In the middle of the barn, taking up most of the space, a vehicle hides beneath a khaki-colored cover. I approach it and let my hand linger on the roof. I picture the mint Capri, Kermit the Frog, the trunk with all of the things.
I throw back the cover. A black VW Beetle, front tires flat, rear ones on blocks. The hood is missing, the engine long gone. I let out a breath and circle the vehicle and release the axe from the vise, then limp past four barrels labeled Hawkins Oil Refinery, and haul my body up the steps to the loft. I lie on my side and face the gaps in the wall, clutching the axe. Dust stirs on a splinter of light.
32
When I wake up there’s a shotgun pointed in my face.
“I use it, don’t think I won’t.”
I squint at the elderly, small-boned Asian woman through the fuzz of my vision, shotgun snug on her shoulder.
“You a junkie?” she demands.
“I was kidnapped.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s the truth, ma’am.”
But as soon as I say it, I am wondering to myself, is it? I’ve been in the wilderness for so long I might have made the whole thing up. What if I got lost? What if I’m delirious? Then I remember about the ten things, the baby.
“From a gas station in Oregon.”
The woman finally looks like she might believe me.
“Please,” I say, shuddering. “I’m so cold.”
She lowers her gun.
“I don’t like this,” she says, looking over her shoulder. “You make problem for me.”
“I won’t, please—”
Before I can finish, a coughing fit grips me and I throw up at least three liters of water. The woman reaches down and puts the back of her hand against my forehead and murmurs something I don’t understand.
*
I sleep a dreamless, blissful sleep for what seems like an eternity. Warm and sound and soft. Like I’m drifting on a marshmallow. When I open my eyes, I find myself on a lumpy sofa swaddled in a green woolen blanket. Directly opposite, a fire glows in the grate. A large black headless bearskin partially covers the wooden floor, and in the corner, on top of a small table, there’s a tiny shrine comprised of a miniature brass Buddha, a clutch of smoking incense sticks, and a burning pillar candle. On the wall above the shrine hangs a framed photograph of a white man in military uniform.
“You been in forest long time?” It’s the Asian woman. She’s at the beige Formica table playing a game of solitaire. She glances at me when I don’t answer. “Cat eat your tongue?”
“Where am I? Which state?” I ask.
She lifts the old-fashioned tortoiseshell pipe to her lips and puffs. I can smell the harsh tobacco from here.
“Washington.”
The woman knocks the ash from the pipe into a saucer and gets to her feet. She takes two steps into the adjacent kitchen area and opens a cupboard to retrieve a plate.
“Must eat. Nothing left of you.”
She reaches inside an old-fashioned pull-handled fridge to take out what looks like cheese and bread. I sit up and see that my foot has been dressed in a clean white bandage, my broken wrist, too.
“Very bad,” says the woman, glancing at my foot. “Will try medicine.”
“Medicine?”
She points to her chest. “I make medicine. For foot. Maybe get better, maybe not.”
She puts a tray on my lap. On the plate there’s a generous hunk of crusty bread and a wedge of cheese.
“Homemade. My goat, Betty, she give good milk.”
The woman returns to her card game and relights her pipe.
I raise the sandwich to my mouth and chew. Food. Real food. I can’t remember how long it’s been since I ate anything that resembles a sandwich.
The woman lifts her eyes from her cards. “Slow down or you sick up again.”
I do my best to be more measured but end up demolishing the sandwich more quickly than is probably wise.
“What’s your name please, ma’am?” I say when I come up for air.
“Nhung.”
“Thank you for the food, Nhung, and for looking after me.” I pick up the mug of tea on the side table and take a sip. “I’m Amelia Kellaway. What is the date please?”
“Date?”
“Day of the month?”
“Seventeenth.”
“Of September?”
“October.”
“You’re joking.” I’ve been lost in the wilderness for over a month.
I’m overcome with emotion and bury my face in my hands and cry. “I thought I was going to die out there.”
“The man who took you, he interfere with you?”
“Yes.”
“Son of bitch.”
The crying drains me and I’m sleepy again. I lie back down in the nest of blankets and watch the flames bob in the hearth.
“Don’t you get lonely out here all by yourself?” But I fall asleep before I can hear the answer.
33
For the next three days snow keeps us inside, apart from when Nhung bundles herself up in a heavy-duty jacket and ventures out to the backyard to empty the ash pan or feed her small menagerie of animals that consists of, as far as I can tell from my vantage point in the kitchen window, two pigs, three goats, four sheep, an unspecified number of chickens, and a deer. Nhung tells me the cabin is powered by a generator, which is powered by gasoline that Nhung keeps in the barn. She doesn’t have a working vehicle and because it’s a two-day walk to the closest neighbor, someone from the county drops off supplies once every two months.
The next visit is due in five weeks. We both know that’s too long to wait. My foot is getting worse despite Nhung’s best efforts and her twice daily treatments of applying her pungent concoction, a lumpy brown paste that smells vaguely of spoiled milk. The foot is totally useless and I can’t put any weight on it. A grape color has started to climb my calf like a vine.
In the barn there’s a dusty long-range two-way radio and Nhung retrieves it and every three hours winds it up to call for assistance. But the radio is old and Nhung tells me it often stops working during big snowfalls and storms and for other unexplained reasons. It belonged to her husband, Jack. The man in the photo. As a sixteen-year-old, she met Jack at a refugee camp in the 1970s when she and her family fled the Khmer Rouge. He was an American military liaison officer.
“Jack worked for the man who own this land—Mr. Hawkins, oil refinery man. He very rich and like Jack a lot. He help build this house and let us stay for as long as we want. That twenty year ago now. Then Jack got sick.”
“I’m sorry.”
Nhung frowns and smoothes more ointment onto my dismal foot.
“The cancer,” she says.
She nods toward the window. “He under the ponderosa.”
I think about how every night Nhung kneels in front of the tiny shrine, chanting softly, palms pressed together in prayer, the flame of the candle bobbing with her breath.
“You had no children?” I say.
She shakes her head. “Born still.”
Wiping the ointment from her hands with a cloth, Nhung lifts her shirt to reveal a zigzag of scars across her lower abdomen, bulbous and red and thickened with time. It looks like she’s been hacked at with a blunt piece of tin.