I watched her realize that I wasn’t going to say so. It was best to give away less than people wanted. “I got hit by a truck,” I said.
“How many times?” she murmured and put down a few words on the chart. “They’ll want to ask you about that, so get the color of the truck straight. In the meantime, we need to get you up to a room, Mama.” Neither of us moved. I didn’t know if I could.
I’d been in pain then, too. Fatigued. What had moved me off the bed and into action? Into the clothes I found on my roommate’s side of the room as she slept, and later, with a twenty the nurse slipped into my hand at the bus station as she dropped me off, onto the bus and away? Away as far as I could afford, and then a shelter that didn’t ask too many questions until I got a job and then the little tin-can mobile home, all to myself. And then the Tennessee state trooper at my door, when I’d only just settled in. “I got to tell them I seen you, miss,” he’d said. “They think you’re at the bottom of a lake, and now they can stop looking.” And then the librarian with a little handwriting knowledge. Then Kent. Who hadn’t I allowed to save me?
I lay in the foul dust of the forgotten garage, forcing myself back into the memory, sorting the moments of my life and the saviors. Not Kent, not the community center librarian before him. Not the trooper, the nurse, not the truck driver, not the little girl. Each had saved me and yet none of them had, not really. This is why people believed in gods, in magic, in wishes on stars. This is why people believed—in rabbit’s feet and fate and crossed fingers. In yellow rooms—
Joshua. But it hadn’t only been Joshua who had saved me. Not only the child I carried and thought I might keep and raise. I’d had no faith in that plan or my own ability to see it through.
What saved me was the child I had been, the child who had not been given a moment of freedom or choice or faith in anything or anyone. Didn’t that kid deserve a chance, this many years later?
I remembered my mother’s eyes shift away from me to the dirty sink of the old motel restaurant. What’s out there? Something else, but it hadn’t been enough. You can’t trust blue skies, she had told me once. My mother had not believed in luck and so neither had I, because the only luck was the kind you made. From doing something, from standing on your own feet, from kicking down closed doors, from leaping into the wide open unknown from a lakeside boulder—
From rising out of green water, retching, to find that the girl you’d been had drowned. That girl was still there, under Sweetheart Lake, waiting for me to give in and crawl back into the water.
I hadn’t come all this way—the apartments, the towns, and the curving roads through pines. Not all this way, just to die here nameless and unknown, alone. I believed one thing: it had to have been worth more than this. What was out there? Everything. Only everything. And no one was coming to save me, not this time.
I pushed myself up and swung my legs like a clapper in a bell across the floor, striking out for any tool—anything—lying about. Nothing.
“OK.” Think. Think.
There was a hulking shape in the corner, just a bit darker than the dark itself. I remembered the sweep of the flashlight, the blink of something there. Firewood covered by a tarp? Or something more useful?
I inched toward the corner, but my mind raced ahead. Joshua. I needed to get out of here. The police. No, the woods. If that bitch so much as looks at Joshua . . . I’d have to find a road first, or another isolated house, and who knew if someone would even be there. I’d have to break in. Then what? A phone. Police. Would the Ranseys still be there?
My foot found something. I tapped at it with my shoe, the object answering with a metallic chink. Not firewood, at least.
I scooted around so that I could yank the tarp with my hands. It caught. “OK.” I backed up into it, reaching my fingers through cobwebs until—
A lawn mower.
I used my feet to topple it, flipping it upright against my legs. Accumulated dust shaken from the tarp swirled over me. I turned my back on the thing and fumbled with bound hands until I found the bottom.
It had blades. Dull, but still there, still in place. Blades.
With a stretch, I found the right angle to saw at the tape. I fumed and rubbed my wrists raw. Bea’s kids would do anything for her. I nearly laughed. “The difference between you and me,” I said. The difference was that I would do anything for my kid. Big difference.
At last my hands broke apart.
I ripped the tape away and then tore at the binds on my ankles with fumbling, swollen fingers.
“OK.” My voice was more assured now. I stood, shaking, and found the door.
Locked. I knew that.
I could still die here. All that maneuvering and I might still die here.
I couldn’t. I had to get out. For Joshua. For Aidan. For Leila Ransey. For myself and for the chance to take an oar to that silver knot of hair on the back of Bea Ransey’s head.
I had to get out. And then through the brambles to the dirt path, the path to the gravel and through miles of forest on a road that no one else probably used. All to find the paved road that led, if nowhere else, back to the Ransey compound.
My skull was exposed, the fever raging. I couldn’t think. My legs trembled under my own weight. I slid to the floor and rested my temple against the cool wall. Think, think. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was getting tired and my head hurt beyond comprehension.
Joshua.
I came roaring to my feet, clawing along the wall away from the door and through a cobwebbed corner. I ran my hands high and low, high and low along the wall. Another corner, more dusty wall, and then my fingernails grazed a wide crack and a different texture. I ran my hand back and then down the crack to the floor, then up until it cornered and turned.
Another door.
There was something covering most of the door, heavy. A wall of thick pressed board. Building supplies? I shoved and pulled and pried, smelling the rot at the bottom of the wood when I gained on it. Water-damaged pressed plywood sheets, heavy as hell.
I strained at it until I lost track of time and my head began to swim. I listened to my own breath. If I died here—
I gave one last groaning push. The weight of the wood panels shifted.
I leapt backward, feeling the rush of air as the boards collapsed and slammed to the ground. My lungs filled with dust, but I fought through the coughing fit and rushed to the door.
It wouldn’t budge. Wouldn’t slide left or right, wouldn’t be pushed or pried open. My fingertips grew raw and splintered. Nothing gave, even a little bit.
“Goddamn it!” And I heard the sound of my scream going out into the woods, free. This was the way. This was the only way. I had to do this. For Joshua. For the girl I used to be and everything she was due. For the beautiful life I had, for the chance to see the blue sky or black, just one more time.