The Forgetting Place (18 page)

I
stood near the edge of the woods, still concealed within the protective cloak of the trees, peering out at the empty stretch of roadway in front of me. Now that I'd gotten here, I was hesitant to leave the safety of the forest, afraid to step out onto the shoulder and allow myself to be seen by the next passing motorist.
Would the men who'd come for Jason be driving the streets looking for me?
I didn't know—
couldn't
know—but I could imagine flagging down a car that would roll smoothly to a stop, the front passenger door opening and a man in a dark suit stepping out.
There you are, Dr. Shields,
he would say.
We've been looking for you.

I could hear the heavy drone of tires now. Instead of stepping away from the woods I stepped deeper into them. A semi rounded the corner, the vertical slats of its front grille glistening like narrow rows of teeth, its driver only a hulking shadow behind the glinting glass of the windshield. Crouching low, I made myself even less visible from the roadway, holding my breath as the tractor trailer blasted by me, its brake lights winking for just a moment before it disappeared around the next bend.

I can't do this,
I thought, but there were no other reasonable options. I'd already tried the phone—still no reception and the
battery getting low—and decided to shut it off for the time being. The closest hospital was Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, about six miles away. It was within walking distance, but there was no shoulder or pedestrian walkway across the heavily traveled Severn River Bridge into Annapolis, and I'd have to catch a ride anyway if I wanted to head in that direction. But going to the closest hospital seemed unwise for another reason: it was too obvious. Instead, I decided to head toward Baltimore Washington Medical Center at the north end of the county. I wasn't certain of the distance. The phone Linder and Remy had given me was a basic model and didn't have access to the Internet or a GPS mapping program. I estimated the hospital to be about ten to twelve miles from here. I
could
walk the distance if I had to, following Route 2—a major thoroughfare—for most of the way, but I'd be conspicuously visible to hundreds of passing motorists, and this seemed even more risky than flagging down a random car.

So it came down to this, waiting here, concealed by trees, until something nonthreatening came along—something benevolent and nurturing. A Prius, maybe. Then I'd step out toward the roadway where I could be seen, wave a hand for them to stop, and hope for the best.

I mustered my nerve, readied myself, focusing my attention to the left, on the far stretch of asphalt that disappeared around the curve. A deep breath slid out of my body through pursed lips. The front sole of my right shoe dug into the earth: a sprinter settling into the blocks. The deformed, swollen mess of my forearm pounded with the quickening wallop of my pulse, and the forest itself grew quiet, as if sensing the intensity of the moment and pausing in its persistent subtle murmurings to watch.

We spend so much time in the midst of others, navigating our way through the seven billion people with whom we share this planet, that it is often a shock—an outrage—to find ourselves alone and in need of help, and for no help to come. For ten minutes I stood and waited, my heart gradually slowing, the adrenaline spent and tapering into nothing. Even the forest began to chirp and twitter again with the call of birds, the tree limbs awakening to a soft breeze and swaying impatiently, irritated with the time they had wasted in pausing to watch. I wasn't even looking at the road anymore—was, in fact, studying the faint blush of reddish purple beneath the taut skin of my forearm—when I heard the sound of tires approaching from the left. I looked up, and for a moment was too surprised to move. “
Son of a gun,
” I whispered, as a sky-blue Prius materialized from around the bend in the road. It covered half the distance to where I stood before I realized it was going to shoot right by me if I didn't get a move on. I lurched forward, the front of my left shoe snagging on something—a root, maybe—that held me midstride for a second, then broke loose and almost sent me sprawling out into the roadway. Instead of stepping out calmly to where the driver could see me, I stumbled onto the shoulder, my upper body bent forward at the waist and too far out in front of my feet. The grass was high here, the terrain uneven, and I stepped on the edge of what might have been a gopher hole, twisting my right ankle in the process. For a panic-stricken moment, I thought I was going to fall directly into the path of the Prius with no time for the driver to react or even slow. I had a clear vision of the car slamming into me at the knees, my body rolling up onto the hood, my head smashing into the windshield, starring it, leaving behind a small wet
patch of blood and hair on the safety glass—and then the brief, curious span of weightlessness as the driver slammed on the brakes and I was flung twenty feet through the air, my body rotating a quarter turn before landing in a bone-splintering heap on the asphalt and sliding another six feet before it finally came to rest. The image was so clear, my conviction that it was going to happen so certain, that the blast of the horn and the whoosh of the car speeding past me—the passenger-side mirror snapping the fabric of my pants but missing my right hip beneath by less than a centimeter—seemed incongruous with the moment. I had difficulty merging the two—what I
thought
was going to happen and what had actually happened—but then the car was beyond me and I was somehow still alive. I stood there, shaking uncontrollably, with one foot on the roadway and the other in the overgrown grass of the shoulder.

She will stop,
I thought.
She nearly hit me, and she'll want to make sure I'm not hurt. I will show her my arm, tell her I fell and injured it in the woods, and ask her to take me to the hospital.
Given what had just happened, I couldn't imagine her refusing such a request. She'd feel compelled to help me.

I was still thinking these things when the car vanished around the next curve and drove out of my life forever.

One of my faults, I will admit, is that I cling to the premise that human beings are endowed with a tendency toward basic goodness and decency. History is, of course, replete with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, and yet time and again I am shocked when people do not behave as I expect. This may sound odd coming from a person who narrowly escaped being kidnapped and possibly murdered less than two hours before, but I stood there flabbergasted, puzzling over how the woman in the
Prius could possibly have driven away without stopping. I stood there with my mouth hanging partially open, everything else temporarily forgotten, and listened for the sound of her returning vehicle. It would come around the bend any second now. She would flip on her hazards and bring the car to a gradual stop along the side of the road, check her mirrors for other cars before stepping out of the driver's door and approaching me with a distressed look of concern on her face.
Are you okay?
she would ask.
Are you hurt? Should I call an ambulance?

That was going to happen, and I stood there waiting for it—believing in it—until at last I registered the growling, gutteral idle of a diesel engine behind me. Turning, I saw a mammoth red pickup truck had stopped on my side of the road five yards from where I stood. It was a ridiculous, obnoxious, fossil-fuel-gulping contraption straight out of a country music song. The front wheels cut to the left and the driver began to ease the truck around me, but then he stopped as the cab of the pickup pulled even with where I stood. Looking through the open window at the man sitting behind the wheel, I could see the tanned flesh of his heavily muscled right arm resting on the steering wheel. He wore a sweat-stained olive baseball cap with a John Deere logo planted on the front, and there was at least two days of thick black stubble on his face and neck. But his eyes—his eyes were a deep cobalt that reminded me of the blueberry patch on my grandfather's farm in Vermont—and there was kindness in his expression. He asked me if I needed a ride. I reached out with my good hand and opened the door without hesitating, grasped an interior handhold, and hoisted myself into the cab. He glanced at my swollen right arm held protectively against my stomach, then back at my face.

“
Can you take me to the hospital north of here,” I asked, “to the one in Glen Burnie off Route 100?”

“Sure,” he said, and dropped the truck into gear and accelerated smoothly. We drove on in silence for a while. I looked out the window mostly, watched the world—one I barely recognized anymore—slipping by around us. He didn't ask any questions, and although part of me wanted to confide in him, to tell him what happened and to maybe ask for his help, in the end I decided it wouldn't be fair. He'd shown me kindness, after all, and I didn't want to reward an act of altruism by placing him in danger. I'd placed enough people in danger as it was.

The trip was not a long one, and when it became clear that I wasn't up for conversation, he flipped on the radio, and sure enough, the music was country—something sweet and earnest and a little lonesome. It made me think of Jason—and, of course, Uncle Jim. And for the next eight miles I sat with my face turned toward the window and tended to the ache in my heart without ever making a sound.

“W
HATCHA LOOKIN' AT
, Uncle Jim?” I asked, standing behind him as he sat looking out through our living room window at the street below.

I'd been getting a snack from the kitchen refrigerator—standing on my tiptoes to reach the corn bread on the upper shelf—when I'd heard him talking to someone in the other room. His voice had been low and hushed, as if sharing a secret, and I'd closed the refrigerator and left the kitchen to see what was going on.

But standing in the passage between the two rooms I could
see it was only him, leaning forward in my father's recliner, his face turned toward the window. He was muttering to himself, his head cocked to one side as if listening to the faint call of birds from far away. “No, no, that's not true,” I thought he said, although the words were muttered, difficult to make out.

“What is it?” I placed a hand on his shoulder, thinking maybe it was a game he was playing, that it might be something fun. He startled a bit at my touch, his muscles twitching, but when he saw it was me, smiled and nodded to himself, seemed happy I was there.

“What's new, Lindsey Lou?” he asked, using one of those made-up names he sometimes called me.

“What're you looking at?” I asked, but he didn't answer—just left the question hanging there between us, and for some reason I was scared to ask him again. I removed my hand from his shoulder, thinking maybe he was sick or something, that I might get it too if I wasn't careful.

“What d'ya think of that kid out there, Lindsey Lou?” he asked me.

I looked out the window to see who he was talking about. “The one on the bike?” I asked, but he shook his head.

“Nah, the other one.” His head did a little twitch and I thought I heard him whisper, “
Leave me alone,
” but I couldn't be sure and, at any rate, it didn't seem like he was talking to me. “The one sitting on the curb,” he said, pointing to the neighbors' boy, Ronald McBee, who was three years younger than me but almost as tall. He had a plastic truck in his hand, his blond head tilted down to study it as he spun its wheels.

“That's Ronald,” I told my uncle. “He lives next door.”

“Ronald,” he echoed. “Yeah,” he said, tapping the fingertips
of his right hand on the chair's leather armrest. “Yeah, I can see that now.”

“Uncle Jim,” I asked, “are you feeling okay?”

“What d'ya mean?” He didn't even turn his head to look at me.

“You're not . . .” I started. “You're not sick or anything, are you?”

“Sick,” he said, but there was no inflection in his voice and I couldn't tell whether it was a question or an answer.

I turned to go, feeling like I shouldn't be here, like maybe I should go tell my mom that something wasn't right with him.
Would they take him away,
I wondered,
if he got sick again?
But on the cusp of that thought I could hear my mother telling my father,
He's got no place else to go.

I was heading toward my room, the plastic-wrapped corn bread a forgotten thing in my hand, when I heard him call my name.

“Lise. Hey, Lise,” he said, his voice just above a whisper.

I turned around. His eyes moved back and forth before coming to rest on my face.

“Why does he keep looking over here?” he asked. “The Ronald kid. What d'ya think he wants with me?”

I went back to the window, looked out at the boy sitting on the curb. His attention was focused on the toy truck, not our house, and although I watched him for a while, that never changed.

I turned to look at Uncle Jim. “I don't think he's—”

“
See? See there?!
” he said, and I spun my head back around but nothing was different.

“He just looked up again,” Uncle Jim told me, his body rigid, his eyes never leaving the window. “Why does he
do
that?”

“I don't kn—”

“He knows we're in here. That's what
I
think,” he said, nodding to himself.

“So what if he does?” I responded, but Uncle Jim had gone back to ignoring me.

I walked away, left him sitting there. I should've gone straight to my mother and told her what was going on. Uncle Jim could be weird sometimes in a way that felt more like a game, like the acting I'd done in my school play the year before. This didn't feel like one of those times—but I wanted it to. I wanted this to be something we would laugh about later.

They come and go—like headaches,
he'd told me two weeks before when I'd asked him about the voices in his head, and I clung to that idea, telling myself that tomorrow he would feel better.