Chapter 2
Two
I woke up in the water.
I stood there, motionless, a solitary figure in the tranquil embrace of the river.
Its gentle ripples tapped my arms, and low waves gulped at my thighs.
Tiny shivers like electrical currents ran up my body.
Debris, soft and shaggy, from the riverbed squished between my toes.
A muscle twitched involuntarily, and I slipped on a rock and stumbled forward, my arms shooting out to balance.
It took me one terrifying second to realize, to remember where I was and what had happened. I had done it again. I had sleepwalked.
Imagine a strange overlap between being awake and asleep, a new world superimposed over the old one, a place that’s as silent and alien as the surface of the moon.
Imagine the dullness of color, of senses, but the surety of a mission.
That’s sleepwalking; the uniqueness is in the details.
My type has always involved doors, unlocking them and moving through them.
Of feeling trapped with the urge to escape, to go somewhere, to be free.
Only I never know where that is, just that the air smells better—sweeter—elsewhere.
I was seven when I sleepwalked for the first time, when Mama first gave herself to someone other than Daddy.
The pressure of seeing and knowing, of swallowing that secret, too large.
Daddy found me outside stumbling through the woods, he said, my nightgown dirtied, my feet soiled with mud.
Months later, Mama heard me attempting to unlock the front door, the broken latch too difficult to maneuver by someone not awake.
Mama and Daddy offered no explanation; they didn’t have one.
Only the crude solution of restraint—a sock knotted around my ankle and attached to the bed frame.
Good intentions, perhaps, for a girl too young to understand such complex behavior, but I knew the truth.
Even then I knew that when we carry pain with us into the night, our bodies seek understanding while we sleep.
The confines of prison helped. There’s no walking through steel bars, no beating those locks.
Even though, over that first month, I tried.
Stress and new environments are relentless triggers to my sleepwalking.
I should have known, should have remembered, that when the bus crashed, hurling my body into chaos once again, my sleepwalking would return, haunting me even in the wake of a disaster.
The wind, an insistent hand, shook me once again, pulling me from the edge of sleep.
The frames of reality blended into focus, and the edges of the dream blurred and vanished.
I felt a shiver of disorientation, my brain filling in the gaps where memories should be.
My name is Leandra. I am safe, I whispered to myself, my mantra until I returned to the solid ground of waking life.
Then the certainty of pain anchored me. I knew I was still there, because everything hurt, and the river held too many bodies.
I waded out of the water and back onto the shore.
The sun breached the horizon, casting its golden warmth across the cloudless sky.
The narrow ravine split, one side bathed in light, the other steeped in shadow, a canvas of contrasts painted in mercurial fall hues.
October, the middle child of autumn, drastic in its extremes, demanded attention, with its temperatures swinging between summer remnants and the chill of impending winter.
My breath caught in the breeze, the South Carolina–prison uniform too thin, and now wet, against the cool morning.
Daylight unveiled the first real look at my surroundings.
Twisted metal cascaded down the ravine walls like jagged teeth.
A kaleidoscope of glass shone like diamonds littering the ground.
A row of seats dangled, a macabre streamer, from a line of canopied trees.
And yet somehow it all blended into the landscape, tucked and smashed against the rocks, as if it had always been there, belonged there, collected and accumulated as if part of nature’s decoration.
A sadness lodged all around me too. This place had claimed more than just our bus; there had been crashes here before.
Other random wreckage told me so. A child’s sock, a rusted bicycle, an old tire, all swallowed by the ravine’s hungry depths.
Five years from now, we’d be gone from easy view too.
A place lost to time and engulfed by circumstance, a forgotten dot on a map.
In that moment, my heart comprehended one truth: There would be no rescue.
With most of the bus submerged, no one would ever know we were here.
Hope lay in the road, offering signs, tire marks or a broken guardrail.
But large boulders cascaded down the ravine, obscuring clues, and smart drivers would keep their eyes on the twisting road.
Whatever was lost here would remain in the ravine’s grip.
If it was to be found, it would be by the same type of misfortune that landed us here—by accident.
I caught my reflection, warped by the river, a wild thing that only resembled a person: chestnut hair, once braided, now wild and matted; a bruised cheek caked with blood; exhausted eyes; a face empty of emotion and fear.
I wrestled with the boxy shirt, my arms wringing in pain, and shed the soiled pants.
Sunlight caught them in its glow, a fiery-orange pile against the river’s calm surface.
I cast aside my white undershirt and panties, laying them to dry against the warmth of a sunlit rock.
Nudity held no sway over me. There’s no shyness within me and no room for modesty in this wilderness.
A lesson first learned many decades ago, etched vividly in memory, sprinting through the forest barefoot with Lila, our laughter mingling with the rustling leaves as we shed our clothes like autumn foliage, toward the rushing river that beckoned us.
We were like fraternal twins, born thirteen months apart.
Our faces carried the same abundance: plump lips, a right-cheek dimple, and large oval eyes that drew others in with their gentle curves.
It happened sometimes; our faces were so alike that someone would turn their head and mistake one for the other.
We both bore Mama’s locks of naturally curly hair and the golden heat of the South Carolina sun across our shoulders, but our long limbs were like Daddy’s, pieces clearly copied from their source.
We were beautiful. In all the ways we knew and ways we didn’t.
I say this not with conceit, but with honesty.
“God blesses you one way or the other,” Daddy would say.
Beauty was our one blessing, our currency to the world. A face to look at.
I resembled Mama, tinged with Daddy’s wild spirit.
A bit untamed. Often a little dirty. Always feisty.
Eyes wide-open from birth, skeptical of the world and curious about the people within it.
Trust arrived second, after thought and consideration.
Lila embodied Mama wholly, however, undiluted and unspoiled, only better—the reason she was Mama’s favorite.
Everyone’s favorite. Polish on unblemished silver.
They floated through life carefree, as though possessing a secret map, knowing where to tread and where X marked the spot.
Mama insisted on naming her Lila; it meant beauty, and that was exactly what she embodied.
Not merely a person, but a trait, her entire essence, a thought that would ruin them both.
Lila would be everything Mama couldn’t or wouldn’t be.
And what did I want to be? Free. Even before I’d known prison.
Free from expectation, boundaries, and rules.
Free to dream. To discover. To live. To love.
All these things at the deepest depths and the highest volume.
That was Daddy’s influence working its way within me.
There was no in-between with us, no safety valve.
We did everything all or nothing. Or it could have been the influence of the ancestors.
The voices that he heard and that I heard too. Or so I thought.
All girls were prone to dreaming, Daddy said.
So I did. I had not yet known about dreams, how they were a double-edged sword.
Funny, but my dreams were of what I already knew: Water.
Sky. Flowers. Of living outside. I filled every bit of unused space and time with a vision of that life.
It didn’t feel like a bad thing at the time.
Now those visions were only in my dreams.
I plunged back into the water, freeing my hair from its braid and scrubbing dirt and blood from my skin.
In the water’s clarity, I confronted the stark realities of my body: the sharp edges of my bones, the tautness of my skin, and the flatness of my stomach.
Years in prison had taken its toll, with weight and muscle melting off me like ice in the summer sun.
But the scar—a perfect vertical line across my rib cage, the texture of dripped candle wax—remained, just as it always has.
When I ambled out of the water, I felt not refreshed but fragile and hollow with emotion.
I had no idea what to do or how to feel.
A branch snapped in the distance. The sun inched across the sky.
My hand shook. Although I couldn’t process how I felt, my body understood I should feel something.
It knew I had just survived a bus crash and there were injuries associated with it.
My physical self reminded me of that, demanded that I at least feel this—the hurt, the pain in my wrist, across my face, from my leg and ribs.