Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-Five
BEAR CREEK LODGE
PRESENT DAY
UNCLE RICKY IS SITTING ON the edge of the hearth by the fireplace, his bad knee extended rigid, stoking the dying orange logs with hard stabs of the poker. A spray of sparks soars over his head like fireflies. The fire is almost out.
“What you gonna do, Johnny?” Uncle Ricky asks.
I’ll get more wood, Johnny tries to say, but his lips won’t pull apart.
When the sparks circling Uncle Ricky fan throughout the living room in Mazelle’s lodge, floating stardust, Johnny remembers that Uncle Ricky is dead.
Is this a ghost, or is he dreaming? Johnny’s head hurts. The pain feels bad enough to bleed.
Uncle Ricky turns to look at him over his shoulder.
He nudges his black suede cowboy hat away from his eyes, the same hat he wore when he picked Johnny up from the airport in Redding when he was thirteen.
This is the same hat and old army jacket that had fooled Johnny into thinking Uncle Ricky had been to Vietnam—except he got a pass because his mother smashed up his lucky knee.
Uncle Ricky has razor stubble and large, dark razor bumps dotting his cheeks.
Johnny had forgotten those bumps. As a kid, he was afraid his face would be marred by the same blemishes one day. Like his arm.
“Am I dead?” he whispers to Uncle Ricky.
“You tell me,” Uncle Ricky says. “Are you?”
“I’m not dead,” Johnny says. He sounds surer than he is.
“Then get your ass up.”
Johnny doesn’t want to get up from where he’s lying on the sofa bed with both shoes on, the soles muddied, staining the blanket. He has urgent questions for Uncle Ricky, but now he can’t remember what. Something about Mazelle and her back porch. Something about the snow.
As Johnny fights for the elusive memory, new pain smothers him, far more agonizing than the throbbing (from where you bumped your head on the road).
Johnny sat up with a long gasp as his body fought for wakefulness before his mind was ready. Uncle Ricky was nowhere in sight. No sparks were flying from the ash of the fireplace. As he had suspected, he’d been dreaming.
He wasn’t on the sofa either—he was staring at the decorative cedar beams crisscrossing the ceiling.
He had been lying on the floor long enough to be sore from the wooden planks.
His left side ached from his neck to his knee.
And the back of his head bayed like an air-raid siren.
The room pitched around Johnny as he tried to sit up and steady himself with locked arms. Why was he on the floor? And why was his head—
Johnny brushed his hand against the back of his head and released a cry of pain amplified by fear when he saw his fingertips damp with his blood. He tried to stand so quickly that his dizziness toppled him across the nearest chair, where Tasha’s plum-colored down jacket lay.
But if Tasha was outside in the cold, why had she left her jacket? She would need her jacket now that—that—
“No,” Johnny said, a panicked reflex, trying to dam away his memories. But one bled through. (You’re not sore from the floor. You’re sore from the road.)
“No… no… no…” Johnny whispered, trying to hold back the tide of memories ready to sweep him to misery. The blizzard of nothingness shrouding him thinned long enough for him to feel the misty, terrifying edges of what he couldn’t yet see.
“John Richard Washington,” Johnny said, reciting his name. He had that, at least. His wife was Tasha. His daughters were Imani and Sharise. His mother was Sadie. If that was all he ever remembered, that was all he needed. Not the rest. Not now. Maybe not ever.
He had hurt his head. That was it. He had a concussion. No sense in panicking until he had a chance to recover, especially since he couldn’t remember what he was panicking about.
“Wrap your head,” Johnny told himself aloud, mimicking control.
Johnny had grown up watching Emergency! after school—proudly noting that one of the star paramedics, Johnny Gage (played by the inimitable Randolph Mantooth) shared a nickname with him—so he knew that much.
Maybe if he wrapped his head, his concussed mind reasoned, he wouldn’t be afraid of his memories. At least he could stop his bleeding.
Johnny discovered that he had stumbled into the kitchen, standing over the sink with the faucet running so hard into the aluminum basin that it splashed his jacket.
He turned the faucet’s flow down and congratulated himself for his coordination during this effort.
As he stared toward the floor, the black-and-white tiles careened until he closed his eyes, clinging to the sink to stay on his feet.
He couldn’t faint. He had to wrap his head.
Why had he turned on the sink? Johnny puzzled over that for long seconds, until he saw the paper towels and decided he must have wanted to wash his wound.
His hands weren’t steady, but he was glad to focus on something he could do.
Wrapping his head might fix his thinking, and he would clean it before he wrapped it.
The wet paper towel he pressed to the back of his head stung like acid.
Johnny yowled. Blood spotted the paper towel, but the bleeding wasn’t as bad as it felt.
He dizzied himself again when he bent over to open the cabinet under the sink to find the first aid kit.
The bright red cross on the blue plastic case was like a Bat-Signal, so he pulled out the kit and fumbled with the tabs until he emptied its contents across the counter.
His fingers raced through Band-Aids and tweezers until he found gauze and wrapping tape.
Gauze first. Johnny wrapped his head until he’d used the entire strip, and he clumsily tucked the end near his forehead before he wrapped it with the tape. He must have looked like a mummy. This task, like wetting the paper towel, calmed him with its ease.
He was doing this, so he must be fine. He would be fine.
An hour might have passed. Or five minutes.
Johnny wasn’t sure. But he was wrapping his injury the way Johnny Gage would.
10-4, Rampart, patient’s wound is dressed.
No, we won’t administer MS because it’s a head injury, Rampart, but we will transport as soon as possible.
Transport. That word made Johnny lean harder against the sink.
Maybe it was working—maybe wrapping his head was healing his memories?
Why else was his heart hammering his entire body so hard that his knees were weak?
But remembering hurt. Johnny sobbed in anticipation, since he wasn’t allowing himself to remember.
He thought about splashing his face with the water, but instead he scooped handfuls of it to his mouth and drank to relieve his parched throat.
Where was the minivan? He could see out the kitchen window, and he thought he’d left the minivan parked there in front of the cabins.
(Except we didn’t bring the minivan here.
We rented a RAV.) The blizzard in Johnny’s head returned as waves of tremors overtook his limbs.
Remembering the word RAV had felt like another blow to the head.
Leaning on the kitchen table for support, then the doorway, Johnny made his way back to the living room.
He wanted to be near Tasha’s jacket—for some reason, he’d been afraid it was gone, but it still lay across the chair.
Johnny hugged the jacket to his chest with both arms crossed before he sank down on the sofa bed’s thin mattress, where he had been sleeping in his dream.
The jacket collar was slightly discolored from her makeup where it rubbed her cheek, and it smelled like the coconut oil in her hair. The scent made Johnny sob again.
He might have sat there for an hour. Or five minutes. Johnny didn’t know.
But he finally noticed a small piece of paper on the floor beside the bloodstained blanket where he had been sleeping. It looked deliberately posed. Waiting.
Johnny drew in a loud breath sodden with tears.
Still holding his wife’s jacket, he forced himself to his feet until he allowed his legs to fold and sink, sink down through the floor, a million miles through space like in Get Out.
He should be close enough to the note to read it without touching it or picking it up—it felt dangerous, so even now he wanted distance from it—but the writing was blurry.
Johnny tested his eyesight—right eye, left eye—and realized his right contact lens had fallen out.
Had he brought his (Emergency!) eyeglasses?
Where had he left his contacts case with his spares?
Johnny reached for the note. Sharise’s handwriting was more jittery than usual, but it bloomed into perfect focus. We’re following the trail to find Mom. Get help!!!
Nine words. For a long moment, all he saw was one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine words.
He recounted once more, just to be sure.
His lips were shaking too hard to count aloud, so he counted in his head.
He couldn’t make sense of the words. Why was Tasha on a hiking trail without her jacket?
“Sharise!” he called out so she could explain her note better.
The empty house sat silent.
Johnny was sure that if he hadn’t wrapped his head so tightly, his brain might have melted by now from this aching. The ache of knowing. The ache of not knowing.
Something made Johnny look up. A presence.
Uncle Ricky was leaning against the hallway wall between the living room and kitchen with one boot propped against the cedar planks in a way he never would have dared in his mother’s sight.
He still wore his cowboy hat, standing directly across from Mazelle’s framed movie poster from Lazy Mazy Goes to New York.
Uncle Ricky took a long hit on his fat joint.
Johnny decided he would accept guidance from the living or the dead.
“This note doesn’t make any sense, Uncle Ricky,” Johnny said like a whiny child. “She says they’re ‘following the trail.’ What trail?” His heart pulsed in his throat with chopping beats.