by Jay Forman
My feet were sound asleep. I let my legs dangle and waited for my feet to wake up. Once I could feel every single toe I knew it would be time to get down from the tree. I had to get moving again. Moving before full daylight.
I looked down at the ground and then turned my head to scan the forest. I could have sworn I saw something moving in the distance behind the tree. Had he walked by me without seeing me up here? Would he go that way? I had to be fairly close to Joshua’s lodge and I doubted he would risk being seen there. I saw the outline of a big bear walking through the woods to my left.
Then I saw him.
He was standing just beyond the edge of the clearing where the bear bait barrel was, peeing. The steady stream sparkled in the sunlight.
I picked Aileen’s rifle up and quickly pushed the butt of it into my shoulder. Fuck, it hurt! I didn’t care. I lined him up.
I heard a helicopter coming, but knew it wouldn’t be able to see us in the forest.
He saw me when he turned around as he was zipping up his fly. He was pulling his big black gun out of the waistband of his jeans when I pulled the trigger.
The pain of the recoil hitting my shoulder knocked me sideways. Or maybe he’d shot me? But I’d only heard one gunshot. I could feel myself falling and looked up at the bottom of the bear stand as I dropped away from it.
I heard more than felt my arm break when I hit the ground.
His tall body cast a shadow over mine when he stood above me and smiled.
I looked down the barrel of his gun and closed my eyes tight. I didn’t want to see the bullet coming at me.
I heard the gunshot … but didn’t feel any pain. Other than the pain in my arm.
What the fuck had happened? How could he have missed?
I opened my eyes just as camouflage hunter’s cap came into view and cast a shadow over my face.
“Seems to me, a gun just made this place a little bit safer.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Is he dead?”
“Yeah.” The Texan put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly. “Found her! She’s over here!” he shouted.
I tried to sit up, but the pain in my arm flattened me down again.
It was over. A tidal wave of relief rolled through me and I closed my eyes. I didn’t have to watch for danger anymore. Instead, I listened to the sound of the many heavy boots running toward me and the voices of the men who stood around me. I recognised Joshua’s voice.
My dry lips had stuck together and I licked them when I managed to pull them apart. “He broke your canoe.”
“Don’t worry about it. Who’s got the water?”
“I do.” Jack’s voice.
I hoped those were his designer boots I heard running toward me.
“Oh, shit!” His voice was really close now.
I heard a zipper unzipping.
“Help me get her sitting up; we have to get that arm braced.”
I opened my eyes and tried to smile at him. His face was right beside mine. “Hi.”
“Hi.” His black eye was a few shades darker. “Lee, this is going to hurt, but we’ll be as gentle as we can.”
I felt many hands supporting me as they lifted me up and then watched Jack wrap his Armani travel jacket tightly around me to hold my arm against my chest. He was right. It hurt. It hurt a lot.
I rested my head on his shoulder as he tilted a water bottle into my mouth. The water felt wonderful. His shoulder felt even better.
“Joshua, can you get the ATV in this far? I don’t know if she’s got the strength to walk and I’m worried that carrying her will move her arm too much.”
“I can walk. I’m fine. It’s just my arm.” I leaned forward and put my left hand on the ground to help push me up.
Both of Jack’s hands held me back. “Just this once, accept the help that’s offered?”
I do myseff.
Shut up.
“Okay.” I relaxed against Jack again.
Jack and I sat in the trailer behind the ATV and Joshua drove as slowly as he could through the woods, only picking up speed once he was on the smoother, pine needle pathway. We drove past the fire pit and down to the shore until the front tires of the ATV were touching the dock.
I looked back at the lodge and saw people in groups of two or three walking out of the woods, all of them armed.
A First Nations woman I hadn’t met before came over to the trailer. “Hi, Lee. I’m Shannen, a nurse here in Webequie. I’ve got something to help you with the pain if you want it.”
“I’ll be okay.” Shut up! “Actually, maybe I will take something.”
I expected her to give me a pill. She gave me a shot instead. And I could feel whatever it was she’d given me spreading through my body before I’d even made it all the way down the dock to the big helicopter that was waiting for Jack and me.
“I’m getting stoned.” My knees felt a little wobbly.
“Good.” Jack lifted me up until my feet were able to step into the back of the helicopter.
Inside it was all beige leather, dark brown mahogany panelling and cupboards, with brass or maybe even gold fittings – definitely not Jack’s taste. It was way too over the top. He liked blacks and whites and greys. My sweater had those colours in it.
“You comfy?” he asked me as he did up my seatbelt.
I just nodded. The buzz was getting better by the minute.
A woman wearing a spotlessly clean white shirt that had striped epaulets on each shoulder appeared in the open doorway and smiled at me. “Hello, Ms Smith, I’m Rachel. I’ll be flying you down to Thunder Bay today. Ready to go?” she asked Jack.
“You have the controls,” he said to her as he did up his own seatbelt.
“Don’t you want to go up front?” I asked him.
“I’m right where I want to be.” My lips must have felt like sandpaper to him when they pushed against his smooth lips. “Don’t ever, ever, do something that stupid again? Please?”
“Okay.” I felt us lift off the ground. “She’s too pretty.”
“Who is?”
“Rachel. I like George better.”
I felt his shoulders shake as he laughed. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
We lifted off and I saw people, so many people, some walking out of the woods and some in boats that were floating out of the bay that lead to the waterfall, that they made me think of the rocks that were blown out of one of Jack’s kimberlite pipes. “Were all those people looking for me?”
“Yes. The chief organized the search and I flew a few people down from the mine to add some more boots on the ground.”
“I love you, Mr Hughes.”
“I love you, too, Ms Smith.”
“I’m your fucking fiancée.”
“Damn right you are.”
****
Aside from the really amazing sex, there were other benefits to being in Jack’s world. I didn’t have to wait hours in the emergency department for treatment. A doctor was waiting for me when Jack wheeled me through the hospital’s sliding doors two hours after we’d lifted off from the lodge dock. And when the doctor kindly offered me something for the pain I said “Sure!”
I barely felt anything when he reset my broken bone and told me I’d been lucky. It was a clean break, I wouldn’t need surgery.
I drifted in and out of reality, letting myself stay out more than in. Reality sucked sometimes. Especially when it foisted memories of my night in the woods on me. I wasn’t sure which world I was in when I heard a voice talking to Jack that sounded vaguely familiar. So I opened my eyes and looked at him.
“Hey! It’s Moustache Man!” The OPP crest on the arm of his black shirt looked like it was wiggling.
I think I answered all his questions, but he sure asked a lot of them.
“I shot him.”
“No, actually, you missed.” He put his notebook away. “I’m sure we’ll be talking again soon.”
“Okay.” He was a nice man.<
br />
“Lee. Lee.”
Why did Jack keep saying my name? “What?” I opened my eyes again.
“I’m back now.”
He’d been gone?
“You’ve been released. We can go.”
“Okay.” Why was I saying that word so much? I was never this agreeable.
I let Jack help me sit up and realised that my sweater and T-shirt were gone. I was only wearing a bra underneath the flimsy hospital gown that had been draped over me. Was it a clean bra? Where had my T-shirt and sweater gone? I hoped they hadn’t cut my sweater off. It took Auntie Em hours to make it. And I didn’t have any clean ones left.
Jack fed my left arm into the sleeve of his Armani travel jacket and then zipped it up around me and my cast-bound right arm.
“How am I going to drive?”
“You aren’t going to.”
“But I have to. I’m driving across the country.”
“Not right now, you’re not.”
“Okay.” Then I remembered that I’d left my car in the parking lot at the Thunder Bay airport. Damn. It was going to cost me a lot to get it out of there.
I looked for my car as the limousine we were in drove past the parking lot at the airport and right out onto the tarmac. I saw Jack’s big plane. It was parked near the helicopter we’d flown to Thunder Bay on. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe … on which one were we going to go?
Too-pretty Rachel was all smiles as we settled back into our seats in the helicopter. I waited for her to take-off, but she’d left the door open. Even I knew you weren’t supposed to lift-off with the door open!
“That plane of yours, Jack. I can tell you, I am never flying economy again.”
Auntie Em?
I felt the helicopter move a little as a woman who looked exactly like Auntie Em was helped into it by too-pretty Rachel.
“There you go, Mrs Saddler.”
“What are you doing here?”
She dropped her Mary Poppins bag near my feet. “Jack invited me.”
That was nice of him.
The helicopter tilted a bit again.
Wow. The drugs in Thunder Bay were mind-blowingly powerful!
Why was I hallucinating the Justice of the Peace who I had to see too often in Anishinaabeg Falls? Were all his suits dull grey or did he only own one suit? Maybe all his other suits were dirty? “Not guilty with an explanation, Your Worship.”
He laughed. I didn’t know he was even capable of laughing. He usually looked so stern. “You’re not fighting a speeding ticket right now, Lee.”
Good. I had too many of those.
“Hi, Lee.”
Come on in! The more the merrier. Blaze getting into the helicopter made about as much sense as anything else.
“How bad’s the arm?” Will asked Jack.
Will? His moustache wasn’t as bushy as Moustache Man’s was. He was wearing his OPP dress uniform, but the brass buttons on it weren’t wiggling.
Was it reality or my imagination that wasn’t making any sense? I decided to leave them both on the tarmac in Thunder Bay and let myself float away into a blissful sleep as we lifted off.
****
I wasn’t wearing Jack’s coat or my bra when I woke up. In fact, the only thing I was wearing was a plastic cast in a sling. It took a few minutes for the fog of my deep sleep, and the drugs, to dissipate. Things slowly started to come into focus in my brain – Aileen, Frazer, my night in the woods, my visit to Thunder Bay – and now I was back at Joshua’s lodge, lying under a thick duvet on the plush bed in my corner suite.
The bathroom door was open and I heard the water stop running in the shower, then the swoosh of the glass shower door being opened. I saw Jack walk in front of the big mirror over the sink and watched his reflection look down and tear a clear plastic strip off of the long red line on his thigh. He reached sideways and grabbed a towel, then dabbed it against the red line. He picked up a piece of white gauze from the marble counter and began taping the gauze over the red line.
“I’m awake.”
He looked up quickly and smiled at me in the mirror. He grabbed another towel, turned around and came out of the bathroom wearing less than I was, rubbing the towel over his hair. Damn, he had a good body!
“Good morning.” He tossed the towel behind him and came over to crawl under the duvet with me. “How are you feeling?”
“A little bit groggy and stiff and sore.”
“And the arm?”
I tried to move it a bit. “It doesn’t hurt if I don’t move it. How long have I been sleeping?”
“About 16 hours, give or take. You got up once in the night to go to the bathroom, but you walked into the closet and got lost, so I pointed you in the right direction.”
“Thanks.” I had no memory of that.
“You were really wasted yesterday.”
“I don’t remember much, and even what I think I remember is too weird to believe.”
“You scared the crap out of me, Lee.” He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. With his dark hair and one black eye he looked a bit like a lop-sided raccoon. “When River came running into the lodge and told everybody about finding your parka I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
Thank you, Canada Goose! “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t planning on seeing Aileen and Frazer—”
“You weren’t planning at all. You went out into the bush without any way to call for help if you got into trouble, without water—”
“I was on a river. I didn’t think I needed to take water with me.”
“Why couldn’t you have just let the professionals handle it like I asked you to?”
“Again, I wasn’t planning on handling anything. I simply went out to think a bit and—”
“Snoop around, because you just couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
He was talking down to me again and not just because his head was above mine. All the words I’d need to blast him, and many more, were lining up in my head – getting ready to be shot out. But I didn’t want to argue. So I hooked my left arm around his neck, pulled his face down to mine and gave him one long deep kiss. And hoped that my morning breath wasn’t too bad. His tongue tasted of minty toothpaste.
“What was that for?” Was he complaining?
“That was to stop me from saying something stupid.”
“Oh, yeah? You know, you say a lot of stupid things sometimes—”
“So do you!”
“Then I guess we’d better do that again.”
This time I didn’t need to pull him down. And I didn’t care about my breath. Or my aches and pains. Instead, I concentrated on the warm pleasure that was spreading through me all the way down to my toes.
“Are you cold?” His hand stopped moving and hovered just over my left breast. The sling was holding my plastic cast in place over my right one.
“Nope. Actually, I’m getting warmer by the minute. How about you?” I reached my hand down to feel just how hot he was getting, being extra careful to avoid touching his cut.
“Ahhh …”
We let our lips, tongues and hands take over the conversation and he was this close to making his point when we heard a knock on the door.
“Don’t let go of that thought,” he said as he got out of the bed and hobbled quickly into the bathroom to grab a towel.
“I’d rather not let go of you.”
“Now that’s something we’ll never disagree on.” He opened the door.
“Good, you’re up.” Auntie Em came trotting into the room carrying a plate that had a tea towel draped over it.
Jack quickly picked up a pair of pants that had been lying over the arm of a chair near the door and disappeared into the bathroom to try to hide just how up he was because the towel had been doing a lousy job of hiding anything.
“Goodness, you two are like a pair of rabbits,” she giggled. “Doug and I were the same way.”
“Too much information, Emma. Way too much
information.” Jack called out from the bathroom.
“You’re really here?” How much of yesterday had been real?
“I really am.” She sat on the edge of the bed. “You really gave us all quite a scare, young lady.”
“Why are you here?”
“I told you. Jack asked me to come.”
Maybe she’d told me that, but I didn’t remember it. And I didn’t really care why she’d come. If I was right, the smell coming from under the tea towel was more than enough of a reason for her to be there. “Are those your blueberry muffins under there?”
She pulled the tea towel back to expose six big beautiful cinnamon and sugar-coated blueberry muffins.
“You’re the best, Auntie Em!” I sat up so quickly that the duvet fell down a bit too far. I pulled it up and shoved the edge of it under my cast before grabbing a muffin. They were still warm!
“You’re going to get crumbs in the bed,” Jack said as he came out of the bathroom.
“You won’t throw me out for it,” I said around the baked heaven in my mouth.
“True.” He sat on the other side of the bed and reached over me to get a muffin. “Everything set?” He asked Auntie Em.
“We’re all ready whenever you are.”
What were they up to? “What’s going on?”
“I’ll let Jack tell you.” She put the plate down on the bed as she stood up, then leaned over and gave me a kiss on the forehead. “Please don’t scare me like that again, Lee? You’re all I’ve got and I couldn’t bear to lose you.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“She’s not all you’ve got, Emma.”
She stood up and smiled at us. “I love you both so much. Now get some clothes on and don’t keep me waiting any longer.”
“Waiting for what?”
“You’ll see.” She made it across the room, opened the door and then stopped and turned around. “Oh, Jack?”
“Yes?”
“We need to have a serious talk about some of the homes in Webequie. Debbie, the nice woman who runs the craft circle, has black mould in her house and she’s not the only one. We need to do something about that.”
“Emma, I can’t fix all the world’s problems. I do my best, you know I do, but—”