In The Forest Of Harm (19 page)

Mary followed Joan's gaze. The sky was as blue and empty of helicopters as it had been a thousand years ago. Maybe it hadn't been real. Maybe she'd just seen a bird and imagined rotors whirring, imagined numbers on its flank. They'd had virtually no food and little sleep. Maybe she was even now imagining things—that Alex was still alive, that this trail would lead them to her. Maybe Joan had been right and Alex really had been murdered and dumped in some nameless, unfindable ravine. Maybe everything else was just wishful thinking. Her throat grew hot and aching. She was beginning not to know what to believe.

“We'll go on,” she told Joan. “If another helicopter comes, we can worry about it then.”

“Are we going to be walking over those cactus things again?”

“Probably.”

Joan greedily eyed Mary's feet. “Then can I wear the boots for a while?”

Maybe another helicopter will come,
Mary thought as she knelt down and unlaced her shoes.
Maybe Charlie and
Jonathan will figure this out and send a whole fleet of helicopters.
And Joan can sing the
Alleluia Chorus
from the mountaintops,
just to help them land.

TWENTY-EIGHT

After the helicopter passed, the weather turned sour. For the rest of the afternoon, biting wind with icy chips of sleet whipped from the sky as Joan and Mary picked their way over slippery rocks high above a rushing mountain river. Though the tracking itself was laughably easy, they progressed at a pitiable pace, sliding backwards on the slick rocks each time they pushed themselves forward. Still, they shared their one pair of boots and struggled on. As long as Alex kept marking a trail, Mary was determined to follow it.

They had just thrashed through some weeds into a small clearing along the river when they heard a high, barely audible whistle coming from the clouds above their heads. They looked up just in time to see a reddish-brown streak plummet down from the sky. Before they could speak, before they could even breathe, a dark shadow swooped to the earth not ten feet ahead of them. Something scurried frantically among the wet leaves; then they heard one panicked shriek of anguish and surprise. Dark wings flapped twice, and the brown shadow rose again, this time lifting another creature high into the air. One more terrified scream reached their ears, then there was silence. It was over before they realized what had happened.

“Jeez!” Joan cried. “What was that?”

“A hawk, I think.” Mary watched as the bird flew away, its awesome wings thrusting it upward.

“It killed something, didn't it?” Joan kept her eyes on Mary, away from the creature still squirming vainly in the hawk's talons.

Mary nodded, her palms suddenly clammy. “A squirrel. Or maybe a rabbit. They scream like that sometimes.”

“Oh, jeez.” Joan knelt down on the ground. She huddled beside Mary, trembling and rubbing her arms. “Are they now just dropping out of the sky?”

“Who, Joan?”

“The hunters,” she sobbed. “The things that kill.”

Mary knelt beside her and hugged her. She kept forgetting how little Joan knew about the woods. “It's part of nature,” she tried to explain, her own voice shaky from the suddenness of the bird's attack. “Hawks are not herbivores. That's how they survive.”

Joan took no apparent comfort in Mary's words. She remained crouched on the ground, not speaking, her body trembling as if she were freezing.

Mary stood up and sighed. In the past few hours, Joan had grown a little more like her old self. The hawk, though, had reduced her to a quivering, barely articulate heap. It seemed pointless to press on any further now. The rain and fog were growing thicker and the nonexistent sun was about to set. She scanned the woods around them. A rotting sycamore, its trunk three feet wide, lay on the ground twenty feet away. For once, they would have good shelter for the night.

“How about we call it a day?” she said to Joan. “You rest here and I'll go over and dig a trench beneath that tree.”

Joan nodded her head.

Mary walked over to the sycamore and with one edge of her paint box started to hollow out a trench on the south side of the bark. She wished she could dig down deep and just pull the dirt back over them, but clay soil was a lousy insulator, and Joan refused to sleep in anything that looked like a grave.

As she scraped the slick mud into her paint box she uncovered a colony of squirming white grubs. With her belly on a long, slow boil from hunger, she picked out three of the plumpest ones and popped them in her mouth. She swallowed them without chewing, then waited to see if her stomach would bid them welcome or send them back up. Nothing happened. Her gut did not recoil but neither did the glowing coals of her hunger abate. She shrugged and resumed digging. Three grubs, she decided as she wiped her nose with the back of her hand, do not a feast make.

After a time Joan wobbled over. Her tears had made slender pale streaks through the grime on her face. Mary knew that she had been weeping for the little creature that had wound up as dinner for the hawk. Without thinking, she picked three more grubs from beneath the log and held them out to Joan.

“You gotta be kidding,” Joan cried, horrified.

“It's protein,” Mary said. “You need to eat something.”

Joan backed up a step.

“Don't chew them. You won't taste them at all.” Mary grabbed Joan's hand and dropped the squirming insects onto her palm. Joan stared at the fat pearlescent bodies, then she looked at Mary, her mouth curling in disgust. “Is this part of nature, too?”

Before Mary could answer, Joan flung the grubs back at her and ran toward the riverbank. At first Mary started to run after her, but then she stopped. She was tired. This was the way things happened in the woods. If Joan needed to recover from the shock of seeing a hawk grab a rabbit, then she would have to do so. Mary had a trench to dig, and not much time to do it. She bent down and scraped her paint box harder into the earth, working double-time against the fading light.

Suddenly, she stopped digging. She heard something— a cry of some sort, like a small animal in pain. Had the hawk returned? She stood and cocked her head toward the river. Above the muffled roar of the water, it came again. A sharp, plaintive ping of a cry.

“Joan?” She frowned, searching the woods for her friend. Where had she shuffled off to? A thick copse of pines and sycamores rose from the very edge of the gorge. Mary dropped her paint box and broke into a run.

Again, the cry came. This time louder. A desperate, pleading sound. Not a rabbit.

“Joan?” Mary reached the trees but saw nothing. She scrambled through scraggly rhododendron that sprouted between the rocks of the gorge. Then, without warning, the ground crumbled beneath her feet. She tumbled— leaves, rocks, twigs and branches falling with her, bumping down what felt like the sheer side of a shale cliff.

Protect your head
, she thought as she rolled, but she was falling too fast. The earth passed by in a painful blur of rocks and bushes.

I'm going to drown
, she decided.
I'm going to fall off this
cli f and into the river. I'll never see Alex again.

She began to scramble, then, with her arms and legs, trying to break her fall against the roots of trees, clutching at the slick rocks as she skidded past them. Flint sliced into her bare legs, and as she fell she felt something pierce the fleshy part of her shoulder. Finally she came to a stop. Her back felt wrenched in a thousand directions, and her head spun dizzily as the rock and the trees and the sky all swam around her.

At first she lay still, trying to figure out where she'd landed. Dirt and pieces of leaves filled her mouth, but she was afraid to move, afraid that the rock beneath her would crumble and the whole sickening plummet would start again. Finally she looked around and realized that she lay on a huge outcropping of solid limestone rather than the treacherous shale above.

She spit dirt out of her mouth and checked to see if anything was broken. Her bare legs bled from a hundred scratches, but her ankles flexed, and her scraped knees bent. She felt a hard lump against her belly. Wynona, still miraculously nestled in the pocket of her sweatshirt.

“I'm okay,” she whispered. “Now, where's Joan?” Another cry floated up from the river. Mary looked around, but saw only the high, rocky gorge, speckled with scrub cedars and rangy stands of laurel. Scrambling forward, she lay belly-down on top of the big rock. From there she could see the whole ravine. “Oh, my God,” she breathed as she looked below her.

The shale had tricked Joan just as it had her. Like Mary, she'd stepped wrong and fallen: only Joan's tumble had been much farther and her landing spot far more perilous. Somehow she'd stopped just before she'd plunged into the river. Now her arms were wrapped desperately around the root of a tree that sprouted from a small, rocky ledge while the lower half of her body dangled in the air, twenty feet above the racing waters.

“Mary!” she begged, her face pinched and white with fear. “Help me!”

“Be calm,” Mary replied, trying to make her voice steady. “I'm coming.”

“Hurry,” gasped Joan. “I can't feel my arms . . .” Mary crawled off the boulder and eased herself down. Here the cliff face was mostly limestone—firm, but wet and slick from spray. Joan was wearing the boots, so Mary had to clutch the slippery boulders with her toes. Cautiously, she climbed down the cliff as Jonathan had taught her, keeping her hands and feet touching the rocks at all times.

“Are you hurt?” she called, sliding as her fingers failed to grip a slimy rock, then biting into the earth with her fingernails to stop her fall. The mist from the river rose like an icy wet cloud; droplets of stinging sleet blinded her.

“I don't think so,” said Joan. “My arms, though. They're numb.”

“I'm eight feet away. I'll be there in a flash.” Mary tried to sound reassuring, but even as she spoke her right foot slipped and she had to fling herself forward to keep from falling. These rocks are so fucking slick, she thought, remembering how she and Jonathan used to think how stupid people were who fell to their deaths at waterfalls. Now she knew how easily it could happen.

She climbed on, like an elderly spider. One foot here, the other there. In the deep cut of the gorge, the cloudy daylight had faded to dusk. Ten minutes more and she would be climbing in the dark.

“Mary?” Joan's voice floated up, nearer, but closer to panic, too. It was hard to hear over the noise of the river boiling below. “Are you still coming?”

“Yes. Look just above your head.”

“Oh!” Joan cried. “I can almost touch you!”

“Don't let go of the roots, Joan!” Mary commanded sharply. “Keep your arms folded tight around them!”

Joan's response was lost in the water's roar.

Moving now by miserly inches, Mary lowered herself to the ledge above Joan. The tree roots she clung to belonged to a young sycamore, an errant offspring of the taller ones that clustered on the gorge high above them. Mary sat down and wrapped her legs around the trunk of the small tree, then lowered the upper half of her body over the ledge. Joan clung just below her, hugging the slender roots while her legs dangled in the wet air.

“Thank God.” Joan's lips were blue in her ashen face. “I was afraid you wouldn't hear me.”

Quickly, Mary studied Joan's position, trying to figure out the best way to grab her. The sub-ledge was too narrow for her to climb down and push Joan up from behind. She would have to try something else.

“Joan,” said Mary. “This is what we're going to do. I'm going to wrap my arms around you. Then when I start to pull you up, let go of the tree and grab on to me.”

“Oh, Mary,” Joan whimpered. “Are you sure? I weigh a lot.”

“Don't worry,” Mary replied with a confidence she did not feel. “I'm braced up here. I can hold you.”

Mary wrapped her legs tighter around the tree, then leaned over the ledge and grasped Joan under her arms. She took a moment to position herself, then breathed deep and closed her eyes.

“Okay,” she whispered, knowing that if this young sycamore could not support their combined weights they would both drown in frigid water, shattered by the sharp rocks below. “Let go, Joan.
Now
!”

As Mary pulled, Joan reluctantly loosened her grip on the roots. At first Mary feared she'd misjudged, and they both seemed to be sliding into the oblivion below. But she tensed the muscles in her legs and back and pulled with all her might. Joan edged up, slightly, toward her. Mary pulled harder. Finally Joan's legs pushed up from the fragile roots and up she came, fast, tumbling over on the ledge on top of Mary.

Gasping for breath, they lay without speaking. The cold, wet air that had before seemed like a shroud now felt good, cooling their sweat-soaked skin. Joan sat up and scrambled back from the ledge. Then she began to weep.

“I thought I was going to die just like that rabbit,” she sobbed. “I thought I was going to drown.”

“It's okay.” Mary sat still, her breath coming hot and hard. “Once we climb out of this gorge, we'll be safe.”

“But we can't climb out now!” Joan wailed. “It's almost night.”

Mary looked up at the slate-gray sky. “If we hurry, we can make it out before dark. The climb up won't be so bad.”

Joan gaped at her, unbelieving.

“You can go first,” said Mary. “I'll tell you where to step, and I'll be right behind you in case you fall.”

Joan did not move. Her tears and her body language betrayed the depth of her terror. She was so frightened, she could get them both killed, Mary knew.

“We have no shelter on this ledge, Joan,” she explained. “If we don't climb up now, the cold will kill us before dawn.”

“I can't do this anymore, Mary,” Joan sobbed, shrinking back against the rock face. “That man hurt me. He hurt me a lot!”

Suddenly a rage enveloped Mary. “Don't you think I know that?” she yelled, leaping forward at Joan. Longing to slap her stupid weak face, instead she grabbed her by her shoulders and pushed her hard against the rock. “Don't you think I know exactly how that man hurt you? He beat you, Joan. He raped you. He nearly killed you.”

Joan shrank back further from the blaze in Mary's eyes.

“I know all that, Joan.” Mary leaned in closer. “But I know something else. I know how strong you can be!”

“No.” Joan shook her head. “I can't.”

“Yes, you can,” cried Mary. “Any little girl from Brooklyn who's fought her way into opera and then fought her way into Emory Law and is now fighting her way up the corporate career ladder in Atlanta is plenty tough enough to climb one lousy cliff.” Mary tightened her grip on Joan's shoulders. “Joan, you can do it!”

“But I've never . . .”

“Doesn't matter!” Mary would not let Joan turn away. “I haven't done it, either. But we've got to try. We may wind up breaking our necks in that creek, but we've got to try!”