The Savage Wild

by Roxie Noir

She’s never done this before. Not with me, at least; the few times I’ve seen her cry she’s been angry and fighting tears the whole way, but now she just leans against me in the rain, on the side of this road, and she cries.

  I hold her. There’s nothing else I can do, no way to make this any better. All I can do is stand here, let her cry, and hope that someone else will come along who’s not a dick.

  “We’re gonna be okay,” I whisper, even though I’m not at all sure. “It’s a road, there will be more…”

  I glance over her head and my words trail off, because there are two pulsing red dots way up ahead in the road, blurry with rain.

  Flashing brake lights.

  “He stopped,” I tell Imogen.

  She jerks her head up, looks behind her. Sniffles hard and wipes a glove across her face, leaving a smear of dirt as she squints through her wet glasses.

  I grab her hand.

  “Come on,” I say, and practically pull her back onto the road.

  I walk as fast as she can handle, and even though I want to sprint as fast as I can before this guy has a chance to drive away, I don’t leave her behind.

  “Hey!” I shout, waving my other arm.

  We reach the back of the truck and Imogen reaches out, touches it like she wants to make sure it’s real.

  “There you are,” a man’s voice calls back. “Shit, I thought I was seeing things.”

  The sound of feet hitting the pavement, and then a man’s shape is outlined in the yellow light from the truck cab: middle-aged, slight paunch, flannel shirt.

  “Sorry,” he goes on. “These things take a while to stop, ‘specially when it’s weathering like this.”

  We close the last few steps between us, stop in front of him. Imogen’s gasping for air, balancing on her left leg, and I’m trying to take as much of her weight as I can as the cold water drips from my hair and into my clothes, soaking me to the skin as the rain lashes us.

  The trucker frowns, steps closer, peers at us.

  “Shit,” he says quietly. “What the hell are the two of you doing out here?”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Imogen

  Ten Years Ago

  Melissa just stares at me, her pencil suspended over the rough draft of her English paper. We’re in her parents’ den again, sitting on the couch. This time her mom made rice krispy treats, and they’re neatly arranged in a small pyramid on the coffee table in front of us.

  “You’re lying,” she says, slowly sitting up straight.

  I just shake my head. My heart is beating so fast it’s practically fluttering in my chest, and I feel like I’ve got a vise around my lungs. I know my face is beet red, and I think I might cry with sheer nerves any second now.

  It took me three days to work up the courage to tell her. I threw up four times, and I’ve already been at her house for an hour before finally blurting out I’m sleeping with Wilder! while trying to answer her questions about passive sentence constructions.

  “I’m not,” I say quietly, my voice shaking.

  “He would never sleep with you,” she says, her voice sharper with every word, filled with disdain.

  “Yes he would,” I say. “He did.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  I swallow hard, forcing myself not to cry in front of her.

  “I felt too guilty lying about it any longer, and I told him that he had to tell you or I would—”

  “I mean, why are you lying?” she says, crossing her arms in front of herself. “There’s no way he’d sleep with you. He told me he loves me last week, and everyone knows that you have some weird thing for him which is why you’re always asking if he wants to study and stuff, and he only says yes because he feels so bad for you.”

  I’m stunned, open-mouthed. My mind goes totally blank and I can’t think of anything to say while Melissa sits there with her perfect pink lips and her pretty blue eyes and looks at me like I’m some sort of circus sideshow.

  “Is that what he said?” I whisper.

  She rolls her eyes.

  “Did you think everyone didn’t know?”

  I can’t speak.

  “Look, you have some weird thing for my boyfriend and I let it slide because you’ve been helping me with this English paper but you seriously have to stop, Imogen, it’s really weird and I think maybe one of these days you’re gonna make a flamethrower or something and come to school with it…”

  I tune her out, because I suddenly remember something.

  It was an accident. Most of the kids at Solaris High have smart phones by now, but I just got my first cell phone a couple of months ago, an older-model flip phone that my parents have reiterated a thousand times is only to be used for emergencies.

  But it turns out that if you press some combination of the buttons on the side, it starts recording audio. I found that out a few weeks back when I accidentally recorded Wilder going down on me.

  Meaning it’s mostly me, gasping and moaning and squeaking, trying and failing miserably not to make too much noise, but he’s on there too.

  I pull my phone out. My hand is shaking, and Melissa stops talking when she realizes I’m doing something.

  I hit play.

  From my phone, Wilder laughs.

  “No, it’s because I like the way you turn bright pink when I say stuff like I’m gonna lick your pussy until you come,” he says, his voice tinny and hushed, but obviously his.

  My recorded voice joins his in a nervous giggle, and I have to put one hand over my mouth because I’m afraid I’ll throw up.

  Melissa’s gone white, her mouth open.

  “You made this up somehow,” she whispers, tears wobbling in her eyes.

  I just shake my head, terrified of speaking.

  “That’s not—” she stutters, tears falling prettily onto her cheeks. “He would never— You can’t—”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, stumbling over even those simple words.

  In a flash her eyes harden, and her jaw tightens. Before I know what’s happening she’s grabbed my phone, leapt off the couch, and run to the bathroom, the lock clicking seconds before I reach the door behind her.

  “Melissa!” I hiss, rattling the knob.

  “Go away,” she says, her voice dripping with tears.

  “Give me my phone.”

  “Go away.”

  “Melissa, seriously,” I beg, trying to keep my voice down because the absolute last thing I want is for her parents to come see what’s going on.

  No answer. It goes on like that for a couple of minutes, long enough for her to listen to the whole thing a few times.

  Through the door I can just barely hear myself, and even though it was hot at the time — hot enough that I didn’t delete the recording, because honestly, I kind of liked it — right now it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. I crumple against the bathroom door, tears sliding down my face.

  How could you be so stupid? I think, over and over again.

  Who cares if she believed you? It’s true, what does it matter if Melissa knew or not?

  I’ve got a bad, bad feeling that I might have just really fucked up.

  Finally, the bathroom door opens. I look up at Melissa, ugly for once with puffy eyes and blotchy skin.

  She drops my phone on the floor next to me.

  “Get out,” she says, and ten seconds later I’m gone.

  Present Day

  The next twenty-four hours are a blur, as for once I give up my own will and just let people do things to me.

  I let the trucker put us in his cab, turn the heat on full blast, and drive us through the rain to Black Mountain Junction.

  I let the Black Mountain Junction volunteer fire department load us into their ambulance and drive us to McBride Mills, the nearest town with a hospital.

  I let the hospital staff take off my clothes, layer me with heating pads, put an IV in my arm. I let them do whatever the hell they want as I answer their questions, lie still while they X-ray my ank
le.

  All I know is that I’m warm, I’m dry, and they’re giving me soup. Wilder’s somewhere too, and I make a half-hearted effort at telling the people whirling around us that he fell into a lake, that he was hypothermic for a while and they should check him out for that, but they don’t pay much attention to me.

  Finally, I accept that they know what they’re doing and relax into the sweet, sweet arms of comfort.

  I wake up the next morning groggy, almost like I’m hungover. I feel like I’ve slept for twelve hours and like it wasn’t enough, but the phone next to my bed is ringing and ringing, and I finally wake up enough to realize that I should answer it.

  “Hello?” I ask

  “Oh my God,” my mom’s voice says.

  She bursts into tears.

  “Hey Mom,” I say, still groggy. I sit up in the hospital bed, blinking, trying all at once to get a handle on where I am and what I’m doing here and how I even got here, not to mention how to comfort my mom who’s now out-and-out sobbing on the other end of the line.

  “Uh, I’m fine, I’m in the hospital in…”

  I try to think of the town name and fail.

  “…I’m in the hospital somewhere, but I’m okay, don’t worry. Sorry.”

  “I know,” my mom says between sobs. “No, sweetie, it’s not your fault, don’t apologize, I just—” She breaks into a fresh round of sobbing, and in the background, I hear my dad say something.

  “I don’t know how to do that, Barry, I told you it never works for me and it always hangs up the pho—”

  Suddenly all the background noise gets louder, cutting into my mom’s sentence. I raise my eyebrows at the opposite wall of my hospital room, not that listening to my parents try to figure out how to use their cell phone is anything new.

  “Immers, honey, it’s your dad,” he says, his phone voice a little too loud.

  “Hey, Dad,” I say. “Can you tell Mom that I’m gonna be fine, I promise?”

  The revelation that the person with me was Wilder Flint can wait, because the only two people on this planet who hated him more than me were my parents.

  “We’re in the Edmonton airport,” he booms.

  I can practically see the two of them, standing somewhere and probably blocking foot traffic, my dad holding the phone about a foot in front of them, speaking very loudly and clearly.

  They’re hippie types, kind of old school, and they never really took to technology.

  “We’re trying to get a flight closer to where you are, so we can rent a car and come see you,” he says. “We originally booked a flight with AirCanada, but it was one of those flights that’s actually operated by their regional jet service and it got canceled because there weren’t enough people on the flight, only you know how these airlines are and if they tell you why it was really canceled they’ve gotta refund your ticket and pay for your meals so they’re claiming it’s a weather issue but you know I can watch the weather channel too and there’s nothing but blue sky between here and McBride Mills, those greedy corporate bastards…”

  I close my eyes, lean back against the pillows, and let my dad rail on about corporate greed for a while, occasionally punctuated by my mom telling me how glad she is that I’m okay. My dad’s got a habit of ranting on about whatever’s in front of him at the time when he gets stressed or upset — something my therapist pointed out — so when he moves on to checked baggage fees and having to pay more for the same seats he’d have gotten for a better deal thirty years ago, I just smile and nod at the phone.

  I’m pretty sure I know what he’s actually stressed and upset about.

  “Okay, Barry, that’s enough,” my mom finally says once my dad’s gone on for a while. “We’ve gotta go talk to the airline and see what they can do—”

  “Got half a mind to rent a car right here and just drive to the hospital.”

  “We can’t drive, there are mountains, Barry,” my mom says, suddenly the reasonable one.

  “Might have to if we want to see our daughter before the dawn of the next millennium.”

  “Sweetie, we’re so glad you’re safe and sound and all right,” my mom says, her voice tearing up again. “We’ll be there as soon as we can get there, okay?”

  I swallow the lump in my throat, because I feel absolutely awful. It didn’t even occur to me, the whole time I was out there, that my parents were probably looking for me like crazy.

  “Okay, Mom,” I say. “Thanks.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Wilder

  Man, hospitals suck. There’s nothing on TV except talk shows, and even though I’m watching two rednecks throw chairs and threaten each other right now, it’s boring. Something about a dog coming into the wrong yard or some shit.

  I don’t have my phone. I’ve got no idea where it is, since it was pretty much useless in the wilderness, except now I wish I could at least play Angry Birds or something while they keep me another day or two for observation and fluids.

  I’m very much under the impression that that McBride Mills hospital doesn’t get a whole lot of exciting action. It’s pretty small, as hospitals go, and nearly everyone else I’ve seen here has gray hair and a walker.

  They won’t tell me how Imogen is, other than fine. They won’t tell me where she is, either, and since I already got sternly admonished once for getting out of bed and trying to walk around with my IV stand, I’m gonna hold off on trying it again for a few hours.

  I mean, the hospital’s not very big. I’ll just keep trying to find her until I actually do.

  I flip TV channels. Some weird cartoon, a close-up of a crying woman, a telenovela. Jesus, I’m bored.

  There’s a knock on my door and before I can say anything it’s pushed open, the curtain in front of it swishing back.

  “There you are,” my mom says, her upper body practically sagging with relief. “The front desk told me the wrong room—” she tosses her purse on a cart “—but the person in there was some old guy, and then I started worrying that I’d gotten the wrong hospital or something or that someone had told me wrong and you were still out there—”

  She leans over me and kisses my forehead, one hand on my shoulder.

  “Hey, Mom,” I manage to slip in between sentences.

  She sits, and I realize her eyes are watering, brimming with tears.

  “Hey, baby,” she says, taking my hand. “You look terrible, are you okay?”

  I squeeze her hand, and she squeezes back.

  “I’m gonna be fine.”

  “I got here as soon as I could,” she says. “I almost got in a screaming match with the guy behind the desk at the private air terminal in Solaris when he tried to tell me that our jet was already being used by some big shots in the oil industry who were headed back to North Dakota, but luckily one of them was standing right there and he was so nice and made me take the plane instead,” she says, sighing.

  I wonder, very briefly, where my dad is or if he’s coming. I don’t ask, though, because I’m pretty sure I know the answer and I’d rather be pleasantly surprised if he does show up.

  “Then I get to the airport only to have the rental car people tell me that they’ve got the car I’ve booked, but they didn’t realize I was driving to McBride Mills and if I do that then they’re gonna have to put chains on the tires, and that’ll be an extra hour of waiting unless I want to upgrade to all-wheel drive but then of course when they go to check, they haven’t got any of those available and — God, baby, I’m sorry, I’m just going on and on, aren’t I?” she says.

  I squeeze my mom’s hand again, reach over, pat hers with my other hand.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “How are you feeling?” she asks, brushing hair off my forehead. “Are you warm enough? When they called, the nurse told me you were being treated for hypothermia, and…” she trails off, concern in her eyes.

  I swallow hard. My mom is usually impeccably put together, the perfect CEO’s wi
fe, but right now she’s messy, frazzled. There are dark circles under her eyes and her hair’s pulled back from her face, strands poking out here and there.

  I feel awful. Even if my dad and I have some differences — even if we’ve barely spoken for almost a year at this point, despite the fact that I technically work for him — my mom’s always been there for me. She was at every football game, sent me emails and letters constantly when I was in the Navy.

  “I’m doing great, Mom,” I say again. “The bad part’s over.”

  “I hope so, baby,” she says.

  By around six that night, the nurses have finally convinced my mom that she should go get a hotel room in town and some rest. Even they can tell how stressed and frazzled she is, and the longer she spends with me, the more obvious it is that my disappearance took a toll.

  She won’t go into details, but I know two things: they were looking for us in the wrong place, and she is pissed at my dad for reasons she won’t say. I don’t pry, at least not right now.

  As soon as she leaves, I push aside the food tray that she insisted on keeping filled, going to the bakery across the street a couple of times and berating the nurses for giving me lukewarm soup. I make sure my IV isn’t tangled on anything, and I kick my feet over the side of the bed, then stand.

  And head out in search of Imogen. By now the nurses who see me up and around don’t do anything to stop me, probably because they’re afraid that my mom might come back and threaten their jobs, pensions, dogs’ lives, and the existence of this very hospital if they dare lift a finger against me.

  For the record, my mom is lovely about ninety-nine percent of the time.

  I shuffle along the hall in my socks and gown until I finally reach someone behind a desk. I ask her which room Imogen Gustavo is in, and finally I get an answer: room 214, just down that way.

  When I open the door, three heads turn. Conversation ceases.

  Imogen’s sitting up in the bed, and she’s pale with deep circles under her eyes, but she smiles.