Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

  “Oooh,” the girls cooed, like a movie audience when baby tigers gambol onto the screen. “A dog.” Wiley sat down neatly in front of them and cocked his head as if in approval of their astute zoological perception. That pose complete, he bowed down, front legs outstretched, chin on paws.

  “He’s a ham,” Heath said half apologetically from her bed of dirt and rock. Now that the excitement was over and Wiley had successfully taken the intruders captive, her elbows were registering complaints about supporting her body so long.

  The children followed Wiley out the three or four yards from forest to path. They were in sorry shape. How sorry Heath guessed from the sharp intake of breath full view of them elicited from her aunt.

  “Go ahead back to camp,” Heath said. “I can get myself righted.”

  “No. No. I can’t . . .” Gwen looked from Heath to the girls and back. The look of panic on her face as she struggled with the minuscule Sophie’s choice, whether to leave her crippled niece sprawled helpless in the dirt or to get the children to safety and warmth before they bolted or collapsed, infuriated Heath.

  “I can do it,” she hissed, hating herself because maybe she couldn’t and hating Gwen because maybe she knew it and hating the sound of her voice, peevish and beseeching at the same time.

  Gwen hesitated just long enough Heath wanted to spit at her like an angry cat—or cry—then, muttering soothing nothings, she gathered the girls to her and started down the path.

  Heath allowed herself to lay her head down for a moment, cushioned on her folded arms. She was exhausted in mind and body and soul, the kind of tired that gets in the bones, replacing marrow with tears. She couldn’t get back in the chair. She doubted she could even set the chair back on its wheels. The fall from the ice hadn’t merely taken her legs, it had taken her strength, her endurance. Her willingness.

  Hot, none-too-sweet-smelling breath blew on the back of her neck. Wiley had stayed behind. He knew which side his kibble was buttered on.

  “What’re you looking at?” Heath growled. Wiley did his courtly bow again. “Oh yeah, like that’s going to work on me.” But it did. It always did.

  The machinations required to return her butt to its previous place twenty-six inches up on a scrap of vinyl took considerably longer than she would have thought. Before she’d even dragged her worthless legs around the right way and got her chair up and the brakes locked, she was drenched in sweat and as filthy as a prolonged bout of wallowing in the dirt could make a woman. With the assistance of the dog, the vocabulary of a stevedore and a small pine tree, she finally regained her chair. Gwen never came thumping back up the path to see if she was all right. By turns Heath was grateful for the faith and pissed off at the indifference.

  When she rolled back into camp, heralded by her wheels crunching obnoxiously on the gravel and her flashlight held in her lap like the headlight of a crotch-high train, Gwen had both girls dressed in sweat suits—one Gwen’s own, the other belonging to Heath. Water was on the camp stove heating for tea, and Aunt Gwen had returned to her old persona as Dr. Littleton. One of the girls had both her feet in Gwen’s lap, allowing the doctor to bathe and dress them. The quietest one, the littlest, sat with her feet soaking in the dishpan.

  The girls saw Heath, and the tranquil field hospital scene shattered. As one they cried out. Feet went flying. Dirty water and blood spattered on Gwen, hissed against the chimney of a lantern. Disregarding injuries and what had to be a lot of pain, the children scrambled free of lawn chair and picnic table.

  Gwen was calling. “Wait. No. Sweetie. Your feet. No. No. Darlins, you mustn’t—” Wiley, forgetting his training and his trusted position as Good Disciplined Helper, began to bark.

  A litany of self-scorn poured through Heath’s mind, a mind made feeble from fighting gravity and floundering helplessness. Rolling in, rocks clattering under her wheels like some sort of deformed robo-beast from a Terminator prequel, she was more monster than human. The girls, already traumatized by god knew what—and from their state of undress, Heath could hazard a guess—were terrified, running.

  They ran, not away, but toward her.

  Heath stopped. The flashlight fell from her lap, rolled a few feet along the ground.

  They want Wiley, the scruffy charmer, Heath realized. Then the girls were upon her—Wiley ignored, Gwen forgotten. The taller of the two hung about her neck, nearly strangling her. The quiet one crawled into her lap, knees banging the metal of the chair, elbow digging into Heath’s middle, and attached herself like a limpet. Both were crying. Not the tiny whimpers of the woods but bawling like babies, gulping and sobbing. Heath could feel tears hot as embers falling on her neck and cheek.

  These two battered girls saw her as their savior. Heath felt like a fraud. Wiley had found them. Gwen had rescued them. All Heath had done was writhe on the ground like a half-squashed earthworm.

  “You poor little buggers,” she said softly. “You must’ve had a real bad rap.”

  Gwen and Wiley shepherding, Heath blew out the last of her strength pushing her wheels through the crushed rock with her added burden. The smaller girl did not want to leave her lap and, for reasons she wasn’t certain of, Heath didn’t want to make her. Maybe it was just that whatever had happened to the girl, it was probably ugly. Definitely ugly. Maybe uglier than anything that had ever befallen Heath, even waking up in a hospital room and being told she’d never walk again. If sitting on a rolling lap clinging to half a middle-aged ex-climber comforted her, so be it.

  And maybe Heath needed a little comforting herself.

  Gwen coaxed the girls back to their former positions. The lap sitter was finally lured to the bench and allowed her feet to be returned to the dishpan but chose not to let go of Heath’s hand. Wiley took up guard duty while Gwen redressed and bandaged the other child’s feet.

  After the tightly knit darkness beneath the lodgepole pines, the light of Coleman lanterns was shockingly bright. For the first time Heath was able to see what her dog had sniffed out and her aunt had brought home.

  The limpet—the darker, smaller girl who’d flung herself into Heath’s lap and still clung so tightly to her hand she wondered if she’d be able to use a knife and fork again—had jaw-length red hair and brown eyes. Shock or night or drugs had dilated her pupils till they looked as black and bottomless as deep wells. Dry wells; there was no glitter of interest or spark of life. Though she was probably in sixth or seventh grade, she had the promise of womanly beauty beneath the skin of a baby. Deadly combination.

  Girls matured earlier every generation and Heath thought she could smell menstrual blood. In the woods she noticed both girls’ legs were encrusted with grime. How much was blood and how much dirt, she wondered. To cover the grim thoughts, Heath smiled into those empty eyes.

  The girl who’d spoken first was quite tall. Heath had noticed when she’d walked next to Gwen. Gwen was five-foot-ten and this slender reed of a girl wasn’t much shorter. Judging height was another thing her fall had affected. Sitting down, everyone seemed to tower. Often Heath felt like an egret among the cows.

  The tall girl sat in a webbed lawn chair, her feet in Gwen’s lap. The child was mostly legs and what Heath imagined, when shampooed, was blond hair—the long, pale, silky kind that most teenagers want and precious few have. Even ratty and caked with grime the hair hung to the middle of her back. There was something utterly familiar about this girl and Heath racked her brain trying to remember if she’d seen her around the park, in the Visitors’ Center maybe, or at an eatery in town.

  Then it came to her. She looked like Skipper, Barbie’s little sister, right down to the preternatural long legs and stick-straight hair. Down to the blank doll-like expression on her face and the unfocused painted-on eyes.

  “They aren’t talking,” she said to her aunt, suddenly realizing the quiet was unnatural.

  “I know,” Gwen said.

  “Skipper can talk,” Heath said. “The girl you’ve got. She said, ‘It’s a dog,’ bac
k in the woods.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk now, do you, sweetheart?” Gwen said kindly.

  Heath turned to the red-haired girl with a death-grip on her hand. “What’s your name?”

  The eyes seemed to grow larger, darker, till they resembled what Heath had always imagined interstellar black holes looked like: places where nothing could survive—not matter, not rock, not steel.

  “Can I call you ‘limpet’?” Heath took the silence for just that, silence, and stopped prodding. She was afraid she was too heavy-handed, too inept, and would cause more damage. “Come here, Wiley.”

  The dog obediently trotted to between Heath’s knees and those of the girl.

  “You can hold on to Wiley if you want. I do it when I’m totally freaked out. It always makes me feel better.” The limpet looked at the dog and reached out tentatively.

  Her hand was babyish, dimples where knuckles would one day be, wrists barely defined. Her finger ends were raw and bloody. The black of dirt and old blood caked under the nails and in the tiny creases in the once-smooth skin.

  “Go ahead. Pet him. He doesn’t mind. I think it makes him feel important.”

  The small hand closed in the thick fur of the dog’s ruff. Wiley sat very still and grinned.

  “They can understand us at least,” Heath said to her aunt, then: “Oh shit, we should call somebody,” as she remembered her responsibilities.

  “I already tried,” Gwen said. Skipper’s feet were cleaned and bound. The doctor set them gently on the ground and moved over to attend to the limpet’s feet. “Cell phone won’t work in this canyon. The guy camped next to us offered to drive in toward town till he could get a signal and call the rangers.”

  “Good.” Heath should have thought of that. Since the accident, things had been dropping through the cracks in her brain. Sometimes it felt as if, in losing her legs, her independence and her mobility, she’d lost part of her mind as well. She’d wondered—but never dared to ask the doctors for fear they’d add “crazy” to the list of things wrong with her—if the much-vaunted “muscle memory” was an actual real thing, bits of knowledge stored, not in the cells of the brain, but cached in cells in other parts of the body. When her brain had lost contact with her legs, had it also lost access to information, memory and experience as well as sensation?

  The sound of a truck engine vibrated out from the trees, and a boxy white ambulance came into view at the far end of the parking lot.

  “Your guy must’ve got his signal,” Heath said.

  “Finish her.” Gwen put the limpet’s dripping feet in Heath’s lap and rose to go flag down the ambulance.

  Heath’s little bears were in bad shape but, of the obvious injuries, those to their feet were the most serious. It was a testimony to their courage and fortitude—or their desperation and terror—that they’d kept on keeping on, putting one bloody, ragged little foot down in front of the other.

  And it was a testament to their peculiar attachment to her that they’d leaped up and run to her when she’d wheeled into camp. By the bright yet unilluminating glare of the Coleman lanterns, Heath could still make out the bloody prints their passage left on the crushed gravel.

  She cupped the battered heels, one in each of the palms of her hands, and looked into the hopeless darkness of the limpet’s eyes. Wind gusted through the trees, making the night sigh around them.

  “Hey, sweetie pie, where ya been?” she whispered.

  The eyes might have glimmered. Something as tiny as a minnow at the bottom of a deep night-bound pool seemed to flicker. The limpet’s lips parted in an exhaled breath.

  “What have you got for me?” came an alto voice, firm, authoritative and loud as a sonic boom in the fragile whisper of contact Heath had managed to establish with the child.

  A woman, mid-forties or early fifties—under the brim of her flat hat, collar-length hair waved more white than brown—walked into the light. She wore the green and gray of an NPS ranger and carried a gun that was probably standard size but on her slender hips looked huge and black and in-your-face.

  Heath was teetering on disliking her for a number of reasons, starting with her untimely arrival and her doing so on two good legs, when the scales tipped suddenly from casual dislike to overt hostility.

  Skipper and the limpet began screaming as they’d done when she’d come upon them in the woods. The fragile calm she and Gwen had knit for them shredded. The fragment of light or life Heath had seen in the limpet’s eyes dove into her internal darkness.

  The ranger raised both hands as if to show she was harmless and backed away, murmuring, “It’s okay. Take it easy. Nobody’s going to hurt you. You’re okay.”

  The tone and gesture might have struck Heath as commendable in another person at another time, but the girls had ceased their shrieking and began to cry silently, not the snotty gulping children’s sobs they’d drenched her neck with, but the slow, unstoppable tears of old women who know nothing but despair.

  Heath had great respect for the instinctive character judgment of dogs and children. True, Wiley was wagging his tail, but this time he’d been outvoted.

  four

  It’s okay. You’re okay. My name’s Anna . . .” Anna had walked into a lot of situations over the years where people weren’t all that happy she’d shown up, but she couldn’t remember entire parties bursting into tears at the sight of her. The rangers behind her, EMTs who’d brought the ambulance, didn’t seem to reassure the children either, though Ryan, a seasonal so cute he actually had an echoing dimple on his left dimple, usually reduced girls of this age to simpering, giggling blobs of hormonal adoration without even trying.

  The children weren’t alone in their antipathy. A disabled woman, fiftyish and probably fairly good-looking when her face wasn’t screwed up preparatory to spitting nails, sat in a wheelchair near the picnic table.

  It was impossible to tell how tall she was and, briefly, Anna wondered if the question of height became moot when one was relegated to a chair. Petite probably, she was delicate-boned, her face almost a perfect oval and capped by short, very dark hair in a pixie cut. Cheekbones slashed hard lines below her eyes. Dark brows, straight as a die, ran parallel above them. On a good day her lips might have softened the effect. Tonight they were as uncompromising as brows and bones.

  One of the girls had thrown herself into the woman’s lap when Anna had come on scene. The kid was too big to be a lap baby and her legs stuck out over the spoked wheels like jersey-clad sticks. Dr. Littleton had run to a tall, skinny child and wrapped an arm protectively about her narrow shoulders. This girl didn’t cling but sat rigid, her hands squeezed tightly between her knees, her chin tucked into her chest. Curtains of filthy, matted blond hair hung over her face like vines over the mouth of a cave.

  Doing everything she could think of to make herself small and nonthreatening, Anna backed to the edge of the light, squatted on her heels and removed her Stetson. She raised a hand to keep the EMTs back. Neither girl had anything life-threatening that was readily apparent. What was apparent was that they were suffering severe emotional trauma. Anna wasn’t in the mood to exacerbate it any more than she already had.

  At least the camp dog seemed glad to see her. He was a scruffy excuse for a helpmate, which Anna guessed he was by the vest he wore. A lab-shepherd mix, maybe. One that had been washed with dark colors and tumbled in a too-hot dryer.

  “Hey, fella,” she said. Wagging his tail amiably, the dog came over.

  The woman in the wheelchair shot one of them a filthy look. Anna couldn’t tell if it was aimed at her for some unknown reason or at the dog for consorting with her. The pooch sat and presented his ears for scratching. For a minute Anna tended to the animal, waiting for a bit of the tension that had come with her and the two EMTs to drain out of the camp.

  The weather gods were not helping. As they did most every afternoon, thunderheads had been building. Often, by nightfall, they’d dissipate. Not tonight. Lightning flickered to
the southwest, startling the granite mountain peaks out of their sleep. Thunder rolled around as if auditioning for the road show of Rip Van Winkle. Anna could smell rain and taste the ozone on the back of her tongue. It was a night when, had she been a cat, she would have raced from room to room leaping at shadows. The atmosphere was charged with a wildness as much metaphysical as meteorological.

  When the air felt less electric, without rising or leaving the dog, Anna addressed the older woman.

  “Dr. Littleton, can you tell me what happened?”

  The doctor rose, stepped into the light and spread her hands as if she were about to give a formal oration. “My niece”—she said—“this is my niece, Heath Jarrod.”

  “Anna Pigeon, district ranger,” Anna introduced herself.

  “Heath had gone for a walk—” The word walk clanked against the metallic reality of the wheelchair, and the doctor came to a stop.

  “Which path did she take?” Anna asked, to get her over the rough patch.

  “Talk to me,” the disabled woman demanded. She’d been growing more restive by the moment. Something had just reached critical mass. Anna could hear the ominous quiet of nuclear fusion clicking behind her teeth.

  “What path did you take?” Anna repeated neutrally. It was too late. Ms. Jarrod had apparently reached a psychic point of no return. Despite the fact she had, nominally at least, gotten what she wanted, she pushed on.

  “People think a chair makes a person stupid or invisible or deaf. I can hear you. This is a wheelchair, not a fucking cone of silence.”

  Anna laughed before she could stop herself.

  A laugh might not have endeared her to the woman, but it served to startle her out of her fit of pique.

  “So you went up the path. Which one?” Anna asked.

  Question by question she got what she could of the story. It was short and simple. Ms. Jarrod wasn’t inclined to be particularly helpful. The telling of the accident on the path and the discovery of the girls in their underwear was shortened to the point of haiku: “My chair, it tipped. Fell. The girls were there in the woods. Aunt Gwen fixed their feet.”