Circle Nine (21 page)

I am not in the cave at all. Not at all. I am somewhere vast and, even though it has all the same things: trees and brambles and bugs and animal noises and dirt — none of it’s familiar. I claw at my face and remember. He’s gone. I left him. I scratch harder and snarl, the way I imagine an animal might, because that’s what I’m feeling: animal pain. Animal pain and otherpain, pain inside. I look down, and my fingernails are bloody. It feels good. It distracts from the otherpain.

It was my fault.

I sit up; a wave of dizziness and nausea overcomes me. I vomit up nothing onto the ground. I scratch more, then I scratch the hands I’m scratching with. My arms are covered in ugly red welts that have made them swollen and inflamed as if there’s a nest of mosquitoes living right there under the skin. I touch my face again. It’s probably the same, but I don’t care. I am empty and exhausted; most of me just wants to lie back down.

My fault.

But then there’s this other part of me.
Move, move, move,
it says.
You won’t die here like this. You can’t.

I laugh and laugh and laugh because I am
so stupid
and that voice is wrong because I
can
die out here and maybe I even want to. I laugh as I’m on my knees, crawling, as I’m standing up, taking steps I didn’t know I could, as I’m moving forward, and the worst part is I don’t know where I’m moving forward
to;
maybe I’m moving even farther away from where I should be moving, and this realization is even more hilarious. I laugh and walk, walk and laugh, choke on my own laughter, stumble on swollen legs, look around me at all these things I never noticed before that seem surreal, maybe enchanted. I am so thirsty.

Maybe I’m in an enchanted forest and if I just fall asleep, a prince will wake me up. Maybe the prince will be Sam; he’ll be well again and nothing will be wrong with him, and he’ll run one palm across my cheek and my whole face will heal up just like magic, and everything will be OK. Everything will be OK. Even if I die, everything will be OK.

I don’t know time anymore; in this place, time doesn’t exist, anyway. It’s just more of the same. Trees and rocks and bugs and dirt. Trees and rocks and bugs and dirt. I say this through my lips, which have turned to wood, firewood. I laugh some more. If a tree falls and you don’t hear it, does it really fall? If a girl dies in the woods and you don’t find her, is she really dead? Was she ever alive?

It’s hot in the shade. I need a gas station to pump some fuel into me or my engine will stall. It’s about to stall. It does. There’s no fuel for my legs, so they give out first and I’m back to the earth, where I was before, where I came from in the first place.

I’m just so exhausted. It occurs to me that I really could die here, that I am too tired to go on, and that maybe I will lie here until I am too thirsty or too hungry to live, whichever comes first. Until my body betrays me. And if that happens, it wouldn’t be so bad; my story will die with me. No one will ever know the truth. I am filled with relief at this thought.
There will be nothing to tell.

When the memory washes over my tired soul, it’s vivid and powerful. I surrender to it because I can’t find the strength not to.

Mama is awake. The flames have spread between me and Mama and Daddy. Mama screams, but I am transfixed. I watch her makeshift curtains light up magically. It’s a beautiful light show before me, and even my parents look beautiful, for by now their sheets are on fire and they appear ethereal. But there is something wrong here; I feel the frantic desire to leave. Something is terribly wrong. The fire is spreading fast, as if the house was glued together with lighter fluid. I’m finding it hard to breathe and now to see, and Sam’s grip on my wrist grows tighter, and this time I allow him to lead me through the haze across the room, even though I hear Mama and now Daddy screaming my name.

I see my mother’s face and I am cold. I see my mother’s face and horror turns me to ice. I am in the core of Circle Nine, the world I loathed and feared. I am shivering, sickened, destroyed. All I want, I think, is to have my family back. All I want is to be forgiven. But still, one voice in my head won’t let me go.

What about Katie?
the voice asks.
What happened to her?

I don’t know, I say back. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

Yet the voice stays with me. I can’t give up, not yet, not while I don’t know everything. I force myself to stumble on.

Gunshots.

I am tired, so tired. It is hard to know what’s going on.

An epic war is going on around me; I wonder if I’ve been hit.

Boom.
Screaming. A furry thing tears by me. It’s crying blood.

Yet I keep walking.

A pair of brown boots in front of me.

Voices, voices all around. I hover in the voices.

“Are you OK? Miss, are you OK?”

I nod. A hand on my shoulder brings me back, just a little.

“Are you hurt?” A long look at my face. “Did someone hurt you?”

“No,” I whisper. A look of doubt.

More voices: “She looks terrible.” . . . “Shhhh.”

“Where do you live?”

“Here.” I gesture. “Right here. I’ve been out here for a while,” I hear myself say in a dreamy voice. I’m awfully tired.

“Come on. We’ll get you some help.” A gentle hand, and I’m being lifted, carried, placed in a truck. I don’t mind. I’m tired, so tired.

Darkness.

The voices fade in and out. They swirl around me, lifting me up on a cloud of comfort. I am buoyant. They are angels.

“She’s doing fine. Just a little dehydrated, and exhausted, I’d say.”

“She looks like she could sleep for days.”

“Maybe she will.”

“Nothing serious, then?”

“Could’ve been much worse. Nearly had a heart attack when I seen her.”

And there’s a little angel, too.

“Will she be OK? Will she, Dad?”

As I dream, I feel promise filling my body; I become limp and light and entirely free from pain, as if I’ve been lifted out of my shell and taken somewhere better. I feel close to everything I ever lost and wanted back. My mother, my father, and Katie. And Sam. Sam, whole and beautiful again, the way he was when he stood over me that day long ago, eyes so innocent and longing and strong and full of promise. I’m warm all over, and there’s something else I feel, something foreign and wonderful. I’m at peace. I want it. I want to stop struggling. I want this peace.

“Hasn’t seen a decent meal in weeks, by the look of it. She’s so scrawny.”

“Thank God you found her. Who knows what she was doing out there all alone. And that bruise on her face! Could’ve been much worse.”

I can open my eyes. I can see the room around me. There’s a man in camouflage and hunting boots staring at me, arms crossed. There’s a woman holding a mug. I’m on a cot. The springs of it dig into my back. The room is small; the walls close in on me. I close my eyes again; I don’t want this. I wanted to die.

“No way, kiddo,” says the woman. “You’ve been out for a full day. Now that you’re back with us, you’re staying. Don’t get any big ideas.” Her face looms, kind and round, above me. “Just to give you your strength,” she tells me, handing me the mug, which has a seductive-smelling broth in it. “Just some fluids.”

I sip it slowly, savoring its warmth; then I close my eyes and will these people away, pretending to sink back into sleep for just a little while longer.

They leave me in peace, and I let my mind drift. I can’t help but turn to my memories. Now I know what happened in the fire.
My fault. All my fault.

But what about Katie?

The pain in my head is tremendous.

I remember her now. Her black hair would become matted and snarled when she slept, so bad that she used to spend what seemed like hours each morning combing it out before our mother came to wake us. Her bed was above mine, and sometimes the stray strands drifted down around me in the space between our beds, and I imagined they formed a protective orb around the rusted frames. I remember the way she meticulously cut her bangs, always a little too short, one metal blade pressed against her forehead as she watched herself in the mirror, fringe falling softly to the sink. I remember the way she kicked at the sink when nothing but a rusted trickle came from it instead of real water and Daddy hadn’t fixed it because he was too tired from pulling a double shift. Fire. And how she lived: wild and defiant and barely muted at all, despite everything. I remember her name. Katie. I whisper it over and over, hoping it will feel familiar, then again when it doesn’t. I sink back into memories of her laughing, her twirling my hair around one index finger, her pressing her bony cheek against mine when things were bad, whistling at the boys across the street through the slats of the attic shutters where we couldn’t be heard by Mama. She was the greatest source of joy I ever knew. We were supposed to be invisible when debt collectors came to the door. We were invisible anyway, the way you are when you’re a gangly teenager and you can’t afford nice things to wear — you can’t afford anything, really, because you live in a house but also on the streets, both places equally your home. Then Sam made us disappear altogether. Even before then, the world wasn’t my own.

I close my eyes, and her voice fills my head.

You see?
it whispers.
I’ve been trying to tell you all along.

I know,
I whisper back.
But I couldn’t listen to you just yet.

I think of the day she gave me the necklace.

“Ghetto-fab-o-lous,” she says, drawling the word as she slips the chain over my neck.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” The necklace spells
Abby
in gold loopy script, bling-bling style, with a tiny diamond at the bottom of the
y.
“Um,” I say, “this isn’t my name?”

“Let’s just say there weren’t that many available,” she replies. Then it dawns on me.

“Katie! Did you
steal
these?” She smiles wickedly and wiggles her eyebrows up and down at me. I am horrified and delighted. I could never be like Katie is. She is larger than life, without even trying to be.