Animals We Are

by Valerie Brandy

  The look on his face says he didn’t find one. He’s crying, now, his tears making the air smell like cotton-candy, and six-flags, and that moment we had at the theme park. He puts a hand on the cheek of the old me, his fingers causing a clinking noise to chime across the forest; the sound of atoms connecting.

  “Don’t go,” he whispers, but it’s too late, because I’m already on my way.

  Mike presses on the chest of the old me, trying to bring her back with CPR. Minutes tick by, but nothing happens. He checks her pulse again, but her pulse doesn’t answer.

  There’s nothing he can do for me now.

  I half expect him to leave the old me in the snow and keep heading for the lodge, but instead he lays down beside her, both of them on their backs. He intertwines his hand with hers, part of a pack, the fate of one the fate of both.

  “Wherever you’re going,” he whispers, red and purple feelings spilling hot onto the snow, “that’s where I want to be.”

  It’s what he said to me by the lake, where the fish jumped high, bringing the worlds of air and earth together.

  The words are an invocation, making me think of the bridges between people, the gaps that we fill and the chasms we cross to find each other.

  I’m between two worlds, now, but something about what Mike said helps me find my way home, like Mike is gravity and now I know which way is up.

  The entirety of the universe is at my disposal. Darkness to light, distance to distance. I peer into the Great Everything, searching in the space between moons, between suns, between us.

  I leap across the chasms in the old me, weaving stardust over the canyons I couldn’t cross, the ones where I hid my questions, the ones where I asked “what if he is a monster, too?”

  I build causeways and swim in the tail of a comet, searching the vastness of the universe for a single pin-prick of light— the one that will bring me back to where I’m supposed to be.

  When I find it, it’s smaller than a marble, but more important to me than any planet.

  I sieze it, and I know it’s the right one, because I’m sucked backward into another tunnel, falling, falling, into a bright light that never ends.

  ***

  My eyes open, and I’m back in my body.

  It’s a shock to my system, like being dunked in cold water after laying in the sun. The beauty I experienced earlier is gone, and an animal grief floods my chest. The world is washed in bland sepia, harsh and angular.

  A sharp pang in my stomach hurts, but even pain is so dull it barely registers. I try to speak, but my breath just rattles in my throat.

  “Zoe!” Mike sits up, leaning over me, running his hands over my face like he’s not sure I’m real. “You’re going to be alright. Stay with me.”

  I try to answer him but I can’t speak. All I can do is inhale and exhale.

  Mike scans the forest for something— anything— useful. Trees dot the horizon, their leaves perfectly arranged in a cross-hatch pattern.

  “Help us,” Mike prays into the emptiness.

  He’s asking the Great Everything, and relief washes over me; whatever is meant to be will be, now. At first, nothing changes, but then there’s a sound, the rustling of leaves somewhere far off in the distance.

  “Oh my God,” Mike whispers, his voice dripping with disbelief. “It can’t be. Zoe, look. Over there, by the ridge.”

  He points at something I can’t see. It’s a shadowed outline against the horizon. It moves, but when I reach out to touch it, I realize my hands are too far away. I’m alive, and I can’t stretch my fingers across galaxies anymore.

  “I’ll be right back,” Mike touches my shoulder, and then he’s gone. I’m not sure how long it takes him to return, but when he does I’m tired, and my eyes are heavy, and the world is going in and out of focus.

  “We’re going to be alright now,” Mike lifts me up, putting one hand under each arm, raising me into the air. He leads us toward that shape in the distance, growing bigger all the time. We’re right up against it now, but I’m still not sure what it is, and the last thing I see before I black out again is a soft, blonde head of hair.

  ***

  It was Molly who saved us.

  Molly, with her fawn-colored mane, her hooves wide like terror, bottomless but somehow still filled with power. The rippling in her haunches, the soft lashes framing her deep-set eyes, the whip of her tail— all things I used to fear, coming to my rescue, plucking us from oblivion.

  After I blacked out, Mike loaded me onto her back, keeping one hand on my shoulder to prevent me from slipping over Molly’s side. They walked together across the snow for miles, keeping each other company under the cold, winter sky. Mike said he got so weak from blood-loss at one point he had to wrap a hand in Molly’s mane to keep from falling over. But she waited for him. She never stopped walking, never panicked and ran away, never threw me from her back. She stayed with us until we made it to the lodge. A quick radio call to the ranger station revealed that every other horse went straight back to camp, except Molly. No one could explain how she got so far from where Brock set her free, except me.

  I woke up to the prick of a needle in my arm, the red lights of an ambulance frosting my bare legs in a strawberry glaze. The concerned face of a male EMT loomed over mine, the scruff on his chin framing his mouth as he asked me my name, my age, the date. Zoe. Twenty-eight. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

  The medical staff tried to keep us apart to assess our injuries, but Mike pushed his way into my ambulance, refusing to move until they stabilized me. They’ve re-bandaged the wound on his arm, and the wrapping looks official, more professional. He told me about Molly while they hooked up my IV. Now, he’s distracting me while another EMT looks at the wound on my leg, muttering about frost-bite and shaking his head.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” I ask Mike.

  “No,” he answers, squeezing my hand. “It’s fine. Don’t think about it now.”

  “What if they have to take it?”

  “Then they take it,” he says it like it’s nothing, on purpose, so as to avoid scaring me. He keeps his voice even, like we’re deciding where to go for dinner, not predicting the future of my leg. Mike pauses, adding, “Did I tell you about what Molly did when we got to the lodge?”

  “No…”

  “She knocked on the kitchen door. I swear to God, she dropped us off, walked right around the side of the lodge, and knocked on the back entrance to the kitchen with her nose. It was like watching you, waiting in line for Chick-fil-A.“

  “Was not,” I’m laughing as I say it, and my voice repeats like it’s an echo, not an original sound. Whatever they put in my IV is good. It must show on my face, because Mike’s looking at me with a smirk.

  “That IV kicked in, huh?”

  “No,” I lie, scanning his eyes again and taking note of the fractal patterns there, the ones I wished I’d paid more attention to when I had the chance. I lean back, sighing. “I’m glad you have eyes.”

  “You wouldn’t prefer a boyfriend without them?”

  “I like them,” I add, serious. “Not just regular eyes. Handsome eyes.”

  “Me? Handsome? Now I know the drugs are working.” Mike runs a hand over my forehead. One of his fingers has changed color, stained dark purple and red. One of the EMTs working on my leg notices it too, and nods to his partner, a woman with straight, stringy hair and perfectly groomed eyebrows. She clicks her tongue.

  “Wish you would let us look at that,” the female EMT says, her voice dripping with annoyance.

  “Her first,” Mike says, and that’s that.

  Someone knocks on the side of the ambulance, sending a rippling across the metal exterior. It’s a man in a khaki shirt and flannel jacket. He looks official in some capacity, like maybe he owns the lodge, or at least manages it.

  “Rangers radio-ed in from down the road. They managed to clear a path through the snow.”

  The female EMT nods. “We should go. Don’t
want to get stuck overnight.”

  It occurs to me that I have no idea what time it is.

  “How long have we been here?” I ask Mike.

  “A few hours,” he says. I must look confused, because he squeezes my hand tighter. “You were asleep for most of it.”

  The man in the flannel jacket turns back to the EMTs. “You’ve got a decent gap in the weather if you hurry. I’d take ‘em now.” He makes it sound like we’re a set of packages being picked up for delivery instead of two people who’ve been through hell and back.

  The ambulance doors close as it reverses, and the change in angle reveals a new view through the back windows: yellow tape, microphones, and dozens of camera lights flashing.

  “Are those—”

  “Reporters,” Mike nods.

  After spending a week alone in the wilderness, the idea that anyone would care about our situation strikes me as strange, until I remember Logan.

  “Have they found him?” I ask.

  Mike shakes his head. “I told them where we left him. But not yet.”

  The ambulance pulls away from the lodge and starts the rickety journey down the mountain. I don’t know if it’s the drugs, or the way the metal inside the van reflects the light, but suddenly there’s a sour taste in my mouth, and I feel the need to confess.

  “I have to tell you something,” I say to Mike, palms sweating.

  “Sure,” he answers, keeping it simple, making room for me like he always does.

  “I thought it was you.”

  “You mean the EMT? You thought he was me when you woke up?”

  I shake my head. He doesn’t understand. Of course he doesn’t. He isn’t broken like me.

  “At the top of the mountain,” I’m talking too fast now, and my words are slurring, but I have to get this out. It’s poison, and I need to suck it from my veins while I’m weak enough to be bothered by it. Otherwise, I’ll leave it there forever, slimy and subtle, spreading between my fingers and toes. “I’d walked so far, I was tired, not thinking straight. And Ken said it was strange you disappeared when the fire happened. We called for you, in the forest, after the fire. You never answered. And then— Logan— he had your backpack. It was so hard to see in the snow, and for a second I thought, maybe, that you, I thought—”

  I don’t say anything else, because the look on Mike’s face says he understands now.

  “You thought I did this to you.”

  The fractal pieces in his eyes seem to break apart for a second, and now he’s looking at me like he’s never seen me before, like I’m a stranger, a person he doesn’t know at all. My ribs split open, because suddenly I understand how it feels: Mike’s looking at me the way I’ve always looked at him.

  He doesn’t say anything, and I dive into the silence, trying to fill the void.

  “There’s something wrong with me,” I’m crying, and now Mike is holding me. “I’m broken.”

  The female EMT with stringy hair leans in, clucking her tongue again like a sensible aunt. She inserts herself unapologetically, as if our conversation is a medical matter, not a personal one.

  “You aren’t broken,” she fiddles with some dial on my I.V. “Been doing this job twenty years. I’ve seen anything and everything. Lotta bad things happen to women. Makes it hard to trust anyone, doesn’t it?”

  There. Just like that. In ten seconds, this total stranger just explained the thing I couldn’t say to Mike. She pointed out that the monster under the bed— the one I’m always looking for— is real, and hunting, and sometimes hides within the people you love most.

  Mike scans the roof of the ambulance like he’s searching for some secret code written there. Then, he runs his hands through his hair, his face the face of a man who’s agreeing and discovering something all at the same time. “Remember what you told me? About the wolves?”

  I nod, replaying the story aloud, my head swimming in a chemical cloud. “The wolves told me I need to end up with someone who can live in the wild with me.”

  “I’m here, Zoe. I’m in the wild with you. We can make our own rules.”

  The EMT glances at me cross-eyed and Mike jumps in, offering an explanation. “She saw a pack of wolves while she was out there. Four of them.”

  The EMT frowns. “That morphine must be working if she thinks she saw a wolf.”

  “What?” I ask, trying to sit up even though my arms won’t let me.

  “It’s a shame,” the EMT shakes her head, as if she’s missing out on something really special. “Wish we had ‘em. We’ve got everything else— bears and mountain lions. Can’t tell you how many tourists come out here hoping to spot a wolf. It’s a waste of a trip. Have to go further North to see some. There’s no wolves in Yosemite.”

  Mike squeezes my hand. The look in his eyes tells me he understands now. The gap between us closes. The fish and the bird can finally build a home together.

  He smiles, and without breaking eye contact with me, answers the EMT.

  “There’s at least one.”

  22

  Two Weeks Later

  Mike and I are finally alone, the wheels of our little rental car bumping against the pavement.

  It took two weeks for the hospital to discharge us. By the time we were allowed to make the long trek back to Silverlake, the linoleum floors and spotted ceilings had started to feel like home. It was strange putting on ordinary clothes, and not just because they were donated by someone who had seen our story on the news. My body had grown so accustomed to the looseness of an open-backed hospital gown that the scratchy waistband of a pair of jeans felt confining by comparison. Mike— outfitted in someone else’s flannel shirt— agreed. Leaving the hospital and returning to the real world was like being thrown off the side of a pirate ship that had taken us prisoner. We were happy to be free, but unsure what to do with ourselves, floating in the middle of the ocean, without our captors presiding over every waking moment.

  The doctors couldn’t identify a sole cause for my temporary demise, except for a combination of dehydration, starvation, hypothermia, and gastrointestinal parasitic infection that prohibited the absorption of nutrients. Ironically, the least serious of them all might have been the most insidious.

  “You probably picked the parasite up from drinking contaminated water,” a male nurse in scrubs told me while changing my I.V. “Did you swallow any unfiltered water out there?” I didn’t answer, because there was no way to explain to him that I swallowed everything out there, including fear, self-doubt, and basic human dignity.

  It struck me as poetic that the parasites were the thing that almost killed me. Not Logan. Not a massive snowstorm. Just tiny little bugs invisible to the naked eye. A course of antibiotics managed to wipe the parasites out— small warriors doing battle inside my body, the scope of my insides an entire universe to them. My leg turned out to be fine, too. The redness we noticed in the ambulance was a bacterial infection, not frost-bite, so the antibiotics killed two birds with one stone.

  Mike wasn’t so lucky. The frost-bite on his finger couldn’t be treated with a drug, and there was talk of amputation. The Doctors said we’d have to find a specialist in Silverlake to monitor the tissue, and it could take a few months to see if it healed or not. Mike says he doesn’t care— he doesn’t use that finger to make his furniture, anyway— but sometimes I catch him looking down at it with a question in his eyes.

  We told them where we left Logan, but inclement weather delayed the search. When they did look for him, they didn’t find anything on the mountain. No body. No backpack. Just some broken tree branches and a burned sweatshirt. They’ve assured us he’s probably dead— it’s difficult if not impossible to last long in the wild, wounded, without help. When I pointed out that we were living evidence to the contrary, nobody said much.

  The news coverage of our escapades spread so fast that apparently it was the highlight of the 24-hour cycle for days. When the hospital called my Mom to let her know we’d been injured, she’d already
seen what had happened on the news and was in her car, speeding down the highway, halfway to Yosemite in record time. Before she got to the hospital, she stopped at a CVS and picked up all kinds of supplies, leaving with a giant bag filled with Kleenex, cough drops, and two cans of chicken soup, one for Mike and one for me. When I pointed out that we didn’t have colds and nothing in the bag would help, my Mom just shrugged and said, “One day when your kid almost gets herself killed, let’s see what you come up with!” Then, she hugged me. Mike actually really appreciated the soup, and made a big deal about how much he preferred it to the hospital’s offering. At my Mom’s insistence, he called his aunt and uncle to let them know what happened. They said they hoped he felt better, and to let them know if he needed anything. He didn’t let them know, because what he needed, they couldn’t give him. They never came to visit.

  The Hardingers made it out alive, too, albeit more unscathed than Mike and I. They came to see us in the hospital, and they brought balloons with them. Big, round, multi-colored balloons tied to thin pieces of ribbon. I didn’t ask where they got balloons in the middle of nowhere, because I’m learning not to question the small miracles in life.

  Sue told me about what happened after we parted, sitting half-on, half-off my hospital bed like a kid sharing ghost-stories at sleep-away camp.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t see it until it was too late,” she whispered, tapping at the bed’s metal sidebars. “And to think, we were with him that whole time.”

  At the other end of the room, Ken waved a hand in the air, re-enacting a scene for Mike. “And then he hit me with the butt of the gun, nearly knocked me out. I was almost down for the count. Thought I’d die for sure, but managed to get back up and push him backwards off the boulder where we’d all made camp. He was climbing back up, and he’d have gotten me for sure, if it weren’t for my brilliant wife…”

  Sue’s cheeks burned a ruddy red as she turned toward me. “I decided to swim to camp rather than walk through the woods so Logan wouldn’t hear me stepping in the brush. I signalled Ken from the lake with the flashlight. He jumped off the boulder right into the water and we swam into the center. It was too dark for Logan to spot us out there.”