“I’m hoping that’s vodka. Don’t you kids store your vodka in your water bottles?” He holds out his hand. I dump what’s left in the bottle over his wound. I try not to worry about whether I’ll regret this when I’m down here alone two days from now because he left me to die of thirst.
I hand him three alcohol wipes from the first-aid kit, and he makes a solid effort at it, but the blood keeps oozing. The nastiest cut is across his right palm, pretty deep, at least four inches long.
I scoot closer to him reluctantly. His breath on my wet hair is like when I get out of the pool and the first tickle of air makes me shudder. He smells good, like rain. Still, I don’t like being this close. I begin to wrap his hand. I wind the scarf tight, around and around, until the blood stops seeping through.
“You look like you’ve done this a few times.”
“I lived in a group home for a year after I left here. If you went to the nurse, it wasn’t good. She reported you and if you didn’t rat on the person who hurt you, you were put in isolation. Which sucked. And if you did tell, and got sent back out, you were likely to end up in a hospital with something a lot worse. Honestly, I don’t even think that woman was a nurse. Anyway, I learned a few things. Colgate Cool Mint toothpaste for a burn. A Lipton tea bag will make blood clot. For a bruise, a package of frozen peas and Estée Lauder Double Wear concealer.” I’m rambling, a bad habit when I’m nervous.
“So you still wear scarves?”
“It’s just in case.”
“In case what?”
I don’t answer.
“I like your voice, Angel. I missed it the last time.”
It’s the first time anyone has called me Angel in five years.
It reminds me of setting those dandelions in a circle of protection in the field because I saw our next-door neighbor do that with crystals around her trailer after my mom died.
It reminds me of when I sat on Wyatt’s couch and thought I heard Trumanell whispering back to him because he said she was. It reminds me of sitting at the kitchen table with Odette while she tried to convince me I was worth something. It reminds me of when I couldn’t see a second into the future, when college and Bunny weren’t prizes that I’d won. I feel tears behind my eyes. I’m worried again that I’m treating those prizes like junk.
I finish the knot. “There. Done. And it’s Angie now. Call me Angie.”
Wyatt stretches back against the wall.
His eyes glow a little yellow in the candlelight. He reminds me of a beautiful feral tabby that used to hang out at my aunt’s trailer. Sometimes, I’d sneak him into bed with me, not caring if he might wake up in the middle of the night and tear me to pieces.
“What’s the worst thing that happened to you, Angel?” he asks. “In the group home.”
It’s not what I expect him to ask down here. I expect him to ask, Do you think I killed Odette? Trumanell? Why did you really come back to this fucking town?
“It happened to Mary, a friend of mine,” I stutter out. “She ran away afterward. Which is what made it the worst thing that happened to me.”
The sound of wind is howling down the stairs. My aunt used to call it the wolf at the door. She always said the wolf wouldn’t go away without his dinner. Once, with half a bottle of whiskey in her, she shoved me out into the wind and rain and locked the trailer door.
It is my third most terrifying memory.
Wyatt leans over. He blows out the candles.
45
We are all the same in the dark.
My mother said that to me when she kissed me good night.
She meant that in the dark, all that’s left is our souls.
She wasn’t imagining me in a hole with a killer, living out my worst fear.
Totally blind.
Floating in space.
One eye just like the other.
Soot and candle smoke are stuck in my throat. I’ve read that real space smells like something burning. Like a crash at the Daytona 500, or a charred house. The moon, like spent gunpowder. Like death.
How long has Wyatt been silent? Ten minutes? Twenty? How long have I held back a scream?
I try to calm the inside of myself, to imagine the open sky and green fields that stretch on and on and on above me. The air that will whoosh down here as soon as it is given a chance. Our little eye in the ground open to the sky, the sun peering down like a firefighter with a flashlight. But all I can really picture is the red farmhouse, blown to pieces, and every one of those pieces smothering our little metal door.
“You have to talk,” I gasp. “I get panic attacks sometimes. In storms. Being in the dark.”
I reach out a shaky hand as far as I can, arm straight, without moving any other part of my body. I touch nothing, not sweaty skin, not chilly wall.
I can’t hear Wyatt’s breath, just mine. Is he holding it, teasing me? Did I go to sleep? Faint? Did he take off his boots and sneak up the stairs in his socks? Wouldn’t I have heard the sound of the world, seen a shaft of light?
Will Bunny ever find me?
The lazy edges of a yawn break the silence.
“My sister used to tell me stories about wildflowers when I was afraid,” Wyatt says. “I’ll tell you one.”
Wyatt is saying that you can blow into the end of a dandelion stem and it will make a noise.
I’m paying attention to him, and I’m not. My relief that he is here, that anyone is here, even if it’s a killer, is overwhelming everything else.
“It sounds like a little horn when you puff air into it,” he’s saying. “You snap off the head and the root and the stem is hollow inside.” I hear him adjust his body roughly. I hope it’s not so I’m easier to reach.
“It was a signal between Trumanell and me so we’d know where the other one was hiding out in the field when Daddy got drunk. So we could find each other in the field if the corn or wheat was high, or if it was night and we couldn’t see. We practiced blowing on those stems, three short toots, so the sound was not too loud, just loud enough, the chirp of a cicada or a cricket. I was good at it, even better than Trumanell. Except one day, I got a bad stem. It wouldn’t blow. So on the next one I picked, I blew too hard. My father heard. He’s the one who found me, instead of my sister.”
Now my skin is prickling. Now I’m all in.
This is not a nature lesson. Not the kind of story that I bet Trumanell told to calm him down. Wyatt is revealing part of himself. Maybe I’ll be the first one he confesses to. About Trumanell. About Odette. Maybe he will say the words just this once and leave all of us down here in the dark.
“Was that the worst thing that ever happened to you?” My voice is a fragile trickle. “Your worst day?”
“No,” he says. “It was a bad day. Not the worst. But I think you already knew that. You know, you’re lucky. I almost left you in that field when I saw the dandelions. Seemed like a bad omen. Seventeen heads blown off. You made a lot of wishes.”
“One, really.”
“Which was?”
“What I always wished back then,” I say slowly. “For God to give me back my eye.”
“You blew a dandelion right in my face.”
“Except for that one. On that one, I was wishing you weren’t a murderer.”