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When the helicopter had first flown overhead the day before, they’d hid. Shauna had heard the noise and slipped behind a tree on instinct, heart thudding in her chest louder than that whirring noise that lingered above her, following her impulse to move out of sight and flinch away. She remembered thinking (and it was almost a surprise that she still could think, even after all this time, but she could), I’m just like an animal. She felt more like herself when thoughts like that would come to her; like her old mind, critical and sardonic, was still there underneath everything else, buried.
(Buried under inches and inches of fresh, white snow.)
The others hid, too. At first, they did, and Shauna knew this though she couldn’t see them, because she could somehow sense it. They had grown together twisted and gnarled, and Shauna sometimes thought she could feel them through the ground, through the earth. They needn’t speak. They were somehow bonded.
It was Nat who first moved from her position into the center of the clearing, a crazed little look in her eye like she’d only just realized where she was for the first time in a long time. The new growth of her hair stood out as a dark shock against the blinding glisten of the snow. Her voice was rough from disuse and Shauna realized only then how much she had missed hearing it. She cupped purple-tinged hands to her chapped, bloody lips and screamed, “we’re here!”
And Shauna had thought, wow. I guess we are. And she’d known that, of course, but she’d kind of forgotten that she wasn’t supposed to be.
Travis was the one who said help, or at least the first one who said it. It echoed up over the mountains, clear as a bell, his head craned back, and all Shauna could think was that his hair had gotten very long. She’d never noticed it before. She’d noticed very little in these past endless days as she had moved mechanically through the woods, dirty and feral, an open wound glowing in the dark, thinking of meat and now but never before or after. He looked like a man, she thought.
She thought, she thought, she thought. Like the noise of the plane was an awakening, a birth. Blood on her hands like amniotic fluid as her cerebellum began to operate again after months of necessary staticy silence. She thought of Javi. She thought of Coach Scott, and wondered if Misty thought of Coach Scott, too.
(WedidwhatwehadtowedidwhatwehadtowedidwhatwehadtoBUT.)
She thought of – no, she didn’t dare, instead she stepped forward and called “HELP!” If only so she wouldn’t have to think at all, face flushed and ruddy red and too hot despite the sharp, cold air (and if it reminded her of something, if the cold made her think of anything, then) “Please, God, help us,” a voice that sounded like it didn’t quite belong to her, disembodied, and she fell to her knees just as Taissa began to call out, too, blinking heavily, like she was fighting her way through some kind of anesthesia fog, eyes all glassy and voice all thick as she said please, please, please, we’re here.
Shauna felt like that, too; like she was waking up from a nightmare, sweaty and queasy and drowning in the sound of her own quick breathing and heartbeat. Yes, it was just like waking up from a nightmare (just like waking up in the attic to see white, white, white, snow covered the ground then just as it does now, an endless, endless cold).
Misty, with her hair a hopeless tangle and one eye of her glasses entirely punched out, gaped up open-mouthed at the clear blue sky.
If there was a before this place, and if Shauna didn’t know Misty before, then she knows her now. Unlike the others, she only seemed to grow younger, vitalized, more herself than she’d ever been, skinny and pale with these bright, bright eyes that sparked behind the broken glasses that still perched on her face. Mostly, the others were all quick hands and brutal movements and blood, blood, blood, quiet and watchful. Misty still chattered away some days, her voice catching a chord somewhere above Shauna’s head while she tried not to listen. It was white noise, endless white, and Shauna didn’t usually have it in her to notice the way Misty’s face tightened some nights when she stared into the hot flame of the fire.
Misty Quigley took a step back and called for help, and that’s how Shauna knew that this must be real, and it must be bad.
Beyond the cacophony of broken, brittle voices, praying for deliverance as the helicopter hovered overhead like a new sun, like a new God, Lottie turned away and squinted at the other end of the sky, head of dark hair leaned back just slightly, her gaze fixed somewhere over the frozen lake.
(Shauna pretended not to know the exact location in the air that Lottie’s line of sight sought out.)
It was only once the helicopter had disappeared over the horizon like a fake-out, leaving them hoarse and winded, that Shauna had finally, tentatively approached Lottie (she hadn’t grown but she seemed taller than she was before, if there was a before this place), makeshift fur boots crunching in the frost with each step. “We can’t leave this place,” Lottie had said, without turning around. She sounded measured, she sounded sure. (She spoke very little, but when she did, she always had that same lilt to her voice: like she knew something nobody else did.)
“I know,” Shauna agreed, or she exhaled, and only then had she realized that she’d been holding her breath.
It took another day before help came, but now it’s here, help, though it’s hard for Shauna to wrap her head around that word, so she just winces against the noise of the helicopter and thinks, oh, God, it’s loud. She remembers only now how hard it had been for her to fall asleep out here during those first tenuous nights, late night hours of unreality. It was nothing like the city, and it had been hard to trade in the whir of late-night traffic for howls in the dark and the wind whistling through the trees. Trading in streetlights for that endless, endless moon (signifying doom, something terrible, there’s a full moon tomorrow night, have a sort of moon homecoming, more like a doomcoming).
The woods are as alive as the people in the cars speeding down Shauna’s street.
Well, more.
The wilderness seems so much quieter in contrast, ineffectual, even, with the whirr or the blades cutting through the air. They six of them are standing side by side, lined up like they’re waiting to be executed, lined up like they’re being shown off at a pep rally, lined up like they’re being chastised at a party, guilty and petulant and looking around like they don’t know what they’re doing there, (I don’t know what the fuck that was, but I do know that it’s over.)
Those words roll back and forth in her head. She cranes her neck, looks around, looks at this life (if you could ever, ever call it that) that they’ve – what, built? Whatever it is. Whoever they are now. Feral and filthy and bad. More animal than not.
There used to be more of her that’d been ebbed away at by this place, by the rest of her, by the cold. She’d been a person before she started losing these pieces of herself, hadn’t she? Yes, she’d been a person. Not a very good one.
(She’d lost Jackie, which was as good as losing herself. Nobody knew where one ended and the other began. Shauna and Jackie. Jackie and Shauna. ShaunaandJackie. Excised like a conjoined twin, like a tumor. She was someone different before that numbing cold.)
She looks at the trees around them and thinks, I don’t know what the fuck that was, but I do know that it’s over. I do know that it’s over. I do know that it’s over. Jackie was right. She was always so right. Shauna covers a humorless laugh with a hacking cough.
Whatever life Shauna is returning to, it doesn’t belong to her. She would be placed back into a world that no longer recognized her. The Shauna Shipman who had been headed to Nationals, to Brown, to bigger things, no longer existed. The name on that acceptance letter maybe doesn’t belong to her anymore. Neatly printed Times New Roman seems so far away after months of blood on her hands, meat between her thumb and forefinger, hearing the screams of girls cut through the air and not thinking a single thing.
(Wedidwhatwehadtowedidwhatwehadtowedidwhatwehadto).
Maybe part of her has always been here in the woods, waiting for the rest of her. It’s hard to believe this wasn’t who she was always meant to be, after everything. Surely, part of her will always be here. Most of her. Who is she, when she’s not here? When she goes home, who will she be then? (Who will she be without Jackie?)
It’s been so long here. It’s been forever since the baby. Maybe a year – but it’s useless to even guess, because she doesn’t know. Maybe five years, maybe six months, but it’s been long, so long, and everything got worse after the baby.
It had been so hot, then. Thick, sticky air, mosquitoes buzzing around her flushed, sweaty face like they were flies and she was already dead, and it had been hard to breathe, hard to think, and she had been so sure she would die. She remembered tasting salt. She barely remembered any of it; a knot of grief, of pain. Aching. The short relief of not being quite so hungry anymore for a little while. She had been grateful it was hot, then. She never could have handled it if it had been cold. It must have only been a couple of seasons (this winter’s been so long, and it should be ending, but she’s not sure it ever will), but, God, it feels like it’s been forever since the baby. Like she was so different then.
She’s going to have to say that, she thinks. They’ll take her to some hospital, and she’ll say it’s been a while since the baby, and then everyone will know, and she won’t know what else to tell them. Her mom always wanted grandchildren. She’s probably spent this past New Life of Shauna’s thinking she’d never get the chance to have them.
It should feel like a second chance. It should feel like a miracle. (Like a birth). But all she can hear is Lottie’s voice, telling her that they can’t leave this place. Something is missing inside of her, she’s hollow, like maybe the sound of her swallowing her spit echoes inside of her chest. Something’s missing, oh, of course, she knows, she’s always known. There’s a lot of things that Shauna will never get back.
Misty takes charge and they all let it happen. Nobody else is particularly eager to give these strangers the rundown as they load into the helicopter on unsteady legs. The rescue team regard them with poorly concealed awe, or something else. (These people are like an invasive species, Shauna thinks, without really meaning to. These other people from somewhere else whose heartbeats Shauna can’t feel through the ground. They’re not supposed to be here.)
She’s probably imagining it all. She knows that. She knows that she’s probably crazy.
Shauna feels more than sees Taissa lingering somewhere near her as they walk up the ramp, and Shauna can tell she’s deliberating as to whether she should reach out to Shauna or not, so Shauna makes the decision easy for her and speeds up.
“This will be hell,” Travis says, and his actual voice is too quiet to hear, but Shauna knows he says it without having to hear the words or see the movement of his lips. Like all of them are one organism now, alive, roots tangled together beneath the surface. They’re not who Shauna would have picked, but she supposes they belong to her, now. They’ve seen her. They’re really seen her. That can be so dangerous, really.
Nobody sedates them, or anything. Nat speaks up to ask if they will, even, but no. They’re going to go home, and they’re going to fly there. And they’re going to suffer through it, conscious. “On the bright side,” Misty says cheerily, “the odds of two aircraft related incidents for the same group of people are really very low.”
Natalie regards her. She says, “I should have eaten you when I had the chance.”
They fill in. They sit down. It doesn’t feel real, and Travis was right. As soon as they leave the safety of the ground, it’s hell. (Ungrounded, untethered, unsteady, unreal). Shauna’s knuckles turn white as she grips her seat. She thinks of before, she plays it over and over in her mind, trees rushing past the windows on a decline as the doors open and the lights flicker and people just fall right out of the plane, fall out of the sky, dead, dead, dead. It’s been so long since Shauna’s thought of Coach Martinez, of the girl in Laura Lee’s math class from some grade below them who died that first day. What a mercy. What a gift they’d been given.
She hears a sound that she thinks might be something mechanical, something truly wrong with the helicopter, but it’s only her own ragged breathing, threading together in the thin air with the noises of the others.
(Shauna, wake the fuck up!) Waking up from a Valium haze.
“Too bad you don’t have any of that now, huh?” The voice is clear despite the deafening noise that surrounds Shauna, swallowing her whole. She doesn’t need to look to know what she’ll see, who she’ll see, sitting across from her in that helicopter, legs crossed politely. No, no, no. She can’t handle this, not now. She can’t handle this. Jackie – not Jackie, but some approximation of her, or just some strange manifestation of Shauna’s guilt – here, now. (But it feels so real. Sounds so real. And Shauna won’t look, but she knows from experience how real it looks. It. She. Jackie.)
Not here. Not that she has a choice in it. Shauna pulls her knees up and ducks her head between them, hiding. Where’s all that primal bravery now? “You can’t will me away, Shipman. I know you’re dying to get rid of me, but.”
But. But Shauna’s lost her forever, and she’ll never be free of her. Some kind of haunting. “I don’t want to get rid of you,” Shauna says, or maybe just thinks, but either way, there’s no hearing her voice when everything’s being drowned out by noise, noise, noise.
“Could have fooled me,” Jackie says, and Shauna can almost hear the eyeroll, the little pout forming on her face, and it’s a sharp, shooting pain in her chest, and she doesn’t know if there’s something really wrong with her or if it’s just that all consuming grief. Okay, that’s not true. She knows: there is something really wrong with her. “I told you rescue was coming, didn’t I?”
Well. She’d said that at first. At first, those first couple of weeks, before Jackie begun to bend and crack and snap under the weight of everything, when she was still playing the dutiful, optimistic captain. She’d been so beautiful then, glowing and tan and smattered with freckles with this fear behind her eyes she wouldn’t let spill out. She’d been intolerable, she’d been fickle and stubborn and bossy, and oh, it was beautiful. Back when she still ate. Back when she didn’t say the word die. “Back before I knew about you and Jeff,” Jackie finishes for her. Some days, they could finish each other’s sentences. “Back when I was alive.”
Shauna tucks her head further between her legs and prays for deliverance.
“I loved you, you know. It’s you I was thinking of. I loved you more than anybody.” It’s enough to force Shauna’s eyes up, though she knows what she’ll see, and she immediately regrets the act.
The same as always: worms and dirt. Earth and rot. Blue skin and frozen eyelashes. If Shauna’s face shows her horror (and she’s sure it does), Jackie ignores it. “I know you hated me, but it’s not fair. I never would have done that to you, Shauna. I don’t know why you hated me so much. I died not knowing that. I wish you had told me.”
Shauna opens her mouth and manages a cracking “I –” before Jackie holds up a hand (gruesome, rotting) to stop her.
“No,” she says, decisive, “don’t bother telling me now.” Too little, too late.
“I’m so sorry, Jackie.” Shauna says that every time, though she hasn’t seen Jackie – this Jackie – since the baby, like a wavering hallucination in that old heat, oh, God, it’s been so long. She says that every time, because it’s all she can think to say.
“You’re going home, Shauna,” Jackie says, and it’s warm, almost encouraging, almost comforting, voice lilting up at the end, though Shauna can hear the tears in her voice. It’s the same tone Shauna imagined Jackie might have said you’re going to Brown, Shauna, in, if things had gone differently, if things had gone right. Oh, God, how did she get here?
“I don’t know. You turned into kind of a badass out there. Ruthless. Seriously. It was a little hard to watch,” Jackie admits, regarding her with a certain look in her lidded eyes that Shauna can’t quite decipher.
The guilt will kill her. She knows this. The helicopter bobs to the left a little too fast and Shauna’s stomach drops, taking her breath away as she chokes out a gasp. “I know,” Jackie agrees, “it’s kinda scary. Like a rollercoaster. Remember in the tenth grade, when we won regionals, and we all went to Six Flags for the weekend? We rode, like, every roller coaster there.”
Shauna’s grip on the seat loosens ever so slightly. She gives a shaky little nod. “You screamed so hard you lost your voice the first day,” she recalls, hint of a smile working its way into her wavering voice. “You had to spend the whole rest of the trip writing down anything you wanted to say.”
“Sure, but you puked. Like, three separate times,” Jackie points out, tiny smile on her face, and what might be Shauna’s attempt at a laugh comes out more like a wheeze, but it’s something. “We did that together, you know? I wanted to do everything with you. I guess you didn’t want the same thing,” Jackie adds, and it’s so quick and so smooth, the way her smile turns bitter (or maybe just sad).
“Jackie, that’s not…” It’s not true. It’s not fair, except Shauna knows that it is. She knows what she’s done, and she knows that she deserves this. Her regret is a ball of heat lodged in her throat. But I loved you. And if Shauna had hated her, too, she hadn’t meant to, and she hadn’t asked to, and she’d never wanted to.
“Poor Shauna. You didn’t ask for this. Well, you’re going home now. And maybe you’re scared now – don’t you think I was scared? Don’t you think the others were fucking scared? Maybe this helicopter ride is scaring you, but you’re gonna be fine, Shipman,” Jackie says, lip curling into a snarl, and God, she does angry so well. “You’re a survivor, right? I told you that you’d be fine, and I was right, but I didn’t know that I wouldn’t.”
Shauna realizes with some surprise that she’s already begun to cry noiselessly. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish it had been me.”
“No, you don’t. But it’s your fault, Shauna. I sat there waiting, you know that? I was so sure that any minute, you’d come outside and bring me back in with you. I thought we’d be together. And the colder it got, and the more time passed, the more I thought, ‘she hates me, so it doesn’t matter if I die out here.’ So, I didn’t go back inside, because I didn’t care anymore. I regret that. I regret thinking you were worth dying over.” There’s something so steady about her anger. Like she’s been waiting to say this. Like she’s been rehearsing it. (That’s crazy. It doesn’t feel crazy.)
There’s nothing Shauna can say to that, is there? She pulls her knees close to her chest and shudders, she sputters out something like nonsense, eyes wide and tearful. “If I’d known – I swear to God, I never wanted you to die. I swear. I’m so sorry. I swear.”
“You killed me. That was bad enough. That was really bad, Shauna, but maybe I could have gotten over it. But now you’re leaving me. You’re leaving me here. Alone, forever. I just – I just want to fucking go home, Shauna. Don’t you get that?” Somewhere along the way, Jackie’s voice breaks a little, anger bleeding into this awful, raw hurt that Shauna can hear, and her eyes grow watery. Jackie always cried when she was mad. She turns to look out the little window, rotting hands trembling near the glass, looking down, down, down. “Getting further and further already,” she murmurs, and just like that, she’s gone. Like maybe she was never there at all. Like maybe Shauna imagined her.
The sudden absence shocks Shauna like cold water, and it’s only then that she realizes she really can’t breathe, some kind of terrible, trapping weight against her chest as her lungs struggle against her ribs, gasping for air. Her face grows warm and she grows dizzy as she fights for air, everything seeming to shrink as she swells with guilt, claustrophobic.
Jackie is right. (Jackie was always so right). It’s Shauna’s fault, and now she’s leaving her there, in the woods – oh, God, Jackie hated those woods, she wanted to go home more than anyone – by herself, to rot in the dark, frozen earth. To kill her was one thing, but to leave her is another. (It was hours before Taissa could drag her back inside. It had seemed wrong to go back into the warmth without Jackie. No. It had been wrong. It was wrong of her. She knows that.)
How can she go back to that place – to home, if she can call it that anymore – without Jackie? How could she have gotten on this helicopter without her? Guilt is a black hole that Shauna’s been walking circles around for fifteen months straight.
For no reason at all she thinks of that necklace, God, the necklace. She can’t breathe. She doesn’t even know exactly where it is now. How could she have done that? How could she have done any of this? How could this be who she was now? Wasn’t the once the little girl who had walked hand-in-hand home from school with Jackie, bathed in golden light? Hadn’t she been someone good for a little while, before it all soured? How could this be who she was now? She didn’t have to ask what Jackie would think, of course, because she already knew.
And Shauna can’t leave her. To go back without Jackie is nothing less than sacrilege, nothing less than wrong, wrong, wrong. She doesn’t realize that she’s standing or that she’s screaming until the others begin reacting. She knows very little except that she’s to blame. She knows very little except that she misses her best friend. She knows very little except that she needs to get off, she needs to get down. Panic writhes in her chest like a trapped animal, eating its way through her, like something’s collapsing around her, like she’s really and truly lost it now, but she needs to go back, she wants to go back, get back down, get back to Jackie, go back, back, back, to before, when she could have been someone good.
Shauna can’t leave her.
That’s what she screams, bare hands beating the walls of the aircraft, “I have to go back, I can’t leave her, you have to let me down, I can’t, I can’t go, I have to go back,” and there’s some kind of commotion because all she ever manages to be is some kind of problem, and somebody is going to stop her sooner or later, but it’s Lottie who gets to her first.
She’s all dirty fingernails and steady hands that wrap around Shauna’s forearms, so effortlessly strong against Shauna’s panicked thrashing, so effortlessly calm in the face of her breathless screams. “Lottie, I can’t leave her, I need to go back.” Barely even coherent.
“Shauna,” Lottie says, and her voice is so full of pity and maybe something else (maybe understanding), so soft and so warm, and it reminds Shauna so much of the Lottie that she knew so long ago that it only makes her ache. She thinks, I want to go back. “I know,” Lottie says, and she pulls Shauna’s shaking frame close to her, limbs all tight and muscles taught against Shauna’s struggling.
“I can’t leave her, Lottie,” Shauna says, or maybe just sobs, and if Lottie understands a word she says, then it’s a miracle, and it’s all owed to the way they’ve bled together in the woods, falling in step with one another. “I have to go back.”
Whether Lottie lowers Shauna to the floor, or whether Shauna simply can’t support herself on shaky limbs anymore, Shauna doesn’t know, but they end up in a heap on the ground like that, and though Shauna can’t see them, she knows that Taissa lingers by her side, and Natalie stands behind her anxiously with hands that twitch in time to Shauna’s cries.
“We can’t go back now,” Lottie says, voice even and smooth and kind, like she’s comforting a child throwing a tantrum. “We can’t go back.” Shauna thinks she might not ever truly understand the girl with her arms wrapped around her. She thinks she might not ever understand what transpired over those endless, fanged nineteen months.
Shauna tries to say something like I loved her, but she can’t make it out, can’t force the air up from her lungs, can’t breathe. Lottie rocks her back and forth and tries to soothe her, and Shauna hates her for it just as she loves her for it. Little meaningless placations into the matted crown of Shauna’s hair. Somewhere beyond the weight of Lottie’s touch, nothingness.
Lottie says, “It’s okay,” and Shauna says nothing (can say nothing, maybe wouldn’t say anything if she could), but she knows this is a lie more than anything else Lottie has told her. After all of this time, Shauna is on a helicopter headed home, and Jackie isn’t with her, and that’s Shauna’s fault. While Shauna is waiting to get transplanted back into her old life like a bad organ waiting to be rejected, Jackie is thousands of miles from home, trapped in the woods forever. How could that ever be okay?