Then what do you call it?
He says, nobody believes it. They think it’s ugly. I think it’s ugly.
He says, I hope we can get this sorted out before you make it worse for yourselves.
He says, but I want to understand, Romy, so you tell me what you think happened.
And it’s not that she tells him it didn’t happen, it’s that by the time he asks, she no longer has a language of her own. But that’s enough. It always is.
Every time I close my eyes, there’s a memory. Every time I open them, I’m still on the road. I’ll never get off this road, not alone. But I’m not alone, I remember. The footsteps stopped. A shadow across my body. Maybe someone nice—but I’m too afraid to look.
“You with me?”
Dirt against my hands. I’m so heavy with heat, my head struggles against it, tries to tell me important things like this is not a safe place and leave.
But I can’t leave if I don’t know how to stand.
“You with me?”
I don’t know what that means. I don’t know anything except this, the air—too dry—the small movements I’m making—hurt—the sun—hot—the sky—it makes me dizzy. I finally squint up at the face above and am relieved to find, not a wolf, but a woman, just like me.
Until I see the uniform.
“romy grey, you hearing me?”
The deputy crouches, setting a bottle of water in front of me. It teeters on the ground, the water sloshing against its plastic sides before settling still as anything, as still as the—lake.
“Oh,” I whisper. My first word in this after.
I try to make sense of her, the deputy. It’s hard to focus at first but when I do, I see brown eyes, curly red hair, a smattering of freckles across a pointed nose. Leanne Howard. Morris Howard’s daughter—he teaches at the elementary school. She’s just shy of thirty.
“You okay?” she asks, but I don’t think she’d ask if I was. I stare at her. “You got a lot of people worried about you, you know that? How’d you get all the way out here?”
Too many questions.
I want—Mom. I reach into my pocket for my phone and only find my lipstick. My phone is gone but I had it last night. I know I did. I look down at myself, at the uneven alignment of my buttons and my heart seizes but—wait. I did that. I did that before Leanne’s car pulled up, remember … I did that because—my shirt was open. And something’s wrong underneath … I remember that too. My bra. I feel it now, undone.
Oh.
“Hey,” Leanne says and she looks past me, over my shoulder. “You alone? How’d you get out here? Can you tell me how you got out here?” My gaze travels from my buttons to my bare, scraped legs, worse than they were from track. “Romy. How’d you get out here?”
“The lake,” I mumble. It comes to me sickly fast, in flashes. Penny. Leaving the diner, biking the highway. The path to the lake—the path. And my feet on it. And the music, music thrumming, bass thumping, thump, thump, thump, I squeeze my eyes shut but that thumping, the pulse pounding in my head, it goes on. The lake. There. I was there. And lights and eyes were on me, and just after the path opened to the water, it cuts to—nothing.
I reach for more but there’s nothing.
I was at the lake.
I’m not anymore.
“Are you hurt?”
I need to be standing. No more … no more questions before I’m standing.
I bring my arm to my mouth and cough into the crook of my elbow before I press my hands to the ground. I get to my knees and bite back the urge to hiss at my raw palms meeting earth. I am hurt. But that has to be where the hurt stops.
“Your mother called us, said you were missing.”
Leanne offers her hand but I ignore it. I find my feet on my own and then I’m standing but I don’t feel like I’m standing.
“My mom—”
“You alone? Penny with you?” she asks. I shake my head and this is a mistake. The world tries to throw me off. Leanne reaches for me. I step back. My body isn’t working the way I need it to, to get out of this. “Come sit in the car. I’ll get the cold air going. I have to call this in and then we’ll get you to a hospital, get you checked out—”
“No.” I’m not letting anyone look at me before I look at myself. “No—” Leanne tries to insist, you need it, Romy, you need to be checked out, and all I can say is, no, no, no and the word gets louder the more she makes me say it, and for once someone finally hears it coming out of my mouth. She says, “Okay, okay—Romy, just—I said okay—”
She grabs my arm. I stare at her hand on my skin. She lets go. I put my hand where hers was, aware of the parts of me that are covered and the parts that aren’t.
I need the places that aren’t covered to be—covered.
“Do you know where you are?” She grabs the bottle of water off the ground, holds it out to me. “Drink that. You need it.”
I look around, wait for the here of this place to reach me, this place I ended up, but the road says nothing. The trees on either side of it say more of the same.
“It’s Taraldson Road. You’re about thirty miles from Godwit—”
“Grebe—” No. Godwit? “But—”
“You know how you got out here?”
Godwit. Grebe. Wake Lake—did I … how—
I’m thirsty, I’m too thirsty to think. I take the water from her and she looks relieved I’m doing that much. I unscrew the cap and drink slowly, small sips. It’s lukewarm but it brings me back a little, just enough to tell her again I’m not going to the hospital in a voice I almost believe.
She crosses her arms. “So what I’m getting from you is you blacked out, you don’t know how you got like this, and you don’t think you should go to a hospital?”
The question goes bone deep. Got like this. This. My thoughts turn into vultures and those vultures circle, one ugly possibility after the other. What happened to me? I can’t—