Ridgeline - Part One: The Trail

The walls were doing it again.

Not moving — she wasn't that far gone. But the apartment had a way of pressing inward at four o'clock, when the blinds striped the opposite wall and the light hit the water stain above the thermostat, and Bree had been cycling for forty minutes through the stages Dana had cataloged without meaning to: the wail, the hiccup, the thin whine that meant she'd forgotten what she was crying about but couldn't stop the machinery of it. Dana stood at the kitchen counter with her palms flat on the laminate, a smell coming off the sponge in the sink that she could not identify and did not want to, and thought: If I don't leave this apartment I am going to put my fist through the drywall and I am not going to stop with one hole.

That was Tuesday. Now it was Wednesday and the jogging stroller was already folded behind the car seat by the door.

She'd been thinking about it since the Facebook post. Has anyone tried the new trail behind Lakemont? Barriers are just sawhorses. Beautiful up there. Nobody around. Thirty-seven thumbs-up. Two laughing-face emojis. One person had written shh don't tell the covid police and gotten twelve hearts. Dana had liked the post, unliked it, and closed the app. Opened it again at midnight while Bree nursed and read the comment thread twice, memorizing the directions.

She loaded the stroller into the Civic's trunk one-handed, Bree on her hip, and the diaper bag caught on the seat belt latch and the seam she'd already fixed with a safety pin ripped open again. She left it. Diapers, wipes, phone, the water bottle with the chewed cap. Fine.

The drive was eleven minutes. She spent nine of them watching the mirrors — not for a man, but for the black-and-white Guilford County cruiser she'd seen parked twice this week at the Food Lion on Gallimore Dairy, the officer inside eating something from a bag and watching the lot like the parking spaces themselves might violate code. Her heart kicked when she passed an unmarked sedan at the BP station. She imagined the conversation. Ma'am, where are you headed? The stroller in the trunk. The baby in the back seat. Is this trip essential? The word printed on every sign, taped to every door she couldn't open. Her mother's church — the wooden cross on the dash still there from Palm Sunday, its palm frond dried to brown lace, and Dana couldn't remember the last time she'd looked at it on purpose. The pediatrician's office, where Dr. Pham's face had become a rectangle on Dana's phone screen, asking her to hold Bree up to the camera so he could look at a rash. The playground on Skeet Club Road where they'd wrapped the swings in yellow caution tape, a neat X over each seat, like the swings had done something wrong.

The lot was gravel. New, pale. A single row of parking spots outlined in landscape timbers that still had the orange price stickers on the cut ends. She pulled in and sat with the engine running and the AC blowing against her face and looked.

Empty. Her Civic and nothing else. Her shoulders came down an inch. A good sign, she told herself, then felt stupid for thinking a parking lot needed signs. She turned off the engine. The AC died. Bree fussed in the sudden quiet.

Two sawhorses blocked the trailhead, orange and white. TRAIL CLOSED — CITY OF and the name had been spray-painted over. Someone had written FRESH AIR IS NOT A CRIME in black marker beneath it, the handwriting angular, furious. She unbuckled Bree, fitted her into the jogging stroller, clicked each point of the five-point harness, tugged, tested the brake with her foot. Ducked under the sawhorse with the stroller tilted back on its rear wheels like she was popping a wheelie. The absurdity of it — a grown woman in a faded UNC-G t-shirt committing a municipal infraction with a four-month-old accomplice — cracked something in her ribs she'd been bracing since March.

The gravel was sharp under the stroller wheels. Not the packed, rounded stuff from the greenway behind the Target — this was crusher run, new-laid, angular, the kind that hadn't been walked on long enough to lose its edges. Each push sent a crunch up through the handle into her wrists. The sound had a brightness to it. She didn't care.

The first quarter-mile cut through hardwoods — oak and tulip poplar, the canopy not yet closed because the trees had been trimmed back eight feet on either side and the stumps were raw, pale as stripped bone, beading sap that caught the late light in amber drops. Sawdust on the trail edge, still yellow. The air tasted like chain-sawed wood and mineral dirt and something green underneath, sap or pollen or just the smell of a place that hadn't been breathed in by anyone for three months.

Her lungs filled differently than they did in the apartment, where the air had a weight to it, a used quality — Scott's deodorant and formula and the Lysol she sprayed on the doorknobs and the wet heat of the dryer running in the closet. This air moved. She could feel it going in cool and coming out warm and she pushed the stroller faster.

Bree went quiet.

Dana looked down. Bree's fists were up, fingers spread wide, reaching for the light that came through the canopy in pieces that moved when the wind moved. Her mouth was open. Her eyes — tracking something above the stroller's hood. A bird. Or the way tulip poplar leaves turned silver on the underside when the breeze flipped them. Four months old and she'd never been in a space this large. The apartment. The Walmart parking lot when Scott ran in for formula and she sat in the back seat, mask on, holding Bree against her chest while a man loaded groceries into the truck next to them and coughed without covering his mouth and she'd held her breath for thirty seconds, counting. Dr. Pham's office once, in early March, before they switched to video and the waiting room chairs got stacked against the wall.

This was the first open sky her daughter had seen.

Something gave in Dana's chest, a joist she'd been bracing for ninety days. She was not going to cry about her baby looking at leaves. She pushed harder. The ache started in her hips right on schedule at the quarter-mile, the postpartum looseness that her body hadn't healed from because healing required time, rest, pelvic floor exercises, any one of which would've been a luxury. She'd gotten none of the three. Her pelvic floor hitched on the incline — a pulling sensation low in her abdomen that her OB had said would resolve by six months but her OB had also said she'd have a follow-up appointment in person and that hadn't happened either.

She ran anyway. Put her earbuds in. A podcast she'd been listening to in five-minute increments between feedings — two women talking about a murder in Minnesota, their voices low and conspiratorial, the kind of thing she used to listen to on the treadmill at the Y before the Y closed and the treadmill became something that existed in a building she drove past on the way to the Walmart. The voices filled the space between her breathing and the stroller wheels and she settled into them like a room she could close the door to.

The trail climbed. Four percent, maybe — enough to burn in her thighs, not enough to justify stopping. The stroller bounced and Bree bounced with it. A cardinal landed on a dogwood branch six feet to her left, too close, and Bree's whole body turned toward the red and her mouth made a shape that wasn't a smile but occupied the same territory — the round O of something arriving that she had no experience of and no word for.

The ridge opened up.

The trees dropped away on the left side where the trail ran along the lip and the valley fell fifty feet to a creek bed she could hear through the podcast — water over rock, steady — but not see through the birch and laurel. She pulled one earbud out. The creek was louder up here than the podcast had let her hear. Late afternoon light came in at a low angle and turned the hardwood canopy green and gold where it hit and dark underneath. The shadows of individual leaves on the gravel, moving. The air cooler by five degrees, carrying the iron-oxide smell of red clay where the trail crew had cut the path into the hillside.

She stopped. Pulled the other earbud out. Leaned both forearms on the stroller handle. Breathed.

Below her, past the creek, through a broken screen of river birch that hadn't leafed out all the way, the rooflines of a subdivision. Lawns. A basketball hoop with a frayed net. A trampoline with the safety netting torn on one side, leaning. Someone's life down there, contained. She thought of Scott pulling out of the driveway at 6:15 this morning, the N95 hanging from his rearview mirror, the hand-sanitizer pump wedged in the cup holder. Coming home at 6:30 tonight smelling like cardboard and the alcohol-sharp chemical they used to wipe down the warehouse at the distribution center. Handing her the baby like a shift change. Eating whatever she'd managed to make while holding Bree on one hip. Something on the laptop. One of them falling asleep before the other turned it off.

The marriage was functional. She'd heard herself use that word on the phone with her mother two weeks ago — We're functional, Mom — and the silence on the other end had been longer than the silence should have been.

She stood on the ridge with both earbuds hanging against her collar and looked at the subdivision below her and her hands on the stroller handle were loose in a way they never were at home.

She turned from the view.

The return leg was faster. Downhill, the stroller rolling with its own momentum, Bree's eyes half-shut in the rhythm. Dana's forearms burned from the braking. She put her earbuds back in. The podcast women were still talking about the husband. She fished her phone from the cup holder — not for messages, just the time, the habit of it — and the lock screen showed 4:47 PM. Below the clock, in the gray notification bar she never read: Curfew in effect 8PM–6AM. Avoid downtown areas.

She swiped it away. June 3, 2020 sat on the screen for the half-second before it went dark. She dropped the phone back in the cup holder and pushed.

The trail curved ahead, bending right around a stand of red maple left as a screen between the path and the creek bank. The canopy thickened. The light went subaqueous — green, heavy, the air suddenly still. The stroller wheels went quiet on a stretch where the gravel thinned to bare packed dirt and the only sound was the podcast voices in her ears and the faint creak of the stroller's front axle.

She came around the bend.

A man on the trail. Walking toward her. Fifty yards, maybe less. Cargo shorts. A faded 5K t-shirt — she could see printing on it. Trail shoes. A cloth mask bunched under his chin. He moved at a speed that wasn't quite walking. A drift. Just a guy out walking.

She hadn't heard him. The podcast had been playing and the trail behind her was the only way in from the lot and she hadn't passed anyone. There was no car in the parking area but her Civic and the question was in her stomach before it was in her head.

The stroller wheels crunched back onto gravel and the sound carried up the trail between them. The man looked up.

Go to the next part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/ridgeline-part-two-man-trail