Fellow Mortals (28 page)

He watches her reaction, shivering and tense. When she doesn’t say a word, he looks deflated and confused.

“I’m rambling like an idiot,” he says. “I’ve never been good at this sort of thing. You can think about it. That’s cool. I don’t need a major answer right here. Just know I’m always here. I’m
always here
. Come on, come here,” he says, summoning her over with his hands.

“Please leave,” she says.

“Ava…”

“Get out!” she yells. “Get out of here, go!”

“Hey hey
hey
.”

Billy staggers up and hugs her round the waist. The stubble on his chin catches in her hair.

Ava flails, hitting Billy with an accidental uppercut. He grunts and backs away, feeling at his teeth, and then he grabs behind her neck and says, “What’s the matter with you?”

Ava falls against the stove and scalds her arm, crying out and shoving at his jaw. Billy pulls her down and kneels on her stomach, pinioning her wrists and twisting at the burn. His eyes look swollen and his cheeks billow out, everything about him melting and disfiguring. A thin line of spit dangles off his lip. It glistens there, stretching down closer to her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Billy pants. “I’m sorry. Calm down. Take it easy, calm
down
.”

Ava glances at the door but doesn’t hear a sound.

“I want to let you up,” he says. “I want to talk this out.”

“You’re hurting me,” she whispers.

“Where?” he says. “How?”

“My wrist. I burned it on the stove.”

Billy lets her go but keeps kneeling on her gut. He takes his coat off and throws it on the floor, rolls a shirtsleeve up and peels a bandage off his arm.

“I’m hurt, too,” he says. “You want to squeeze it? I’ll let you do it if you want to.”

Ava doesn’t move.

Billy stares at her and says, “I’ll let you up. We can talk. I’m trusting you—I wouldn’t trust Sheri like this. Just stay calm, all right? Everything’s okay.”

Ava lies there, looking at the shadows in the rafters. Eventually she stands, shaky on her feet. As soon as Billy turns, she shoves him over a chair. He falls sideways, reaching out and swatting at the floor, and hits the corner of the stove right above the ear. His neck goes rubbery and awkward when he slumps.

Ava runs out, looking for the ATV, and when she doesn’t see a thing, she pauses in the dark. Her phone is in the cabin but she hears him getting up, vigorous and guttural, knocking into chairs. She doesn’t trust herself to run the quarter mile to the street, not with Billy right behind her, following the trail. She darts across the clearing to a thick stand of trees and hides behind a trunk.

Ava sees him at the door, working things out, a crooked silhouette leaning on the frame. He notices her prints in a line across the clearing, but he totters and he still seems addled from the fall. Eventually he’ll find her—even now he’s looking over—so she runs to keep ahead of him and heads toward
The Reacher
.

She’s freezing in her dress and isn’t wearing shoes but if she concentrates, remembering her way around the sculptures, she can lose him in the dark, circle back, and get away. She hurries through the snow. Billy crackles up behind her. He can follow but the woods are all hers, so familiar, and the statues seem to look at her and guide her on the way.

*   *   *

Billy’s vision blurs. He tries to walk and finds he’s already moving, tries stopping and he can’t for several seconds. Whenever he falls, it’s a banged knee or scraped knuckle that alerts him. It takes him too long to get back up, and when he does, he finds the footprints and wonders what they are, where they’re leading him, and why it’s so important that he follow.

He keeps touching his head. It isn’t bloody but he checks every time, sometimes remembering the fall against the stove, other times feeling only pressure and a pulse. Thoughts stab through, causing him to wince, until eventually it comes to him—Ava in the cabin. Only where’s the cabin now? He doesn’t see it through the trees. Something dark pools in, confusing him again, and so he staggers on ahead, frantic and afraid.

There’s a body right before him. Billy jumps backward in the snow, legs kicking wild, staring at the figure with its arm raised to hit him. It’s a man, or rather
half
a man, rising from a trunk. He isn’t real, Billy thinks, and yet he isn’t quite sure—it’s skeletal and twisted as a long-dead corpse and yet it
looms
there and really seems to menace when he flinches.

He escapes and rushes on, crashing through the branches with his hands out before him, and he’s scraped, jabbed, and tangled up from unexpected angles, almost like the woods are reaching out to get him. He can feel her up ahead, barely out of sight, and then he comes upon another dark figure in the trees. Bearded and colossal with its arms spread wide, it tries to grab him and he pushes it away, saying “No,” feeling dizzy and surrounded, reeling as he goes.

He sees a log near a brook and swears it has a mouth. He sees an arm in every branch, things swaying overhead, congregations in the shadows and a hundred other forms. Little creatures out the corners of his eyes and at his ankles, faces in the bark, faces in the snow. A man with crooked antlers, and a serpent, and a bear, all with human features and a snarl, and a leer. He finds a woman on her back, beautiful and nude, writhing in the feathers of a terrifying wing. He thinks of Sheri on the bed and Ava on the floor, lepers in a cave and bodies in the ground. There’s a figure with a blade, carving at his thigh, and a girl with no expression being eaten by a spider. Now the forest is evolving into fire, into webs. Billy huddles in the dark to overcome his nausea but he vomits and the night feels infinite around him.

He sees her up ahead, clinging to an oak. The footprints lead directly to the trunk. He’s caught her mid-climb and yet she freezes when he comes, her only covering a dress and the glitter of the snow.

“Ava,” Billy says, crying when he sees her.

He’s tired and his body feels gray and unclean, as if the cut along his arm has putrefied his veins. There isn’t any motion in the pines or on the ground, but the quiet’s like a rumble in the bottoms of his feet. He stands awhile, panting and admiring her hair, wishing he could touch her but afraid, too afraid.

“I’m sorry,” Billy moans, ears building to a roar.

He charges headfirst directly at her back. At the moment of embrace, there’s a great black flash.

He lies for several minutes, bleeding in the snow. Then he rolls and lurches off, forgetting who he is until he stumbles to his hands, puzzled by the blood, and starts to worry that he’s done something very, very wrong.

*   *   *

Ava pauses in a thicket, straining for the faintest sound or movement in the dark. Her shiver’s gone deep. She has spasms in her core. The burning in her lungs has settled to an ache, and she can’t feel her feet or move her toes anymore. Her adrenaline matures to a wiser kind of fear, an awareness of her ever-growing distance from the cabin. She can stay here barefoot, assuming that he’s quit, or she can hurry out now and hope he isn’t waiting.

Ava runs, looking hard for the gully of the stream, the clearest way to go without getting lost. She finds her tracks from earlier on and freezes at the sight. She meant to loop around but now she’s here where he can find her, fifteen yards from
The Climber
. There’s a second set of prints covering her own; the prints veer away and Ava gasps. There he is.

Billy’s shadowy and slumped, just a body in the snow. At first she can’t determine if he’s lying down or crouching. Several steps more and Ava sees blood. It gives her energy to run, watching Billy all the while, and he doesn’t even twitch when she crashes through a shrub.

She’s elated that he isn’t getting up and yet it worries her. The ease of her escape, so strange and unexpected, makes it feel as if he’s tricked her—like she’s running into danger. And the blood … is he bleeding from the stove? Is it new? For a moment she’s afraid, looking all about, scared that something else is prowling in the woods.

She pauses at a pine in the shadow of a bough, enlivened by the strong green odor of the sap. If she runs and he recovers, if she flees and Billy dies … she can’t just leave him there bleeding in the dark. She creeps toward him slowly, growing bolder as she goes, following a need to help him if she can.

Billy’s unresponsive, lying on his face. The blood around his head has melted through the snow. Ava prods him with her foot and says his name. He doesn’t move. She rolls him on his back and marvels at his forehead, dented in the center with a wide flap of skin. Blood’s slicked through his hair, down his cheek, and to his throat.

She checks his breathing with her hand and verifies a pulse, and then she tears her own hem to make a bandage for his head. It’s delicately tied but enough to stem the flow. Billy moans when she starts to say his name more insistently. She tugs off his boots and puts them on her feet, leaving Billy in his socks and buttoning his coat. She lifts him by his armpits and drags with all her strength, and when his head lolls back he sees her upside down, glassy-eyed and slurring, wholly in her care.

“That’s good,” she says. “Look at me. Focus on my face.”

Billy garbles, shuts his eyes, and grows heavy in her arms, passing out at intervals and waking up dazed. She hauls him backwards, rarely looking but convinced of her direction, passing by
The Gazer
, and
The Weaver
, and
The Fire
.

“Billy,” Ava says. “Billy, look at me, come on.”

“Am-sa,” he says. “Am-sa.”

“That’s right. I understand.”

“I’m-sa. I’m-sa. I’m
sai
.”

“We’re almost there.”

She recognizes trees and looks beyond her shoulder. There’s the cabin, gently lit. She smells the chimney and his blood. Billy stares at her and gapes, head dangling to the ground, with his mouth above his nose and his eyes long gone. When she struggles in a tight-fit passage in the briars, it’s a feeling of defiance that rejuvenates her will.

She sees a pair of headlights coming up the trail. Billy gazes at the cabin—accidentally, it seems—and Ava’s saddened by the lantern hanging in the window, his only consolation when she leaves him in the dark.

She has her coat and phone when Sam drives into the clearing and sees her there, bloody in the headlights. He jumps off the ATV, unable to hear most of what she’s saying now that Wingnut’s barking from the flatbed. He hasn’t yet seen the body near the cabin and he stumbles running over, falling to a knee. Ava meets him halfway and Sam’s afraid to touch her, holding her as gently as he dares by the shoulders.

“What happened, where are you hurt?” he asks, panicked by the blood.

“It’s Billy, Billy Kane,” she says, pulling his arm and pointing at the ground.

“Billy … what, he hurt you? Did he hurt you?”

“No, his head—he hit his head. He chased me out of the cabin … no, Sam!”

She physically restrains him when he lunges down at Billy, worried Sam will harm him more severely in his anger.

“He’s dying,” Ava says. “We have to get him out.”

Sam looks at her with crazed incomprehension, seeming to believe her levelheadedness is shock. He may be right—she isn’t shaken, isn’t crying or relieved, only wired to the moment with a clear-cut goal. One look at Billy’s wound and Sam understands: whatever happened doesn’t matter now. They have to act fast.

He brings the ATV right beside the cabin and they lift Billy up, as smoothly as they can, onto the flatbed. Wing stops barking, neither wary nor aggressive, comforted that Ava’s near, and sniffs Billy’s arm. Once they’re all secure, Sam drives them out, more careful on the trail than when he’d driven with the Finns. Along the way, he calls an ambulance to meet them on the street.

Ava sits with Billy, holding his head in her lap and saying his name, gently but distinctly, like a mother with a child waking from a nap. Billy looks at her. He moves his lips but doesn’t really speak. Wing keeps watch, instinctively subdued, knowing something serious and intimate is happening.

28

Billy lapsed into a coma after surgery for a depressed fracture of the skull. He woke the following week, and though he tried to understand when people asked him questions, he neither spoke nor followed instructions and spent the bulk of his time gazing at the television or the blank wall of his hospital room, incapable of feeding himself or possibly unwilling. Much of his life came to light—his unemployment and his debts, his self-inflicted cuts, Sheri’s testimony of abuse throughout their marriage—but despite being charged with trespassing, unlawful restraint, and aggravated assault, to name a few, no one expected a full enough recovery for Billy to stand trial. No one visited. His long-term care was undecided, assuming he’d survive the hospital at all. He was still losing weight and fighting off infection. He’d begun to stare obsessively at trees out the window.

Ava was treated kindly throughout the investigation, and the police who examined the woods were careful at the cabin and respectful, almost reverent, when they searched around the sculptures. They questioned Ava, Sam, the Finns, and even the Carmichaels, who had witnessed Billy entering the woods that day, and although the injury at the tree was ruled accidental, some suspected that the act had been intentional—a suicide blow resulting from panic, drunkenness, or the deeper instability that brought Billy to the cabin in the first place.

Sam blamed himself, both for leaving her alone and for neglecting her concern after Billy had approached her in the drugstore. Ava spent a week with the Finns after the attack. She found herself scrutinizing people at the lab, growing leery when her patients seemed a little too friendly. She went shopping only if the Finns went along. She yelled at Sam for not having a fire extinguisher, scolded him for climbing on his one-story roof, and even tried leashing up Wing so he couldn’t run wild in the woods.

One night the telephone rang and Ava picked up, thinking it was Sam. It was Sheri Kane, who introduced herself twice before the name made sense. She’d gotten Ava’s number from the phone book; she’d had it for a while, since the week of the attack. She hoped that even now she wasn’t calling too soon.