“Alex.” The strangled feeling has moved from my throat to my chest, and without realizing it, I have begun to cry. I move toward him. I want to run my hands through his hair and kiss his forehead and each of his eyelids and take away the memory of what he has seen. But he steps backward, out of reach.
“I didn’t die. I don’t know how. I should have. I’d lost plenty of blood. They were just as surprised as I was. After that it became a kind of game—to see how much I could stand. To see how much they could do to me before I’d—”
He breaks off abruptly. I can’t hear any more; don’t want to know, don’t want it to be true, can’t stand to think of what they did to him there. I take another step forward and reach for his chest and shoulders in the dark. This time, he doesn’t push me away. But he doesn’t embrace me either. He stands there, cold, still, like a statue.
“Alex.” I repeat his name like a prayer, like a magic spell that will make everything okay again. I run my hands up his chest and to his chin. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
Suddenly he jerks backward, simultaneously finding my wrists and pulling them down to my sides. “There were days I would rather they have killed me.” He doesn’t drop my wrists; he squeezes them tightly, pinning my arms, keeping me immobilized. His voice is low, urgent, and so full of anger it pains me even more than his grip. “There were days I asked for it—prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you—the hope for it—was the only thing that kept me going.” He releases me and takes another step backward. “So no. I don’t understand.”
“Alex, please.”
He balls his fists. “Stop saying my name. You don’t know me anymore.”
“I do know you.” I’m still crying, swallowing back spasms in my throat, struggling to breathe. This is a nightmare and I will wake up. This is a monster-story, and he has come back to me a terror-creation, patched together, broken and hateful, and I will wake up and he will be here, and whole, and mine again. I find his hands, lace my fingers through his even as he tries to pull away. “It’s me, Alex. Lena. Your Lena. Remember? Remember 37 Brooks, and the blanket we used to keep in the backyard—”
“Don’t,” he says. His voice breaks on the word.
“And I always beat you in Scrabble,” I say. I have to keep talking, and keep him here, and make him remember. “Because you always let me win. And remember how we had a picnic one time, and the only thing we could find from the store was canned spaghetti and some green beans? And you said to mix them—”
“Don’t.”
“And we did, and it wasn’t bad. We ate the whole stupid can, we were so hungry. And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.” I’m gasping, feeling as though I am about to drown; I’m reaching for him blindly, grabbing at his collar.
“Stop.” He grabs my shoulders. His face is an inch from mine but unrecognizable: a gross, contorted mask. “Just stop. No more. It’s done, okay? That’s all done now.”
“Alex, please—”
“Stop!” His voice rings out sharply, hard as a slap. He releases me and I stumble backward. “Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that—what we felt, what it meant—that’s done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.”
“Alex!”
He has started to turn away; now he whirls around. The moon lights him stark white and furious, a camera image, two-dimensional, gripped by the flash. “I don’t love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never loved you.”
The air goes. Everything goes. “I don’t believe you.” I’m crying so hard, I can hardly speak.
He takes one step toward me. And now I don’t recognize him at all. He has transformed entirely, turned into a stranger. “It was a lie. Okay? It was all a lie. Craziness, like they always said. Just forget about it. Forget it ever happened.”
“Please.” I don’t know how I stay on my feet, why I don’t shatter into dust right there, why my heart keeps beating when I want it so badly to stop. “Please don’t do this, Alex.”
“Stop saying my name.”
Then we both hear it: the crack and rustle of leaves behind us, the sound of something large moving through the woods. Alex’s expression changes. The anger drops away and is replaced by something else: a frozen tenseness, like a deer just before it startles.
“Don’t move, Lena,” he says quietly, but his words are laced with urgency.
Even before I turn around, I can feel the looming shape behind me, the snuffle of animal breath, the hunger—craving, impersonal.
A bear.
It has picked its way into the gully and is now no more than four feet away from us. It is a black bear, its matted fur streaked silver in the moonlight, and big: five or six feet long, and, even on all four legs, almost as high as my shoulder. It looks from Alex to me, and back to Alex. Its eyes are just like pieces of carved onyx, dull, lifeless.
Two things strike me at once: The bear is skinny, starving. The winter has been hard.
Also: It is not afraid of us.
A jolt of fear shocks through me, shorting out the pain, shorting out all other thoughts besides one: I should have brought a gun.
The bear takes another step forward, swinging its massive head back and forth, evaluating us. I can see its breath steaming in the cold air, its peaked shoulder blades high and sharp.
“All right,” Alex says, in that same low voice. He’s standing behind me, and I can feel the tension in his body—ramrod straight, petrified. “Let’s take it easy. Real slow. We’re going to back away, all right? Nice and slowly.”
He takes a single step backward and just that, that little movement, makes the bear tense up in a crouch, baring its teeth, which glisten bone white in the moonlight. Alex freezes again. The bear begins to growl. It is so close that I can feel the heat from its massive body, smell the sourness of its starving breath.
I should have brought a gun. No way to turn and run; that makes us prey, and the bear is looking for prey. Stupid. That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.
The bear swings forward another step, still growling. Every muscle in my body is an alarm, screaming at me to run, but I stay rooted in place, forcing myself not to move, not to twitch.
The bear hesitates. I won’t run. So maybe not prey, then.
It pulls back an inch—an advantage, a tiny concession.
I take it.
“Hey!” I bark, as loud as I can, and bring my arms above my head, trying to make myself look as large as possible. “Hey! Get out of here! Go on. Go.”
The bear withdraws another inch, confused, startled.
“I said go.” I reach out and strike against the nearest tree with my foot, sending a spray of bark in the bear’s direction. As the bear still hesitates, uncertain—but not growling now, on the defensive, confused—I drop down into a crouch and scoop up the first rock I can get my fist around, and then I’m up and chucking it, hard. It connects just below the bear’s left shoulder with a heavy thud. The bear shuffles backward, whimpering. Then it turns and bounds off into the woods, a fast black blur.
“Holy shit,” Alex bursts out behind me. He exhales, long and loud, bends over, straightens up again. “Holy shit.”
The adrenaline, the release of tension, has made him forget; for a second, the new mask is dropped, and a glimpse of the old Alex is revealed.
I feel a brief surge of nausea. I keep thinking of the bear’s wounded, desperate eyes, and the heavy thud of the rock against its shoulder. But I had no choice.
It is the rule of the Wilds.
“That was crazy. You’re crazy.” Alex shakes his head. “The old Lena would have bolted.”
You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher.
A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn’t love me.
He never loved me.
It was all a lie.
“The old Lena is dead,” I say, and then push past him, back down through the gully toward the camp. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone.
You must hurt, or be hurt.
Alex doesn’t follow me, and I don’t expect him to. I don’t care where he goes, whether he stays in the woods all night, whether he never returns to camp.
As he said, all of that—the caring—is done now.
It’s not until I’ve almost reached the tents that I begin crying again. The tears come all at once, and I have to stop walking and double up into a crouch. I want to bleed all the feelings out of me. For a second I think about how easy it would be to pass back to the other side, to walk straight into the laboratories and offer myself up to the surgeons.
You were right; I was wrong. Get it out.
“Lena?”
I look up. Julian has emerged from his tent. I must have woken him. His hair is sticking up at crazy angles, like the broken spokes of a wheel, and his feet are bare.
I straighten up, swiping my nose on the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “I’m okay,” I say, still hiccuping back tears. “I’m fine.”
For a minute he stands there, looking at me, and I can tell that he knows why I’m crying, and he understands, and it’s going to be all right. He opens his arms to me.
“Come here,” he says quietly.
I can’t move to him fast enough. I practically fall into him. He catches me and pulls me in tightly to his chest, and I let myself go again, let sobs run through me. He stands there with me and murmurs into my hair and kisses the top of my head and lets me cry over losing another boy, a boy I loved better.
“I’m sorry,” I say over and over into his chest. “I’m sorry.” His shirt smells like smoke from the fire, like mulch and spring growth.
“It’s okay,” he whispers back.
When I’ve calmed down a little, Julian takes my hand. I follow him into the dark cave of his tent, which smells like his shirt but even more so. I lie down on top of his sleeping bag and he lies down beside me, making a perfect seashell arc for my body. I curl up in this space—safe, warm—and let the last tears I will ever cry for Alex flow hot over my cheeks, and down into the ground, and away.
Hana
Hana.” My mother is looking at me expectantly. “Fred asked you to pass the green beans.”
“Sorry,” I say, forcing a smile. Last night, I hardly slept. I even had little snatches of dream—bare wisps of image that skittered away before I could focus on them.
I reach for the glazed ceramic dish—like everything in the Hargrove house, it is beautiful—even though Fred is more than capable of reaching it himself. This is part of the ritual. Soon I will be his wife, and we will sit like this every night, performing a well-choreographed dance.
Fred smiles at me. “Tired?” he says. In the past few months, we have spent many hours together; our Sunday dinner is just one of the many ways we have begun practicing merging our lives.