So instead, I guess I’m stringing him along.
Jesus. Is there ever a right way to break things off with someone? I never cared before, so I never gave it much thought, and now I’m pretty sure I’m making a mess of it.
I swing my legs out of bed even though they’re screaming at me. Everything hurts. I’m still wearing the shirt dress I put on after getting back from the forest, and I consider whether or not I can get away with just staying in it. But no. I’ve got to get to the shelter, so I drag myself into the bathroom to get ready.
What the hell am I going to do about my arm? I take a pill, put on the salve, but it’s still purple. It doesn’t hurt as much, but it looks atrocious. I realize my hands are all scratched up, too. Must have happened while Bo and I were butchering the deer, or maybe when I was dragging the sledge, walking through some tougher brush. I’m covered in bruises. It’s alarming. I’ll have to wear a long-sleeved shirt and keep my hands out of sight.
I wash my face and stare in the mirror. I open the vanity. The orange bottles of pills are all lined up, just as I left them.
I waver. They would make this easier. I want easier. But I don’t really deserve it.
I shut the vanity and go downstairs. My grandparents aren’t up yet. I make coffee for them, have a cup myself, and then get on my bike.
This is the way Mila came after she dropped me off at the shelter to get my bike. After we got ice cream. Right before she fell off the face of the earth.
She drove on the other side of the street. What doesn’t make sense to me is how Mila went from being scared out of her mind about what was in the woods to going on a hike through them just minutes later.
Did she see something on this road that made her decide to go home, get her hiking gear, and go into the woods? It’s kind of a busy road – if you can call any street in this sleepy pocket of the world busy. It runs through several towns going up the coast. Did she pass someone or something on the way that made her decide suddenly to embark on a dangerous night hike?
I slow down and look around. I see tyre tracks as if someone went off the road. They look new. Excited, I pedal over to them to get a closer look, and as soon as I do, I recognize the ridiculousness of my actions. They’re just tyre tracks. I’m not a sleuth. Any clue short of a blinking neon arrow saying ‘She went that way!’ would be lost on me.
I push on to the shelter, still thinking about Mila. I can’t fathom why she would go into the woods at night. I don’t buy that it was to find drugs. There are a dozen ways a beautiful young girl can score if she wants to. Ways that are far more certain that she will actually get drugs than wandering around the woods blindly.
Unless she knew where she was going and knew for certain that there were drugs there.
Unless she knew how to find Dr Goodnight.
I don’t know how I know I’m right. I just know I am. Mila wasn’t telling me a ghost story at the Snack Shack. She was asking for help without asking, because that’s her way. Speaking around the problem. Never naming the unnameable.
I remember the desperate way she looked at me. How she kept begging with her eyes. She was hoping that I’d be smart enough to figure it out, or at least that I was suspicious enough of her behaviour at the Snack Shack to follow her out on a hike, say, that afternoon. She knows I can hike, and she knows that I’m fascinated with Dr Goodnight, or I wouldn’t have grilled her about him. She was practically daring me. She wanted me to follow her. Find him. And save her.
And I laughed in her face.
‘You coming in?’
I turn and find Gina standing next to me. I’m still at my bike, although I’ve already chained it up. I’m just standing here, stuck.
‘You ever think you’ve already been the worst person you could possibly be, and that you’re past all that, that you’ve grown, and then you wake up one morning and realize that you’re an even bigger asshole than you ever were?’ I ask her.
She looks me up and down, sucks her teeth, and says, ‘Girl, you need a meeting.’
‘Mila’s missing,’ I say. I realize I’m twisting the bike chain in my hands. ‘No one’s seen her. It’s been almost forty-eight hours.’
Gina sighs heavily, and all the tough-girl bluster goes out of her, and I swear I can see a teenaged girl inside this forty-year-old woman standing across from me, and she’s hearing for the first time that her friend is gone. The police don’t count someone missing until after forty-eight hours. But after forty-eight hours whatever is going to happen to a girl has already happened. We know that. We both know what forty-eight hours means.
‘He has to pay,’ Gina says.
I nod. ‘Yes. He does.’ I keep nodding hectically, but my voice is calm. Because this is something I know I’m good at. I had a lot of practice making people pay while I was in the hospital. ‘I will make sure he does.’
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘You got family inside, and we’ll get you through it.’ She locks up my bike for me and corrals me into the kitchen.
We go in the back, but before we can pass the walk-ins and go on to the kitchen, I stop Gina and pull her into one of the freezers.
‘You know him,’ I say flatly. ‘Dr Goodnight. You know him.’
Gina bites her lip and shakes her head. ‘I haven’t seen him in years,’ she mumbles. ‘Way back before he was Dr Goodnight. Even before he had a kid and disappeared into the woods.’
‘A kid?’ I say, my voice thin. ‘So . . . what, does he have, like . . . a family out in the woods?’