The girls are nowhere to be seen.
“Why’d you do this?” he says quietly, taking one wide step closer to me.
And I take the next step, to close the gap. “I had to,” I say, the words thick in my throat, forcing me to choke them out.
Also the smoke, coughing from it.
Making it difficult to speak. “She . . .
They . . .”
He holds me, and I have his arms around me again. I know what I should do is shove him into the pines and tell him to start running. Get away from me, Jamie. I’m burning. Get away before I burn you, too.
But there’s the way his body feels pressed to mine. The way his fingers brush away my tears when I didn’t even know I was making any tears and the way his mouth says the things that calm the blazing fury in my head and there’s everything we used to have between us, not dead and trampled in the snow, but here, somehow still among the living.
I have his voice in my ear, and it’s not a phantom, not a demon, not a hallucination. His voice that I lock on to so it’s all I’m hearing.
“It’s okay,” is what he’s saying.
“Look at me. Lauren, look at me.
They’re not real. They’re not real. I’m real. I’m right here.”
— 61 —
WE break apart when we notice a flicker of movement down the hill.
There’s a figure in the distance who I think at first must be Fiona herself, come out to lure me away from Jamie and back together with her and only her, the way it was when this night started. But the figure is in dark colors and appears much larger than Fiona ever was, even in my memories.
It’s a man. And I’m afraid I know who it is.
“You called the cops on me!” I hiss at Jamie, horrified, but he appears just as shocked as I am, pulling me off the pathway and into a thicket of trees.
“I didn’t, I swear,” he says, close up against my ear. “Quiet.”
“But you called my mom.” I whisper it as if I can worm my way into his head for the answer, the way I have with the girls. I watch his face as he stares down the hill.
“Yeah,” he admits, “of course I called her.”
“So she must have called them,” I say, indicating the man at the bottom of the hill. “The cops.”
The dark-clad figure’s movements against the white snow are impossible to miss. The man looks up, toward the fires —he doesn’t seem to see us hiding in the trees. Witnessing the fires blazing appears to make him move even faster.
But not toward them. Toward something else.
He’s headed for the maintenance shed, along the path where I found my fallen scarf. My stomach sinks when I realize: the footprints in the snow, not an animal’s, a man’s. The one who called himself Officer Heaney. Is that what he said, Officer Heaney, or did I mistake him for something he wasn’t? Did I assume?
Jamie echoes what’s coursing through my mind. “You think that’s the same guy?”
I nod.
“I’ve been thinking. About him. That night. I’m not sure he was an officer . . .
A security guard, maybe. But police?”
“My mom said he wasn’t,” I say.
Whatever his name is, whoever he is, we watch him struggling with the locks on the door of the maintenance shed.
Pushing the door open, disappearing inside.
“You saw that, too?” I say quietly to Jamie, wanting to be absolutely sure. My eyes can’t be trusted. I’m not positive if any part of me can be trusted from now on.
Jamie only nods, watching. He stays very, very silent. His body straightens and I swear he goes cold, colder than the snow we’re knee-deep in right now.
Near us, the fires continue to burn. But if we walk the path down and out of the campground, we’d have to pass the maintenance shed. I know now that the man isn’t a police officer, and I feel very sure that we don’t want him to see us.