“Because it looks right.”
Josie gritted her teeth. “We have no reason—”
The drizzle stopped. Neena stared down the line of her own finger.
“—to believe that that’s the right way—”
Neena sidled forward to inspect a towering red spruce. The rain clouds cleared, and the sky brightened. The sunshine felt discordant with the way Josie was still berating her. She cut her off. “Josie!”
Josie bristled with outrage—but then slackened as her gaze landed upon the spruce. On its trunk, at eye level, were two indentations the size of bottle caps.
Neena examined the ground, expecting to find the missing bottle caps resting in the moss. “They must have fallen off.”
“Fine,” Josie said, though her voice was tight with resistance. Obeying the missing instructions, she veered course to the left. “But we’re still going home. If you think I’m spending one more night with you out here—”
“Or . . .” Neena peered closer at the holes. “It almost looks as if they were pried—”
A crash of sticks and branches and debris exploded through the woods.
Josie screamed as she fell into the earth.
CRACK. JOSIE’S LEFT fibula snapped as her left tibia punctured through skin. The fracture was heard before it was felt. Josie’s vision blurred as she thunked to a splashy halt. Her heartbeat flailed erratically, and her face flushed blazing hot.
Even here, her first emotion was humiliation.
Even now, her first thought was, Of course it was me.
“Josie! Oh my God. Josie!”
Stunned, Josie blinked at her left foot, which was mangled around a gnarled root. Something was wrong. More wrong. She squinted. A thick hunk of bone was bulging out from within. Her shoed foot hung limply from her ankle, held on by torn muscle and bloody flesh. Pain and terror rocketed through her. She screamed again.
“Josie!” Neena was shouting, sobbing from above. “Oh my God. Answer me. Answer me, please!”
Josie gasped. “Something’s wrong with my foot.”
“I know.” Neena’s tone changed abruptly. She sounded peculiar, gentle, shaky. “You’re okay. It’s gonna be okay.”
Josie glanced at it again. Sour nausea rolled through her. She whimpered.
“You fell into a hole,” Neena said.
“I didn’t see it.”
“I didn’t, either. It must have been covered with debris. You slipped in the mud and then slid right in.”
“My foot.”
“I know. Can you move?”
Fear, dark and glassy, descended over Josie. Neena was asking her if she was paralyzed. Observing Josie’s expression, Neena quickly adjusted the question. “No, I mean, can you move your right foot? Is it still okay?”
Unsure—petrified—Josie attempted to wiggle it. It wiggled. The girls exhaled their collectively held breaths. Josie moved one arm and then the other. Everything . . . everything else—oh God, the left foot was barely attached—seemed to be working.
“Can you get out of your pack?” Neena asked.
Josie was lying on her back at bottom of the hole. It appeared to be eight or nine feet deep and only a few inches wider than she was tall—maybe six feet. Roots jutted out from the earth like grabbing, snatching fingers. Her left leg was ensnared a couple feet above the rest of her body. Her pack was underneath her. With a grimacing twist, she slid out from the straps. Fiery pain bolted up her leg, spinal cord, brain. She gasped in shock. Her arms freed, and she fell back against the cushioning pack. Tears stung her eyes.
Neena’s voice cracked. “That’s good.”
“It hurts.”
“I know.”
A sludgy pool of water stagnated beneath Josie’s buttocks. She looked up and discovered that Neena was a remote blur. She panicked. “My glasses!”
“I think they fell off when you fell down.”
Josie squirmed, patting around until she located them in the muddy slush underneath her pack. But when she put them on, the frames were bent and sat wildly askew. Her final shred of composure vanished. She began to wail.
“It’s okay,” Neena said. “You can wear your sunglasses.”
“I can’t reach them.”
“You can. I know you can. Come on, Josie.”
“I can’t move. It hurts too much.”
“It’s okay. Those are only a little crooked, right?” Neena disappeared above her. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit!” She was yelling now. “Help!” Her vocal cords strained to their breaking point. “Help!”
The forest didn’t respond. Trees dripped softly as rain shed from their boughs. The surrounding emptiness was total and immense.
Neena dropped onto her stomach on the squelching ground at the edge of the hole. She stretched an arm toward Josie. Testing. Already knowing she couldn’t reach. “It’s okay. We’re going to get you out.” She sniffled.
“You aren’t allowed to cry,” Josie said. Snot oozed down her chin as she tried to unbend her glasses. They resisted. “You’re not the one stuck in a hole.”
Neena laughed through a sob. She sniffled harder and swallowed her mucus. She didn’t know what to do. Feet weren’t supposed to dangle. “Can you reach me?”
Josie lifted an arm.
Their straining fingers were nearly three feet apart. But, even if they could have reached, Neena wasn’t strong enough to haul her up. She didn’t even know if moving Josie was the right thing to do. Unless they made a brace? Out of what? Frenzied and distraught, she considered anything in her pack that might be retooled before realizing there was still the basic problem of getting Josie out. Her brain scanned for information gleaned from movies and TV shows. “We need to bandage the wound to stop the bleeding—I think,” she said. “Is there anything like that in your first-aid kit?”
Josie put her glasses back on. Her breathing was short. “Band-Aids.”
“Anything bigger? More, uh, bandagey?”
Josie suddenly cried out, and Neena lunged back into her pack with an inspired recollection of T-shirts in action movies. Tomorrow’s clean shirt proclaimed in bold type that she was a PAWNEE GODDESS. She ripped it. Tried to rip it. As she bit down, the fabric squeaked unpleasantly against her teeth. With more precision, she bit again and rubbed with her canines until a hole formed. “Aha!” It sounded maniacal—she felt maniacal—as she wriggled a finger inside the hole and ripped.
“Pads,” Josie said.
Neena tore the shirt into a strip. “What?”
“Pads. In your bag.”
“Oh my God. You’re a genius.” Four menstrual pads were left—clean, sanitary, and absorbent. Neena laid them out before attending to her patient. Her patient that she still couldn’t reach. The ankle gaped open like the slit of a lewd mouth. A knob of bloody bone and pink muscle protruded from the skin. The dangling foot rocked in the air.
Neena’s throat convulsed, and she retched, nearly vomiting. Pull yourself together. She had a vision of long white casts in hospital beds. Legs raised in spidery contraptions. “I need you to be brave, Josie. I need your help. You’re the one who has to do this.”
Josie’s eyes spilled over with fresh tears. “No.”
“Tap into that adrenaline, okay? We’re gonna untangle your foot, and then we’ll use that same root to elevate it.” Neena prayed this was the right thing to do, but at least keeping it elevated would prevent more blood loss. Maybe? “One step at a time. First, I need you to scoot your butt forward so you can reach the root.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“I can’t.”
“On the count of three,” Neena said harshly. “One. Two. Three!”
Josie scooted and screamed. Her vision spotted and fuzzed in electric bursts, fuses burning, as Neena handed down the supplies and barked the orders.
The pain sizzled. Her ankle and foot became a singular it, separate from the rest of her body, as she complied with Neena’s sadistic demands. She unsnagged it. Cradled it. Supported it with pads. Support the gap, not too tightly. Wrap it, wrap it! Wrapped the whole thing in cloth. Woozy with agony, Josie blacked out. Only for a second. She was screaming again.
Lie back, Neena was shouting.
Breathe, Josie. Deep breaths. You did so well.
Breathe with me.
Josie found her breath and clung onto it. Her pulse was going haywire. She goggled at her ankle, fatly wrapped in feminine hygiene products and bandaged with the T-shirt, her mind blank with trauma.
“Can you hear me?” Neena said. “I’m going to get help.”
Josie’s pupils widened in fright. “No.”
“I can’t get you out on my own. I’m sorry.”
“You can’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.”
Their eyes locked through Josie’s lopsided glasses.
Neena’s heart shattered into spiky fragments. “I’m leaving my stuff here so I can run faster. It’ll still take a few hours, but at least it’s mostly downhill. I’ll plug my phone into my car’s charger, drive until I get a signal, and then I’ll call emergency services and bring them back with me. I’ll only be gone for a few hours—I promise.”
“It’ll be dark.”
“Only for a few hours. I’ll be back so soon.”
Josie’s complexion blanched. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“I know, sweetie. It’ll be okay.” Hurriedly, Neena rummaged through her belongings. Hoodie. She put it on. Headlamp. She hung it around her neck. Water. She’d have to carry the bottle. What else? “Car keys,” she said, stuffing them into a hoodie pocket. “What else? What else?”
“Phone?” Josie asked.
“Oh my God.” It seemed unbelievable to Neena that she’d almost forgotten the one thing she never forgot. She snugged the phone into her back jeans pocket, where it felt safer because she’d be able to feel it the whole time. Paranoid, she moved the keys to her other back pocket.
“Food?”
“It’d weigh me down. You should have it.” As Neena searched for the safest place in the hole to drop the hefty canister, the shiny metallic wrapping of a protein bar winked at her from behind the clear plastic. Changing her mind—don’t be stupid, you might need the energy—Neena grabbed and pocketed it. Then she crawled onto her belly and lowered the canister so that it wouldn’t have as far to fall.
The canister reached Josie without incident. She hugged it like a teddy bear for comfort. “Which way are you going?”
“The way we came in. Maybe it’s faster the other way, but I’m afraid I might run into more missing blazes and get lost.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t move your leg. And drink lots of water. You can reach it, right? I’ll be back soon, so don’t dehydrate yourself. And eat.”
Josie lifted a trembling arm. “Be careful.”
Neena reached toward the tips of Josie’s grubby, outstretched fingers, hoping that she could reach them this time. She couldn’t. Instead, she mimed squeezing them tightly. And then she was gone.
APART
JOSIE
THE LEAVES WERE still clinging, hopeful and green. They didn’t realize that their time was almost up. That soon they would yellow and wither and brown, and fall to the forest floor. Their skeletons would grow brittle and crumble. Rubbery worms would swallow them up and shit them out. Their bodily remains would enrich the soil, feeding and fortifying new life, but their true forms would never be seen again. They would be ghosts.
With her glasses askew, Josie’s world had split. Her depth perception was gone, and neither eye could see in perfect focus. The leaves above were an Impressionistic blur. The sky seemed weak and anemic, and the storm had left behind wisps of streaky clouds.
Among all of her meticulously rationalized disaster scenarios, she had never imagined breaking her bones and being left alone. Being left behind. But how fitting that it was her—not Neena—trapped in the middle of the woods. It would have been downright poetic if it weren’t so goddamn typical. What kind of hapless loser fell into a hole? It was like a cartoon, if Bugs Bunny had ever been stupid enough to be tricked by one of Elmer Fudd’s traps.
Too deep to have been dug by hand and too remote to have been dug by machine, Josie had concluded that it must be a sinkhole. It was roundish in shape, all earth and roots, apart from a skinny rhododendron that grew out from the side near the top. Branches poked underneath her body, too. They had probably been covering the hole and had come down with her in the fall. This was the most comforting narrative—that she hadn’t noticed the hole because nature had hidden it. It wasn’t her fault.
Sinkholes were common around here, but the only one she’d ever seen was in the parking lot of a vacant building on Merrimon Avenue last year. She and Neena had taken a special trip just to peer down into the newly ruptured asphalt. At the time, she had been unimpressed. The darkness had been vague and bottomless.
Josie cried softly. The pain was as lonely as it was agonizing. Hovering gnats whined around her face. When she waved them away, they pestered double. Her skin was pink and warm. A warm body temperature was good, though, right? At least her breathing had stabilized. And her blisters weren’t bothering her anymore. Ha.
Having never broken a bone before, she hadn’t expected it to be so revoltingly auditory. That snap. How many months had it taken for Win’s arm to heal after he had attempted to slide over the hood of their dad’s sedan like a cool detective in a B-movie? “Action cop,” he’d called the move. He’d had that dumb bowl haircut back then, and her little-kid, chicken-scratch signature had taken up most of the space on his cast. He’d gotten so mad at her for that.
A few years later, her father’s car was the scene of a second accident when a refrigerator slipped from the back of a pickup truck driving in front of him on I-240. The driver hadn’t wanted to pay Best Buy to deliver it. Instead, he was charged with manslaughter for not securing it properly, and he went to prison.
He was out now. Josie’s father was still dead.
The brute power of vehicles terrified her, but equally frightening was the idea that one careless slip could cost somebody their life. Josie began to collect stories about mistakes and tragic accidents. People who fell off cliffs while taking selfies. People who were killed by foul balls while watching baseball games. People who choked while eating competitively, were sucked into jet engines while repairing them, were impaled by fence posts while playing tag. People who fell into sinkholes while backpacking in the woods.
In the ninth grade—only a year after her father died—she’d had a panic attack during the behind-the-wheel training of her driver’s ed course. The teacher had passed her anyway, out of pity, but Josie was still too afraid to apply for her limited learner’s permit. She had leaned heavily on Neena’s father to drive her around and then, later, on Neena. She felt safe with them. They were responsible. She didn’t feel as safe with her mother or even Win, who drove too fast and didn’t always signal. With Neena leaving, Win had been urging Josie all summer to get back behind the wheel, but he didn’t realize that time hadn’t lessened her fears. It had expanded them.
Proving her point that the world was dangerous, however, was not a satisfying victory.
How long would it take for Neena to return? And who would arrive with her? Josie imagined a team of medics sliding down the ropes of a helicopter, racing down the Wade Harte with a stretcher. The ring of uniformed adults would scrutinize her from above and scold her for being careless. How much did a rescue and evacuation cost? Her mom would be in debt for years to come. The gulf of shame widened.
Josie would have to start college in a wheelchair. At bare minimum, in one of those clunky Velcro-strapped boots. What if it took so long for help to arrive that her foo
t became infected? What if she lost it altogether thanks to sepsis or gangrene or any of those other conditions she’d heard about but couldn’t actually define? She visualized coming to in a sterile room and groping down the side of her leg—only to discover the lower half was missing. The doctor would be harsh and ill-mannered. The nurses, stern but sympathetic. Her sobbing mother would cradle her, assuring Josie that she could still lead a full and fulfilling life.
It would be true, of course. It would also be devastating.
It’s only a foot.
But it was her foot. How long would it take to learn how to walk again? Was a prosthesis hard and smooth like a mannequin, or did the plastic have some softness and give? Or were they all metal these days? Those good prosthetic blades, the ones athletes wore, had to be expensive. Oscar Pistorius. She’d nearly forgotten the man on the cover of the glossy magazines from her childhood. He was a Paralympic athlete, the first double-leg amputee to participate in the Olympics. He had been so cool, until he murdered his girlfriend. Then he was on even more magazines.
Josie continued to catastrophize. She began to think of her injured leg as already gone, a phantom limb, and it twitched in self-pitying outrage. Perhaps the rescue team would never find her, and she would starve to death like the deer they’d seen the previous afternoon. The same carrion birds would claw into her flesh and peck out her eyeballs.
Or maybe an internal injury, something unknown, would kill her first. How many people would attend her funeral? The turnout would be poor, she decided, which felt irresistibly worse. And Neena would be destroyed. This felt both terrible and gratifying.
The rainwater evaporated, but Josie’s ass remained submerged in the dormant puddle. The afternoon sun baked the mud onto her skin. The light forced her eyes into a squint. Maybe she could reach her sunglasses. Delicately, her arm stretched behind her head, and she fumbled to unzip her pack. The top pouch opened tooth by tooth. As her fingertips groped, something small fell out. She shifted for a better angle, and pain shot through her. It ripped and blinded. She gasped and hissed. The pain was a chasm, and, as she strained to touch every item, she plummeted all the way down.
The Woods Are Always Watching Page 10