by Ashley Ream
“I’m making a bigger point.”
There was a gear shift that happened in Tilda before any debate. It sharpened her mind—at least she felt it did—but it dulled her affect. She came off cold and calculating, and there had never been anything she, or any number of image consultants, could do about it. It was as though her mind had to retreat behind the castle wall to fire the cannons, and voters had not been the only ones on the other side.
“In the future,” Tilda said in her flattest voice, “it would be a good idea if you didn’t use the traumatic deaths of two young women while trying to elicit sympathy for yourself, especially when one of those was my child. I pray you never know that pain.”
Tilda tossed the remote down and turned to leave the room.
“Here.” Juno interrupted her dramatic exit.
“What?” Tilda snapped out the word.
Juno had a folded piece of paper in his hand and was holding it up toward her. “I found this.”
Tilda took the paper from his hand, resisting the impulse to snatch it. It was a ruled sheet torn from a legal pad. She unfolded it.
Dose at 3:45.
20 mins—pain (illegible)
1 hr approx—movement in hands improves
In car, hours after dose. (illegible) backseat. She doesn’t talk.
Elevated HR. Tuna sandwich—half.
Thirsty. 2 (illegible)
It didn’t make sense at all and wasn’t helped by Harry’s handwriting, which tended to look a lot like the tracks of a spider that had recently fallen into an inkwell.
“What is this?”
“I found it on the couch in the library,” Juno said. “Is Dad taking some new medicine or something?”
It seemed that way, but Harry hadn’t mentioned any changes to her. The truth was she didn’t know if he would mention it. She refolded the paper and put it in her pocket.
“I’ll talk to Dr. Woo,” she said and walked out before Juno could respond. She’d never even had a chance to hit the unmute button.
Harry had left the light on above the first landing. If he hadn’t, Tilda probably wouldn’t have noticed. But the light just above her was on, and the door handle of the woman’s room was so shiny, like the newest brass. Tilda looked over at the bathroom door. That knob wasn’t shiny at all. In fact, it was a flat, darkened pewter. Tilda had chosen those knobs herself because they didn’t show smeary handprints. This one here was all wrong.
Tilda took hold of it, adding her oily marks, and turned. It moved less than a quarter inch. If she had put all the torque her arm could manage on that knob, it would not have turned more than a quarter inch. Tilda knew the woman was not inside, but she banged on the door with the meaty side of her fist anyway. Whomp, whomp, whomp. Tilda gave the door one last pounding before turning sharply for the bathroom, snatching up Harry’s pants and throwing them into the sink to soak.
32.
Day Five of the Miracle
Rachel’s heart was tripping over itself trying to get out of her chest. She had her pen flashlight in her backpack, but using it was even more dangerous than not using it. She had snuck away from the research site, going up toward the bathroom and then walking off the side of the road along the forest’s edge. She’d walked half a mile coming down to the beach, just on the other side of the bay where the shoreline fell inward, providing her position just enough cover.
If Hooper had seen her then, he would have screamed at the risk she was taking. Rachel was sitting in the sand because she was shaking too hard to stand. She was naked but for her underpants from the waist down. The ocean temperature was forty-five degrees Fahrenheit, and the ambient temperature was thirty-three. With her own work, plus what she was dosing herself and Harry, she needed to collect more samples than she could sneak away from the research site. With only one day left, the tents and the shoreline were manned every minute, and she couldn’t wait. She needed these samples. Risk no longer mattered to her, not in the way it had. Nothing short of death or failure mattered. And so she had hiked half a mile, picked her way down the wooded slope, and felt her way through the tangle of brush that barricaded off the rocky sand. She had stripped off her shoes, socks, and pants and walked into the bay with her collection net and jars.
This late in the breeding the glow—the animal density—was less uniform. She needed to wade farther out to get a good sample. When she was in past her knees, she stopped being able to breathe. Every bit of her from the skin on her scalp to her lungs contracted, trying to pull away, and she didn’t think she would ever be able to expand them again. It was hard not to panic, and she had to push little gasps of icy air between her teeth, in and out, just the little her body would allow. Her scars nipped and zinged and tingled. It wasn’t quite pain. She’d had enough of the compound to fight pain, but even it couldn’t take away all the feeling, not under these circumstances.
Just as her scars awoke, like a sleeping monster, her feet went numb, which was just as scary. There were sharp rocks that would slice at bare skin and send her sprawling face-first into the water. Hypothermia had already set in. She was losing fine motor control with each tick of the second hand on her watch. She told her arms and legs to move. She yelled at them, “Move! Move now!” but they were slow to respond, and the slower they responded the longer she stood in the water. The longer she stood in the water, the worse everything got. If she couldn’t use her hands, everything would be for nothing. She pushed and pushed and pushed herself, but none of her joints wanted to bend.
It was amazing how much nature did not care. It did not care if she was freezing or if she was even there. No matter what she did, nothing stopped. The waves, small ones, stretched out all the way to the horizon. She could see them outlined in the green light of the Artemia lucis. The waves piled up, one overlapping the other like snake scales.
“Geyah!” Like the loud kiai before a karate chop, Rachel used the shout to propel her forward, leaning into it, leaning so far that her legs had to catch her or allow her to fall on her face. She made it to the brightest part of the glowing ribbon and ran her collection net over the surface, filling her jars and scattering the animals, which swirled away from her like ink dropped into a glass of water.
She didn’t know how long she had been out there, but she was numb from her crotch down. Putting her legs into her jeans was like trying to stuff sausages into casings. She didn’t think she was ever going to get them on, and she had to get them on. She had to get dressed, and she had to move, to gather up her jars and get them into her bag and get back. She had to focus. The movement would warm her if only she could manage it.
It took her three tries to button her pants, and she shook so hard, she dropped her backpack trying to unzip it. Rachel was getting angry with her body, angry that it wouldn’t comply with her simple demands. She gave up tying her shoes and instead tucked the laces into the sneakers to keep from tripping.
With the jars in her bag and her arms through the straps, Rachel turned her back on the ocean and started toward the road. There was no moon up here for the constant blanket of clouds. There was no artificial light—no cast off from streetlamps or passing cars—nothing to show her the way. There was only the shimmer of the Artemia lucis, which did nothing to help and only kept her eyes from adjusting. The path she was using was a small one, a narrow track through the brambles, the sort of thing a deer might follow, which was just how she felt. She was a black-tailed deer, lifting each foot carefully, big ears rotating toward any sound.
The brambles had even begun to take back this little path. The twigs and the prickers and the thorns reached out and snagged her clothes and pierced her hands when she tried to push them away. And when she got through the brambles, there was the slope that went up, up, up to the road more than forty feet above her head. Narrow bits of railroad ties had been sunk into the sandy earth who knew how long ago. It was long enough that the earth was taking them back, pulling them in deeper, leaving only the narrowest toe holds and coverin
g what remained with blown sand and creeping grasses that sunk in roots and rotted the ties, leaving them weak and crumbly, ready to go to splinters like something the termites had got at, and maybe they had done their damage, too.
As she climbed, the sand fell away, and the giant ferns, prehistoric things three feet across, covered the ground on either side, and the cedars grew up between them, and the moss-covered trunks of the maples grew up between them, and there was hardly any space at all. In a moment, the horizon had gone from being empty of everything but the ocean to being as dense with living things as a Tokyo subway. It was an oppressive kind of dark, a dark that made it hard to breathe and pressed in on her ears. To keep from falling on her numb feet and shaky legs, she had to bend forward, putting her hands to the crumbling ties in front of her, carefully raising up one foot and then the other. Foot over foot, hand over hand, she made her way toward the road. She thought of Harry and his fall on the stairs and then tried not to think of him. Foot over foot. Hand over hand.
Freeze.
Rachel stopped her breath and listened. She had one hand and one foot raised, a lung full of air she dared not expel. There was something. She had heard something, or maybe she had felt it, some change in something. She couldn’t identify it, but she was not alone. Rachel, who believed only in the most empirical of data, knew in her bones that she was not alone. Her scars prickled.
There it was. A whisper. A shhh, shhh to her left. Shhh. Sh— It stopped, but it had been there.
Below the trees, under the outstretched arms of the giant ferns the soil was covered in dropped pine needles, short blunt ones and long thin ones that could pierce and cut. They fell and dried and matted together on the forest floor until it was a soft carpet. It was a soft carpet that went shhh, shhh under feet.
Shhh, shhh.
Let it be a coyote, Rachel prayed. Oh, how she wanted it to be a coyote. But she knew, even as she wished it, that it was not a coyote. The Olloo’et people believed the coyote to be the slyest and the craftiest of all the creatures on earth. They admired him even as they distrusted him. He was a politician, a mobster, an antihero, and he moved on silent paws. This was not a coyote, but he had aspirations.
Rachel had no choice but to try to deny him. She did the only thing that made sense. She had already been made. She took one breath, and then she ran.
Hand, foot, hand, foot, hand, foot up the ties to the top of the ridge. Chhh, chhh, chhh. Her own feet churned up the fallen needles, scattering them behind her as she kicked off. She heard the ground turn to gravel, heard the crunch of it under her sneakers. She was near the shoulder of the road now.
Shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh.
Footsteps that weren’t hers. He was trying to be quiet but picking up speed, the desire for speed soon to overtake the desire for stealth. No, not like a coyote at all no matter how he tried.
Between the parked empty cars, over the gravel and onto the black asphalt of the road, she went. Rachel broke all cover in favor of the smooth surface. Slap-slap-slap went her sneakers now. The white of the painted lines was so bright it glowed alien in the black, charcoal, and navy of the night. Slap-slap-slap. She ran back toward the houses, the research site, the people, the safety. Her backpack, heavy with ocean water, slammed against her spine. Whack-whack-whack with each step. She felt the samples shifting and sloshing inside, the balance all off. She tried to compensate, but she heard him behind her, closer now. He, too, was running. Slap-slap-slap.
No air. Rachel had no air. She was not in shape for this. She had not trained. Just a lap or two around the student rec center was all she’d done in so long, and she’d gone farther than that, faster than that here. So cold. So afraid.
Rachel risked a glance over her shoulder.
Bad idea. Terrible. Someone was there. She was not imagining it, not running from some ground squirrel or bunny rabbit up past his bedtime. John? It had to be him, and he was not more than thirty feet behind her, and his legs—not recently dipped in the icy bay waters—were churning up ground faster than she ever would. She would not make it. She could not win. There was nothing she could do.
She turned her face back around, and she was blind.
33.
The headlights were so bright that her vision ceased to exist. It was like looking into a solar eclipse. Rachel knew she would never see again, and it did not matter because in a moment, in just one second, the bumper of whatever that was would impact her femurs—both of them. They would shatter, and she would fall. Just a little. Just enough for the car to eat her up and suck her under and for the tires to run over her body, crushing her pelvis and her ribs and her spine, popping organs like Jell-O–filled balloons, shredding muscle and nerve fiber and killing her, although not instantly. Almost nothing died instantly. That was something people said of their loved ones to soothe themselves. She would feel it, and it would be the last thing she would feel.
Rachel closed her eyes.
The horn sounded, and the blowback coming off such a big piece of metal moving so very, very fast nearly knocked her off her feet. She opened her eyes in time to see the taillights swerving across the road, the whole center of gravity of the small SUV shifting, so Rachel thought it might topple over, and then it righted itself and found its lane and continued around a curve and was gone.
Rachel had stopped running, but she was panting even harder than before. She was alone. No car. No John. He had cleared from the road. But not gone. No. He couldn’t be gone. Only dived for cover, only hidden.
With legs so cold and so full of adrenaline, she ran. She ran and ran and ran, and nothing mattered, not the lack of air, not the invisible knife in her ribs or the pain of her scars, not the scream of her muscles and pounding in her head and the slosh of her samples and the slap of her bag. She ran until her legs were like windmills turning too fast for the rest of her body to catch up. She ran until she fell, throwing herself forward and landing on her stomach with her arms and her face in the gravel and dirt just off the road. And when she looked up, she saw in front of her the blue porta-potty set up for the team. She had made it. She was back. Somewhere, somewhere nearby there were people, and she could scream. She rolled over on the ground as far as she could with her pack like a turtle’s shell behind her, braced for whatever might be above her.
Nothing.
Rachel scampered, all torn palms and scraped elbows and knees, until she was up again. She turned all 360 degrees, her knees bent, her hands up like claws. But there was nothing. Nothing but a blue porta-potty and some parked cars up ahead. There was the sound of the waves down below and the reflective road sign just before the next curve, warning drivers to slow for switchbacks.
Rachel heard herself panting like a dog. She reached up and, with bloody hands, gripped the straps of her backpack and speed-walked down the embankment, heading for the beach. She did not cross the yellow tape, did not wave or motion to her fellows or acknowledge them in any way. Maybe they saw her, and maybe they were too absorbed in this next-to-the-last day of work to pay her any mind at all. But whatever they did, Rachel did not know because all she wanted was to get to Harry’s deck, up, up, up the stairs and through the sliding door that was always kept unlocked for her.
Rachel did not stop to wipe her shoes or turn on a hallway light or grab any food or drink from the kitchen. Head down, she pushed through. Through the downstairs—no Harry in the library—to the stairs, clomp, clomp, clomp on the honey-colored hardwood. Had they always been this steep before, this narrow? Had there always been so many of them? It took forever to get to that first landing right in front of her bedroom door. Rachel shoved her hand into her pocket for the shiny new brass key that had come with the lock. She closed her fingers around it and pulled, taking the whole lining of her jeans pocket with her hand, turning it inside out, but she didn’t care. She needed to get in. She needed to get started. She needed—
“Hello.”
For the first time that night, Rachel screamed.
Tilda
had taken the wooden stool that served as her nightstand and carried it down the stairs to the landing. She’d brought a David Foster Wallace book with her, but she kept dozing, her back leaned against the wall. It was the clomp of the woman’s shoes that woke her. The book sat closed on Tilda’s lap, heavy as a gallon of milk, pinning her there and, as much as anything, keeping her from toppling over. Her butt was numb. She’d been there several hours, but it had been worth it. In truth, very little could make her night any worse than it had been.
Rachel was no longer capable of pulling herself together. The best she could do was place her bloodied palm over her heart to calm her pulse rate.
“You scared me.”
Tilda could hear Harry rustling behind his bedroom door. Rachel had woken him, which was another good reason to be angry, and now she had turned her back and was putting her key in the lock, as though no further discussion was required.
“When Harry offered you a place to sleep, that invitation didn’t include the right to make structural alterations.”
Rachel blinked twice before answering. Language was slow to move from her brain to her lips. “I needed a lock.”
Tilda stood. Rachel had the door open and was walking through it. There was no way—just no way—Tilda thought. Rachel went to close the door. Tilda heard Harry crossing the hardwood floor of his room. She could hear his three-point walk, two steps and then a clomp of the footed cane. Tilda put her own bare foot out over the threshold. If she had thought it would come to this, she’d have worn shoes.
“I’d like to know what the hell is going on here,” Tilda said.
“I have to get to work.” Rachel shut the door as far as Tilda’s toes, not squashing them but applying enough pressure that someone less determined would have moved.
“There is no rational excuse for a houseguest to lock out the owners unless there is something going on. What is it that you don’t want us to see?”