Another truck, equally burdened with its unthinkable tonnage of logs, burst into view and rumbled across the bridge. This time I caught a whiff of exhaust, delectable as perfume.
Pia’s face pinched with stress and fatigue. “Jesus, Win, what are you doing?”
Dean sat motionless, eyes locked on the road.
“Leave him!”
With some kind of curse I didn’t catch, Rachel and Pia took off straight for the bridge at full trot. Dean squeezed his eyes shut, opened them, and we both watched the women make their way through the field toward the road. Every cell in my body screamed, Run, but something chained me to that spot. To leave him at that moment would have compounded an age-old grief in a way I simply could not bear.
As I crouched down next to him, some part of me noticed I barely minded his smell anymore; that or I was beginning to smell just as bad. “Dean. Look at me.”
He didn’t.
“What’s the matter?” I glanced back anxiously at the field we’d just crossed, at the cows watching us with dull-eyed stares.
“I am afraid. Weak,” he signed in small, tight gestures.
“I can understand that. It’s all so different for you,” I said, my eye on Pia and Rachel as they closed in on the road. I thought, What am I doing here with this feral boy when my friends—the ones left still alive—are running toward salvation and freedom? Have I lost my fucking mind? I forced myself to focus on him, think how in hell I could get him to move. “Have you seen trucks before?”
“I don’t know,” he signed. “Too big. Too loud.”
“They’re big, and they seem scary, but the drivers are nice. These people will help us, okay? But we have to go. . . .” I was desperate to not care about him but sat there frozen. Exhaustion and despair rolled over me. I couldn’t leave him. I had to leave him.
“What is in the world?” he signed, finally meeting my eye with great interest.
I racked my brains. My God, what a question. Cable TV? Mortgages? Parties? Meaningless jobs? Bad marriages? Fifty thousand unanswered emails? Wine?
“People who will love you and take care of you, Dean. Beautiful things. Things that are hard to imagine right now, for me to explain. But good things, like delicious food, and books you can learn to read, and—”
He rocked back and forth on his heels. I felt like a zookeeper coaxing some beautiful wild thing into a cage. “I don’t believe you,” he signed with an air of embarrassment.
I scanned the field for Pia and Rachel. Limping, clinging to each other, they climbed up an embankment to the road. Another behemoth truck burst forth from the willows, not slowing for a second as it charged over the bridge. Dean rocked harder, faster, uttering odd, guttural sounds I’d never heard from him before.
I knelt in front of him and took his hands in mine, held them fast. He watched my white fingers holding his dark, gnarled ones, too shocked to move, I think. He became still and silent. I tried to imagine what Sandra would do, here, now, my calm and patient friend, the one who had understood better than any of the rest of us that friendship is more than the funny and the flash; it’s also for bearing witness, for life’s requisite doggedness, for never giving up on each other.
“Look, Dean, I can’t say everything is perfect out there, okay? I’m not going to lie to you. But there’s really great stuff waiting for you that I don’t even know how to describe—music, movies, friends, school—you’re going to love it all so much. And you have those pictures, and they don’t lie, right? Those are real people, you know it in your heart. We’ll try to find them. People like me and Sandra are out there, lots of them, people who can sign with you, much better than I can, okay?”
He smiled a little, and I thought, what did I really know about what was good in this world? How could I call myself an authority on that? Who knew, maybe the forest was a better place for him . . . at least here, all around us, was beauty and certainly bounty if you knew how to find it—he’d shown me that—and I thought, Why not let him be wild? What if it’s wrong to sell him on the greedy, dirty, moneygrubbing, backstabbing, brutal place we call the civilized world?
A change in the air; a quickening. My body tensed.
I looked up.
A dot. On the far side of the field, just past the trees that guarded it. The dot moved with dispatch down the hill. Grew. I turned to the road where Pia and Rachel stood like two rag dolls, waiting.
Dean signed in my hands that still held his. It felt intimate, like Marcus when he was little and sharing a secret with me or telling a joke. “I remember chocolate,” Dean signed in my sweating palms. “Do you have chocolate in town?”
I watched the dot take shape terrifyingly fast, grow arms and a head as it disappeared and reappeared among the tall grasses. “That’s the first thing we’ll do when we can get to a store, okay? Get you some chocolate.”
He looked up at me finally. Signed, “You stay with me?”