I Know You Remember
Page 16
Ben halts in his tracks, reaching out an arm to stop me. And I can see from his expression that he knows what he’s smelling—that he recognizes it, a moment before I do.
Blood.
The world goes sideways, my vision blurring with vertigo. I know what we will see next. I know what’s behind the door to her cabin. Tabitha was right. Tabitha, and Ben both, because she came here to do it—to this place she loved. Alone. Where no one could stop her.
A sharp pain shoots through my arm. Ben is squeezing, hard. His face is still as a pillar. And then I hear what he does.
A low grunt. And then a horrifying crack, like wood being broken. And the wet, messy sound of eating.
It’s coming from my right—from between a splintering red cabin and a blue one. I don’t want to look. But I have to look. I have to know.
The first thing I see is movement. It’s hard to make out what’s happening; my eyes can’t assemble it into a picture that makes sense. Something large and bloody on the ground. Bone jutting up. And perched on top, a behemoth. Thick neck twisting as it pulls meat from the bone. Hair bristling along its back. Muzzle dark and wet.
A bear.
It’s maybe forty yards away. The size of it . . . it’s hard to fathom. You see bears on TV, filtered through a lens, and you don’t have any real clue. It’s enormous. All muscle. All tooth and claw.
Ben’s fingers dig into my arm.
“Don’t run,” he says. His voice is stunningly calm. “Walk. Slow. Come on, this way. Walk.”
I can’t lift my feet. He pulls at me, and I stagger a few steps after him.
The bear lifts its massive head and looks at us.
“Come on, Ruthie. We’re just going to walk over here to this cabin, and we’re going to let ourselves in. Okay? Don’t run. Breathe. Just walk.” He talks loudly, clearly. Some part of me recognizes what he’s trying to transmit to the bear: We’re no threat. We don’t want your food. I take a deep breath and force myself to start walking.
The bear takes a wary step away from its meal. I follow Ben blindly as he cuts a wide arc away from the two cabins to either side of it, toward one a few doors down.
“No need for anyone to be scared.” Oh, God, his voice sounds like it’s coming from so far away. “We’re just going over here.”
My neck wrenches around as we walk away. I can’t tear my eyes from it. It takes another few steps toward us.
“Ruthie,” Ben says. Beneath the calm I hear the urgency. “Stop staring at it. Don’t make eye contact.”
I force myself to turn away. My body is mechanical again, but it’s slow to respond to my commands. And somewhere in that large empty space, in that rattling tin-can robot body, an alarm is going off, shrill and repetitive.
We’re on the wooden porch. Ben’s fingers curl around the doorknob. He twists, but it doesn’t turn.
“Fuck,” he says.
I turn to see the bear coming closer. For a moment it seems confused by the playground equipment—it stands before the swing set, huffing and grunting. Then its small, dark eyes fix on us again.
“I know Zahra’s is unlocked,” he says, nodding at the yellow cabin. It’s not far—twenty feet, give or take. Not far—but then, the bear isn’t far, either. “Nice and slow. Come on now.” We move toward the yellow cabin. The alarm in my head is getting louder and louder. I can’t stop to worry about that. I can’t stop to think about the . . . thing I saw, back there on the ground. The bear’s made its way through the playground now and nothing stands between us and it. It’s building up to a charge, its gait clumsy and lopsided but shockingly fast, faster than anything so large should be. We’re a few feet away now, Ben’s hand already outstretched to the brass doorknob in front of us, and behind us the bear lets out a low, guttural bellow, and I’m certain I can feel its breath on me, I’m sure of it, and still we’re walking, walking, walking so slowly . . .
And then the door is open, and Ben shoves me inside. I fall to the dusty plywood floor, bracing myself on my hands. I crane my head in time to see Ben jump in behind me, flinging the door shut.
A moment later, a great weight slams against the side of the cabin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I AM ON THE floor, something hard at my back, staring at the door. I can’t move. It’s odd—it feels just like when something terrible happens and I go very calm and very quiet, but this time—this time I can’t move. Some connection seems to have broken. Some circuit has been fried. I can’t make myself move, no matter how hard I try.
I think of the thing. The thing on the ground. Blood and gristle and bone. It’d been impossible to make out details in the midst of the mess. It’d been impossible to see what it was.
No, not impossible. Because I know what it was. It was death.
My eyes are wide and staring at nothing and I keep trying to will them to blink, to focus, but they don’t obey any more than any other part of my body. My hands are limp against my legs.
“Ruthie. Ruthie.”
Ben’s voice is calm and hard and insistent. He is somewhere to my right. He takes my hand in his and squeezes hard.
“Was it her?”
I don’t even recognize my own voice for a moment. My eyes are still fixed and I can’t refocus; I don’t even look toward Ben as I speak. The words come grating out of my throat, rough and slurred.
“Can you say that again? I didn’t quite catch it.” He sounds like the search-and-rescue people that came to get Mom out of the ravine—almost condescendingly composed.
For a moment I sit in silence. My breath is heavy—this body reflexively dealing with fight or flight. And then I blink, slowly, and look up at him.
“The body. Was it her?”
He is crouched next to me, still holding my hand. There’s a look of forced calm on his face, but his pupils are wide in his already dark eyes.
“No. It was a moose. Well . . . half a moose,” he says. “I saw the hooves.”
And that’s when I snap fully back to my body.
I curl forward, nauseated and shaking, heart shuddering. My whole body begins to tremble, starting at the top of my spine and spilling downward. For a moment I think there’s something wrong with my lungs—my breath is coming in weird hitching starts and stops. Then I realize I’m sobbing.
“Shhh shhh shhh.” Ben’s hand flies over my mouth. “Ruthie . . .”
The cabin shudders again, the bear slamming against the wall. There’s a splintering, cracking sound.
“We don’t want to agitate it,” he whispers. “No loud noises, okay?”
I choke down the noise and nod. When he takes his hand away, I press my own palms to my mouth.
It’s not her. It’s not Zahra out there. The terror leaves me in hot, heavy tears, spills down onto the dusty floorboards. I take deep, desperate gasps of air, but I do it silently.
It’s only several minutes later that the fact registers: we are trapped here.
By a seven-hundred-pound apex predator.
With serious personal boundary issues.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. My voice is strained and shrill. “We almost died.”
“There’s still time for that,” Ben says with a grim smirk. He’s standing next to a grimy little window, peering out. “It’s gone back to that moose for now. But it can knock this cabin down like tissue paper if it wants to.”
I think about all the stories I’ve ever heard about bear encounters. Most of the time bears avoid humans—but if you startle them, especially when they’re protecting their meal, they’ll go berserk.
We are very, very lucky.
“We may be here for a while,” Ben says. He looks down at his phone. “Do you have a signal?”
I pull my phone out of my backpack. “No.”
“Me neither.” He glances back to the window. “We’re about to lose the light
. I think . . . I think we’re here for the night.”
I look around the little cabin. It’s a small single room, most of the space taken up by a double bed pressed against one wall. The mattress is old and water-stained. There’s a rough wooden table littered with old camping detritus—bug dope, sunblock, a broken pair of sunglasses. The only light comes from the two little windows. In the corner is a ladder to a loft.
“It could be worse,” I say.
“In so many ways,” he agrees.
He puts his backpack down on the bed and opens it up. Inside is one of those super-light synthetic jackets backpackers use—extra warm, without taking up much space. He unfolds it and tucks it around my shoulders, over my hoodie.
“I’m not cold,” I say.
“You’re kind of in shock,” he says. “Just humor me and wear it for a little while, okay?”
“Okay.” It smells faintly of wood smoke and conifer.
He sits down next to me, exhaling heavily. “She hasn’t been here.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“Nothing’s been moved.” He gestures around the cabin with one hand, without looking up. “This is where we usually spend the night. That bug dope over there, we left that here in July. It’s dusty.” He’s quiet for a moment. I feel his breath, slow and even, next to me. “I knew she wasn’t here the moment we landed. She usually leaves her shit all over the place. Towel on a porch rail to dry, boots by the stove to warm. The dining hall stove hasn’t been used and there’s no ash in the bonfire pit. Even if she came out here to hide and keep a low profile, there’d be some sign of her.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes. Outside, I can hear huffing, grunting. The bear back at his meal. The birdsong starts up again around the cabin.
“I just feel like if I knew her better, I’d be able to find her,” he says. “And it pisses me off so much. Because I showed up. Every day. I showed up, and she kept putting me off.”
Maybe I’m just raw from the unaccustomed crying fit—or maybe an actual bear attack is the only thing that can leave me vulnerable. But my breath catches a little at his words. His feelings send a resonant shiver through my body.
I speak slowly, carefully. These aren’t the kinds of things I’m used to saying out loud. “Ever since I got back to Anchorage, I’ve been trying to figure out just who Zahra is. She’s changed. Or . . . she was always someone else, maybe, and I just saw a side of her that no one else did. I don’t know which. For the last few years, I’ve thought I knew her so well. And it’s been really hard to find out that’s not true. The girl everyone keeps telling me about seems so strange to me.”
He rolls his head to the side to meet my eyes. We’re close enough that I can see the thin gradient of color between his iris and his pupil, the place where the deep brown gives way to black. I catch my breath, inch ever so slightly away.
“Tell me about her,” he says. “The version you knew.”
So I do. I tell him how we met, when she saw me reading Abhorsen in the little postage-stamp yard outside my trailer and asked if I had the other books in the series. How we would hang out talking about books for hours on end. How I’d show up at her door at ten most mornings—that was when she rolled out of bed—and eat cereal at her cluttered kitchen table while her mom read us our horoscopes. How we’d park in front of the TV to watch Star Wars or superhero movies. How we’d bike to the mall and try on the ugliest dresses we could find and take selfies in the fitting room. And how, more than anything else, we worked on our own writing together.
“I’ve never told anyone about it,” I say. “And I guess she didn’t, either. It’s kind of . . . God, it’s almost embarrassing how into it we got. We had these characters and they were, like . . . they were us, basically, but with superpowers.” I’m purposely glossing the details—how, at a certain point, we’d call each other Lyr and Starmaiden anytime we were alone. How I could sometimes feel the weight of my sword in my hand. How our secret clearing in the woods felt truly like another world sometimes, how it felt literally like we were a million miles away and if we just pushed a little harder at the stubborn membrane of reality we might break through and become those characters, with all their strength and all their sense of purpose.
Instead I focus on the way we’d sit, so close I could feel her curls on my own shoulders, passing a notebook (wide ruled; I preferred college but we had to accommodate Zahra’s wide, looping letters) back and forth to write scene after scene in purple glitter pen. I tell him about the outline we made for a whole trilogy—we only ever made it halfway through book one, but we had plans. I tell him we were going to mail the manuscript to Tamora Pierce to ask if she’d help us find an agent.
I don’t mention the playground. Because that’s ours. Mine and Zahra’s, and nobody else’s.
By the time I stop talking, the light has gotten low. Outside the window the sky is striated in lines of pink and gold and blue. The sun’s down, but its rays die slowly.
I can just make out Ben’s face—his small, thoughtful smile. There’s nothing in his expression that comes off as mocking or amused. I’m grateful for it.
“She was always . . . dreamy, I guess. To be honest, she had the better imagination. I just had the discipline to get things down on paper. Zahra was like a will-o’-the-wisp. Sort of . . . wandering and capricious.” I shrug a little. “But Marcus and Jeremy and Tabitha talk about her like . . . like she’s sort of a mess. And you talk about her like she’s an ice princess. And . . . I don’t know. Are they all true? Or was I wrong all along? Or . . . has something happened to her?”
He shifts his weight. I can feel his arm next to mine, warm through the sleeve.
“Don’t you think that’s how we all are, though? You only see what you want to see in other people. Or maybe you only see what you can see in other people. And everyone acts a little different depending on who they’re around. So maybe what you saw as her free-spirited side just looks messy to Tabitha. Or maybe you brought that free-spiritedness out in her.”
I laugh a little. “I seriously doubt that’s it. I’m the opposite of a free spirit. I’m always so in my head about everything.”
“But that’s why,” he says. “Because some part of her, conscious or not, knew that was what you needed. I mean, I’m not saying she was playing it up for you or anything. I’m just saying, maybe the way she related to you has to do with what she saw in you.”
I consider that for a moment. It’s not the way I’m used to thinking about people. “That feels . . . I don’t know, kind of cynical. Like everyone just performs for each other all the time?”
He gives a little laugh in the darkness. “It’s only cynical if you’re trying to manipulate someone. Which I don’t think Zahra on her worst day would do. I think maybe it’s more about finding the best way to connect. Whether you realize it or not, you show them the part of you they most want to see. You do it because you want them to like you.”
I let his words sink in. I understand what he means—and in a way, he’s right. But for some reason it hurts, too. Hurts to think that the connection I shared with Zahra might not have been as unique as I’d thought.
“Did Zahra have mood swings?” I ask, a little abruptly. “Tabitha says . . .”
“Tabitha is not the ultimate authority on Zahra,” he says.
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m asking you,” I say, a little shortly.
He sighs, gets to his feet. I see his outline against the square of the window, stretching.
“I guess you could call them that,” he says. There’s something so profoundly sad in his voice, so aching. He’s looking out the window now. The light is pale blue, the moment in twilight when it gets somehow lighter on its way to getting darker. “She had really bad panic attacks sometimes. I don’t know why. But they were awful. And she’d get depressed after them. Shut herself in her room, refuse to eat or
bathe or anything. She’d never talk to me about what was wrong.”
“That must have been . . .”
“Awful. It’s really fucking awful to know the person you love doesn’t trust you,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I bet.”
He runs his hands through his hair. “She wasn’t like that with you?”
“Honestly, she never told me much about her feelings. But that might have been my fault. I was more interested in talking about imaginary things. I was avoiding my own feelings. So I don’t know that I ever asked her much about hers.”
“She was good at deflecting,” he says. “She’d redirect the conversation without me even noticing it until later, if she didn’t want to talk about something. And I never wanted to invade her privacy. I figured she’d tell me what was wrong if she wanted to. But . . .” He trails off for a moment. “Fuck. Now I just wish I’d pried.”
“You can’t make people talk about things.” I rest my head on the mattress behind me. “Trust me.”
“Yeah.” He moves quietly in the darkness. I hear the rustle of his clothing, the creak of his shoes on the wood. Then, suddenly, he’s right next to me again, his leg against mine on the floor. “I guess you’d know that.”
“What do you mean?” I hate the sound of my voice, tremulous in the dark. It sounds rough, oddly sensual, and the very thought makes my cheeks burn.
“You know. After we got away from the bear. You were, like, shut down for a little while there. It was spooky.”
“Sorry,” I whisper.
“Don’t apologize. It’s not an accusation.”
We’re quiet for a moment. I imagine I can hear his heartbeat, just a foot or two away. I imagine I can hear the bellows of his lungs.
“It happens when things get really bad. I’ve done it since I was a kid,” I say softly. I’ve never talked about this, either, but here in the dark, the only humans on the island, it feels all right. It feels safe. “I don’t know why. I guess maybe it helped me survive. My dad was a drinker. He never did anything really awful, but there was a lot of yelling. Things were unpredictable. I think I went a little robotic sometimes, just so I didn’t have to deal with it.”