In Wilderness by Diane Thomas Page A

bend and, for a disorienting moment, in the same way one experiences déjà vu, sees the cabin as a place where she lives and belongs. She drops her wood on the porch, goes to the corner where she heard the deer the night before, brushes away the dry leaves and peers at the ground. There’s nothing there. No tracks of any kind.
    Perhaps she doesn’t yet know what to look for.
    Perhaps her deer’s a spirit deer that floats.
    Hardly. More likely is that fear can prompt hallucinations, aural as well as visual, and there was nothing outside her wall last night at all.
    Inside the cabin, two cabbages, huge and green, lie with everything else on the floor beside the trestle table. They are everything she sees. When she picks one up, it’s cold and alive between her hands. One leaf, two leaves, three leaves, so sweet you chew them slowly. Now, sit here on this bench, breathe quietly. Oh, miracle! She keeps it down.
    Lying on top of her sleeping bag on the sun-warmed floor, she closes her eyes for her midmorning nap, the low point of her day. No one naps mornings except people like her. Damaged, sick, dying. Outside, what has to be a mockingbird sings whole long songs, never repeats itself. They sing because they’re lonely, so the guidebooks say; they sing because they’re looking for a mate. If she lives out her remaining four months of allotted time, she’ll be here when it finds one.She’ll be here when the trees take on that first green haze of spring and then leaf out. Growing up, she used to watch for it out her bedroom window. The year she turned eleven, a small gray bird built a nest in the top branches of the tallest tree, where she could see it. One morning while she was in school the bird hatched three sky-blue eggs. It seemed magical, a miracle, because she hadn’t been there.
    I T WAS THAT SAME time of year, when she began once more keeping watch over the trees, that she met Michael. She was sixteen, like all her friends, the lot of them just starting to go out with boys in cars, living for the musty smells of Packards and Hudsons when their dashboard radios got hot, the scratch of wool upholstery through their thin spring skirts. The air was wet and heavy; their winter coats were not yet packed away in cedar chests. It happened fast. He was three years older, out of school, which made her feel all at the same time very young and very old and very special. He had played football and she knew even back then who he was, the way you know a movie star. Now he was in the Army, saving to pay for college. In April they had their picture taken at her junior prom under a cardboard archway decorated with crepe paper roses. He had his arm around her. They had only just come from frantically tasting each other in the back seat of his car; anyone could see it in the photograph, in their eyes. She can’t remember if she knew then he was leaving.
    Of course she wrote him every day; he wrote her every day he could. In June, after the trees all got their leaves, the phone rang.
    Okinawa. A hideous and unfamiliar word. The details didn’t matter, only that he was dead and all the life in her died with him. Their plans. Because there had been plans, there had not been any question he’d come back and they’d get married. And so they saved themselves for it, that future, even the night before he left. No one so young imagines anyone they know will die.
    They wouldn’t let her see inside his coffin. Wouldn’t remove the flag, pry up the nails. Her mother had to lead her from the church when it was over. Because she could not move for sobbing, no onewould take her to his grave. When she got home she tore the dress she’d had on into little pieces, gripped the pieces with her teeth and ripped them once again, threw them in the garbage. Would have burned them had she been alone.
    How she got through her senior year she can’t remember, only that she marched down the aisle with all her classmates in a white cap and gown, hating