Clearly no one, I thought.
“I’ll tell Tully about it,” Simmee said. “He’ll get this mess outta here and patch the roof.”
“No rush on that,” Lady Alice said. “Larry’ll do it next time he—”
The unmistakable blast of gunfire exploded somewhere in the distance, swallowing Lady Alice’s words, and I gasped, startled.
“What’s the matter?” Simmee asked me, as though she hadn’t even heard the sound. The boot cleaner had gotten to me even worse than I’d realized.
“Sweetness looks like she done been shot herself.” Lady Alice laughed, definitely more at me than with me. “Tully just kilt your dinner,” she said. “You can bet on it.”
I forced a smile. “Speaking of dinner,” I said, motioning to the basket Simmee carried. “We brought you some rabbit Tully smoked.” My voice shook, and neither of them missed it.
“Don’t mind her,” Simmee said to Lady Alice. “She got neuroses.”
Lady Alice widened her eyes. “You got nerve pain, child?” she asked, and I was impressed that she recognized the root word neuro.
“No, I’m fine,” I said. “Simmee’s teasing me.”
“Oh, she’ll do that,” Lady Alice said. “Once this girl gets to like you, she’ll tease the daylights outta you.” She drew Simmee across the threshold with a hand on her arm. “Y’all come in,” she said. “It’s a might better inside than out here.”
It was. The living room was tiny and dim, the only light coming from two small windows, but it reminded me of every grandmotherly room I’d ever been in: neat and clean, and filled with treasures. Framed photographs covered the simple wooden mantel and the end tables, though it was too dark for me to see the people in the pictures. The top of every table was covered by a doily, and quilts, folded with precision, blanketed the backs of the sofas and chairs.
“I’d offer you somethin’, but ain’t nothin’ worth offerin’ without the damn stove or Frigidaire,” Lady Alice said.
“We don’t need nothin’.” Simmee sat down on the sofa with a heaviness I hadn’t seen in her before. I’d thought about myself on the walk. My leg. My ribs. I hadn’t thought about what it was like for her to lug that baby through the woods. I wondered if her due date might be closer than I’d thought.
“You sit, too, Miss Maya.” Lady Alice motioned to the chair next to me, and I lowered myself into it. She remained standing herself, peering into the basket Simmee had set on her coffee table. “Smells right delicious,” she said.
“Lady Alice,” I said, “your son—Larry—hasn’t been by, has he?”
Lady Alice broke off a small corner of the flatbread Simmee had made and nibbled it. “No, darlin’. Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him.”
“If he comes, please be sure to send him over to Simmee and Tully’s,” I said. “I need to get home. People are so worried about me.” I was beginning to sound like a broken record.
“Oh, I bet they are!” Her sympathy encouraged me. “I’ll be sure to tell him. Don’t you worry.”
“He probly won’t be ’round for a while,” Simmee said, and I wondered if she, too, was getting fed up with my prodding.
“What keeps you out here?” I asked Lady Alice, hoping the question didn’t sound rude. “Wouldn’t you rather live near your children?”
“Oh, I’d like to be near my children ’n’ grandchildren, sure ’nough.” She folded her arms and sat down on the edge of a chair. She looked spryer than I’d noticed the other day. Right then, she looked as though she was in better shape than either Simmee or myself. “I even have a couple of great-grands in Georgia.” She smiled. Her teeth were small and white, but one canine was missing. “But I don’t belong in no Georgia,” she said. “Don’t belong in no Ruskin, neither. This is home. Prolly you can’t understand that.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You bein’ a worldly woman and all. But I was born here,” she continued. “Not in this house exactly. House I was born in fell apart in seventy-three. Then Dee—that was my husband—he built this one. More folks lived out here then. Not a lot, but more ’n just me and Jackson and Tully and Simmee.” She mentioned Jackson’s name as though he still lived with her. “I’ll never leave here,” she said firmly. “Never. This is my house and my trees and my crick. I love this here shelter and crick, even when the damn thing’s got a mind of its own, like it do right now.”
I was stuck on the word crick. A crick sounded like something you could simply hop over.
Lady Alice stood up and limped toward Simmee, leaning down to kiss the top of the girl’s blond head. “And right soon there’ll be a little one joinin’ us here,” she said. “The cycle’ll start all over again. There’s beauty in belongin’ somewhere, Miss Maya. Can you see that? Beauty in belongin’ to a place. To callin’ that place home.”
“I know,” I said wistfully. “I know exactly what you mean.”
I felt more than neurotic on the way back to Simmee and Tully’s. Hearing the gunshot had spooked me. I knew Tully wouldn’t shoot either of us on purpose, but what if he saw us moving through the woods and mistook us for an animal? What then? I wanted to hurry, but Simmee was taking her time.
“Look through there.” She pointed to our right.
I glanced through the tangle of brush and trees and saw the glint of sunlight on water. I caught my breath.
“Is that the creek?” I asked.
“Sure is,” she said.
Finally!
“More of a river right now,” Simmee said. “Come on.” She turned off the path and I followed her, struggling to keep my balance as branches and leaves smacked me in the face. I couldn’t wait to see the water, though. To see a way out.
In a moment, it was in front of us, and it was not a creek at all. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It was as broad as a river, and a raging one at that. Bushy shrubs poked through the surface here and there, and the water tore around the branches. I shaded my eyes against the sunlight and looked across the water to the green, swampy-looking forest in the distance. The view was a weight in my heart. Even if I could somehow get to the other side of this body of water, what then? It looked just as desolate on that side as it did where Simmee and I were standing. It looked worse, in fact.
“The part of the creek that covers the strip of land linking Last Run Shelter to the mainland…where is that?” I asked. “Is the creek narrower there?”
“This is it, Miss Maya,” Simmee said. “See them treetops?” She pointed toward the center of the raging creek, and I realized that the shrubs jutting from the frothy water were indeed the tops of trees. “Them trees are on the side of the dirt road that runs between us and the mainland.”
The weight in my heart grew even heavier. I let out a long breath, then suddenly had an idea. The fact that I was only now coming up with it made me realize exactly how out of it I’d been for the past few days. “Maybe I could make a big sign and put it on the bank here,” I said, “so if a boat goes by, the people would see it. I could say…I don’t know, I could write my name on it. Tell whoever it is to stop here and go to your house. I could add a little map and—”
I stopped talking when I realized that Simmee was looking at me as if I’d grown a second head.
“Ain’t no boats comin’ ’round here, Miss Maya,” she said. “You need to get past it. It’s like Tully said. You ain’t goin’ nowhere till this creek goes down.”
I looked at the boiling, swift expanse of water again. It was pretty, in a way. The trees in the distance were a thousand shades of green velvet. I thought of Lady Alice. There was beauty in belonging to a place, she’d said. This was home to her. Home to Simmee. Home to Tully. But it wasn’t home to me, and it never would be.
29
Rebecca
REBECCA HAD GOTTEN LITTLE SLEEP THE NIGHT AFTER Dorothea and Cody Ryan brought Maya’s shoe to the trailer. She hadn’t been able to still her mind. She’d tried counting backward from one hundred. She tried picturing herself at Machu Picchu, one of her
favorite places on earth. She tried reliving jump school, remembering the thrill of the free fall before she pulled the cord. But her mind kept drifting back to the peeled-open helicopter, the raging stream and to what she now imagined had been Maya’s final frightening moments. It was so unlike her not to be able to sleep. No matter what was going on, she was usually out the second her head hit the pillow. She wanted to wake Adam up so she wouldn’t be alone with her thoughts, but he was snoring softly on the couch, and it wouldn’t be fair.
In the clinic the following morning, she was trying to keep her eyes open when a woman rushed into her cubicle with her son, a boy of about eleven in the throes of an asthma attack.
“It’s never been this bad!” the woman said as Rebecca helped her lift the boy onto the gurney they were using as an examining table. The dark-haired boy was wheezing with such intensity that he couldn’t answer Rebecca when she asked him his name. His green eyes looked straight through her as if he didn’t hear the question. He was very still, all of his energy going into his breathing.
“Tristan,” the woman answered for him.
The boy’s eyes were wide with terror, and Rebecca didn’t blame him. He was, quite literally, suffocating.
“Stay sitting up, Tristan,” Rebecca said as he tried to lie down. “Lean forward a little. Lean on your mom. It’ll help you breathe,” she added, although she was afraid not much she could do for him in the clinic was going to help. She and Adam had arrived that morning to discover that their makeshift pharmacy had been ransacked overnight. Entire cabinets of medications and supplies had been carried out of the building. She’d stared at the empty room in a stunned fury.
“Does he have an inhaler?” she asked as she listened to the boy’s lungs. They sounded even worse than she’d feared.
“We ran out last night. They told me he could get another here.” The woman tried to whisper so her son wouldn’t hear. She had the boy’s green eyes and was probably a beauty in her pre-evacuation world. Now her blond hair was lank, glued to her forehead with sweat. “I’ve never seen him this bad before,” she said. “Does he need to go to the hospital?”
Rebecca was a step ahead of her. She’d already waved over one of the volunteers—the girl who’d led her and Adam to their trailer a couple of days earlier. Her name was Patty, and she had lost every shred of her perkiness since the evacuees started pouring into the school.
“Call EMS for status asthmaticus,” Rebecca said when the girl was close enough.
Patty opened her mouth, and Rebecca held up a hand to stop her. She knew what she was going to say, and didn’t want Tristan or his mother to hear it: both ambulances dedicated to the school were gone. Adam had sent a man suffering a heart attack and a woman in labor to the hospital in the last forty-five minutes. “Just call for the next available,” she said. “And tell Dr. Pollard I need him. Then wait outside for the ambulance and lead them right here. And close my cubicle,” she added. The fewer distractions Tristan had, the better.
Patty flipped open her cell phone, wheeling the partition into place as she stepped out of Rebecca’s cubicle.
“Can you speak, Tristan?” Rebecca asked.
He let out a few gasps, then said, “Mom.” The word came out of his mouth in a raspy, guttural wheeze, followed by more gasps for air, and his mother started to sob.
“Oh, baby!” she said, pressing her hands flat against her cheeks. She looked at Rebecca. “Why aren’t you giving him anything?” she asked. “Do something for him! Please!”
“You need to breathe slowly and calmly, Tristan,” Rebecca said, as she stepped intentionally between mother and son. Tristan’s lips were beginning to turn blue, and his mother’s agitation was only making things worse.
“Calm down, honey!” his mother said. “Breathe slowly, like she says!”
Rebecca needed to get this woman out of her cubicle. Tristan stared straight ahead of him, his eyelids beginning to droop. He was tiring quickly, Rebecca thought. Soon, he’d be too tired to breathe.
She was relieved when Adam stepped in front of the partition. In one second, he took in the situation—the wheezing boy with the cyanotic lips, the terrified mother, the overburdened doctor—and reached for the woman’s arm.
“I’m Dr. Pollard,” he said quickly. “Ma’am, you come with me into the hallway, so Dr. Ward and I have room to treat your son.”
“I can’t leave him!” she cried, grabbing Tristan’s arm.
Adam pried her hand from her son. “Come with me, ma’am,” he repeated, “and I’ll explain what we’re going to do.” He glanced at Rebecca. “You called EMS?” he asked, and Rebecca nodded.
Tristan’s breathing worsened momentarily as his mother disappeared from the cubicle. “It’s all right, Tristan.” Rebecca kept her voice far calmer than she felt. “Your mom will be right outside the room, and we’re going to wait here together for the ambulance to come. They’ll have everything you need to feel better.”
She watched him struggle to exhale. Nearly a decade ago, she’d lost a little boy to an asthma attack in a dusty collapsed house in Chile. She didn’t want to lose this one, yet she felt as powerless now as she’d felt then.
Adam reappeared in her cubicle.
“Do we have any O2?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Sent the last canister with the MI.”
Anger mixed with her apprehension. If this had happened the night before, she would have had everything she needed at her fingertips. Epinephrine. Oxygen. Albuterol. IVs. Terbuta-line, if necessary, and she had the feeling with Tristan that it would be necessary. Now she had nothing.
She looked at Adam. “I’ll do manual exhalations,” she said.
“Good.” Adam took her place in front of Tristan, and Rebecca hopped onto the gurney and sat behind the struggling boy.
“Look at me, son,” Adam said. “Just concentrate on my eyes.” His voice was quiet and calm, almost serene.
“I’m going to help you breathe, Tristan,” Rebecca said into the boy’s ear. She let her own voice mirror the calm in Adam’s, although she felt anything but serene herself. Slipping her hands beneath Tristan’s T-shirt, she spread her fingers over his ribs. “It’s going to feel strange at first, but I promise it will help you breathe better.” She waited to hear his next wheezing intake of breath, then squeezed his slender rib cage to help him expel the air. Tristan grabbed Adam’s arms in a panic.
“It’s all right,” Adam said. “I know that felt weird, but she’s doing just what she should be doing to help you breathe better, and she’s the best doctor in all of North Carolina, so you just keep looking at me. Right at my eyes.”
Tristan let out a brutal, wheezy cough. He panicked the next time she squeezed his ribs as well, this time with a heartbreaking whimper.
Oh, honey, she thought, her cheek against his musky-smelling hair. She knew she was hurting him, but it couldn’t be helped. She blocked the little Chilean boy from her mind.
“Listen to me, Tristan,” Adam said. “We don’t have any medicine to give you, so until the ambulance comes, you have to be your own medicine, and you’re doing a great job. You can do it. You can slow down your breathing and get very, very, very calm.”
The third time she squeezed his lungs, Tristan stopped fighting her, and she knew he was beginning to feel some relief. She began to feel it herself.
Although she couldn’t see Tristan’s face, she knew the boy’s gaze was locked on Adam’s brown eyes, as was hers. She could see the overhead lights reflected in the dark irises, the lashes thick and black. She remembered Maya telling her about him after their first date. She’d sounded smitten, so rare for Maya. “He has these eyes, Bec. They’re so amazing. He’s so amazing.” She knew now what had drawn Maya to him. She knew what her sister had fallen in love with.
Tristan’s mother and Patty rushed back into the room with paramedics and a stretcher. Someone pushed the partition out of the way, and in moments Rebecca, Adam and the paramedics had Tristan on the st
retcher, an oxygen mask on his face, an injection of epinephrine under his skin. “Thank God, thank God!” his mother wept. “You’ll be okay now, Tristan.” She took her son’s hand in her own.
The boy turned his head on the stretcher until he spotted Rebecca and Adam standing above him. He looked from one of them to the other.
“Y’all…saved…my life,” he wheezed.
Adam leaned over him, brushing a lock of dark hair from Tristan’s forehead. “You saved it yourself, kiddo,” he said. “Don’t ever forget that.”
He stepped back as the stretcher was wheeled into the hallway. He looked at Rebecca and they exchanged a smile. She would have liked to talk to him. To tell him about the boy in Chile. To tell him what it meant to her to save this boy’s life. To tell him what a terrific dad he would be someday, because one way or another, he had to be a father.
She pictured Adam and Maya up late at night with a sick child, holding him, comforting him, the little boy cradled between their bodies, sure of their love. And sometime during that fantasy, the woman changed from Maya to herself, and she was awash in tenderness for the boy and for Adam, her heart so full it hurt, and she realized the metamorphosis only after the image had taken root so firmly in her mind that she couldn’t shake it.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
30
Maya
“WHAT FISH CAN YOU CATCH AROUND HERE?” I WAS TRYING TO make conversation with Tully as I sat on the concrete stoop, waiting for Simmee. She and I were going to pick berries. I’d been trapped at Last Run Shelter for nearly a week, and the one thing I’d learned was that neither of my hosts was lazy. Right now, Tully was lighting the charcoal in the smoker. If he wasn’t hunting or fishing or cleaning and cooking his catch, he was cutting brush back from the house, repairing the chicken coop, burning and burying garbage, or hammering shingles on the roof. I had the feeling Simmee did her fair share of home maintenance when she wasn’t as big as the house itself. I could have sworn she’d doubled in size since I’d been there, and every day she seemed a little more tired, a little more winded. But she kept on going. “Lady Alice says better to keep movin’,” she told me. And so she did.