Archive of Our Own

They are two hours in the woods when Helena speaks up.

"I just keep thinking about her," she says. "The sister."

They had spoken at the landing site, Helena and Ramon and this woman whose brother is now five days missing. She hadn't cried. She'd worn bags under her eyes, lines in her skin, weight on her spine, but she hadn't spilled a single tear as she introduced herself and thanked them for being here.

"She carries a heavy burden," says Ramon. "I would not wish to be in her shoes."

"She's all alone," says Helena, and Ramon looks at her sideways.

"Is that so?" he asks. "What of her husband, who wouldn't leave her side? Or all those people, the fire department, police, all those volunteers off the street who came to search for the boy? What of our own son, who helped her organize all this?"

"Her parents should be here." It's a simple statement, one that bears more conviction than its words. "A daughter shouldn't have to carry this alone."

"Of course not." Ramon's tone is familiar, somewhere between agreement and placation. "But they aren't here. There are always things that people should be, things they should do but they don't. If you cannot fix it, work with it."

He shrugs with a satisfied little nod, as if imparting some great profound wisdom.

"We would be here," Helena snaps. "If it was our son out there, lost and alone, we would be here. We wouldn't put it on our daughters to lead the search."

"We are here."

"Are we?"

Ramon stops in his tracks, a fact Helena only notices when she is several feet ahead. She turns to him, finds him regarding her with brows drawn.

"Where is it you think we are?"

Helena blinks slow, and doesn't answer for a long moment. She knows what she wants to say, but with equal surety knows that Ramon would not understand. It's a pragmatic man she married, one with romantic ideals about duty and roles and no small lack of imagination.

"We're a long way from home," she settles for saying, "searching for a man we barely know, but our son intends to marry. A man who's loved by so many strangers, but not his own parents."

"I don't think they're strangers to him."

"They're strangers to us."

"Yes," Ramon says and continues walking. "I suppose they are."

Helena follows.

They cut a path through the woods, as due south as they can manage. In theory, the nearest pair of volunteers should be no more than fifty feet away, but they've long since lost sight of them, orange visibility vests hidden through boughs and distance. It's no worry. The whistle around Helena's neck and the GPS tracker clipped to Ramon's belt are meant to safeguard them from being lost.

The woods prove easier to navigate than Helena imagined. They're not the dark and haunted things of the books she'd favored as a child, full of impassable thickets and hungry beasts. There's no mysterious mist or sense of magic — only twisted boughs and the space between, the dirt and shrubs underfoot, the occasional tangle of brambles.

They aren't what she imagined, because she imagined something as harsh and inhospitable as the desert she knew. The forest was alien to her; she could not imagine being lost here.

When she heard her son-in-law-to-be was lost in the woods, Helena had asked no followup questions. Not what had happened to him. Not where he disappeared, or how long he was missing. Not how her son was holding up.

What Helena had done, when she heard the news, was purchase plane tickets for herself and Ramon. She had walked, unannounced, through her son's door and declared in the face of his red eyes that she would support him by watching over his son, her grandson, in this time of need.

That was three days ago. It hadn't gone over well.

There is a whistle around Helena's neck, and it sits heavy against her chest. If she blew it now, who would come running? There is, supposedly, a pair of volunteers no more than fifty feet away: a pair of women whose names Helena did not ask. She thinks they might have been married; she thinks one of them might have worked with her son.

"Would your parents come?"

"My parents are both dead."

He says it casually, but Helena knows well the grief that carries, if only in the safety of their home.

"If they were alive," she says, "would they be here?"

A sigh falls from Ramon's lips. "My mother was very fond of the boy. If she were still alive, she would be here. But that's not what you're asking, is it?"

"Not quite."

He looks at her a while before conceding. "If it were me … if I were missing, my parents would have moved Heaven and Earth to find me."

It's still not what Helena is asking, but she lets it rest for a moment. After all, she doesn't need the answer to her question. Not when it sits, sure and steady as oak, in the back of her mind.

And still she is compelled to ask.

"If it were me?"

Ramon hesitates.

"They would be here," he says, picking his words like footsteps through brambles. "I would make sure of it. I would make them show up."

"Like our son made us show up?"

"That's different." He makes no show of it, no waving hand, no insistent tone. Just a gentle declaration. "We are here. We've been here for days."

Even a simple declaration can be wrong.

"We haven't been here," Helena says. "We've been at the house. We had to be lectured here."

Ramon stops again. Helena notices this time, and stop with him, but he moves again before it can matter.

"It's different," he says. "The man we're looking for is not our son."

Helena follows. She does not say it's for their son that they're looking at all.

It's midday; there are twigs in her hair and dirt under her fingernails, and it doesn't make sense that there's dirt under her fingernails because all they have done is walk. There's no digging, no rummaging through foliage. They walk, and every so often they call out a name that goes unanswered.

They walk, and Helena thinks. She can recall the face of Ramon's mother, her genial eyes and reduced stature. She would be here, Ramon had said. She was fond of the boy.

Helena had never earned her mother-in-law's fondness. She had earned her patience, her tolerance, her understanding, but never her fondness.

"My parents wouldn't look for you," she says when the quiet is filled with too many things she never had. "If you were missing. They probably wouldn't even fly out."

Ramon snorts. "Your father would organize a party," he says, "but it wouldn't be a search party."

Helena laughs. Some scars are so foundational as to become landscape. A nice little picnic spot where once you feared to tread.

"They never did get over me marrying you," she says.

"They frowned through the whole wedding!" Ramon roars. Under it lies his mother's geniality. "'Helena, don't you know what a mistake you're making? Don't you know this family will only make your life difficult?' I'll never forget that — who says that to their daughter on her wedding day?"

Helena laughs, but it's thin. "Your family weren't much better."

"It's not the same," Ramon says. "My parents never hated you. They couldn't understand, at first, why I wanted to marry a white woman. They thought I should marry within our culture. But, they did come to love you."

Helena says nothing. She tries to imagine Ramon's mother here, boots in the mud, voice gone hoarse shouting Helena's name to the trees.

The image doesn't come.

"You know what I'll never forget?" she says. "That first time you brought me home, and I met your sister. The way she looked at me and just said, 'It won't last.'"

"And here we are," Ramon says, "thirty-eight years later. Meanwhile she'll never tell, but she is on her second marriage."

She's here too, somewhere. Deep in the woods, beside Helena's son, searching for a man she holds higher than Helena in regard.

"So is our son."

'It's different,' Ramon doesn't say. 'He is a widower. It's different.'

There's something about the silence of a desert that just isn't found in the woods. In the desert, silence demands to be heard. Here it's filled with the snapping of twigs, the call of songbirds, the faint babbling of a distant brook.

A silence like this could stretch forever, and no one would notice.

"Do you ever think about her?"

Helena does. She remembers hair like rain, and tears like a waterfall — a woman who moved like a river and left a drought in her wake. She remembers shooing her from the kitchen; remembers taking her grandson from her arms; remembers watching her fight tooth and nail for her place in the family. In Helena's family.

"Sometimes," Ramon says. "She never made our lives easy."

"No," Helena agrees, and wonders if Ramon's mother ever said the same about her. "No she did not."

They come upon a log, then, some overturned mass of wood and dirt and moss. Ramon climbs it first, and extends a hand; Helena takes it, and follows.

"Do you think we'll find him?" Helena whispers. Days ago, she'd been sure he was already lost, that the search had long since turned to futility. Here, under dappled light, with dirt beneath her fingernails, that possibility seems inacceptably cruel.

"I worry," Ramon admits, "about what we will find. What it will do to our son."

Helena's voice is hoarse, no louder than a croak. "We never did like him." Her eyes sting.

"We never disliked him."

He doesn't get it. Helena shakes her head.

"What are we doing here, Ramon?" she says, seized with a sudden desperation to be out of the woods. "We don't even know him."

Ramon is quiet a long time. "We know some things," he says eventually. "We know he makes our son feel loved. We know he makes our grandson feel safe. Maybe we have been unfair to him. Maybe that should have been enough."

"Maybe," Helena says. "That doesn't exactly fix it."

"Then we have to work with it."

Somewhere to the west, a whistle blows. Helena stands still, gaze fixed on her husband, as it blows again, and again, and again, in the signal the rangers taught them at the beginning of the day. A triumphant pattern.

Something has been found.