As I gagged, Bea heaved a sigh and stood. She retrieved the flashlight, the beam brushing past a few dark shapes in the corners and then pointing unkindly into my eyes.
“I owe you, I guess,” the woman said. “Least I can do is Josh’ll never go needing, as long as I’m there. Of course, if his father comes along wanting him . . .”
I kicked at the woman’s feet. I tried to cough out the rag and scream—scream at the retreating flashlight, at the door opening and closing, at the sound of the rusty locks squeezing back into place. At the black that descended and the silence that followed. Bea gone, and the wide woods of Wisconsin wrapping around me.
Chapter Forty
I worked on spitting out the cloth, making progress in increments I wouldn’t have known how to calculate. Bea was gone minutes, hours. Coughing, choking, spitting. And then I sneezed twice in a row and the awful thing was away from me.
“OK.” I heaved and grabbed for air. “OK.”
When I had regained my breath, I raised myself up on an elbow and screamed.
The sound bounced against the walls and back, filling the shed.
I tried again, listening carefully. Cement block or brick. Something sturdy. Not a shed, but an outbuilding, a garage. Surely some of the sound escaped. I took a deep breath and screamed long and loud.
I pictured the shadowed woods all around, the gray lake. Houses—there would be a few, at least, and some more across the water. But it was off-season, and the lake could be broad. I thought of the ride in, the sound of limbs and scrub dragging across the truck. The pines around the garage and a mile back would be thick and cushioning. And the last paved road a half hour or better on the other side of that. I could spend all my energy screaming and no one would ever hear.
I fought the tape at my wrists for a while without progress, then I let myself rest against the wall. How long before someone realized I was gone? But I was already gone, and with Joshua missing, who would even think of me? Margaret would wonder. Russ would not be surprised. Ray, Mamie, Theresa. No one would blink if they never heard from me again.
I slid further down the wall and to my side and cried into the dirty floor. It was my fault, for teaching people to expect me to disappear. My fault, for spending all my energy saving Joshua and making sure there was no one left to save me. Not this time.
That escape from Ray, I had let everyone else save me. I had needed them all.
It was the little girl who saved me the first time.
That day at the dock, when Ray threw me down the stairs and picked up the oar, I had woken in the water, my chin just above the surface. My head was heavy. I lay back and let the surface of the lake hold me.
After a few minutes, I found the sandy bottom and walked my hands over the length of the dock until I could kneel in the shallows. Under the water, dark smoke rose from my skin. Blood. The ends of my hair dripped red streaks down my T-shirt. I reached for the back of my head, then stopped myself.
The dock was dark with blood.
The new oar lay on the embankment, cracked through the middle all the way from the blade to the collar.
Up ahead: the house we didn’t own, the lives we wouldn’t get to live.
I had decided.
I reached into the boat and grabbed one of the lifejackets. I stumbled out into the lake and walked until the jacket floated, lifting me along with it.
I had drifted around the bend and toward the camp’s dock, when the girl’s tuneless singing wormed into my fever dreams and woke me again. It was later in the day, the sun down a few notches. I hadn’t gone far enough. The orange kayaks were tied up, twenty or more of them, and the girl sat at the edge with her back to me, swinging her legs. The seat of her swimsuit was dirty, her ponytail long and crooked, hooking out from behind an ear. She’d tightened it herself at some point with her own grubby little hands.
I didn’t know about kids. She seemed young to be down at the water by herself, but then I’d always been the girl down by the water by herself. Shhhh, little girl. Or maybe I had never made a noise. Maybe she thought she imagined me, and then woke in the night with dark dreams.
The man in the truck saved me next. I had dragged myself over a long stretch of shallow water onto a low shelf of grass to get out of the lake, out of the way of the after-work water-skiers and tubers, the pontoons full of people with cocktails. I lay on the shelf of grass for a long while, letting the woods behind me fade into dusk. Our little rental house seemed a million miles away, and the time had stretched so that I wasn’t sure if I had floated through the afternoon or a full week.
I crawled up the embankment and dragged myself upright to skirt the clearing and any buildings that might be there. I was reminded I was barefoot by a sharp rock.
“Who’s there?”
I stood, quiet, waiting for him to go back inside. My ears were ringing and I was cold, quaking. I knew suddenly that he could see me, that he couldn’t believe his eyes, that he didn’t know what to do.
“Holy . . .” Barely a breath’s worth. “Baby girl, how are you still standing?”
In his truck, I fell asleep again but he reached over and gently shook me awake. “Don’t die, sweetheart,” he said, his voice reverent, only a prayer. Maybe he only thought these things and I could hear them inside his head because I had already died and before I could be an eagle on the wind, I would be a ghost. His hand on my shoulder was warm and insistent. “Hold on, now.”
And then the nurse. She wore scrubs with stick-figure drawings on them, as though a gang of children had decorated her that day. She leaned into my view. “Well now,” she said. “That looks like it hurts, doesn’t it?”
I hadn’t seen it, didn’t want to. Didn’t want to talk about it. The man was gone. He’d let me out close to the hospital and pointed me in the right direction. “You understand,” he said, his mouth barely forming the words. “Tell them what happened to you, baby girl. They’ll fix you up.”
By some luck the man had taken me to the hospital in the next county, not the closer emergency clinic where my file was thick. And maybe this place had a file, too. A list. When it came to emergencies, I was what they called a known entity. A frequent flier: bones, bruises, casts, ice packs, bloody noses.
The nurse had a sense of humor. “Now, what brings you in today, sugar?” she said. She turned my chin this way and that and took a long look at my neck. “Bludgeoned head, bruises in the shape of someone’s fingers, or did you have some other complaint I needed to know about?” By now my whole body was stiff, my left arm cradled to protect the shoulder that had caught my fall off the deck.
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
“Well,” she said. “That’s good news.”
I knew she was being sarcastic, but I thought the news might be good. The news could be good.
“Did the daddy do this to you?”