EMILY’S DAD HAD many useful things in his backpack—that was his style—but the most important, as far as Emily was concerned, was a bottle of amoxicillin.
While her mom sat next to Aidan on the bed, talking softly to him, her dad took a look at Bob’s arm.
“This is a bullet wound,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Bob.
Emily’s dad leaned back. “How did you get a bullet wound?”
Emily cut a glance at Bob.
“A hunter, we think.”
“A hunter took a shot at you?”
“We weren’t wearing hi-vis jackets,” said Bob.
Emily’s dad looked out of the window, though there wasn’t much to see. “You saw him?”
“No,” said Emily. “He must have been far away.”
“It’s not hunting season,” said her dad.
“Doesn’t always stop people,” said Bob.
“True,” said Emily’s dad. There was still an edge to his voice. Like, there would be more questions later, like the trueness of true applied only to the very limited idea of people hunting outside of season, not to the totality of what Bob was saying. He took the bottle of antibiotics from his backpack and handed it to Bob. “Anyway. We need to get you to a hospital, maybe some IV antibiotics, but start by taking this in the meantime,” he said. “I’m not a doctor, but you’re gonna want a capful three times a day, at least.”
Emily’s mind was running calculations almost in the background of her thoughts. If her parents went to the hospital with Bob, could she and Aidan get away somehow? Continue on?
“Thanks,” said Bob. He was sitting in a chair, his leg propped up on the other chair. Emily’s dad had confirmed what she already knew—that the ankle was only sprained—though, of course, it didn’t help in terms of getting out of the mountains.
“How did you get here?” said Emily to her dad.
“We drove to a spur road about twenty miles east of here,” he said. “Hiked the rest of the way.”
A pause. There was a conversation looming, and Emily wasn’t happy about it. And there was still the question of how to continue their journey. The men in black weren’t going to just give up, after all.
“What about you?” asked her dad.
Yep, now it was here. Not looming anymore but present. The storm broken, the cloud emptying out water on the earth, in torrents, in floods.
“I mean, we know how you got here. But why? We got lucky, you know. Marvin from the airfield saw you hanging around Bob’s plane, and when we started asking questions in town to try to find you, when the police put out a missing persons alert, Marvin put two and two together.” Another pause. “Your mom has been out of her mind with worry.”
The longest pause yet.
“Me too, actually,” he added. “And when the plane went down…when it went off radar…we thought you were…” He couldn’t complete the sentence.
Emily grimaced to herself. Great. Marvin was the type who’d usually put two and two together—and get a night in a holding cell for drunk and disorderly—so it was just her luck he’d been on the ball enough to clock her near the plane.
Her dad took a breath. “So, Emily. Why?”
“I…,” she began. “I don’t know.”
“Is it because of school? The…fire?”
Interesting. So whatever Aidan had done to their memories had stopped working.
“You can say arson, Dad,” she said. “You can say suspension.”
“Fine. Is it because you got suspended from school for arson? Because Pastor Norcross thinks that you—”
“It’s not any of that,” said Emily. “I just…” What could she possibly say? The truth was, she had plenty of reasons to run away. The insularity of her town. Her inability to fit in at school, at Bible class on Sunday; her total incapacity to care about the things her parents cared about: bake sales, Friday football, church, hiking, hunting.
Because she’d never wanted to be in Alaska in the first place.
Because she had no friends there. Because Jeremy was over two thousand miles away.
Because there was one coffee shop and three fishing-supply stores.
But she wouldn’t have boarded a plane in secret because of any of those things. The real truth was something she couldn’t say, something impossible.
Only, she realized, perhaps the best way to lie was to form it around a grain of truth.
“There were some men,” she said. “They kept…following me and Aidan.”
Her dad tilted his head. “What?”
“I swear, it’s true.” She was trying to sound like a teenager. She was a teenager, obviously. But she was really trying to sound like one. Like an adult’s idea of one. Someone with incoherent thoughts, impulsive behavior. “Everywhere we went, they were there. They followed me back from school. Men in suits. I felt like…like they were maybe there to take me away.”
Her mom had come over, was standing next to her dad. Aidan was asking her a question with his eyes, behind them. Where was she going with this? She had no idea.
“Take you away?”
“I mean…,” Emily said. “I tried to burn down the school, right?” This was true. Well, not true. But true as far as her parents were concerned. The layers were getting complicated. “And Aidan’s so small, I thought they, I thought you—” Nice touch, Emily, but don’t go too far. “I mean, I thought they were official, you know, that they might worry about my influence on him. I don’t know. I got paranoid. Thought maybe…they were from social services, come to take me away. I’ve watched too many TV shows, maybe.”
“I’ve always told you to watch less TV,” said her mom.
“Social services doesn’t take kids away for lighting a fire in a locker room,” said her dad, sticking to the logic of the story.
But that was Emily’s secret weapon: she was a teenager, she was antilogic.
“I guess,” she said. “I just kind of freaked out. And Aidan too—he didn’t like those men. You know they came to our house once?”
Her dad didn’t stop frowning, but he let out a long sigh. “They did?”
Her mom shook her head. “Census takers, honey. I was there.” She put a hand on Emily’s. Her expression was solicitous: worried but relieved too. Like: she’d been hurt by Emily getting on the plane, worried about her getting lost. And she was sad that Emily was so emotional, so confused. But there was a part of her that was pleased it wasn’t about rejection; that it was about irrational fear. “You know you can still see the school counselor?” she said. “They told us that. Even though you’re suspended. If you want to talk about…”
A pause.
“…about…the fire.”
Emily winced.
“Everyone wants to help you,” said her dad. “Us included, even when you…stray from the path.” Even when you sin were the words in his head, Emily knew, though he was self-aware enough not to say them, and Emily was grateful for that at least. “There’s no one who wants to hurt you, no men in suits coming to—”
A bullet thwapped through the plastic window, shattering a little framed picture of Jesus on his cross, hanging on the opposite wall.
The second bullet hit her father in the side, spinning him around.