But there was only silence. Just the swaying of the earth below, and the branches and leaves dancing around her, and the gradual awareness of her arms and legs scraped raw from the bark. Her wrists itched. Her left hip throbbed. Between gusts she could hear the creek.

She was too high up.

Mara climbed down slowly. Inch by inch, time stretching around her. Feeling with her toes for each solid branch, pressing twice to make sure it wouldn’t break beneath her. Everything trembling, though she felt strong. She couldn’t stop shaking. Halfway down she stopped to catch her breath, and when she had caught it enough she continued to descend.

At the base of the tree, she lay on her stomach and pressed her face into the ground. Ants and insects crawled in the grass, which had grown tall and thick. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. She searched for the spent flares and gathered them and put them in her pocket and started toward camp. She didn’t want to litter.

When Mara got to the shelter, Ashley stood before it with her arms at her side. Like she was screwing up the courage to go in. Then Mara came closer and saw the gun in her hand, the spray of blood across her face.

“He asked me to,” Ashley said.

Mara ran to her as she collapsed.

26

Bullfrog came shortly. He must have heard the shot, the flares. He took in the two women, clinging together. Then he went into the shelter, and when he came out he caught Mara’s eye and shook his head.

“You don’t want to see that.” The way he said it, he might have been talking to himself.

Mara didn’t want to see it, but she had to. She went into the shelter and went out again.

Bullfrog was right. She wished she hadn’t. She stared into the blue sky, trying to get the image from her head. She closed her eyes and saw it on her eyelids. Kyle’s hand outstretched on the grass mat, palm down, layers of freckles and dirt. Dark curves under cracked nails.

They sat on the grass for a long time, and finally the silence came around to a place where they could talk. They had all become very calm.

Mara was thinking about Kyle, but she wasn’t thinking about Kyle. She couldn’t think about him directly. She thought about his hero, Chris McCandless, instead.

“Isn’t it weird,” Mara said, “that McCandless used to be a person?”

“Like that he was alive?” said Ashley.

“No, not like that. But, like, that he was a person. He went to the bathroom and ate cereal and had thoughts, and probably most of them no one ever heard. And that’s all gone now, but people act like they know him.”

It seemed to her now that the more people acted like they knew you, the less you existed. They built you a shell and didn’t care if it fit. People talked like they knew McCandless—hadn’t she?—but the thing they talked about wasn’t him. They all just pretended it was. And nobody stopped them, because who would?