It would be a good place to abandon a dog.

From the high curves of Donner Pass Road, the mountain pines seem to go on and on, stumbling up the rocky shoulders and then massing into one vast greenness that climbs the gentle slopes of the Sierras. Erin leans against the passenger-side door and searches the passing landscape for the unlucky creature that she’s created. Filthy, obviously–muddy enough that you can’t tell its real color until you get it cleaned up in the bathtub. A big doe-eyed golden retriever with a limp, a smart dog who knew that there would be no one there when it returned from chasing the ball, but who did it anyway to spare its owner the misery. Out here too long, its ribs countable beneath its matted coat, its nails curled into its paw pads.

She tries to imagine the wheedling and the whining it would take to get her father to admit it into the car, and reality, now with one foot in the door, pushes her a step further. She thinks of the way such a little thing as a new dog would, upon their return, ruin her mother’s day, and she drops the daydream immediately. The past hour on the road has been relaxing; it’s a rare trip that doesn’t include her mother, and the thought of fighting with an adult again just makes her tired. She is sixteen now, and she lives on angst and heartbreak, strumming their chords deep into the night to the saddest tune she can think of. Abandoned dogs are sad. Mothers? Just infuriating.

The parent driving the car isn’t all bad. She feels, on days like today, that they’re united against a common enemy. They stopped outside Auburn for coffee for him, a hot chocolate for her, and sat at a picnic table in the weak winter sunshine without having to fill the silence. Her father is still a mystery to her, muted by the force of her mother’s neuroses, but she can always count on him to be delighted by an enormous dog. Quietly, the golden retriever becomes a mastiff.

They are going to the mountains to pick out rocks for the yard, big cookies and cream chunks of granite that cost money down in the Sacramento Valley but are free for the taking higher up if you’re discreet about it. There’s no real reason for Erin to come along today; she’s extra gas in the car, an extra lunch later on, and she won’t earn back her cost in the lifting. But she knows why he’s brought her. It could have been his own idea or it could have been her mother saying, “Get rid of her, I’m sick of her,” and either way, she’s grateful because now she can breathe.

Her father turns the car onto a side road. The only sounds are the birdsong, the slamming car doors and the crunch of pine needles under their shoes. It doesn’t occur to Erin to wonder how he knows where to go; he just does. He moves through the world with competence that she takes for granted. He builds things, tears them down, plays peacemaker, knows about taxes and landscaping and the location of wild rocks in the Sierra Nevadas.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we saw a bear?” she says.

He laughs. Not a real laugh, just a sort of “Hah!,” but when she glances over at him she can see that he’s amused. “Maybe if we’re in the car,” he says.

“I’ve never seen a bear. Remember when Grammy and Grampy would spend the summers up here and there was a bear that got into all the garbage cans? I always hoped I would see it, but I never did. Or a mountain lion,” she adds.

He looks at her like she’s nuts. When he turns away, he shakes his head, and she feels adrift. She had meant to draw him into a conversation but has lost him somewhere, as she usually does. There is something wrong with her, she’s sure: some fundamental way in which she’s never settled perfectly into this family the way that her non-adopted friends fit into theirs.

For the first time it occurs to her that maybe he’s brought her here to abandon her.

It’s not a thought that has any bearing in reality. There are places for kids like Erin to go. She has biological parents out there somewhere, though whenever she brings it up her mother has been quick to point out that maybe they don’t want to know her. Erin is under the impression that she has worn out her welcome in one family and is quickly doing so in the other. But she’s secure in her mother’s possession, knows well that, despite her threats to take off when she’s eighteen and never see them again, she won’t escape that easily from her mother's control. If she is to be abandoned, it won’t be in the woods. So she is free to wander the mountains like an abandoned dog, looking through bungee-corded trash cans like a bear, asleep in her thin cotton hoodie as a bank of insulating snow forms around her.

The pretending is sweet, and it doesn’t take any effort. That’s what she loves most about her father and why she worries for him: his passivity makes him whatever she wants him to be, and there is little he does to ruin the illusion. She can pretend he’s leaving her here and adore him for it at the same time.

They come across the rocks sooner than Erin thought they would. Of course; how would they get them back to the car otherwise? Her father bends and pulls one from the banks of a meltwater stream, and rocks it back and forth in the water until the mud washes away. He judges it. It has to be perfect somehow, and he’s good at perfect, or at least the illusion: the diagonal lines of the back deck, the caulking around the bathtub. The wild granite will have to fit together in an aesthetically pleasing way—not exact, but like nature could have maybe had a hand in the arrangement of the rocks under the living room window. Erin tries to make suggestions, but they’re clearly not right, and so instead of arguing, he just agrees as though he’s taking her advice, and picks different ones entirely.

“Why don’t you go see if you can find some more,” he tells her. “I need about ten.”

This is it, then, she thinks bravely, and stands. When you’re sixteen and wallowing in your own sadness, heartbreak is easy to manufacture. Tears come unbidden to her eyes and she turns away, the obedient Dickensian orphan aware she’s about to be left in the forest, colluding in her abandonment. She sniffles as she walks, and tries to stem the tears; her father will wonder why she’s crying when he catches up, and it’ll ruin the fantasy. It’s such a delicious one, too, ripe with the sympathy she craves. The specter of her mother’s scrutiny lifts, and relief washes in.

Erin has found no suitable rocks by the time she hears her father’s footsteps. “By the creek,” he says, watching her tug at an enormous piece of granite that the ground refuses to surrender. The ones in the water come up more easily, and she stands over him as he lifts another. It comes up with a great sucking sound, and the water and mud rush to fill the hole it left.

“You want these ones?” she says. He has made a pile. “Dad.” When he doesn’t answer, she pulls her sleeves up and carries one to the car. Her father has the keys, so she sets it by a back tire and goes back for another, again and again until she can’t feel her hands. In the car, she presses her knuckles against the hot skin of her stomach and waits for her father to finish arranging the rocks in the trunk.

They turn onto the main road. Her story shifts. She has been rescued. The cold that’s gotten under her sweatshirt is the cold of a month of mountain nights, and the vague hunger of an approaching lunch has been eating her for days. She has lived on wild strawberries and roast squirrel for weeks, but nothing now; it’s too cold. She is going to be okay. There will be a hot bath and a filling meal and a warm bed at the end of things, and the arms of strangers who will protect her. People with whom to start over, and in her fantasy, this time she gets things right.

As they descend the Sierras, the pretending gets harder.

He has been sitting on something, Erin realizes, and she knows what it is the moment he sighs. They are stuck in traffic close to home; this is the last opportunity he has to say it, unless he detours and keeps driving.

“I called around to a bunch of group homes yesterday,” he begins. His gentleness is clumsy, or maybe Erin just isn't used to hearing it.

She stares steadily out the window.

“None of them would take you because you’re not a ward of the state and you haven’t committed a crime.”

So they’re not giving her up. They can’t. From the corner of her eye, she can see his head turn to her, assessing her reaction. She wonders if he is disappointed. She probes at her own feelings, wondering if she is.

“Look. You have to try to get along with Mom. I know she doesn’t make it easy. Maybe if you just try to breathe once in awhile. Count to ten.”

Erin laughs, silently, bitterly. They are so far past counting to ten.

“She loves you. You know that, right?”

“Yeah. God. Okay.” Get her out of this conversation. Let her sink back into where she’s spent the day.

And he does. He doesn’t like to linger on life’s discomforts; he will take, as always, the past of least resistance, and it’s easier now to let the conversation die.

Erin tries to think of something sad to bring the fantasy to life again, but reality, abrupt and ruinous, dogs her the rest of the way home.

Ada Hardy is a software developer and adult adoptee living in Southern California, whose work has appeared The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review and Fantasia Divinity's Autumn Harvest anthology. For more about Ada, visit https://adahardy.com.