by Kim Fu
The bear cub trotted just past Siobhan, back to the edge, to watch its mother’s approach. Siobhan shut her eyes. She didn’t want to see what happened next.
And then Nita was with her, Nita’s hands were on her, unraveling the knots with practiced fingers, her face close enough that Siobhan could feel Nita’s breath on her cheek, steady and sure. Not because of the mother bear, Siobhan knew, not because Siobhan was in even more danger, but because the cub had gotten out of the way.
When Siobhan could feel the last knot was almost loose, she braced her boot against the ground, wedging it beside a root to push herself forcefully free. The toe caught and she heard—felt—a loud crack in her ankle, a sound sent jolting through her body.
Still she ran. Pure adrenaline kept the bones of her leg in place. Nita was running alongside her. Andee and Dina fell in line. Siobhan knew without looking back what was behind her: the mother bear traversing the ravine, and the bag, with the tent and their last scrap of food, hanging forlornly in the tree.
They ran and ran. The woods seemed to deepen and thicken around them, the canopy blotting out more and more of the sky. They weren’t running the way they’d come, and the compass around Siobhan’s neck spun as they took random turns, no longer trying to move systematically north, no longer following any plan at all. They ran even long after it seemed the bear hadn’t followed.
This couldn’t be the island they thought it was, Siobhan thought, the trees blurring past, her foot growing limp and stony, useless. The island with the town and the motel and the diner. They were in some boundless, uninhabited hell.
They came to a clearing, the reappearance of full daylight. A small, open field of grasses and wildflowers that was surrounded on every side by a wall of trees.
When they paused to take it in, Siobhan collapsed. She rolled back and forth on her spine, cradling her ankle in her hands and howling in pain. Her right shoulder blade burned, but that was nothing compared to the shattering, diamond-bright pain between her right shin and foot.
The girls knelt beside Siobhan. If only Siobhan’s mother were here! She’d once had hair the color of Siobhan’s, a wispy rose-gold that made the hair seem translucent, barely there, a trick of the light on their milky scalps. Siobhan had only ever seen it in pictures. Her mother had gone gray at a young age, and for all of Siobhan’s life, she’d dyed her hair a deeper, more vibrant red, a purplish maroon that made her stand out in every room. Siobhan loved her mother’s hair. She loved that she’d never seen anyone else with hair that color. She loved that she’d never lose her mother in a crowd. Her hair was a beacon, a lighthouse, forever guiding Siobhan home.
What she would give to see her mother walking out of the woods, into this clearing, her vivid hair flapping in the breeze like a flag of surrender. If her mother were here, Siobhan could finally give up. She could crawl into her mother’s arms and cry, and her cry would signal that she was the center of the universe, her pain mattered more than anything else, and it was someone else’s job to fix it, it was everyone else’s job to fix it, she was too small and too helpless to do anything but cry.
But instead of her mother, Nita, Andee, and Dina hovered over her. The mean little faces that had almost—she was sure of it—left her strapped to the tree with the bears. “Can you walk?” Nita asked.
Siobhan swallowed hard. She pulled herself to a sitting position, and the pain in her ankle flared magnificently as it rolled a fraction of an inch. She shook her head.
Andee asked Nita, “What should we do?”
“I guess we’re camping here tonight,” Nita said.
“We don’t have a tent,” Dina said. “Or any food or water.”
“I know that!” Nita snapped.
Siobhan closed her eyes, clenched her teeth. Her whole body shook and a tear traveled from the inner corner of her eye to the tip of her nose. She knew they were looking at her, but she couldn’t help it.
“Hey, Siobhan,” Andee said. Siobhan opened her eyes again, and Andee was waving a hand in front of Siobhan’s face. “Does it hurt a lot? Like a lot, a lot?”
Siobhan nodded.
Andee reached in her pants pocket. She took out Jan’s joint, still rolled in its Ziploc bag. Siobhan looked at her questioningly. “I grabbed it when we were packing up this morning,” Andee said. “Good thing I did, huh? Or the bears would have it too.”
Andee found the lighter in the remaining supply bag. “I’ve seen grown-ups do this a million times,” she said. She tucked the joint between her lips, lit it, and then pressed it against Siobhan’s mouth. Siobhan shook her head, drawing back. “It’ll help with the pain.”
Siobhan bit down harder on nothing. She was trembling violently, and the more she tried to tense and hold still, the more she shook. Her ankle hurt so much it almost wasn’t pain anymore, and it wasn’t really in her ankle anymore—it was a thrilling, murderous sensation that roamed from her foot to her knee to her brain.
“Will it really help?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Andee admitted. “Maybe. I think.”
“God, it’s scary seeing you like this,” Nita said. “Please just try it.”
Siobhan clamped her mouth around the paper. She immediately coughed so hard the lit joint fell into her lap. Andee caught it and held it pinched in her fingers. “Relax,” she said. “Just take a deep breath in and hold it, okay?”
Siobhan took the joint into her hand this time, holding it the way Andee had, between her thumb and first two fingers. She inhaled. The smoke burned her lungs, like staying too long underwater, like she’d swallowed a lit match, but she held it in, as Andee had said. She counted to six before she couldn’t stand it any longer. She exhaled. Smoke billowed from her mouth.
“There you go,” Andee said. “Now do it again.”
Based on TV PSAs and a rant by a gym teacher, Siobhan expected to hallucinate a melting, topsy-turvy world of kaleidoscopic color. As she waited for her flowerchild dream to kick in, she watched the other girls unroll the sleeping bags on the cold ground. The pain in Siobhan’s ankle dulled slowly as she smoked the joint down to a nub, from feeling like it was on fire, like she would’ve gladly cut off her leg at the knee, to an ache that throbbed in time with the pulse in her ears. She could hear her heart beating, the blood sloshing around in her skull. She could smell herself, rank and earthy, crusted with sweat.
The four of them huddled together, two sleeping bags on the ground and two laid overtop their tangled bodies. She could smell all of them too, each bringing a different note to the stink. Together they smelled fungal, swampy, something that grows in the damp. Elbows and knees prodded Siobhan all over and jostled her ankle.
Siobhan turned her head. Daisies swayed nearby, the edges of the petals sharply in focus. Her vision had a new capacity for detail, a new acuity. A beetle crawled through the grass, and its iridescent back glittered, an alien green. She put her finger in the beetle’s path and delighted in the tickle of its feet on her fingertip.
She fell asleep briefly but wholly, like she’d been drawn down into a pit of tar. When she woke, Andee and Dina were asleep beside her. Andee clutched Dina in her sleep. She murmured another girl’s name into Dina’s hair, a friend or a sister from Andee’s other life.
Nita was sitting up, only her legs under the sleeping bag, her upper body unprotected in the cool night air. The sky was still more indigo than the black of its darkest hours. Siobhan imagined she could see the stars reflected in Nita’s eyes. She pushed herself up onto her good elbow. “Are you watching out for the bear?” Siobhan asked.
“No. Just thinking about stuff.” Nita wasn’t looking at Siobhan. “What do you think the girls did back at camp today?”
Siobhan didn’t answer. She thought of her cabinmates, the heavy sleeper who had been in the bunk above hers. Already Siobhan couldn’t remember what the girl looked like, exactly, or where she’d been from.
“I’m sorry I was a jerk to you before,” Nita said. “At camp. You got
on my nerves for no reason. Sometimes people just do.” Nita ran her hand through the grass at the edge of the sleeping bags. “I’m glad you were with us. I wanted you to know that.”
“It’s okay,” Siobhan said. She could hardly feel her ankle and shoulder at all anymore. She knew she had been angry before, but she couldn’t remember why. She felt peaceful. Everything was okay. Nita had come to her rescue in the end. Sleep was near at hand, irresistible, the sucking pull of the tar, her injuries and a new queasiness in her gut drowned in the viscous black. “I knew about the bear.”
“What was that?”
“I saw it last night, while we were eating dinner. And I saw its tracks today. I knew there was a bear somewhere.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I didn’t want to freak you guys out. Dina was so scared of cougars and bears already. I thought she’d just lose it. I tried to steer us away from where the tracks led, but I guess I messed up. I’m sorry.”
By the time Nita answered, Siobhan was half asleep, lucid but crowded by dreams and phantasms. “Don’t be. I understand,” Nita said.
“You do?”
“Yeah. You were trying to protect us. I get it.” It seemed to Siobhan that Nita was whispering right into Siobhan’s ear, her voice close and warm and syrupy. “That’s what a leader does.”
Siobhan woke again for only a moment, surfacing through the thick darkness. She perceived motion, voices. She remembered smoking the joint. Her mom would find out, she thought, and she’d be in trouble. Then she was submerged again, lost in that inky, consuming place. She felt something soft wrapping and compressing her; the mother bear was embracing her, pressing Siobhan between her paws and her fur-covered belly.
She woke for the third time choking on a scream. The pain in her ankle had returned in full force, pain both marrow-deep and crackling on the surface of her skin and every millimeter in between, like she was being eaten from within and without. Hurt, nothing but hurt, galaxies of hurt.
She spent a long time just trying to breathe, in and out, in and out, trying to regain control of her body and her senses. Other information filtered in. She was tucked into her sleeping bag, which had been zipped snugly around her. The sun was on her face.
She looked around as best she could without moving her lower body, trying to hold her bad leg perfectly still. The pain in her shoulder reasserted itself as she stretched her neck. Hello, it said. I’m here too. The girls had already packed up the other sleeping bags. She couldn’t see where they’d put them. She couldn’t see the girls.
She sat upright in shock, wincing and crying out again. “Nita?” she called.
All around her, only grass, weeds, flowers, the bordering trees. Their muted, sludgy colors, their speechlessness. “Andee? Dina? Where are you?”
She knew right away what had happened, but she couldn’t stop herself. She surveyed the same scene, the empty land, over and over. “Hello? Guys? Are you still here?”
She shouted in all directions, into the woods, at the sky. “Nita! Andee! Dina! Anybody? Anybody!”
She remembered Nita asking her if she could walk. She remembered Nita kneeling behind Isabel, hands on her shoulders, promising Isabel that they’d be back soon, they’d get Jan to a hospital and she’d be okay. She knew what Nita had said to Andee and Dina in the night, as Siobhan lay in her drugged sleep. They could make it to town only by leaving Siobhan behind. They’d send help for her and Isabel. No one was ever going to find them in a clearing in this unknown heart of the forest. And what was the point of asking Siobhan, of telling Siobhan, and causing a scene? Causing her distress, making them all cry and fight and doubt themselves. Better to let her sleep. Maybe help would even arrive before she woke up. Better to leave right away, the sooner to get her that help, to help them all.
It made sense. It made perfect sense. It was the only way.
“Come back!” The trees hid no faces. Siobhan was more frightened by their abandonment than she had been by Jan’s unhinged jaw and unblinking eyes. “Come back! Please don’t leave me here!”
Siobhan’s voice gave out. Her throat felt raspy, her lungs singed. She hadn’t needed to go to the bathroom since the day before. She remembered another fact from the same science lesson: people could only go a couple of days without water. She realized that her textbook and her teacher had likely been talking about adults, not children.
The grass still glistened with dew. Instinctively, her shoulder and ankle pulsing, she dragged herself backward using her hands, so her head and shoulders were on the ground instead of the sleeping bag. She licked beads of moisture off the blades of grass, took grass into her mouth and sucked on it. Her tongue and the roof of her mouth still felt like leather, dried out and impenetrable.
Clouds bounded across the sky in a strong wind, blocking and unblocking the sun. The same wind rustled through the trees, and the branches and leaves whistled like a human voice. She burrowed back down into her sleeping bag, a neatly wrapped snack for the bear.
She was hungrier and thirstier than she’d previously known was possible, but her terror was stronger. She knew she should stay put, where the girls knew she was, where they’d send help, but she just couldn’t. She wanted above all else not to be alone.
She thought about a boy at her school who’d broken his leg skateboarding. He’d been back at school within a few days, where he’d let his friends try out his crutches during recess. Everyone else had watched as they went swinging and leaping across the blacktop.
She looked around for something she could use. A walking stick. She spotted a few fallen branches near the western edge of the clearing, jutting out from the woods, impossibly far away.
Siobhan carefully, agonizingly, rolled onto her stomach, her hands out in front. She took a few more breaths in this new position, straining to hold her bad ankle aloft, before she began dragging herself slowly across the hard, wet earth.
Weeds and wild grass tickled her face. Her clothes grew damp, smeared with even more dirt, the blood of insects crushed and scraped by her forearms and knees. Every few feet she stopped to rest and suck on more grass.
She didn’t know how long it took her to crawl across the clearing. By the time she got there, she’d almost forgotten why she was doing it—she’d been focused on each determined instant, stilling her ankle and shoulder while the rest of her body fought forward and gradually wore itself out. She reached the branches and lay facedown on the ground, panting.
Eventually, she lifted her head. How was she supposed to stand up? She crawled farther, to a nearby pine tree. She pushed off her hands to sitting. She braced against the trunk, and with a single, heroic leap onto her good leg, she was standing on one foot.
Sweat coursed down the sides of her face. As Siobhan caught her breath, she looked down at the fallen branches. Only one looked like it could be used as a walking stick, with relatively few arms off a thick central column, probably the right height and thickness, and sturdy enough to hold her, yet not so heavy that she couldn’t lift it. But now how was she supposed to pick it up off the ground?
Her back pressed against the tree, she slowly bent her leg. She lost her balance and caught herself on the foot of her broken ankle for an excruciating moment, before tilting her weight back into her one-legged squat.
Her fingers could just touch the stick she wanted. She clawed it closer to her and managed to grasp one end. She wedged the other end against the ground, and used the stick and the tree for leverage to straighten her leg once more.
She clutched tightly on to her new walking stick as she leaned her head back against the tree to rest. She was utterly exhausted. She couldn’t face the endless, bewildering forest again, another hobbling march to nowhere. Not yet. Her sleeping bag, surrounded by the shining, open faces of buttercups, dandelions, and thumb-size daisies, looked like the last chunk of civilization on earth.
She used the stick to hop back to where she’d left her sleeping bag in the center of the clearing, pleas
ed that her plan had worked and the walking stick functioned so well. She dropped the stick beside the sleeping bag. Her good leg, now completely spent, wobbled as she tried to ease herself back down. She fell hard onto her tailbone.
The clouds were thickening and turning a pale gray. She wanted to sleep, every cell in her body begged to rest. She was so, so tired. She escaped, however briefly, from this reality.
The sky had darkened when Siobhan woke from her fitful nap, but the clouds remained unbroken, the sun lowered and dilute. She thought she should retreat into the woods, dragging her sleeping bag and her stick, before the rain began. At least she’d have water to drink when it did.
She saw at once her mistake. In the middle of the flat clearing, there was nothing she could use to stand up. She held the stick with both hands and shoved it hard into the dirt, trying to pull herself up, rocking back and forth on her unbroken foot and her butt to build up momentum, but it was no use. She would have to crawl to the trees all over again.
She didn’t have the energy. She didn’t have the will. She lay back down. She covered her face with her hands so she couldn’t see. Her body wracked with dry sobs. She cried for her mother, her father, God, every authority in the universe. Nobody was coming for her, and she couldn’t save herself.
The wind droned through the branches and smelled like rain, but the sky remained sealed and taut. The heavy air taunted her. Her skin felt damp and a wet chill penetrated her clothes, but there was nothing to quench her thirst.
Siobhan slid deeper into her sleeping bag, pulling it over her head. In the darkness, listening to herself breathe, her teeth chattering and her whole body quaking, she thought again about the girls back at Camp Forevermore. Archery, bird-watching, swimming, inner tubes, hiking, arts and crafts, friends and sisters for life. And then they would go home. They’d go home, and they’d get to grow up, and she wouldn’t. Siobhan had always thought she was mature for her age, that she understood more than adults gave her credit for, but she saw herself differently now. She saw herself as grown-ups must have: new to the world, larval, her final self unrecognizable in this form. She thought about Isabel, Dina, Andee, and Nita, cursed them and longed for them. She knew somehow that they’d be okay, even Isabel. They’d survive and go on. Who would they become? What would they get to do and see? Who would they love?
