in that room.
Where they’d break her fingers and shoot her.
Her stomach hurt from hunger, and her throat clicked from thirst. When her teeth chattered, she didn’t know if it was from fear or cold.
Maybe she could sleep, just for a little while. She could climb a tree, sleep in the branches. It was so hard to think when she was so tired, so cold.
She stopped, leaned against a tree, laid her cheek on the bark. If she climbed a tree, slept, maybe when the sun came up, she could see where she was. She knew the sun came up in the east, knew the ocean was west. So if she saw the ocean, she’d know . . .
What? She still wouldn’t know where she was because she didn’t know where she’d been.
And they could find her when the sun came up.
She trudged on, head drooping with fatigue, feet shuffling as she just couldn’t lift them anymore.
Half dreaming, she walked. And smiled a little at a sound. Then shook herself awake, listened.
Was that the ocean? She thought, maybe . . . And something else.
She rubbed her tired eyes, stared ahead. A light. She saw a light. She kept her eyes on it, walked on.
The ocean, she thought again, getting louder, closer. What if she missed a step and fell over a cliff? But the light, it was closer, too.
The trees opened up. She saw a field in the moonlight. Wide and grassy. And . . . cows. The light, well beyond the edge of the woods, the edge of the field, came from a house.
She nearly walked into the barbed wire that kept the cows inside.
She cut herself a little getting through it, ripped her new sweater. She remembered from making the movie in Ireland that cows grew a lot bigger for real than they looked in books or from a distance.
She stepped in cow poop, and said “Gak,” with a ten-year-old girl’s disgust. From there, after swiping her sneaker on the grass, she tried to watch her step.
A house, she saw now, that faced the ocean, with decks up and down, with a light through the lower windows. Barns and stuff that meant ranch.
She navigated the barbed wire again—more successfully.
She saw a truck, a car, smelled manure and animals.
After stumbling again, she started to run toward the house. Someone to help, someone who’d take her home. Then stopped herself.
They could be bad people, too. How could she know? Maybe they were even friends with the people who locked her in the room. She needed to be careful.
It had to be late, so they’d be asleep. She only had to get inside, find a phone, and call nine-one-one. Then she could hide until the police came.
She crept toward the house, onto the wide porch in front. Though she expected to find it locked, she tried the front door, nearly dropped with relief when the knob turned.
She eased inside.
The lamp in the window burned low, but it burned. She could see a big room, furniture, a big fireplace, stairs leading up.
She didn’t see a phone, so she walked back toward a kitchen with green things growing in red pots on a wide windowsill, a table with four chairs, and a bowl of fruit.
She grabbed an apple, shining green, bit in. As it crunched between her teeth, as juice hit her tongue, her throat, she knew she’d never tasted anything so good. She saw the handset on the counter beside a toaster.
Then she heard footsteps.
Because the kitchen offered no place to hide, she rushed into the dining room open to it. Clutching the apple, more juice dribbling down her hand, she squeezed herself into a dark corner beside a bulky buffet.
When the kitchen lights flashed on, she tried to make herself smaller.
She caught a glimpse of him as he walked straight to the refrigerator. A boy, not a man, though he looked older than she, taller. He had a shaggy mop of dark blond hair, and wore only boxers.
If she hadn’t been so terrified, the sight of a mostly naked boy who wasn’t a cousin would have mortified and fascinated her.
He was pretty skinny, she noted, as he grabbed a drumstick out of the fridge, gnawed it while dragging out a jug—not like a store carton—of milk.
He chugged milk right from the jug, set it on the counter. He sang to himself, or hummed, or made ba-da-ba-dum! noises while he pulled a cloth off what looked like some kind of pie.
That’s when he