Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [40]
The two teddy bears, the orange kitten, the beat-up Grover she’d had since she was two, and the large purple hippopotamus on her bed eyed her as she moved. She remembered the compass her father had gotten her last Christmas as part of a junior adventurer’s kit and she grabbed it, and then dug out the flashlight, the canteen, and the whistle from her bottom drawer. The kit had had a Swiss Army knife, but Jack broke it performing an emergency tracheotomy on the dinosaur rock at the park.
And then she found herself looking at the baseball again. It would be lucky, Jack had promised, for it was a baseball signed by Joe Mauer. She grabbed it and put it in the backpack.
She crept into the kitchen and pulled out some of the energy bars her mother alleged were food and filled up the canteen with water, then took a deep breath and went into the living room, where her mother was still on the phone.
Heart in throat, Hazel gave her a “do you have a minute” look.
“I’m sorry,” her mother said into the phone, “could you hold on a second? . . . What is it, Hazel?”
“Um, I’m going to go to Mikaela’s. We have a group project.”
“Oh!” She cast a glance at the clock. “Look, if you wait a half hour, I can drive you.”
“Oh, no. That’s okay. It’s not that cold.”
Her mother nodded. “Remember, I have class tonight. I won’t be home when you get home.”
Hazel gulped. “Okay, Mom.” And her mother nodded and turned back to the phone.
Hazel stood for a moment, looking at their living room. It held a yellow couch that some long-dead cat had scratched up, a TV perched on a small cart, her mom’s desk with a computer and all kinds of papers, and a row of shelves teeming with books. The walls were light blue, Hazel’s favorite color. She’d helped her parents pick the paint four years ago, and her dad spilled a whole bucket of it on his shirt. You could trace his path through the house by the little drips that still lingered everywhere like breadcrumbs.
It was one of the few records of his ever living there. There used to be pictures of the family scattered around the living room, but her mom had packed them all away, and now the only record of Hazels-past was last year’s school photo, preserving Hazel forever in long braids and a puffy green T-shirt that Jack thought made her look like a vegetable.
She stood so long that her mother gave her a questioning look, and she smiled as if everything was okay and put on her jacket.
“’Bye, Mom,” Hazel whispered. She stood there for one beat. Two. And she went out the front door.
Hazel was trying so hard not to think, because if she thought about what she was doing she could never possibly do it. Instead she put one foot in front of the other, her sneakers crunching the snow, her socks absorbing the wet and cold and transmitting it up her legs. Already she’d made a mistake, but she could not risk going back for boots.
Anyway, how cold could it be in the woods at night, right?
Hazel trudged forward, down the long blocks to the park with the good sledding hill. She noticed among the footprints in the hard snow some tracks, like from a dragging sled, and she wondered if she was seeing the last record of Jack and when that record would melt away into nothing.
There were kids at the park, building snowmen, having snowball fights, barreling down Suicide Hill. Hazel walked as far around them as she could. She had a reason to be apart from them now. She climbed up the hill at the other side of the park, feeling the effort in her legs. The trees stood in front of her like sentries, and she could not tell whether they intended to welcome her or keep her out.
She stood looking at the line of trees that demarcated the woods as clearly as any doorway. Uncle Martin was right. She knew it at that moment. There were secrets, and there were witches in white, and somewhere there was Jack.
She wished he were with her now.
Hazel had read enough books to know that a line like this one is the line down which your life breaks in two. And you have to think very carefully about whether you want