As they get closer, Amelia recognizes a mine entrance, about four feet tall and three feet wide. Like in the ghost town where Victor ran away, but with more room inside this one. Her light travels at least ten feet into the tunnel before hitting the collapsed wall at the back.
The tunnel smells dank and musty, but it’s dry. The rain can’t reach them here. She crouches over and yelps a little as she steps inside.
“What?” Santi says quickly, alarmed.
“Just my arm.” The brief respite from the pain is over.
“You scared me.” Santi laughs as he removes his pack. “I thought something was living in here.”
She’s surprised to find that the tunnel is warmer than outside, though it’s still cool. The inside must be insulated by the earth.
“I can’t believe you saw this,” she says.
“My eyes must have adjusted better than yours. You know, because I don’t have a headlamp.”
“I know you didn’t just accuse me of stealing,” she says. “What time is it?”
He extends his wrist so that his watch is in her shaft of light. Three thirty in the morning. They’ve been walking for almost two hours.
She props her headlamp against the tunnel’s back wall, and the beam casts creepy shadows on the way up. Exposed rock covers most of the walls, chipped and uneven, with roots poking through the occasional patches of dirt—dangling from the ceiling, protruding from the side walls. Rocks the size of Amelia’s head dot the ground, but once she and Santi pile them at the back of the tunnel, the uneven floor is level enough to sleep on, with a slight incline up toward the entrance.
Amelia pulls her right elbow through the armhole of the poncho and tries to lift the whole thing over her head, but her ponytail catches on the hood. Santi reaches over to help, but she waves him off.
“I’ll give him back the gold, if we ever see him again.”
“You should just get rid of it,” she says. “Leave it here, in the mine, where it belongs.”
“He’d never believe that I ditched it.” Santi takes out the chunk and turns it around in his hands. The gold sparkles even in the dim light of the headlamp. “I wouldn’t believe me either.”
Their one inflatable sleeping pad takes up almost the entire width of the tunnel. Santi pulls their only sleeping bag from the pack—an inventory of everything else can wait until tomorrow. They’ve got no rope to hang the pack with, so they lean it against the slope outside. If a bear comes along, they’ll just have to hope it attacks the food in the pack and not them inside the tunnel.
They lie next to each other on the sleeping pad, fully clothed and soaking wet, Santi on Amelia’s good side so that he doesn’t accidentally knock against her arm in the middle of the night. Her feet graze up against the rocks at the tunnel’s end, and there’s almost no room between their shoulders and the side walls. Santi covers them both with the unzipped sleeping bag.
BO fills the small space, but Amelia knows she stinks just as much as he does.
Besides, at this point, comfort is a luxury. After pushing herself all day simply to get to the cabin, and then scrambling downhill in the wet darkness, Amelia is just grateful to be horizontal.
Her exhaustion is so intense that she’s almost asleep when he starts talking.
“I thought there would be bunk beds in juvie, like the movies. Sharing a cell with someone worse than me. That’s what I figured. I had my own space, though. Big enough to hold a bed and a shelf, with a yellow line across the entrance that only I could step over.”
She chooses not to respond. She wonders if he knows she’s still awake.
“I thought I wouldn’t belong there. I was a good kid, right? Not like the other dudes in there, right? But I was full of shit.”
The wind picks up outside, gusts that rattle through the trees, the sound louder—finally—than the drone of the rainfall. It’s like alternating between the crashing of waves against the beach and a gentle murmur of hushed conversation.
“All I could think about, from the second I stepped over that yellow line, was what it would be like when I got out. What I would be like when I was on the free again. How I would be different.” Santi takes a deep breath and pulls the sleeping bag higher onto his chest.
“Jerry was wrong, you know. That my decisions don’t define me. I can tell you that for damn sure. Every decision I’ve ever made has led me right here. Freezing and wet in a dark cave, lost in the middle of nowhere. If he was alive, that’s what I’d tell him. That he was wrong.”
38
Amelia’s sister, Charlene, had cut her hair. What had reached almost to her waist the day she left for college was now clipped on the sides and back, with just enough bangs to cover half her forehead. It was just easier that way, she said, not having to blow-dry it and style it.
Amelia couldn’t stop staring.
Charlene sat across the Thanksgiving dinner table, home from the University of Virginia for the first time, having just arrived that morning. She and her sister hadn’t kept in touch as much as they’d promised.
“When you really think about it,” Charlene said, munching on the tip of a green bean as though it were a cigar, “you’re making the most important decision in your whole life. It’s not just four years, you know. It’s the rest of your life, really.”
Amelia made grooves in her pile of sweet potatoes with the tines of her fork. It was a Timmons family rule that everyone was in charge of at least one dish, and the potatoes were Amelia’s. Charlene handled the steamed green beans. Dad took care of the turkey and everything related—stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce—leaving Mom with dessert, which was an old family recipe at the limits of her cooking ability: lime Jell-O under a thick layer of Cool Whip.
“I mean, think about it, right?” Charlene continued, nodding at their parents. “You guys met in college. Most of your friends are from college. Your first job—”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Amelia said.
“Have you written your essays yet? You should totally get on that.”
“Charlie,” their dad said. “I think she’s got it under control.”
Amelia grunted a laugh. Applications weren’t due for over a month, but of course she’d written her essays.
“I can’t believe you’re not even applying to UVA,” Charlene said. “You should at least come visit me before you decide.”
“Too much of a Greek system,” Amelia said.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Their mom reached out and patted the table next to Amelia. “She’s still working on her list.”
Charlene laughed. “Come on, Ellen, are you still—”
“Don’t call me Ellen. Only two people in this world get to call me ‘Mom,’ and you’re one of them.”
“Okay. Mom. Are you still working the Princeton angle?”
“Princeton has something for everybody,” Mom said, now turning to Amelia. Her tone was light but firm, as though reminding Amelia it was time for bed. “The social scene—”
Dad cleared his throat. “Ellen, she said she didn’t want to talk about it.”
They sat in their normal places—the same arrangement, no matter the table, no matter the layout of the house. Kids across from each other. Parents across from each other. But Amelia had gotten used to the table without Charlene, and the four of them had become three, and now her normal seat didn’t feel so normal anymore.
Charlene said, “Stacy Neff said you haven’t been out at all this whole year. What the fuck is—”
Mom’s eyes went wide with shock. “Charlie!”
“Sorry.” Then back to Amelia. “What the heck is up with that?”
“I’ve been busy,” Amelia said.
“I mean, you only get one chance at senior year. At least you had an excuse when you were with Tyler.”
“She’s doing cotillion,” her dad said, trying to be helpful.
“Cotillion.” Charlie stabbed her fork into the mashed
sweet potatoes and stared at Amelia. “I take it back, then. Look at you.”
“It’s not for another three months,” their dad said, “but you wouldn’t believe the planning that goes into it. I should never have joined the parent committee; these moms are committed.”
Cotillion had once been a kind of extracurricular manners class. Kids from the area private schools would gather at the Junior League to learn about how to set a formal dinner table and which fork to use and how to ask a girl to dance and how to dance with the boy who’s just asked. It was innocent and Southern.
Somewhere along the line the focus on manners disappeared, as did the classes at the Junior League, leaving only what amounted to a bonus prom. Corsages and designer dresses, boys covering dinner at an expensive restaurant, followed by a dance that ran on smuggled booze at whatever venue was stupid enough to open itself up to the liability of hundreds of obliterated minors.
“It’s not for me,” is what she’d said to her dad when he came home from the parent information meeting.
“Okay,” he’d said, but it was not okay, and she’d caught the disappointment in his face. This was what her parents had worked so hard for: to give her the opportunities and experiences they never had. This was about making it up to her—all those moves, the schools, the cities—finally providing the kinds of social connections and experiences she deserved.
So she’d changed her mind. And now she, too, was committed.
Amelia placed her knife and fork together on her plate in the four o’clock position and scooted her chair back. “Who’s ready for some green Jell-O?”
39
Amelia wakes to the sun, of all things. She doesn’t move at first, wanting to enjoy the heat against her face, but other sensations soon intrude: a stiffness in her neck, the familiar throbbing in her arm, a rock wall against her left cheek, and Santi’s back pressing against her right shoulder. Santi lies curled on his side; in the night, he managed to drag most of the sleeping bag his way.
She eases the rest of the bag on top of him and uses her right hand to push up into a seated position. The entire left side of her body, from her ankles to her face, is covered in dried mud. She grabs her boots from the end of the tunnel and crawls slowly outside, on her knees and good arm, pushing the boots forward a few inches at a time.
When she can stand, she does so gradually—first kneeling, then rolling up as if she’s unfolding herself. She slides her feet into the hiking boots, which unfortunately are just as wet this morning as they were the night before. Her clothes are almost dry, at least. Her ponytail is filthy, caked with so much dirt that it keeps its shape when she tries to shake it out, like it’s been dipped in concrete.
Mercifully, no bears ransacked their backpack during the night. But even though Amelia’s hungry, she decides not to rummage for the food. She doesn’t want to know for sure how little of it there is.
Stepping away from the mine, she’s startled by how none of what she’s seeing looks familiar. None of the ridges, none of the mountainside, none of it. Even the valley way off in the distance, which—based on where the sun is coming up—must be to the north, is unrecognizable.
They seem to have stopped in an elevated gully. To the west, the mineshaft cuts into a hill rising about two hundred feet, with higher ridges visible behind it. To the east, beneath the sun, is a large scree field, lined with elk or deer tracks. To the south, uphill, is a ridge bigger than the one at the west; it has to be where they came from. If Victor is following them, that’s the route he’ll take.
Thanks to the elastic waistband of Jerry’s shorts, she’s able to pull them down one-handed to squat and pee without calling Santi for help.
Now that she’s moving, her arm begins to throb. Wearing the sling for the last two days has caused all sorts of compensatory pain: soreness in her upper arm, a twinge in her shoulder, and an ache on the left side of her neck. She could use a massage.
The swish-swish sound of sleeping bag on air mattress reaches her from inside the tunnel. Santi groans, then yelps in surprise. “It’s ten thirty?”
He’s at her side a minute later. Though the mud has made dreadlocks of his moppy hair, the rest of him is nowhere near as dirty as she is.
“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey,” she says.
“Did you sleep okay?”
“You hog the covers.”
“Yeah,” he says with a shrug. “Did I snore, too?”
She should still be furious with him, but she can’t summon the same anger she felt last night. Maybe it’s the simple fact that what’s done is done, or maybe it’s because he looks ridiculous: tilting his head up to the sun, basking in its rays like some Rastafarian iguana.
She doesn’t mention any of what he talked about the night before, and if he’s expecting her to say anything, he doesn’t let on.
“We have to get moving,” she says. “What do you want to do first? Take inventory or figure out where we are?”
“Have you eaten already? I’m starving.”
“Inventory it is, then.” She leads him back to their gear, noticing over her shoulder his tentative steps. For a moment she thinks of how huge his blisters must be by now; then her arm reminds her that she still wins the injury competition.
Amelia ducks inside the tunnel and drags the air mattress onto a patch of uneven ground while Santi stuffs a handful of synthetic filling back inside the six-inch gash in the bottom of the sleeping bag and drapes the bag over the branches of a nearby tree.
When he’s done with the sleeping bag, he grabs the backpack, kneels down next to Amelia, and removes its contents piece by piece, separate piles for the gear and clothing. There’s not enough of either.
“That’s it?” she says.
“We were in a hurry.”
“Don’t we me.”
In addition to the sleeping bag and pad, the gear pile contains the map, Victor’s kitchen knife, an empty fuel bottle, her empty flask, Jerry’s water bottle, and the duct tape wrapped around it. They’ve also got the rest of Jerry’s clothes: a baseball cap, sweatpants, a hoodie, long-underwear bottoms, a T-shirt, and the red poncho Amelia wore the night before.
The gear pile, unfortunately, dwarfs the one next to it. Their only food is a sleeve of saltines, a sandwich bag of powdered milk, a chewy Quaker chocolate-chip granola bar, one pouch of dehydrated beef stew, and two packets of cinnamon-and-spice instant oatmeal.
“At least we have the map.”
“I should have grabbed my own backpack,” Santi says.
They decide to split the granola bar for breakfast, given that they have no water for the milk, stew, or oatmeal, and the saltines would turn their mouths into chalk.
She tries to savor her half of the granola bar, taking tiny bites at first. That just makes her stomach angry, so she gobbles the rest—and regrets it immediately. Santi is focused on his half, nibbling here and there, lost in his own little world, showing all of the restraint she was incapable of. She hates him.
“That bar was only 100 calories,” she says, turning the wrapper over in her hands. “And everything we have left, combined, can’t even be more than 2,000.”
“How would you know that?”
“I spent a lot of time putting all the food together. Plenty of opportunity to stare at nutrition information.” She licks the metallic inside of the wrapper, hoping for a smudge of chocolate, but comes up empty.
Santi finishes his half, and they look at each other, and she can tell what he’s thinking.
“We’re going to starve out here,” she says matter-of-factly.
“Who knows, maybe we’ll find some mushrooms or berries or something.” He slaps his knees as if pulling himself from a trance. “Okay, plenty of time for doom and gloom once we’re back at it. First we have to figure out where the hell we are.”
They spread the map over the sleeping pad, using the sun to orient themselves and the mine’s narrow hill to ballpark their location. They estimate that they’re only about two mile
s from Victor’s cabin.
“I thought we came farther last night,” he says. “I mean, I know it’s not the easiest terrain, but—”
“Straight down is the fastest,” she says, pointing at the map. “It’s a little over twenty-five miles. We could do it in two days.”
“Probably closer to three, with your arm. And the food, too; we won’t have a lot of energy. We’re not going to be able to jog.” He sits back, and a sudden burst of anxiety hits his face. “You know, if Victor is following us, he’ll probably figure that’s the way we’ll go.”
“What are you saying?”
“I think we should head here first,” he says, dragging his finger across a thick stack of elevation lines, charting a route up and over the ridge to the west. On the other side of the ridge is a tiny blue spot, indicating a lake.
“You want to make this harder?”
“I don’t want to, but if he’s coming after us, there’s really only one way down from his cabin, right?”
Now he drags his finger from the clearing above Victor’s cabin toward the valley. It passes exactly over their current position, and she knows that Santi’s right. If they take the most direct route, the terrain will funnel Victor right toward them.
“He wouldn’t even need a map,” she says.
Santi glances at the food, and the worried look returns to his face. “I don’t know, though—we don’t have enough food to mess around with extending the trip.”
“We probably don’t have enough food, period.” Amelia forces a laugh. “We’re going to have to figure something out one way or the other.”
“The hard way it is.” Santi stands up with the map and folds it backward, neatly, so that their location is on the visible rectangle for easy access. “You carry this. I’ll carry everything else.”
“You know that’s not as impressive as it was the first day, right?”
“As long as it’s still a tiny bit impressive.” He tears a strip of duct tape from Jerry’s bottle and uses it to patch the gash in their sleeping bag.
On the Free Page 17
