I swallowed. Winced under the weight of all their focus, all three of them hanging on to me like I was a hand about to pull them from a ledge. I breathed deep.
She dropped Scott at home last Monday, I said slowly, wading through their thoughts to find my own. Then I give her a lift back into the village when I took Scott to school Tuesday morning, after she dropped off the truck. I guess that was the last time.
And she didn’t come back to your house?
Not after Tuesday.
And she didn’t call to check on you?
No, sir.
His brown eyes lingered on my face and I made it blank as I could. I felt suspicion like spider legs skitter all over my skin. Then he nodded.
Well, you think of anything, you tell me. Or your dad.
Will do, I said.
Dad’s hand found me, his arm slipped round my shoulders and give me a squeeze. Go on upstairs, both of you, he said. And try not to worry. VSO Chappel here will help us. We’ll find her.
His hope as palpable as his doubt. I ducked my head as he kissed the top of it, unwilling, unable to look him in the eye.
She really didn’t call? Scott whispered to me when we got to the top of the stairs. That doesn’t seem like her. She’s a nurse. She was worried about you.
Well, she didn’t, I said.
He trailed behind me as I tried to ignore him, his words tugging at me. Why would she walk away from her Jeep? Where would she have gone? She wasn’t far from here—why didn’t she come home if she needed help? Do you think she got hurt?
My head on fire.
Why aren’t you more worried?
I spun round. Shut up! Just shut up!
He blinked. The color went out of his face, and then a storm gathered where his worry had been. Not a thunderstorm, but a soft, ceaseless rain. Drops that found no place to land, just fell through a bottomless crater.
I’m sorry, I said. I’m just—scared. I’m worried, really. I just don’t know what else to do.
His face softened a bit. He wanted me to stay, to sit in his room till he fell asleep, the way I used to do sometimes, right after Mom died, when a nightmare woke him and he called me to his bedside. He hadn’t done that in ages. I guessed the nightmares had stopped. His whole self latched onto me, digging blunted claws in, wanting me to comfort him. And still, from downstairs, Dad and the VSO radiating their selves up at me. Made sense for Dad to think after me, I felt concern for me tugging at the corners of his mind, the parts that wasn’t focused on Helen. But I nagged at the VSO’s thoughts, too. He felt me like a distraction, kept trying to swat thoughts of me away like a tiresome gnat. I hated knowing he hadn’t brushed me aside. Like there was a searchlight looking for me, edging closer in the dark.
Scott’s thoughts hopeful, pleading with me not to leave him.
Night, Scott, I told him and turned away from the disappointment I didn’t need to feel, it was so plain on his face.
I closed my door, then wadded up a blanket and shoved it under the space between the bottom of the door and the floor. It seemed to help a little.
I’d stashed the pills from the bathroom under my pillow. I took three this time and hoped it would be enough. Then I waited for sleep, staring dry-eyed at shadows.
When I woke, it was still night. The house quiet, my head quiet, too. Mom quiet as she sat on the edge of my bed, weightless. No red coat now that she was indoors, instead she wore her fuzzy white robe, her hair wet.
I was a lot like you when I was your age, she said without saying anything.
I remembered the day she come to my room to warn me away from strangers, not because the strangers was dangerous but because she worried I might be. Hikers, hunters, folks who had lost their way. People get lost in the woods all the time, she said. Like that boy who had disappeared from the village where she’d growed up. I even went looking for him, she’d told me.
Was you the one who found him? I asked her now.
She reached into the pocket of her robe. Her fist clenched when she took it out again, she dropped a knife on my bed. Not a pocketknife like mine, but a kitchen knife, a small one with a serrated blade, the kind you would use to cut your dinnertime steak.
She drew her hand away, the hand of a child, and the mom fresh from the shower with dripping hair was gone, in her place was a girl younger than me, bare chested and wearing only a pair of boys’ shorts, her hair a tangled mess, her fingernails crusted with dried blood. Her lips smeared with it. A wild thing.
You drunk him? I asked and realized it wasn’t a question because I already knew the answer. You done it as he died.
She fiddled with the knife, not looking me in the eye.
And after? I said. You knew him, but did you know—everybody?
She was herself again, pale and frail looking. Too tired to keep her eyes open. I thought of all the times she spent days in bed, shut away from everyone. Of the pills I’d found in the medicine cabinet and used myself to plunge into sleep. To escape everyone else’s thoughts.
Thought of the years and years she must of lived with other people inside her head.
Now she wore her red coat. Her lips too red, and there was blood on her face. She wiped at it with the back of her hand.
Vomit at the back of my throat. I swallowed it, and my stomach burned.
Scott was awake. I knew it, not because I could hear him get up and cross the hall to the bathroom or because his light clicked on, but because I could feel the pressure in his bladder, the groggy half-woke murmur of his brain remembering the remnants of the dream he’d been having, something about a lynx that stalked outside Helen’s house.
My eyes went hot, and I squeezed them shut.
Does it stop? I asked Mom, my voice cracking.
But I knew she was gone even before I opened my eyes again.
Jesse made it home the next day, skinnier than ever but happy and full of stories from the checkpoints he’d worked. He’d caught a ride with Steve Inga, who stayed to dinner, and the kitchen was lively with conversation, even livelier if you could hear what wasn’t said, the silent commotion that happened inside every person’s head. Some of the talk and thought was about the race, but most of it centered on Helen. They laid out their facts and memories like puzzle pieces, tried to fit them together into a picture that would tell them what might of happened.
I stayed in my room, still feigning sickness. Took four pills that evening, and sunk into a heavy sleep.
Late the next morning, Dad roused me.
Come on, he said. Pack a bag. We’re going camping.
I would of been confused if I couldn’t of felt the aimless desperation in him, the need to move, to get out of the house. I rummaged round my room, collecting what I would need for a night or more on the trail. Stuffed clothes and gear into my pack then found one of the straps broke when I tried to shoulder it. Shit, I muttered. Stuck my head under my bed, found Jesse’s pack, the one I still hadn’t told him I’d found before I even knew he existed.
I had done my best to avoid thinking about Tom Hatch. Wasn’t all that hard, actually, with Helen taking up most of my thoughts and the rest of my head filled with other people’s existence. It was possible Hatch was still round, still planning to show up on our doorstep one day. But every day that passed, the likelihood seemed smaller. Everything seemed small under the shadow of Helen’s death.
I repacked my things in Jesse’s old pack, then strapped it to the sled Dad had already drug from the kennel. Threw a tarp over it when Jesse materialized in the yard, heading my way.
Need a hand?
He followed as I fetched Boomer from the dog yard and led him back to the rigging laid out in the snow. Though I had drunk too many animals to count at the moment of their death, not to mention Old Su as she had faded in my arms, there wasn’t no cacophony from the dogs inside my head. But I didn’t even have to try to sense Jesse. His voice was casual but his thoughts was tremulous with anxiety and curiosity, invisible fingers poking at me, prodding for information.