“A friend.”
“Who?”
“No one you know.”
“The bad guy?”
Ruth looks shiny herself. She smiles. “There are no good guys or bad guys. Not really.”
“Just don’t leave me again. Or at least let me know if you’re going to leave. OK? I didn’t know what to do—whether to wait or what. I didn’t know if you’d come back. Just tell me if you’re going to leave again, OK?”
“How could I do that when I can’t talk?”
She’s got a point.
“You should lie down, Cora. Get some rest. We’re leaving again in the morning.” Ruth leads me over to one of the beds. She pulls back the covers. “Did you have fun with Sheresa tonight?”
“Yeah.” I yawn and stretch. “She’s great. I really like Sheresa.”
“Me too. She told you about Nat, right?”
I lie down. “Yeah. Don’t leave without him. Got it.”
“Good, because that’s why we’re doing this.”
“OK.” I’m like a sleepwalker.
“Good night,” Ruth says, and douses the light. She runs her fingers through my hair, combing through it. “Get some rest.”
“Yeah. All right.” My eyes shut for one minute. “You’re not going to disappear again?”
“No.”
“OK. Thanks. Don’t leave where without him?”
“The End.” Like she’s finishing a bedtime story.
My eyes are closed and I feel peace like a coma, like a child being cared for by her mother. I’m so deep in sleep that I almost don’t hear it when a man speaks.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hit her,” he says. “I thought it might be him.”
I’d like to sit up and ask this man some questions, but moving my jaws and tongue would be extracting motion from a chunk of ice. It would take forever to melt the moving parts.
“She’ll be OK,” Ruth says.
Though my eyes are closed in the darkness, I can make out their bodies. The guy is sitting in a chair, tipping a bag of nuts into his hand, shelling them. They’ve cleaned up the room. “Pistachio?” He offers some to Ruth. It’s the guy from the office earlier, the sexy bandito who speaks strangely and doesn’t want to be called Carl.
She takes a few from his palm, and he pulls Ruth into his lap. She cracks a nut, pops one into her mouth. He wraps his arms around her. Ruth’s Walkman’s headphones are looped around her neck. A tiny bit of music leaks out. “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” He sings with Elvis, repeating the words. “‘Shall I? Shall I? Shall I? Come back? Come back again? Again? Again?’” Ruth and the man and a quiet song.
“I’ll miss you,” he says. Beside the chair he’s got an old water-damaged suitcase as if he’s packed to go somewhere.
“We’ll be together again soon. I promise.”
He kisses her head. “My love,” the man says.
“You need this.”
The man opens his mouth, allowing Ruth to place a coin on his tongue. “My bell,” she calls him. “My bell,” and as she says it, the bell, so loud, starts to ring.
Ruth swats her hand on the motel’s alarm clock.
It’s still dark out. My brain hurts. Ruth comes to sit on the edge of my bed. She shakes my back.
“Where’ve you been?” I ask her.
She smiles.
“Hello?”
She smiles again because Ruth doesn’t talk.
“Whoa.” I hold my splitting head together. “I had a crazy dream.”
She nods.
“You could talk.”
She puts her hand on my forehead checking for fever. She puts another hand on my belly.
“Where’s the fish? Where’s your boyfriend? Bell?”
She lifts her eyebrows high, shrugs, and straps on her backpack. She nudges her chin toward the door.
I pull myself out of bed. “Hold on there, sister. Just slow down. You disappear for a day. Then you reappear and want me to just pop up, all ready like? Shit. I need a minute.” I waddle my big way to the bathroom. I peek my head back out the door. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but I’m about nine and a half months pregnant here.” I wash slowly. I pee and collect my toothbrush and toothpaste. “You have a boyfriend, Ruth?” She kicks the carpet. Ruth blushes and shakes her head no. She’s a solid wall again, but that doesn’t stop my dream from slipping away, right through her.
In the light of the bathroom, I find my things. I check the bed, the desk. I take one last look and turn to follow her, but at the end of the bed, something crunches under my foot. Ruth grabs my shoulder. The light is bad, but it sounds like the shell of something hard—say, a nut; say, a pistachio nut. Ruth pulls me out the door. We walk quickly away from the motel’s light. Ruth behind, pushing me on. One hundred yards into the darkness, she reaches for my wrist and leads me off the road, down the embankment. We cut through briars and into the black woods. Branches poke my face and belly. “Back off,” I tell them. Ruth digs through her backpack. Her flashlight creates a narrow, overexposed swath on the low branches of hemlock trees. She takes my hand again like I’m a prisoner. We walk into the woods.
I should count our steps or leave a trail so we can find our way out, but it’s already too late for me. Holding her hand, I shut my eyes, still half asleep. I stumble onto my ankle in a rut. I don’t even care. I’m tired. I’m pregnant. I’m exhausted. We go so far into the woods, I wonder if we are now on our way out of the woods. Where is the middle of the woods? Where’s the middle of this walk? Have we already passed that point? Do the woods ever end?
The sun hasn’t risen. There’s just a path made out of light, more trees, the back of my aunt’s head and my belly making the smallest streak of color in the dark world, a walking artist. I accidently crush a fairy circle of mushrooms. This foot, that foot. I’m pretending I understand what’s real and what’s not. “Where are we going?” We duck under sharp branches. Time passes, bolts of long fabric. “Where are we going? Where are we going?” The light moves ahead of us, a small patch, seeing very little of the big woods.
Eventually I let go of her hand, lowering myself onto all fours. I sit back. “I have to rest.” Ruth stands above me like the trees. She switches off the flashlight. She rubs my body everywhere, trying to warm me or scrubbing off my dirt. When’s she done, she pulls me up to standing. We walk again. We walk so long, the sky blues. Green surrounds us, kelly and lime, pine trees and the other kind. Everything is alive in the woods. Except for the dead things. It’s only scary if I am responsible for getting us out of here and I’m not. We might never get out. I don’t even care.
We walk farther. The sun rises. We have walked straight into the woods for hours. The walking happens without me even noticing. Until again I tell her, “I have to stop.” We’re in a clearing of baby trees, soft grass, and orange needles. She folds an item of clothing for us both, pillows. She takes a drink of water and offers one to me. Ruth lies down. The quiet is so intense, it menaces from behind some of the larger trunks, but we’re tired, hungry, nearly desperate. Not much can scare me anymore. The small of my back feels like bone rubbed against bone. I lie down beside Ruth and curl into her. The weight of the baby grinds my hip into the ground, curves my spine. The baby sits on my lungs and bladder, takes whatever it wants. I shut my eyes and I’m asleep.
Clouds move quickly overhead. Sleeping on the open ground, cold and hard, bones, stones. I half expect to find parts of our bodies disintegrating back to dirt, sprouting roots. Ruth unwraps a chocolate bar. She passes it to me. “Thank you.” I’m starving and there’s not a place on my body that doesn’t hurt; maybe the tips of my earlobes have been spared.
These woods are where silence has come to lick its wounds.
I break off some more chocolate. “How long were we asleep?” A dumb question. I’m full of them. “Where are we going. Where’d you disappear to. Why’d you come back. Who was that guy in our room.” I’m too tired for question marks.
Ruth raises her hands to her eyes. She looks soft, pretty. She packs our pillows. I sit on the forest floor. She starts walking again. She doesn’t wait to see if I’m coming, and I’m too tired to follow her any farther. So this is how I’ll die, rot like a log, turn to moss. She brought me all this way to abandon me in the woods where a sapling will one day spring from my navel. “I’m not coming, Ruth.” She’s gone twenty-five feet, zigzagging through the branches, snapping those that block her way. Ruth keeps walking. She’s leaving me here. I’ll be dead, but at least I won’t have to get up. I look up through the branches. I am more lost from the world than anyone has ever been. More lost than people who lived here before here had a name. Those people understood stars. They still felt north in their bodies. I don’t have any idea what happened to north. My life so far has made me stupid, helpless, dependent. I am not like the people who came before. They knew how to feed themselves, how to give birth by squatting in the roots of a tree. They were lost, but lost didn’t matter back then, since there was no found. They could wander these woods before tribes, before people even. Following deer or bears or who knows what. The sort of lost that doesn’t exist anymore anywhere.
Ruth doesn’t stop walking away. This is how I’ll die. That kind of lost. Until she does. I see the bumpers of her sneakers in front of me, her fingertips, chewed back to ragged nails, scratching on her jeans. I wait for her voice. She has to say something. Ruth looks into the woods from where we came. Her urgency surrounds me like skunk stink. Something is getting closer? Let it. I’m too tired. I’m done. So Ruth collects sticks to start a fire. A fire means we’ll be here a while. I help her by collecting wood on my knees. It’s easier than bending over. Ruth lights a tepee of sticks. I lie back down and the baby is a furnace beneath my navel, hot to the touch. Ruth curls up around me again, combs some leaves from my hair, straightens my part. The shriveled child—shaped like an ear or a gourd—keeps us warm with its fever.
When I wake, the woods are dark again. I have to pee and can see sufficiently to know that there’s much I can’t see. I hear leaves and I hear trees. I hear beetles walking, and their footfalls are as loud as a bogeyman with a machete coming through the woods. Ruth snores. One hand pinched between my legs helps me hold my pee until it can’t be held back any longer. I force myself up, onto hands and knees and then to standing. Each footstep disturbs the night. I look for a spot away from our camp where I can hold on to a tree as I crouch. The rush of urine is loud. My nails dig into the tree’s bark so the air smells of pitch and pee. When I am almost done, he starts to laugh.
Having spent years not believing in God, I call to him, her. God. God. God. There’s a bad man in these woods. I fall back in the warm puddle, clutch up into a ball, try to stop breathing. God. God. God. There is a bad man in the woods. My shoulders creep up my neck, making a wall around the baby with my limbs. My head booms static in the silence. His steps come closer.
“I told you I’d follow wherever you went.” He’s mumbling, a greasy, deranged person.
God. God. God. I beg for God to exist.
“Wherever you went.”
If I keep my head down, if I don’t see him, he won’t see me. God come. There are the man’s shoes. He’s standing just beside me. God. Help me. Save my child.
“You.” He lifts his cane and, with it, gives my back a shove. “Looka me.”
I can’t move.
“Looka me.” Angrier.
I turn my chin just slightly. With one feral animal eye, I see him, heavyset, raised wildly, still wearing his dark sunglasses. His sports jersey makes me loathe all sports, all teams. His mind is not right. “Where’s Ruth?” His dirty pants and boots are male, foreign. His hair is clumpy with grease.
I shake my head no. My fear is toxic, stinking. I crouch in a ball. I don’t want him to see the baby.
“Ruth.” He gargles her thick name.
One eye up to the sky. God.
“She said she was mine.”
His mind is not right. He crouches down next to me. I cannot lift my head off my chest. He smells of rotten raw things. I can’t move. He lifts his hands as if to touch me but instead removes his sunglasses, and I’m sorry I see it. One eye is as stupid as a sheep’s, blank. The other eye is not an eye but a hole carved out by a gunshot that traveled straight through this man’s brain. He’s so close to me.
“Ruth.” His fat, wet lips stink of hard-boiled eggs. “You said you were mine.”
God. God. Help my baby. Each moment I don’t run is an exit I miss, shaving off the possibility I might not be chopped up. But I can’t run.
“Stand up.” He’s furious. I do what he says. “Take me to Ruth.” My damp hands shake at my sides so they won’t draw attention to my belly. He follows behind. God, I call again. God. I keep walking, waiting for the blow to come, for him to kill me. I walk through the dark until I see Ruth. She’s not sleeping anymore. She’s a crazed warrior, furious in the forest. God.
“Leave her alone, Ceph. Go away.” Ruth speaks again, but this time her words are slow. Her voice is an empty bucket kicked down a stone cellar staircase.
The man’s head lists to one shoulder. “I tried to stop him,” he says.
Ruth nods. “I know.”
The man’s glasses are off. I see the forest through the hole in his head. He staggers back as if shot again. I shut my eyes, and when I look, he’s gone.
Ruth remains guarded. She pokes into the night with a stick, making sure he’s gone. “You spoke,” I tell her as she passes by me. “I heard you for real that time and I’m not dreaming, Ruth.”
“Are you sure?” she asks. The thinnest string of a dream as it slips away, a snake across the ground. Even as I try to convince myself I heard her, I don’t believe it. I hear a lot of things on the road that aren’t really there. And what’s a Ceph anyway?
Ruth packs our things. Dead and dark of night we walk, but I can still feel him behind every tree watching me. I’m filled with holes, night breezes inside chill me, all that fear and the impossible hole in his head. The baby turns and stretches inside, and a house I thought had many rooms turns out to have just one, where birth and death duke it out to decide whose turn it is this time.
The sun comes up. Ruth fingers the trunk of a bare tree. There’s a pattern, a larvae fringe some creature tracked back and forth, drunk on whatever it ate, making writing no one can read. I want to get out of here. I want life to win, for now. I want to be a mother. We keep walking, trees and trees and sometimes a small clearing. I take no breaks. Dead leaves, dead needles, dead logs, but green everywhere. I can see the sky and I can see Ruth. Every now and again, a bird. We do not rest because now I know what we are running from, and it looks a lot like death. Still it is hard to understand when we step out of the forest and onto a road, stepping into Technicolor. Even Ruth laughs. What’s a road doing in a place so lost?