened after I’d gone. I only remembered stumbling toward greenness, being swallowed by it. I remembered being afraid to look back, afraid I’d see what I so wanted to forget.
I looked around the clearing. The ground was rubbed raw in a few places, scrubbed by fire, but otherwise it looked untouched. I knew it had been, though.
Someone had left a wreath of flowers on top of the tallest rock. They looked brittle in the wind, dried out and rustling. I didn’t want to look at them. I didn’t want to see who had left them.
I looked around again. I knew that corner, over by those rocks. I’d seen Walter there. I’d watched his hat drift away. And there, on the other side, that was where Sandra—I bent down, pressed both hands into the ground. The dirt was cold and rocky, scraped my fingers.
The last time I’d felt it, it had been wet and hot, searing my skin.
I looked behind me. There was a faint groove cut into the ground, and I knew that once it had been deeper. That I’d crawled out of a piece of the plane by it, Carl’s hand clasped in mine.
I didn’t cry. The pain inside me was too raw for tears. This was where I’d closed my eyes and woke up to a burning sky.
I didn’t want to see it again, but I looked up anyway.
The sky wasn’t burning. It was cloudless and blue, the gentle color of late afternoon. It was now. It was real.
I got up and walked away.
Wanda didn’t ask me how it went when I got back to her. She didn’t say anything at all. Maybe she could tell I didn’t want to talk. Maybe she was tired. I was grateful for the silence as we drove back, and watched the forest growing dark around us. I didn’t like seeing the trees.
I looked at them anyway.
Once Joe said that maybe people like us couldn’t get better, that maybe we had to learn to live with what we’d seen. What we knew.
When we got back, I asked Wanda to hold off calling my house for a little while.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I promised I’d call right away, and it’s getting awful dark out. I couldn’t let you go back up into the hills by yourself now.”
“I don’t want to do that, I promise. I just need to go see someone in town real fast.”
She looked at me and then sighed. “Well, I guess I could wait a little while.”
“Thanks.”
She nodded. “I get needing a little time. The team I was with . . . we were the first ones there. We all looked at—well, we all looked around and were sure no one could have lived through that. But you did, didn’t you?”
“I did,” I said, and for the first time the fact that I’d lived didn’t feel like something I’d never understand. It just felt like something that was.
When I drove away, Wanda waved goodbye, and in the rearview mirror her arm swayed like a tree in the wind. I waved back, and watched until she disappeared.
Joe’s car wasn’t parked by Mrs. Harrison’s house. It was by the town cemetery near Reardon Logging, up by where the hills began. I drove past it, then turned around and went back. It took me a little while to get out of the car.
Beth’s grave was toward the back, by the sharp swell of earth that marked the true beginning of the hills. Joe was sitting cross-legged on the ground next to a stone that had her name carved across it.
“Hey,” I said when I reached him.
He looked up at me, surprised. “What are you doing here?”
“I saw your car out front. Don’t you usually come here later?”
“Yeah, but sometimes there’s stuff I really want to tell her. Like today I . . . here, let me move over so you can sit down too.”
I did, folding my legs like his. “Thanks. So, today you told her what?”
“Just stuff.”
I looked at him.
“I was . . . all right, don’t laugh, okay? I was telling her about Friday.”
“Why would I laugh? I’m glad you said you’d come.”
We glanced at each other, and then looked away.
“I’m kinda glad you weren’t here about five minutes ago, actually. I was practicing stuff to say to your parents.” He grinned at me, and then tilted his head a little to one side. “You okay?”
I looked down at the ground. “I went up into the hills this afternoon.”
“Oh. To see—”
“Yeah. Where the plane crashed.”
“Have you been there since—?”
“No,” I said. I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t. He didn’t say anything either.
After a while, I looked over at him. He was looking at me. “Do you want to be alone for a while?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He was silent for a second, and then said, “I’ll go. It’s a good place to think about . . . stuff.”
I looked at Beth’s grave, all Joe had left of his family. I read her name again, and then looked up into the hills. “You can stay if you want.”
“You sure?”
I nodded and looked away from the hills. I looked at the sky. It was clear and dark, speckled with stars. It was beautiful. It was real.
I was real.
I looked at Joe. I took a deep breath.
“When I woke up,” I said, “the sky was burning.”
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Elizabeth Scott, Miracle
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