“The trees are bigger now.”
“And there was a gap to the right—”
“Oh my God—I remember that!” Nicola pointed to the spot. “Where the counselors from a couple of years before us had a fire and burned out part of the woods!”
“It’s grown back now.”
“That’s good. Environmentally speaking.”
“Navigationally speaking, it sucks.”
“Fortunately we’re a lot bigger and a lot older now.” Nicola took out her BlackBerry and looked at it. “And some of us have two bars, so we should be fine. Now follow me.”
With more confidence in the “two bars” thing than in anything else Nicola had said, Holly followed her into the thicket and along the overgrown path. Obviously, whatever they did at the adult education and retreat center, they did not hike, because where Holly remembered a narrow clearing through the woods that had been easy enough to follow even in the dark, now the pathway was closed in and there was only the merest hint of clearing along the way.
She wasn’t even sure she wasn’t imagining it.
But Nicola was on a roll, walking through the woods like Helen Keller on a mission, knowing exactly which way to go and when.
“I can’t believe how this is all coming back to me!” She stepped over a fallen log and held some branches aside for Holly to follow. “I feel like I did it yesterday!”
Holly glanced back uneasily in the direction of her car but said nothing about it. “Good thing, because I’m following you. I can’t believe we did this in the dark. We must have been nuts!”
“We were motivated, for sure. Actually, I used that experience when I did The Black of Night.”
Holly looked confused.
“That slasher picture I did.”
“Oh! The one where you were actually invited to the casting couch for a bigger role?”
Nicola nodded. “Hence, my small role.”
Holly cracked up. “Little did he know you’d become a big star anyway. What’s next, by the way? Did you get the Nicola Kestle Project?”
“No.”
“No?” Holly stopped. “Are you serious?”
“Dead serious. I didn’t even get an offer to blow someone to get it.” It was a lame joke, and it fell flat.
“I’m so sorry,” Holly said. “I can’t imagine what they were thinking.”
“Apparently they were thinking I no longer look like Nicola Kestle.” Nicola started walking again. “And they’re not the only ones. I sat next to a self-proclaimed fan on the plane, and she not only didn’t recognize me, but she didn’t believe me when I told her who I was.”
“Holy cow! Did you show her your license or something?”
“No! I didn’t need to prove myself to her!”
“I would have.”
Nicola smiled at her friend. She used to think that way about being famous, or semifamous, too. Turned out, it really wasn’t so great as she’d imagined. “We’re getting close, I think.” Nicola stopped, almost like a hound dog sniffing the air. The contours of the woods had changed, but she was almost positive she knew where she was. “It’s right over there.” She pointed to a place twenty degrees off the path they were following now and tramped through the brush.
“Are you sure?” Holly was beginning to wonder if they should have been dropping bread crumbs behind them. “We’re getting really far from the car. . . .”
“Oh, come off it, Holly, we’re not really far from the car. You’re thinking like a kid. We’re not even a quarter of a mile into the woods.”
“That’s a long way!” Holly objected. “A quarter of a mile of woods is a lot of woods.”
“In the dark. When you’re thirteen, but now—” Nicola stopped and frowned.
“What?”
“Shh!”
“What?”
Nicola shot her a look. “Jeez, it’s a good thing I wasn’t trying to silence you so a grizzly bear didn’t hear us!”
“You cannot just stop like an English pointer in the middle of the woods and shush me and expect me to do my nails!”
“Shhhh!”
This time Holly did.
“Never mind, it was only a bird.”
Holly glanced around uneasily. “You heard something unusual? Do you think it might be a person?” Suddenly the things in the woods were far less of a concern than the people who might also be there.
“It was a mourning dove. Wow, you are really a scaredy-cat.”
“I am not!”
“You absolutely are.”
She was. It was only hitting her now, but she really was. Take her out of the coddled safety of her urban neighborhood, and every little nature sound freaked her out. “You’re the one who’s freaking me out,” she lied.
“Oh, okay.” Nicola’s dimple showed, though she didn’t actually smile. “So. Here we are.”
“Where?” Holly looked around. “Where are we?”
“This is the clearing. Or it was the clearing.” Nicola wrinkled her nose. “Nature is taking over everything. It’s good, of course, but it’s also like a science fiction novel, where nature wins no matter what.”
“And it happens quickly, like we’re standing here and vines begin to wrap around our legs.” The air was thick with gnats and humidity, and Holly was beginning to feel like she couldn’t breathe. “Where’s the birdhouse? Oh my God, what if it’s not here anymore?”
“It’s got to be here. They took down the house but not the birdhouse. Who would come back for the birdhouse later?”
“True.” Holly scanned the tangle of trees and limbs and leaves, looking for a box, or even the broken remains of one, high in them.
“It has to be close to one of the bigger trees,” Nicola said, “because it was solid as a rock when I climbed up it.”
“That narrows it down.” Holly found a thick, gnarled trunk and looked up into the foliage. “Is that it?”
“Where?” Nicola squinted. “No, that’s just bramble.”
They walked around, searching in silence, apart from the crunch of dead leaves and twigs under their feet, for more than half an hour before Holly finally felt like it was time to give up.
“Maybe this was a stupid idea.” She was sure it was. In fact, she really wished she’d never run into Lexi Henderson, because now she was going to wrestle with the guilt of it forever, and it was all for nothing. There was not a thing she could do to help Lexi or to make up for what she’d done to her.
Nicola looked at her. “This was not a stupid idea. This was a really good idea. A noble idea.”
“I don’t know how noble it is to remember, twenty years later, that you stole something from someone and, only then, want to make it right.”
Nicola shrugged. “A lot of people might not have even bothered. We at least deserve credit for that.”
Holly nodded, but she wasn’t convinced. “It doesn’t really matter now one way or the other, though, does it? I don’t see the birdhouse, and we’ve been looking for it for ages here. How long are we going to tramp around in here before we finally admit we’ve failed?”
Nicola sighed. “We have gone over every inch of this area. It’s not here.”
“Maybe it came crashing down, and the ring was dislodged. You know what we should have brought? A metal detector.”
“Wow. That would have been a good idea. I wish we’d thought of it.”
“There’s a Toys R Us in Frederick.” She’d seen it when she went to pick up frames from an estate sale a few weeks ago. “We could go down and find one, then come back. It’s only about half an hour away.”
“Let’s do it!”
With their optimism invigorated, they headed back in the direction they’d come from. It was a little after noon, so Holly felt confident that they had enough time to get to the store in Frederick and back before they lost all the daylight.
They’d been walking only a couple of minutes when Holly heard Nicola shout behind her and turned to see her fall heavily to the grou
nd, breaking her fall with her right hand.
“Oh, no!” Holly rushed back to her. “Are you okay?”
Nicola was pale, and her face was tight with pain. “I slammed my hand. I think it bent all the way backwards.”
“Ugh!”
“My wrist is killing me.” She lifted her right hand, which was at an odd angle.
Holly sucked air in through her teeth. Just the sight of it made a shiver run down her spine. “We’ve got to get you to an ER, fast.”
Nicola nodded. “Yeah, this hurts like hell.”
“Should I call nine-one-one?”
“No, it’s not an emergency.”
“Are you sure?” Holly winced, looking at Nicola’s wrist, which was swelling as she watched.
“Yes. Let’s just go. It’s not an emergency, but the sooner I get a painkiller, the better.” She gave a short laugh. “I’ve had a lot of experience with broken bones, cartilage, and narcotics this year.” She gestured at her now-perfect nose.
“You poor thing. Let’s get out of here. We can come back in a few days when you’re drugged.”
“Sounds good to me.”
But not five minutes later, Nicola said, “Stop!”
Holly started and turned to her. “Are you okay?” Her eyes fell on Nicola’s wrist, which did not look okay at all.
“I think this is it.”
“What?”
Nicola was looking around urgently. “I think this is the place.” Her eyes fell on something, and her expression sharpened. “There it is!” She pointed into the trees.
“There’s what?” Holly followed Nicola’s gaze and saw it. A little birdhouse high up in the trees. “Are you kidding me? We spent all that time looking in the wrong place?”
“I’m not a human compass.”
“You’re pretty close.” Holly shook her head. “I can’t believe that’s it.”
“You have to go up.”
“What? I have to go up?”
“Well, I can’t climb with this.” Nicola lifted her hand. “You’re going to have to do it.”
“But we have to get you to the hospital!” There was no way Holly could picture herself climbing up that tree. It had to be thirty feet up there, maybe more.
“We can’t leave now that we’ve found this!” Nicola argued. “God knows we might never find it again. You have to go up. There’s just no other way.”
“I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not a climber! I can barely hike through these woods in a straight line! If I climb up there, I’ll fall and kill myself!”
“Holly Kazanov, you had me come all this way for this, you have been obsessed with finding this ring for Lexi, there is no way I’m going to let you give up this opportunity.”
“We can make a chart of where we are, and when you are well again, we can come back and you can climb the damn tree, since you’re the one who’s good at it.”
Nicola shook her head. “Get climbing.”
“I’m scared.”
“Then this is the most valuable thing you’ll ever do in your life. Trust me. You can do this.”
Holly looked dubiously at the tree. There were a lot of branches sticking out. Chances were decent that, if she fell, she’d get caught up in them at least long enough to slow her fall.
“You can do it,” Nicola said again. “Now, come on.” She went to the tree and pointed to a large knot. “Put your foot here and reach up for that branch there.”
It looked doable. But everything in Holly was resisting. She never did this kind of thing. Not when she was a kid, not when she was a teenager, and definitely not now. “I’m too old. I’m too fat.”
“Actually, Hol, you’re not nearly so fat as you think you are, and you’re perfectly proportioned. It’s not like you’re going to tip one way or the other. Whatever your boobs do to pull you forward, your ass counters.”
Holly had to laugh at that. “Thanks.”
“Any time. Now get moving.”
Holly swallowed hard. If she didn’t do this, if she walked away now, she would be disappointing Nicola, failing Lexi, and solidifying her position in this world as a fat girl who couldn’t get out of her own way.
But more important, if she did do it, she would prove to herself—and to the rest of the world, too, but mostly to herself—that she was not the loser fat girl.
That maybe she never really had been.
She put her foot in the knot and hoisted herself up, reaching for the branch. She missed the first time but caught it the second time. Thoughts of her late nana came to mind. Nana who always said Jesus will save you.
She hoped Jesus was here now.
“Good. The rest are closer together,” Nicola said. “Step here and reach for that branch now. See?”
“Yes.” Holly nodded and reached. This time it was easier.
All her life she’d felt constricted by the clichés about fat girls. That they couldn’t run, that they were ugly, that they were unworthy (of too many things to mention). This was her chance to shoot every one of those things down for herself. To hell with the kids who had teased her in elementary school!
She took another step, reached for another branch.
To hell with Randy!
Another step, another branch. Already her hands were getting sore, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t losing strength; she was gaining it.
To hell with the bitches at camp who had made her feel like an embarrassment to them all. From Brittany to Sylvia, Tami, and even Lexi. To hell with Lexi!
Holly wasn’t risking her life here for Lexi. This had ceased, at least for the moment, to be about Lexi. She was doing this for herself.
“Keep looking up!” Nicola called.
“What?” Holly glanced down.
She nearly fell.
It was a long, long way to the ground. How had she gotten so far, so fast? She froze. How would she get down?
“Shit, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have said anything. But seriously, keep looking up. You’ll be fine.”
“I’m scared.”
“Look at the birdhouse. It’s one more step away. See it?”
Holly looked. She did see it. She could almost reach it now. And actually, there was something comforting about it being right there. Someone had put it there. She wasn’t on the magic beanstalk high in the clouds; she was just in a tree, heading for that box, and she was almost there.
“One more step,” Nicola repeated. “And there are, like, ten branches you can choose from. You’ll be fine.”
Holly took a short breath, fastened her eyes on the birdhouse, and reached for a higher branch. The step was easy—she felt around with her foot and eased herself up.
She was there.
Now what?
The holes were tiny. There was no way she could fit her hand in there. She looked for the chain Lexi had kept the ring on, hoping, perhaps foolishly, that it was still sticking out.
“Can you see anything?”
“No.” The house was made out of metal, not wood, as she had thought at first. She reached out for it, and the sheets of miniature siding shifted easily under her touch. It was rusted. “Hang on, I might be able to see. . . .” She pushed at it gently, and a piece of rusty metal fell to the ground. “Look out!” she called after the fact.
“Don’t worry, I’m fine!” Nicola called back.
Holly pressed her lips together in concentration and reached in again. This time she thought she saw something. It wasn’t a glittery, shiny mass, the way she remembered the ring, but a lump covered in dirt and dried bits of grass and leaves.
A lump with a chain attached to it.
“Oh my God!”
“Did you find it?”
“Oh my God! Yes! I think so!” She tugged at it. It didn’t move. She pulled again. A little harder. This time it did move. She was able to reach in and grab it.
It was the ring.
“Tell me what’s going on!” Nicola called.
> “I’ve got it!” She was laughing, but tears rolled down her cheeks. She’d done it. She couldn’t believe it, but she’d actually climbed up the tree, reached into the mystery box that may have had the ring or may have had a dead bird in it, and she’d gotten the ring.
She had never, ever felt so accomplished in her life.
Keeping her eyes focused up, she felt her way down the tree. It seemed to take forever. She was dying to examine the ring, to see if it was real or if it was a fake that had mottled and chipped with age. At the moment, she didn’t care which it was, because she had gotten all the way up there to retrieve it.
She’d done it!
“Careful,” Nicola said. Her voice was close.
Startled, Holly jerked her head in the direction of the voice and lost her footing. Branches scraped down her leg, tearing into her flesh as she fell. It was only about three feet, but it was an unexpected three feet. She flailed her arms, trying to grab on to something—anything—to stop her from falling.
Instead, all she did was smash her arm against something soft and warm.
Nicola’s face.
The blood gushed from Nicola’s nose immediately—and dramatically.
“Oh, shit!” Holly shoved the ring into her pocket and reached for Nicola. “Are you okay?”
Instinctively, Nicola recoiled. “I’m okay.”
“You’re bleeding like a fountain!”
“I am?” She pulled her hands away from her face and looked. “Fuck. It’s my fucking nose. Again.”
“Here!” Without thinking, Holly pulled her shirt up over her head, turned it inside out, and handed it to Nicola. “Put this against it with a little pressure.”
Nicola did, and Holly led her by the crook of her arm to the car. They’d passed a hospital sign about ten miles down Route 15. They’d be there soon. Everyone just had to stay calm.
They got to the car, and Holly opened the door for Nicola and helped her in.
“It’s okay,” Holly reassured her in a voice she hoped was convincing. “We’ll be at the ER in just a few minutes.”
Nicola said something, but it was muffled.
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