Page 90 of Mazywood

“No,” Imani panted. This was the closest she had felt to crying since she was still in the RAV, her mind replaying the impossible sight of Mom’s abduction. “It can’t just stop. It can’t.”

Now it was Sharise’s turn to rest a maternal hand on Imani’s shoulder. “We’ll get help,” she said in a thin voice. “Search teams and dogs. More guns. People with shovels.”

Imani yanked away from Sharise because her touch was far from comforting. Talk of shovels was the same as talk of burial and mourning. Imani stared up at the sky as if the eagle might give her a clue, but only the rows of tall pine trunks and branches spiraled into her sight, making her as helpless as an ant in the cradle of their dominion.

This couldn’t be where Mom’s trail ended. It couldn’t be.

Imani leaned against the nearest tree trunk because her legs were already giving up. Before now, she’d only felt hints of the weariness that sagged over her.

“It can’t just end…” Imani whispered. “It can’t.”

The trail. Their mission. Her life as she had known it.

Imani forced herself to stand up straight. She looked back toward the snowdrift, hunching over to study it more closely. What had she missed?

“Imani, you promised,” Sharise said. She wasn’t crying anymore; now she was mad.

Imani ignored her. No path went through the snowdrift in a straight line, but what about on the end where the snowdrift met that scrubby brush? Was snow scattered across the bush’s lower branches as if something might have burst out? Imani stepped closer still.

A grayish-white object was nestled in the snow’s whiteness on the brush. Whatever it was, it wasn’t snow. It looked like fabric.

“Wait,” Imani huffed out.

“Imani, be careful!” Sharise said, but Imani was bounding to the bush, taking labored steps in ever-higher snow. As she got closer, the object became apparent: a sock! Imani grabbed the slightly graying tube sock, which had once been bright white, now limp and wet. She knew the matching black stripes at the top and the dark gray toe because she always borrowed Mom’s socks, an ongoing game between them.

A small scurrying sounded. Close. Imani kept the cold, wet sock crumpled in one hand while she brought the rifle back up, snapping it to aim at the tree trunks and shrubs around them. A white rabbit hopped away. She never would have seen its pale fur if it hadn’t raced past a dark pine stump. Even after she saw it was harmless, Imani was still breathing in gasps.

“What?” Sharise whispered.

“A rabbit,” Imani said, keeping her gun raised to be sure. She swung it around 360 degrees two more times—to the forest before them on three sides and the snowy valley behind them—before she lowered it again and opened her palm to show Sharise the sock.

“Oh my God,” Sharise said. “Is it…?”

“It’s Mom’s. I’m wearing the same ones—see?”

Happy to prove that the sock was a sign of Mom, Imani lifted the damp leg of her jeans to show Sharise her identical sock. Sharise grabbed Imani’s shoulders like claws. “She was here!”

“Maybe we’re close!” Imani said.

They forgot to whisper. Their first taste of joy since the road was intoxicating. No body parts or streaks of blood had met them here, only evidence that they were getting closer to her. Mom was not nothing—and she would never be nothing.

Buoyed by her precious discovery, Imani scanned the area on the other side of the shrub, which Mom clearly had passed through for her sock to snag, and saw the slashing tracks that she knew so well resume, winding past the maze of trees on a mild downward slope. The Beast had changed direction after plunging under the snow, but the tracks were intact. Maybe the Beast racing through the snowdrift had been like a dog running through a puddle of mud.

“There it is!” Sharise said. “The trail!” Now she sounded excited too.

“Let’s get back on our boards,” Imani said. “It’s faster.”

When Sharise handed Imani her snowboard, Imani took one last look at the sock, as if to prove to herself that it was real. She pulled the sock open—and immediately wished she hadn’t. Inside of its lip, she saw a trail of red that hadn’t seeped through to the other side, diluted by moisture. The stripe was so small, not even an inch, that Imani hadn’t noticed it at first.

Mom’s blood. Imani’s heart stomped her rib cage.

Quickly, she shoved the sock into her jacket pocket. She pulled out her spare glove and zipped the pocket to seal the sock inside.

“Here,” Imani said, offering her spare glove to Sharise, penance for her lie of omission. She did not want Sharise to see the blood—she wished she could unsee it. Why hadn’t she just put the sock away while she was so happy? Now her insides rattled like broken glass.

“Oh God, thank you,” Sharise said. “I don’t know where I left my gloves.”

When she slipped on the single glove and rubbed her naked hand with her gloved one, a look like rapture came over her face. For a moment, anyway, her tears were gone. As Imani envied her sister’s ignorance, she almost forgave herself for concealing Mom’s blood.