Jonah started awake in his chair. The cabin was so dark and cold he felt at first he was still a boy exiled to the back shed for peeing his bed. More and more he thought of those days: boyhood without a childhood. Here, in the dark, he might have been anyone, of any age, in any time. He might have been an animal. Or a bird. Or dead.
He felt his face.
No animal.
No bird.
Not dead.
Not yet.
He was relieved to no longer be that boy, but dismayed to still be the man whose first thought upon waking, as it had been for twenty-five years, was: Where are my wife and child?
Where’s the girl? a voice said.
The girl.
He’d forgotten her. He had dozed again, without realizing it. It seemed he could not remain awake.
He did not remember where he’d set the flashlight. His entire body ached, a dull humming throb of pain. He swam his hands in the dark, mole blind, navigated to where the lantern sat, its metal cold as the devil, his old, cold fingers hard-pressed to work its pump. He got a wooden match and struck it, gravedigger’s breath in the match glow. He worked the pump. The mantle pulsed with greenish light, whooped into a bright glowing orb.
He cupped his hands around the warm glass.
Better.
The girl. Where was she?
He wondered if he had dreamed her. No. He could hear her mumble in the dark beyond the lantern light’s arc.
He carried the lantern over. There. There she was.
Good.
Good.
She lay on the couch. The blanket had slid down off her; he pulled it up to her chin, then stoked the fire in the woodstove.
Fire lit, he gently rubbed the girl’s feet, cold even in his socks.
With her feet warmed and the woodstove heating the cabin, he killed the lantern and sat again in the dark, preparing in his mind to return her home.
The darkness and his exhaustion were so complete as the woodstove’s heat washed over him that he did not know if he was awake or asleep. Alive or dead.