He shook his head; his stringy hair flew around his shoulders. He signed, “No,” over and over, but after some time he slumped and signed, “She kill me too.”
“No, she won’t,” I said. “You are her son. She won’t hurt you.” But I had no idea what this woods creature would do to her son. Look at what she had already done to him.
“You my family,” he signed, tearful. “Sandra, family.”
I felt myself crying again and said, “Okay. We are your family.”
“Happy,” he signed, though his eyes stayed sad, and I could see that in his mind he was already racing through the forest.
“But, Dean, go. Now, all right?”
I watched his face working, hatching a plan. “Wait for me by the raft here,” he signed. “Wait overnight. I make you all safe. Wait sunrise.”
Pia and Rachel stood talking in low voices, glancing back at us every now and then.
“Make promise?” he signed.
“Okay. Promise. We wait here till first light. If you’re not here, we go, do you understand? We take the raft and go.”
He nodded, turned, and vanished into the forest.
39
I ran down to the bank, barefoot. Pia and Rachel, ropes slung over their shoulders, were already hauling the raft back down toward the muddy bank. The river ran silvery green where it wasn’t darkened by evening shadows. I stood watching them, hands in rock-hard fists at my sides.
“What are you doing?”
They ignored me. As if I were already dead, a ghost. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure Sandra, but I couldn’t even feel her spirit anymore. Was she already gone from this earth? I watched Pia and Rachel as they positioned the raft at an opening in a tangle of brush near the bank, chatting together easily as they had since they were children. I had never felt so alone.
Finally Rachel looked up, squinted in my direction. “Is he gone?”
Pia glanced back at me and said nothing while something like guilt flickered across her face.
“Yes, but he’s coming back in the morning.”
Pia snorted, yanking the raft so hard over the mossy embankment that one corner dipped down, tasting the water. “We’re leaving, Win.”
A cavity opened in the depths of my gut. My head seemed to vibrate slightly. “What do you mean ‘we’?”
Rachel faced the river, away from me, legs planted wide apart in the dirt. With a grunt, she bent down and heaved the raft a few feet forward. It landed half in, half out of the water, resting at a forty-five degree angle to the bank. Already the river wanted it; one more solid shove would set it free. “All of us,” she said, staring at the lagoon-dark water.
“Listen to me,” I said.
No one made a sound. The current sang its burbling song and tugged at the raft, inching it farther from the shore.
“He says he’s going to get us out of here.”
Rachel stepped into the water up to her knees, splashed over to the far side of the raft that bobbed and flirted with the waves. Pia stood at the shoreline, arms folded, watching her.
“Did you hear me? He says he’s going to make us safe.”
“What does that mean?” Rachel turned in my direction. Her curly hair had begun to dry; it stood out in a crazy halo around her head. She looked walleyed and unstoppable. The water rumbled past her waist, yanking at her shirt. “Is he going to kill her?”
Our ragged breathing filled the air. The green pressed in on us as long-legged mosquitoes swarmed our foul, sweating bodies. I watched one bloat to twice its size with my own blood before I smacked it, reddening my thigh. I felt, viscerally, Sandra’s body lying yards away, already starting to become not Sandra, but a part of the earth we stood on. We owed her something, a large and complex debt I was too depleted to face or even comprehend.
“Is he?” Rachel repeated, hate in her voice.
I took a few steps down the bank, my feet stinging and aching on the sharp stones, before I clambered onto the raft, anchoring it to the shore with my weight. “I promised him we’d wait till dawn. He’ll help us.”
They eyed my every move but stayed where they were. Pia’s bare feet were bruised, scratched, and bloody.
“We don’t care what you promised him,” Rachel said. I couldn’t tell which stung me more: this we business again or their refusal to listen; all the time the loss of Sandra stabbed me like shards of glass in my spine.
Rachel rested her arms lightly on the raft, her eyes aimed vaguely skyward toward a point somewhere over the wall of black spruces that crowded the bank. It occurred to me she needed at least one of us to even think of getting out of here. “And honestly, Win?” she continued. “Between you and me and Pia and the trees and shit? I’m not even sure you’re telling us everything Dean is saying. Or not saying.”
Anger rippled through me. “Rachel—seriously? You’re accusing me of—”
“Wini,” Pia said, stepping gingerly toward the water, “don’t take this the wrong way, but Dean is not your brother.”
I planted myself on the raft, glared at her. Still she wouldn’t meet my eye. “So what the fuck does that mean?”