After the bus was gone, I opened the door, heading to the only place I thought had answers: the maintenance garage where Frick worked part-time for the tribe. I knew he’d be there. During the cold months, he was paid to sit around in the maintenance garage and sip water from the water cooler. His duties during the warm months were to mow the tribal buildings’ lawns and weed-whack the tall grasses growing around all the chain-link fences surrounding the Island school and the graveyards. But it was the end of winter, and so he had nothing to do but shoot the shit with the guys in the garage and wait for the snow to melt.

I sprinted the whole way there and only slowed when the garage came into view, men sitting in metal fold-out chairs away from where ice dripped water from the garage’s roof, each sipping coffee or water or something else in little cups. They all looked at me when I got close, and then one of them yelled to Frick.

“Your boy’s here,” a man said.

I didn’t go any closer, not wanting to talk to anyone but Frick, and when Frick came out he stayed back like he didn’t want to talk to me.

“Why ain’t you in school?” he said.

“Mom’s gone,” I said. “Since yesterday she’s been gone. I don’t know what to do.”

He looked at me and then at the ground, then looked behind him at the garage, at all the men who had gone back to talking and sipping their drinks.

“Come on,” he said, and he started for his truck.

He didn’t say anything, just started driving, and I thought he was taking me to school but we drove right past the long tan-brick building and red playgrounds. He wasn’t driving fast—Frick never did, was always so careful on the road—and at each street he slowed, looking, and finally I realized he wasn’t taking me anywhere. He was looking for my mother, and I got this feeling that he felt bad for something.

We checked every road on the Island, and then Frick parked his truck on the bridge to Overtown, the river flowing under us, carrying ice sheets toward the dam. Even in the warm truck I was cold.

We stayed on the bridge until lunch, and we didn’t speak one word to each other until my stomach rumbled.

“Let’s go eat,” he said, and then he put the truck in drive and drove over the bridge. He took a right—there was nothing to the right except camp, so that was where we were going. I hadn’t been there since I was nine, since the time Frick had finally made me put a bullet in a rabbit’s head that hadn’t even turned fully white, this little thing in between changes, in between something larger than simple molting, simple brown to white.

The way to his camp used to be a path that we had to walk, leaving our vehicles a mile behind, but Frick had had the way cleared, wide enough for his truck, and like all camp roads, the one to Frick’s was bumpy, jagged, the dirt solidified like a rough sea frozen. The road was straight, but then it curved, and once the curve was turned, the road went straight again, and another curve popped up—there was a never-ending feeling to the road, like the ocean. And the road only ever ended when the camp—unfinished, a blue plastic bucket upside down to step on to get through the yard-high door, the inside walls pink cotton-candy insulation—appeared unexpectedly, and stood wrapped by pine trees.