Notes from My Captivity(36)

“Podozhite!” Again she screams the unfamiliar word. Far away past the stream, the older brother’s voice answers in the darkness.

“Mama?”

I turn and head toward the woods to my right, reversing course. I stumble, fall, get up, fight the darkness that prickles and dips and buzzes and shrieks and tears at my clothes, trampling the stalks of the sunflowers.

The mother cries out one more time, and then I hear a fluttering of wings as the owl swoops for me. I cover my head and charge straight into the thick forest, tearing through the brush as I struggle to get away. I battle things I can’t see, tangles of vines and branches and sticks and webs, all kinds of textures that rattle and break, pushing where the owl can’t follow me, squeezing between trees and crawling on rotted leaves, the stars blocked out by the dense treetops overhead. I’m the wildest thing out here, the most out of place, the least evolved. My arms and legs are stupid, useless. I need claws and teeth. But I keep lunging forward until there are no voices anymore; the owl is gone and the family is gone and I crouch completely out of breath, alone in the forest.

I lean back against a tree and try to gather myself.

There is no chance of rescue. No one will even know we are missing for another two weeks. And then what? Even if somehow a rescue party did make it this far, where would they look? I’m on my own. I have to use my wits to stay alive.

The woods are recovering from the shock of my intrusion. Night birds begin to call. Crickets start up again. Every now and then something skitters nearby, and I jump. Mosquitos bite my arms and face. I slap them away, making small wet splashes on my face with my own blood as their bodies explode.

The memory of the mother and the wild owl play on my nerves. I don’t think the owl can get to me now, or the mother. And the sons must be looking in the wrong direction. Unless the mother is truly a witch and drifting through the trees to me right now, her feet barely touching the ground.

I shake the thought away and decide to stay where I am and wait, and let some time pass by before I attempt to make a move. In the meantime, I think about my father. Think about the outline of the Big Dipper I saw from my own open grave. I look up and can barely make out a patch of night sky between the trees.

“Dad, are you up there?” I whisper.

He didn’t die immediately. It took him twelve days. In that time period I invoked my ten-year-old magic, praying to a variety of gods, casting spells, even burying my marble collection in the backyard as a sacrifice. A candle flame burned my nose when I tried to chant into it. I walked around the neighborhood, retracing his last route, stopped in the place where the tire marks still hadn’t been scrubbed, and stared beseechingly up at the sky, as though the sight of my sad ten-year-old face would move some celestial court into action. Look at that kid. Let’s wake up her father.

My mother explained, in that quavery voice that meant she was trying to be strong for me, that they were doing tests on his brain, and that machines were helping him breathe. He was here, and he wasn’t here. Dead and alive. Present and absent. Not quite of the earth anymore but hovering somewhere above it, in the part of the atmosphere that is neither cold nor hot, above the treetops, below the weather balloons.

Somehow I was still supposed to go to school and come home to a sitter who would make my dinner and help me with homework while my mother stayed at my father’s side in the ICU.

The sitter, whose name was Heather, was an older girl, nineteen or twenty, who lived down the street and moved back in with her parents after flunking out of college. She was large and heavy footed and made a lot of noise on our floors. She’d make the same dinner every night—Hamburger Helper—and we’d eat it while she stared at the Travel Channel.

“I’m going to go there,” she’d say to just about everything, in a voice that sounded spacey.

I watched with her: the dreamy islands, the ice-blue sky spilling off glaciers, the rain forests of Ecuador.

I didn’t want to go to any of those places. I wanted to go to the hospital.

One night Heather peered at me, studying me. “So your father got run over.”

I didn’t know how to respond. Having it put that way, so casually, made him sound like a dog or a squirrel. But then again, my mother told me Heather had trouble communicating with people. I didn’t really care. I just wanted her to keep her snout in her Hamburger Helper and mind her own business. “He was hit by a car,” I said.

“That’s tough,” she said.

“I’m praying a lot,” I said. “To a bunch of different people. Do you want to pray with me?”

“Prayer’s bullshit,” she said.

That night when Mom got home, I told her what Heather said, and the next night, some girl named Samantha had taken her place.

I kept up the spells, the magic. Samantha helped me light candles and bury toys. I saw my father in a dream one night, and he told me he was going to make it. When I told my mother this the next morning when she was cooking me breakfast, she didn’t answer but gave me a pancake that wasn’t done in the middle and went to her room.

She let me visit him only once in ICU, on the eighth day. He looked very normal, and the ICU room looked more like a cleared-out storage closet. I expected everything to be dramatic, like the ICUs on TV shows, but everything just seemed very neat and clean and calm, a few tubes running in and out of him, a monitor over his head, and the breathing machine.