IT WAS FARTHER TO THE airstrip than it seemed, and there was no clear path. Each time it felt like I was headed straight for the green light I found myself turned around and trying to reorient myself. The sun couldn’t reach all the way through the trees, but it wanted to.
The airfield looked like an abandoned airfield because it was one. I came through the trees by an old, blasted-out logger road that dumped out to a landing strip littered with tires and mangled pieces of metal that looked like they were dripping with tetanus. I could see straight through what was left of the small hangar, and at the far end of the property there was a small pillbox guard station with a sixty-foot tower climbing from its roof. On top of the tower there was the swooping green light.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled her name. When she didn’t answer I tried calling her real name.
“Allison!”
Her real name echoed back to me.
“Sorry I called you Allison,” I said. Then, “Lump?”
More nothing. Just ghosts of sound. I jogged down the dilapidated airstrip, checking around the piles of tires for anything that might help. I checked the hangar.
“Lump!” I called. My voice banged off the rusty walls. Aside from the stacks of old newspapers and burnt-out oil drums, the hangar was gutted. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the hangar as only Lump would see it: filled with streamers and golden light, one mighty plane fueled to travel around the world.
My breath burned in my chest and my legs shook like cowards as I ran to the guardhouse. I pulled my phone out to check for messages, but it was dead.
I tried the big, locked door before pressing my hands against the squat building’s glass and peering in. At first I didn’t see anything, just a closet and an old control panel in front of an equally old calendar that showed a woman poking her head out from behind a mostly transparent shower curtain. And then I saw it.
“Fuck.”
I ran to the other side of the building. There was a hole in the wall where something forever ago had punched through. On the inside, though, there were fresh candy wrappers laid atop a FOUND poster.
I shoved my shoulder against the hole and tried to squeeze through, but it was impossible for anybody other than a child.
While the guardhouse wasn’t huge, there was a smaller door inside of it that was closed.
“Lump?” I called while I circled back to the front and started banging on the glass. “Are you in there? Lump?”
I went quiet and moved my ear to the glass. There were corners under the control panel I couldn’t see, and there had to be something behind the door.
“Lump, if you’re in there: don’t move. I’m breaking the glass. I’m coming, okay?”
I pried a rock the size of a volleyball from the frozen ground.
“Okay, Lump,” I said with the boulder cradled against my stomach. I swayed my arms and torso back and forth and gathered window-destroying momentum. “Here … it … comes,” I said and underhanded the huge rock at the dirty glass.
The rock hung in the air. It floated in lazy thousand-frames-per-second slow motion until it hit the glass and obliterated it. I let one sharp puff of air go and climbed through. I didn’t hear my feet crunching over the broken glass and I didn’t feel my palms cut on the window frame because I was trying to look everywhere at once and I kept picturing worse scenarios:
We’d missed the hole where she’d fallen into the lake.
She was wandering farther and farther into the woods, away from us and warmth and safety, with winter screaming closer every minute.
She had found the bears she wasn’t afraid of.
Someone had found her, and this someone had taken her.32
I looked under the control panel; I opened the small door and of course she wasn’t there because it was just a broom closet filled with mouse shit and cigarette butts; I looked at the calendar for clues. I blinked hard and the poster was still on the ground. It didn’t disappear or shimmer away like a dream trying to be remembered.
There was another code written on the paper. Another expanse of seemingly random numbers.
711 627 4310 913 915 519 3626
Below the code it looked like she’d written a note to herself. It said, “Up down equal. How many X.”
And when I shook the candy wrappers off to read it better, the goddamn poster still didn’t disappear like a bad dream because I was awake and there was blood on the picture of the deer. Just a few smudged fingerprints, but unambiguously blood all the same.
I felt carved out. It was that empty sensation in your gut that reaches out and makes your palms and fingertips cold and feels like maybe you forgot to put all the bones in your feet. It was cold outside of me and it was cold inside; early-evening, Midwest-October cold, and the trees were bare, inky shadows against a pink, billowing sky that was just a painting in front all of the unlimited space full of dead stars. I was cold. I was hot. I was all there and I was not there at all.
The numbers refused to make themselves understood.
I couldn’t stop my breath speeding up and the childishly impotent frustration that shuts you up because if you talk your words are going to come out cracked and staggered because you’re too busy trying not to cry or scream.33
There was a metal control box on the wall. The rusty lever sticking out of it, ending in a faded red rubber tip, had been pushed up. The only part of the lever that wasn’t rusty was a small semicircle at that bottom that was a clear, unvarnished silver. My hand pulled the lever down and, outside, the lazy green light clicked off. My hand pushed it back up and the light came back to life.
I unlocked the door and stepped out. Everything felt disconnected and upside down and heavy. My legs decided that I needed to sit down.
“She’s probably dead. Or she’s about to be,” Charlie said, sitting next to me. He took a pull from his cigarette before offering it to me.
I waved it away.
“We have to talk, Charlie. About me and you.”
“I know,” he said, looking off into the middle distance the way I always imagined he would when we had this talk.
“We weren’t good together. Something broke between us and it never got fixed.”
“I know,” he said again, lacking the devastating rebuttal I was always certain he’d have.
“I hated you so much of the time. As much as I loved you, I hated you too.”
Charlie nodded and took a deep drag on his cigarette.
“We were toxic. You were reckless. I was always the one left to pick up whatever mess you made. I was always the one left standing because you were always so confident that I’d get back up. Pull some stupid, dangerous shit: let Moses deal with it. It’s okay, he’s family and he’s bulletproof.”
He raised his hand. “Can I say something?”
I smiled, even though I was terrified of what he’d say. “Yeah.”
“We’re going to have this conversation for a long time. But first: I have good news. Give me your hands,” he said, placing the cigarette in his mouth.
“I don’t have time for this, Charlie.”
“Would you just give me your hands?” he said around the Winchester like I was being an unreasonable asshole.
I held my hands out, palms down, and he shook his head, puffing air out of the corner of his lip, and said, “Other way.”
“I have to find her, man.”
He nodded and smiled with the corner of his lips and blood started trickling down his forehead. It started as a single bead that lolled down his brow, around the concave of his eye, and worked its way around the groove of his mouth, and when it dripped off his head it fell on my gloves. He took my hands. The blood kept flowing until it covered his face like a mask.
Everything but his eyes; they were clear, and when mine connected with his, he said, “Then go find her,” right as he dug his thumbs into my bleeding palms.
I sucked air into my mouth and swung my hands in front of my face, spattering blood onto my cheeks. My gloves were soaked through with red and there were still tiny slivers of shattered glass sticking out of the dark fabric.
I would need stitches across my palms and wrists, and I knew they’d heal to look like brackets.
The sun was fifteen minutes lower in the sky than I’d remembered it being. In the non-wind I could hear the faraway voices of the search party calling out for her; the only other noise was the hum from the green light spinning around a hundred feet above me.
I pulled my gloves off and looked at my raw hands and after two deep breaths I made fists as tight as I could. It was like grabbing two live wires: white pain exploded outward like the universe being Big-Banged and after the red blur faded around my vision everything went unfathomably vibrant.
“Think, you fucking asshole.”
Nothing but the faraway voices and the hum of the light spinning around. Faraway voices and green light. Nothing else. Nothing but green light bouncing off the snow and faraway voices looking for Lump, who wandered off to save a hurt and scared baby deer named Harriet Tubman.
I went to dig my fingers into my palms again but stopped.
“No fucking way,” I said, digging the code sheet out of my pocket. “You fucking idiot, no way.” I pulled her last scribble out, the one that said “Up down equal. How many X.” It wasn’t a note. I read the first code. The first number in the sequence told you whether to count up, down, or stay equal—zero to four meant down, five meant equal, six to nine meant up. The second number was how many, whether up or down. The last was where to start. It was just a stupid roundabout number to letter cypher.
112 518 447 9826 55 3119 421
A R C H E R Y
I read the next one, the one we’d found at the archery range:
6225 59 7315 56 2211 11318 91226 32226
A I R F I E L D
Under each of the coded numbers on the FOUND poster, I wrote the corresponding letter.
B
I
G
N
E
S
T
I stood up fast enough to make my head swim and ran back into the guardhouse, skittering to a crouching stop in front of the hole. Off in the distance, sitting at the top of the tree line, there was a huge brown-and-black nest.
Below it, halfway between me and the trees, there was a strange puddle of light. I blinked and the box was behind me; I blinked and I was at the strange puddle of light that wasn’t light at all but a dirty, discarded LOST poster.
A hundred yards away there was an orange square stuck to a low pine branch, just visible in the fading light.
As I ran, so did the nighttime wind; it picked up and numbed my hands and face. I shoved the FOUND poster in my pocket and looked for the next one.
I yelled her name and I swear, for just a second, the world listened. The wind went quiet and I could almost see the words swelling and pushing through the forest, demanding to be heard and felt but, more than that, demanding color into the bleak expanse.
The next one was sticking out of a log, lower than the rest. I followed its trajectory.
“Lump!” I said.
“Lump!” I said.
“Lump!
“Where are you?
“Please.
“Please, Lump, where are you?”
I looked and I looked and I looked and I was afraid to move too far in any direction because moving meant risking the already thin and fading cosmic radio signal. Moving meant risking the footing in the avalanche; the grip on the orange ring while the ship plummets under the cold water.
I closed my eyes and turned my head to the side and I focused on hearing everything in the world because she had to be in that everything somewhere.
The wind rattling the trees; my breath coming out hot and sharp; my heart; the dead leaves under my feet; crying.
A whimper; soft and young and a million miles away, but a living whimper.
“Lump?”
The sound ignited my feet and I ran into the wind, following the noise.
“Lump!”
The wind answered and I shook my head like it would shut the world up. I listened. And I listened. And I heard it.
I moved.
The slice of color stuck in the low branches of the tree made it seem like part of the sunset had caught itself on the tree’s outstretched fingers. The neon-pink piece of paper with the drawing of the deer flapped against the breeze. This one was FOUND.
“Lump! Where are you? Lump! It’s okay, I’m here!”
I grabbed the flyer and the adrenaline turned my eyes into radar, into sonar, into infrared, X-ray. I demanded the color flyers into my vision. I told the stars that were hiding themselves away behind the pinks and reds and golds that I needed the color here. Here. Not there.
Twenty yards away, half in the dirty snow and torn up, was the next one. One of the original LOST flyers.
It was covered in mud but the orange color on it blasted defiantly out from the ground. The crying was louder, closer, and it sounded sick.
“Lump!”
And I knew.
I knew where she was.
Thirty feet away I could see an incline that went up six or seven feet and was covered by a felled spruce that made for a makeshift shelter and I knew she was in it because there was no other cover for a hundred yards and I could hear her. I dodged around the crater left by the ripped-up base of the tree and slid down.
She was curled up atop the spiral center of a muddy galaxy of bruise-colored LOST and FOUND flyers. I locked my eyes on hers. I couldn’t see her coat anywhere and her ears were whitish blue because her hat was somewhere else altogether.
“Lump,” I said, edging in under the branches. “Where’s your coat?” Her right hand was wrapped snug around her body mid-hug, but the other one was stretched palm-out. Her Amelia Earhart shirt was muddy and torn but you could still see the image of the famous pilot waving to an unseen crowd.
Her eyes didn’t follow mine as I inched closer.
“Lump? Lump?” My coat kept snagging on the branches of the tree. Every time I tried to reach in and grab her hand, my coat would catch and I’d be pulled back. “Fuck—I mean—sorry—come on,” I said pulling my jacket off. “It’s okay, Lump, I’m here. I’m right here.”
I started talking under my breath so she couldn’t hear me:
“Please, fucking goddammit, please be okay.
“I’m coming, Lump. Hey, listen: say something, okay?”
I couldn’t get my stupid goddamn coat off because my hands didn’t want to work the way I needed them to. When I finally had ripped my coat off to the waist, I heard the crying again.
It was the single sweetest sound I have ever heard.
I threw myself into the tangle of sharp branches, wedging through the ones thin enough to wedge through and trailing my coat behind me.
Her color was off—blue in all the places you expect someone to be blue when they’re supposed to be pink—but the crying was there, just past the veil of green pine.
She cried again and I was made of light and air and hope; I was the white knight, the survivor climbing from the wreck to save the other passengers.
But her lips were wrong.
The cry lingered, tapering off into an almost buzzing sound, and her lips didn’t move to the sound. Like her audio was off.
“Lump?” I said.
I broke through and as she filled my vision I saw her coat. It was next to her, not on her shoulders or her arms or on her back, but next to her wrapped around the crying deer with a twisted, bloody leg. The deer made a braying noise and nuzzled closer to the girl, licking at the Band-Aids on her cheek and ear.
“Lump? You didn’t give your—”
Her eyes were glass.
Her lips were purple blue.
“No. No. Fucking no—what were you thinking?” I said, pulling her toward me and throwing my coat over her. Her shoulders were sharp even under my puffy coat, but I rubbed my hands up and down and up and down like I was trying to start a fire.
I felt for a pulse.
“Lump: listen to me: come on now.”
I pulled my coat back and laid my hands across her chest, pumping them up and down. I listened for breath.
Chest compressions.
Listening.
Chest compressions.
Listening.
I pinched her nose and tilted her head back to open her airway and breathed my air into her lungs to keep oxygenated blood flowing into her brain and vital organs. I compressed her chest less than two inches because of her age and at a rate of one hundred compressions per minute.
Again.
And again.
You repeat.
You repeat.
Then you start yelling. Yelling for someone to please for Christ’s sake please help because you found her.
And you don’t think anyone hears you.
And the baby deer bleats against her because you’re screaming for help.
And you sit back because if you keep pressing her chest plate down you know you’ll crush it.
And you stare at her.
You don’t cry.
You don’t notice the rip in your shirt and scrapes beneath it.
You don’t feel anything because everything is mute. You try to say something but the only thing you hear is the clicking in your mouth that has run out of saliva.
Someone behind you is yelling that they found you. That they’re here.
And, save for the single-tone whistle of wind through the trees, everything goes very quiet.