Out of The Woods (3 page)

Halley was surprised. Fernando rarely asked her questions like this, questions that invited her to speak openly. “I was thinking about us,” she said. They had stopped walking and were facing each other. The sun filtered through the trees.

“What about us?”

She couldn’t quite read his tone. “I don’t know,” she stalled.

“I was thinking about that picture of us on the dresser…you know the one?” Her hands moved as if drawing the frame of the picture in front of them. “The one I took with the tripod.” It wasn’t really a lie – she had thought about that picture earlier.

Fernando’s forehead creased. “What, the one out on Cougar Mountain? No…wait, it was in the canyon, that’s right. You led that day.” He said it like her leading was a liability. “What? What about the photo?” He seemed to see it in his mind, and his eyes softened. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I remember now.” His tone had changed. “You were so hot that day, baby…” He took a step towards her.

Halley blinked.

“You know, Halley, you’re still hot,” he said. “Still so beautiful.” His eyes pulled at her. “I love that picture; I love the way you’re looking at me in that picture.”

Halley felt as if the ground had become soft under her. It was always like this; he always won. “Oh, Fernando,” she said, looking up at him. His name felt of satin to her, the name of a Latin lover from some tropical climate. Inviting images overcame her: the taste of mangoes, ripe and in season; the passionate dance of a tango; the color red; the feel of hard muscle against her chest. Her face flushed. She found herself tumbling fast into the depths of his black eyes, which, when he wanted them to, could seem bottomless.

He took another step closer. “I love when you look like that, as if you can’t wait for it. Come here…” He nodded his chin at her and crooked the forefinger of his right hand. He smiled his devastating smile.

She started to move towards him, but her body clenched. “But you said…you said we had to hurry, that it got dark earlier now.” She couldn’t bear to be blamed again for their being late.

“No, baby, there’s time for this.” He smiled invitingly, and opened his arms. When she stood just a pace away from him, he reached out with one muscular arm and drew her tightly up against him. The feel of his solid body pressing into her was unbearably good. He held her upward gaze; they seemed to breathe as one.

* * *

It was over quickly anyway, she reflected, zipping up her combat trousers. She hadn’t even had to take off both boots.

They walked for another hour. She was thinking about the strong outward curve of Fernando’s tanned shoulders when the first sharp pain hit her. It took her by surprise, striking her right where her inner eye would be, if she had believed in such a thing as an inner eye. The pain was so sharp and so sudden that she stumbled, inadvertently bumping into Fernando’s solid back.

“What the…?” he said, turning around to face her, and at the same time taking a step back from her.

“I’m sorry. My head…” She sunk onto her knees, both hands pressed against her forehead.

“What’s the matter with you?” His tone didn’t suggest patience. “Do you need some water or something?”

Halley looked up and tried to meet his eyes, but he just slicked his away, like a car skidding on an icy highway. It made her feel like she’d simply disappeared.

Abruptly, she looked up. She could hear a baby crying, in deep distress. The pain in her head grew. The wail and the pain were insistent and pulling, but when she looked at Fernando, he seemed oddly unfazed.

“The baby…” she said.

The sound crowded her head, dragged at her. The crying was pulling at a deep place inside of her. Suddenly, she could hear another voice, that of a young girl. It was saying something over and over again, what was it?
Save the baby, save the baby, save the…

The pain in her forehead throbbed urgently.

“What baby?” He looked around with aggravation, cocking his head slightly. “I hear a bird calling, I hear some insects. I hear you…” He took a prickly breath. “Come on,” he said, gentling his voice with apparent effort. “Try. Please. For us. I need to get back. We’re at the end of the trail anyway.” He looked at her, as if unsure whether to continue. “You keep…God, Halley…why do you keep acting so crazy? What’s the matter with you?”

Her eyes were closed and she didn’t answer. He waited.

“Come on. Get up off the ground. You’re acting like a lunatic.” He bit the words out. His large hand reached down to help her up.

Her eyes opened and she stared at his hand, overcome by a strong sense of déjà vu.

This scene had played out before, somewhere in her past. The world was suddenly unstable and shifting. Time was no longer a straight line. She had the sensation of falling, of tumbling off the very earth on which she knelt. She closed her eyes and the vividness of the seeming memory swept her away:

She had taken his hand; he had pulled her to her feet. With effort she had forced herself to numb her feelings, to dismiss the cry of the baby. A moment later, she had let him lead her out of the woods.

Her eyes opened, and the feeling of déjà vu vanished.

A new feeling replaced it: utter despair. For she could see her life stretched out before her. Empty; aching. In that other lifetime, she had followed Fernando down a path which was not her own. That path was littered with what-never-would-be’s: the centering love of another; a sense of self-assurance; the feel in her hand of the tiny hand of a child; a long life filled with purpose and meaning. All this, she had lost. She had followed Fernando one last time, and that one last time was the point around which the rest of her life pivoted.

She could see it all with great clarity. Their relationship wouldn’t work; in the end, he would leave her, and the Halley he would leave would be too damaged to ever love again. In some strange, parallel universe, her whole life had already played out. She had made the wrong choice, and from this choice, disaster had followed.

But it didn’t have to be this way.

“A new place to begin,” she whispered, looking up.

“
What?
” Fernando said, his forehead wrinkling.

“This is my new place to begin.”

Rising without his help, she experienced a sudden clarity. The leaves on the trees were more defined than usual, their individual veins appearing as finely crafted lines; a single bird cried; a musky pine scent permeated the air; even her skin felt more finely tuned.

Fernando, in contrast, had faded. He seemed to have become subtly porous, as if she could feel the slight breeze pass through the infinitesimal spaces between his cells. He was suddenly less relevant.

“I won’t follow you. I have to find the baby. I have to save him.”

He blew out a hard breath. “You’re crazy! There’s no baby – I told you – if it’s anything, it’s a goddamned bird.” His impatience got the better of him; he let the word
goddamned
draw itself out long and sinewy, and then snapped it at her like a whip.

But even as he spoke, the keening grew louder, more a wail now than a cry. It couldn’t be ignored; it was like the whine of a manual car stuck between gears. The urge to make it stop was unbearable.

He stared at her through his suddenly solid black eyes. “It’s the end of the trail. I’m not wasting my time looking for some imaginary baby lost in the woods. I’m going back to the car, Sparrow. You can do what you want.” His eyes dared her.

He stepped around Halley, and began walking the path back towards the car.

Halley watched the shape of his back as he walked away. She watched, and she forced herself not to follow. It was strange that even at a great distance he still looked tall, like a leader. He turned the corner and the trail’s vast and sudden emptiness made her throat hurt.
Oh My God Oh My God Oh My God.
The force it took to keep herself from following him made her gasp aloud; it was as if he were pulling her innards out along the trail behind him.

He hadn’t looked back. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t looked back.

Time passed. The trail remained empty.

Looking up at the sky with closed eyes, fighting back tears, she pressed her palms together with fingers interleaved as if in prayer. She tried to breathe. The blood pounded in her clenched fingers and the hollow between her palms grew warm. After a long while, she opened her eyes. She turned around, away from the empty trail where Fernando had been.

She stood at the end of the long straight trail, staring hard at the trackless wilderness before her, at the close-knit forest. It was a terrible place for the trail to end. She was alone; afraid to move; with no idea of where she should go next. It was a crossroads-without-a-crossroads.

Shaking slightly, she felt Fernando, felt each step he took away from her pull at her body. She stared straight ahead. Silence; stillness. Even the air hung quiet, the clouds immobile, as if stuck, waiting for her move, her choice.

She couldn’t go back; she couldn’t follow Fernando any longer. That was not her path. Though the crying had stopped, she knew the baby she had heard was real, that it was alone, that it needed her help. No one else could save it. She didn’t know how she knew; she just did. There was no turning back.

In her loneliness and desperation, she asked herself pointed questions aloud. “Where do I go next? How do I find this baby by myself? Out here in this wilderness, full of thorny things and sharp teeth. How do I carve a trail, alone?”

She looked outwards for wisdom. None was forthcoming. To be at the end of a trail, without a crossroads, alone; to discover that she had been heading the wrong way, following the wrong guide, for quite some time; to have an urgent, illogical need to save a baby she heard crying in the woods, and to be unsure how.

The “next” was unclear, but in the “now”, the storm clouds broke open, and rain began to fall, pricking her exposed skin mercilessly, chilling her in her stasis. Freezing her to the spot.

“Which way, which way?” she said to herself, urgency in her voice. She willed a leader, other than herself; she willed a hero. A hero would find the way, would take charge, and would save this baby.

The first step off the trail. She took it.

And fell, headlong down a steep hillside, tumbling, rolling, moving. And the thing was, the bruises and thorns didn’t hurt as much as the staying over long, as the following the wrong guide. She was off. She was begun.

The rain stopped as quickly as it had begun. In some more civilized place, the end of rain might have left silence in its wake, but here in the woods it did not: when she stopped falling, the first thing Halley noticed was the incessant, battering noise.

The woods aren’t like people think,
she reflected, trying to catch her breath.
There’s no silence in the woods, no peace.

All around her were whispers, chattering, the thick rustle of insects burrowing under piles of dried-out leaves. An orange and black millipede moved its legs on a nearby tree – Halley imagined even this tiny movement was adding to the chaotic noise that surrounded her. It strummed itself higher up the tree, its bright skin in sharp contrast to the grey of the tree trunk. Bird calls resounded, high pitched screeching that shocked her senses. Each call was different, as if there were no two birds alike in these entire woods. Water roared over rocks in a hidden riverbed, terrible in its power.

Without warning, a black snake slid out from the surrounding undergrowth, slipping quickly in front of her. It was so fast that she didn’t see its head, only the length of its long black back, skimming over the dirt. It didn’t pause, and her startled scream lasted exactly as long as it took for the snake to slide its length by her, and move off into the undergrowth.

Her scream had been unearthly – it was not so much a scream as a subtle unraveling of her voice. She felt a cold sweat begin: she had not expected snakes in these woods. There were no snakes anywhere near where they lived. She’d never seen a snake move so fast. To what far away place had Fernando brought her?

She imagined snakes all around her, poised, ready to strike. Curling her body in, she sat on her haunches and tried to keep her limbs close. A scrambling sound next to her made her jump, made her think snake! but when she focused on the spot where the sound had come from, she saw only a crow, picking its way carefully in the scrub. It was a glossy, cool-looking thing, its eyes piercing as they darted about.

Near the crow, she noticed her pack. It must have been dragged off during the roll down the hillside. She must retrieve it. But she stared at the pack without moving, thinking only of how very far away it seemed. Even this small distance was insurmountable; it was impossible to imagine traversing the whole forest alone. Hardening her belly, she stood up, and took an un-steady step forward. The crow, seeing the movement, let loose a shriek that filled the forest. It took wing.

Halley’s hands were trembling as she grabbed the backpack and sat back down quickly, under a tall, thin tree. She hugged the pack into her belly, as the enormity of what she had done began to sink in.

She was alone. She was deep in the woods, possibly lost, and was not even sure why she was here. The baby she’d come to save was completely silent, and this left a strangely filling emptiness. Was Fernando right? Had she just made up the baby? Or was it simply too late to save her? This last thought stunned her. She sensed the loss of an irretrievable treasure, like a fire that burned a lifetime’s worth of family photographs.

A sharp crackle of leaves snapped Halley from her reverie – the snake had made a lunge towards the crow! Without thinking, Halley screamed “NO!” and it was only Halley’s loud shout that allowed the bird to flutter away, leaving the snake with a mouthful of long, black tail feathers. After she screamed the word she was confused – why would she care whether the snake ate the crow? Why would she care enough to try to prevent it?

A sudden picture formed in Halley’s mind, as if in answer. It was a picture of her, stretched out still and motionless – pale as skim milk. She shivered violently. As if it were her own death she had foreseen. As if her shout had been to save herself. Bile rose in her throat, choking her, and she was desperate to get up and move, run away.

She was afraid to get up though, and not just because of the snake; she was afraid of herself. If she got up at this moment, her treacherous limbs would follow Fernando right out of the woods, right back to him.
It’s so much easier to follow him, even if it’s down the wrong path
, even after all the pain. To stop herself, she made a quick bargain; she would not leave this spot until she was sure she could force herself not to turn back.

In her self-imposed stillness, she sat and fingered the weathered canvas of her backpack, staring at its blackness. Fernando had given her the bag two years ago. “Your bag is the wrong kind,” he’d said. Said it kindly enough, this was true, and only after first asking whether he could “tell her something personal”. She’d been honoured by the question, had gone warm at the word “personal”. She’d had no idea.

Each time she’d picked up this “gift” of Fernando’s she’d had a feeling of ineptness. She had carried her old bag for years – had it been “wrong” all that time? Had everyone known but her?

The chill in the air brought her back to the present. Unzipping the backpack, she pulled out her long-sleeved t-shirt. It was still damp with sweat but it would have to do. She shrugged it on, and tied the windbreaker around her waist. The action engaged her mind, and she was able to think about what to do next. She must figure out her whereabouts, she knew, before she moved away from her last known position.

Feeling around inside the pack, she let her fingers explore the familiar objects: food, sealed in plastic bags; water canteen; slim sunglass case; insect spray. She shoved the objects around, growing more and more uneasy. Where was it? Where was the map? She picked the backpack up and peered inside, looking for the familiar green and grey shadin
g. I’m just panicking. It’s got to be there. I put it in myself.
Taking out the objects one by one, she laid them in the space between her knees. When the bag was empty, she sat for a long time, staring at the contents spread before her. No map. She thought of her compass in the small zip compartment in the front of the bag but she knew even before she looked – it too was gone. In her mind’s eye, she watched Fernando at the back of their car earlier that day, rearranging the packs.
He took them out. He took out my map and compass
. She imagined what he had said to himself, “Sparrow won’t need this. I’m going to lead.”

“Goddamn him!”

With a sudden, unexpected fury she threw the black backpack from her, watching it fall in a long arch, hearing the quick crack of leaves and branches when it landed. It was a reckless thing to do, but she was so sick of how the backpack made her feel, sick of the subtle message of her incompetence that it carried. It was the same message signalled by Fernando’s removal of her map and compass, and it was infuriating. It was just like him, deciding for her what she needed.

The combat trousers had lots of pockets; they would hold everything she had to carry. The insect spray and sunglass case would fit nicely in the left side pocket, and the canteen could be strapped over her back. She ate the apple and the cheese from the food supply, and tucked the sealed zip-lock bag with energy bars and dried fruit and nuts into her right side pocket. The absence of the backpack on her shoulders was agreeable; it allowed her chest to lift and her shoulders to move down and back. She rolled her shoulders around, enjoying the feeling.

It was when she lifted her gaze again to the broader landscape that the truth came back, and it was like someone had punched her in the stomach. The woods were so vast. The aftertaste of the cheese on her tongue turned rancid. She’d never been here before – she didn’t even know where she was. How could she find her way alone, without her map and compass?

She swallowed; there was more to it than that.

How could she go on, without Fernando? Her breath caught in her throat. His going sat there in her belly, and the apple she’d eaten turned to a heavy stone of grief that left room for nothing else. When he’d walked off, he had taken the solidity of her core with him and replaced it with this unbearable, hollowing weight.

She leaned back against the thin tree and dropped her head into her arms. Her grief overflowed, pouring from her in wracking sobs. The pain made her whole body shake and was vast enough to fill the entire forest. It was the pain of letting him go, but it was also the harder to bear pain of taking herself back.

As she sat sobbing, a strange burning sensation began to move through her body. A condemning light was blazing into all her darkest places. Moving inside her; then intruding into her, slipping into crevices she had long closed off, had forgotten were there. Without Fernando to hide behind, she was fully exposed to herself, and she couldn’t bear what she saw. Clenching her jaw, she made tight fists of her hands, her fingernails digging her palms.

Goddammit! It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. I want to make it stop and make it better and I want to go back to him and I know I can’t because he doesn’t even really exist not the way I want him to but it hurts so and I’m so afraid and it’s so dark here and so dark inside and so not-quiet and the snake and what do I do next and…

She sucked at the air, and her body shook. The leaves in the smaller branches of the tree shook with her, crackling and rustling, as if absorbing the force of her distress.

The crow hopped back, unnoticed. In its beak, tightly, it held a small scrap of paper. Old, worn, the writing on it faded, but still legible. It dropped the bit of paper next to Halley, and hopped backwards, head cocked to one side.

When Halley finally lifted her head, her neck felt stiff and tight. Her whole body hurt. Inside her felt empty, scoured out. It took a few moments for the forest floor to come back into focus, and when it did, she stared numbly at a single black feather. She picked it up and turned it over and over, running her forefinger along its edge, feeling the soft serrations. It was comforting. She tucked the black feather into an inner pocket, zipping it for safe-keeping.

When she looked back at the forest floor, she noticed a graying piece of paper. She picked it up. It was faded, hard to read. She studied it carefully.

You will be all right

She just had time to decipher it when a sudden wind lifted the bit of paper high into the air, and carried it away.

Getting to her feet, Halley let the words settle into her. You will be all right. In them, she felt a breath of hope. Brushing the leaves off her chest and arms, she took a deep breath, and gently moved her limbs about. While they were stiff and probably bruised from her fall, nothing was broken. That was something anyway.

With courage she did not feel, she began to walk. If the baby was here, she was going to find it. It would be near a trail. That was all she had to go on. But first, she had to find a trail.

Trance fought to stay still. What luck! He could hardly believe it. She had come here to begin again, of all places. Here! He allowed himself a quiet smile. Save the baby; as if she could. She couldn’t even save herself.

He pictured the car underwater. All their lives depended on her. And he knew she’d never do it, never save them. She’d not done one heroic thing in her entire life.

Oh, she would die. They would all die. He would see to that. But first, he would have a little fun with her.