Maybe it was the trauma. She was hurt. She’d lost a lot of blood. She needed to eat. So if she needed to eat, I needed to make sure whatever I cooked for her would be to her taste.
“You like spicy?” I asked, cringing when my voice boomed back at me through the empty space.
All I got was a grumbling noise.
Hearing the scratch at the door, I let Captain in. And I swear the bastard gave me a disapproving look. Like he thought I had been yelling at her, before running inside, jumping up on the couch, circling around the cushions, then dropping down onto her feet.
“Alright, you hold down the fort.”
It was late afternoon when lunch/dinner was done. I served it up with some rice, dropping hers down on the coffee table as I ate mine in silence at the dining table.
Nothing.
Not a word.
Not a stir.
Trying to bank down the uneasiness, I fed the dogs, put the animals away. When I came back, her spoon was in her bowl. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought a bit had been eaten. I cleaned up, started a fire.
“You want light on?” I asked, glad when my tone came out more even. “Don’t usually put light on at night, but it works if you want it,” I told her. And got nothing. “Um, the dogs all sleep out here,” I told her, feeling the heaviness of sleep deprivation start to weigh on me. Maybe I would be able to figure her out better after some sleep. “Alright. ‘Night,” I mumbled, heading off toward my bed, dropping into it.
Tired as I was, it took a long time for me to settle down, get my mind calm, slip away.
I woke with a start, the kind of anxious you get when you realize you slept through your alarm, that you were running late.
The light was just starting to move through the trees, casting everything in a comforting, familiar orange glow.
Miller was likely already on her way in.
And I had a lot of shit to handle before she got here.
On that, I got out of bed, walking out of my room, expecting to see the newly familiar body huddled under blankets on the couch.
I won’t lie.
My heart skittered into overdrive when I saw the blanket tangled up with no form beneath.
Captain was gone too, I reminded myself as I tore through my home, worried she had gotten herself lost in the woods again, this time without having Cap to lead me to her if she was deep enough for me not to hear or see her.
Throwing open the front door, I noticed things I had missed.
Like all the dogs hadn’t been inside.
Like my jacket was missing from the hook.
I noticed them then, though. Because the dogs were tussling near the end of the clearing, pouncing on each other, dragging one another around by the collar or scruff.
And she was sitting in a chair I often found myself in right outside the house, an old rocking chair I had inherited from my grandfather who had built it himself. My jacket dwarfed her small frame. With her knees pulled up to her chest, the jacket was pulled down over her legs, reaching nearly to her ankles. The hood was pulled up against the cold morning air, her breath puffing into white clouds.
“Morning,” I mumbled, taking a deep breath to stave off the impending heart attack that had threatened to engulf my system.
I got nothing.
I didn’t expect to.
But, oddly, I felt disappointment.
“Miller is coming in today,” I told her, not sure why I felt the need to carry on a one-sided conversation. Maybe a part of me knew that in my worst places, sometimes just knowing someone was there, someone gave a shit, would be there, even if you didn’t give them dick to work with, it helped.
“Gotta bring your medications. Haven’t gotten a look at the cut on your stomach. Getting worried about infection.”
Her head fell back onto the wood, her chin angled over near the empty pasture.
Figuring she was imagining the animals, I grabbed shoes, went through the motions of letting them out, so she had something to watch before going in to make coffee, bringing her out a cup.
She reached for it, cradling it between cold fingers.
I figured that was a good sign, and gave myself the luxury of a quick shower before heading back outside, wondering if Miller would be able to find her way here. It had been a while. Trees got bigger. Underbrush changed. Woods were tricky that way. Always the same, yet constantly evolving.
The question was answered about an hour later while I was filling the food troughs for the goats and donkeys. And the dogs went apeshit.
There were fox warning barks and squirrel chasing barks and play-with-me barks.
And then there were someone-is-here barks. The least frequent, the most menacing.