Chapter 2 - Alone Among the Pines
For a long while, Richard simply sat there, back against the rough bark of the great pine, letting the tears run their course. He was not a man given to self-pity — he'd buried his own father in a hard winter, buried his wife in a harder one, and never once let the world see him break. But this was different. This wasn't grief for someone he'd lost. This was grief for something he hadn't known could be taken from him at all: the quiet certainty that his children, whatever their flaws, loved him.
Eventually, as the shadows between the trees deepened and the afternoon chill began creeping into his joints, something in Richard shifted. It was a small thing at first — the recognition that if he simply sat here weeping until dark, he would not survive the night. And whatever his children thought of him now, whatever cruelty had brought him to this clearing, he was not ready to give the forest the satisfaction of finishing what they'd started.
He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, the same rough motion he'd used a thousand times chopping wood in the cold, and pushed himself up using his cane and the trunk of the pine behind him. His knees screamed in protest, but they held. They always had.
"Alright, old man," he muttered to himself, the way he sometimes did when Margaret wasn't there to talk to anymore. "Let's see what you remember."
He'd spent more nights in these woods — not this exact stretch, but woods like it — than most men spent in their own beds. His own father had taught him to read a forest the way some men read a newspaper: which trees held water in their roots, which plants could feed you and which could kill you, how to find north without a compass by studying the moss growing thick on the northern side of a trunk, how the angle of the light told you how many hours of daylight remained.
The first task, he decided, was shelter. Night in these mountains could turn dangerously cold even in late spring, and if he was going to survive until someone found him — if anyone ever did — he would need more than his jacket to keep the cold from settling into his old bones.
He began to walk the perimeter of the clearing slowly, leaning heavily on his cane, his eyes scanning the ground and the trees with the practiced patience of a man who had done this before, decades ago, when his back didn't ache and his hands didn't shake. He found what he was looking for near a fallen log about sixty yards from where the cars had left him: a natural depression in the earth, sheltered on one side by the log itself and on the other by a cluster of young firs growing close together.
It took him the better part of an hour to drag enough fallen branches to lean against the log, weaving smaller boughs between them the way his own father had shown him when Richard was no older than seven. His hands, arthritic and slow, fumbled more than they used to, and twice he had to stop and rest, breathing hard, his heart pounding uncomfortably in his chest. But he kept going, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering the sound of the car doors closing.
By the time the shelter was rough but functional, the light had turned gold and low through the trees, and Richard knew he had perhaps another hour before real darkness set in. Fire was next. Fire meant warmth, and more importantly, fire meant he might be seen if anyone came looking — though a small, cold part of him wondered whether anyone would come looking at all.
He gathered dry pine needles and the papery inner bark of a dead birch he found near the clearing's edge, along with a handful of small twigs, arranging them in the careful teepee shape he'd taught to two children who apparently hadn't listened as closely as he'd hoped. In his jacket pocket, worn soft from years of carrying, was an old brass lighter Margaret had given him decades ago, one he still carried out of habit even though he'd quit smoking before Daniel was born.
The flame caught on the third try, and Richard felt something loosen in his chest as the small fire crackled to life, the warmth washing weakly over his cold hands. He fed it slowly, patiently, the way you build trust with something fragile, until it was strong enough to hold through the night.
As true darkness fell over the forest, Richard sat close to his small fire, his cane resting across his knees, and let his mind wander back through the years. He thought of Daniel as a boy of eight, terrified of the dark, curling up close to Richard's side on nights just like this one, asking a hundred questions about the noises in the woods. He thought of Emma at six, fearless in a way Daniel never was, insisting on holding the fishing rod herself even when it was nearly as tall as she was.
Where had those children gone? When had they become the two adults who had driven away without looking back?
He didn't have an answer, and as the fire popped and settled and the forest around him filled with the calls of night birds and the rustle of things moving unseen through the underbrush, Richard found himself talking quietly to Margaret, the way he sometimes did in the empty house on Willow Creek Road.
"I don't understand it, Maggie," he whispered to the fire. "I don't understand what we did wrong."
The forest gave him no answer either. But somewhere in the darkness beyond the firelight, unnoticed by Richard, a pair of eyes reflected the glow of his small flame — not predatory, simply curious, watching the strange sight of an old man alone in a place where old men rarely came alone. It was a young doe, cautious and quick, who would slip away into the trees within moments and think nothing more of it.
But she would not be the last creature to take notice of Richard that night, nor the last living thing whose path would cross his in the days that followed — and it would be one of those crossings, more than anything Richard did himself, that would determine whether he lived to see his children again.
Richard slept in fits that night, waking every hour or so to feed the fire, his old joints stiff and complaining against the hard, cold ground beneath his makeshift shelter. Each time he woke, for just a moment before full awareness returned, he forgot where he was — reaching instinctively for the warmth of Margaret beside him, or the familiar creak of his own bed. And each time, remembering hit him fresh, like a wound reopening.
By the gray light of early morning, Richard's body ached in ways it hadn't in years, but he was alive, and the fire, though reduced to embers, still glowed faintly in its bed of stones. He allowed himself a moment of quiet pride at that small fact before the deeper cold of his situation settled back over him: he had no food, uncertain access to clean water, and no way of knowing whether anyone in the world even knew he was missing yet.
May you like
He thought of Mrs. Pemberton next door, who might notice his mail piling up after a few days. He thought of his weekly card game with old Frank Delgado, who would surely wonder when Richard failed to show up on Thursday. Small threads of hope, thin as spider silk, but threads nonetheless.
He pushed himself up, using the cane as leverage, and began the slow work of surviving one more day.
