Page 35 of Be Not Far From Me

“Georgia,” she answers, handing me a water bottle. “We both are.”

“Huh,” I say, and try to twist the cap off. It won’t move. She reaches for it and cracks the seal, then hands it back to me.

“I got it started for you,” I tell her, and she laughs. It’s a wonderful sound, strong and full, without the edge mine has started to develop.

“So I walked right out of Tennessee?” I ask, taking a drink of water.

“If that’s where you started, then yes,” she says.

The water hits my stomach, and I flinch. I don’t want to puke in front of this woman, don’t want her to know that it doesn’t taste like real water because there’s no dirt trailing on my tongue, or an aftertaste of fish. Everything about it, from the clarity of the plastic to the ridged cap in my hand is off, and I feel an edge of panic when I realize I’m going to have to get into the truck eventually.

“What’s your name?” I ask the woman, taking another experimental sip.

“Tammy,” she says, and holds out her hand for me to shake. I do, noticing how thin my fingers are inside of hers, a scrape the shape of Florida across the top of my left hand, and the filth under my fingernails.

“What’s this?” Tammy asks, reaching out to touch Davey Beet’s hat. I shy away, dumping some of the water in my lap. I can stand to have someone touch me, but Davey’s stuff is another story and not one I’ll tell to just anybody.

“It’s a hat,” I say.

Tammy nods and slowly sits down next to me, propping her elbows on her legs like I do. I pull my blanket closer around me, covering my fireboard and whiskey bottle, like I’m afraid she might try to take them away.

“She’s from where?” the guy’s voice cuts across the space between us, the phone conversation clearly going places he hadn’t expected. Just like I did.

“Hungry?” Tammy asks, reaching into her lunch to pull out a bologna-and-cheese sandwich.

The truth is I’m not. I’m too far gone to consider being hungry. But the sight of the sandwich carefully tucked into a bag with a fold-over top makes me think of Meredith, and all the supposedly extra bologna-and-cheese sandwiches she’d brought to school for years, even though I knew damn well she hated bologna.

I start to cry.

The woman puts her arm around me, and I lean into her, smelling the clean scent of her shampoo and the simple warmth of her and how solid she is. I take a deep breath that feels like it’s scraping the back of my throat clear down to the spine, but it can’t go deep enough, can’t quite reach the place where everything that’s happened to me rests.

I’ve been trying to find words, and I thought I was failing because it’d been so long since I used them, but instead it’s because there aren’t any that’ll work. There’s just crying. Crying ’cause I’m happy to be safe, and terrified to see people again. Crying because even though I said my name when I came out of the woods, I don’t know if that’s who I am anymore. Crying because of Duke and Meredith and Kavita and my dad and how I’ll get to see them again, and crying for my momma and Davey Beet because the same isn’t true for them. There’s lots of reasons to cry, but I’ve got a mouth and it was made for more than just gasping for air in between sobs.

I stop crying.

And I eat.

The truck is going impossibly fast.

I made Tammy sit in the middle, next to Paul—who keeps saying, “Tennessee!” over and over again like it’s a new state or something. I needed to be near the window, and even though it’s still raining I’ve rolled it down, letting the drops hit my face as we speed toward where the squad is going to meet us once we get down out of the hills and off the service roads. I glance over Tammy’s legs at the speedometer, shocked to see it’s barely touching forty.

Everything outside is whipping past us so quickly I can’t take it in, can’t see each tree, touch every leaf. My life has slowed to a point that moving above a crawl feels obscene, and sounds startle me. When Paul started the truck the radio blasted on and Tammy had snapped it off quickly when I yelped, covering my ears with my blanket.

They’ve both been quiet as we drive, the rain picking up and soaking my arm as I let it drift out the window, feeling the resistance of the breeze against my hand. I look over at Tammy, and she tucks her phone away but not before my own face appears under a news headline.

“You googled me?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says sheepishly, turning her phone over. There’s a muted video playing of my dad standing at a podium, the only tie he owns tied all wrong and his dress shirt from Grandpa’s funeral too tight across his belly. But I don’t think anyone is looking at him, only listening. Faces crumple along with his as he breaks down, and I don’t need to hear the words to know that he’s asking for someone, please, to bring his little girl back to him.

“I brought myself back,” I tell him quietly, my thumb resting against the screen.

There’s a long article that I can’t read while the truck is moving so fast, the few bites of bologna and cheese that I managed to get down threatening to come back up. I don’t want to thank Tammy and Paul by puking on them, so I give her the phone back, aware that she’s double-checking the face on the screen and comparing it to the one in front of her. I wonder how hard it is to find a resemblance.

The squad meets us where the service road dumps out on a state route, their lights flashing but sirens off. I pop my truck door and move to get out, but there are suddenly people everywhere, and no one seems to want me to move. A female paramedic scoops me out of the truck like a baby, not even huffing for breath when we make it over to the ambulance, where I’m given a lot of instructions.

Lie back. Relax. Calm down. Breathe normally.

I’m doing all these things, but the medics in the back with me still have little frowns on their faces as they methodically list everything that has gone wrong with me. They use different words than I would, like contusion for bruise, laceration for cut and malnourished for starving. The male—his lanyard identifies him as Michael—is reeling off these things, and the female is writing quickly across the back of her rubber glove.