The Eel River rose and rose. It was swollen and angry and it wanted everything. But Emma’s house remained strangely untouched. Her beau was in the parlor, watching the engorged river with a fascination that made Emma’s stomach turn.

She sneaked to the kitchen door, choosing to leave behind every concern about her parents, what they would think of her, how much they might worry. She ran all the way to Ada’s house. It was right on the riverbank. It was dry as a bone.

Emma waited in the bushes outside Ada’s house. When Ada didn’t appear, she smacked Ada’s window with pebbles, too hard, cracking the glass. Then Ada came out and shouted at Emma. “Go home. You need to stay safe.”

“We don’t have to fear anymore,” Emma said, the water rushing by her feet without so much as touching her stockings. “If we lived through today without being touched, we must be a miracle.”

Ada brought Emma inside and tried to warm her up by the fire.

“I’m not staying here another day,” Emma said. The words wavered slightly, so she said them again, to turn them solid. “I’m leaving, and you should come with me.” She pounded up the narrow stairs to Ada’s room and grabbed Ada’s favorite drawing brush and ink. Then she drew a map on Ada’s arm, as she had when they were little girls playing at being prospectors. She formed a big black X at the spot where they were supposed to meet.

Ada held her breath. She watched Emma as if she wanted to believe all of this was real, and not just some game concocted by a nervous, dramatic girl.

She watched Emma as if she didn’t believe it at all.

That night, Emma spun through the dark woods. She waited at the place she’d marked on Ada’s skin. Emma was alone for hours, and then days, but Ada did not come, and the world grew cold.

She stayed in the woods, only she didn’t have her black shiny shoes anymore, or her heartbeat, or the hunger that had killed her.

At first, she clung to the spot where she’d died, an uneven basin where a mighty tree must have lived at some point. She thought staying there would help her move to the next thing, to pass to heaven or, more likely, hell, considering everything she’d been taught in her church pew on Sundays.

But she didn’t pass on to any kind of after. And the longer she stayed, the more she came to understand that she wouldn’t be leaving. Sometimes, Emma could feel other spirits thickening the air. They became part of the fog, drawn into the trees, a resting place for those without graves.

Emma stayed separate, different.