“But, Dean,” she wailed. “Your mama’s starving! You’re killing her!” She lunged at her ropes, shook her head, kicked like a tantrumming child.
He turned to leave but just as quickly swung back around and approached her, just out of range of her thrashing limbs, and sank to his knees. He fell forward onto his hands like a penitent, head down, sobbing silently, his body shuddering. She grew quiet, watching him with an expression between a snarl and hope. Fog hung in ghostly shrouds around us as we watched them, transfixed.
He signed, “I will come back for you.”
She stopped kicking at the dirt, quieted, then lifted her head. For just one moment, her face softened and the insane glint left her eyes. I could almost picture her as a normal mother speaking to her son. She whispered, “In my dreams, I never laid a hand on you. In my dreams, we could go home.”
Dean pushed himself to his feet, wiped his wet eyes, and gazed off into the thick woods. He seemed done with her, with all of us.
“Dean, please—” she cried out to him.
But he had already turned, vanishing into the green. The forest settled around the place he’d stood as if he had never been there.
“Pia!” Rachel yelled. “Let’s go!”
Without a backward glance, Rachel and I took off after Dean, Pia at our heels. Soon she ran past us, calling for him. I clutched my broken arm to my chest with my good one as I stumbled down a densely wooded hillside, finally descending into a copse of dwarfish pines, all but their sad drooping tops obscured by fog and mist. Inhuman sounds—Simone’s unearthly caterwauls—echoed from the river behind us. I could just make out Rachel’s form only a yard from me as she clung to Pia’s waistband.
We slogged along for a good half hour that way, dropping down and down through the hemlock forest, the hush of the river to the right our only constant.
“Dean!” Pia cried, exhaustion in her voice. “Where are you?”
We stopped and listened to our ragged breathing and Simone’s wordless howling. Rain banged down on us. We looked like savages. I remembered something Richard had shot back to me one day as I complained about something stupid like a parking ticket: Pain and suffering is simply the human condition, didn’t you know that, Wini?
I yelled Dean’s name. Nothing.
Pia bent over to catch her breath, pale and shivering in just her athletic bra and shorts. “We are so royally motherfucking fucked.” Her wound did not look good, the edges whitish and swollen as the rain diluted the blood into orangey rivulets down her arm and legs. Rachel gazed blankly into Pia’s back, hair hanging in her face like a lunatic.
Dean’s shape came into view, a fierce apparition out of the fog. Deep furrows darkened his cheeks, his hooded eyes sunken in their sockets.
“Slow down, Dean, please! We can’t go so fast,” I said. “We’re hurt. All of us.”
He stared at me too long. I couldn’t read him, and my heart sped up. He took a wide stance in the mud, and though he was slight, I considered his bestial strength; every muscle tensed and full of unknowable resolve. One hand clutched the bow to his chest as the other reached up toward the quiver, his fingers grazing the arrows as if to count them. Three remained.
“You took raft,” he signed in clipped, slicing gestures.
I didn’t like the look of his face. A wave of nausea hit me, and I steadied myself against a branch. “He’s asking why we took the raft.”
“Jesus,” Pia whispered hoarsely.
How could I have forgotten my promise to him? “We had to,” I breathed.
“My raft,” he signed, pounding himself in the chest with the sign for “my.”
Rachel stared at nothing: the seething rain, the haunted woods. “I made her do it, Dean. I was the one who—”
“No glass circles,” he signed, close to her face. “Dangerous.”
“He says he knows you can’t see,” I said.
Rachel breathed heavily in the humid air. A big welt had risen up close to her right eye and festered there. “The thing is, Dean, Pia and me, we got scared. Haven’t you ever been scared? Really terrified?”
Pia had begun to weep, her warrior-woman persona in abeyance. “We’re sorry we took your raft, and that it got wrecked.”
Expressionless, he watched her cry. “Scared is weak,” he signed. “No help in scared.”
With a look of disgust, he turned away from us and pushed into the gloom, but we saw that he had begun to pick his way more carefully, so we were able to track him through the phantom pines. Often his body would vanish in the fog, so we followed the bow he wore strapped to his back, which bobbed ahead of us, until we passed through the scrub pines and found ourselves in scummy water up to our shins. The fog settled thigh-deep, and we saw we were walking in some kind of bog, one in a series of sumps plugged up by beaver dams bristling with thatches of sticks chewed into points.
“Hold on, everybody,” I said. Rachel bumped into Pia, who stopped and turned to me. Dean’s face floated in the mist. “Dean, where are we going? Do you know?”