True Places(3)

A breeze licked through the woods, and the sweat on her neck and back chilled. She was strung rigid and thin, like the wire of a snare, and exhaustion threatened to snap her, but her mind flew, sorting through possibilities, pushing aside the fear and hope battling for attention.

“Room,” Mama said finally.

The girl’s mind fell still, paralyzed. Her mother’s voice was a frayed thread and yet full of the import and finality of her message. “It’s a room.” Her voice gave out.

The girl stared at the harness in her fists, her knuckles white beneath the dirt stains, then at the slick, gaping mouth of the cave. The meaning of her mother’s words rose over her like a pall. She had assumed the hole was a shaft; the first few feet of the sides—what she could see—were vertical. But below that, she knew now, the walls spread wide, curved out, perhaps, to form a room. What shape and what size she did not know. It didn’t matter. Mama could not have scaled the canted walls even if she had not been injured, and the girl was too slight to haul her out on her own. The girl knew the basics of mechanical advantage, levers and pulleys, but there was no horizontal branch of sufficient size to loop her rope over, and if there had been, she concluded in an instant, that, too, would not have been enough.

She tossed the rope to the side and retrieved the blanket.

“I’m throwing down a blanket.”

“No!” It was a high bark, not like Mama at all. There was pain on all sides of it.

A feeling of dread entered the girl through every pore. She sat cross-legged beside the mouth of the cave, hugging the blanket that was too valuable to be sacrificed for brief comfort.

“I’m sorry, Mama. I’m really sorry.”

Mama replied, “I know,” or maybe it was only a muffled moan.

She imagined her mother’s terror and pain expanding across the darkening floor of the cave, completely filling the stone-walled chamber. If only it had the power to lift Mama, carry her to the surface, harmed but close. But the girl believed in no magic and had been death’s witness countless times so she could eat and live. Her mother was an animal, the same as she was, subject to the relentlessness of physical reality, and could not wheedle her way into some other realm of existence—the supernatural, the spiritual, or the transcendent—simply because she was in danger. Reality offered unvarnished truths, especially now, the two of them separated by an insurmountable yet perfectly ordinary arrangement of rock, and yet bound together still by a column of air and, for a short while longer, refracted sunlight. Her desire to be close to her mother kept her near the hole, and more than once she considered reattaching the rope to the tree and lowering herself into the shaft, for both their comfort. She might, not allowing for the unforeseen, shimmy up the rope again and rejoin the surface of the world. But those were only her thoughts, not her will. Mama was dying and there was no remedy for it.

Violet shadows hastened into the spaces between the trees. The air chilled. The girl put on her jacket and placed the rifle inside the backpack to protect it from the night’s moisture. Wrapping the blanket around her legs, she assumed her vigil by the hole and, out of necessity, ate the jerky she had saved for herself. The food was dust in her mouth.

The light melted away, as the fog had that morning, leaving the sky pale and thin and touched with mallow pink, then retreated succinctly behind distant mountains. As the stars emerged at last, the girl sighed and spoke.

“I’m gonna sleep here tonight, and you should, too, Ash. She might not know we’re here, but I don’t want to leave yet.”

She refolded the blanket and lay down, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. The ache that had been accumulating in her bones was fierce now, and she gasped. She wanted her mama. A finger traced along her cheek would do, or the warm steady weight of Mama’s body next to hers, by the stream or at the table. The girl tried, but it was impossible for her to imagine the magnitude of the loss of such things, having had them so recently and so often. It was like counting stars.

She lay still, the never-ending vault shimmering overhead, and gathered herself. “I’m gonna miss her,” she whispered. She paused, nodded, rose on her elbow. “I know, Ash. I know you will, too. Come lie next to me. Try to sleep now.”

Sleep came for her quickly, her body taking control. She woke before dawn, unfurled her limbs, and swept the dew from her face. Memories of yesterday replaced the vestiges of her dreams—the lingering sweetness of escape already lost to her—and sadness, thick and heavy as wet clay, fell onto her. She watched the night shapes around her resolve into familiar forms. When she was sure of where she was, she crept to the edge of the hole.

“Mama?”

Birds stirred in the branches around her but did not call.

Louder: “Mama?”

The girl listened, not only with her ears but with her entire being, melding the input from her senses, subtracting the background noise, pointing her full attention at the hole in the earth, at the stone vault. Her mother’s scent of loamy earth and sun-scorched grass lingered, faint, mixed with the bitter scent of fear, but that was all.

She listened a long while, until she was certain, then shrank back from the cave mouth and sat on her heels, rubbing a finger over a scab on her knee. Her stomach churned a slurry of acid and grief, her soul limp. Again she fought against the impulse to lower herself into the dark. That was based on a wish for something she couldn’t have. Mama was not there, only a cold, broken body, heaped on stone, surrounded by seeping walls. Mama was gone.