“Martin, remember this feeling. Hold on to it like hell. This is over for the Stevenses and for Ama, but there will always be a next one for you.”
“So I’m not fired?” Martin asked, only partially joking.
“No. We’ve got a shelf full of cold cases with your name on it, when you’re ready. There will be an office door with your name on it, too.”
“Tomorrow,” Martin answered. “This is the kind of news I want to deliver in person.”
He headed for his car, his mind already inside Eddie and Hazel’s home, no longer silent, no longer plagued with empty places where Hazel should be.
HAZEL Chapter 88 | May 3, 2007 | Tarson, Georgia
DAD PULLS THE VAN INTO the lot at the Tarson Woods trailhead. It’s empty except for Ama. She’s leaning against a silver car, her arms folded across her chest, her eyes all shadows. My palms break out in a clammy sweat, and my throat threatens to draw shut.
“You called Ama?” I manage to ask.
Dad nods. “You two fought your way out of those woods together. If you really got it in your mind to go back in there, I thought she might be able to help see you through,” he says. “But we don’t have to go one step on that path, Hazel. We can turn around right now and you don’t ever have to come back here.”
“I do,” I whisper. I’m leaving Tarson for Savannah College of Art and Design come August, and if I don’t face these woods, I am afraid I’ll bring them with me no matter how far I go. And I’ve tried. Oh, I have tried. Twice now, I’ve made it as far as where the concrete gives way to earth, but I shook with such a force, blown back from it as if by a rogue gust of wind only I could feel, and both times I turned, head down, and somehow made it back to the van on wobbling legs.
“Michael’s not out there, Hazel,” Dad says.
I nod.
We climb out of the car. Ama strides toward us. Even though the spring afternoon is warm and the air still, I swear I see her shiver.
“Thank you for coming,” Dad says to her.
“Thanks for calling,” she replies. “This is something I need to face, too.”
“You haven’t been back here?” I ask.
“Fuck no.”
She stares into the woods, and I am mystified by this. Ama Chaplin, the angel in a white dress who came through Michael’s door and would see it stand open long enough to slide me through, is rocked back on her heels, goose bumps covering her arms, her body stiff as if she is bracing against the same frigid wind I feel every time my mind travels this path, every time I breathe air that tastes like it tumbled across the surface of Cold River on its way to me.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
“No,” I say. We shuffle toward the path anyway, side by side, my dad a few steps behind.
Ama stops where the concrete turns to dirt. I glance at her face. She’s glaring up the trail.
“I can go first,” my father says.
“We got this,” Ama says. My legs are lead, my feet cement blocks, and it is everything I can do to not turn around.
“I need you to go first,” I whisper.
“You don’t,” she says. We stand in silence. I can feel Dad shifting, wanting to whisk me back to the car, back to our home, to cook dinner and put on my favorite movie and offer to add a blanket or take one away, making sure I am neither too warm nor too cold at fifteen-minute intervals.
“Without you, I would still be out there,” I whisper. This truth has haunted me, as present as a shadow in every room.
“Maybe,” she says. “Without you, I would still be out there.” She looks at me. “But we’re not out there. And those are not Michael’s woods. This is not Michael’s trail. We were not Michael’s fate, and he was not ours. That’s not how it works. Only one thing had to go right for Michael to take us—he had to not get caught. About nine million things had to go right for us to survive him. So if there is such thing as Fate, you tell me whose side Fate was on.”
“So why haven’t you come back here?” I ask.
“Because this is still the last place on earth I’d choose to be.”
I nearly smile. I keep my eyes on her taut face, witnessing her blatant reluctance somehow making it easier to define my own, and I step with one foot onto the dirt.
It is only dirt.
Not quicksand or a trapdoor. Not the center of a snare or the trigger point of a landmine.
“How far do you want to go?” she asks.
“I want to make it one step past the place where Michael took me. One step.”
“Okay,” she says. “We’ll follow you.”
We enter the woods. The trees seem taller, the air still. Even from this distance I swear I can hear the river. I breathe out slow and count as I’ve been taught to do when my pulse rockets.
Dad’s uneven strides are a comfort in my ear. I know the sound like I know my own hands. Ama treads so lightly I’m not convinced she’s there until I peek over my shoulder to see her. Her stare is fixed beyond me, and her lips are pressed into a line.
The trail turns on a series of switchbacks climbing the first big hill. Sweat beads on my hairline. The exertion feels good, and every few seconds I realize I’m just thinking about my breathing, the trail, my pace, and I am the girl who could run this six-mile hike in under fifty minutes, not reduced to the headline of the girl who survived a year with Michael Jeffery Walton. Then I see the scars on my swinging arms and I am back in the bunker, cold and hungry and terrified and silent. That girl still lives inside me, still wakes up gasping for breath when dreams of black water haunt my sleep.
We reach the bend in the path, and I remember seeing Michael come through the trees and start the other way down the path. My legs demand to move faster, and I start running down the hill. Ama keeps pace, stride for stride. My dad’s footfalls come heavy and quick. The trees blur, the dirt feels like a wet sandbank under my shoes, and each breath feels like it’s made of shards of glass. My lungs could be on that wall, my vocal cords strung across them. I run harder, legs and arms burning, air whipping past me.
I remember exactly which two trees we had stopped beside when Michael pretended to see a turtle in the leaves. I’d bent down for a better look, then felt a blow on the back of my head, a crunch reverberating in my skull, and when I woke, I would not see the sun again for a year.
I see the two trees now, unchanged, still leaning away from each other in a haphazard V. I slow to a stop in front of them and stare up at the sky. Light winks down through the canopy of the forest. Ama stops beside me. Dad catches up, one arm swinging in front of him, the other hand pressed into his side.
“What happened to Michael’s walking stick?” I ask as my breathing slows.
Ama lets out an uncharacteristic bark of laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“That damn stick.” She walks in a circle, her chin tilted skyward, her hands on her hips. “I asked Martin for it before we knew Michael was dead. Once his body was found, I fantasized about all the ways I could get rid of it—burn it, bury it, throw it in the river. But they all seemed too… meaningful.”
“So what did you do?”
“Put it out with the trash,” she answers. “Michael doesn’t get one minute more of my life.”