Once Again

by Catherine Wallace Hope

  “Let’s get rid of these.” She needed to undo them, but they were clasped tight. She tried to slip Korrie’s hands out of the tight bands, but Korrie moaned and Erin quit. She turned her face front and said, “I’m sorry.” She zipped up the hoodie, and with a hand on Korrie’s shoulder, she said, “You’re okay?”

  Korrie’s breathing hitched and caught in her throat, and she nodded.

  “Korrie.” Erin reached out and touched her other cheek. Here she was. Her Korrie. Her girl. A mess of joy and terror and relief and fear and pain spun through her.

  Korrie shivered. Erin looked into her eyes. “Listen, Squid, I need to know two things,” she said. “Did that man touch you?” Her lips were so tense with anger she could hardly get the words out. “Inside your underwear?”

  Korrie shook her head.

  “Okay,” Erin said with a small measure of relief. “Did he give you anything to swallow?”

  Korrie’s eyes welled wetter and she nodded.

  “Pills?” Erin said. “Red pills?”

  Korrie nodded. “He made me.”

  Too late. Erin tried to keep her expression calm, but she was too late. Her eyes burned as the heavy realization sank into her. Too late. “When?”

  Korrie dropped her chin and shrugged.

  “Can you think back?” Erin held her shoulder. “Was it a little while ago? A long time ago? I have to know.”

  Korrie’s face drew down, and she began to cry again. She shook her head. “I don’t know, Mommy.” Her frozen breath hung in the air. “A long time ago.” She sobbed, “I’m sorry.”

  Erin wiped tears from the small face and said, “No, Squid. Not your fault. It’s going to be okay.” In her chest, her heart clenched and wilted, clenched and wilted. “But they’re very bad, and we have to get them out of you, okay?”

  “Out of me?” Korrie said, her face a small white sculpture of fear.

  “I know.” Erin stroked Korrie’s hair from her eyes with a fingertip. “It’ll be okay. Here’s what we have to do. We have to make you throw up so the pills will come out, okay?”

  Korrie shivered, lowered her head with a soft groan.

  “We have to do this, Squid.”

  Korrie nodded, but distress and cold made her sway slightly from foot to foot.

  “Are you ready?” Erin said.

  Korrie gave her a quick bob of the head.

  “I’m just going to touch the back of your tongue and it’ll make you feel sick and you’ll throw up those bad pills.”

  Erin’s right hand was swollen, skin tight, red as meat, white stripes across splayed fingers, knuckles like bulbs where the joints disarticulated crookedly. Her left hand was less damaged: blisters, splinters, scratches. Pain lit up, metallic and sharp, as she pried off her ring, with its sharp, protruding diamond, Zac’s time stone. She shimmied the ring into her pocket where it would be safe.

  With another glance at the ugliness of her hands, she said to Korrie, “Sorry about this.” Slowly, with her left hand, she slipped two fingers between Korrie’s lips. “Here we go.” Korrie’s mouth was warm, too warm, feverish. Erin pressed the back of Korrie’s tongue until she gagged. She leaned forward and heaved a strangled but empty retch.

  “Again,” Erin said, and she repeated the effort. She got the same result.

  After the third try, Korrie shook her head. Tears flooded from her eyes. She whispered, “I can’t do it,” and she trembled as if she were about to come apart.

  “That’s okay,” Erin said, and she cradled Korrie’s head against her neck. So hot in the icy air. “It’s going to be okay.” Fleetingly, Erin thought, My god, you’re still six. The five hundred days had aged Erin by a hundred years, but here was Korrie, still just turned six. “We’re going to get you to a doctor, sweetie.” Standing up like a scarecrow gathering itself, Erin raised her damaged body. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Okay,” Korrie sniffled.

  Erin picked up the phone and swept its light around them. Within a cataract of stone, they stood at the junction of four mining tunnels. Rock walls, ancient beams, trolley tracks leading down into drifts of dirt, dust. No way to climb back up to the shaft they’d fallen through. The phone turned off, saving the last of its power. Erin turned it back on. The shattered display read 5:45 PM, November 1, 2022. She squinted down in disbelief. How could that be? Now an interval so far in the future? An icon for winter said the temperature was ten degrees.

  She had no energy left to dwell in her confusion. Whatever the phone said, she had to get Korrie to the hospital. She had to find her way back to the car. Which tunnel? One led down, the others upward. She chose the one that had a draft, the direction that pressed the chill against her cheeks. Her body cried its pains, but she forcefully ignored it. By some miraculous fluke of physics, the child once taken from her and Zac was theirs again. Breathing, heart beating.

  Now she had to find the way to keep her alive. She had to assume Clype could not find them here in this future interval. She had to get Korrie to the emergency room.

  She put a hand on Korrie’s shivering back and said, “This way, Squid.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  One Week After The Day Of: Friday, February 14, 2020 | Valentine’s Day | Patrol of the University of Colorado campus

  Tom was sitting in the warm airflow behind the steering wheel of his Interceptor, waiting at the snowy corner of Folsom and Colorado for the light to change. He’d taken an extra shift, and it was lunchtime, and he wanted to take a code seven and go up to the highest seats of the football stadium and see if he could locate himself. For almost a week, he’d fought hard against this relapse. None of his old tactics were working, but sometimes the clarity of the air after a snowstorm helped. He took off his aviators and looked into the rearview mirror. He had no idea who that was.

  On February eighth, for a moment anyway, Tom had thought he might be okay. When he’d seen Beccs arrive on the scene that day, the way she’d looked at him, he thought there might have been something there. Beautiful Beccs. He saw nitrile gloves on her small hands, long fingers, no ring. But then the moment passed, and he was alone, with the little bird in his chest.

  Now, on the seat next to him lay a shopping bag with a bottle of sun tea, a package of sesame sticks, and a valentine card. He took the card in his trembling hand and looked at the cover. It showed a rabbit holding a hand-drawn heart, offering it to the viewer. It looked kind of stupid to him now. Inside, it read “Hop” and then there was a hand-drawn “e” to spell the word “Hope.” “Hope you’ll be mine.” Was it stupid or not? He couldn’t tell what things were anymore.

  He drew a pen from his pocket, clicked it to start writing, and reflected on how bad his shakes were now, back again in full force. He flattened the open card against his thigh and wrote, Dear Beccs, ‘Hope’ this finds you well. The penmanship looked like a mess, a scrawl wobbling with hesitation and the tremolo of his disorder. He closed the card and looked again at the cover. It was stupid. He tore the card in half and dropped it on the floor.

  The dispatcher called out his unit number. She said, “County located your suspect vehicle, RO Aidon Clype. PNB interior.”

  Every fuse in Tom’s body fired. Damn it to hell. PNB. Pulseless non-breather. Clype was dead, if it was Clype. Now Tom felt singed inside. The rising hum of anxiety in his ears cut into the transmission. “Tango,” he said. “Come again.”

  “Nineteen frontage road north of Niwot, between Eighty-third and Airport.”

  Tom’s foot punched the pedal of his vehicle, and it leaped forward. The location was fifteen minutes away. “Request standby for City of Boulder.” He made a three-pointer to head to Diagonal. “Arrival in fifteen.” He turned on lights and sirens, running berries and cherries like a blue flamer, but he needed a fast exit from this damned city.

  Hell. Tom wanted to make an incision in himself so the sulfuric disappointment would leak out. Because there is no justice in a mere death. Simply slinking out. Everybody can die. H
e had wanted desperately to bring Clype in, to be the one to expose him to the fists of the system.

  When he and Nate had gone up to the Fullarton residence for the death notification, one of the worst things was not being able to tell the mother, “Here she is, right here. I’ve got your beautiful little bird in here”—with a tap on his chest so light he wouldn’t wake the nestling from her nap.

  Then later, he’d planted himself in front of his screen and sifted through surveillance of every vehicle entering the rear parking area of the school, from the evening before to the end of that day, and he’d latched on to the pickup truck because he had a feeling about it. A few days later, they’d confirmed Clype as the suspect when the saliva specimen from her autopsy matched his DNA profile from an older case. Clype had been questioned, but no charges were brought. Nothing probative. They’d tried like hell to track him down. All the while, Tom’s heart was getting eaten away by the little bird.

  He exited the highway at Eighty-third, listened to the burble as his tires crossed the railroad tracks, and pulled onto the frontage road. Less than a mile on, he approached the scene. Two sheriff’s cruisers sat kissing mirrors, the deps talking, gusts of breath rising, laughter. Tom drove past them and nosed in behind the truck registered to Clype—the target he had sought to bring to account.

  Whatever man he’d been once, Tom was some other thing now—a thing not properly assembled anymore. The pieces were tethered to each other by wires, but afloat and incongruous. Quaking hands shoved into his coat pockets, he made pleasantries with the deputies, laughed even, and took ownership of the scene. But as he turned to inspect the vehicle, he felt he might piss or retch, or his legs might detach at the joints, and he would founder because he was some kind of take-apart dummy impersonating an officer.

  On the rear gate of the truck, a bumper sticker read “Honk if you want to suck my dick.” Tom went livid inside at the filth of it. That would have felt like reason enough to blow Clype away if he’d found him sooner.

  He neared the driver’s side and tugged a glove onto his shaking hand. He opened the door. Upon visual, anger bloomed in him, and he tried to repressurize his lungs. It was Clype. Long dead. Still frozen. A corpsicle. Tom decided he would say that word once he got back so everyone would laugh and think he really did have a sense of humor.

  The body. Shirt unbuttoned. Blue-skin face. Mouth rimmed in the foam of an overdose. Too easy an escape. Tom had wanted more than anything to illuminate for Clype what a piece of crap he was, devastate him with enlightenment, and then exile him to a system that would take revenge upon him.

  But Clype had skipped out free into the vale.

  Tom’s fingers crawled along his holster, allowed him the comfort of the cold grip of his Sig. He tasted a coppery impulse to fire all his rounds into the ice-blue chest. Next best thing. Desecrate and ventilate. For a second, his tremors stilled and he felt better.

  But you may not, he thought. You may not. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the system. Preserve this piece of crap for CSI like it’s priceless. He leaned in and inspected the face. Iceberg-blue, corneas dark, mouth gaping. Drool and vomitus and foam frozen around the purple lips and down the scruff on the chin. A lap full of vomit, a dark stain of urine in the crotch of the jeans. No blood. No violence done upon him. No righteousness carried out.

  Beccs would catch this one. This was still Boulder County. She would divest the corpse of its cohesion. His mind flashed with the shine of stainless steel as he pictured not Clype, but himself on her table. If she snipped all the wires that held him together, it would be easy. Pieces and parts. He would happily watch her work as she opened him up. She’d peel back all the damage and look inside. If she saw his heart, she would see the grievous harm done to it, and maybe she would understand. Maybe she could. He visualized her surprise, and a moment when she might look so pleased when she discovered that ounce-weight bird, still fluttering deep inside there, and she’d know that he’d saved the little girl after all.

  Look at yourself, Tom, he thought. You’re shaking like a damned jackhammer. He glanced at the two sheriff’s vehicles. Are you going to come apart in front of a couple of county deps?

  Pain struck high behind his ribs like a tuning fork deep inside his chest wall. The sharp jab of something related to his tremors. PDR, Tommy—pretty damn real.

  Sweating like a worked beast in the freezing air, he turned away from the truck and consciously instructed his legs to get him back to his own vehicle. Left, right. Left, right. Hurry up. Equatorial fricking heat. The half-ton of deadweight descended on his chest, and his first thought was that it might crush her. He had to retreat and find some air to breathe. Deep breaths. Had to sit down. Pain of the tuning fork traveling through his neck and down his back. Left, right, left, right. Time to puke, I think. Hurry now. Sit. He crumpled into his cruiser and slammed the door.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  6:00 PM

  November 1, 2022 | Three Dog Knight Mine

  Erin and Korrie found themselves facing the narrowing of a tunnel.

  Shivering hard, Korrie leaned against Erin’s sleeve and asked, “How did you find me, Mommy?”

  This was the second time Korrie had asked. Erin looked at the scared pink face of her child in the phantom light of her phone and then at the same face in the background image on the dim, splintered display. Erin had no idea how much to tell Korrie, how much she could understand when Erin didn’t understand it herself, and she knew she had to keep her calm.

  “Remember?” Erin said, “I told you how I followed his tracks.” Korrie blinked with confusion. Erin added, “From school.”

  “He is a horrible man!” Korrie’s voice broke when she said it.

  “I know,” Erin said, rubbing Korrie’s shoulder, “but he can’t follow us here.” And she believed that was true.

  Korrie looked unconvinced. “Where are we?”

  “Remember I said this used to be a mine once upon a time?” With a few more steps, Erin saw in the light of her phone that the tunnel had dead-ended.

  Between red beats of the low-battery alert, the display read 6:00 PM and still November 1, 2022. Had they truly skipped forward now? By months and months? She turned back to face in the direction they’d come from. “We just have to find our way out.”

  Korrie nudged her arm. “Mommy, I feel weird.”

  Erin dropped to her knees. “In what way, baby?”

  “Floaty and sideways-y.” Korrie tried to wipe her cheek against the shoulder of the hoodie. “Dizzy.”

  It was closing in on them, the repetition of events. Erin breathed in the sharp, icy air and raised her aching hand and put a knuckle under Korrie’s chin. “That’s what we’re going to fix. We’re going to get out of here and get in the car and drive fast, fast, fast to the doctor.”

  “Okay,” Korrie nodded.

  They hurried through the dust into the widening of the frozen tunnel.

  Erin tried to sequence things in her mind. Her car was parked in summer, where they would have to find it as soon as this interval ended. Once they got to the hospital, the medical staff would take care of Korrie, and Erin would call the police, call Zac, and then they could take care of her own injuries. Probably stitches in her back, she judged, from the resounding sting of it. Broken fingers. Splintered breastbone. Whatever else. Somehow, she would explain all of this. The question right now was, if time had skipped all this way forward, did that buy Korrie more time or give her less? How could Erin figure it out? All she could do was pay attention to Korrie’s condition. Right now, she was still able to walk. So sometime early in the exposure to the oxycodone?

  The tunnel made an L-turn, and in another fifty feet it ended in the squared-off housing of sets of pulleys that hung by shredded rope. Wrong way.

  “What if we can’t get out,” Korrie said. Her eyes wide and the corners sunk down in fear.

  Erin cleared her own doubt out of her voice and said, “We can do it, Squid. We can find a way out.”
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br />   They headed back past the L-turn, and Erin tried to think of ways to reassure Korrie. “When we get home,” she said, “you can have a nice hot dinner and then a warm bath.” Erin was struck by how odd it sounded to talk about such ordinary things. “You can snuggle up under the covers, and we’ll read for a little while.”

  “But Mommy?” she said, teeth chattering. She seemed to doubt Erin’s assessment.

  Erin felt a current against her cheek. “Wait, stop,” she said, and she put up a hand in front of Korrie’s chest.

  “What?” Korrie said.

  “Do you feel that?” Erin turned her head.

  “What?” Korrie looked up at her.

  “That must be the wind,” she said and faced it. “That’s the way out, Squid.”

  Goosebumps prickled along her bare arms. Relief rolled through her, and she felt almost certain inside. The light of the phone blundered along the walls as they charged toward the current. From a narrow side passage, moving air brushed Erin’s arms.

  “Here we go,” she said.

  At the end of the passage, a decrepit black lattice, crosshatches of charcoal, hung aslant. Erin rushed to it and kicked it down. Korrie approached from behind her and said, “You did it, Mommy.”

  They climbed over the splintered sections, out of the tunnel, and stepped into a frozen, decimated burnout. The cold of twilight seemed to suck the life out of Erin’s bones. Before them in the feeble light lay a blasted landscape, the ground covered not with snow, but with the dry char that follows a devastating forest fire; no snow-burdened trees, but only black spires bristling over the surrounding hillsides—burnt trunks of bare aspen and pine, all spikes of carbon. The forest around the mine was utterly destroyed.