Next I rolled her forward so that I could see her back, easing the tape and gauze off slowly. Tomás pushed in closer, then groaned. Put a hand to his mouth. Crouched beside him, I didn’t make a sound, but I knew how he felt because I could see what he saw and smell what he smelled. Not only was the area on Rose’s lower back hot and pus filled, it reeked of horror, like meat left in the sun. The wound had grown, spreading into a wet gaping circle edged by black-crusted skin. Worst of all, things were moving in her flesh, filling my mind with images of fly-strike—blowfly swarms that gathered to lay eggs in the wounds of sick animals, allowing their maggots to feast and grow on what was unlikely to survive.
What it looked like, more than anything, was death.
46.
I DIDN’T LET myself panic. I couldn’t. Tomás was already falling apart, slipping into a shuddering mess. Rose had been fine earlier, he told us, with tears pouring down his face. Yes, she’d been tired and foggy and not wanting to eat. But she’d had water and hadn’t said anything about feeling this sick. And then he’d found her like that less than an hour later.
Terror bubbled inside me. Part of me wanted to snap at Tomás, to tell him that while he shouldn’t take responsibility for what had happened to Archie, he and Shelby sure as hell should feel bad about putting that dirty T-shirt on Rose’s wound when she’d first been shot. But it wouldn’t have been fair to say that. It also wouldn’t have helped.
Avery took charge, spurring us into action. She ordered me to boil water and sterilize tweezers and find a towel so that she could try and drain the wound.
“Damp heat can pull the infection to the surface,” she explained. “It’s worth a try.”
“What are the tweezers for?”
“Don’t ask,” she said. “What about medication? Do we have more? She’s in a lot of pain.”
“I have Tylenol 3. It should help her fever.”
“How much can she take?”
“No more than two. You can’t . . . you can’t overload on Tylenol. It’s toxic.”
“I don’t think we can worry about that right now,” Avery said.
I nodded. Told her where to get the pills.
Then we did those things. We boiled the water. We cleaned her wound. We gave her more pills. The sun rose higher in the sky and we were desperate and scared, but there was nothing to do but wait for the others to return or for help to arrive. So we waited.
And we waited.
—
Rose alternated between sleeping and moaning in pain. Tomás, Avery, and I took turns sitting with her, but our uselessness soon grew unbearable. So did the thought of failure.
“We don’t know where the hell they are,” Tomás said, referring to Shelby and Clay. “We don’t even know if they got back to the cars. What if they took a different route and got lost? Or if they’re injured somewhere?”
“What do you want to do?” I asked him.
“I want to get help. She needs a hospital.”
“So then let’s walk out,” Avery said. “We’ll go the long way to Junction City. The snow’s mostly gone. It won’t take more than three hours if we hurry.”
“But we can’t all go. We can’t leave her.”
“I’ll stay,” I said.
Tomás looked at me. “You sure?”
“Yeah. My shoulder’s too screwed up. You’ll be faster without me.”
He nodded, growing restless now that there was a plan. I got the map out and showed them exactly where they’d be going. It was a straight line once they got past Papoose Lake. They just needed to head due south, connecting up with the Canyon Creek Trail and keeping the ridge of mountains to their right. I helped them pack clean water and salt pills and gave them the last of the food.
Tomás ducked into the tent to kiss Rose good-bye and returned with his eyes brimming with tears. Avery hugged me hard.
“We’ll be back soon,” she said. “It’ll be okay.”
“Thank you,” I told her.
Then they were gone. Opting to let the fire burn out rather than tend it, I crawled into the tent to stay with Rose. I lay beside her. I stroked her hair. Held a wet towel to her burning cheeks.
I wouldn’t leave her, I promised myself.
Not until she was safe.
Not until we were saved.
47.
ROSE WOKE EVENTUALLY.
“Ben,” she said weakly.
“Shhh.” I felt her forehead. It was as hot as ever. “You’re okay.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“The gunshot. It’s infected. Maybe gangrenous. It’s making you sick.”
She began panting again. “That’s bad, isn’t it? Like, really bad.”
“It’ll be okay. Help is coming.”
“What help?”
“The storm’s over. It’s sunny. Everyone’s walking out. Someone’ll be here soon. I promise. A doctor. Real help.”
“Everyone?”
“But me.”
“Why didn’t you go with them?” she asked.
“I couldn’t leave you, Rose. I won’t. I’ll be right here.”
She nodded. Her eyes fluttered closed. I watched her sleep.
—
She began twitching, her shoulders and legs. I panicked, thinking she was having a seizure, and tried holding her down with my good arm. Rose thrashed against me, then twitched again, quicker this time, and she made a gurgling sound, deep in her throat.
“Rose!” I hissed. “Rose, wake up!”
“Gah,” she said, before turning her head, throwing one arm across her face.
“Rose!”
“Stop it,” she mumbled, and she pushed my hand away. “Just leave me alone.”
I sat back, temporarily relieved. She wasn’t seizing, just fitful. She was asleep, it seemed, hovering in that space between rest and REM. She settled eventually and the thrashing slowed, although her limbs continued to twitch and jump, like a dog that was dreaming of running past its fence.
48.
DAY DRIFTED INTO afternoon.
No one returned to say they couldn’t make it through the melting snow.
No one came back with help.
No search-and-rescue team found us on their own.
Nothing.
It was just me and her.
But, I whispered in her ear, it was also us.
—
Rose’s fever climbed. She woke again but didn’t recognize me. Her cheeks, which had been so pale and sunken, were now flushed bright like she’d been slapped, and she was breathing hard. Too hard. Steam train fast. Puff-puff-puff.
I’d tied open the tent door earlier to let the air circulate, and I glanced out at the trees. At the growing patches of wet earth and budding moss. The shadows looked longer. The sun lower. Or maybe that was my imagination? I had no clue when night would fall but Rose couldn’t wait until then.
I couldn’t, either.
“Please,” I prayed out loud to no one in particular—or to everyone, really; my desperation was nonspecific. “Please come. Please, please save us.”
—
Rose needed more Tylenol, but before she could swallow it I had to boil more water. Spring or no spring, I couldn’t risk getting her sick from giardia, which was everywhere around here. That meant starting up the fire again—the propane was long gone, as were the water purification pills. I flirted with the idea of jogging back up to the upper campsite and foraging there for supplies but couldn’t bring myself to do it. A fire wasn’t hard. I’d watched Clay every time he’d started ours.
“The flame is like your voice,” he told me, back on our first night by the river, after he’d hauled in all those fish. Then he’d glanced over at me, tomcat scowl etched across his skinny face. “That’s not, like, a shitty metaphor or anything. Acoustics and fire behav
e really similar to one another. It’s all energy, okay? It’s waves. And if you need more of something you don’t have, you bring in a second energy source to amplify the first. Like this.”
I’d leaned in close as he crafted a nest of dry grass kindling beneath the larger logs he was trying to light. As the kindling caught, its flames flickered short of goal, unable to reach the thicker wood. Its heat quickly dimmed, but before going out completely, Clay crawled forward on his knees and blew beneath the ashes. Oxygen flooded in and the kindling erupted again, its flames shooting higher this time, sending lit sparks spiraling upward to set the logs ablaze.
He sat back on his knees in a haze of satisfaction.
“And that,” he said, “is how you do it.”
Unable to rely on my own skill or experience, I worked hard to re-create just what he’d done: stacking the wood I found into a triangular shape. Finding kindling was more difficult. There was no dry grass or bark—everything was wet and mushy—and as the wind picked up again, whistling through the gorge, I did the only thing I could think of: I pulled the cash I’d found in the Preacher’s jacket from the inside pocket and began to shred it, stuffing the torn bills beneath the branches.
When I’d stuffed enough in there, I set it all ablaze with a match. Only unlike Clay’s fire, there was too much of a breeze for my kindling. It threw the flames in every direction, and I had to cup my hands around the burning money to contain all that energy. Finally, the flames shot straight up and took. I frantically stuffed more cash in to keep it going, and when the wood began to crackle and the heat felt constant, far out of my control, I stuck the water kettle directly on the flames. Once rolling, it would have to boil for three minutes for purification purposes, but the time until then was anyone’s guess.
Rose began to scream.
“Shit.” I slipped and fell trying to run to her, landing on my bad shoulder with a howl. I got up again, quick as I could, and when I got to her, all I could tell was that she’d gotten sick on herself and the blankets. She screamed more when I touched her, tried to help her, and flailed her body.
“Rose, Rose, Rose,” I said. “Please, baby, it’s okay. I’m making water for you. I’ve got more pills. They’ll help.”
Her screaming trailed into hacking coughs and sobbing, only her tears were dry, and that was a bad sign. It meant she was dehydrated and I had no fluids to give her. I put one of the Tylenols in her mouth and tried to get her to swallow it, but she ended up choking. Spitting it out. Sobbing more.
The tent reeked of vomit. I brushed flies from her body, but they kept coming back. I couldn’t stop shaking. I couldn’t stop telling Rose I loved her, that help was coming and that she would be okay. The pain would stop, I said. She just had to hold on. Her heart jittered against my chest, a wild double-time beat it couldn’t possibly sustain, and while my tears were as dry as they always were, it wasn’t long before I heard my own sobs mix with hers. A hoarse sound both ragged and rare, but not wholly forgotten.
She jerked hard and fell against me. I threw my good hand out to steady myself, letting it land first on the squishy air pillow Rose had been using. I knocked it aside only to set my hand on cold metal. Startled, I looked down to see Archie’s loaded handgun, the one he’d brought on the trip to ward off any apex predators. It lay there on the tent floor, where it must have been, all this time—hidden not close to Rose’s heart, but mere inches from her head.
My stomach soured. The first thrum of a migraine began worming its way into my skull as I took in what I was seeing and what it meant. Rose had stolen that gun from Archie on purpose. I knew she had. She must’ve lifted it from his backpack before sending the two of us up on that mountain together. Or else she’d had Avery do it. Either way, knowing me well—and not knowing about the storm—Rose had trusted me not to leave him. Not even to save her.
But she’d done more than that, I realized. Far more. I was sure of it. Because Abel was no bank robber—Tomás had told me that. And while he’d been far from innocent, I didn’t believe he’d told Rose a story about any fake money, not even out of spite or malice. He’d been too close to death for dissembling. Not to mention, it couldn’t have been him who’d spun the bank robbery story in the first place. That had happened back up on the mountain. All of which pointed to the fact that Rose had been telling the truth when she said that everything that had happened was her fault. Because the gift Rose had given Archie was a lie.
A hopeful one.
I picked up the gun.
No, Rose didn’t want me. She hadn’t since the day she’d returned from Peru with her skin tan and her heart ripe with remorse. But in that moment, my love for her burned more fiercely than it ever had. I loved her for caring enough to push me away. For trying to teach me that abandonment didn’t have to be my destiny. For not giving me any easy outs and for insisting that some choices were the kind I had to navigate alone.
My hand shook, but I held her close. I cooed my love song in her ear, no longer a duet, but no less loving, and I told her about the beauty around us: the sunlight dancing on the water; the mountains kissed with snow; the tender spaces hollowed between the trees that were built to bear witness to secrets always to be kept and promises never broken. Rose gasped and struggled to breathe, her hands clawing at her throat, her back arched in constant pain.
I held her closer, and I told her about the gun. How I’d come to realize that like freedom, salvation could look different to different people, depending on where you were and what it was you needed. How I knew now that who we were was more often defined by what we’d done than what it was we one day hoped to achieve. And how I’d learned, more than anything, that survival so often meant letting go. I knew she understood that. We’d talked about it the night we’d lain half naked beneath the stars. It was the reason Rose had told Archie the things she did, offering him purpose even in the hell of his mind’s own winter. Hope soared over surrender, and reason triumphed over despair. Even in death.
That had been her gift, I whispered, pushing her soft hair back as I brought the gun to her head. Hope and reason. Now freedom would be mine. And for my beautiful, wilting Rose, who was stuck in her own agony, just like my mother before her, it was one I gave willingly.
Only this time, it was with my eyes wide open.
AFTER
49.
WHAT MORE CAN I tell you?
What else is there, really, to say?
50.
WELL, THERE IS more to say, of course.
Only I don’t know where to start. Or even how to begin. In reaching the end of her story, all that remains is now mine alone, and I never wanted that. Other people are born to be the protagonist, the main character, the brightest star in their galaxy.
But not me.
I could tell you, I suppose, about the snow falling outside my window as I write this, a near-poetic dusting of the dawn. It isn’t easy to see through the bars, but if I close my eyes, I can picture the way the flakes might gather on the ground, sticking together to become something greater than themselves.
Speaking of poetic, it’s not Chatterton, but William Bryant who haunts my conscience these days, his ode to impermanence capable of savaging my soul.
Loveliest of lovely things are they
on earth that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour
is prized beyond the sculptured flower.
Do you see? Do you see how those words might ruin me?
As well they should.
I could also tell you it’s been two months since the trip to Thompson Peak, which means it’s been two months that I’ve been housed here in Trinity County’s juvenile detention facility, waiting to stand trial for the murder of Rosemarie Augustine. I left my Humboldt home back in October and have yet to return, which I guess makes this place a purgatory of sorts.
No one from that trip has come to see
me, in case you’re wondering about that. They also haven’t called. Or written. Or communicated with me in any way. None of this is a surprise, but it still hurts. From what I hear, though, they’re alive and healing, so I suppose that what I ought to feel is gratitude.
There are people who visit me, and they like to ask all sorts of questions. About Rose. About Archie. About Rose and Archie. About everything that happened, and why, when search and rescue finally showed up on that mountain, I was found alone in a tent, with my dead girlfriend in my arms and the gun I’d used to shoot her lying on the ground beside me.
My court-appointed lawyer doesn’t let me answer any of these questions. I understand why, but even when we’re alone, he never wants to hear what I have to say—unless it’s that I’ll take a plea deal, which I won’t because I’m not guilty of what I’m being accused of. So it turns out the only person around here I’m allowed to talk to with any degree of honesty is the county doctor they send me to who helps me with my migraines.
He also asks about my shoulder, that doctor. It worries him, I guess, that I still have so much pain. That’s what we talk about mostly. Pain. How bad it is and what I think I can live with. He wants to refer me to someone else in case surgery is necessary, but I don’t want to do that, to be cut open. I can live with the pain, I tell him. I’m pretty sure I can live with anything.
Hearing this always makes him frown. Pain isn’t meant to be punishment, he says. It’s a signal to tell you when something’s wrong. Well, I’ve heard this before and I know what he means, but I’m not sure I agree. My mother’s only spoken to me once since I’ve been here, and that was to tell me she’s through with me and my problems—forever. That she can’t handle what I’ve done, no matter with what love I might’ve done it.
Not this time.
Not ever again.
51.
THE SNOW’S CONTINUED to fall off and on over the past few days, and I think it might be getting to me. I started feeling bad after lunch today and ended up in the bathroom for a long time and then I ended up sort of wanting to die. That’s an awful thing to say, I know, but it’s an awful way to feel and it can overwhelm me at times, everything that’s happened. All that’s been lost. Doing the right thing doesn’t preclude regret, I’ve found. Or self-loathing. These are truths I have to learn to live with, and I suppose the good news is I managed to get myself out of there without doing anything stupid.
When I Am Through with You Page 24