She ran between black pines, her sneakers crunching the thin crust of old snow. Needles, twigs, lichens, and fallen branches littered the forest floor. Somehow, the whiteness of the snow seemed to light up the wood so that it didn’t seem very dusky.
Ellen stopped. She heard the sounds of the highway and her breath, sounds that heaved together like the wheezing of a phantom. Wet vernal scents of cold wood and hard green buds came flowing on the wind, which was not warm but not frigid like in February. A thin layer of chill spread over her fingers and chin, so she bunched her hands into her sleeves and tucked her face into the collar of her jacket.
Just as she decided to lift her foot where it was numbing in the spring snow, Ellen caught a glimpse of the lynx. A greyish, beige, liquid shadow between the pines, it lifted its foot when she picked up her own. When she stopped, the big cat stopped. It was about the size of a large dog, but ever so much more beautiful. Its movements were soft and syrupy. The amber eyes gazed at her with what appeared to be either love or complete indifference. Or maybe both?
Ellen stood and watched the animal as it watched her. She was eleven, alone in the forest, and it was dusk. The muscles of the lynx rippled across its shoulders.
Ellen gave a sigh.
She was not afraid. The big cat could rip her to shreds and she would not feel anything. She smiled as if comforted.
I knew then that she saw me.
“Hello,” she said in a tiny voice, those great clear eyes opened to mine.
Come with me, I said silently.
The lynx took a step toward the highway.
Ellen heard the cars shushing by. For a moment, she hesitated; her eyebrows formed a questioning triangle. Then she took a step, too.
The snow light illuminated her rosy cheeks and the dark red bow of her mouth. Her face was long and narrow. My Ellen. “Don’t be sad,” she’d said. “I’ll be right here all the time.”
And here she was.
The lynx moved silently into the trees, leading to the slick black road.
Ellen followed.
At the highway shoulder, the big cat waited until all was quiet, then leapt in one swift arc across the two lanes. Ellen looked both ways. Feeling dreadfully independent and adventurous, she crossed in ten steps. The lynx kept a distance of several metres, always watching her intently. Its short tail stood erect.
Now standing on the other side of the highway, Ellen looked back and felt suddenly afraid of the dark pine forest, more afraid of it than the wildcat only metres away. The melting shadows between the trees looked forbidding and wrong. But when she glanced to the lynx as if for reassurance, all she saw was its fluffy tail and back legs bounding out of sight, down a gravel path beyond a tall rock-cut.
Ellen followed. The lynx was gone. Now she realized she was on the side road to the Howey Bay Cemetery.
Part of the reason she kept going is because of what she would be able to tell Pammy in the coming days. She could just hear herself: I left my house and went all the way across the Slimes, through the forest to the cemetery. Yes, after dark! No, my parents had, like, no idea! It would sound so crazy and cool.
In reality, Ellen’s knees were quaking all the way up the curved gravel path, until she reached the cemetery gates. She gulped. She didn’t want to enter. She knew about spirits, knew even that the stories probably weren’t true, but it didn’t matter. She was this close to a host of dead bodies.
She put her hand on the gate and swung it open. Creak.
Ellen looked around furtively. No one could see her from the highway. As quietly as it had appeared, the lynx had vanished.
Breathing shallowly, she entered.
Her fear was short-lived. There, in the first row, stood an engraved headstone: Marjean Hostetler. With God. Uttering a sound in her throat somewhere between a sob and a laugh, Ellen rushed to the stone, threw herself down on the muddy new grass, and put her arms around the stone.
“Marjean,” she said. The word came alive around her. Marjean’s hair, Marjean’s woodsmoke and caramel and vinegar scent, Marjean’s concerned eyebrows, Marjean, fierce, warm, humble. My Marjean.
Ellen lay full-length on the grave for what seemed like an hour. She whispered everything to Marjean; it didn’t seem so ugly this way. It seemed, somehow, normal. She felt Marjean chuckling at the weird parts, clucking at the sad parts, tsk-ing at the sick parts. All was forgivable and stupid and she knew, when she finally left, that her life would keep going indefinitely.
She didn’t know how long it would continue, or what would come after. How about all the souls in this graveyard, this comforting place? Where were they now? Ellen clasped her hands together at the gate and turned back to face the many rows of headstones. They were all under her feet right now, people who’d lived and died in Howey Bay. Even though she wasn’t Anglican, had never stepped inside an Anglican church, she prayed for their souls. God be with you, she said aloud, then thought of their grey stillness, their rotting limbs, and shuddered. God be with you.
The mine whistle moaned. It was nine o’clock, time to go home.
Ellen walked quickly along the highway, shivering against the wind. Within a few minutes, a small rust-coloured sedan swung to the shoulder in front of her. A brown-eyed man leaned across the seat and asked, in a friendly way, if Ellen was where she should be.
She sighed and looked at him for a moment with sad eyes.
“No,” she answered, and accepted a ride into town.
He was a stranger and she knew she shouldn’t get into the car, but she implicitly trusted his face; and then, what was safety nowadays?