“I’m cold,” Luke says, beside me.
“I know,” I tell him. “I’m sorry.”
The snow has returned and although it’s coming down slowly, it’s lying on our hats and gloves and coats, on the masks covering our faces. I’m worried about how deeply it might penetrate, not to mention how much colder that might make us feel as night falls.
“We’re covered in snow again,” I say, giving my head a shake. Before I can help Luke brush off his hat, he lifts his hand to do just that. “Wait, be careful of your—”
“Ow,” he says, bumping his injury.
Poor Luke.
While he’s hunched forward, trying to recover, I look uphill to check the dark section of forest again. I’m almost certain it’s something manmade.
“What do you think of that dark area, up there?” I ask. “Does it seem like a building, or just a clump of trees?”
Luke lifts his head in the direction I’m pointing, and although it takes longer than one might expect, he answers. “Can’t tell.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure it’s something. Even if it’s only trees, it might help protect us from the snow. Let’s keep going that way.”
Luke groans about the pain in his head and mutters something about revenge and how I don’t like him anymore.
“I need your help,” is all I say, and when I step forward, he comes with me.
“This sucks,” he says under his breath.
“I agree,” I tell him, and he gives me a dirty look, the same kind he used to when he was being pissy as a kid.
We walk, Luke stumbles, we walk some more. When we finally get closer, I’m at last able to say something good. “It’s a building. Really, it is.”
Except, the place looks less and less impressive the nearer we get. Eventually, we arrive, as the air is turning a smoky shade of purple and the shadows are casting long blue bruises over the snow. It’s some kind of shack, old and dilapidated.
Luke seems thoroughly unenthused, but he knocks at the rotting door anyway.
“Luke, there’s no one home. Can you help me get this door open?”
We force our way inside and are greeted by an awful smell, something dank and musty and unnamable.
Luke chokes beside me and I worry he might get sick again. “It reeks in here,” he says, his voice muffled by the glove he’s holding over his nose and mouth. “What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know. Rotting leaves and stuff, I guess.” I hope.
Luke coughs a couple of times before speaking again. “I don’t even care. I just want to sleep. Is there a bed or something?”
“Um, I doubt it?”
He turns to me, wordless, and I’m sure I’ve hurt his feelings. I make it worse by saying, “I still don’t think sleeping’s a good idea, anyway.” Even I’m beginning to think I’m the cruelest beast ever.
“Are you serious? Why not?”
“Because of your concussion and because we might freeze if we don’t stay active.”
“I have a concussion?” he asks, irritation slanting his tone. In the lowlight, I see him touch his head. “Ow. Damn it. I don’t care, I want to sleep.”
“But I’m not really sure…”
“God, Layla. Please.” He turns to me again, his face a shadow, his eyes misty and dark behind the goggles. My heart breaks a little for the guy. He’s suffering.
“Listen,” he tells me, lowering himself to the floor—if whatever’s below us constitutes a floor. “I’ve had concussions before. I slept…and I didn’t die.”
I make not a single remark about stating the obvious.
“Maybe they woke me up…don’t know,” he says, “but I’m fine.”
I can’t agree with the “fine” part, although I do agree to the naps. I watch him struggle for several minutes, trying to find a comfortable position, until, wordlessly, I sit cross-legged beside him on the decaying, once-wooden floor, and guide his head into my lap. He doesn’t seem to notice, so I take it a step further: I stroke the back of his head until his breathing changes, becomes deeper. Someone needs to take care of him, and I’m the only one here to do it.
I settle into a slumped-over version of my own dozing, punctuated with rough head jerks into awareness, which help me remember to wake Luke. I make him get up a handful of times, so we can shake the creeping cold from our hands and feet and pace around a bit. Also, so he can continue not dying.
Later, I awaken with a jolt. The darkness around us is complete; it seems to have a mass of its own. I’ve slept longer than I meant to and I can’t be sure, but I think I just heard something scurry by. I hope I’m wrong. My entire body hurts, like a single bright point of pain, and it doesn’t help that Luke and I are half-coiled around one another, our positions stiff and cramped. He groans as I extract myself from our tangled embrace.
“Luke,” I whisper, flexing the tingles from my fingers and toes, forcing my aching arms and legs to stretch. “Luke, you’d better wake up.”
He mumbles a few things that sound like curse words and keeps dropping back into sleep until I finally start pulling on him, trying to make him sit up.
“What the fuck?” he shouts and I know he’s awake.
“Luke, I’m sorry. I was afraid to let you keep sleeping.”
“Layla? What’s going on?”
I sigh; I can’t help it. We’ve danced this tango more than once tonight. “Luke, we were in an accident in your truck, and now we’re stuck in the woods.”
“My truck?”
“Accident. Remember?”
“No, but…God, it’s so cold. Wait, where’s my truck?”
“On the slope of the mountain, upside down.”
“What? Shit, are you okay?”
I’ve nearly forgotten about my arm; its throbbing pain has melded with all my miserable, half-frozen, bitterly complaining muscles. “I hurt my arm a little, but I’m fine. Anyway, you’re the one with the concussion. That’s why I keep waking you.”
“Concussion?” Luke goes silent and I tug on him, worried he’s going back to sleep. “Okay,” he says, his voice subdued.
I stand and, slowly, he climbs to his feet beside me. Then, he asks what we’re supposed to do.
“Move around, I guess. That’s what we’ve been doing.” I wish I had a better answer, but it’s been the same, each time.
I open the door with his help and we head outside into fresher air and scant, watered-down moonlight. Night has established itself by now, grown solid and certain.
“I don’t know how long we slept this time,” I explain, feeling that I’ve pretty much failed at my guard duty.
“Should we sleep more?” Hope lifts Luke’s voice, and I realize how much better he sounds, like he’s coming back into focus. My chest expands and I take my first deep breath since the accident.
“No sleep, not yet,” I say. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Yeah, but I could still sleep.”
“Well, we need to walk first, to get our blood flowing. Let’s try your phone, too.”
I pull Luke’s cell from my backpack and turn it on. “It’s two a.m.,” I tell him, “still no signal, and the battery’s a little more than a quarter drained. I’ll turn it off again, but should I keep holding onto it?”
Luke nods, winces, and reaches up to where the cut is on his head. “What the hell am I wearing?”
“Ski mask.”
“No, under that.”
“Oh. Thigh high.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. It’s currently a bandage, and it’s working. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’m freezing and I’d rather not die out here, so could we please take our walk?”
I grab Luke’s hand out of habit and his body stiffens beside me.
I freeze, likewise, unsure if I should let go or just ignore the whole hand-holding thing, pretend it isn’t happening. Instead, I address it, head on. “Listen, we’ve been doing this to help prevent a fall. Anyway, I’m not hitting on you, so no worries about ups
etting…your girlfriend.” I can’t say Marissa’s name aloud without adding a certain tone, so I don’t say it at all.
Luke makes a sound in his throat and takes the first step forward, changing our grip to thread his gloved fingers through mine.
We walk, and after we’ve stumbled for the third time in as many minutes, he says, “Pretty sure she isn’t, anymore.”
“Um, what?”
He crouches down to rub the shin he’s just caught on a branch, and stands back up again, gripping his head. “I’m tired of being in pain.”
I’d offer to rub his leg for him, but…no. Awkward. “You were saying?”
“…Huh? Oh, right. She’s not my girlfriend, not if she got the message.”
“You broke up with her in a message?”
“I told her to her face. She just never seems to get what I’m saying, you know?”
“I kind of do.” I think of Evan, but I don’t bring him up.
We resume our walk and Luke tries to steer us back toward the shack too soon. I guide us away again.
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to go on this ski trip,” he says. “That Snow Ball thing…”
I wait for him to continue. He doesn’t. “You mean the dance last Friday?”
“Hmm? Yeah, that. Did you go?”
“Me? No way.”
“Exactly. Marissa wanted to go and I just…couldn’t. I kept telling her she should ask someone else, but when she finally figured out I was serious…she lost it. She’s been calling me ever since, trying to break my eardrums.”
“Mm.” I don’t commit to a comment.
“You think I’m a jerk?”
A quick, surprised breath slips from my throat. “No. To be honest, I think she is.”
“Oh.” He turns to me. “You know her?”
“Unfortunately. She seems to detest me more than her average victim.”
Luke lowers his head. “She knows about us…that we were really close. She’s the kind of person who would be jealous.”
Pain billows inside me and flows right out of my mouth. “Despite the fact that it’s no longer true, you mean.”
Luke’s head lifts; he looks at me. His masked face is pale gray in the moonlight, darker gray in the shadowy places. I wait for him to say something, because it seems like he wants to, but he starts walking again instead, giving a gentle swing to our linked hands. “Look at us now, though.” He lets the joke fall flat, and I don’t think either of us smiles.
We turn back and when we near the shack’s door, I slide my hand from his. “You go ahead. Try to sleep and I’ll wake you in a bit.”
“Okay.” He goes inside by himself and I wait, searching for stars behind nighttime clouds.
♦ ♦ ♦
When my eyes open, my body is shivering, covered with goosebumps under my layers of clothing. My fingers and toes are numb. That can’t be good.
I move and a wave of nausea hits me. Also not good, but maybe to be expected, since I’ve only had one granola bar and some water since yesterday’s accident.
A feeble kind of sunlight shows through the numerous cracks and holes in the shack’s walls. I pull off my goggles and mask, sick of the claustrophobic feeling they give me, and look around, blinking. The place, its recesses and corners filled with lumpy, misshapen shadows, is even more frightening in the daytime.
Last night, I got tired of waiting out in the cold, lonely dark, so after a while, I came inside to the mustier dark, which was just as cold and just as lonely, even though Luke was never more than a few feet from me.
I wake Luke for the ninth or tenth, or maybe the twentieth time since we stopped to rest. I’ve lost count.
He barely stirs when I push at his shoulder and I worry about how long I’ve let him sleep. I prod him some more, until finally he turns to me: silent, absent. Once he seems to register that he’s awake, he sits up with a visible shiver, and his hand goes to his head. “Ow,” he says once again, his face crinkling in pain. He’s given up commenting on the thigh high, though I’ve seen him trace its shape through the ski mask a couple of times.
“How’s your head today?” I ask.
“Bad.”
He seems to awaken another degree, lowering his hand from his injury and pulling off his goggles. Confusion tangles in his eyes.
“We were in an accident in your truck,” I answer proactively, “and I’m pretty sure you have a concussion.”
“I remember. Or, I remember you said so. But…what are we going to do?”
“That’s a good question, except I don’t have an answer. …Defrosting might be a nice place to start. How are your extremities?”
“My what?” He draws back, like I’ve said something wrong. I’m pretty sure I haven’t.
“Fingers and toes, Luke. Mine are numb. And yours?”
“Oh. Fingers and toes. All right, I guess. Hang on, numb isn’t good, Layla. You have to get your blood flowing.” He sits up straighter, trying hard to hold my gaze. The effort alone appears painful.
I stagger to my feet. “Ouch. Okay, my toes aren’t entirely numb.”
“That’s a start.”
I nod in agreement and warn Luke not to laugh while I shake out my hands and kick my feet in the dim space. It takes some actual effort before the tingles begin returning. More pain is a good sign, in this case.
Luke stands—a slow, uncomfortable-looking process—and after I finish pushing back the last remnants of my numbness, he helps me open the door, the hinges of which have loosened from our use. It became increasingly difficult to move throughout the night and, this morning, it hardly wants to budge at all.
Together, we make our way outside to find heavy clouds obscuring the newly risen sun. At least the snow hasn’t returned.
Dusky as it is, Luke holds his hands above his eyes to shield them. “Too bright.”
I dig into the front pocket of my backpack. “Here.” I hold out my hand with a pair of sunglasses resting in it. They’re not just any sunglasses; these are vintage cat-eye sunglasses that Nina found for me in a store on South Street in Philly.
He peeks at the glasses, still cowering from the sunlight, and squints back up at me. His face might be mostly covered by a mask, but I can read the frown in his eyes as easily as when we were little.
“Take it or leave it, buddy,” I say.
“Fine, but if anyone hears about this, I’ll know who blabbed.”
“Is that a veiled threat?”
“No, it’s an open one, buddy.”
While Luke dons my sunglasses and adjusts his goggles to fit over them, I rub my legs and arms, trying to chase away the remaining stiffness. The pain in my injured forearm has been ratcheting up by degrees ever since I started moving; this activity only makes it ache more.
“The snow is still so bright,” I hear Luke say as I peel back my sticky coat sleeve to check on my cut. I loosened the scarf yesterday, worried I’d lose circulation otherwise, but haven’t touched it since. This time, when I adjust the fabric, it pulls on my skin enough to restart the bleeding.
Luke’s sharp inhale makes me look up. He’s staring at my arm. “That’s from the accident?”
“Looks worse than it feels,” I lie. “There was broken glass all over the place, but I don’t think it was sharp enough to do this. Maybe it was part of the bent window frame or something.”
He steps closer and takes my arm carefully in his grasp, lifting it to get a better look. “It could’ve hit an artery.”
“But it didn’t,” I say, tugging back some on my arm, “and it’s not all that deep, either.”
“It’s deep enough,” he says, resisting my tugs, “and it could get infected; you need antibiotics. We should tighten this scarf, too.”
“No way. You practically made it into a tourniquet, yesterday.” I push his hands back and pull my arm from his grasp. “It was weird, though,” I say, looking up at him. “You were kind of fuzzy after the accident, but then you got worse before you started getti
ng better. It scared me.” I don’t tell him how much.
“Maybe I do have a concussion. They can be like that, I guess.” He lifts a shoulder, lets it fall, winces when it does. “I’ll be fine.”
“Well, you would know, right? You said you’ve had them before.”
“I did?”
I nod, but he says nothing more.
With Luke’s help, I rewrap my injury, happy to hide it from his concerned gaze. I pull on my mask and goggles, swing my backpack into place with my good arm, and automatically reach for his hand.
He stares down at my outstretched glove and looks up at me in silence.
“Oh.” I yank my hand back. “Guess we can stop doing that. You’re not dizzy anymore, right?” I turn away, rolling my eyes at myself, and walk ahead.
Great. He probably thinks I’ve been using his impaired consciousness to come onto him.
“Wait up.”
I glance Luke’s way when he reaches my side. He’s breathing kind of unevenly and looks a little off-kilter. “Are you okay?”
“Been better.”
Maybe he’s feeling dizzy again, but I’m afraid to ask. I don’t want him to think I’m still trying to hold hands.
Five
What the Light Shows
Ican’t decide whether I’m starving or nauseated. Both seems like the appropriate answer.
Luke’s just offered me some of his beef jerky, which my vegetarian brain considered for what felt like a long time, before declining. I did accept some peanuts, but only because I gave Luke my remaining two granola bars last night, which means I’m officially out of food. I also gave him the majority of my bottled water, so when he suggests I share one of his Gatorades, I take him up on that offer, too. My hunger decreases as a result, but the nausea rises.
My shivering has also returned, and the numbness has found its way back into my fingers and toes, even though we’ve been actively climbing the mountain for an hour or more. Luke hasn’t complained much about the cold, so I don’t mention my situation. There isn’t anything he could do about it, anyway.
Picturing You Page 4