in which she was forgotten and starved and carried off in the talons of hungry eagles to feed their babies.
Garner! Garner! And the pounding. He would need the right tool to pry up that latch this time. An ice pick . . . pick, pick, prick, poke. The pricking, the piercing! The agony of cold and hot raced along his every nerve, arms and legs and head aflame with a thousand red-hot stabs of the poker, the pricking, picking, relentless jaws of fire ants eating him alive.
Eating him up, gobbling him up, savoring his skin and masticating his muscles and burrowing into his bones, leaving each super-sensory nerve fiber for dessert, until he had been whittled away into a ham hock for a soup base, and his predators were bursting, and the eagle would swoop to the locked balcony like an open field and pluck his Rose and steal her away to the nest of ravenous eaglets.
He could not let it happen, not to Rose, who needed rescue in spite of her piercing, pricking thorns.
Garner! Daddy! Garner!
“I am coming!” he shouted, and he fought the fire ants, he sloughed them off his body with his bare hands, he beat them to the ground and then rolled atop them, their fragile exoskeletons cracking and crunching under the weight of his will.
He felt their pain. It was his, and he feared he would not survive it. If it had not been Rose calling, if it had been anyone but his daughter, he knew he could not have survived.
The shudder of a terrible chill passed through him, the shadow of death. I am coming, Rose. How he hoped she was not already dead!
In the depths of the cold shadow he opened his eyes. He had forgotten his eyes entirely, so overwhelmed was his brain by the sensations of fire and ice. But they opened and freed a flood of water, a dam of pain, released. And in the liquid blur he saw Rose on the floor within arm’s reach, her back arched like that jump rope on the upswing, her lovely black hair chopped off and splayed around her pale head, her beautiful head . . .
She breathed like a fish on dry land. Garner! Listen to me! But the command didn’t come from her lips, stretched wide like a shark’s jaw to swallow all the air in the room. He reached out to touch her, and the tears washed away his vision finally, and he could see that this was not his Rose. This was his daughter who was not his daughter, whom he loved anyway.
He couldn’t remember her name.
Rose would know it. Rose, crying at the glass door. It rattled and shook and cracked under her pleading fists.
Somehow, Garner stood. Somehow, he went to her.
35
The feet clad in red shoes moved. Beth saw them turn to the side, and a few moments later, white fingers gripped the edge of the door frame. The ball peen hammer in Trey’s grip made a hesitant bounce on the glass as if he had seen it too.
“That’s him, right?” she asked Trey.
“Those are his shoes,” he said.
Soon the rest of the man appeared, limb by limb, extracting himself from the room by turning over and then pulling his knees up under him, still holding the frame. He came out the way an adult backs out of a tunnel for children, stiff from confinement and unsure of the space behind him. He pushed back into the hallway with his head close to the ground.
Beth pressed herself up to the glass as if her desire to help him would be enough to get him off the floor. She had never been so glad to see a man alive, this complete stranger, nor so afraid that he would die when she was so close to reaching him. She pounded a fist on the window, and he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, then turned his face in her direction, but the morning light from her window glanced off his glasses and she couldn’t see his eyes. She wasn’t sure that she was anything more to him than a shadow beating on the glass.
“Garner!” Trey shouted.
“Where’s Dr. Ransom?” Beth asked.
“Garner!” he repeated. “Can you unlock the door?”
Beth doubted the man could see straight, let alone crawl the marathon that stretched out between them.
“Call 9-1-1,” Beth ordered.
“Cat Ransom is our 9-1-1,” Trey said. “But the sheriff will bring someone.”
“You called the sheriff ? Of course you called the