“Slow down,” she told him, and immediately he eased his foot off the gas.
Outside, there was nothing but endless fields to see, but Pete knew them better than he knew anyplace in the world. He had driven these roads a thousand times, and suspected the reason Claire wanted to stop now was because she recognized it too.
Surreptitiously, he watched her. She had rolled the window down and was leaning out, her hair blowing crazily around her face. The night breeze was cold around her, and Pete shivered.
She looked back at him. “Stop,” she said and he did.
“This is where Pa and me found you,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, I know.” She opened the door and stepped out. He waited for his cue to follow, but it didn’t come. Instead she just stood staring at the barbed wire that separated the field of cotton from the road. At length, she turned. “Do you have a flashlight?”
He nodded slowly. For Claire, he knew it was a simple request, but the small slim object, no bigger than a pencil, that he slid free of his jeans pocket came with a story she hadn’t given him the opportunity to share.
He had driven a shard of glass into the eye of its previous owner, and couldn’t remember taking it before he and Louise had left the apartment, but as soon as he’d sat down on the park bench, he’d felt it digging into his thigh and realized that at some point, despite the circumstances, his curiosity had gotten the better of him.
Afraid Claire might be able to read the story from the lines of guilt on his face the longer he withheld it, he gave it to her and looked away, studying the road, where his father had made a decision to save a life and end his own.
Maybe it was a mistake, Pete thought, and was startled by the venom that accompanied it. Then he decided that it was justified. Saving Claire had cost Pa his life and turned Pete’s upside-down, and for what? He glanced back at the girl, who was now leaning on the barbed wire, lowering it so she could climb over. He knew he should help, but staying where he was made him feel better. She was not the girl they’d rescued. Not the girl Pa and Doc Wellman, even Louise, had been willing to die for. She was a stranger, and perhaps he was the fool at the back of it all. Who was to say this wasn’t the real Claire? He hadn’t known her before the men tried to kill her and yet he’d invested his hope and his weak heart in her before they’d ever exchanged a word. Why should he be surprised that she was like all the other girls he’d fallen for over the years? He’d first seen her as a battered broken thing and his empathy had quickly become desire. She would wake, he’d believed, and she would need him.
But it was clear now that she needed no one. He suspected if he hadn’t agreed to take her to Elkwood with him, she’d have hurt him and taken the truck herself.
Well, you got her here, he told himself. Nothin’ to stop you drivin’ away now. She looks well enough to fight if she runs into trouble.
But that wasn’t true, and though he was angry, he made no move toward the keys, just slumped over the wheel, his hands resting atop it, eyes watching the road for lights or any sign that trouble was bearing down on them.
The simple elemental fact of it was that no matter how cold or dismissive she was, she was all he had left in the world, and he still loved her. Had to. If he gave up on her, the loneliness would crush him.
The cotton whispered against Claire’s legs, the thorny twigs on which they seemed merely suspended scratching the material of her jeans as she stood motionless, surveying the field for a glimpse of what she knew was there. When it failed to resolve itself from the dark, she began to walk, the flashlight in hand but not yet switched on. For now, she preferred to rely on her memories of this place to lead her. The ground was uneven beneath the cotton, making traversing it treacherous, and the last thing she needed was to fall and twist an ankle, so she carefully made her way along them. A bird rose from the field and took off, flying low. Night creatures scurried away from the unwelcome intrusion of her feet.
At last, she stopped, out of breath from the exertion, damp with sweat despite the chill. It had been a long time since she had pushed herself, or in truth, tried exercise of any kind, and it proved only how out of shape and unhealthy she was. But that didn’t matter. She looked ahead and up, at the spindly branches of a tree so large it blocked out the stars, and turned on the flashlight.
A twisted, bone white trunk rose before her, its surface gnarled and ancient and rotten in places where industrious insects had attended to it. Some of the roots were above ground, tangled together in a chaotic jumble that seemed to Claire to symbolize confusion and anguish, their inability to find the earth from which they wished to draw nourishment, prevented from doing so by nothing more sinister than their own brethren.
She raised the flashlight, aimed the beam upward.
Shadows fled. An explosion of limbs radiated out from the tapering trunk, the branches themselves seemingly heavy enough to force the tree to bend toward her, like a Victorian woman bowing beneath her umbrella, or a jellyfish pushing upward, the weight of the sea forcing its tentacles down and around itself.
Tentatively, she reached out to touch the trunk, almost expecting to feel an electrical charge or a rush of memory as she did so. But when her fingers brushed the dried wood, she felt nothing. Whatever the tree had represented on the day she had stood bloodied and bruised staring at it, eluded her now.
With a sigh, she reached into the pocket of her jeans and retrieved a small penknife, then slowly, painfully got down on her knees and dug the point of the blade into the bark. It sounded hollow, as if she were carving into the last layer of its protective skin before the elements and the insects ground it to dust, erasing it from existence forever.
In the trunk, she etched out:
And underneath:
Then she stood and studied her dead friends’ initials, each one filled with shadow thicker than oil as the breeze made the branches tremble, the wood creaking as the tree swayed.
She turned her back on it, felt as hollow as the tree and wished she could recall why it had meant so much to her. For one fleeting moment it had seemed like the only thing in the world to her, a savior.
I was out of my mind, she thought. In shock.
The breeze grew stronger.
She stopped.
All around her flecks of cotton rose from the field like fireflies, caught in the beam of her flashlight as it carved a channel in the dark. Her hair fluttered around her face, her senses filled with the smell of earth and smoke, and without knowing why, she smiled as the million specks of cotton rose ever upward like souls released to the Heavens to join the stars. It was over in a moment, and to anyone else, it might have seemed a perfectly ordinary thing, something visible on any day of the week.
But to Claire, the significance she’d sought from the tree was there in the cotton, and with it, came the answer to the riddle of what she’d thought she’d seen in the field that day.
There is something else, she thought. Something afterward. Life ends and something follows. In all her years, she had never been asked about her faith, nor had her family ever assumed a denomination. If forced, however, they would have claimed agnosticism as the closest representation. But with that lack of faith came a great fear of death. Without proof of an afterlife, they were intimately aware of their mortality and the limitations of it. The passing of her father and what Claire had endured here eleven weeks ago only reinforced that fear. Nothing follows, they’d thought. You die and you turn to dust.