Bone Gap (30 page)

And if she ran now, left Finn here, she would never forgive herself.

The icy-eyed man seemed to understand this, so serene was his expression. He thought he knew how this story ended. He thought he had written it.

He said, “But if Roza agrees to stay in your place, well, then . . .”

Finn shook his head, swearing under his breath. Roza caught a glint of silver in the overbright sun. A shard of mirror winking from Finn's back pocket.

When are you going to do something with that knife?

In Polish, Roza said, “Why do you want me?”

“You know,” said the man.

“I want to hear it again.”

Again, the serene smile. His story, written his way, with the
ending he always expected. “Lovely women are so vain. You pretend you're not, but you can't pretend for long.”

“Tell me,” said Roza.

“Because you are beautiful.”

“The most beautiful?”

The man nodded, enjoying his moment, the moment when he got to keep his prize, the one he had stolen, the one he thought he deserved. “The most beautiful woman of all.”

“If I weren't, you would let me go?”

“If you weren't, you never would have been here in the first place.”

“And you would let him go?”

“He wouldn't have been here either,” said the icy-eyed man.

“Roza,” Finn whispered. “What are you two talking about? Why don't you get out of here? I'll think of something, okay? Tell Sean I'm sorry.”

“You will tell Sean,” said Roza, in English. She pulled the shard of mirror from Finn's back pocket and held it up to the light.

The icy-eyed man said, “Beautiful women are so—”

Roza sliced her face from one ear to the corner of her mouth.

“Roza!” Finn yelled.

“No!” the man howled. “No, no, no, no, no!” He said it again and again as if it were the only word he knew how to say.

Roza whispered, “Yes.”

Seconds ticked by before the pain registered, white-hot pain,
a line of fire, blood that burned its way down her face and neck. Despite the pain and the blood, Roza took in the icy-eyed man's expression of frozen, stony horror and reveled in it, delighted in it. It was delicious, his horror. She wanted to see it up close.

She wanted to
eat
it.

She walked toward the stage and stood right in front of him, letting him see the wound, her red and seething insides, the place where her fury pulsed, where her fire lived.

She said,
“Do you love me yet?”

He recoiled from her, from the look of her. “You don't love me because you can't see me,” she said. “Look! Look! I am beautiful now.
I am beautiful.
”

The icy-eyed man said, “You are mine.” He waved a hand at her face. But the wound did not knit, did not heal, and the blood kept pouring down her face and neck, hot and thick. The man waved his hand more and more frantically. “What do you think you have done?” the man said. “You have ruined yourself. No one will want you now.”

“Then I don't want them,” said Roza. “Foolish boys who drop you in puddles. You are the puddle.”

Finn moved close. “I don't know what you're saying, but I think we've got some other problems here.”

Roza turned. The fields—wherever they were, whatever they were—had gone darker, the grass yellowing under their feet, the rides rusting, the candy apples moldering, the smell of rot and wet and damp assaulting her nostrils. The people,
thousands of them, crept forward, their limbs stretching, elongating as they limped and crawled and skittered like insects.

“Stop!” the icy-eyed man said as the creatures advanced. “I collected you. You're mine. You do what I say.”

Finn said, “I don't think they believe you.”

“Stop!” the man roared, as a buzzing arose from the crowd. Wings burst from backs, mandibles from mouths. The buzzing got louder and louder as the man was swarmed.

Roza grabbed Finn's hand. “We go!”

They turned and ran. The creatures lurched after Roza—attacking her or trying to help her, she couldn't tell. Finn beat them off as best as he could, but they tore at her arms and dress, their black tongues flapping and flailing. One latched onto her—maybe it had been a man once, but it now looked like some kind of wasp—and Finn and this creature tugged at her as if she were a length of rope. She screamed, and a giant reddish blur slammed into the wasp-man, yellow teeth tearing off its dark, chitinous face.

“What was that?” Finn shouted.

“My friend,” Roza said. She and Finn and Rus ran from the fairgrounds. Roza almost shrieked with relief.

“The corn!” Roza said, just as Finn said it. At the sound of its name the corn seemed to grow taller, greener, thicker, reaching upward,
alive
alive. They threw themselves into its lush green arms and it drew them in, hiding and sheltering them, delivering them from one world to the next. They ran until they could
run no farther, till a river of green was a river of blue, blue water that crashed and swept them in a wild torrent. Roza kept one hand knotted in Rus's fur and her other hand in Finn's as the water carried them, until their feet brushed upon the rocks at the bottom, until they were running again, then walking, the waters receding to a brook, a stream, a wild tangle of plants. They slowed, stumbling, holding on to one another as they broke through the wall of plants and spilled onto a familiar road.

They stood, panting in the dim light, jumping when something else crashed from the corn. Rus, dancing alongside Roza like a monstrous, bedraggled pony. She fell to her knees in the road, not minding the scrape of the pavement on her bare skin, and threw her arms around his shaggy neck.

“Is that a wolf?” Finn said.

“Dog,” said Roza.

“I don't think so.” Finn watched the cornfield as if expecting an army of monsters to burst from it.

“Not coming,” Roza said. She couldn't have explained how she knew, but she did. The man was not going to follow. He couldn't.

A sudden breeze made Finn's hair dance. “You mean, that's it? We're done?”

“Not done,” said Roza. “Free.”

THEY STOOD IN THE ROAD FOR A WHILE—FINN KEEPING
an eye out for lurching monsters and Scare Crows, Roza hugging the strange beast that had followed them out of the gap. Amazingly, Finn had forgotten what Roza had done to free them until he saw the dark smear on the beast's reddish fur.

“Roza. Your face. We need something to . . .” He patted his pockets, but he had nothing to stop the bleeding.

She bent down, tore a length of cloth from the bottom of her dress. She pressed it to her cheek.

“I live,” she told him, standing. She smiled at him, even though it must have hurt. “I live.”

They started to walk. “Did he . . . did he . . .” He couldn't say it—
Did the Scare Crow touch you? Did he hurt you worse than that cut on your face?
He examined his shoes, laces dripping water onto the pavement. Any other time, he might have said something about the impossibility of what had happened, how it was some kind of horrible nightmare that they, that
she
, needed to forget. Instead, he said, “Sean would have come if he could have.”

She laid a palm on the dog's head. “No matter.”

It wasn't the time for this, she was hurt, it was stupid, but he kept talking. “It does matter,” Finn said. “It's just . . . he couldn't come. Because of me. And when I told them what I saw, that a man took you, he didn't believe me. It's not his fault. No one believed me. I didn't describe the man so well. I'm not good at faces.”

Roza nodded. “I know.”

“You know? You know I'm not good at faces?”

She took his hand, squeezed it. “Who does not know this?” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Right,” he said. “Who doesn't?”

She let go of his hand, instead slipping her arm around his, elbows linked like a chain. They kept walking down the dark road toward town. He felt every step—the rub of his wet socks in his shoes, the burn of his wounded leg, the ache in his hand—but he also felt more himself than he ever had before. So he tried again.

“About what I saw, about what happened to you,” he said. “It's not just because I'm bad at faces. I didn't understand you went with that man to save me. That's what you did, right?
Because that would mean you didn't want to leave us. That would mean you didn't want to leave
Sean
. And everyone leaves Sean. Do you understand?”

“Dumb,” she said.

“Dumb is cutting yourself like that.”

“I save you, you save me, I save you. We save, we will again. Circles.”

“If you wanted to stay in Bone Gap, it would mean Sean was worth staying for. And he doesn't know that. But maybe you can forgive him for it?”

“No,” said Roza.

“That's fair, I guess. I don't blame you. If it's any consolation, I punched him before I came to get you.”

“Good,” Roza said. “I punch, too.”

“You already did,” said Finn. “He won't ever be the same.”

They walked in silence for some time, arms still linked, considering who wasn't the same anymore, and in what way. They had almost reached Finn's house when they heard the buzzing. Not the terrifying buzz of nightmares, not the low buzz of sleepy bees, but the buzz of the people of Bone Gap, all of whom seemed to be gathered in Finn's front yard. Jonas Apple. Charlie Valentine. Amber Hass. Miguel Cordero. Mel Willis.

Petey.

And then everyone started talking at once, voices rising in a crescendo of relief and alarm:

“There they are!”

“Oh, thank God!”

“Is that a coyote?”

“Is that a werewolf?”

“She's bleeding!”

“Her face! Oh, no! Her face!”

“Someone get a blanket!”

“Someone get them to a hospital!”

Finn and Roza walked past each person, some of them reaching out and pulling back as if they were afraid that she wasn't real, that this wasn't happening. Roza stopped to touch one of Miguel's arms, to nod at Petey.

“You were right about the bees,” Roza said.

Petey's eyes had never seemed so big. “What?”

Sean shouldered his way through the crowd, running toward Finn and Roza. He stopped short at the sight of Roza, the bloody cloth she held to her cheek. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, no.”

“Yes,” she said. She let go of Finn's arm and stepped forward. For a second, Finn worried that she was going to punch him, or tell him that she wouldn't forgive him, or scream at them all for not looking long enough or hard enough.

But she dropped the bloody cloth to the ground, took Sean's big hand in her small one and laid it on that terrible wound. “You fix.”

“We'll get you to the hospital right now. I know a doctor who—”

“No,
you
fix.”

Sean shook his head like a dog shaking off water. “I drive an ambulance, Roza, I'm not a surgeon, I'll never be a surgeon, I can't . . .”

“You love me.”

“What? I . . .”

“Is not question. You love me.”

Sean swallowed hard. “Yes.”

“I love you. Even with you so stupid.”

His mouth dropped open. Then, “Okay.”

“You fix.”

“Roza, please. I'm not . . .”

“What?”

Sean shook his head, no, no, no, just like Roza had when they'd found her in the barn. “I couldn't come for you. I didn't come for you.”

“No, you wait for me. And I come back for you. You see me. You see.”

Sean blinked—frozen, terrified—until Finn said, “Come on, brother. Let's get your bag.”

Dawn was spreading her rosy fingers in the sky when Sean finished twenty of the smallest, neatest, most careful stitches his big fingers could manage, would ever manage. It was only after he laid the curved needle on the kitchen table that his hands started to shake, then his shoulders. Finn had never seen his brother cry before and wasn't about to now. He left Sean with Roza, and
they tended to each other as they would have tended any garden, running their hands through each other's hair, as if to make something inside them both burst and bloom, whether they were ready for it or not.

Finn drew the curtains in the living room so that the people choking up the lawn wouldn't gape. Then he collapsed on the couch next to Petey. Rus, the wolf-dog-coyote, sprawled out on the carpet while Calamity Jane gave him the evil eye from the hall.

Petey said, “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Eventually.”

“You should have let Sean take a look at you, too. You're a little mangled.”

He was mangled in all sorts of ways. “Sean's in there
crying
, which, I'm sorry, is really screwed up.”

“It's like watching a superhero cry.”

“Yes! And besides, I'm stronger than I look.”

“I know,” Petey said. She bit her lip. “So if you're not going to tell me what happened to you, how about I tell you what happened to me?”

Finn was doing his best not to look at her. Looking at her hurt, and too much of his body hurt already. “Sure. Whatever.”

“It was the Rudes.”

“What was the Rudes?”

“I went to deliver some honey to the Chat 'n' Chew? And I was thinking that it was so weird that the world could keep turning. I mean, that honey would still need to be delivered and
vegetables would have to be picked and laundry would need to be done when I was so miserable.”

“You were miserable,” said Finn.

“But the world does keep turning even when you're miserable, in case you didn't know that, so I went to the Chat 'n' Chew with the honey the way I always do. And Frank Rude started in on me the way
he
always does, and you know what happened?”