And here, Brad thought, is where she was thrown.
Maybe he would discover her on the other side of that thick trunk, her body hidden in some declivity, invisible until you stumbled on its very edge.
But there was no hollow to hide her body, nothing. And after he had climbed to the road, looked up and down it, and crossed to gaze at another stark vista that revealed no trace of her, he accepted what he'd already known. She wasn't here. He would have known if she were nearby — because he was connected to her, more than ever since the onset of her illness. He had always had this psychic compass, this inexplicable but inarguable ability to know just where she was in the world.
In their house in Austin, he always knew what room she was in. If she was down the street visiting a neighbor, Brad knew that, too — and knew which neighbor. If her car was gone, he knew where she had driven to (the library, the grocery store, the YMCA at Town Lake, wherever), and he realized, one day, that he knew this whether or not she had told him.
Once, when they were kids, nine-year-olds, Meta had gone missing. It was dark outside, and Meta had failed to come home. The neighborhood went looking. Brad set off on his own. Under the luminous summer moon, he ran past the elementary school, past the creek where they hunted frogs and crayfish, across old man Halder's field. He found her at the abandoned barn. She lay next to a rusted-out wheelbarrow, one of her legs crimped oddly under her. That she was alive filled him with wild relief and the terrible knowledge that he could have lost her forever, that the world was a monstrous machine, and anyone in its path could come to mortal grief. She frowned at him, pale blue eyes under tangled red hair, and said, "You were right about that rope," and they both gazed at the tire, on its side in the dust. Until recently, the tire had been an integral part of a swing.
"Why did you do something so stupid?" he had shouted, and she had begun to cry, silently, tears falling from her eyes, her lips parted, lower lip trembling, and he thought, I'm an idiot, and he realized that he would marry her one day, if only to keep an eye on her, to protect her (from evil, which ranged across the world, and from his own desperate love, half-mad and hiding in his heart).
Standing on the road, he remembered that he had a cell phone and, after retrieving it from his pocket and turning it on, he remembered why the cell phone was no cause for rejoicing: no signal, no help.
He turned away from the empty road and studied the mountains. They were purple and black and seemed closer now. Could she have walked to the mountains? And why would she do such a thing? Surely the road was more likely to bring rescue.
He thought of Meta, conjured her, carefully visualizing her blue eyes, curly red hair, and high cheekbones (sown with a constellation of freckles that refused to fade, a last vestige of her tomboy childhood). Ordinarily, imagining her calmed him, relieved the stress of a bad day at the office, an unhappy client, the black dog of depression, of fear, but now, with Meta missing, her image failed to console, only exacerbated his dread. Her face shimmered, faded, was gone, and he realized that the mountains were glowing, exuding a pulsing light, a mottled purple hue that filled him with inexplicable disgust and panic and despair.
He felt consciousness receding like a tide. He leaned into oblivion, seeking refuge from the horror that assaulted him.
He woke to white light in a white room. He was propped up in a hospital bed, his left leg encased in an elaborate cast and suspended artfully from stainless steel scaffolding. A large, ridiculous bolt pierced the cast in the vicinity of his knee, like an elaborate magic trick. Breathing, he discovered, was difficult — although not, he decided, impossible, not worthy of panic — and gazing down at his chest, he saw what looked like duct tape, yards of it, binding swathes of surgical gauze and cotton around his ribs.
He remembered the damage then, remembered the wasps.
A woman stepped into the room and said, "Where's Meta?"
It was Gladys, Meta's mother, dressed in khaki pants and a white blouse, filling the room with willed energy.
Where is — Before Brad could speak, someone to his right spoke.
"She went to the cafeteria to get some coffee." It was Buddy, Gladys's husband. He had been sitting silently in a chair, dozing perhaps. He was a stern, formal old man (much older than his wife), bald with tufts of grey hair sprouting above each ear. Querulous, nobody's buddy: Buddy.
Before Brad could assimilate Buddy's statement, Meta appeared in the doorway, behind her mother. She was holding a cardboard carton containing three styrofoam cups with plastic lids. Her eyes widened. "Oh," she said. "Brad."
Gladys turned. "Oh my," she said.
Meta put the carton down on a dresser top and came to him. There were tears in her eyes, and she was smiling. Brad felt as light as dust, mystified, out of context. Wasn't Meta the one in hospital beds? Wasn't he her visitor, her caretaker, her terrified lover?
"Where have you been?" she said, laughing, running her hand through his hair.
And wasn't that his question?
Meta told him he had been unconscious for two days. They sorted it out, or rather, they did their best to make sense of what had happened. Wayne County's sheriff came by the hospital, and Brad and Meta told him what they could remember.
The sheriff was a big man with a broad face and a mournful mustache. He was slow, his bearing solemn and stoical, as though he'd seen too much that ended badly. He introduced himself by taking his hat off and saying, "Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, my name is Dale Winslow, and I'm the sheriff in these parts, and I'm sorry for your misadventure," and he pulled up a chair and produced a small notebook and a ball-point pen from his breast pocket.
He told them what he already knew. A local named Gary Birch had been driving back from a visit to his ex in Owl Creek when he'd seen a woman out on the road. He stopped and got out of his car. He could see she was bleeding, blood on her face, her blouse, and, when he came up to her, he could see the Ford Ranger on its side maybe fifty yards from the road. It didn't take any great deductive powers to figure out what had happened. Here was a woman who had flipped her truck; she was in shock, couldn't make a sound. Gary told her to hang on, and he went down and looked at the Ranger, checked to see that there wasn't a gas leak, took the keys out of the ignition. He didn't see anyone else, but he wasn't looking. A fool thing, not to look, but it didn't even enter his mind. He wanted to get her over to the hospital in Silo. For all he knew she might already be as good as dead and just not know it. That happened sometimes. Gary had heard about such things from his dad, a Nam vet. A fellow could say, "I'm okay," when he was nothing but a disembodied head, although maybe that one was just a story.
Meta, it turned out, had sustained no serious injuries. She didn't remember anything about the accident. She didn't remember the wasps in the truck, didn't remember Gary stopping for her and taking her to the hospital. At some point, in the ER, she'd started screaming for Brad, and a nurse, Eunice Wells, who'd worked the ER for twenty-some years, put two and two together, got Sheriff Winslow on the phone, and hollered Gary Birch out of the waiting room. "This is Eunice Wells," she told Winslow. "Gary Birch just brought a woman in here for treatment. He found her on Old Nine where she'd flipped her truck. Sounds like there's someone still out there. I'm gonna give the phone to Gary, and he's gonna tell you just where you gotta go."
Which Gary did. Sheriff Winslow found Brad lying by the side of the highway, as inert as yesterday's roadkill, a dark lump next to a creosote bush. He might have been a sideswiped deer or a sack of trash that fell off someone's pickup on the way out to the Owl Creek dump. Likely Winslow wouldn't have noticed him if he hadn't known where to look.