“The guy before Edgar was forty-three,” she says quietly. “I met him on the A train.”
“And the guy before him?”
She pauses. “I don’t know. He said twenty-four, but I know he was lying.”
“Have you ever been with someone your own age?”
“Never. I mean it’s probably because . . . or at least Vivian thinks . . . it’s because my uncle . . . Well, my uncle. He wasn’t a good guy.”
Her back is turned to me, and my arm is curled around her skinny frame, so I can’t see her face. Some cognitive psychiatrists believe that humans are often unconsciously drawn to the repetition of painful experiences.
“Vera. God. Did he—?”
“What, irreparably damage me for life? Apparently. Because I’m here, aren’t I?”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
“Mary Pat talks about the difference between behaviors and core issues. Well, you already knew about my behaviors. But now you know my core issue, too. I would have told you before, but it’s so . . .” She trails off.
“It’s so not your fault.”
“It started when I was eight, and it didn’t stop until I was eleven and finally found the guts to tell my mom. The last few years, I’ve had to make a decision: either she genuinely didn’t know that whole time, which makes her the dumbest mother in the world, or she did know and just didn’t do anything about it, which would make her the worst mother in the world. I’ve chosen dumb. It’s easier to forgive her that way.” She is perfectly still, her voice even and calm, each muscle tensed beneath her skin. “Anyway. It’s one of the reasons Vivian gives for why I’m seventeen years old and have made so many terrible decisions. Why I’ve never even been kissed by someone my own age. Why everything in my life is tainted.”
“Not everything. Not this.” I hold her in the sleeping bag, a pocket of warmth in the vast cold wilderness, as the snow sifts down from the branches all around us, making the tiniest whispering sounds as the flakes melt on the fire-warmed sleeping bag. I hold her until her body relaxes, until her hands become hands again and not claws. And then, slowly, she turns to me.
“You’re my own age,” she whispers.
For once in my life, I know exactly what to do. I put my hands gently on her cheeks, and beneath my palms I can feel the scars and bumps of her pimples, the warmth of her, the long-festering hurt that mirrors my own. As I lean over and kiss her on the lips as gently as I can, I wonder if pain is like an atomic structure. When pain bumps against pain can it create joy? Can it breed love? I hope so. I hope so, so much. Her hair is brittle and sweaty at the same time. Her breath smells like mealy November apples.
“That was nice,” she says. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Then she begins to cry.
I wish I was a witch, a real Wiccan, not an Ariadne/Bronwynne Wiccan, the real kind; I wish I were a voodoo queen, someone well versed in the dark arts. If I could, I would visit suffering upon Vera’s uncle, and then upon Edgar, and the guy before him, and the guy before him, on all the pimps and dealers, the rapists and manipulators, the thieves and traffickers and stranglers and stalkers and nasty older relatives who have built-in sonar trackers, pain-seeking missiles that home in so expertly and exactly on the girls who are easy targets. But as it is, I’m just a crazy runaway, a troubled teen, a reformed slut, and I have nothing to give but my flawed, threadbare love, the warmth of my body in the absence of the Rule of Six Inches. So that’s what I do: I wrap my arms around Vera and let her cry until her breathing settles and her body relaxes, asleep, into mine. In the morning we will reach the highway, and when we get there, we will thumb our way to Minneapolis, find our way to the apartment in Northeast of some girl named Jenya who I’ve never met before, and then Vera can be the brave one.
Tonight, it’s my job.
48
IN THE NIGHT I STARTLE AWAKE, thinking I hear horses. Galloping, whinnying. But I am mistaken. It’s sirens, hundreds of sirens, wailing and wailing like a stampede of hooves. But I am mistaken again. The fire burns in front of us, hot but contained, saving our lives, and out here in the wilderness, there are no horses and no sirens. No city sounds. No animal life but ours. We are astronauts, floating in the blackness. The sky above us is a glitter bomb of stars. I wrap my body more tightly around Vera’s and let sleep kidnap me like a transport man, put a black cloth bag over my head and pull me back under.
49
I WAKE UP JUST BEFORE DAWN because I feel something. Something out there in the trees, watching us. My first thought is that it’s the ghost of someone—my mom, probably, because who else would bother haunting me?—except that Vera bristles, too.
“Do you feel that?”
It’s light enough now that we can just about see the outlines of the trees. Our fire, though low, still burns, emanating a weak circle of warmth.
“Yes.”
A streak of something—the movement of muscle. I smell something wet and mammalian—a tang of urine and blood.
“Deer,” Vera whispers, nodding her head in that direction. “Maybe even moose or elk.”
“It won’t bother us, will it?”
“Hey, you’re the Girl Scout, not me.”
We lay there together, very still, waiting for the deer or moose or elk to emerge from behind the trees, but nothing happens even as the feeling of being watched persists.
“We should probably get moving.” I push myself unwillingly from our nest and stretch my aching legs.
“Three miles,” Vera says. “Three and a half, maybe. I can practically hear the cars.”
We’ve just rolled up the sleeping bag and thrown snow over the fading embers of our campfire when we see them.
They step out from behind the trees in a line almost militarily straight. Though we are two city girls, we recognize them instantly. They are definitely not dogs, and definitely not coyotes.
They are definitely wolves.
Eight of them, a whole pack, huge and beautiful and light-eyed, soundless, with thick matted pelts of stone-colored fur, their paws crunching in the snow as they circle and surround us. I’m aware, in the spaces between the trees, of a sick blood-pink sunrise. For a tiny moment before the terror liquefies me, I’m struck by the stunning beauty of this tableau.
“Mia.” I’ve never heard Vera’s voice like that. It’s pure fear. “Mia. Oh shit, Mia. Mia. Oh shit.”
The wolves pad closer, their giant paws sifting through the snow. Each one is at least as big as a motorcycle.
“Don’t move,” I murmur. “And don’t look them in the eye.”
“Okay.”
We keep our eyes downcast, avoiding their impassive tapered faces and instead concentrating on the thick muscular ripple of their haunches as they sniff closer to us. I can feel the biggest one watching me, and I can’t help it: I meet its gaze. Its eyes are the same color as the sky, as deep and full of cunning as a human’s. I look away quickly, just as I might look away from a boy who catches my eye at a party I shouldn’t be at in the first place. The wolf steps closer. I stop breathing, stop moving, stop everything. Prepare myself for what it’s going to do to me. Imagine the pain. Imagine the word “evisceration,” which I am now realizing is the sort of word that sounds like what it is.33 The hissing long sound that my skin will make as it unzips itself beneath the wolf’s claws, when my chest cavity is ripped open, wet and steaming to the morning, giving itself over to fangs and teeth. Evissssscerate.
Meanwhile, beside me, Vera has gone silent with her own thoughts. We stand frozen at the mercy of these eight creatures, our lives placed just out of our own reach, two precious gleaming things on a too-high shelf, like that time with those boys on Lake Shore Drive, like the shattering warehouse skylight. In the past, I’ve told myself that my body is just a body and that it doesn’t belong to me, but now I feel wildly possessive of it. I want, desperately and too late, for it to come to no harm.
An unbearable moment, drawn out forever
, and then the energy of the world shifts and the biggest wolf walks past us. The others follow, so close that their paws kick up snow onto our sleeping bag and I feel a swish of air against my cheek from a departing tail.
Then they’re gone.
After what seems like a very long time, we let our breath go. I manage a “holy shit.”
“You know what this means, don’t you?”
“That we are unbelievably crazy lucky?”
“Lucky?” Vera yanks up her ski mask triumphantly. “This has nothing to do with luck, Mia. Wild animals aren’t like people—they don’t make things harder for themselves on purpose. That’s why they only attack the weak.”
“So you think they were afraid of us?”
“No, they weren’t afraid of us. They respected us. Game recognizes game and all that.” She laughs, and clouds of steam swirl around her mouth. “They knew we were alphas.”
I have no idea if she’s right or not. I don’t know a thing about wolves. Except that they could have killed us and they didn’t. So it feels right. Only last night I was so afraid that I would die in a snowstorm, and now, at once, I don’t feel afraid of anything. With Vera, I could conquer the whole world. We are alphas. We are survivors. We are not troubled teens at all, but queens of the boreal forest.
The rest of the hike is gravy. Before the sun’s even all the way up in the sky, we can already hear the cars.
50
WE ARE FREEZING, our boots are leaking, we have sixteen dollars and a half loaf of bread between us, but we’ve made it. We are standing at the side of Highway 169 in the early-morning light with our mittened thumbs sticking out, watching headlights whoosh by through the snow, getting blasted by muddy slush. But I don’t even mind. No more prison food or group chat or lights-out at nine, all funded by the corpse of my mom, floating in the shallows of the Florida Keys. I’m free.
I don’t think anyone will actually stop for us—what kind of death-wish weirdo would pick up hitchhikers in this day and age?—but Vera assures me that eventually someone will, because we’re girls, and as soon as she says that, someone does.
I’m hoping for a woman, someone middle-aged to elderly and harmless, but no such luck.
It’s a man, white, maybe in his fifties. A real country dude, wearing one of those canvas jackets that all the hipsters at my old school like to wear, except I’m guessing he didn’t buy it ironically. He has a baseball hat pulled low over his face, and I don’t like that because I can’t see his eyes. The cab of his pickup stinks of cigarettes, but when I ask him for one, he says he doesn’t smoke.
“Where you headed?” He’s squinting through the salt-streaked windshield at the road as some cheesy Christmas music plays quietly on the radio.
“Minneapolis,” Vera tells him. “But we’ll go in that direction as far as you can take us.”
“I can get you as far as Milaca.”
Vera and I glance at each other and nod. Neither one of us has any clue where Milaca is.
We’re driving along the highway in nervous silence for not more than five minutes when the guy starts pulling off the highway at an exit. It’s a little before 7:00 a.m. the day after a blizzard and there’s nothing around but pine trees and snow. Barely any other cars are on the road. He must feel the nervousness in me and Vera because he says as explanation, “Gotta gas up.”
“But—” I hate the sound of my voice as it comes out of me, so high and tremulous and weak. I clear my throat. We’re alphas, Vera and me: even the wolves knew that. And if the wolves understood that, so will this guy. I try again, louder, firmer. “Your gas tank is full, dude.”
He glances down at the dash, and I see the tightening of his gray-stubbled jaw. “Gas gauge is broken. I just have to keep track in my head of when I need gas. And I need gas.”
We’ve pulled off the highway onto a two-lane road, and there is no one around, no one at all. The man is driving fast—over eighty miles an hour, unless his speedometer is broken too, and the salt is spraying up onto his windshield, caking it, and his windshield wipers are flying. For the second time today—and it’s barely past sunrise—I’m scared for my life. But this kind of fear is far more familiar than what we faced with the wolves. Hereditary suffering: I wonder what went through my mom’s mind the moment she realized Roddie was going to kill her.
Vera, who’s sitting between us in the bench cab, reaches over and squeezes my hand. Her fingers are clammy, and her lower lip is trembling. We are lizard brain now, just like we were in the woods. She’s in my head. She knows what I’m thinking, and that’s a comfort. Unlike my mom, I don’t have to do this alone.
But then, the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen: a Shell sign in the distance. The man pulls in, and we park up under the neon glow.
“I won’t be but a minute,” he says, climbing down from the cab, and as soon as he slams the door Vera and I turn to each other.
“Bad vibes?”
“Majorly bad vibes,” I agree. And as we say this, just before he disappears inside the station, the guy turns back, clicks something on his keychain, locking us in from the outside. We’re trapped in the filthy cab of his truck, and it smells like stale smoke and farts, and oh God, let me be torn apart by wolves rather than die like my mother did, at the hands of a man she thought she could trust.
If someone, anyone, would pull into this godforsaken snowbank and get some gas we could pound on the window, scream for help. But no one comes. What kind of psycho would be out in this cold at this time of day? Anyone normal, anyone who isn’t a troubled teen runaway or a serial killer in search of his prey, would be curled up warm in bed.
“We need to make a plan,” Vera says, reading my mind. “We need to figure out a way to—”
The snap of the door locks, and the squeal of the driver’s side door. A roasted smell, rich, heavy with memory—
“Thought you girls looked hungry.” He hands up to us first a plastic box filled with doughnut holes and then a drink holder containing three steaming cups of coffee.
“You brought us . . . coffee?” Vera’s voice is full of wonder.
The doughnuts are greasy as hell, good old-fashioned gas-station fare, covered in a thick layer of powdered sugar. Not to disparage Chef Lainie’s egg-white omelets or anything, but, well, sometimes you just need a doughnut. We devour them so quickly I can feel the man looking at us with wry curiosity. But the coffee is even better: scalding hot and wonderfully bitter, both warming and waking. Before Vera’s even finished hers, her arms begin to vibrate, and I remember she hasn’t had a drop of caffeine, let alone an unregulated meal, in over two years.
“I gotta be honest with you, man,” she says now, wiping sugar from her face with the down sleeve of her coat. “We thought, when you pulled off into the gas station, that maybe you were a serial killer. But you’re not, right?”
“Nope.” The man’s eyes are steady on the road now, and we’re starting to see signs for Milaca.
“I mean, a serial killer wouldn’t buy you coffee and doughnuts, right?”
“I don’t know what a serial killer would do,” he answers. “Because I’m not one.”
“Oh. Well, good.”
We drive in silence for a while.
“I mean, don’t be mad at us for thinking you were a serial killer,” she continues. Her voice, normally so gravelly and self-assured, has taken on the staccato catch of an awkward little girl trying to seem older. She sounds jangly, nervous. Maybe it’s the coffee. Or maybe it’s the fact that she hasn’t spoken to a human male stranger since she was fifteen. “Me and my friend Mia here—it’s just that we’ve been through some shit. So we can be a little paranoid.”
“Huh.”
He leans over and changes the channel on the radio to a local news station. The newscaster is talking about a brain-eating parasite that’s threatening the already fragile moose population. A sign at the side of the road indicates that Milaca is five miles up ahead.
“So the big city,” our driv
er says. He sips his coffee. “You girls know where you’re going when you get there?”
“Sort of,” Vera says. “I have this friend. We’re going to stay with her, hopefully. If we can get in touch with her.”
“How about Milaca? You girls know anybody out that way?”
“Nope.”
“Well, how do you plan on getting from there to Minneapolis? Once I drop you off?”
“We’re pretty self-sufficient,” I say. “We got this far, didn’t we?”
“How far is far? You never said where it was you was coming from.”
“Well, you don’t seem the type exactly to invite conversation, sir.”
“Yeah,” agrees Vera. “You’re quite the chatterbox.”
We both bust out laughing, nervously, and he shakes his head, allowing himself a half grin. We are approaching the exit for Milaca, but instead of turning off, he flicks on his indicator and switches to the left lane, passing a semi in a splash of slushy salt.
“Hey,” I say, pointing at the exit. “That’s Milaca.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“But you just missed the exit.”
“Wait,” says Vera. “So does this mean you are a serial killer?”
“Might as well take you two all the way to Minneapolis now. You girls think you’re tough. But I’ve never seen two more lost-looking sheep.”
51
WE ROLL INTO MINNEAPOLIS in the full yellow light of a winter morning. Our driver pulls his truck into the fire lane in front of the Hennepin County Library, Northeast Branch; a brown brick building huddled beneath snow piles where we plan on using the free computers to contact Jenya. The doors are just opening for the day.
“Hey,” I say, turning to him. “Thank you. You’re a good dude.”
“The best,” agrees Vera.
He nods stoically, not the type of man who goes in for much fuss, though I can see he is pleased. I reach for the passenger side door.
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