Chapter 9
9
A scream echoes off the rocks—strangled and wild. Then I realize. It came out of me. The thought breaks whatever gravity roots me in place.
I run forward, then stop. The woman’s body—I can tell it’s a woman, even through the mask of blood—lies in a few inches of water. You’re not supposed to move people with a head injury, or is that a spinal injury? If she fell off the cliff, it could be both. Though I’m not sure that rule applies when they’re lying in freezing water.
The woman’s jacket is lumpy and dark where water has soaked through. Below, a sliver of jeans, white socks, water lapping against brown boots. You could almost believe it’s just a bundle of clothes except for the pale hand floating in the water, fingers curled. And the face. Oh God, her face.
She must have hit her head on the rocks when she fell. One side of her skull looks caved in. Blood is everywhere. In the deep wrinkles around her eyes that are open and staring at nothing, coating the wisps of white hair poking out from under her hat. Threads of blood run from her body into the water and disappear.
She’s dead. I’m sure she’s dead. But I have to check. I pull off my gloves. My fingers scrabble through her layers of clothing like some scavenger searching for the meat. No pulse, or maybe my hands are just numb. Her skin is warm. It feels good. My stomach heaves and I turn my head away to vomit.
A twig snaps. I stagger to my feet, still wiping threads of saliva from my chin, and scan the pines above me. Some of them are fifty feet tall, but lean over, clinging to the rocks with exposed roots. They’ve probably grown that way for a hundred years, but they still look like they might crush me any second.
“Hello?” I call, but my voice is a whisper. I try again. Louder this time. “Is someone there? I need help!”
Some distant part of my brain sends off warning signals. I’m miles away from the nearest road. I’ve been standing in freezing water. I’m wearing leggings and sneakers. I’m pretty sure this woman is dead. I’m the one who’s in danger now. I fumble the phone out of my pocket and can’t believe it when I see one bar of service. I dial 911. Seconds of eternal silence. Come on. Come on.
Then a voice answers. “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” He sounds young and cheerful. I want to dig my claws into that voice, cling to it.
“Help.” My words are slurred. I sound drunk. “I need help.”
Somehow I manage to explain where I am and what’s happened. Don’t move her, the operator says, and walks me through CPR. I can’t do this, I think. But I must have said it out loud because the operator is saying yes you can and assures me that help is on the way. Hang on, he says. Fifteen minutes. But by then, his voice is cutting out. And the line goes dead.
Fifteen minutes. It isn’t long, considering.
It’s an eternity.
The woman’s eyes stare at me. The water around her is pink with blood. I notice a rock near her head the size of a grapefruit. It’s covered in blood and chunks of something I don’t look at too closely.
Chest compressions only, the operator had said. Something about spinal cord injury. I felt relieved—I can’t imagine putting my mouth on hers where the blood is drying to brown. A wash of guilt, for being disgusted, for being alive while she is dead.
I kneel in the freezing water and fold my hands together. I begin chest compressions.
For some reason, I think of this old woman from my neighborhood in Brooklyn. This tiny, hunched figure always pushing a wheeled cart full of things that seemed unrelated. An onion, a potholder, a jar of jelly. But she was always dressed beautifully in wool suits or silk dresses. Seeing her made me embarrassed to be out in sweatpants. But I felt sorry for her too. For all old people and their dignified decay. Or maybe I was just feeling sorry for my future self.
The woman’s bones give beneath the pressure of my hands. A regular thunk thunk thunk echoes through the cove. A woodpecker slamming its head against a tree. I think again of the sounds I’d heard right after the scream. The scrape. The thunk. Different than any other sounds in the woods. The way they’d gone silent when I called for help and then accelerated.
Someone else was here.
Lights bob in the trees, followed by the crackle of static. Blue uniforms appear above me on the rocks. I try to get up, but my legs aren’t working. “Down here!” I call. The EMT jogs down the stairs, blonde ponytail swinging. Then suddenly she’s there, taking my wrist in her hand, leading me away. “Can you tell me your name?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I mean, yes, but it’s not me that’s hurt, it’s—”
I don’t finish. Another EMT is already kneeling beside the woman, and calling to his partner. Airway, pulse, eye movement, motor response—negative, negative, negative. Something the opposite of adrenaline courses through me. The feeling of responsibility leaving my body.
Ponytail joins her partner at the water’s edge. They unzip the woman’s jacket to reveal a flannel shirt, then rip that open too. Buttons plink into the water. I tamp down the urge to pick them up. Beneath is a plain white cotton bra and the pale, spotted skin of an old woman. I turn away.
Ponytail inspects the head injury with gentle fingers. Her partner lifts the woman’s limp wrist, where a silver bracelet dangles in the water. “DNR,” he says.
“What does that mean?” I ask. Or try to. My lips refuse to cooperate and form words.
The EMTs turn toward me and rise, as if they’re one creature. Then they’re surrounding me, hands everywhere, feeling my wrist, my neck, wrapping a blanket around me. I want to slap them away, those fingers coated in death.
“I’m fine,” I say. They’d just left the woman there, lying on the ground. The blood on her face has dried to rust, nearly the same color as the rocks. “You can’t just leave her there.”
There’s a beep in my ear. “Ninety-two point four,” says Ponytail. She shines a light in my eyes.
“You have to help her,” I say.
“She has a DNR bracelet,” says the partner. His orange hat is pulled low over his eyes, so only his nose sticks out. “Do not resuscitate, which means no CPR.”
“Even if you’re pushed off a cliff?”
I don’t mean it to come out like that—angry and unhinged. They exchange a look. The high wail of sirens comes from the woods.
“There was someone else here,” I say, but a motor roaring drowns out my voice.
“We need another blanket,” says Ponytail. “And the warmers from the kit. What’s your name?”
“Alex.”
“Okay, Alex. You’re moderately hypothermic and possibly in shock. We’re going to warm you up and get you out of here.”
I nod, though the idea of walking feels absurd when I can’t feel my feet. Her partner returns with something that looks like a giant piece of tinfoil and wraps one around my legs, another around my shoulders. He offers two small papery packets, already giving off a chemical warmth. I press them against my face. The heat feels like coming back to life. I sit and he helps put two more in my shoes.
Both their radios crackle. Then the world explodes. A boat roars into the cove just as a line of police officers appear on the trail above us. They swarm the beach like ants in uniform, all of them shouting to each other or into their radios. When I look up, my medics have been swallowed by the chaos. I can’t see the old woman’s body anymore.
“Alex.”
My head snaps up. One of the officers crouches beside me.
“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
His face comes into focus—the long nose, the startling eyes with their golden centers. My stomach sinks. Not here. Not today.
He clears his throat. “It’s Parker,” he says. “Russell Parker. We met before.”
If everything wasn’t so awful, I might have laughed. “Yeah,” I say. “I remember.”
Parker unfurls a dark bundle of cloth in his arms. A jacket.
“Here,” he says. “I had an extra in my car and thought you might need it.” He holds it up so I can slip my arms into the flannel-lined canvas. It’s so heavy, it feels like a hug.
“One more thing.”
I catch the smell of pine and sweat as he reaches into the pocket for something. “Coffee.” He holds up a metal thermos. “It’s hot. I haven’t touched it yet, if you want some.”
And God, do I ever want some. I nod and he pours the hot, dark liquid into the lid. The first sip sears my throat. I take another. “Thank you,” I say.
My arms and legs have turned to sandbags. I wonder if I’m going to faint or something else embarrassing.
“Are you all right?” Parker’s face is all frown. “Never mind. Stupid question. Let’s get you out of here. Do you think you can walk? My cruiser is parked about a half mile back.” He looks at me, doubtful. “Or they can take you in the boat.”
“The boat?” I picture the solid ice across the harbor, the tiny ice-fishing huts dotting the surface. “But it’s frozen.”
“Only south of Rock Point,” he says. “It’s still open water to the north, for now. There’s a coast guard station on Grand Isle and they can drive you back to town from there.”
I think of being surrounded by all that water with the freezing wind roaring around me. “I can walk.”
“One minute,” Parker says and disappears into the throng.
I don’t want to look at the body. But when someone says don’t think about elephants, suddenly it’s the only thing on your mind. Then the officers part and the body is gone. I imagine the old woman sitting up, medics sponging the blood from her face. Maybe we made a mistake. Then I see the long black bag lying at the edge of the water.
Parker reappears. “The medics cleared you. My car is closer than their rig. But I promised we’d go straight to the ED if you showed any more symptoms of hypothermia. You sure you’re okay to walk?”
I nod. All I want is to be somewhere warm. Somewhere not here. I trudge after him.
At the top of the stairs, an officer wraps yellow caution tape around the slender trunk of a birch. He nods at us as we pass. I turn back to take in the cove, now below us. The ledges of red rocks crowned with green pines. The body bag surrounded by dark-suited officers like mourners at a funeral. Then I look directly down at the shallow water beneath the stairs. I’m standing right where she must have stood. Maybe twenty feet down. I feel a hand on my arm.
“Careful,” Parker says.
I take a step back, away from the edge. He lets go.
“Could falling really do that?” I ask. It doesn’t feel high enough.
He’s silent for long enough that I’m not sure he heard me. “The rocks are slippery,” he says, finally. “And it’s high enough that a fall—if you hit your head just right—could do real damage.”
“There was someone else here,” I say.
He looks at me sharply. “You saw someone?”
I shake my head. “No. I—I heard something.” It sounds feeble.
“We’ll know more soon,” he says. “Come on, the car isn’t far. We’ll blast the heat.”
The trail is a slushy mess of bootprints and disturbed earth. “This way,” Parker says, guiding us down an offshoot trail. I can feel him there beside me—arm held out a few inches from his body, fingers spread—to catch me if I stumble.