The Altar Girl: A Prequel

CHAPTER 21

On the morning of her third day, Nadia woke up to find her fire had survived the night. The log-feeding mechanism Mrs. Chimchak had taught her to build had actually worked. The sight of the low burning flames boosted her spirits, as did the realization her fever had broken.

She climbed out of her lean-to. The red sun rising in the East told her it was still early morning. She still had the rest of the food Marko had brought, and enough juices and water to last her through the night. With the fire burning and the extra matches he’d left her, nothing could go wrong. All she had to do was waste time and survive one more night.

Nadia ate a Baby Ruth candy bar for breakfast. It was the smart choice. It had peanuts for lasting energy and caramel for an instant pickup. Then she hiked to the stream and washed up. After she was done washing her face, however, she had to sit on a log to rest. The short walk and the simple act of splashing water with her hands had tired her out. By the time she returned to her camp she felt feverish again. Nadia cursed her bad luck as she fed the fire.

She wished she had some Sucrets throat lozenges or some Vicks cough drops to ease the pain in her throat. It hurt every time she tried to swallow. Then she remembered Mrs. Chimchak had given her the box of Altoids. Maybe a mint really could make a person feel better when she had no better options.

Nadia popped one into her mouth. Instead of a burst of mint, however, she choked on a bitter explosion. Nadia bolted upright and spit out the tablet. What was it? A salt or iodine tablet? Was it another test? Was she supposed to survive with some sort of strange substance in her body? Maybe the KGB had interrogated Mrs. Chimchak back in Ukraine. Maybe this was her sick way of toughening Nadia up. All the immigrants were wacko that way, Nadia thought. They had a different mentality about what made a person strong from regular Americans because they’d been through so much themselves.

The residual aftertaste of the tablet lingered on Nadia’s tongue. Thirty seconds after she’d spit it out, she recognized the taste. It was aspirin! The kind adults took, not the baby kind her mother used to give her. She’d taken only one tablet about nine months ago when she’d had a terrible headache. Mrs. Chimchak had pretended to give her mints, but she’d filled the box with aspirin. It was a real wonder medicine, and Mrs. Chimchak cared about her so much she wanted her to have some in case she got sick. Either that or Mrs. Chimchak could already tell she was getting sick when she’d visited her camp. She knew things about people they didn’t even know themselves. She was a strange, bizarre, spooky woman. She was the best.

Nadia took a fresh aspirin and washed it down with some pineapple juice. Then she slipped into her sleeping bag to rest. Her mind wandered, and she began to get scared about being sick all alone in the wildness.

Marko had taught her how to deal with unpleasant situations like these. Don’t be scared of getting scared, he said. It’s normal to be frightened in unusual circumstances. Make fear your friend. Let the fluttering in the belly and the pounding of the heart remind you to be alert and not do anything stupid. Then focus your mind on something else, Marko said. Picture yourself doing something you enjoy, and imagine you’re really doing it.

And that’s what she’d trained herself to do when she got scared or nervous. She did it when she had to recite a poem in front of the entire Uke community on stage at the National Home. The community put on half a dozen banquets during the year to commemorate a person or an event like Uke independence day. Sometimes a Uke dance troupe would perform, other times a Uke choir would sing.

And then there was the obligatory Nadia Tesla poetry recital. That was her punishment for being the best Uke student in school and having the best Uke diction. There was nothing she hated more than being volunteered by her father to commit eight stanzas to memory and stand in front of five hundred people and perform. She didn’t even know what half the words meant or what she was getting all emotional about.

As the recital approached, her nerves got so tight she thought her head would explode. To ease the tension, she pictured herself eating her reward at McDonald’s, a cheeseburger with fries and a vanilla shake. The key moment was when she sipped the shake with a mouthful of food, and the sugar in the shake blended with the salt from the burger and fries. Except she didn’t get any reward after the last recital because she forgot a line and had to be prompted by her teacher from behind the stage. Her father got so mad…

But not as mad as he got when he learned Marko had doctored his report card, used a typewriter to turn an F into an A. As soon as he’d taken his belt off, Nadia had raced upstairs to her bedroom, hidden under the blanket, and covered her ears. Then she pictured herself reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the living room, her father smoking a pipe, her brother watching baseball on the TV as their mother pared apples for them to share. They were happy. So happy…

But there were times when the trick didn’t work. Like when her father and mother screamed at each other, when he told her marrying her was the dumbest decision of his life, and she said she regretted having had his children. There was one time in particular, when they went totally ballistic and her father picked up a kitchen knife and pointed it at Nadia’s mother, and Marko jumped in and stood in front of their mother to protect her. The anguish in Nadia’s soul had been so intense she thought she would never get out of the moment, that she would never recover from the incident, that she would be incapable of experiencing happiness again.

Much to her surprise, she did recover from that incident. And her family went on pretending there were no problems, that they were a normal family. And so she would survive her final night here on the Appalachian Trail, too, Nadia thought.

She drifted in and out of sleep for hours. When she woke up to the sound of spitting and cracking, she thought she was seeing things because giant orange flames were raging against the black of night. That was impossible, she said to herself, because she’d been sleeping and hadn’t fed the fire. Then she felt a gentle hand on her forehead and heard a voice that made her realize she was no longer sleeping and this was not a dream. It was the sound of a voice that might have instantly calmed other girls, but for Nadia it was the voice of holy terror.

It was the sound of her father’s voice.