After she’d run into the woods, he’d edged the car along the guardrail and flipped the flashers. He sat, rethinking, second-guessing himself. Then he’d gotten out, the rain stinging his face, his shoulders, soaking his jeans and his boots in a matter of seconds. He leaned over the guardrail and called her name into the inky blackness.
He thought about it, those woods. A million and a half acres of state game lands all in total, much of it wild, dense. Thick brush, few footpaths. He stopped, almost didn’t do it.
He’d yelled until his head swam and he felt the veins in his neck pop. Lucia! Over and over, his voice swallowed whole by the rain. He hitched one leg over the metal rail, then the other, sliding almost immediately down the muddy embankment, his body somersaulting feet over head halfway. At the bottom, the red blinking of his car looked like miles away. He stood; his bones ached and he stretched his legs, his shoulders. He hadn’t fallen like that in years; it seemed to be a skill honed in childhood and left to deteriorate with age.
He might have walked for five minutes into the woods, half running, half walking, calling for her before he realized it was hopeless. Stupid, he was so stupid. She didn’t really want his help. She didn’t want someone to save her. She preferred victimhood. It got her out a myriad of troubles, from late class assignments to skipping work, to getting drunk at parties and sleeping with men. Boys. Except, except. Nate’s mind skittered around. He had to go back.
Get back to his car, get to Tripp’s, change his clothes, call the police. Maybe go to the station. Tripp was working a double, he could ask for help. Advice.
When he turned around, his car was gone. All he could see in any direction was the black outline of trees against a slightly less black sky, his eyes blurred with the rain. He spun one way, then the other, and then looked up, the air wet, and he gurgled, sputtered, choked until his vision exploded with stars. He took ten steps back the way he’d come, nothing in front of him or behind but gnarled brush.
Something scratched at his arm and he jumped.
In his pocket, he fished out his key chain, a small carabineer, with a mini-LED flashlight. He pressed it on, swung it one way, then the other, illuminating mere feet in front of him, and wondered how long it would last. The rain was rhythmic, falling hard, then soft, a pulse that matched the racing of his heart. Nate pushed forward, in the direction he thought he’d come, walking far longer back than he’d been walking in, and that’s when he realized he’d gotten himself lost. He stepped over a fallen log that he was sure he hadn’t stepped over to get here.
He stood with a hand on his hips and brought the other hand to his head in a long-standing habit of men everywhere: lift his baseball cap, scratch his head, put it back. He realized then that his hat was gone, presumably when he’d fallen, tumbled down the hill, caught in the mud.
His Mt. Oanoke Raiders hat, the burgundy coach on the back. He’d had it since the first year he’d started coaching. Oh well, if he found the embankment, he’d likely find the hat.
He pushed on through the brush and wondered if he was in fact walking away from the road. There was a rustle to his right and he called, Lucia! Not expecting an answer.
If he was lost, she was likely lost hundreds of feet ahead of him. He pivoted, walking the opposite direction, figuring he’d have to do it for at least twice as long before he hit the road. If he hit the road.
He could just keep doing this, quartering off his walk. He was a math teacher but he grew up in the outdoors. If he walked ten minutes in one direction, he should be able to turn and walk twenty in the opposite and maybe hit something. Turn ninety degrees, repeat. If he kept going this way, he’d eventually have to find the road he started from. Eventually.
So this is what he did, periodically flicking on the flashlight to swing in front of him, but keep his feet planted in the direction he was walking, keeping his orientation. The rain let up. The steady falling of his sneakers against the brush, in the mud, sticks poking at his calves, scratching at his arms, his neck. The skin piercing open with a warm flood. It was almost a comfort, the pain. Like Lucia, those dotted patches of scabby skin along her scalp. He could see it now, the relief that came from physical pain. It drowned out the noise in his head.
When he finally saw it, the tall muddy tower of the embankment, the lights of his car still blinking hypnotically, but faintly, draining the battery on the old Honda, he almost whooped. The relief felt like a high.
He clawed in the squelchy mud, coming up a hundred feet down the road from his car. He scampered over the guardrail and jogged back, his energy renewed. In the car, the engine sputtered and turned over and he flipped on the heat as high as it would go. The hot air blew in his face, his eyes red, his neck burning. His skin doughy and pale, like a dead fish.
He looked at the dash clock, which blinked 2:17 a.m.
He’d been lost for three hours.
CHAPTER 21
Lucia, forever ago
It’s hard to figure when everything changed. Lucia spent a lot of time thinking about this.
See the thing is, they all used to be friends in pairs: Taylor and Lucia. Kelsey and Riana. Josh and Porter. But then there was Andrew, who didn’t need anyone.
Sometimes Taylor said Andrew was stupid, and although Lucia didn’t agree, Taylor was far from the only one. He fooled a lot of people with his eyes half lidded and his deepening voice, that sleepy “what?” that was always followed by a laugh. Everyone else always laughed, but Lucia, she saw him. It was an act.
The mill closed when they were all ten, still kids, riding their bikes to Tibb’s shoving their pockets full of penny candy and riding back to Taylor’s. Before Mr. Lawson left, Taylor’s house was the newest, not the biggest, but the friendliest: plush, plaid couches and lit candles, hot cookies and big, sunny windows. You could forget, for a second, you were in Mt. Oanoke in that house; it smelled like a scratch-and-sniff sticker.
Mrs. Lawson would fuss and fidget and do all the things that Lucia never knew a mother should do: cooked them dinner, poured their milk, and once even sliding a pair of flip-flops into Lucia’s backpack because she noticed her heels hanging off the backs of her old ones, her ankles dusty from the summer dirt. When Taylor found them later, digging through Lucia’s bag for a pen, all she said was fucking Jesus.