by Paul Pen
“Oh, Fra—” The rest of his name was reduced to a groan in Grace’s throat. “He’s dead.”
“He just appeared in front of us,” Frank said, showing his palms. “On this dark road where no one should be walking. In a split second. I couldn’t do anything. It’s not my fault. We’ll just have to explain what happened.”
An accident. That was all. Frank made himself believe it. He had suffered too much, blaming himself for recent events, and he couldn’t carry any more guilt on his shoulders or his knees would buckle. He asked his wife to stay where she was, but she gripped his hand. Without letting go, behind him, she started walking again—short, slow steps.
“Oh my God, oh my God . . . ,” she murmured.
He heard her sniffing in snot.
“Hello?” Frank yelled at the body, at nothing. “Can you hear me?”
His arms broke out in goose bumps, and the cold of the Idaho mountains now seemed more intense. He heard activity inside the motor home. The children were moving around in the bedroom. They poked their heads out of one of the two side windows at the rear. Frank swiped the air to tell them to stop spying. He turned back to the body.
“Are you all right?”
“How could he be all right? Please, Frank, I don’t know . . .”
The next step took them close enough to see that the oval shadow that resembled a shoulder was, in fact, a purse. They also discovered the victim had long hair, spread out like a fan on the earth.
“Oh no, a woman.”
Frank asked himself whether that was worse than running over a man. It sounded absurd, but the alarm and sadness with which Grace had said it made him really wonder.
Then something scraped on the earth. A groan cut through the darkness. The body moved, and black-painted fingernails scratched the ground.
“She’s alive,” whispered Grace. “Oh my God, she’s alive.”
Frank didn’t hesitate this time. He reacted with the same feeling of responsibility that Grace had shown immediately after the accident. He patted the pockets of his pants. The front ones. The back ones. He was searching for his cell phone to call for help. His chest pocket was empty, too.
“Go get a phone,” he said to Grace. “Hurry, it’s inside. We need help. Call nine-one-one!”
This last cry sounded too much like another recent cry, when it had been Simon who needed assistance. Frank’s pulse quickened, and the blood throbbed in the bruise the seat belt had left on his thorax. Grace also remembered that cry, because her eyes widened, her body tensed up. She was left immobilized as if it were her son who was in danger again.
“Go!” Frank ordered, to make her react. “Run!”
10.
The motor home’s retractable steps creaked under the force with which Grace climbed them. Though she could feel her entire body trembling, her hands remained steady. She kept the fear contained, as if some emergency protocol had taken control of her nervous system, enabling her to act with precision during the crisis. With her knee on the driver’s seat, she groped the dashboard, the crevice where it met the windshield. She expanded the search to the other end.
“Did Dad kill someone?” asked Audrey, standing next to the kitchen.
“No, honey, of course he hasn’t.”
Grace stuck her hand down the sides of each seat, and underneath. Down on her knees, she combed the cabin’s carpeted floor with her fingers. She caught crumbs, a coin, a pen lid.
Simon came out of the bedroom.
“But he’s really hurt,” said the boy.
“She is,” Grace corrected him. “It’s a woman.”
She stood and held her hair up with both hands, her elbows raised on each side. She looked around the front compartment.
“Where are they?” she mumbled before spinning around. “Honey, give me your cell phone, quickly.”
Audrey shrugged. “I don’t have it, Mom.”
“Come on, Audrey, I need the phone.” She took a step forward and held her hand out. “Give it to me. Now. This is more important than your friends and your Instagram. Right now, please.”
“I didn’t take it, Mom, honestly. I haven’t had it since Dad put them in the ziplock at the restaurant.”
Grace’s throat tightened. She turned back to the front. She remembered the transparent plastic that was close to tearing open, and the zipper forced shut, curving. She also looked at the open window that had given her liberating blasts of air that smelled like damp earth. Then Frank had swerved left. And the dashboard would have acted as a launch pad to propel the bag out. Through the right window.
“Oh, no.”
“I knew that bag was a bad idea,” Audrey pointed out.
Grace climbed out without answering her daughter. She combed the illuminated part of the road with her feet, lifting dust into the air.
“No, no, no . . .”
As soon as she ventured outside of the lit area, the ground disappeared. She couldn’t even see her feet. She searched the sky for the moon, but all she found was a ghostly claw.
“Brilliant, Frank,” she said through her teeth. Then she yelled while she walked toward him. “Great idea you had to confiscate the cell phones! Just great. They’ve all gone flying through the window. And it’s impossible to look for them now, you can’t see anything outside the—”
She found Frank on his feet, covering his mouth with his hands, his eyes fixed on the body on the ground. Words gurgled in the victim’s throat, which seemed to be blocked with some kind of fluid.
“Help . . . me . . . Hel . . .p . . . He . . .”
The woman tried to sit up but spasms shook her injured body. The air smelled like fresh wounds.
“Frank?” asked Grace. “Are you all right?”
He shook his head in silence, unable to take his eyes off the ground. On the victim’s blood-soaked face, a hole formed—the mouth opening to try to speak. To breathe. It coughed dark liquid on the road. Grace was torn between tending to the woman or to her husband.
“Are you all right, Frank?”
His hands were climbing his nose, trying to cover his eyes, to insulate him from reality. Grace took his elbow and massaged his arm. She understood her husband’s shock—it was one thing seeing the back of a body lying on the ground, it was quite another looking into the eyes of the victim pleading for help. Especially for Frank, who had never dealt with the guilt of what had happened with Simon.
“Frank, this isn’t your fault. You said it yourself. Not this time. It was an accident. And she’s alive. You dodged her in time. That’s why I hit her in the face with my hand.” She showed it to him as if it was evidence. “And what happened with the cell phones is just bad luck. Sorry for yelling. That wasn’t your fault, either.”
“He . . . Hel . . . p.”
“Come on, Frank. We have to help her. We have to think. We have to find the cell phones.” She shook him by the shoulder. “Do we have a flashlight in the RV?”
“We have four.”
Graced sighed with relief.
“One on each cell phone,” he added.
“Frank!” she berated him. “Come on, I need you to be OK. Frank!”
He squeezed his eyelids shut and suddenly opened them, as if waking up.
“What? Right, yeah. The cell phone, have you brought the cell phone?”
“Frank, they’re not there. They flew out the window. In the bag you put them in. They’ll be lost out there, in the trees.”
The thick forest caught Frank’s eye, and he gazed at the pines. On the ground, the woman choked, her coughing ending in a retch.
“Goddamn it, Frank!”
Grace pushed him aside, realizing he wasn’t helping and it would be up to her. She knelt next to the woman although she didn’t know what to do—whether to touch her back, sit her up, lie her on her side, face down, face up . . .
“Do you have a phone?” she asked. “We need a phone.”
The eyes on the dark face looked at her without reacting, as if the woman coul
dn’t hear her or didn’t understand the language. Grace repeated the question in mime, pointing at the woman, stretching out her thumb and little finger on one side of her face.
“Do you have one?”
The answer was a cough that spattered Grace’s face with snot, blood, and saliva. She dried herself with her shirtsleeve without showing her disgust.
“We need a phone so they can come help you. We’ve lost ours and we can’t search for them because we don’t have a flashlight, either. Our flashlights were the cell phones.” She smiled as if it was a joke. “I bet you have one on you. Can you give it to me?”
The woman remained silent. Grace moved closer and identified a sour odor of sweat that the smell of blood had covered up until now. She began to search in the pockets of the sweatshirt the woman was wearing. Nothing. Then she delicately patted the jeans—she didn’t want to put pressure on any fractured bones. Finally, she pulled on the purse’s strap to investigate its contents. The woman let out a scream that carried over the treetops. Grace gave a start.
“All right, all right, I won’t touch your purse.” The trace of anger in the scream made Grace feel as if she had been trying to rob the young woman. “Just tell me whether you have a cell phone.”
There was a spark of comprehension in the woman’s eyes—at last she was listening. A pitiful gurgle came from her throat.
“It hurts . . .”
“I know, I’m sorry. But I need a phone and I think there might be one in your purse. Tell me if you have one on you, please.”
She accompanied her words with a pleading gesture, pressing her palms together. The woman cleared her throat, swallowed something thick.
“I . . . I was carrying it in my hand . . . I don’t know where it is . . .”
A feeling of dangerous isolation overcame Grace. She saw herself trapped in a glowing bubble floating in a void, surrounded by a darkness that stalked them, that was hiding their cell phones like an evil big brother. She undid another button on her shirt so she could breathe. She sought Frank’s support, but he was walking around in circles a few yards away, hands on his waist. He moved in and out of the field of light, disappearing at intervals as if he truly did not want to be there.
“Frank!”
With an absent expression, he moved into the darkness.
“Don’t worry.” Grace stroked the woman’s face with her thumb, spreading blood across her cheek. She feigned calm, although she was so frightened she could vomit. “Let’s think, we have to think.”
She felt dizzy. She sat back on the ground to stop herself from falling.
“Frank!”
He emerged from the shadows.
“Stop that now, Frank. Pull yourself together, we have to do something.”
Her husband looked at her from the semidarkness, without approaching.
Grace made a noise of frustration at his inaction.
“At least bring me the first aid kit,” she ordered.
Frank headed to the motor home without taking his hands from his waist.
11.
Audrey was at the door.
“What’re we going to do, Dad?”
Frank stood there, a hand resting on the back of the passenger seat, pinching his bottom lip with the other hand.
“Can we help?” Audrey persisted.
He heard his daughter’s voice articulating words, but his thoughts were louder than her words and he couldn’t pay attention to both things at the same time. It was why he hadn’t been able to continue the conversation outside with Grace.
“Yeah, yeah, all right,” he replied to something that sounded like a question.
“So what should we do? Search for the cell phones?”
“We hit a woman.”
Audrey blinked, confused. “Are you OK, Dad?”
She touched his elbow just as Grace had. His daughter reminded him more and more of the girl he’d fallen in love with. He felt jealous of all the boys who would succumb to her charms, and it hurt him to think how much he loved his daughter. His wife. His family.
“I love you all so much,” he said.
“Calm down, Dad, we’re all fine. Look, Simon’s fine.”
The boy was still sitting at the table with his back too straight for him to appear calm. He looked at Frank with his eye wide, and he didn’t smile.
“He’s scared like you, but we’re OK. Nothing hurts. Someone will have to come help the woman.”
“That’s why I came in here,” Frank suddenly remembered. “Go get the first aid kit. Where was it? I can’t think.”
Audrey leapt into action with the energy of a nurse receiving instructions from the emergency-room doctor. She searched in the bathroom. Frank heard drawers opening, cupboards closing, the toothbrushes shaking in the tray the four of them shared—a cup wasn’t very practical in a house on wheels. The girl came out with a plastic case with a red handle.
“Here it is. But hang on, Dad, your hands are shaking.”
He felt Audrey’s fingers folding his own around the first aid kit’s handle, just as he had done with hers on the handlebars of her tricycles.
“Should I get towels, too?”
Frank identified the intonation of a question again but forgot its contents as soon as Audrey finished asking it. He said nothing, preferring not to invent an answer.
A sob broke through the silence. It was Simon, crying at the table.
“I’m scared . . .”
He pressed the patch against his eye to dry a tear.
“Hey, Gizmo, no,” Frank said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Yeah, right. Even you are scared,” the boy blubbered.
“It’s the shock, I’m not scared. I’m just a little”—he searched for the right word—“a little punch-drunk.”
Audrey sat next to her brother.
“Si, you’re in shock from the accident, and that’s perfectly normal.” She kissed his shoulder. “Dad had to brake really hard. Cry if you need to, it’s healthy to get all the tension out. Even Dad should cry if he feels like it.”
If only he could. Sit down, cry, and do nothing else.
“Thanks, sweetie,” he said, holding up the first aid kit.
He stood looking at his children, at Audrey consoling her little brother just as she had by his hospital bed when he left the intensive care unit.
“Are you going?” she asked. “Do you want me to take it? Should I give you some towels?”
Frank turned around to go out but his feet stopped on the first step. He couldn’t move.
“Dad.” Audrey hardened her tone. “It’s not a hitchhiker or a stranger you can decide not to pick up, it’s a woman who needs your help.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. I’m going.”
He walked along the side of the motor home, searching for the fasteners on the case with his fingertips. He thought he could hear laughter in among some whispering, but that made no sense. It must have been his exhausted mind manufacturing the illusion of the most inappropriate sound for that situation. When he turned the vehicle’s rear corner, where the hazard lights blinked, the supposed hallucination became real. He recognized Grace’s chuckle, seeing her now sitting with her legs crossed. Beside her, the woman had also managed to sit up as well, resting on an elbow. She was holding her sweatshirt, rolled into a ball, against her forehead, using it as a compress. They both looked at him, Grace grinning with relief.
“Good news,” she said in a deep sigh. “She’s feeling better. It looks like the blood’s only coming from a cut on her eyebrow.”
“I am better,” the woman confirmed.
Her voice sounded solid, with no choking or grating.
“But I need the bandages, quick,” Grace pressed him.
The first aid kit fell onto the ground. The bandages, the roll of surgical tape, some blunt-tip scissors, and dozens of other items scattered around Frank’s ankles.
“Shit!” he yelled.
He crouched to pick up bandages, antiseptic w
ipes, syringes. He returned them to the case, open on the ground. The roll of surgical tape rolled off toward the motor home. Grace leapt after it.
“For God’s sake, Frank, you can relax now.”
She snatched the bandages and some sample-sized packets of disinfectant from him. “I’m going to need a towel.”
“Sure, Grace, I’ll go right now.” He remembered that Audrey had thought of this, too. “Let me pick everything up.”
The needle on a loose syringe pricked his hand. Frank howled with pain.
“Look, seriously, step aside,” Grace ordered. “Better to do nothing if you’re going to do it like that. I’ll take care of it.” She picked up the case and closed it, not caring that some of the things hadn’t been put back in. “She seems to be OK, so stop worrying. She just hit my hand and then fell on the ground. A big scare for everyone, especially for her, but she can move her body. It’ll all just go down as a scare.” She rested a hand on his face. “That’s good, right? Now relax, breathe, and let’s all calm down. I’m going to tend to Mara. Her name’s Mara.”
Frank sank down on the road while Grace went back to Mara to dress her wound.
“Audrey!” Grace yelled. “Audrey, come give me a hand! And bring towels!”
He felt ashamed that his wife preferred the help of a sixteen-year-old girl to that of her inept husband, defeated by the situation.
“What have I done?” he whispered.
12.
Making two trips, Audrey brought towels and a couple of pans full of hot water. Grace had embroidered Frank’s or her own initials at the corners to differentiate between them when they hung both behind their bathroom door at home. Audrey returned from a third trip with a kitchen lighter, like a long-barreled cigarette lighter that produced sparks when its button was pressed. Bending over, she held it near the ground to search for the bag of cell phones, unfazed by the weak and fleeting light each spark offered.
“Simon’s inside seeing if he can connect to someone’s Wi-Fi on the laptop.”
“Out here?”
Grace regretted the tone of her question, which betrayed the lack of confidence she had in her children’s solutions to their situation, whether it was using a lighter in the dark of night or searching for an internet signal in the middle of the forest.