The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Vacation doesn’t begin when Father pulls the Volkswagen camper out of the driveway, and speeds through the sleepy Tacoma streets toward Narrows Bridge. It doesn’t begin on the long stretches of Route 16 through Gig Harbor, Port Orchard, and Bremerton, your twin brother Jaime fast asleep beside you on the warm back seat, his dark blond hair falling over his eyes. It doesn’t begin with the hasty lunch at the small restaurant outside Poulsbo, where your father converses with the worn folds of the triple-A map as your mother slips the receipt into a carefully labeled, accordioned envelope. 16 whittles down to 3, blossoms into 104 as the camper crosses Hood Canal onto the Olympic Peninsula, and still your vacation does not begin. Discovery Bay, Sequim, Dungeness: all the feral playgrounds of vacations and summers past: no. It is in Port Angeles, under a storm-whipped sky, against the backdrop of Canada-bound ferries gorging their wide, toothless mouths on rivers of slow-moving cars, when Father turns away from your mother, thin-lipped and tearful from the forced confession that another envelope holding four passports sits on the quiet kitchen counter back in Tacoma. You roll your eyes. Why do they go to such trouble of pretense? Oh, yes: for the neighbors. For the pastor, for colleagues and relatives, for all the strangers and passers-by who wouldn’t understand, who want to hear only the normal. Father sees the look on your face, and takes you aside as his large flat thumb rubs against your cotton-clad arm in that old familiar way, that way you’ve known all of your fifteen long and lonely years, the way that always sends your mind into the flat black void. Old Spice tickles your nose, and you rub the itch away as Jaime scowls, the color fading from his perfect face like the sun.

“Don’t worry, June-Bug. I know a place. Better than Victoria. No distractions, no tourists. Where there’s nothing at all. You know the place. You’ve been there, before. It’s where you always go.” He places his calloused finger at the center of your forehead, and you almost piss yourself in fear: does he know?

“Where we can — you know.”

Your mother takes Jamie aside, her fingers sliding around his slender waist as she spins her own version of the same tale. Father winks and parts his lips, coffee and cigarette breath drifting across your face as he whispers in your ear.

“Be alone.”

Vacation has begun.

Salt ocean air and the cries of gulls recede as Father guides the camper through Port Angeles. You wish you could stay, walk through the postcard-pretty gingerbread-housed streets with Jaime, shop for expensive knick-knacks you don’t need, daydream of a life you’ll never have. Father drives on. Office buildings and shopping districts give slow way to industrial parks and oversized construction sheds surrounded by rusting bulldozers and dump trucks. None of it looks permanent, not even the highway. 101 lengthens like overworked taffy into a worn, three-lane patchwork of blacktop and tar. Campers and flat-beds, station wagons and Airstreams all whoosh across its surface, with you and against you. Port into town, town into suburbs, suburbs into the beyond. The sun has returned in vengeance, and all the grey clouds have whipped away over the waters, following the ferry you were never meant to take.

“Once we’re off the highway, we can follow the logging roads,” Father shouts over the roaring wind as he steers the camper down the Olympic Highway. He sounds excited, almost giddy. “They’ll take us deep into the Park, past the usual campgrounds and tourist spots, past the Ranger Stations, right into the heart of the forest. And then, once the logging roads have ended — well, look at the map. Just see how far we can go.”

You stare at the silhouette of his head, dark against the dirty brilliance of the window shield. One calloused hand rests on the steering wheel, one hand on your mother’s shoulder. His fingers play with the gold hoop at her ear, visible under the short pixie cut of grey-brown hair. She turns to him, her cheek rising as she smiles. They remind you of how you and Jamie must look together: siblings, alike and in love, always together. Father and you used to look like that. Now you and he look different. You clench your jaw, look away, look down.

“It’s not even noon, we should be able to make it to Lake Mills by this afternoon—”

Your mother interrupts him. “That far? We’ll never make it to Windy Arm by then, it’s too far.” So that’s your destination. You’ve been there before, you know how much she loves the lake, the floating, abandoned logs, the placid humming of birds.

“Not this time, remember? We’re taking Hot Springs Road over to the logging roads. Tomorrow we’ll start out early, and we should be there by sundown.”

“But there’s nothing — wait, isn’t Hot Springs closed? Or parts of it? I thought we going down Hurricane Ridge.” Your mother looks confused. Evidently, they didn’t make all the vacation plans together. Interesting.