It hit her again, how desperate their circumstances were. No water. No food left. They hadn’t had a meal in nearly three days. They were getting weaker, or at least she was. Simon was wounded and needed to rest his leg. They’d never get out of the country if he didn’t heal.
Oh, Dad.
Mia wanted to curl up on the floor of the boxcar and go back to sleep. She forced herself to stand. She stretched out her legs, brushing the bits of dead leaves and grass from her clothes.
Simon had slid to the floor by the doorway with his left foot on his right knee, examining his leg. She crawled over to him.
“Simon! It looks terrible!” The blood was dried and dark, the nasty line of the wound black at the center. Around it, his shin was purple and swollen, the skin pulled tight. “Is it infected?”
“Not badly, not yet. The redness is only around the wound itself. I think the swelling and bruising could be from the trauma, and from walking on it.”
“You’ve got to rest.”
There was a silence. Simon shook his head and sighed. “Yeah, I’m afraid so. I need to elevate it.” He leaned his head back against the door edge, as if he didn’t have the energy to hold it up anymore. Mia sat down beside him, her legs dangling toward the rails.
“I need to go look for food and water.”
His head swiveled to her, sharp. “No, Mia, uh-uh. No way are you going alone.”
“But we’ve got to get something to eat and drink. Maybe I can find something.”
“Like what? A grocery store? McDonald’s?” He closed his eyes.
Really, Simon? Is being right and in charge more important to you than being alive? Mia caught herself. She remembered what she had learned last night: He was being a jerk because he felt helpless. They couldn’t afford the time or energy to fight about this.
“Water, at least. We really need water.”
Simon still had his eyes closed, as if it was too much effort to keep them open. Resting against the doorframe, her tough, athletic brother looked utterly spent. If she didn’t get water, his leg might get really infected. He needed her help.
“Simon, we don’t have any choice.”
He opened his eyes, his face stony, resisting.
“Listen, I’ll stay on the tracks, or within sight of them. We haven’t seen a single sign of anyone since we left the road. And remember, I look Korean. And I’ve got the badge. If I see someone — which isn’t going to happen —” she added quickly as he flinched, “but in the highly unlikely event that I see someone, I’ll pretend I’m mute or something.”
“Jeez, Mia, no! N-O. It’s too dangerous.”
She was on her feet now, facing him. “Simon, it’s already dangerous. Look at you.” She gestured to the woods around them, keeping her eyes on his. “I’ve got to go. You can’t stop me.”
He calculated, the emotions playing over his features. Finally, he turned away, let out a breath. “One hour. You have to be back here in one hour, whether you find anything or not.”
Mia nodded and collected both their water bottles. They checked that their watches were synchronized. 7:46 a.m.
She started down the tracks, turning once to wave at Simon. From this distance, he looked small and alone, sitting in the opening of the dilapidated boxcar. Mia wanted to run back to him, but she turned to the tracks, to her quest.
Her head felt woozy, with a faint ringing in her ears. Walking was more like floating, her body curiously weightless. The colored leaves were brilliant in the early morning light. It was beautiful, but it felt completely different from being in the woods behind their house in Connecticut or finding a path through the forest in Quest. Instead, it seemed strange and sinister that the day could be so lovely when they were in such terrible trouble.
She moved as quickly as she could, peering from side to side for any signs of a stream. There had to be water around here somewhere.
After she’d walked for about ten minutes, she caught a flash of movement to the left, just past her vision. She froze, swiveling her head in a broad circle, surveying the woods.
She waited, holding her breath. Nothing moved.
She made herself move forward. If she was in real danger, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. One step, then another. Nothing seemed to be following.
At twenty-eight minutes, she found it. Water, flowing right under the tracks and down to her left, carving a thin slice out of the hillside.
It was a beautiful stream, a perfect stream, a burbling, babbling brook right out of a fairy tale. She’d never seen anything more lovely. She knelt on the grass below the tracks and plunged her hands into the flow. She splashed handfuls of icy water on her face, then drank big gulps, only admitting at that moment how thirsty she had been.
Hurry. She took out the two water bottles and filled them to the brim. She should have brought the bloody cloth to wash. Well, they had water, that was miracle enough.
She checked her watch. 8:17. She’d been gone thirty-one minutes. She calculated. She wouldn’t need quite as much time for the return trip because she wouldn’t be wasting time searching. If she followed the stream downhill for just a few minutes, maybe she’d find something they could eat. Anything. Wild berries. A tree with nuts. That’s what people were always eating in wilderness stories.
Mia grasped branches and saplings as she made her way downstream, crossing back and forth on rocks, careful not to slip and fall. She scanned the ground cover, the bushes, the foliage. Some of these wild plants must be edible, but she wouldn’t know them if she saw them. And she wasn’t ready to try tree bark.
Thirty-four minutes. Just ahead, the stream curved to the left, out of sight behind the trees. She’d go just around the bend. If there was nothing, she’d start back.
There, around the turn, was a crumbling low wall and a gnarled tree. And high in the tree among the nearly bare branches, a few orange dots shone against the bright blue sky. Mia blinked and shaded her eyes. Still there. Round, orange dots.
Her eyes swam, looking up into the sun. She shook her head to clear it. How could there be a tree with fruit in a country where people were starving?
The wall was a disintegrating pile of stones and packed mud. Beyond it was a structure of earthen walls. Once a one-room shed, now missing its roof. Nearby, another crumbling wall surrounded a larger building. A farmhouse with a porch. Pieces of straw matting still clung to the damaged roof. Clearly no one lived here anymore.
But the fruit was still there up in the tree. Maybe fifteen or twenty pieces, squat and round, like bright orange tomatoes. She’d seen those before, on the October pages of Korean calendar paintings: country boys perched in the trees picking the fruit, while girls waited below with their skirts held open to catch the harvest. Persimmons.
Maybe she could climb the tree.
No, she’d run out of time. But this was food. A few fallen persimmons lay scattered on the ground. She could come back later to get the rest.
Mia scooped up the fruit from the ground. Three pieces were split, and one was half-mashed, but she slipped them into the empty outer pocket of her backpack. Bits of the persimmon flesh clung to her fingers. She licked them clean. It tasted like the best thing she had ever eaten.
Then she ran.
Up the stream bed, splashing a little in the water, hanging onto branches to keep herself from falling. She got to the tracks, panting. 8:27. She had nineteen minutes to travel a distance that had taken her twenty-eight. She was already out of breath. She couldn’t run anymore.
She took long strides, moving along the rails as quickly as she could. The distance seemed so much longer than it had coming. Eleven minutes left. Seven. How far was she from the boxcar?
At 8:45 she called out, “Simon! It’s okay! I’m coming!” But she couldn’t get enough breath to make her voice loud. He’d never hear her. But someone else might.
Mia made herself run again, her legs rubber. Her heart beat painfully against the walls of her chest. Her breath was rag
ged, tearing her throat.
Then, finally, there was the boxcar. Simon wasn’t in the doorway. Where was he? She stumbled to the edge of the doorway, gasping.
Simon was lying on the floor, turned on his side away from her. Not waiting and worrying. She could have walked instead of killing herself running.
Then she realized that he was asleep. A little zipper of fear ran through her. If Simon were well, he would have been watching for her. Counting the minutes. Angry when she was late. To have passed out at a time like this meant he must be completely overcome with exhaustion. Or weak with hunger or dehydration.
She sat watching him for a few minutes until she had her breath back. Then she shrugged out of her backpack and pulled out one of the bottles of water.
“Simon?” He stirred but didn’t wake. Mia got on her knees and reached over to gently shake his arm. “Simon, wake up. I found water.”
He grunted and turned over onto his back. As his hurt leg hit the floor, he moaned. He raised his head and looked at her, as if through a haze. “Huh?”
“Water. I got water.” She held out the bottle. He reached his hand out to take it, but his eyes closed and his head went back to the floor. Her heart pounded. This was bad.
She shifted closer to him and unscrewed the cap. With one hand she lifted his head, put the bottle to his lips, and let a little water trickle into his mouth.
That woke him. His eyes opened, and he raised himself on one elbow, took the bottle, and drank. Mia watched with satisfaction as he downed half the container. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, sat up, and scooted back to rest against the wall of the boxcar. At least he was awake.
“Whew, I needed that. So you found something.”
A smile spread slowly across her face. “A stream. And more.” She unzipped the outer pocket of her pack and pulled the flaps open to display the fruit.
“What’s that?”
“Persimmons.”
“Wow, Mia, seriously?”
She pulled off a mashed piece and held it out. “Try it.”
Simon dipped a finger into the pulp and licked off the dab. His eyes widened.
They ate all five persimmons, every bit of flesh and skin, licking around the stems, spitting out the few seeds. The pulp was soft, deeply sweet and tart at the same time, with a kind of puckery aftertaste. It was heavenly, eating.
“There’s some still up in the tree.” She told Simon all the details of the stream and the abandoned farmhouse. “It’s about a thirty-minute walk, but we can eat the persimmons and use the house for shelter. We’ll have all the water we need while you rest your leg. And then, when your leg is better, there must be a path from the house that goes somewhere.”
The sun was high overhead by the time they reached the farmhouse, Simon leaning on a stick Mia had found for him. Everything was still there. The stream. The persimmon tree. The crumbling walls. Following Simon as he limped into the overgrown yard, Mia was grateful she wasn’t alone. It was the kind of place that made her think of ghosts.
Now that she wasn’t in such a desperate hurry, there was time to examine the farmhouse. It consisted of a single room with a raised wooden porch under an overhang. A door hung at an angle off one hinge. Inside, wooden rafters framed the sky where sections of the thatched roof were missing. Fixed up, the structure would have looked a lot like the carved box the Ministry officials had presented as a gift.
“Kinda small, isn’t it?” Simon said, letting himself down slowly onto the edge of the porch.
“In farmers’ houses, the whole family lived in one room.” Mia remembered the pictures she’d pored over in a book at Korean school. They showed traditional homes — from peasant cottages to royal palaces — with layouts like little maps, with all the details of how the houses were built and how people lived. “They’d eat in here, sleep in here, everything. They didn’t have any furniture, just quilts they folded up in the corner. A table that was carried in to eat on. That door would have been covered with rice paper, to keep the wind out but let a little light in.” She pointed to a passage to the right of the porch, under a lean-to roof. “And that’s the kitchen. See that clay shelf with the hole in it? I think it goes under the house, like an oven. They’d build a fire to cook with and it would also heat the floor of the room.”
Simon winced as he lifted his leg to the porch. Mia hurried to help him. He leaned back against the porch pillar, jaw muscles clenched. She bit her lip.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?”
“I just need to rest.” He sounded completely drained. Mia climbed onto the porch and stepped gingerly into the room. She knelt and ran her hands over the section of the clay floor that wasn’t cracked and crumbling.
“I think you can lie down in here. There’s still some shelter.” She moved into the corner. “We can sleep here. Even if it rains.”
“It sure is tiny. But it must have been a good place to live.” Simon’s voice sounded faint, half asleep, as he gazed out at the view. “It’s facing south, so they got sun all day.”
The farmhouse perched on an open hillside, looking across at other tree-covered hills. The stream ran along the field behind the house, tumbling down toward a small valley. Everything was overgrown now, but there must have once been a few terraced plots for corn or vegetables.
“I wonder why they left,” Mia said.
“Dad said people got sent off to labor camps for doing anything against the regime,” Simon said. “Like hoarding food. Or being accused of it. And people starved to death, whole families.”
She made a moan of protest, imagining the skeletons of a farmer, his wife, and his children in this space.
But Simon was shaking his head. “People who have crops, fruit trees, a whole forest to hunt in, they’re going to be the last ones to starve to death. They might go hungry in the winter, but there’s always something to eat. The really desperate ones were in the towns and cities.” His head dropped back against the pillar, as if that bit of thinking had used up all the energy he had.
Mia stepped back into the room and used her hands to sweep a corner clear of dust, dried leaves, and crumbled clay. Then she helped Simon onto the floor, propping his head on his rolled-up backpack. He leaned forward, hissing through clenched teeth as he pulled the cuff of his jeans up over his shin.
Everything about his injury looked worse. The redness was a deeper scarlet, the swollen skin shiny where it pulled tighter, the bruising darker. A disaster zone.
“Nice.” Simon’s tone was grim.
“We have to wash it. With the soap.”
“What it really needs is heat. And raising it up, that will help with the pain, maybe the swelling…. But first I just need to sleep….” He lay back, spent, his hurt leg bent, foot on the floor.
Fear flickered in her stomach. Simon’s wound was getting worse, not better. He was losing strength. She knew that people could die of blood poisoning from infected cuts.
If only they could trade places. Simon would be so much better at handling this. But it was up to her to figure something out. Or they were both doomed.
Out in the yard Mia found a large rock with a flat top. Squatting, she got her fingers underneath it and gradually pried it out of the ground. She brushed off the dirt, then lugged it across the yard and into the room next to Simon.
“Here, I’m going to put this under your foot.” He grimaced as she lifted his heel and placed it on the rock. His foot was raised up about six or seven inches. Maybe it would help a little.
He mumbled, already drifting off.
Mia could feel the beginning of panic at the edges of her brain. Do something. Keep busy.
Their water bottles were empty. Kneeling by the stream, she filled them. She splashed cold water on her face again and again. She needed to stay alert.
She washed Simon’s cut. He winced a lot and sucked in his breath, but he let her clean it. She managed to soak some of the scab off and get the cut to bleed a little. But it wasn’t enough. Like Sim
on said, it needed hot water.
She’d found water. The next step was to find a way to heat it.
She examined the layout of the lean-to kitchen. She’d been right, there was a firepit. The woods around the farmhouse were full of kindling. They had matches, and paper from Simon’s magazines.
All she needed was a vessel that could hold water and withstand heat. All they had was two plastic water bottles, a container of hand sanitizer, and a tiny bottle of shampoo. Nothing that wouldn’t melt.
Maybe she could make something. Some kind of pot, out of whatever she could find around the farm. She might be able to mix dirt and water into clay. But that would take ages to dry, and she needed the hot water as soon as possible.
She could try weaving something. She gathered handfuls of long dry weeds and some twigs. She was the arts and crafts camper; she understood the basic principle of over and under, over and under. But nothing would stay together long enough to be woven. She threw down the mess in exasperation.
She needed something that would hold a round shape. When she took Simon’s knife from the pocket of his jeans, he didn’t even stir. She yanked her mind back from the fear to her task.
Mia cut three U-shaped lengths of some woody vines. Back on the porch, she hit on the idea of lacing their middles together with some tough pieces of grass. The brittle strands of grass kept breaking until she tried braiding several into a rope. Finally, she had a claw shape, with six long fingers tied together at the bottom. Two more curved stems formed a circle at the widest point, which she lashed to the ribs. Then another smaller circle to connect them at the top. A skeleton of a bowl.
It seemed to take forever to weave the grasses in and out through the vines to fill in the bowl. How had ancient people managed to survive, when everything took so long to make? Of course they had nothing but time. Mia was working against the ticking bomb of Simon’s infection.
The final vessel was lopsided and scraggly. Pieces of grass stuck out in every direction. And there were holes, lots of holes. No way was it going to hold water. She could line it with mud. But then the water would get dirty. Mia sat back on her heels, hands covering her face. Her stifled scream came out in a long moan.
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