Somewhere in the rest of the world, I’m pretty sure it’s Friday. But here, in this ghost camp that God has forsaken, it’s just the next morning. It’s overcast. I’m on the trail, cardboard box in tow, foraging for grub.
He’s nearby, peeling the bark off a tree, nibbling on it like a curious fool. I feel his energy, coiled, ready to strike. The fact that he can go from inconsolable to jovial without segue makes him scarier.
I pass a live oak with a trunk of mossy green. I double back and duck under its lowest boughs. At its base, congregated like gossipers, are jaunty-capped mushrooms.
My palms go crazy—itchy, prickly, burny crazy.
I stoop, I dig, I gather. I feel him watching, but I try not to care.
A few hours later and I’m gathering mushrooms again, transferring them from the cool earth to the sad box. It’s even more overcast now. The kind that makes you swear the sun never was.
I move to the other side of the tree, the mossier side. When the sun’s out, this is probably the shadier side. I pick up a stick and dig around at the base of the trunk. Huddled in a cul-de-sac of roots, are some paler, thinner, more densely clustered mushrooms.
As if I’m a human divining rod and these little growths are gold, my palms flush with heat.
I pull up the mushrooms and lay them in the box, being careful not to let them touch the ones I already gathered. I squat there for a minute, seeing my plan take shape.
His feet pulverize fallen leaves as he makes his way over. He stands over my shoulder. “Hurry the hell up. It looks like rain.”
I straighten up. “I’m ready.”
“I’m gonna get us out of here,” I say to Max. You, I correct in my head. I’m going to get you out of here.
We’re locked in the cabin, just the two of us, after all three of us ate sautéed mushrooms. I don’t shape my plan into words, in case he lurks outside.
Maybe because he was pleased with me that I foraged and cooked, I was able to convince him to unchain her for the night. In the dark, she’s poking at the walls, at the door, even though I warned her if he hears he’ll shackle her to the cot again.
It’s funny, but she reminds me of me now. Stubborn. Ignoring sound advice. Scoffing at reason.
“I’m sorry,” she says when her feet stop moving.
“For what?”
“I’ve been thinking about Race, about Will, about my mom. I haven’t been thinking about you. Not in the same way. It’s so fucked up that you got pulled into this.”
“I hitched a ride on his truck. I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘pulled into.’” I bite my lip, deliberate, take a deep breath for courage, and say it before I chicken out. “Besides, it’s really my fault anyway.”
“What? Not true.”
“It is.” I sob and surprise myself with it. Damn, here are the tears. Mom used to say tears were little liquid truth tellers. I try to staunch them and end up making a weird honking noise.
She sits beside me on my cot, puts an arm around me, pulls me to her. “That was the least feminine sound I’ve ever heard.”
I laugh and surprise myself with it.
“He was crazy before you got here,” she says. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
“What then?” Her arm’s still around me. I want to collapse into it.
“If I had listened to you,” I say, “if I hadn’t taken Ezra for granted, if I hadn’t gone out to do some harmless ‘fooling around,’ I never would’ve met this bastard, and none of this would be happening.” At least not to us.
And then her arm’s not around me, and she’s not beside me on the cot anymore, and I have nothing to collapse into other than the well of my fears and regrets.
“I can’t do this,” she says, on the other side of the room. “I can’t go there.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” I feel her pacing in the dark. “But you’re not Harper. I know Harper. You have a bunch of memories that were Harper’s—like accessories, really—but you’re not her. My eyes don’t lie.”
I’m tired, so tired, in my head as well as my body. I’m trying to formulate a response, but she gets there first.
“Can’t you just be her?” she says. “Just be Linnea? Can’t I like you for her? Can’t we make that a new start?”
“Yes, we can.” The part I don’t say is that the end, at least for me, is almost here.
Saturday.
If this were a regular Saturday, the boys would be watching cartoons while I slept. Around noon, the smell of bacon would coax me out of bed. Mom would marvel aloud at how anyone would want to miss out on the best part of the day. Max would roll her eyes in solidarity, even though she’d have been up for hours helping Mom with brunch.
Despite his joke that he wanted eggs benedict, hollandaise on the side, there are mushrooms for lunch again, sautéed in the big heavy skillet on the big heavy gas stove that he brought to life with his lighter. My hands are doing the cooking, I guess, but they’re hands that look nothing like mine (they’re smaller, for one), and it’s a trippy disconnect.
I only cook the mushrooms that “I” know are okay. I’m not 100 percent sure about the skinny ones. I have to be sure first. I have to do this right. I can’t pull the weapon until I know it’s a weapon.
Now I’ve got the mushrooms—routine and very much non-routine—in the kitchen, sitting on the drying rack, segregated. Part of me mistrusts the knowledge that the other part of me is sure about.
I decide to take a tiny tiny—whisper-tiny—bite of the one I’m pretty sure is poisonous. My cloudy subconscious, weighty with someone else’s knowledge, knows enough to know that I can’t die from a minuscule shred of it, and if it is as toxic as I think, in a few hours I should feel something.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I do it. Just the sliverest of pieces, so small I don’t even have to chew. It’s spongy and dry. I swallow.
Okay, and one more sliver.
I know it’s too soon to feel anything physical, but I feel something else: hope. How ironic: downtrodden girl feels hope after tasting her first killer mushroom.
The door whooshes open. He’s whistling. I have the irrational urge to cover up my gathered prize, but that would arouse suspicion.
He stomps up behind me. “Mushrooms again. What a surprise.”
“They’re plentiful around here.” I force the words out. Sound nonchalant, stupid.
“Ready for a side of rabbit?” he asks.
“You caught one?” Opening cans without a can opener was one thing. Skinning a rabbit, quite another.
“Not yet. But I made a trap.”
“Oh.”
He suddenly lurches toward me. At first I have no idea what he’s doing. But then I realize he’s hugging me. Savagely. Maybe the only way he knows how.
He pulls back. Appraises me. His gaze lingers around my mouth.
“I feel it, you know,” he says.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“The heat between us.”
“But I won’t come between you and Maxine,” I say. “She loves you. She told me so.”
“She’s not ready for me, though. She still needs to work through the sickness she brought with her.”
I busy my hands so I don’t blurt something that’ll get me killed. Like: Lay a finger on her I’ll bash your brains in.
“It’s been right in front of me the whole time,” he mutters. “I can’t believe it took me this long to see it.”
“What has?”
“Moses had three wives. King David had seven.”
Before I can think, move, talk, his mouth lands on mine.
He thrusts his tongue into my mouth. Searches with it. I command myself to keep my tongue there, keep it flat, instead of giving in to the instinct to jerk it back, swallow it down, way down into my gut, choke on it, even, if that’s the only way to keep it from him.
“Mmm, you taste good,” he whispers, his mouth still on mine.
You like the taste of death, motherfucker?
He brings his hands up to the tangle of my hair. He pulls his lips away from mine and presses his face against my scalp, inhaling deeply. “And you smell good too.”
Using dish soap I’d found in the kitchen, I washed my hair last night at the pump. I was weirdly proud of that accomplishment, of at least the outside of my head feeling more normal. I don’t have a comb, so my hair’s a knotty mess. I wish I had kept it dirty.
He kisses my neck. Bites my earlobe. I manage to keep my shoulders from stiffening and not knee him in the nuts.
I know that no matter how still I remain, it won’t end here.
But I know I will do it.
For my sister.