Newt Run

Allison Gray

  "Allison ran down the side of the ridge. The way was steep, and thickly forested. Once she stumbled, nearly dropping the girl in her arms. She stopped then, resting with her back against the trunk of a pine tree. The girl struggled against her, but Allison would not let her go; she crushed the girl's small, slight body to her chest, feeling her protests as a hot press of air on her skin. Finally the girl managed to free her mouth. 'You're hurting me,' she gasped, and Allison set her down."

  The old man looks up from his hands and pictures Allison in the woods, and the girl, Sarah, wandering off to sit with her back turned on a moss-covered rock.

  It's been awhile since he's sat in this bar, three weeks at least, maybe even as long as a month, and in all that time he hasn't thought much about Allison, or Sarah, or any of the rest of them. He has a life, such as it is, and other things to think about (money for one thing, or the lack of it, and an ever dwindling collection of memories that at times he views with fondness and at other times as a type of penance.) If he ever turned his thoughts to Allison it was only in passing, but now he sees her as clearly as if he was standing in the woods next to her.

  "Sarah never spoke about that day," he says. "Or any of the things that happened on the Northern Road, and Allison was happy. She wanted to forget everything that had come before, all of the wasted years since she'd given Sarah up. She wanted to start a new life."

  The two of them stumbled into Newt Run a few hours before dark. By then Sarah was almost asleep on her feet, and Allison took a room in the first hotel she could find. After putting Sarah to bed she went to the window and gazed out at the empty parking lot in front of the hotel. She looked at her own reflection in the glass, finding that she barely recognized it, as if it belonged to a stranger. She smiled, or tried to smile, and the face reflected in the glass did the same.

  "She's my daughter," said Allison, and watched as the woman in the glass mouthed the words along with her. She stared at the other woman's eyes, trying without success to see them as her own. At last she turned around and joined the girl on the bed.

  They remained in the hotel for almost a week, during which time Allison began looking for work. Eventually she took a waitressing job in a restaurant that specialized in breakfasts, and soon afterwards she moved with Sarah into a small apartment just south of Norfolk. She never considered returning to the capital or letting any of her friends and family know where she was. Rather, she did her best to shut her mind to the past completely; everything before the attack seemed to her like an image from a fading dream, and in time as even less than that, the ill-defined outline of a story that had nothing to do with her at all.

  For her part, Sarah also seemed content. She never complained or questioned the fact that she was now living with a woman she barely knew in a town she'd never heard of. She did sometimes ask about her grandfather, but Allison told her that he was fine, and that they would find him as soon as they could. The answer seemed to satisfy the girl, and Allison left it there. She didn't feel good about lying, but she had no intention of going after Lawrence, if he was even still alive. She was afraid (rightly) that if she did find him, Sarah would be taken from her. Instead, she fostered a vague hope that Sarah would forget about him.

  "She knew it wasn't likely the child would ever completely forget her own grandfather," says the old man, drumming lightly with the tip of a finger on the edge of the counter. "But maybe in time he'd start to fade, growing less and less real to her as the years progressed. Allison only had to look back on her own childhood to know how easily that could happen. On those rare occasions when she did pause to consider her past, the best she could manage was an impression of her elementary school and a brief sketch of her parents' faces. It never occurred to her that there might be something wrong with her memory, something more than the natural progression of age, and the almost limitless capacity of the human mind to forget. She never suspected that her life had been rewritten by a broken egg. Why would she?"

  Rather than dwelling on any of these things, Allison threw herself into her new routine. She worked double shifts at the restaurant and did her best to ignore the black, gaping hole that loomed beside her and the life she'd so precariously built for herself, a life which she knew would fall apart if even its smallest details were ever questioned. For a while it appeared as if they never would be: Sarah gave up asking about her grandfather and anything else that had happened before. She kept her peace, staring at the world through large, placid eyes, and seeming to accept it all, evenly.

  In this way five years went by. For Allison, they were the happiest of her life. She wanted nothing more than for things to go on as they were, living in a continual present where both the past and future were merely opposite sides of the same, worthless coin.

  "And then," says the old man. "Sarah came home from school carrying an egg."