He drinks more coffee. The aroma reminds him of the crisp texture of burned toast.
Outside, the elk are gone.
A night of mysteries.
The mounting wind lashes the long fronds of the ferns. Like evidence of violence, bright wet rhododendron blossoms spray through the night.
The forest stands untouched. The power of time is stored in those massive, dark, vertical forms.
Mr. Vess shifts the motor home out of park and releases the emergency brake. Onward.
After he cruises past the damaged Honda, he glances at the rearview mirror. The bedroom door remains closed. The woman is in hiding.
With the motor home rolling again, perhaps the stowaway will risk turning on a light and will take this opportunity to meet her roommates.
Mr. Vess smiles.
Of all the expeditions that he has conducted, this is the most interesting and exciting. And it isn't over yet.
Chyna sat on the floor in the darkness. Her back was against the wall. The revolver lay at her side.
She was untouched and alive.
"Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive," she whispered, and this was both a prayer and a joke.
Throughout her childhood, she frequently prayed earnestly for that double blessing-her virtue and her life-and her prayers were often as rambling and incoherent as they were frantic. Eventually she had worried that God was growing weary of her endless desperate pleas for deliverance, that He was sick of her inability to take care of herself and stay out of trouble, and that He might decide that she had used up all of the divine mercy allotted to her. God was busy, after all, running the entire universe, watching over so many drunks and fools, with the devil working mischief everywhere, volcanoes erupting, sailors lost in storms, sparrows falling. By the time Chyna was ten or eleven, in consideration of God's hectic schedule, she had condensed her rambling pleas, in times of terror, to this: "God, this is Chyna Shepherd, here in"-fill the blank with the name of the current place-"and I'm begging you, please, please, please, just let me get through this untouched and alive." Soon, realizing that God, being God, would know precisely where she was, she reduced her entreaty further to: "God, this is Chyna Shepherd. Please get me through this untouched and alive." Finally, certain that God was exasperatedly familiar with her panicky presumptions on His time and grace, she had shortened her plea to a telegraphic minimum: "Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive." In crises-under beds or lost in closets behind concealing clothes or in cobwebbed attics smelling of dust and raw wood or, once, flattened against the ground in a mire of rat shit in the crawl space under a moldering old house-she had whispered those five words or chanted them silently, over and over, indefatigably, Chyna-Shepherd-untouched-and-alive, ceaselessly reciting them not because she was afraid that God might be distracted by other business and fail to hear her but to remind herself that He was out there, had received her message, and would take care of her if she was patient. And when each crisis passed, when the black flood of terror receded, when her stuttering heart finally began to speak each beat clearly and calmly again, she had repeated the five words once more but with a different inflection than she had used previously, not as a plea for deliverance this time but as a dutiful report, Chyna-Shepherd-untouched-and-alive, much as a sailor in wartime might report to his captain after the ship had survived a vigorous strafing by enemy planes-"All present and accounted for, sir." She was present; she was accounted for; and she let God know of her gratitude with the same five words, figuring that He would hear the difference in her inflection and would understand. It had become a little joke with young Chyna, and sometimes she had even accompanied the report with a salute, which seemed all right because she had figured that God, being God, must have a sense of humor.
"Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive."
This time, from the motor-home bedroom, it was simultaneously a report on her survival and a fervent prayer to be spared from whatever brutality might be coming next.
"Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive."
As a little girl, she had loathed her name-except when she had been praying to survive. It was frivolous, a stupid misspelling of a real word, and when other kids teased her about it, she wasn't able to mount a defense. Considering that her mother was called Anne, such a simple name, the choice of Chyna seemed not merely frivolous but thoughtless and even mean. During most of the time that Anne was pregnant, she had lived in a commune of radical environmentalists-a cell of the infamous Earth Army-who believed that any degree of violence was justifiable in defense of nature. They had spiked trees with the hope that loggers would lose hands in accidents with power saws. They had burned down two meat-packing plants and the hapless night watchmen in them, sabotaged the construction equipment at new housing tracts that encroached upon the wilds, and killed a scientist at Stanford because they disapproved of his use of animals in his laboratory experiments. Influenced by these friends, Anne Shepherd had considered many names for her daughter: Hyacinth, Meadow, Ocean, Sky, Snow, Rain, Leaf, Butterfly By the time she had given birth, however, she had moved on from the Earth Army, and she had named Chyna after China because, as she had once explained, "Honey, I just suddenly realized one day that China is the only just society on earth, and it seemed like a beautiful name." She had never been able to recall why she had changed the i to y, though by then she had been a working partner in a methamphetamine lab, packaging speed in affordable five-dollar hits and sampling the merchandise often enough to have been left with a few blank days in her memory. Only when praying for deliverance had young Chyna liked her name, because she had figured that God would remember her more easily for it, would not get her confused with the millions of Marys and Carolines and Lindas and Heathers and Tracys and Janes.
Now her name no longer dismayed or pleased her. It was just a name like any other.
She had learned that who she was-the true person she was-had nothing whatsoever to do with her name, and little to do with the life that she'd led with her mother for sixteen years. She couldn't be blamed for the dreadful hates and lusts she had seen, for the obscenities heard, for the crimes witnessed, or for the things that some of her mother's male friends had wanted from her. She was not defined either by a name or by shameful experience; instead, she was formed by dreams and hopes, by aspirations, by self-respect and perseverance. She wasn't clay in the hands of others; she was rock, and with her own determined hands, she could sculpt the person that she wanted to be.
She hadn't reached this realization until a year ago, when she was twenty-five. The wisdom had come to her not in a dazzling flash but slowly, in the way that a plot of bare earth is covered gradually by creeping ajuga until one day, as if miraculously, the brown dirt is gone and everywhere are emerald-green leaves and tiny blue flowers. Worthwhile knowledge always seemed hard-won while the winning was in progress-but seemed easily acquired in retrospect.
The old motor home lumbered through the night, creaking like a long-sealed door, ticking like a rusted clock too corroded to register every second faithfully, toward dawn.
Crazy. Crazy to be taking this trip.
But nowhere else to go.
This was where her entire life had been leading. Reckless courage wasn't restricted to the battlefield-or to men.
She was wet and cold and frightened-and strangely, for the first time in her entire life, she was at peace with herself.
"Ariel," Chyna said softly, one girl in the darkness speaking reassuringly to another.