The Lies We Told

by Diane Chamberlain

  They’d landed next to the search and rescue helicopter that had arrived the night before and were greeted by the S and R team: two women, two men and one golden retriever named Rocky. It was barely daylight, and a gray pall hung over the clearing. As the chopper’s rotors stopped spinning, an eerie silence filled the woods, broken only by the echoing, early-morning calls of the birds.

  They exchanged introductions with the S and R team. The pilot who had flown them in also had search and rescue training, and he seemed to know the team. The conversation swam around Rebecca’s head in a haze. She’d slept little the night before as she lay next to her wakeful brother-in-law, so aware of his presence and grateful for it. Now her thinking was muddy, as though her mind had room for only one thought and that was find Maya.

  “Okay,” said one of the men. “Let’s head out.”

  She knew he’d given them instructions, orienting them to how they would proceed in the search, but she hadn’t heard a word. She hoped Adam had.

  They began walking at an almost leisurely pace into the dense woods and Rebecca thought they were acting more like a bunch of hikers than a search and rescue team. She started to plow ahead of the group, her gaze darting into the woods.

  “Ma’am!” one of the men called to her when she’d passed them all. “Get behind us!”

  “You’re too damn slow,” she said over her shoulder.

  Adam caught up to her, taking her arm. “They know what they’re doing, Bec,” he said quietly.

  “I can go five times faster by myself.”

  “It’s not about speed,” one of the women said.

  Adam nodded his head behind him. “Come on.”

  Reluctantly, she gave in, and Adam drew her to the side to let the searchers pass them. She hated being at their mercy. She was used to leading, not following.

  The two men and the pilot carried a small pontoon boat, and they once again took the lead. The search team members all wore orange T-shirts, baseball caps and backpacks from which helmets and inflatable life vests dangled. Rocky sniffed indifferently through the brush. The terrain was just plain weird, full of spindly pines, twisted live oaks hung with Spanish moss, and spongy ground that gave beneath their feet. Branches smacked Rebecca in the face and invisible cobwebs clung to her cheeks and hands as she tripped over the roots of trees. The woods were dark and claustrophobic, and she understood now why a search would have been impossible during the night.

  She tried peering through the undergrowth as they walked, looking for Maya, as though her sister might simply be wandering among the trees. They walked for what felt like a long time, Rebecca and Adam obediently bringing up the rear of the party. Rebecca was beginning to feel disoriented.

  “I swear,” she said to Adam. “How do they know this is the right way?” She looked back over her shoulder. There was no trail at all and the view in every direction looked the same.

  “I’m sure they know what they’re doing,” Adam said again.

  Rebecca called ahead to the team. “We should look for them along the way in case any of them were able to walk away from the crash site,” she said.

  One of the women spoke over her shoulder. “We’ll go to the site first and assess what we find,” she said. “If there are survivors, we’ll most likely find them there.”

  One of the men pointed ahead of them, a little to the left of the way they were headed. She followed the direction of his arm, and through the thick, leafy branches, saw what had drawn his attention. A broad, horizontal chunk of army-green metal was visible through the trees. Rebecca drew in a breath and started to rush forward, past the women, the men, the dog.

  “Maya!” she shouted.

  “Careful!” one of the guys called after her. “There’s a drop-off ahead of us.”

  Rebecca fought her way through the brush, even though she’d lost sight of the green metal. “Maya! Anyone!”

  “Stop!” one of the women called.

  She heard the sound of rushing water ahead of her and stopped abruptly. Her eyes searched the woods for the green metal. She turned to the others, breathless. “Where did the helicopter go?”

  The men carrying the boat rested it carefully against the trunk of a fallen oak. “It’s that way,” one of them said, pointing. “But let us walk in front.”

  She stepped aside, the bubbling sound of the invisible water unnerving her. Adam caught up to her and she sensed the tension in his body as they stepped aside to let the others pass.

  “There she is,” one of the women said, and Rebecca felt as though someone had thumped her heart with a mallet.

  “Maya?” she asked. “Where?”

  One of the men turned to her. “She means the chopper,” he said, and it was now light enough for her to see the sympathy in his eyes.

  With a few more cautious steps over rocks and roots, she was able to take in the scene herself, all in one horrible, hope-stealing moment. She stopped walking and simply stared.

  “Shit,” Adam said. She felt both his hands circle her arm as though he was trying to keep himself upright. She knew exactly how he felt.

  The helicopter lay on its side, suspended precariously in the squat, stubby brush above a river of rushing water. It was perched high enough in the trees for Rebecca to see that the side of the craft—the side parallel to the water—had been peeled back like the lid of a sardine can. She pressed her hands to her eyes as if she could make the scene disappear. She’d witnessed the worst that life had to offer: men burned beyond recognition, children crushed by pillars of concrete. Yet the mangled helicopter was the most horrific thing she’d ever seen.

  “Don’t rush forward,” someone warned her. “It’s hanging by a thread.”

  “I’ve been here before.” One of the men looked around him. “Near here, anyway. This was a creek.” He pointed to the water below. “Now it’s a damn river.”

  One of the S and R guys was scrambling down the bank of the creek, and Rebecca guessed he was trying to get into a position to see inside the chopper’s cabin. The dog started to run after him.

  “Rocky, come!” one of the women called. Rocky nearly squeaked to a stop before turning around neatly and trotting back to the woman’s side.

  The man on the bank balanced himself against a splintered tree trunk, holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes as he studied the helicopter.

  “Can you see inside?” Rebecca started to run down the bank, but one of the women caught her shoulder and held her back.

  “Looks empty,” the man called. “I’m guessing no one was strapped in.”

  Rebecca studied the rough bank and frothy water below them, trying to remember what Maya had been wearing. The damn gray DIDA uniform, no doubt. She’d blend right into the water and terrain.

  “Maya!” she shouted again, unable to stop the word from coming out of her mouth.

  “I think the pilot is still in there.” The man with the binoculars was bending low, trying to get a better look into the cabin.

  “Alive?” one of the women asked.

  “Can’t tell,” the man said. He looked up at the helicopter, then below him at the creek that was now a river and shook his head. “This ain’t gonna be easy,” he said.

  They divided into teams. Two of the men stayed behind to find a way to get to the pilot. One of the women, the pilot, Adam and Rocky began searching the woods close to the crash site, and Rebecca and the other woman—she still didn’t know any of their names—took the pontoon boat into the rushing water to search the bank.

  The current was swift, but the water near the bank was so littered with rocks, fallen trees and debris, that it slowed their progress. They’d been exploring the overhanging brush for twenty minutes when, a distance away, Rocky started barking. Rebecca looked up to see the dog high on the bank behind them, staring down at the water.

  “There must be something there!” Rebecca said, although all she could see was more scrubby undergrowth and tree limbs.

  The woman from the searc
h team turned the tiller so that they headed upstream again. She pointed to the area that was still drawing Rocky’s noisy attention.

  “Is something there?” Rebecca could see nothing other than a tangle of brush at the side of the frothing stream. Then she began to make out what had drawn the dog’s attention. “It’s a litter!” She started to stand.

  “Sit down!” the woman commanded, and she sank again to the bottom of the boat, leaning forward hungrily to see who was attached to the litter. Certainly it wouldn’t be Maya, yet she felt irrational hope that it could be—and that somehow, she would be alive.

  The woman held on to the limb of a downed tree to hold the boat steady, while Rebecca reached toward the litter, trying to flip it over. She struggled, leaning far beyond the side of the boat, the water streaming over her arm as she grasped the aluminum tubing.

  “Be careful it doesn’t get caught in the current!” the woman shouted.

  Rebecca strained against the rushing water to turn the litter. It flipped over all at once, and she drew away in horror. The man’s gray skin was so scraped and tortured it was hard to tell that he was a man. Worse, his legs had been sliced off above the knees.

  “Oh my God.” Rebecca sank back into the boat. “That must have happened when he fell out of the chopper.” Could Maya have suffered a similar fate? “The metal cut off his legs.”

  “Uh-uh.” The woman studied the man’s injury with a dispassionate eye, as though she saw things like this every day. “Alligator,” she said. “An alligator did this.”

  Oh, no. Rebecca thought of Maya suffering a similar injury, maybe clinging to a downed tree nearby, too exhausted to call out. She hoped the woman was wrong.

  They made sure the litter was secured to a tree limb so it wouldn’t wash away. Then they continued exploring the stream and the bank, following the current. Rebecca’s eyes hurt from trying to pierce the veil of vines and branches. They found shards of metal from the chopper, someone’s jacket, a bicycle, several tires. The creek gradually widened as it neared the river, and Rebecca’s feeling of helplessness mounted. She watched a short, leafy branch of a tree, little more than a twig, as it was buffeted by the swollen waters. It rose and fell in the frothy stream, slipping ever nearer to the river. She watched it rise over one last bubbling wave before it was propelled into the wide, wild Cape Fear, where it quickly disappeared underwater. The sight made her queasy.

  “We need to go back,” she said suddenly. “We need to look closer to the crash.”

  “Look at this river.” The woman drew her arm through the air to take in the expanse of water in front of them. “And look how fast this creek is running. Unless it got stuck on something, like that one guy we found, everything from the crash has moved in this direction.”

  “That ‘it’ you’re talking about is my sister,” Rebecca said, but she knew what the woman was saying. She knew it was the terrible truth. Unless Maya had been able to survive the crash, and unless she’d somehow managed to fall from the cabin of the helicopter in a way that didn’t kill her, and unless she’d managed to free herself from the racing water, she was out there now. Out in the Cape Fear River.

  She lowered her head to her knees, wrapping her arms around her legs. She was so, so tired, and she expected to cry. To sob. She was ready for the tears, but they didn’t come. Instead, a numbness settled over her, a cold, dead sensation so completely devoid of emotion that it would have frightened her if she could have brought herself to care. She welcomed the numbness. Embraced it. She no longer wanted to feel a thing.

  20

  Maya

  WHAT WAS THAT NOISE? IT RUMBLED INSIDE MY HEAD, SO loud that it made my teeth ache as I typed chart notes at the nurses’ station.

  “It’s cannons!” someone shouted. “They’re rolling cannons toward us!”

  I peered down the hospital corridor and caught my breath. Yes! Someone was pushing a huge black cannon toward me across the long, rough wooden floor. I tried rolling my chair away from the computer, ready to flee. Where should I go? Where was everyone? I stood up, but wasn’t sure I’d be able to run. To move at all. My side hurt. My head. Oh my God, my head! My chest was on fire and I could barely draw in a breath. And what was wrong with my leg? It felt as though a shark was tearing my shin apart.

  The cannon suddenly rammed into the nurses’ station, the barrel smacking my temple, and I screamed.

  My eyelids snapped open and I knew in a heartbeat I was not in the hospital at all. A dream. A nightmare. Light flickered around me. Golden light. Moving away, then coming close enough to make me wince. Above me, I saw the angled wooden beams of a ceiling, and the slant of them made me dizzy. Was I in an attic? Where was I?

  My body shook uncontrollably, although I was definitely not cold. I was suffocating. The shifting golden light sucked all the oxygen from the air, and the hatchet that had split my head in two lodged itself deeper into my skull. The cannon rumbled again, but now I understood. Thunder. It was loud, and I pressed my hands to my ears.

  I heard a woman’s excited voice, the words unintelligible.

  “Help,” I pleaded, my throat so dry I wasn’t certain I’d made a sound. “Help,” I said again. I didn’t know what sort of help I needed. I wanted only to be freed from the pain. From the suffocating heat.

  “I’m right here, ma’am,” the woman said. She leaned forward so I could see her in the shimmery light. The Virgin Mary, I thought, even though I knew that was irrational. I remembered a picture my parents had in our home when I was very little, back before Daddy talked my mother out of her Catholicism with his intellectual, philosophy professor’s arguments. Like Mary in that old picture, this woman had a halo of spun gold around her head.

  “Mary.” I reached a hand toward her face. I wanted to touch her perfect cheek, gold in the flickering light. Everything, everything was gold, even my hand where I lifted it toward her.

  “Is that your name, ma’am?” She was holding a wet cloth to my forehead, where the pain was the worst.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “I bet you’re right thirsty,” the woman said. “I got a pitcher of water over here, just waitin’ for when you waked up.” She started to move away and I panicked.

  “No,” I pleaded. “Don’t leave me.”

  She leaned over me, a look of concern on her face. There was a small scar dissecting her pale left eyebrow. The halo, I saw now, was hair coming loose from a clip or a ponytail. She was young, barely a woman at all. Her eyes, when the flickery light caught them just so, were the color of leaf buds.

  “Beautiful eyes.” My words were so quiet that even I couldn’t hear them. The woman did, though, and she laughed.

  “I can’t wait t’ tell Tully you finally waked up,” she said.

  Tully? I searched my memory. “Who’s Tully?” I rasped.

  “Tully brung you here,” she said. “He saved your life, ma’am. Miss Mary. We was scared you wasn’t going t’ come to, but you did. And you’re gonna be fine now Lady Alice got that leg stitched up. I know that must’ve hurt like a bitch, but you was so out of it you hardly griped at all.”

  The words were coming fast, and they made no sense. “Where am I?” I asked.

  “Last Run Shelter,” the woman—the girl? Yes, she couldn’t have been more than eighteen—said. “Bet you never heard of it.”

  A crack of thunder split the air in the room, making me jump. There was another noise, too. Drumming. Rain? I stared at the angled rafters above me and knew rain was coming down hard, spiking against the roof a few feet above my head. “I’m not in the airport?” I asked.

  “You need another blanket, ma’am? Miss Mary? You’re burnin’ up, but you’re makin’ the whole house rock with that shakin’ of yours.”

  “The airport?” I repeated. Where was Adam?

  “That chopper you was in,” she said. “It crashed over to Billings Creek.”

  I shut my eyes. Brace for a crash! My body jerked with the memory. I looked up at th
e girl. “The others,” I said. “Where are they? There’s a nurse. A little boy. And—”

  “Hush,” the girl said. She turned away, and I wanted to grab her. Keep her close. The gold light flickered in the room, and I saw that it came from a lantern she was carrying.

  “Come back,” I managed to say.

  “I’m right here, ma’am,” she said. “Just gettin’ you some water. You ain’t had none since Tully brung you here.”

  She helped me raise my head to sip from the glass she was holding, and the hatchet cut more deeply across my temple. Water dribbled down my cheek and the girl brushed it away with warm fingers. I wanted to hold her hand, turn my cheek to press against it.

  She drew away a bit to set the glass down.

  “You’re a doctor?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We figured right, then.”

  “The others,” I said again.

  “Hush, now,” the girl said. “I’m goin’ to git Tully. Let him know you come to. I’ll leave the lantern with you. We ain’t had no electric since them storms come through.” She glanced toward the dark window. “Just what we need, right?” she said. “More rain.”

  “Don’t go,” I whispered, but she was already gone. I shut my eyes and slipped into sleep again, as the drumming of the rain and the rumbling of the cannon faded into the distance.

  It hit me in the middle of the night—the cramping in my gut that put every other pain in my body into perspective. I struggled to sit up in the pitch-black darkness, one hand grasping the edge of the narrow bed, but I fell back onto the pillow, my head spinning. Even if I could get up, how would I find a bathroom in the dark? I felt my bowels loosen and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it besides hope I was in the midst of another bad dream, one I would soon wake up from.