The last thing I remember

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Angeline

“Angeline!”

A clear, sweet woman’s voice came to me as if through a mist.

“Angeline! Where are you?”

I was lying with my face planted in a thin carpet of damp leaves. I had climbed out of the cave-I don’t know-maybe fifteen minutes before. I was conscious, I guess, if you can call it that, but it was an awfully dim consciousness. Cold, exhausted, hungry-so hungry it was like a high, annoying siren going off in my brain. I couldn’t seem to muster the energy to move anymore. I felt empty, as if I’d been hollowed out, as if there were no more muscle or bone or sinew inside me to give me the strength I needed.

“Angeline, sweetheart!”

I couldn’t tell at first if that voice was real or something in my imagination. It was all mixed up with the other things swirling around in my brain: memories of the karate demonstration and the talk with Beth and the argument with Alex and then the rest: going home to dinner, writing my paper, IM’ing with Josh, and talking on the phone with Rick and then going to bed, my own bed, for the last time…

“Angeline! Where’d you go to, you mouse?”

For another few seconds, I lay half-awake and confused. I guess there was a part of me sort of hoping that voice was my mother’s voice. Maybe she was calling my sister, Amy, and soon she’d call me to wake me up for another day at school.

“Wow,” I’d tell her. “I had the weirdest dream…”

But then I took a deep breath and lifted my head out of the leaves and looked around me.

I was still in the forest, but it was different here. The trees were farther apart. They were mostly birch trees with peeling white bark. The underbrush was not as dense. There were open spaces covered with leaves. I could hear a brook bubbling happily nearby and birds chirping. The sun was low, but it wasn’t blocked out of sight like it was before. I could see it clearly through the branches, a reddening ball among the clouds.

I turned my head to scan the area-and stopped.

There was a little girl standing there, gazing down at me.

She looked like she was about five years old. A solemn little creature with a pink woolen cap pulled down over her brown hair. She had a pink Windbreaker on and purple leggings marked with patches of dirt. She was holding a small ball in her hand. She was sort of turning the upper half of her body this way and that. She seemed mesmerized by the sight of me.

I stared at her as if she were a vision. I was half-afraid she was. Slowly, I pushed myself up onto my knees. I reached out to her. I wanted to touch her, to make sure she was real.

She just stood there, turning this way and that. She moved her gaze from my face and gazed at my reaching hand. She seemed fascinated by it, hypnotized.

I let my hand fall. I didn’t want to frighten her. I didn’t want her to run away. I tried to smile. It wasn’t easy. My face felt encrusted in dirt and pain.

“Hello,” I managed to say. My voice sounded hoarse and rasping. “My name is Charlie. Charlie West. What’s yours?”

The little girl hugged her ball tighter. She tucked her chin down as if she wanted to shrink up and hide behind the ball. She swiveled her body this way and that.

I kept staring at her. She was real, all right. She was really real. And if there was a little girl here, there must be an adult nearby, someone who could help me.

“Is someone with you?” I asked her, unable to keep my voice from trembling with hope. “Is your mother here… or someone?”

The little girl didn’t answer. Only now did it occur to my muddled brain that the voice I’d heard, the woman calling, must be…

“Angeline! There you are!”

I followed the sound of her voice and saw her. A tall, slender lady in her thirties. A kind, pretty face with pretty red hair falling to her shoulders. She was wearing a navy-blue overcoat and jeans. Having finally found her daughter, she was stepping toward her. She hadn’t seen me yet.

Then she did. She spotted me. She froze in her tracks. She stared at me with wide blue eyes.

She looked at her daughter again. Very quickly, she said, “Angeline! Angeline, come here right now. Come to Mommy right now!”

That broke the spell. Angeline turned away from me and ran to her mother, her pink sneakers crunching on the dead leaves. Clutching her ball in one hand, she clung to her mother’s overcoat with the other and tried to hide in the folds of it.

The red-haired lady licked her lips. Staring at me, she began to back away. She was leaving me! She was going to leave me here!

“No! No, wait!” I said.

I managed to get to my feet, reaching out a hand to her. The mother took another step away, pulling her child with her.

I called out, more harshly than I meant to: “No! Stop! Don’t go!”

The mother froze at the tone of my voice. She clutched her daughter to her more tightly. Her eyes traveled over me.

I took a stumbling step toward her.

“Please,” she said. She spoke in a near-whisper, as if she could barely get the words out. “Please don’t hurt us.”

I stopped moving. I’d been so desperate for help that it hadn’t occurred to me what I must look like to her. A filthy, bloodstained, battered young man-and with a gun stuck in the waistband of his pants! I must’ve looked like some kind of madman or escaped convict or a killer or something. The sight of me must’ve terrified the poor woman out of her wits-but I hadn’t thought of that.

“Hurt you?” I said, confused.

“Do you want money? I can give you some money. Please…”

“No, no…”

“Please. My daughter. She’s just a child. You can do anything you want to me, but don’t hurt her.”

“Mommy!” the little girl cried out tearfully. She clutched her mother’s coat tighter in fear.

Openmouthed, I stared at one of them and then the other. Finally, some understanding worked its way into my befuddled brain. My eyes misted over. I shook my head.

“No, no, no,” I said. “Listen to me, listen. I swear to you, I swear: they could give me all the money in all the banks in all the world, and I wouldn’t hurt a single hair on your head or on your daughter’s. So help me. So help me.”

She clutched her child even tighter. She took another step away, eyeing me suspiciously. “What do you want then?”

I stopped moving. I held up my hand to show I wouldn’t come any closer. “Help. Please. I just need help.”

The lady’s lips trembled. Her eyes were swimming. She was so scared of me she was close to tears. I could see she was a nice lady, and it hurt my heart for her to be afraid of me. But I was desperate for her not to leave.

“What sort of help?” she asked. “I can give you some money. I don’t have much. But I have some.”

“Have you got a phone? If I could just call my mom and dad… They’ll come and get me. They’ll take me home. Please.”

She licked her lips again. I saw her eyes go to the gun in my waistband. I put my hand on it.

The lady let out a cry of fear and turned her body to shield her daughter from a bullet.

“No, no, no-here!” I said. I drew the gun out of my waistband. I took it by the muzzle and held the handle out to her. “Here-take it.”

There was another moment before she dared to turn around and look. Then she did. A look of surprise came over her face as she saw me holding the gun out to her.

“Take it,” I said. “I would never hurt you. Never. You’ve gotta believe me. I just want to go home. Please. Take the gun.”

I could see in her eyes that she was confused now. She didn’t know what to think of me. She just stood there, staring at the gun, trying to figure out what to do, how to protect her little girl.

Finally, she edged toward me cautiously. She reached for the gun gingerly, as if she was afraid I was trying to trap her, lure her in and grab her or something. When her fingers touched the gun, she snatched it quickly and leapt back out of my reach. She pointed the gun at me. It made me pretty nervous. It’d be just my luck today if I escaped from, like, a million guards and then got shot by a mom who pulled the trigger by mistake.

She just stood there, pointing the gun, not really knowing what to do next.

“Look,” I said. “There are men after me. Bad men- dangerous. I don’t know how far away they are, but they may still be looking for me. If I could just use your phone…”

Holding the gun on me, the lady swallowed. “It’s…

It’s in the car,” she said uncertainly. “I don’t have it with me.” Then she added: “It doesn’t work out here anyway. There’s no signal.”

“Well, listen, I really need to call…”

“All right, all right,” she said. She thought some more. I could see she was making a plan. “You can come with me. We can drive back down the road. It usually picks up a signal at the bottom.”

I nodded. “Great. That’d be great, ma’am, really. Uh… Do you think you could stop pointing the gun at me now?”

She looked down at her hand as if she’d forgotten the gun was there. When she saw it, she considered it a long moment. Finally, I guess she came to a decision. She took a deep breath. She slipped the gun into the pocket of her overcoat. I took a deep breath too, relieved.

“Okay,” she said. “Come with me.”