The wolf is barking and the push and shove of the wind finally gets me moving. I stagger down the hill and turn left and try to keep moving forward. Shelter. Find shelter. But in the darkness I’m as good as blind and suddenly I am felled by something I do not see.
*
When I rouse, I feel calm. There’s a soft silence. At first, I think I am deaf, that my body is shutting down one sense at a time. But when I open my eyes I see snow float in feathers above me. Everything is shrouded in white, the tops of the pines, the forest floor, the spikes on the thorns, me.
I stay there, not wanting to move. I am dreaming a beautiful dream. Nature has come to take me away.
Then a sound arrives. A gentle sound. It means something, but I don’t want to think, all I want is the snow. But the noise takes shape, trickles into the shells of my ears. Trickling? Not trickling, gushing. Water.
I lift myself up and stumble toward the sound. Trees thin out. The air feels full, fresh, wet. I look down. I’m standing on the precipice of an enormous, roaring waterfall. It thrashes into the boulders below. These boulders sit in white rapids that belong to a reptilian monster of a river—deep and treacherous and wide. A mile down the waterway, the bridge and sheer cliffs of the gorge.
I call for the wolf. But he’s nowhere to be seen. I call again. A flash of gray zigzags through the trees and the wolf steps from the forest’s edge. He pauses there, his paws sunken in the snow.
Turning from him, I limp toward the bridge through the mantle of white. The wolf trails me, the shush of his footfalls behind me a comfort. Halfway I stop to lick stamps of snow from my palm then continue along the bluff. My energy is failing and I’m barely able to remain upright, but I keep going until I reach the gorge.
We stand looking. The bridge is impassable. The first ten feet of planks have rotted away. The next twenty-foot stretch hangs in midair like a ladder.
In the crags and cracks of the sheer gorge cliffs, tendrils of green spill out and host a bright pink flower. A black-winged falcon wheels through the gully.
I turn to thank the wolf, face the cliff, and jump.
Return
31
I fall through the misted air and plunge into the frigid water below. Tossed over and over, I am a tiny leaf, grasping at anything—rocks, branches, the water itself. But I’m too fast-moving. My head goes under and I can’t raise it up again and I’m dragged down deep until I’m bouncing like a baby and I try to claw my way back up and my blood is turning to ice and my lungs are filling with silt and then, all at once, the washing machine stops and there’s daylight and oxygen and I am sucking in air and coughing out water.
I raise my head. I have been spat out into a tributary and there’s an embankment to my left. Paddling forward, I keep going until I feel pebbles underfoot then haul myself on to dry land and collapse on the cold, snowy stones.
My ragged breath ghosts the air as I lift my arm and look at my shattered wrist. I can’t feel a thing. But the rest of my body could have been smacked by a truck.
*
I come to on the frozen stones. It’s sleeting. I need to move. I squint through the curtain of icy rain and look for a road or some other pathway. To my left I see something. Set back in the woods about fifty yards sits a single-story cabin. Out of its corrugated tin roof juts a chimney chugging smoke.
*
I force myself to my knees then to my feet. My clothes are heavy and wet and dragging me down. Pushing through the pain, I heave myself up the bank and hobble away from the cabin toward the forest. Shielded by the trees, I circle back and crouch behind a bramble bush and pause, shivering, to study the house.
A hip-high stone fence made from chunks of large bronze river stone is dissected by a small wooden gate that opens out onto a pathway leading up to a porch. On the porch in the corner is a lone high-backed rattan chair, with a box for a footrest. By the door, under a clean single window, sits a pair of large brown leather work boots.
I don’t open the gate. Instead I approach the rear of the cabin, where two back windows are lit with soft light. I drop back into the shadows. Stacked neatly under the shelter of the eaves is firewood cut in precise single-foot lengths. Nearby, a small generator hums and peppers the air with diesel.
The yard is a decent size, and over the way there’s a wire-fenced pen with goats and sheep, and an adjoining pigpen and chicken coup. Next to that is a garden with rows of carrot tops, broccoli, string beans, and beets. A barn, not much bigger than the cabin itself, is located at the end of the yard.
A wave of exhaustion hits me. Inside my drenched clothes, my body shudders and jerks. I lift my eyes to the barn and stumble toward it. Avoiding the front shutter doors, I see a side entrance and go there to peer through the gaps in the wood, but it’s too dark to see inside. I lift the latch, push open the door, and stand there listening.
I inch forward, close the door behind me, and wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. The barn looks smaller from the inside and is filled with all manner of things. But everything is orderly and in its place. Above a work bench, tools hang from nails on the wall. In the vise an axe waits to be sharpened. On the side opposite there are sacks of animal feed, and garden equipment including a shovel, hoe, and rake. A rough-sawn staircase leads to a loft.
In the middle of the barn, taking up most of the space, a vehicle hides beneath a khaki-colored cover. I approach it and let my hand linger on the roof. I picture the mint Capri, Kermit the Frog, the trunk with all of the things.
I throw back the cover. A black VW Beetle, front tires flat, rear ones on blocks. The hood is missing, the engine long gone. I let out a breath and circle the vehicle and release the axe from the vise, then limp past four barrels labeled Hawkins Oil Refinery, and haul my body up the steps to the loft. I lie on my side and face the gaps in the wall, clutching the axe. Dust stirs on a splinter of light.
32
When I wake up there’s a shotgun pointed in my face.
“I use it, don’t think I won’t.”
I squint at the elderly, small-boned Asian woman through the fuzz of my vision, shotgun snug on her shoulder.
“You a junkie?” she demands.
“I was kidnapped.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s the truth, ma’am.”
But as soon as I say it, I am wondering to myself, is it? I’ve been in the wilderness for so long I might have made the whole thing up. What if I got lost? What if I’m delirious? Then I remember about the ten things, the baby.
“From a gas station in Oregon.”
The woman finally looks like she might believe me.
“Please,” I say, shuddering. “I’m so cold.”
She lowers her gun.
“I don’t like this,” she says, looking over her shoulder. “You make problem for me.”
“I won’t, please—”
Before I can finish, a coughing fit grips me and I throw up at least three liters of water. The woman reaches down and puts the back of her hand against my forehead and murmurs something I don’t understand.
*
I sleep a dreamless, blissful sleep for what seems like an eternity. Warm and sound and soft. Like I’m drifting on a marshmallow. When I open my eyes, I find myself on a lumpy sofa swaddled in a green woolen blanket. Directly opposite, a fire glows in the grate. A large black headless bearskin partially covers the wooden floor, and in the corner, on top of a small table, there’s a tiny shrine comprised of a miniature brass Buddha, a clutch of smoking incense sticks, and a burning pillar candle. On the wall above the shrine hangs a framed photograph of a white man in military uniform.
“You been in forest long time?” It’s the Asian woman. She’s at the beige Formica table playing a game of solitaire. She glances at me when I don’t answer. “Cat eat your tongue?”
“Where am I? Which state?” I ask.
She lifts the old-fashioned tortoiseshell pipe to her lips and puffs. I can smell the harsh tobacco from here.
The woman knocks the ash from the pipe into a saucer and gets to her feet. She takes two steps into the adjacent kitchen area and opens a cupboard to retrieve a plate.
“Must eat. Nothing left of you.”
She reaches inside an old-fashioned pull-handled fridge to take out what looks like cheese and bread. I sit up and see that my foot has been dressed in a clean white bandage, my broken wrist, too.
“Very bad,” says the woman, glancing at my foot. “Will try medicine.”
“Medicine?”
She points to her chest. “I make medicine. For foot. Maybe get better, maybe not.”
She puts a tray on my lap. On the plate there’s a generous hunk of crusty bread and a wedge of cheese.
“Homemade. My goat, Betty, she give good milk.”
The woman returns to her card game and relights her pipe.
I raise the sandwich to my mouth and chew. Food. Real food. I can’t remember how long it’s been since I ate anything that resembles a sandwich.
The woman lifts her eyes from her cards. “Slow down or you sick up again.”
I do my best to be more measured but end up demolishing the sandwich more quickly than is probably wise.
“What’s your name please, ma’am?” I say when I come up for air.
“Nhung.”
“Thank you for the food, Nhung, and for looking after me.” I pick up the mug of tea on the side table and take a sip. “I’m Amelia Kellaway. What is the date please?”
“Date?”
“Day of the month?”
“Seventeenth.”
“Of September?”
“October.”
“You’re joking.” I’ve been lost in the wilderness for over a month.
I’m overcome with emotion and bury my face in my hands and cry. “I thought I was going to die out there.”
“The man who took you, he interfere with you?”
“Yes.”
“Son of bitch.”
The crying drains me and I’m sleepy again. I lie back down in the nest of blankets and watch the flames bob in the hearth.
“Don’t you get lonely out here all by yourself?” But I fall asleep before I can hear the answer.
33
For the next three days snow keeps us inside, apart from when Nhung bundles herself up in a heavy-duty jacket and ventures out to the backyard to empty the ash pan or feed her small menagerie of animals that consists of, as far as I can tell from my vantage point in the kitchen window, two pigs, three goats, four sheep, an unspecified number of chickens, and a deer. Nhung tells me the cabin is powered by a generator, which is powered by gasoline that Nhung keeps in the barn. She doesn’t have a working vehicle and because it’s a two-day walk to the closest neighbor, someone from the county drops off supplies once every two months.
The next visit is due in five weeks. We both know that’s too long to wait. My foot is getting worse despite Nhung’s best efforts and her twice daily treatments of applying her pungent concoction, a lumpy brown paste that smells vaguely of spoiled milk. The foot is totally useless and I can’t put any weight on it. A grape color has started to climb my calf like a vine.
In the barn there’s a dusty long-range two-way radio and Nhung retrieves it and every three hours winds it up to call for assistance. But the radio is old and Nhung tells me it often stops working during big snowfalls and storms and for other unexplained reasons. It belonged to her husband, Jack. The man in the photo. As a sixteen-year-old, she met Jack at a refugee camp in the 1970s when she and her family fled the Khmer Rouge. He was an American military liaison officer.
“Jack worked for the man who own this land—Mr. Hawkins, oil refinery man. He very rich and like Jack a lot. He help build this house and let us stay for as long as we want. That twenty year ago now. Then Jack got sick.”
“I’m sorry.”
Nhung frowns and smoothes more ointment onto my dismal foot.
“The cancer,” she says.
She nods toward the window. “He under the ponderosa.”
I think about how every night Nhung kneels in front of the tiny shrine, chanting softly, palms pressed together in prayer, the flame of the candle bobbing with her breath.
“You had no children?” I say.
She shakes her head. “Born still.”
Wiping the ointment from her hands with a cloth, Nhung lifts her shirt to reveal a zigzag of scars across her lower abdomen, bulbous and red and thickened with time. It looks like she’s been hacked at with a blunt piece of tin.
“Two boy, one girl,” Nhung says as she slips her shirt back into her pants. “Khmer rape me when I ten. Hurt inside where baby grow.”
“I’m so sorry.”
She tucks a wisp of gray hair behind her ear. “Sons of bitches will go to hell.”
She turns her attention back to my foot and finishes with the ointment then wraps it with a bandage. She looks at me. I know what she’s thinking. She mentioned it yesterday when she unfurled the bandage, sodden with my bodily fluids, and threw it into the fire like she’d done with the rest. The two-day walk to the neighbors’.
I grasp her hand. “Don’t leave me.”
“You need doctor.”
I grasp tighter. “Please.”
“Okay,” she says finally, getting to her feet. “I try radio again.”
*
I shudder awake. It’s night. The firelight draws an apricot ghost on the ceiling. Nhung is at the window looking out. She glances at me when she sees me awake.
“I get through. Someone be here soon. Take you back. See doctor. Police.”
Police. Real life. I don’t like the sound of it, perverse as it seems, given what I’ve been through. Logically I know I can’t stay here in the warm, safe bubble of Nhung’s home, but nothing about any of this is logical. I fight the urge to tell Nhung that I don’t want to go and instead let her help me to her bedroom, the only other room in the cabin.
She points to the old-fashioned pitcher and basin of steaming water. “You wash. Put on fresh clothes.”
She leaves me and I glance around at the neat plain walls, the large bookcase stacked with Harlequin romance novels, the crumpled black-and-white photograph wedged beneath the frame of the mirror—her and four siblings and mother and a bespectacled man who must be her father.
I remove the flannel nightgown and dip the cloth in the water and wipe my skin. I turn to look in the mirror. Reflected back is a body I don’t recognize, thin and slack and covered with bruises. I run a fingertip over the tracks of my ribs and say a prayer of thanks to my body for carrying me to Nhung.
I slip into fresh clothes that smell like lemon soap, and walk over to the bookshelf and select a well-thumbed Harlequin. I tear out the blank back page and pick up the pen from the dresser and write Thank you then put the note under Nhung’s pillow.
There’s a rumble outside. A car engine. I sit down on the end of the bed and take a deep breath. I think of all that’s to come—the city they will take me to, the doctors who will inspect and swab, the probing questions of detectives with pens and note pads, the explaining myself over and over. For a moment, I consider opening the window and fleeing back into the woods.
But before I can make good on this insane impulse, I hear the snap of the car door close, followed by a crunch of boots then voices in greeting.
It’s time. There’s no going back. I get to my feet, smooth down the bedspread, and hobble over and open the door. I blink, confused, at Nhung and the man standing next to her.
“Hello, Amelia,” says Rex. “I heard you were having a lick of trouble.”
34
I can’t move. The air has been sucked from the room. Rex in blue jeans. Plaid flannel shirt. Green puffer jacket with a Hawkins Oil Refinery logo.
I plunge a knuckle in my eye. Open. Blink. He’s still there.
“This Mr. Hawkins,” says Nhung. “Jack’s old boss. He good guy. He look after you now.” She stare
s at me and frowns. “What wrong? You white ghost.”
My mouth is cotton. I glance at Nhung, who is looking at Rex like he’s the greatest American hero, and I begin to doubt myself. Maybe it’s not him. Maybe it could just be the fact he’s a man. Maybe my fried brain is making all the wrong connections. I shake my head, literally shake my head, and look again. Then he does that thing, lifts his forefinger to rub the spot just above his top lip, and I know this is no mistake.
“You’re bleeding,” says Nhung, pointing.
I glance down. Blood is trickling down the inside of my thigh. I look at Rex.
“It’s him,” I say.
“What you mean?”
Rex turns to Nhung. “I put a gas can out the back for the generator. That should see you through the month.”
“He’s the one that took me from the parking lot.”
“And a sack of feed for the chickens.”
“The one who raped me.”
Rex looks at Nhung. “It’s the shock, Nhung. I take no offense.”
Nhung pauses and stares at me. “You confused. Mr. Hawkins our neighbor. Respected community man. He good guy.”
I take a step back. “He kidnapped me and took me to the woods and raped me and left me for dead.”
Nhung shakes her head, glances at Rex. “Don’t say these things.”
“It’s him. I know it is,” I say.
Rex places his hands on Nhung’s shoulders and looks at me over the top of her head.
“Trauma can do funny things to a person, Nhung,” he says. “Amelia will be better once the doctor sees her. Speaking of which, we should get going before that second snow front moves in.”
I take a step back. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
I glance to my right, see the shotgun in the kitchen corner, way out of reach.
“I wouldn’t,” says Rex, following my eyes.
“Leave us alone.” My voice trembles and I hate the way it sounds so weak. “Get in your car. Turn on the ignition, just drive away.”
Left for Dead: A gripping psychological thriller Page 9