trying to grab his eyes. He distanced himself when he was angry, went behind what she thought of as his journalist face—which was stern, seeing, skeptical. She wanted him to understand but she wasn’t sure she even understood herself. “Bound—by what happened.”
“No,” said Greg, leaning forward. He wasn’t one to yell or bang his fist on the table. But he might as well have. The sudden intensity in his gaze pushed her back. “You’re not. You’re bound to me, to our daughter. Not to him.”
No, no. That wasn’t true.
She was bound to the present, to the future, with her family.
With Hank—the boy who was taken when it should have been Rain or Lara or LAH-raine or whoever she was—with Hank she was lashed to the past.
She sat there for nearly twelve hours, she’d later learn, huddled in the wet hollow of the tree. It didn’t seem like twelve hours or twelve minutes. It was a space that existed without time, a dream, a twilight between life and death. She was bleeding profusely—another couple of hours and she would not have survived. But it might have been a year, or five minutes. She’d separated out from time, stayed suspended by pain, terror and shock so far out of the realm of her nearly twelve years of life experience.
The giant in the woods, the evil dog; she’d been bitten, struck—her jaw shattered—watched her friends be beaten, dragged away. Dusk fell; she drifted in and out of consciousness. Then her name on the wind. Even then, she didn’t dare call out. She dug herself deeper inside the tree, the black, wet womb of its hollow.
“Hey, Lara Winter, is that you? Everything’s okay now, kid,” said the police officer when he came to kneel in front of her. Detective Harper. She’d come to know him well over the years. “You’re okay.”
But it wasn’t true, and she knew it even then. There was who she was before and who she was after. She would never be that other girl again. And nothing could be okay now.
He reached a hand to her, but she huddled away from him even though his eyes were kind and he seemed strong and good.
He stood and started yelling. “Here! I need the paramedics. I’ve got the Winter girl!”
She heard a woman scream and she knew it was her mother. And still no words could come. The Winter Girl, someone with arms like dead branches, covered in ice, hair and lashes icicles, frozen and half-dead. That was the image those words put in her mind. She wondered before she blacked out again if maybe she was dead.
Then there was a crowd, her parents hovering, holding each other. Tess’s mother stood frozen, arms wrapped around herself, her face blank and pale. Rain was in and out, lifted, carried. Pain a distant siren. She heard her own screaming.
Her mother weeping in the ambulance.
Detective Harper was there, too: Lara, honey, I know you’re hurt. But you have to talk to us. Where are your friends? What happened?
The words came then in a tangled rush, everything, everything she could remember—shouldn’t have been in the woods, he sat by the creek, the dog, big, enormous, a disgusting beard and thick ugly glasses, a monster, he walked north. She knew the direction because of where the sun was in the sky; her father taught her to always know where she was.
The man in the woods. Did she know him? Had she seen him before?
Yes.
Where?
She couldn’t remember.
Think. Think. Try, baby, try, urged her mother.
No one said that Tess’s and Hank’s lives depended on it. But she knew that.
“I know how hard this is,” said Detective Harper. They were at the hospital; he ran beside the stretcher down a hall where people shouted. “Where did you go the last few days? Who did you see? Try to remember, Lara. Help us find your friends.”
Tess and Hank. They needed her to remember. Through the pain and terror, she pressed. Summer days. Hot ones. Nothing to do. Her father wanting her to come while he ran errands, she didn’t want to go but did anyway. Because she loved any attention he had for her.
And then she remembered.
At the garage where her father got their car serviced. She went with her dad, under protest, and waited and waited and waited in a room that smelled like gasoline, filled with ancient magazines for old people, wood paneling and a sweating, struggling air conditioner. Even the vending machine looked spent, it’s wilted offerings unappetizing