CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

ELIZABETH

I did not keep my wits about me this morning, didn’t calculate my best hope, didn’t formulate a strategy, even if that strategy amounted only to rambling through the forest and hoping for the best. The sun warmed my body as it dulled my wits and I fell asleep, dropping back onto the weeds and the grasses, rage, fear, thirst, and hunger banished, not even the mosquitoes enough to call me back. I awoke an immeasurable time later to find a deer and a pair of yearling fawns nibbling on the grass at the edge of the marsh, heads rising and falling, ears turning like radar dishes. Tails aloft, they fled when I sat up, darting into the safety of the dark forest.

I stood then, my first instinct to follow, but a steady breeze caught me off guard, prickling the exposed skin on my arms. The threatening cold of last night had diminished, but not disappeared, and I became suddenly aware of a gnawing hunger quickly overwhelmed by thirst. I raised my head, drawn by an unfamiliar smell, sharp and sour, that radiated from my own body. With no mirror handy, I couldn’t inspect myself, not fully, but I knew my hair was in a tangle, as my clothing was a mass of sweat stains and wrinkles, and again I sensed that I was being slowly transformed by forces beyond my control.

I laughed then, at the irrelevance, at the idea that maybe I was about to become dead, at the obvious truth. And I couldn’t sit still, a fawn in the grass. With no search party scouring the forest, every step I took enhanced the probability that I’d stumble on a trail made by actual humans, a trail that led to a road or a Ranger Station, a safe path through the forest its only purpose.

I couldn’t measure time, didn’t know how long I’d slept, or how many hours until sunset, or how far the temperature would drop. I was only sure that I couldn’t spend another night on the run, my calves and thighs already producing a dull, persistent pain. And so I finally moved, constantly shifting to bypass obstacles, a tangle of immature pines, knotted brambles, bone-gray branches rising from tangled vines, fallen trees coated with green moss. And everything the same, always the same, an illusion or cold reality, I couldn’t know. Is this tall, isolated conifer the same one I passed fifteen minutes ago? Are the tiny blue flowers clustered near a damp hollow the same flowers that earlier attracted my eye? Or the mushrooms sprouting from the trunk of a rotting tree? Or the blue jay on that branch? Or the gray squirrels frantically gathering fallen acorns beneath every oak?

I continued on, no choice in the matter, until an overwhelming thirst drove away useless speculation. One foot in front of the other, step after step, I placed my fate in the hands of a luck god I’d never acknowledged, embracing meritocracy though I could make no claim to choosing the womb that bore me.

I kept at it until I stumbled upon a little brook, still running when it should be dry in mid-September. Drawn as if by pheromones, I walked against the current for five or six minutes, emerging finally in a small glade with a pool of clear water in the center. I could see past a lone tadpole right to the bottom and my eyes focused on the tiny bubbles rising from somewhere below the pool’s bottom. This was a spring, not muddy runoff from a stagnant pond. I looked at my filthy hands for a moment before dropping to my knees, then to my elbows, finally pushing my face into the water, exactly as I’d seen all those animals drink at all those waterholes in all those nature documentaries.

Far from demeaned, my body screamed with joy, its central intelligence operating on a single principle: keep this moron alive despite herself. And I kept looking up, turning my head from side to side, as if expecting that pack of hungry coyotes to appear any moment. Followed by the wolves and the bears.

As I finally stood, I realized that I’d never find my way back to this spring, that remaining close by was no option at all, that I had no vessel to carry water, no handy gourd. Nor could I know what pathogens might be hidden in water clear enough to be invisible. Surely animals drank here, animals less than fastidious, and it might only be a matter of time until I became sick. Me already weakened by hunger.

And so I continued, admitting that nothing had changed, to wander and hope the order of the day, or wander and don’t hope, only keep on moving. Sooner or later, you’ll stumble onto a hiking trail or a horse trail or even discover the edge of the forest, even burst into overwhelming sunlight and harvested cornfields stretching to the horizon. With, of course, a picturesque farmhouse in the center.

Instead, a time later, I found a blackberry patch, enough berries still on the vines to make a meal, squirrels, small birds, and insects already at work. I told myself that I should move on, the risk of contamination too great, but the Elizabeth I knew didn’t have a say in the matter and I endured the protests of the squirrels, drove the birds to nearby branches, filled my mouth even as a hatred beyond emotion, beyond anger, beyond even rage, grew inside me.

If ever given the chance, I would, I knew, give birth to it.

Now fed, however poorly, I took up my wandering. I still had no sense of direction beyond the nagging fear that I was walking in circles. Above, the clouds darkened as the temperature sank a few degrees, as the breeze sharpened. Irrelevant, all irrelevant, and I ignored the conditions, pushing forward until I finally stumbled on what was left of a trail. Little more than a slight depression, overgrown in places, I might have seen it for what it was, a cut through the forest made decades before, probably when the forest was still being logged. I didn’t. Instead, my heart nearly exploded and my brain simply wouldn’t entertain the possibility that I’d happened on another dead end.

Yet, dead end it was, leading from a marsh on one end to a pond on the other. I stopped at the edge of the pond, needing to drink again but afraid, the water here streaked with tiny green plants that didn’t concern the geese flying over the pond, two adults and three fledglings. I watched them come down into the water, landing heavily, honking at the top of their lungs. They rested for only a moment before they began a clumsy ascent, running over the surface until they gathered enough momentum to lift their heavy bodies from the water.

I sat and watched for a few minutes, until I finally got the point. They were preparing their young for the migration, perhaps to the bayous of Louisiana, or even into Mexico, a do-or-die journey of at least a thousand miles that some would not complete.

I have a cousin, an addicted gambler who refuses to acknowledge fixed odds. Everybody knows that you can’t beat a roulette wheel, or overcome the fixed advantage of a house slot machine, but in his cups at family gatherings, this cousin inevitably tells whoever’s willing to listen that luck always turns. Unless you give up.