At eighteen she left home. She didn’t go to University.

At nineteen she found herself in Edmonton, Alberta, nearly a thousand kilometers from where her mother lived. She told herself she wanted to get as far away from the crazy old bat as possible. There had been some pretty epic fights between them just before she left—screaming fights. Worse, even. She had punched her mother in the nose, not all that hard. There hadn’t been any blood. But it was going to be a long time before she could go back there.

Edmonton was okay. It was huge but it always felt half empty. There were big parks to roam around in and plenty of cheap places to live. She tried living with a couple of girls her age in a nice place near old Strathcona, which was safe and clean. After six months though she found she couldn’t live with other people. They wanted to sleep at night when she was still full of energy. After the forty or fifty thousandth time they knocked on her door at three a.m. and told her to turn her stereo off she moved out.

She got a room above a car repair shop and had to listen to metal screaming and tearing all day long. It only sounded a little like the way the car sounded when the wolf clawed it, and the rent was next to nothing.

Chey got a job as a bartender, which was pretty easy work and it paid well. She’d stopped drinking herself to sleep after she started waking up places she didn’t recognize, but being around alcohol didn’t bother her as much as she thought it might. She didn’t mind pouring shots for the Ukrainians in cowboy hats and the real cowboys in baseball caps who surged in and out of the place every night, as reliable and reassuring as the tide.

The bar had a reputation as being a real tough joint but for the three female bartenders there was no safer place in the world. They kept a bouncer at the table next to the door all night, big guys who drank for free but never very much. If anything went wrong the bartenders would slip out back and share a smoke while the bouncer took care of it. When she started Chey wasn’t sure how well one guy no matter how big could keep a lid on so many rowdies but she quickly learned. Good bouncers didn’t wait for a fight to break out. They watched the crowd and they could see right away who was going to be trouble—the ones who laughed too loud at dumb jokes, the skinny little ones who looked like they wanted to prove something. Just as trouble was about to begin the bouncer would jump in, grab the idiot’s arm, and haul him outside. It was truly rare that a punch ever got thrown—things usually ended well before that point.

That was how you kept yourself from being victimized, Chey realized. It was how you kept from being prey. You found out where the would-be predators were and you dragged them out of their dens when they didn’t expect it. She made a mental note.

Not all of the men who came to the bar were after violence, of course. Occasionally somebody would grab her ass or make a stupid pass at her. Occasionally she would go home with one of them. Nobody ever came back to her place and she always drove her own car—those were her rules. Some of them told her they wanted to be her boyfriend. Some said they wanted to marry her. She never stuck around long enough for them to sober up and decide if they’d meant it or not.

A lot of the guys asked her about her tattoo, but she just shook her head and smiled in reply. Very rarely somebody would recognize her. She didn’t look the same as she had when she was twelve, when she was in the papers. She had no idea how they figured out who she was but she didn’t bother finding out, either. People who knew her name got a drink on the house, and got politely told to shut up. If they didn’t shut up they got told to go home. If they didn’t go home, she called in the bouncer.

Work didn’t end until four or five in the morning, when the cleaners would come in and the bar back would put all the chairs up on the table. The regulars who stayed that late got to drink for free in exchange for washing glasses. The bartenders left as soon as the doors were locked.

Most nights Chey drove straight home but she knew she wasn’t going to sleep. Sometimes she would drive around town, looking at the lights with the radio on low and soft. Sometimes she drove out to the edge of town, or beyond. One night she caught herself driving half-asleep as the sun came up and pulled over onto the side of a highway. She had no idea how far she was from home. Up ahead she saw a sign saying she was on Highway 16. There was another sign below that showing a man’s head in silhouette, painted a bright yellow. It couldn’t be more literal.

She was on the Yellowhead Highway. The road that ran from British Columbia all the way to Manitoba. She knew it best for the stretch between Edmonton and Jasper National Park. The stretch where her father had died.

She breathed a curse and pulled a road map out of the side pocket of her car door. She studied the landscape, looked for clues as to where she was but she couldn’t figure it out. It looked like there might be a little town ahead of her—she drove slowly toward the slumbering cottages and convenience stores where the Coke signs were the only lights still on. When she saw the name of the local bar—the Chesterton Arms—she stamped on the brakes and closed her eyes and waited until she could think straight again. Chesterton. That was the town she’d driven into when she was twelve years old, the town where she’d told the local police about what had happened. It was the safe place she’d gone to when she was running away from the wolf.

She thought about getting out, going into the bakery down the street. They might remember her—or they might not, maybe the people there weren’t the same.

She turned around and drove back to Edmonton with the radio turned up. She didn’t want to think about how she’d gotten out there, a hundred and fifty kilometers from home. She didn’t want to think that her subconscious could control her like that. She drove home, she pulled the heavy drapes closed across her windows, and she swallowed three Ambien with a can of flat ginger ale.