The Wild Inside

by Jamey Bradbury

  Whoa, there, Dad said when he seen how my legs buckled. You’re not still feeling poorly, are you, Trace?

  Concern reaching for me like hands, and numbers clicking through his mind, he always forgot if the clinic’s phone ended in an eight or a nine. And an absence tugging at him.

  Helen leave this morning? he asked as he led me to the table.

  I dropped into a chair, my stomach plunging. Grateful this openness didn’t go two ways, that he couldn’t know what was in my head, because along with the dread of him discovering Helen was missing, and the guilt over what I done, now I understood I wouldn’t just feel my own loss and regret and horror at what I done. I would feel his, too.

  It didn’t make sense. Dad and I had always been close in the way of two people who work alongside each other or who like the same things. The dogs brung us close, racing, the woods, even the times he showed me what he knew about hunting or shelter building. All that linked us together, but not the way drinking would of. Yet now I was as close as I could get to him. I had the same sudden access to him as I had with Scott.

  She wasn’t here, Scott was telling Dad. I haven’t seen her since Chris Lester’s mom dropped me off Friday. Did she come back after you got sick again? he asked me.

  I didn’t tell her, I mumbled, then added that I didn’t feel so well now, I thought I would try to nap a bit, and I stumbled up the stairs, leaving Scott and Dad downstairs to wonder about Helen. While their unspoken thoughts and feelings trailed after me like tendrils of smoke.

  I stopped in the bathroom first. The only way I had been able to get Scott out of my head the night before had been to sleep. I was wide awake now, despite how I felt, like someone had wrung out my guts. I rummaged round inside the medicine cabinet till I found an old prescription bottle, a picture of a truck on its side with a line drawn through it. May cause drowsiness. Alcohol may intensify this effect. Use caution when operating a car or dangerous machinery. I swallowed two pills without water, then flopped onto my bed, didn’t bother getting under the covers.

  My dreams was my own, no one else’s. I know because I dreamed of Helen, her body sinking slow into the icy water. Her eyes, filled with snow.

  I skipped dinner, though I woke enough to hear Dad describing the race to Scott. He recounted each leg of the run from Willow to Nome, though he didn’t sound as animated as he’d done in previous years. He was distracted, worry fretting his brain, plucking at it like fingers that couldn’t still themselves. Till finally, in the middle of a sentence, he got up and dialed the phone. His fifth call to Helen that day. I listened to ringing through his ears, till her answering machine picked up. Hello, you’ve reached Helen Graham’s residence. I can’t come to the phone right now . . .

  Think maybe I’ll drive out there, he said to Scott.

  Can I come?

  The whole house suffused with their distress. Suffused. I rolled the word round in my head, not a word I would normally use, but a Helen word, a word I had got from her. I closed my eyes and buried my face in my pillow, didn’t stir when Dad knocked on my door, and when he and Scott was long gone, I went downstairs to find the note he’d left me on the table. Gone to Helen’s, back soon. Love you.

  My head finally my own for a spell. Clear. The thoughts inside it only my own. My arms and legs limp with relief. I roused them, shoved my feet into my boots and went outside. For the first time since my trip to the lake, I sought out the trail. Run into the trees.

  I needed to find a way to disconnect myself from Dad and Scott.

  I stayed in the woods long past when I should of come home, at first hunting, setting snares, then waiting in the sublime silence of the woods, reveling in it. Near about midnight, it begun to snow, slow, soft flakes that wafted to the ground. It covered the tracks of animals and masked the sounds of them in their dens. I rose finally and plunged deeper into the wild, looking for traps I had set. I found one triggered, then another, the animals already dead but I drunk from them anyway. Filled my head with random minutes from their lives. I was quickly full, but I kept running, searching, and when a vole darted across the trail I was quick, I snatched it before it vanished in the underbrush. Its whole short life rushed through me. Then the silent wood again, and my silent head. Escape, finally.

  When I come home, I found that Dad and Scott had returned with company. The Village Safety Officer’s car was parked outside, engine still running against the swiftly dropping temperature. The snow had stopped.

  Stepping inside the house was like turning on three radios all at once, all at full volume. All three minds, Scott’s, Dad’s, and the VSO’s, exposed. I waded unwillingly into the stream of their existence.

  There you are, Dad said, and there was relief I was home and irritation that I had gone out without telling him. Worry about Helen, weighing heavier on him now that he knew she hadn’t showed up at work, neither, something the VSO had told him, the VSO whose attention was like a mirrored ball, each face reflecting upon a detail, a scrap of information, a face, my face, marking me as an unknown, noting that he would have to make time to ask me questions, the way he had asked Scott, whose fear had escalated though he was trying to tamp it down, a boy sitting on the lid of a cage that contained a rabid bear, willing and eager to eat him whole.

  Stop it, I hollered. Or only whispered, since the three of them ignored me.

  We found her Jeep about thirty-five miles south of here, parked on the shoulder of the highway, the VSO told Dad. This was after someone at the clinic went to her house to check on her. She’d missed— He glanced at the small notebook in his hand. Two shifts. Coworkers said that wasn’t like her.

  Dad shook his head. No.

  We sent search and rescue out, in case she broke down and got lost somehow.

  She wouldn’t of left the highway in that case, Dad pointed out.

  The VSO nodded. Still, worth a look. Didn’t find any sign of her, though.

  So, what now?

  I had crept across the room, nearly to the stairs, but now I felt every face of the VSO’s attention turn to me, the glare of it hot as the sun.

  When did you last say you saw Ms. Graham?

  I swallowed. Winced under the weight of all their focus, all three of them hanging on to me like I was a hand about to pull them from a ledge. I breathed deep.

  She dropped Scott at home last Monday, I said slowly, wading through their thoughts to find my own. Then I give her a lift back into the village when I took Scott to school Tuesday morning, after she dropped off the truck. I guess that was the last time.

  And she didn’t come back to your house?

  Not after Tuesday.

  And she didn’t call to check on you?

  No, sir.

  His brown eyes lingered on my face and I made it blank as I could. I felt suspicion like spider legs skitter all over my skin. Then he nodded.

  Well, you think of anything, you tell me. Or your dad.

  Will do, I said.

  Dad’s hand found me, his arm slipped round my shoulders and give me a squeeze. Go on upstairs, both of you, he said. And try not to worry. VSO Chappel here will help us. We’ll find her.

  His hope as palpable as his doubt. I ducked my head as he kissed the top of it, unwilling, unable to look him in the eye.

  She really didn’t call? Scott whispered to me when we got to the top of the stairs. That doesn’t seem like her. She’s a nurse. She was worried about you.

  Well, she didn’t, I said.

  He trailed behind me as I tried to ignore him, his words tugging at me. Why would she walk away from her Jeep? Where would she have gone? She wasn’t far from here—why didn’t she come home if she needed help? Do you think she got hurt?

  My head on fire.

  Why aren’t you more worried?

  I spun round. Shut up! Just shut up!

  He blinked. The color went out of his face, and then a storm gathered where his worry had been. Not a thunderstorm, but a soft, ceaseless rain. Drops that found no place to lan
d, just fell through a bottomless crater.

  I’m sorry, I said. I’m just—scared. I’m worried, really. I just don’t know what else to do.

  His face softened a bit. He wanted me to stay, to sit in his room till he fell asleep, the way I used to do sometimes, right after Mom died, when a nightmare woke him and he called me to his bedside. He hadn’t done that in ages. I guessed the nightmares had stopped. His whole self latched onto me, digging blunted claws in, wanting me to comfort him. And still, from downstairs, Dad and the VSO radiating their selves up at me. Made sense for Dad to think after me, I felt concern for me tugging at the corners of his mind, the parts that wasn’t focused on Helen. But I nagged at the VSO’s thoughts, too. He felt me like a distraction, kept trying to swat thoughts of me away like a tiresome gnat. I hated knowing he hadn’t brushed me aside. Like there was a searchlight looking for me, edging closer in the dark.

  Scott’s thoughts hopeful, pleading with me not to leave him.

  Night, Scott, I told him and turned away from the disappointment I didn’t need to feel, it was so plain on his face.

  I closed my door, then wadded up a blanket and shoved it under the space between the bottom of the door and the floor. It seemed to help a little.

  I’d stashed the pills from the bathroom under my pillow. I took three this time and hoped it would be enough. Then I waited for sleep, staring dry-eyed at shadows.

  When I woke, it was still night. The house quiet, my head quiet, too. Mom quiet as she sat on the edge of my bed, weightless. No red coat now that she was indoors, instead she wore her fuzzy white robe, her hair wet.

  I was a lot like you when I was your age, she said without saying anything.

  I remembered the day she come to my room to warn me away from strangers, not because the strangers was dangerous but because she worried I might be. Hikers, hunters, folks who had lost their way. People get lost in the woods all the time, she said. Like that boy who had disappeared from the village where she’d growed up. I even went looking for him, she’d told me.

  Was you the one who found him? I asked her now.

  She reached into the pocket of her robe. Her fist clenched when she took it out again, she dropped a knife on my bed. Not a pocketknife like mine, but a kitchen knife, a small one with a serrated blade, the kind you would use to cut your dinnertime steak.

  She drew her hand away, the hand of a child, and the mom fresh from the shower with dripping hair was gone, in her place was a girl younger than me, bare chested and wearing only a pair of boys’ shorts, her hair a tangled mess, her fingernails crusted with dried blood. Her lips smeared with it. A wild thing.

  You drunk him? I asked and realized it wasn’t a question because I already knew the answer. You done it as he died.

  She fiddled with the knife, not looking me in the eye.

  And after? I said. You knew him, but did you know—everybody?

  She was herself again, pale and frail looking. Too tired to keep her eyes open. I thought of all the times she spent days in bed, shut away from everyone. Of the pills I’d found in the medicine cabinet and used myself to plunge into sleep. To escape everyone else’s thoughts.

  Thought of the years and years she must of lived with other people inside her head.

  Now she wore her red coat. Her lips too red, and there was blood on her face. She wiped at it with the back of her hand.

  Vomit at the back of my throat. I swallowed it, and my stomach burned.

  Scott was awake. I knew it, not because I could hear him get up and cross the hall to the bathroom or because his light clicked on, but because I could feel the pressure in his bladder, the groggy half-woke murmur of his brain remembering the remnants of the dream he’d been having, something about a lynx that stalked outside Helen’s house.

  My eyes went hot, and I squeezed them shut.

  Does it stop? I asked Mom, my voice cracking.

  But I knew she was gone even before I opened my eyes again.

  Jesse made it home the next day, skinnier than ever but happy and full of stories from the checkpoints he’d worked. He’d caught a ride with Steve Inga, who stayed to dinner, and the kitchen was lively with conversation, even livelier if you could hear what wasn’t said, the silent commotion that happened inside every person’s head. Some of the talk and thought was about the race, but most of it centered on Helen. They laid out their facts and memories like puzzle pieces, tried to fit them together into a picture that would tell them what might of happened.

  I stayed in my room, still feigning sickness. Took four pills that evening, and sunk into a heavy sleep.

  Late the next morning, Dad roused me.

  Come on, he said. Pack a bag. We’re going camping.

  I would of been confused if I couldn’t of felt the aimless desperation in him, the need to move, to get out of the house. I rummaged round my room, collecting what I would need for a night or more on the trail. Stuffed clothes and gear into my pack then found one of the straps broke when I tried to shoulder it. Shit, I muttered. Stuck my head under my bed, found Jesse’s pack, the one I still hadn’t told him I’d found before I even knew he existed.

  I had done my best to avoid thinking about Tom Hatch. Wasn’t all that hard, actually, with Helen taking up most of my thoughts and the rest of my head filled with other people’s existence. It was possible Hatch was still round, still planning to show up on our doorstep one day. But every day that passed, the likelihood seemed smaller. Everything seemed small under the shadow of Helen’s death.

  I repacked my things in Jesse’s old pack, then strapped it to the sled Dad had already drug from the kennel. Threw a tarp over it when Jesse materialized in the yard, heading my way.

  Need a hand?

  He followed as I fetched Boomer from the dog yard and led him back to the rigging laid out in the snow. Though I had drunk too many animals to count at the moment of their death, not to mention Old Su as she had faded in my arms, there wasn’t no cacophony from the dogs inside my head. But I didn’t even have to try to sense Jesse. His voice was casual but his thoughts was tremulous with anxiety and curiosity, invisible fingers poking at me, prodding for information.

  He didn’t show, I said.

  Jesse shook his head. I was going to ask if you’re feeling better, he said.

  Only because you don’t want me to think you’re more worried about Hatch than you are about me.

  Whoa, Jesse said and grabbed my arm, firm but gentle. Why would you say that?

  I stared at the ground, trying to wade out of the soup of him. He was too close.

  Sure, I’m worried about Tom, Jesse said, quiet. But either he showed up and left, or he showed up and—you took care of it.

  The unspoken question not just in his eyes and his inflection, but hovering in the air between us, a tangible thing.

  Dad come over, guiding Marcey by her harness. She had long recovered from her chocolate treat, was back to wolfing down any food you put in front of her. She grinned with her tongue lolling, danced up on two feet, and I wished with everything inside of me that my mind could be as simple as hers. Eager to run, not thinking about much else.

  I think two on the line will be enough, Dad said as he clipped Marcey onto the gangline. We’re not going too far.

  I’m ready when you are, I told him.

  What can I do? Jesse’s voice dropped to a whisper as Dad stepped onto his own sled.

  I knew Jesse meant what could he do to help me. To mend things between us, since he sensed something was off. But even with that worry, hope shimmered round his edges like light creeping into a dark room round the edges of a door. With Tom out of his life and a new family of sorts, here, Jesse was finally starting to believe maybe he could have what he’d been searching for ever since he left Oklahoma. Since before that, even.

  But at the center of him, still, a box with a lid shut tight. A part of him I still couldn’t reach.

  I rubbed my forehead, squeezed my eyes shut for a brief moment. Dad whistle
d to his team, and they sprung forward, pulling him toward the trailhead.

  Nothing, I told Jesse and tried to sound like myself. Everything’s okay. We can talk when I get back.

  I hopped onto my sled’s runners and called out, Let’s go! to Marcey and Boomer before Jesse could say anything else. Followed Dad onto the trail, not needing to look back to know Jesse watched till I was gone.

  The deeper we dove into the woods, the quieter my head grew. The woods closed round me and the runners of the sleds hushed against the snow and the dogs breathing, their feet churning, we traveled in a cloud of our own breath, under the bowed limbs of trees and sky growing lighter with the burgeoning day. Dad’s head was quiet, too, the fullness and emptiness of the woods had the same effect on us both, our worries didn’t exactly vanish, instead they was like the land after a big snowfall, everything buried, the shapes of things still discernible but all their hard edges blunted.

  I was warm in my coat and hat but when we hit the lake and crossed its icy surface, a spike of cold shot through me. I begun to shiver almost as hard as I had the day I pushed Helen into the water. I gripped my handlebar, thankful Dad was ahead of me and couldn’t see how badly I shook.

  We made camp after dark. Dad was quiet as we ate next to our fire, preoccupied with thoughts of Helen now that we wasn’t moving over the trail. He didn’t know what to do, and he gnawed at his not-knowing, a bone he couldn’t chew through or leave alone.

  Where’s the farthest you ever gone from here? I spoke up.

  Hmm—? His face emerged from the shadows as he leaned forward into the circle of light cast by the fire.

  Training out here, on your own, I said. How far out have you gone?

  He sipped hot chocolate from his thermos, his mind mulling over the question now, distracted for the moment. Like I’d hoped. His cheeks was still windburned from the race, and his hair had got shaggy. I noticed for the first time it was starting to gray, the white in his beard wasn’t from frost.

  Long time ago, Dad said, I took a small team all the way through the mountains. You know those two peaks, the ones that look almost like a pair of blunt teeth?