Near the Bone(16)

Mattie glanced anxiously up at the sky. The footprints were only useful as long as she had light. William had said it was only a couple of hours until sundown. She didn’t know how much time had passed since then.

Every minute you stand here dithering is a minute of sunlight wasted.

She vaulted off the second tree as she had the first, but the next trunk was farther away and she nearly missed it, only just grabbing one of the low-hanging branches to stay upright.

Mattie staggered from tree to tree in this way, always keeping the trail of William’s footprints visible. Too soon she realized that the trail was growing more difficult to see. The shadows had deepened. The sun was setting.

A bubble of alarm bloomed in her chest. She didn’t have any light. William had the candles and matches.

She took a good look around her for the first time since she’d awoken from her faint. Nothing appeared familiar. There were only trees and rocks and snow, and she had no notion of how far away the cabin might be.

Her stomach twisted. It had been hours since she’d eaten. Her mouth and throat were parched, too.

Mattie knew how to find edible berries in the woods but it was well past berry season. She gripped the tree hard with one arm and cautiously lowered into a crouch. She inspected the snow for animal droppings and, finding it clear, scooped large handfuls into her mouth.

It was so cold against her bruised throat that it hurt. A second later she felt a sharp pain in her temple and behind her left eye.

Brain freezy! she heard Heather say. I got a brain freezy!

Mattie almost saw Heather there, waving a dripping ice cream cone around while she held her head with her free hand.

I got a brain freezy, Mattie thought, and pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. Her mother told her once that was how to stop an ice cream headache.

Mom, she thought, but there was no face or voice to go with the name. There was only a vague sense of a person Mattie might have known once, a shadow that she called Mom.

The snow did nothing to fill her stomach or to fix her lightheadedness, but her throat was less parched and that, at least, was something.

Mattie didn’t know what to do about the growing dark, though. William never let her carry or keep matches. She wasn’t even allowed to use them unless he was present, and she didn’t know how to start a fire without matches.

That man might, though. The stranger by the cave. If you asked him, he might help you.

William would be so angry if she did that. Maybe angrier than he’d ever been.

Look how he was just because the stranger talked to you.

“It doesn’t matter anyway. You’re too far from the stranger now.”

But it would be nice if he were near. It would be nice if she weren’t alone in the creeping dark, hungry and hurt and exhausted. The stranger had kind eyes. Mattie thought he would be kind to her.

That’s fairy-tale nonsense, Mattie. That’s the sort of thing Heather always liked, stories about princes who saved girls from towers and witches and curses and glass coffins. That’s not the kind of thing that happens in real life.

In real life you never see the stranger again, and no one comes to rescue you from the tower.

(or the cabin)

Mattie pushed off the tree, staggered to the next. William’s footprints in the snow were nearly impossible to see already. How could the sun set so quickly? What would happen if she wasn’t at home when William wanted to go to bed?

“A man’s got to have sons, Mattie.”

Yes, it was her duty to give him sons and she had failed thus far.

If she wasn’t home when he said she should be, would William come looking for her? Or would he leave her out in the night and cold and find some other vessel to bear his children?

“I’ve invested so much time in you, Martha. I hope you appreciate how I’ve worked to make you a good life.”

“Yes,” Mattie said as she tossed herself from tree to tree, clinging to trunks and branches like bits of driftwood in the ocean. “Yes, I know how hard it is for you.”

William had to work so hard, had to discipline her so often. She wasn’t a good listener. She forgot that she wasn’t to criticize him. She forgot to be grateful.

“I’ll be a good wife to you, I promise,” she whimpered.

She was so tired and hungry and it was so dark. She never knew until she came to live on the mountain how dark the night could be.

“I’ll be good, only come and find me, don’t leave me alone out here, don’t leave me.”

Mattie didn’t know where she was going anymore, couldn’t see anything except the vague shapes of trees and the shifting shadows in the snow.

The night moved all around her, the secret wind and the silver sliver of moon, the rustling of branches, the scurrying of night creatures, the trickle of water.

Water.

There was water nearby.

“The stream,” she said, hurling her body in the direction of the sound.

If she found the stream, she’d know her way home. The deer path was easy to find from there, even in the dark. Mattie knew that path by heart. It was the only place she was allowed to go on her own because it wasn’t far from the cabin.

She wouldn’t be home too late and William wouldn’t be furious. The sun had only just gone down, hadn’t it? Soon, so very soon, Mattie would be back in the cabin, fed and safe and warm.