Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
PRESENT DAY
DARKNESS.
The dark was so thick that Tasha couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed. She fanned her face, lightly touching her eyelids, revisiting herself. As a child, she had imagined Hell as the fires foretold in the stories, but that felt foolish now. Hell was the cold, unrelenting dark.
She shrieked for help; to feel her own existence, to stanch her Unbecoming.
The sound of her voice mocked her in fragmented echoes, distant and distorted.
But the need to hear herself was more irrepressible than her fear of teeth, claws, and fur, or more of the endless dragging that had jolted and dizzied her so much that she nearly choked on her own vomit.
No, not dragging—she could not have survived that.
Her skin rarely had touched the snow while she was swaddled.
She had kicked out her left foot once when she felt the movement slow, instinct driving her to try to break from the tight cocoon, but she had screamed from the pain of the hard world outside, instantly drawing her damaged foot back inside.
Beyond the cocoon lay solid trees and stones and biting cold.
Finally, the motion had rocked her silent when she could scream no more. Then the blackness was everything.
Unseen twigs crunched beneath Tasha when she moved.
Her left foot stabbed her with vicious complaints, but she didn’t shriek again despite pain that felt like bones carving through her skin.
She slid her hand beneath the band of her sweatpants, past her underwear, across her thin thatch of hair to probe herself for blood between her legs.
Year after year, trying to conceive Imani, she had lived in fear of waking to blood in her underwear.
Or on the tissue. Or in the toilet. Blood was the gatekeeper between life and death, joy and tragedy.
She didn’t feel blood or moisture. When she raised her finger to her nose to sniff it, to taste it, she detected dirt and perspiration, but no coppery tang. Barely any scent in this cold. She had not lost the baby from the shock of her passage.
She might be in this pit of unseeing and silence, but she was real—and her baby was inside her. Ethereal grace broke her terror with a single, faraway voice.
“Mom?”
The first time she heard the voice, Tasha assumed it was a lie; her imagination granting her embryo speech, not just a cherub’s face.
But the next voice, though barely more than an echo, was strong enough to carve through the pitch like human touch. “We’re here! Tasha, we’re right here!”
“Johnny?” she called back.
How could this be? She heard all three of them—Johnny, Imani, and Sharise—in a flurry of celebration.
(Too loud, she thought. Don’t be so loud.) Were they somewhere enfolded in this darkness too?
Her biggest terror during each twist and turn of her long journey had been that no one would find her.
But her solace had been believing the rest of her family was safely away.
“Tasha—tell me anything you…” Johnny’s next words were too faint, lost, until his voice strengthened again. “… where you are!”
She sat upright. Her life still lay intact somewhere beyond this darkness. Her heartbeat, subdued before, animated in her breast.
Movement made Tasha notice her body’s shivering.
The fur collar of Mazelle’s robe comforted her skin, but the rest of the robe was so sheer that her only protection from the cold were the sweatshirt and sweatpants she had slept in.
Her bare left foot was probably colder, but she didn’t notice the cold as much as the pain.
Or maybe the pain was muted by the cold.
She leaned over to touch her left toes. They were frozen ice.
Only her fingertips confirmed that they were still intact, not greased with blood.
When she told her brain to wiggle her toes, they remained rigid, unmoving.
But when her fingers skated across her left ankle, electric pain jolted through her. She suppressed a cry. Shit.
She tried to forget her pain by remembering Johnny’s question: Where was she?
Something small clattered near her when she moved, a sound she thought she recognized.
Tentatively, she patted the space around her.
This dark triggered vertigo, as if she were high on a ledge and would tumble down if she moved too far.
She felt twigs, crumpled paper, fabrics. Was she on a makeshift bed?
There. Her fingers landed on something hard and cold.
Small enough to clasp. Her phone! Her thoughts reeled at the impossibility of finding her phone here, in a place she didn’t know and couldn’t see, but she’d grabbed it that morning and shoved it…
Where? In her sweatshirt pocket? It was only now falling out because she’d been wrapped so tight before by…
That thing. She gasped. Was it still with her here now?
Tasha hadn’t permitted that question in the not-real blanket of darkness, but even the light from her phone’s home screen was enough to show a rough cavern wall beside her and orient her to reality.
With shaky fingers, she pawed at her screen to try to trigger the flashlight icon; Imani always teased her for fumbling to turn on her flashlight, but this time the light glared on with shocking clarity.
As she’d guessed, she was on a large bed of twigs and moss tangled in white fur.
Dear Lord, is this its nest? Woven in the twigs and soft pine needles were scraps of old paper, and fabrics that look like clothing.
A woman’s sweater? Was this a green evening gown crumpled and stained beside her?
Despite its age and condition, the gown glittered in her strong beam.
“Tasha!” Johnny’s voice called again from the void. “Is it near you?”
Tasha quickly swept the space with her light to make sure the giant was not leering at her. The cavern was wide, vanishing to darkness beyond her flashlight’s circle of reach, but she was in a smaller nook in a corner. Yes—a nest! This must be where it slept.
But nothing moved in her wavering flashlight beam. Craggy, dark walls all around.
She shined her light toward the voices behind her.
Was the passage to them somewhere beneath the mass of twigs and pine needles?
She dug through the nest, and her sudden movement dragged her left foot against a sharp twig, making her fight a cry of pain.
Her ankle was broken, or her foot, or both.
She must have shattered her foot against a tree when she poked it out beyond the safety of the giant’s cocoon.
The pain was so sharp and sudden that Tasha’s eyesight faded to brown. She gasped in a deep breath.
“No—I’m in a cavern!” she shouted, trying to ignore the pain. “Some kind of nest!”
But why hadn’t she heard any other voices? Was her family trying to mount a rescue alone? Like her, they probably didn’t have a cell phone signal. Had they followed her? Why in the everlasting world would Johnny bring the girls with him to find her?
“Just get them away from it!” she shrieked.
Her horror emerged as a wave of rage. “Johnny, get the girls away! Go get help!” Did she have to be the anchor of common sense even now?
The next time she saw Johnny, she would slap his face.
If something happened to her today and she became a ghost, she would never stop haunting him if her babies got hurt.
The joy she’d felt when she first heard their voices melted into helpless tears. Too many of them were now talking at once for her to make out what they were saying.
“We’re safe in the tree, Mom!” she heard Sharise say—or thought she did. How could a tree keep them safe? Johnny had told them he heard it climbing the tree outside the lodge before they went to bed.
“You don’t know if you’re safe!” Tasha screamed back. “Johnny, get them away!”
More garbled shouting from them, trampling each other’s words.
Tasha’s chest heaved with heavy breaths.
She wrapped her arm around her stomach as if she could protect all her children with her embrace.
She had believed the worst was the shock of seeing snow grow limbs and wings and drag her away from her family, then waking up in this dark (tomb), but she had assumed they were all far away.
Safe. She had assumed a rescue party was already on the way.
Her family couldn’t be her rescue party. Dear Lord, please see them safely home.
“… The tree!” she heard Johnny say. “It can’t fit inside!”
Why did he keep talking about a fucking tree?
She sucked in a deep breath to try to slow her heart.
The harder her heart pounded, the more her foot radiated with pulsing pain.
Johnny wouldn’t intentionally put the girls in danger, so she had to trust him.
He must have his rifle with him, she remembered.
She imagined him in the bedroom with that gun, ready to confront an intruder with command.
Tasha exhaled and saw her breath floating in the flashlight beam. She noticed she was shivering again. She focused her beam on the clothing she’d seen. She shook the green evening gown free of pine needles and wrapped it across her shoulders like a shawl.
That done, she braced herself to examine her foot more closely.
Swollen and purple. Her toenails were black from impact, as if someone had hit her foot with a sledgehammer.
When she shined her light on her ankle, raw white bone gleamed back at her; her skin had peeled back, a bone jutting free.
Shocked by the sight, she turned the light away.