Down

Chapter 5:

I ran.

Not the smart kind. Not the kind where you pick a direction and keep your head. The other kind. The kind where the branches hit you in the face and you put your arms up and keep going and don't know where you're going because going is the whole point.

My boot caught a root and I went down hard on my knees and got up without deciding to. My bag was gone. I didn't know when. Somewhere back in the dark it had come off my shoulder and I hadn't felt it go, and my mother's ring was in that bag, and I did not turn around.

The footsteps came on.

Not running. That was the thing that got into me worse than if they'd been running. They walked. They walked at the same unhurried pace they'd walked at when they started, and I ran, and they walked, and they were still there.

I went sideways through a gap in two trunks and something took my hat off — no, I didn't have a hat. Something took the top of my hair and pulled, and I felt the sting and kept going, and my chest was on fire and my legs were not my legs anymore, they were two things I was dragging.

"Help," I said.

The word came out wrong. Thin. Not loud. I'd meant it loud.

"Help!"

The trees ate it. There was nothing out here to hear it and I knew that even while I was saying it.

I came out of the trees into a slope going down and I took it too fast and lost my feet and slid, on my back, on wet rock, and my head hit something and the world went white and then came back, and I was still sliding, and then I wasn't.

I lay at the bottom of the slope and looked up at the trees and the grey sky through them.

The footsteps came down the slope. Slower now. Careful. The sound of a man picking his way down wet rock and not wanting to fall.

I rolled over.

My arms worked. My legs worked, sort of. I got my hands under me and I pushed and I got up on my knees, and my head swam so hard I had to put a hand on the ground again and wait for it.

The footsteps stopped.

I looked up.

There was a shape at the top of the slope. Tall. Standing still. I couldn't make out a face or a coat or anything — just a shape against the grey, dark, wrong somehow, too still.

"What do you want," I said.

My voice was a croak. It didn't carry. The shape didn't move.

I got up.

I don't know how. I want to say that I found something in me and I stood up on it. That's not what happened. What happened was that my body got up without asking me, because lying on the ground with something standing over you is a thing the body won't do, and I stood there swaying with my hands out and my knees shaking and I looked at the shape at the top of the slope.

"Come on then," I said.

It didn't move.

"Come on. You walked me half the night. You want something. Come down and get it."

The shape turned its head. Slow. That same slow turn from the stream, the way a dog turns at a sound it doesn't like.

Then it stepped back, out of sight, behind the trees.

I stood there.

I stood there for a long time, or a short one, I couldn't tell. My hands were shaking so hard I had to press them against my thighs to keep them still. My heart was in my throat and my ears and my hands.

Then I walked. Because standing there was worse.

I went along the bottom of the slope. The ground was flat and rocky and there were roots, and I walked with my hand out and my eyes moving and I did not look behind me. Every few steps I'd hear something — a drip, a creak, a branch — and my whole body would seize up and I'd keep walking anyway.

The sky got lighter.

I noticed it the way you notice a headache going away. Slowly, then all at once. The grey at the top of the trees went from dark grey to light grey to a grey with yellow in it, and the trunks started having edges, and the ground started having color, and I stopped and looked up and the sky was doing the thing it does before the sun.

I had walked all night.

I sat down on a rock. Just for a minute. My hands were blue at the fingertips and I couldn't feel my feet and there was blood on my palm from somewhere and I couldn't remember where I'd cut it.

"Okay," I said.

The forest was quiet. Morning quiet. That's a different quiet from night quiet. Night quiet has something in it, waiting. Morning quiet is just tired.

I put my head in my hands.

Here's what I want to tell you about that moment, and I'm telling you because I've never told anybody. It wasn't the rejection. It wasn't the laugh. It wasn't the shape on the slope or the night in the trees.

It was that I reached for her, and she wasn't there.

I did it without thinking. The way you'd put your hand in your pocket. I reached for my wolf, the way I had every day of my life since I was eleven years old, the way you'd reach for a sister in a crowded room — and the room was empty. Still empty. Empty in the morning light the same way it had been empty in the dark.

I sat on that rock in the cold and I said, out loud, "Where are you?"

The forest didn't answer.

I thought, she's scared. She's hiding. She'll come back when she's ready.

I thought, I've never heard of a wolf that was scared for this long.

I thought, if I can't shift, what am I?

The answer came up so fast and so ugly that I stood up off the rock to get away from it.

I started walking.

The ground went uphill and I climbed it because uphill meant out, and my legs hurt in a way that had stopped being pain and become a kind of noise, and my head was doing something I didn't like — going soft at the edges, thinning out, like a photograph left in the sun.

I stopped. Put my hand on a trunk. Waited.

"Just a minute," I said. "Just a minute."

I closed my eyes.

I opened them and I was further up the hill. I didn't remember walking there. The trees were thinner. There was light coming through them, real light now, gold, and I could hear something that wasn't the forest.

I stood still and listened.

Water. Not the stream. Running water, fast, over stones, and a sound behind it that took me a second to name because I hadn't heard it in a night and a half.

A chicken.

I went toward it.

I don't remember the last part of that hill. I know there was a hill, and I know my hands were on trunks, and I know I was talking to myself — I could hear my own voice, low and steady and saying things that didn't matter, almost there, keep going, almost there — and then the trees opened.

There was a clearing.

There was a garden. Rows of something dark and green, frosted at the edges, and a fence made of sticks, and a cottage beyond the fence with a stone chimney and smoke coming out of it.

I stood at the edge of the trees and looked at the cottage.

My legs went.

Not slowly. All at once, both of them, like somebody had pulled a pin, and I went down sideways and my shoulder hit the ground and the world turned over and I lay on my back in the wet grass looking up at the light through the leaves.

I tried to get up.

My arms wouldn't do it. I told them to. I said, out loud, "Get up," and my arms lay there next to me like they belonged to somebody else.

The sun was in the trees.

Somewhere off to my left a gate opened and closed.

I turned my head. It took everything I had. There was a figure at the fence, coming through the gate, and she was walking fast, and there was a basket in her hand, and her mouth was open like she'd said something I hadn't heard.

I tried to say help.

What came out was a sound.

She was running now. The basket went over on the path — I saw it go, I saw it tip and the green stuff spill out of it in the wet grass — and she didn't stop for it. She came on across the yard and her boots were loud on the frozen ground and I could see her face now and I didn't know her, I'd never seen her, an old woman with grey hair and a wide mouth and something in her eyes that wasn't fear.

She dropped down beside me in the grass and her hands came up and one of them found my cheek and turned my face toward her.

"There you are," she said.

I looked up at her.

"I—" I said.

"Don't." Her hand was warm. "Don't talk. Don't you dare."

"Can't—" My voice was going. The light was going with it, the gold in the trees going soft and far away like somebody turning down a lamp. "Can't feel my—"

"I know." She was pulling at her own coat, her hands fast and sure and not shaking at all. "I know what it is. I've been waiting for you."

The gold in the trees was going.

"What," I said.

Her face was the last thing. Old woman's face, wet at the eyes, and she was saying something — my name, she was saying my name, she knew my name — and I didn't understand it and I didn't have time to ask.

The light went.

Chapter (5) Ends.