by Andrew Pyper
He looks one way and sees us. Looks the other way and sees the dog.
We never get to three.
64
JERRY COMES AT US FASTER than I would have thought his injuries would allow. I get in front of Bridge and widen my stance, preparing myself for the blow, then see from where he’s looking that he doesn’t care about reaching me or Bridge. It’s the door at the end of the hall he’s going for.
Bridge is ahead of me. She would have made it to the door before any of us if Jerry hadn’t shoved her against the wall as he passed. It doesn’t take her down though. She regains her footing and has caught up to him by the time it takes me to reach my top hopping, jumping pace.
My target isn’t the door. It’s Jerry. I launch myself at him, grabbing for any part to hold on to. My fingers pull into fists, gripping the fabric of his untucked shirt along with folds of his skin, and throw him behind me.
Bridge slams into the door. Tries the handle.
“It’s locked!”
I think of the different ways to numerically express Dad’s birthdate. Month, day, year? Day, month, year?
“Enter 07041951. See the keypad?”
She presses some buttons. “Didn’t work. What’s the number?”
“July fourth, 1951. Dad’s birthday.” I say the numbers again.
Bridge finishes the sequence. Pulls on the door. It eases open with a depressurizing whoosh, popping my ears.
“Go!” I shout at her when she looks back.
She slips out the door and it seals shut again.
I suppose it’s relief in knowing that Bridge is free, that at least she is out of Jerry’s reach even if there’s only the enormous forest waiting for her outside of the cave—whatever it is, the exhaustion hits me now, a few feet short of the door. I wouldn’t move if I didn’t hear the dog behind me. The animal paused, watching the three of us struggling against each other and now seeing the two wounded humans left behind.
It was the body that pushed me forward when I was in the pod room. But it’s the mind that does it now.
You’re so close.
I take a dainty skip with my good leg.
You can let all of it go on the other side.
Another skip. Another and another and I’m there.
The door sucks open with a blast of fresh air, hard as water. Something is behind me—the dog, a rush of motion, the sense of weight about to crash into me—and I squeeze myself through the gap. The door clicks shut.
“The number worked on this one too,” Bridge says. She’s standing by the external keypad, blinking the sweat from her eyes.
A soft thump against the door.
“Open it.”
Jerry’s face. Three inches from mine through the porthole window’s glass. Not shouting, not reasoning. He’s giving me an order.
“Open the door, Aaron.”
I keep my shoulder to the metal surface. Stare at Jerry through the glass, his skin pallid and buttery.
“Let me the fuck out!”
There’s no refusal other than my staying still. Jerry reads it in me before I’m certain of it myself. I won’t open the door. There is no order or plea I will listen to. A realization that brings a nauseous smile to his lips.
“I read the file. I know who you were before. I know,” he says through the glass.
I look past him and he turns to see the dog approaching. It holds its head higher than before, nourished and emboldened.
Jerry turns back to the window and I can see him consider begging me to help him, but he changes his mind. There’s no way he can stop the fear from showing. But he can keep his mouth shut.
Even so, he appears about to say something when the dog scrambles forward and rips into the back of his leg. After that there are only his screams.
The door trembles. When I peer through the porthole again, Jerry is down on the floor, the animal upon him.
“Can you walk?” Bridge asks.
“I’ll be faster if you hold my elbow.”
She cradles my arm in both her hands and the two of us start up the concrete stairs. I came down the same stairs only two days ago but it feels like months. It makes me think how Belfountain, as with all fairy-tale places, is no more constrained by time than by geography. The characters in those stories—Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella—the way they existed as only names on paper prevented us from feeling the horror they would have experienced as they were enslaved, imprisoned, baked into pies.
A whistle.
Not the kind made with pursed lips, but a sports whistle, loud and shrill. The one left for Jerry as a gift and that he’d put in his pocket.
I wait for the dog to growl or whine before silencing him, but there’s only the abrupt interruption of the whistle, then nothing.
65
IF WE HAVE A CHANCE of getting out, it’s now. We could try to go back to the fake house to find the gun. But I don’t know how to get there. We could spend hours wandering around before we found it. There’s a good chance we never would.
Eventually, the dog’s hunger will return.
Eventually, it will come for us.
We stumble through the camp and into the forest to join the trail again, start back toward the lodge. When we get there, we see where Jerry had been digging at the twins’ graves, a group of smaller piles of soil next to the two larger ones. We proceed into the lodge where I pull a quarter-full jug of orange juice from the fridge, and then the two of us walk out through the smashed wall of glass.
Bridge takes a drink. Hands the jug back to me. The juice is too sweet, too cold, too good. And then I remember that I’m still alive.
“You found Mom,” Bridge says once we start out along the road.
“Yes.”
“She wasn’t who we thought she was. She knew.”
“Yes.”
“What about the Tall Man?”
“He’s gone. They’re all gone.”
“The dog?”
“It’ll come for us. But we’ve got a little time, I think.”
When we reach the fence, I tell Bridge that if it’s still electrified I might not get up again after I touch it. If that’s how it goes, she shouldn’t stay with me but go back to the lodge. Secure the food, barricade herself in one of the rooms. Wait for help.
“Sure,” she says. But she’s only agreeing because there’s no point in arguing. She knows there’s no help coming. Either we get out now or we never do.
I walk up and place both hands against the metal.
There’s a tremor in my arms, but it’s only me, anticipating the jolt that doesn’t come. I slip my fingers through the holes. Then I pull back hard to the left.
“Still locked,” I tell Bridge, looking up at the barbed wire. “There’s one thing I want to try.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve climbed a fence. Not that I remember having ever done it; it’s only how my body feels pulling itself up while negotiating the too-small footholds and finger locks that tells me I have. Once at the top, I use my free hand to pull the pruning shears from my pocket.
The wire isn’t thick. Clamping the blades firmly around a point is half of the challenge, and pressing through the cut without the sharp burrs gouging into my face is the other.
I can only do it with my right hand. Soon my left is numb, and my bad ankle won’t stay in the hole in the fence, so I have to choose between coming down again or falling. Whatever cuts I’ve managed so far will have to be enough.
“Watch out,” I call down to Bridge before letting the shears drop to the ground.
I start dividing the wire to the sides. When it has yielded the widest gap I’m ever going to get—a couple of feet, no more—my hand is so bloodied it looks like I wear a single, shining glove.
I pull myself onto the top of the fence. Shimmy into the gap between the razor wire, the sharp ends snagging into my skin on both sides. When I’m halfway, I hold myself in position as firmly as I’m able.
“Climb up,” I tel
l Bridge. “Up and over me.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Do it.”
I’m worried she’s going to refuse. But then the fence is shaking, and I have to hold on hard as she makes it up to where I am.
“Put one leg over me so that you’re sitting up on my back,” I say.
“The wire—it’s in you—”
“I’m all right. Can you do it?”
She doesn’t answer. She’s doing it.
“Ow!” The burrs find her on the way up and again at the top “Ow!”
“Now slide over to the other side.”
“I’ll fall!”
“Hold on to me with your one hand. Your foot will find the fence if you lean over far enough. I won’t let you fall.”
When her foot comes into view, I guide it into a hold in the fence. Bridge slides over my back until her other leg is free. Then she grips my jacket and lowers herself until she can hold the fence on her own. I watch her scramble down to the ground. Once she’s there, she looks up at me.
“Now you,” she says.
“It’s going to be messy.”
“You’re already messy.”
I try to climb down the other side head first. My hips are barely past the top bar and I’m tumbling through air.
The meeting of body and ground takes my breath away. For a good while all I do is try to find the air again, coax it down my throat until my lungs accept it.
“Does it hurt a lot?” Bridge says.
“Not much.”
This is true. It may ultimately be a bad sign, but for now there isn’t much more than a burning here and there on my skin that I keep waiting to dull but never does.
“Look,” Bridge says.
The old woman stands on the other side of the fence. Maybe she followed us here and only now arrived. Maybe she was here the whole time, watching.
She makes no appeal to be released, doesn’t speak. She remains more still than the trees around her. It’s as if she had always been there. An object—pickup truck, corroded bed frame—you sometimes come upon in the woods and mistake for a living thing because it’s halfway between the two, a piece of the human past losing its identity as the vines and branches pull it deeper and deeper into the green.
OCEAN
66
NEITHER OF US IS SURPRISED to find there’s no satellite phone inside the metal box. Even if there was, we couldn’t let whoever answered know where we were.
We walk all the way to the interstate. None of the few pickups or military vehicles that pass stop to check on us. Our hope is that we look like a problem. To inquire how we came to be shuffling along this remote road, a bloodied man and teenaged girl, would be to involve yourself in that problem. We’re counting on the self-preserving calculations that go into minding your own business.
By the time we collapse in the prickly grass next to the on-ramp, it’s almost nightfall. The highway groans behind us. We need help. We cannot ask for help. The paradox of prison escapees or refugees or wounded animals.
Bridge’s questions reach me through the near dark, and somehow because she is only a graphite silhouette, it’s easier to answer them directly. She wants to know about all the things Mom told me in the house-that-wasn’t-our-house. Who Jerry was in the life before. How we were chosen, left to drown, returned from the dead.
She doesn’t ask who I really am. She can tell I’m not ready for that, and like an actual friend, an actual sister, she lets it go.
When I’m finished, it’s dark. The passing headlights almost touch us but not quite, so that with every passing vehicle Bridge is briefly stretched out, a shadow that bends and rushes over the grass.
“I think I know why the Tall Man came after us,” she says.
“Tell me.”
“He saw us and recognized something from before. He saw a family and he wanted to be closer to it. Part of it. He was lonely, Aaron.”
I nod but I’m not sure she sees me do it. It makes me feel invisible. A spirit observing its final glimpses of the world and trying to memorize it, holding fast to the vague outline of this one person sitting next to me.
“My file,” Bridge says. “Brigit and Olivia. Neither said anything about my cancer. What do you think that means?”
“It means it’s not true.”
“Is that what you think, or what you hope?”
“I’m doing my best to make them the same thing.”
“But some of it you can’t hope away. Like me cutting myself. That part was true.”
I reach out for her but I can’t find her in the darkness. “You’re different now,” I say, and imagine casting a spell toward her through my fingertips. “You can make yourself different.”
• • •
At the earliest sky-bruising of dawn an older model Sunbird rattles onto the shoulder. An arm appears from out of the driver’s-side window, waving us over. Bridge starts toward the car. A woman’s arm, no other passengers.
“You going into the city?” the woman asks once we’re stuffed into the back seat and she starts us rolling onto the blacktop.
“Yes,” I say.
“Need a hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Any preference?”
“A busy one, I guess.”
None of us speak over the next couple hours until we reach the outerlands of the city, the sound barrier walls separating the lanes from the malls and housing developments and schools. Then the low-rise office buildings, the software developers and makers of parts that go into fighter jets and submarines.
“There’re checkpoints along here sometimes,” the woman says. “You two have ID?”
“Not me,” Bridge answers.
“I do,” I say, feeling the wallet in my back pocket but not pulling it out. “But I’m pretty sure it’s fake.”
The woman looks at me in the rearview mirror.
“Don’t tell me anything more. The less I know the better,” she says, returning her eyes to the traffic ahead. “Most days I wish I didn’t know a goddamn thing about any of this.”
A few minutes later we’re downtown, stopping on the edge of the university campus, a block from the Swedish First Hill Hospital. When we thank her, she waves at us with her fingers as if shooing away the very concept of gratitude.
“We’ve got to stick together now, right?” she says.
Once she’s driven off, I tell Bridge to wait under an elm on the Union Green. I warn her not to talk to anyone until I come back.
“Who am I going to talk to?” she says, trying a smile and getting it halfway right. “You’re the only person I know.”
• • •
In the emergency room the doctor doesn’t ask any follow-up questions when I tell her I was injured in a dog attack. A neighbor’s rottweiler that jumped the fence. She doesn’t believe me, but decides the truth isn’t necessary. There’s an administrative nurse who asks for my insurance information, and when I assure her my roommate is bringing my health card from home, she laughs in my face.
It’s a chaotic, bad-smelling place I’ve never been to before, yet this is the hospital where I worked as a surgeon. In the life I never lived I would have been treating these shouting, pain-twisted people around me, not been sitting among them, waiting my turn. I wish at least this one aspect of Mom’s made-up story had been true.
When my wounds have been swabbed and bandaged, the doctor tells me an orderly will come soon to take me to get some X-rays done. Once she pulls the curtains closed, I count to thirty and slip through them, heading right and going straight the way someone who knows where they’re going might.
There’s the certainty that my doing this will trigger an alarm. But I make my way out a side door without any of that. I might have gotten lucky. They might have been aware of my leaving but happy to see a case like mine walk away, a number they could wipe from the board.
• • •
Bridge is waiting for me. I hoped she would be but figured there were a dozen good
reasons why she’d be gone. Police spotting her and sweeping her up. Passersby noting her soiled appearance and offering help of either the genuine or false kind. There’s also the possibility that she would leave on her own.
“You’re still here,” I say.
“I didn’t stay the whole time.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I borrowed a phone. Called the police.”
“Bridge. Do you know what—”
“Not for us. And I didn’t tell them who I was. Where we were.”
I look at my sister and instead of telling me she waits for me to see it in her.
“You sent them to Belfountain,” I say. “To find the old woman.”
“Yes.”
“Because you didn’t want to leave her there.”
“No.”
Bridge starts to walk and I follow her. Part of me wants to ask her who she borrowed the phone from, if they could have reported us. Part of me knows it won’t make any difference in where we have to go next even if they had.
“How are you?” Bridge asks after a stretch of silence between us as we make our way along Pike Street toward the waterfront, the mountains a watercolor in progress.
“Aside from feeling like a pincushion covered in duct tape, I’m fine. You?”
“Tired. But I think I’ll always be tired, you know?”
We pass a group of National Guardsmen at a corner, then a similar clutch of men—not army, not cops, just uniformed militia, the official-looking patches and stripes down their pants stitched on at home—holding mismatched rifles. None of them question us. They’re too occupied by striking the right pose, trying to find the balance between menacing and bored.
At the park by the waterfront we sit on a set of concrete steps and look out over the harbor. In the distance tankers slide over the horizon as if cleaning it.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever been here before,” I say. “But the water—it’s so familiar.”
“Maybe it is.”