by Cara Martin
She’s supposed to have the chance to be happy with Cal. Or some other guy who will love her in all the right ways. Sit on her nanaji’s porch with him listening to his animal tales until he’s a hundred and two. Have a family of her own someday, maybe. Or not. Start an epic new business and take the world by storm. Whatever she wants, every good thing she deserves. A life beyond this hellish night. A life far beyond me and my fucked-up problems that should never have gotten near her to begin with.
If I stay and the worst things happen, we’ll face it together. But if I walk away and leave her behind — live while she never escapes this ground — the guilt will cripple me, and her absence from the world will destroy whatever shell is left.
How could it ever be worth it to survive without her?
“And you tell me you won’t, right?” Tanvi blinks quickly, her eyelashes filling up with snowflakes. She takes three fragile baby steps forward before freezing in her tracks, bending her head to stop it from reeling. “Listen, I can’t walk, let alone run.”
“It doesn’t matter.” My words disintegrate as they hit the air. “Cal and Lauren are way ahead of us. They could already have reached the road and sent back help.”
“I hope so. But we don’t know that. John might have attacked them. Cal would try to protect Lauren. She could be all alone out there now. We can’t assume they made it. For all we know they’ve circled back to the house again. You saw what Josephine did to Lauren. At least two of the kidnappers are dead because of this place.” Her right foot plows frantically through a snowfall we shouldn’t have seen for months. “Look at this — the things this place can do.”
Tanvi digs her fingernails into my arm exactly the way she does in my dreams. “We need better odds, Misha. You’re fast, and I can’t run now. You have to be the one.”
“And if I say no?”
“Don’t.” She drops her eyes, stares unfocusedly at the unlikely blanket of white at her feet. “It doesn’t make any sense. You cheated on me like I was nothing to you. Posted my naked picture on the Internet to humiliate me, but now that we’re not together you’re going to just lie down in the snow and possibly die here with me instead of doing something to try to keep us all alive?”
This is different, I almost say. But it’s not. It’s easier to fight to the death for someone you love than to keep yourself from hurting them. That’s the truth about being me.
“You’re not allowed to tell me no now,” she adds, her glare zooming up to catch me. “You still owe me.”
I blink the water and grit from my eyes, peer straight ahead, struggling to see into the army of tall trees waiting for us on the other side of the clearing. The forest ahead is darker than where we came from, and I understand why she wants me to go. I get it, I do. She’s lost too many people already. She’ll do anything to ensure Lauren’s safety.
I want Lauren to be safe too. But Tanvi matters more. Tanvi is everything, and she wants me to go.
I watch her lower herself carefully into the snow, staring demandingly up at me, her knees and the underside of her legs scraped raw from being dragged through the woods.
“I have to tell you something.” I choke on the damn sentence like the constantly drunk asshole that I’m not, but could have been someday if I hadn’t spent most of the past four years fighting it. “When you came to my house after I posted the photo —”
A guttural howl cuts me off, a multitude of screams falling in behind it. We’re running out of time.
“I remember,” Tanvi prompts.
“When I held you back and you fell.” My fingers knead my forehead. Dig into my hair. My eyeballs drown in the things I’ve done, and the thing I’m about to do — for her, because it’s what she can live with even if I can’t. “For a second, I felt glad. Stronger than you. Like my dad must have felt every time he hurt my mom.”
Tanvi’s eyes hang on mine, unclouded and unyielding. She’s the strong one. She can take the truth. It’s the weakness inside me that wants to run or look away.
“He’s not that person anymore,” she says, closing her arms around her bare legs, one of her running shoes digging trenches in the snow. “You don’t have to be either.”
Tears freeze on my skin. Crack when my jaw quivers.
She’s more generous than she has to be, and I still love her. Probably always will, in some way. But this is not a story about undying love conquering all. We were never going to get back together. If I can move quickly enough — and if I’m extremely goddamn lucky — it’s the story of our survival.
“I don’t want to leave you.” I try one last time. “Don’t make me do this.”
Tanvi stretches out her foot and taps my shoe with hers, just like she did the second time we met. I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again, and it’s just the same now. “You’re going to make it,” she tells me. “You’re going to bring back help. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“You promise?” I try to smile, Shantallow’s many voices drowning out mine with their dissent.
I reach down the back of my jeans and hand Tanvi the Glock.
Then I dive into the trees, running for both our lives.
21
I’M NOT FAST THE way Tanvi says I am. Not anymore. Wracked with pain, my body fights me with each step. It wants to double back and lie down in the snow with Tanvi, just like I do.
The voices serenade me with their hate as I weave through the trees. One of them screeches, “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night.”
Another voice I can barely make out slips in under it. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s my dad’s and that he’s saying something good. Letting me know he hasn’t deserted me. The thought alone makes me feel a little better, and I pick up speed.
Icicles form in my hair. Frostbite can’t be far behind. My feet keep sliding out from under me in the snow, making me work triply hard to keep my balance.
I don’t know how to pray like Tanvi does, but as I run my mind singsongs my grandmother’s old chant:
Moon and stars, forever shine,
Moon and stars, friends of mine …
I’ve spent so long under various shades of black that when the quality of the darkness shifts, I don’t trust it. The murkiest, most somber blue is virtually indistinguishable from black unless you have something to compare it to. Every time I glance up at the patches of sky between treetops my eyes doubt themselves. After everything I’ve seen tonight, how can I be sure of anything?
My stares run longer with each crane of my neck, striving to detect the truth. With my eyes scrutinizing the atmosphere, my feet are left to themselves. My lower body crashes into something solid, waist-high. I bounce off it and tumble backwards into the snow. There’s so much of it now that it softens my landing. Hoisting myself up with my arms, my eyes steer to the object that I smashed into — that smashed into me. An antique wheelchair, its seat bottom hanging crookedly down through the metal frame, iced with layers of snow.
My hypothalamus and nervous system go wild. My heart tilts. My muscles tighten.
Something grabs my neck, crushes at my windpipe. Something else whips up my shirt and slashes talon-like down my back, slicing deep.
I stumble forward, around the wheelchair. No oxygen.
The voices rise as one, the snow-filled air suddenly suffused with loathing. How can anyone hate someone they don’t know so much? My feet shuffle on, my left leg kicking out from beneath me as an unseen force belts into my calf.
No air. No strength. No way forward.
I crawl on my hands and knees, gasping for breath, my brain scrambling for a way out. Tanvi, I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do.
In my memory I hear her call out from behind me on the steps of the movie theater: “Hold up.” Offering me a ride home. Offering me, in the end, everything.
&n
bsp; Then my mind hops swiftly backwards, pages flipping. My dad after he was released from prison, watching me show off on my two-wheeled bike. Proud of me in the summer sun.
He must regret most of the things that came after that. He must be here, somewhere in the woods, watching me, and if this is the end maybe I should be thinking something else — my entire life flashing before my eyes like people say it does — but what I land on, the thought that stays, as I’m inching forward on all fours, is that I’ve been living in my father’s shadow all my life.
“He’s not that person anymore,” Tanvi said just before I left her, and then my brain takes another leap — vaulting over the rest of my life and landing here earlier tonight. “Don’t listen to them,” she told us. The voices.
For the second time tonight I close my eyes against them, fasten my palms firmly over my ears. I creep forward on my elbows and injured kneecaps, imagining I can feel my father watching, willing me not to stop. Through it all, the same thoughts circle. An understanding I should have reached long before now.
My problems are mine. My father’s left this life. I’m still here, and the longer I hide from the things inside me, the harder they’ll cling. I have to wear them on the outside, like everyone else.
I’m damaged, but not beyond help. That’s the real truth, isn’t it?
Anyone living can change. The dead too, although usually we don’t know it.
I never actually hit Tanvi. But I might have someday. I don’t want to be that person; I don’t have to be. But I have to deal with the demons inside me.
The fingers around my neck loosen. Is that what happens when you die? Everything lets go?
I keep my eyelids shut tight. If the white light is out there, waiting for me, I’m not ready for it. I want another chance.
Vigor and wholeness hold me high,
Turn my eyes to the endless sky.
They’re the only words my brain has left. My grandmother’s chant with the white candle. Her migraine cure.
I can’t remember the rest, that’s fallen away too. My mind loops over the same thirteen words until I lose sense of their meaning and hear only their cadence — the way your brain registers the sounds of a foreign language it has no practical knowledge of.
There’s no feeling left in my hands. The numbness spreads quickly to my kneecaps. My elbows, my face, my toes. I’m disappearing inch by inch, swallowed by a cold blackness I can’t see, scared out of my skull. Not of death, not exactly. But that I never fully took a shot at living.
Seventeen years, and I never got it right. Seventeen short years for Tanvi too, when she should easily have had seventy more.
The light in the tunnel must be bright, just like they say. Because suddenly there’s warmth on the back of my head and the bridge of my nose. The ice that’s formed on my neck pops, my own personal fault lines breaking. If this truly has to be the end, I don’t want to miss it. There are worse things than death. I’ve seen them here tonight, and I don’t want to remain in Shantallow with them.
My eyelids open into the light. My hands slide away from my ears.
There’s no tunnel. No malicious voices. Only the sound of birds chirping to greet the day.
Yellow morning sun beams down on me through the thinning trees. In the distance, another clearing stretches out ahead of me. If this is a trick or a dream, the cars and uniformed men and women in the road will fade. Night will return with a vengeance.
Not a dozen feet away, fallen brush crackles. My neck pivots, my eyes whisking to the left. A coyote stares pensively back at me, its muscular frame nearly large enough to suggest a wolf but the sheen of its silvery-red coat unmistakable. It yawns dispassionately as it turns away, returning its gaze to the street.
The mess of emergency service vehicles and personnel seems closer now. I stand on trembling legs that retain only the most basic comprehension about their function. My will marches them through the remaining trees onto a country road where thick tire tracks have compacted snow into multiple grooves.
Lurching past two police cars, I fall into step with a trio of paramedics wheeling a gurney in the direction of an ambulance. The patient’s strapped down, an IV running from his arm, his clothes dusty black. Greg’s face comes into view on the gurney, still breathing. The paramedic next to me — a woman in her thirties — surveys me with eyes that understand everything in three seconds flat. “Hey,” she says calmly. “It’s going to be okay. Let’s get you some help.”
Two other paramedics, flanked by a pair of police officers, instantly surround me. “A girl,” I mouth, my voice only a trickle. “Back there in the woods. You have to go get her.”
Another gurney slips behind me. Someone tells me to lie down.
“Back in the woods,” I insist, volume rising sharply. The woods, the woods, the woods.
A cop with stony blue eyes and a stern jaw pins me in his cross-hairs. “Son, they’re okay,” he promises with improbable gentleness. “We got your friends. You’re the last one out.”
“They’re okay?” I echo, as I lie back, heart throttling.
“Some frostbite. Other minor injuries. But they’re going to be fine.” He nods firmly. “You’ll see them at the hospital. Don’t worry. Just sit back and enjoy the ride now.”
Both cops disappear into the crowd as the paramedics begin strapping me in. “What about the others?” I mumble.
“Three of the kidnappers are dead,” one of the paramedics responds. “They just loaded the fourth — with multiple gunshot wounds — into an ambulance.”
Glancing up at the sole snowflake left in the sky, I momentarily fumble my words. “Why is it — why, the snow?”
“What’s today’s date?” the same paramedic asks, his head suddenly leaning over me so that I can see the nick on the underside of his chin where he must have cut himself shaving earlier.
The date? My brain’s temporarily lost that too. “Early September,” I mumble. “Thursday, the … I don’t know. Can’t remember.”
“December nineteenth,” the paramedic declares, peering at me worriedly. Head injury, he must be thinking. He’s probably right, too. But what neither he nor any of us five survivors will ever comprehend is how Shantallow held us within its grasp for three and a half months of darkness.
And what I alone will understand, down all the days and years ahead — after graduation; after future girlfriends; after becoming an uncle to twin girls; after counseling with a guy who only seems to own four shirts but who makes me talk and think and take myself apart and then put the pieces back in a different way; after becoming not an engineer but the kind of teacher who tries to go the extra mile, even for the students they don’t like; after falling in love and then having a girl and boy of my own who never have reason to be afraid of me and who are as smart, brave, and compassionate as I’d ever hoped they’d be — is how in some bizarre twist of fate one of the most evil places on earth saved the rest of my life.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for helping make this book possible through their Recommender Grants for Writers. Your support is much appreciated. I can’t stress that enough!
Barry Jowett, thanks for your invaluable help in sculpting Shantallow into a made-of-steel book with your editor-vision super powers. Thank you, also, to the entire Cormorant team for their outstanding work: copyeditor extraordinaire Andrea Waters, book designer Tannice Goddard (for always making my books look terrific), editorial assistant Sarah Jensen for her keen eye, cover designer Emma Dolan (your fantastically eerie cover sends shivers up my spine!), publisher Marc Côté for his continuing support, and Renee Newton, Matthew Doyle, Jessica MacDonald, and Jessica Carter.
Thanks to Greg Coleman for his horror acumen, for being an earlier reader of Shantallow and for lending a character his name.
Deborah Kerbel deserves a standing order of gratitude for
making each of my DCB books possible when she offered an introduction to Barry years ago.
Most of all, thanks to Paddy, who is the best thing that ever happened to me and who makes everything else possible.
CARA MARTIN is the author of several acclaimed novels for young people published under the name C.K. Kelly Martin. Her most recent novel, Stricken, was released in 2017. A graduate of the Film Studies program at York University, Cara has lived in the Greater Toronto Area and Dublin, Ireland. Within the space of 3500 miles she’s worked a collection of quirky jobs at multiple pubs and video stores, an electricity company, a division of the Irish post office, a London toyshop, and an advertising analytics company. She’s also been an image editor for a dot-com startup that didn’t survive the 90s, and a credit note clerk for Canada’s largest national distributor of General Merchandise. Cara currently resides in Ottawa, Ontario with her husband and is still afraid of the Child Catcher from the film adaptation of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
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