Unsound (A Lei Crime Companion Novel) (9 page)

There was really nothing to do now until it boiled, which could take a while. I hauled the backpack into the kitchen and unloaded all my food supplies onto the counter, lingering over the coffee and one-cup drip basket I’d brought from home. Yes, it looked like I’d have enough coffee for only one cup a day for the week, but that cup was going to taste so good—and I could have two if I reused the grounds.

I could feel a headache beginning at the base of my punished spine. It was rising with slowness and inevitability toward my eyeballs. I got out the large bottle of Advil I’d also brought. There was nothing to take them with until the water boiled—but the vodka.

I might as well enjoy my last sips—the pint bottle I’d bought at the Liquor Barn was down to half.

I unzipped the sleeping bag and wrapped it around me, stepping outside into the clear morning.

The cabin was snuggled against the precipitous wall of the vast crater, and the floor of it spread before me. To the east, the sun bloomed, a warming bonfire striking the rugged, unworn, jagged volcanic ridge across the valley floor with rich red gold. The air was so thin and pure, I could hear nothing—absolutely nothing—but the rattle of my own tired lungs. Then, ever so far away, I heard the honk of flying nene.

My companions of the day before had flown, leaving little brown piles of scat and a lawn as well trimmed as a golf green. I put four Advil into my mouth and washed them down with vodka.

I swear I meant that to be all I drank, but the next time I looked at the bottle, it was because nothing was left.

But I felt good. Loose in the legs, optimistic. I was going to be cold turkey after this, but it was okay. It was going to be like a spiritual retreat—I’d figure out everything I wanted from life, and I’d visualize it, and it would manifest, like that pop psychology book
The Secret
promised. I was vibrating at the highest level of the universe. I was going to attract joy, health, prosperity, and love into my life.

I squinched my eyes shut, visualizing hard.

I went back into the cabin as the sunrise dissipated itself into the glory of full day in Haleakala Crater.

The giant pot of water was boiling, and had been for some time. I turned it off, relishing the warmth from the stove. My empty belly was awash with vodka and Advil, and I didn’t need water or food. I crawled back into bed to enjoy my last alcohol buzz for a week at least, and hopefully the rest of my life.

The next time I woke, I could tell by the sharp shape of the shadows in the cabin that it was evening. I sat up. Headache. Dry mouth. I went into the kitchen and wrestled the pot to the sink, poured the cool, boiled water into a series of abandoned water bottles from under the sink. No need for refrigeration—all I had to do was put them outside the door.

I drained one of the bottles and poured more water over the dehydrated prunes the Sports Authority woman had recommended “to keep things moving.” While they soaked, I took a big piece of jerky outside.

The valley was the same, but the angle of the light was different. That was about all the change this place ever saw on a daily basis.

I meditated on that awhile and considered whether it was too late in the day for coffee. Decided it wasn’t; time was a construct used by people who had to keep a schedule, and I no longer did.

I made that cup of coffee, ate the jerky, and the body was temporarily appeased. I had brought my phone, useless now, but it had a camera in it. I put the boots back on and walked carefully and gently down a meandering path that led to one of the cinder cones.

I climbed it and watched the most spectacular sunset I’d ever seen do a wild, heavenly lightshow in a blaze of Technicolor drama, unfettered by anything so mundane as smog, vog, or fog. It made me dizzy and hurt my eyes, but I took a couple of totally inadequate phone pictures anyway.

Cold and approaching dark finally drove me back toward the cabin—and as I tromped along, I realized there wasn’t going to be anyone waiting for me there, fixing dinner, lighting the stove. No Hector, even, with his questioning tail. No one knew where I was.

I was truly alone for the first time in my life.

Terror stole the breath from my lungs. I felt invisible, as if I’d never really existed and didn’t really exist now. I found myself lumbering to the cabin at a run, a graceless rapid stumbling with sore legs, big boots, and fear reactivating the awful personal stink.

As that lip-curling stench bloomed around me, it put me back in my body and made me feel real again.

I found myself scanning around the doorway for something left by the stalker—but there was nothing.
This is the beginning of detox; common symptoms are anxiety and paranoia
, Constance reminded me as I climbed the step and took hold of the knob. Still, I wished I’d remembered to carry my pepper spray with me. It was stowed in a side pocket on the backpack.

I opened the door slowly, standing back and ready to run. Of course, the cabin was empty and echoing, only slightly warm from leftover sun and the log I’d burned so many hours ago. I was definitely paranoid—but I wouldn’t give in to it and carry the damn pepper spray around, when it was being alone that was scaring me. I got another log going.

I ate the soft-soaked prunes standing at the sink. Drank another quart of water. Put another pot of water on to boil—water was going to be my salvation in the days to come. Maybe I could even take a bath. That marginally happy idea got me through another joyless trek to the outhouse, this time with a ziplock bag I could use to put the toilet paper in.

Back at the cabin, which was warming up from the wood-burning stove, I stripped to naked at the sink and washed my reeking body with dish soap found under the sink and the blue T-shirt I’d worn, sacrificing it for the duration.

It had been a while since I’d really noticed my body. It wasn’t in good shape. I’d always had one of those athletic tennis player builds—tennis being a game I did enjoy—but now my breasts had collapsed into pale little wallets that dangled on my bony rib cage. I’d always had pretty, muscular legs, and this was the first time I ever remembered seeing a gap between my thighs and knees, and the meat of them was jiggly and loose.

I looked like what I knew I’d look like in a rest home if I lived that long—a flask of bones held together with muscle and sinew that were too stubborn to disappear just yet. This was bottom, I reminded myself. I had to get sober before I could get healthy. But I wept as I washed my poor, abused flesh, the skin the color of animal fat rendered to make candles on a farm.

I put on a pair of sweatpants, the thick socks, a sweatshirt. This was my other set of clothes, and it now had to last the rest of the week. It was okay, though. I was clean and ready for the night ahead.

I found a pot to pee in, since constant trips to the outhouse through the dark seemed impossible—and realized I was actually using that hackneyed phrase in a real sentence.

I had a pot to pee in. I laughed out loud, and it bounced around the cabin and came back to boomerang off me like a sonar ping. It was the detox, I told myself. I was having a little auditory hallucination.

I had Advil. I had a lineup of bottles of boiled water. I had my sleeping bag, and I was clean. This was as good as it would get. I used the flashlight to read over Kamani’s file as I lay in the Naugahyde-covered bunk

I lifted my head. I heard something—a rhythmic crunching sound, like someone was approaching. I switched off the flashlight. I hadn’t locked the doors, and that suddenly seemed a ridiculous oversight.

I swung my legs out of the sleeping bag. It was very dark, but I could see the outlines of the windows, limned in moonlight. I crept to the front door, twisted the dead bolt. I heard the steps outside, crunching on the path, as loud as if they were going through the room—then a muffled swishy sound—someone was walking on the grass.

I realized the back door was still unlocked.

I ran across the room and through the kitchen by feel and memory and felt over the surface of the back door, patting it frantic and blind until I felt the parallel knob of the dead bolt and turned it.

Unless they had the ranger code, I was safe.

I crouched below the level of the windows, out of sight, listening. I heard the crunching again, and then the swishing, and then nothing. A series of people were walking by the cabin? The main trail led past it, but it was a bit of a jag to come up to the cabin. I shouldn’t be able to hear them.

I heard the steps approaching again, steady and the same tempo as the others. With my eyes adjusted, I was pretty sure I’d be able to see whoever it was. I stood cautiously and looked out through the kitchen windowpanes. The moon was high, and the desert floor of the crater was bathed in otherworldly light. The steps crunched to the front of the cabin and then swished by where I stood, moving on past the window through the grass.

No one was there.

The scene before me was starkly, beautifully empty, moonlight brazing the outlines of every stone, rock, and blade of grass. I remembered the night marchers, a Hawaiian legend of warriors slain in battle who walked the land at night in a ghostly reenactment.

I must be hallucinating.

The hairs all over my body had risen and I trembled, perspiration springing up under my armpits to sully my clean sweatshirt.
This is not acceptable
, Constance said.
You’re going to need something stronger than Advil to get through the night.

I turned on the flash and dug in the backpack, found my Advil bottle, shook out the brown glossy pellets until I found several big, white Vicodin hiding in the bottom.

I took two, tossing them back with a swallow of water, climbed into my sleeping bag, and clamped my eyes shut, wishing I had earplugs or a pillow to wrap around my head. I had neither, and the night marchers passed by with terrible regularity until my friend Vicodin dragged me under into sleep.

I drank that first cup of coffee in the pearly predawn of day three. My brain felt spongy, like a computer with a virus, glitching and rebooting whenever it felt like it. The act of thinking reminded me of the hunt-and-peck typing of my master’s thesis so long ago on an old
Olympia:
current trends in attribution of attractiveness to facial structures in males.

I still remembered how hard it had been to come up with something scientific-sounding to describe that early fascination I’d had with handsome men—a thesis that had ended with a close-up anatomical study of Richard. His cheekbones, bold jaw, crystalline blue eyes under symmetrical brow ridges . . . His beauty had intersected with my attribution of positive characteristics to his looks. I saw that now.

I’d always had a keen aesthetic sense, and it carried me past my ruminations as my bruised-feeling eyes wandered over the sweep of crater before me. I could almost see the molecules of the air warming before me—the heat of the rising sun making them vibrate faster, light reflecting on minuscule particles of matter, capturing the process and transmuting it into bands of yellow and pink that brightened the stark sky.

A gentle honking, increasing in volume, heralded the return of my nene friends—but I didn’t believe it was really them until I saw their graceful black arcs against the morning sky. They hove in and splashed down on the lush patch of grass in front of the cabin, trotting toward me, folding their wings and chuckling a greeting.

“Hi, guys.” The nene bobbed their heads, sidling toward the water spigot and pantomiming drinking. I got up, turned it on for them and watched them paddling their beaks in the drops, lifting their heads so the water ran down their graceful throats.

Knowing about delirium tremens was definitely not the same as experiencing it. This morning my skin was exquisitely tender, and the thousands of tiny fibers of my clothing felt rough as sharkskin. Tiny spiders were crawling over me, and I looked, for the hundredth time, at my arms. Still nothing there since the last time I looked two minutes ago.

I needed to do something today, get out, get my mind off the night that didn’t bear remembering and my current problem with crawlies. The nene dipped their heads, making gentle commentary as they finished drinking. One of them sampled the edge of my sleeping bag, cocked his head at me.

“No food,” I said, startled by the volume of my voice. “I got nothing for you, guys.”

They seemed to accept this and walked away, grazing. The dawn gilded their feathers.

I went back inside the cabin. My paranoia was still pretty bad—I felt like someone was watching me, and I couldn’t stop myself from checking under the beds, in the Pres-to-Log closet, outside the back door.

Perhaps what I could do for a project was make a video log with my phone of this whole thing—something I could play when I was tempted to drink again. A note to self from “detoxing me” to “tempted to drink” me. I was semishocked my brain had enough juice left in it to come up with such a great idea.

I turned the phone on. As usual there was no signal, but I set it on the battered table and sat in front of it on video mode. Talked to my future self.

“Caprice, you’re a wreck. You’ve been given another chance at life. You’ve just been through the longest, darkest, scariest night of your life. Auditory hallucinations—the night marchers went by this cabin like clockwork all night long. Paranoia. Anxiety. The shakes. Right now you’ve got skin hallucinations.” I held my arm up in front of the blinking camera. “See the chicken skin? Something’s crawling on me right now.”