Feel Me Fall Read online

  Her explanation didn’t ring true.

  Molly pointed at Viv and me. “They never liked me. Viv and her shadow, and Nico, of course he’s gonna side with them.” She turned to Derek. “But you believe me, right? You know what it’s like to have everyone against you….”

  Derek didn’t answer.

  “Derek, you have to believe me.”

  Anger rose in me. Earlier she’d implied that I would steal the food. It took a lot of work to get those grubs. It’d helped our morale just knowing there was food, and now it was gone.

  Molly sensed our disbelief. Fear radiated off of her in waves. Maybe she thought we’d abandon her. “I didn’t take it!” Molly stuck her finger down her throat. “I’ll prove it!” She pushed her finger to the back of her mouth, wiggling, retching.

  “Stop it!” Nico grabbed her hand. “It won’t prove anything. You either didn’t eat ‘em, or if you did—”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Then it’s probably already digested.” Nico turned to us. “This isn’t helping. What’s done is done.”

  Viv asked, “What are you saying?”

  “We forget it and move on.”

  “That was our food, Nico. Our food.”

  “We’ll get more.”

  “Not until morning,” said Derek.

  Nico glanced at the darkening sky. “Then we’re just gonna have to wait.”

  As if on cue, my stomach rumbled. It took a few seconds for us to realize nothing was going to change. No amount of accusations or arguing was going to make food suddenly appear.

  We split off to finish our beds, our movements lagging, saving our energy. Later I heard Molly crying and I wondered if it was because she’d been caught, or whether she’d been telling the truth. That was worse to consider. Because if she didn’t steal it, then who the hell did?

  Chapter 15

  “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. If that mocking bird won’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”

  I open my eyes. My mother is leaning over me, softly singing a nursery rhyme. I’ve never heard her sing before, and it’s pretty. Soothing. I like this version of my mom.

  “If that diamond ring turns to brass, Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass.” When her eyes meet mine, I can see the haze behind them. She’s had Ativan—at least two, maybe more—and she’s in one of her fuzzy states. The nursery rhyme isn’t so pleasant anymore, and I can smell the antiseptic cleaner the hospital uses.

  “Did I ever tell you how much I love you?” she asks.

  If I was home I could just walk away. Here, I’m a captive audience. Stuck.

  Her voice takes on that dreamy quality I’m all too familiar with. “So many times I thought to myself: what if? What if I wasn’t a mother? What if I never moved out here? What if I could start all over? To be your age again.” She smiled ruefully. “The things I’d do differently. You don’t have those thoughts. Not at your age. But you will. One day, we all have those thoughts.”

  “Mom, I’m tired,” I lie.

  She takes no heed. “I’ve thought so many things. Possibilities.” Her eyes land on mine. “If I never had you.”

  “Mom, please.”

  “No,” and she reaches out and holds my hand. Her grip is strong, almost crushing. “You need to hear this. You need to know.” Her eyes are haggard, and I realize she’s been crying. “When I got that phone call and the man told me there’d been a crash, I hung up. I hung up and stared at the phone and prayed it wouldn’t ring. You don’t know what those seconds felt like.” Her body tenses, as if holding something within, afraid to let it out. “When the phone rang again, I unplugged it. The apartment got quiet and I thought can’t reach me now, can you? And then my cell phone rang, and that’s when I knew. I knew my baby was gone.”

  She stops herself from falling apart. “I thought of all the things I’d wished for, my selfish thoughts floating around, caught in the clouds, just waiting….” Her mouth trembles. “And your plane flew right into them.”

  I consider pressing the nurse’s button to get her to stop.

  “It’s my fault, Emily. If I’d never thought those things, if I’d never…. Some wishes almost came true, don’t you see?” The dam bursts and she cries, a wounded animal next to my bed. She buries her head in my quilt, my mother reduced to a little girl, a parishioner to my priest. “I don’t wish them anymore. I don’t wish for anything but you.” She lifts her head. “Can you forgive me? Can you ever forgive me?”

  I look into her eyes.

  She waits for my answer.

  Chapter 16

  That night in the jungle I dreamt of food—red ripe cherries hanging from a tree. I anticipated biting into one, juice dribbling down my chin. I reached up to a branch and it was too high. The cherries were so close and their sweet scent only stirred my hunger. I scrambled up the tree, and as I did, the tree seemed to expand. For every step I climbed, the branches stretched above me, telescoping into the sky. I climbed; they stretched. The tree grew so tall that I was in the clouds. Looking down, there was nothing but vast empty space and the pattern of the earth. I pushed one last time and jumped to a branch and grabbed onto it, my body hanging loose, feet swaying beneath me. I inched over and picked off a cherry.

  I was about to pop it in my mouth when I heard the sharp crack of a branch and it snapped.

  I fell in my dream.

  I didn’t want to die in a dream.

  I didn’t want to die.

  Someone else, but not me.

  I slammed into the earth and woke with a shudder. The tartness of the phantom cherry rested on my lips. I was left with my hunger pains and I moaned, or I thought I did, only to confuse the sound with Ryan’s labored breathing. I crawled out of my bed, moving in the dark, and slid into his. His body was furnace hot. I snuggled close, spooning him. If he died in the night, he wouldn’t be alone. Having a body next to me made me feel less lonely, too. Ryan whispered gibberish and I gently shushed him, brushing my hand over his head.

  “Sleep, Ryan. Sleep.”

  We did. We slept.

  In the morning, I opened my eyes and Ryan was facing me. For a moment, I thought he might be dead, for his eyes stayed unblinkingly on mine. Then he said, his voice weak, “How long have you been here?”

  It was the first thing he said that had made sense in the last 24 hours. I reached out and felt his forehead. I touched again to be sure. “Your fever. It broke.” His jaundice, too, didn’t seem as severe. “How do you feel?”

  “Like shit, but I’ll live.”

  He rolled to get out of the bed, and I placed my hand on him. “Rest. You’ll need it.”

  I got up and woke everyone up, sharing the good news. They seemed relieved. No one had to make the impossible choice. If I was honest with myself, I was relieved, too. Before the moment of truth, it was easy to say, of course, I would stay with Ryan. Of course I wouldn’t leave him. But if the moment really came, I wasn’t so sure. I hated that seed of doubt.

  The first thing we needed was food. I was hungry. It went beyond sensation. It was need, like an addict seeking his next hit. Everything revolved around filling that need, every thought, every action.

  We left Ryan behind, and he seemed peaceful lying in the bed, caught in a tableau of mist, almost otherworldly. He Zen-ed out in Nature’s Garden while we split off in search of fruit, creating new finger-like paths in the green.

  No one spoke. The jungle’s varied vocabulary filled the emptiness.

  I’d read about Japanese soldiers, lost in a jungle during World War II, who continued to fight for months or years after the war ended because they were cut off from civilization. It had only been a few days, and I had the feeling anything could’ve happened in our absence. Catastrophes, terrorism, nuclear war. Why else would it take rescuers so long to find us?

  I tried to keep my thoughts positive: You’ll be fine. They’ll find you.

  No, a voice argued, the plane mi
ght be lost.

  They’ll find the black box.

  What if the black box was damaged?

  Impossible.

  Nothing’s impossible. You know that.

  Above me, a weird-looking black monkey with a white furry face ate fruit. He hopped along the treetops, picking at dark, round berries. If it was good enough for a monkey, it was good enough for me. Unlike my dream, I easily grabbed onto the tree and climbed, finding purchase on branches, one branch and then another, careful to avoid strange bugs, until I picked a bunch of berries. Perched in a tree, I yelled for Derek.

  A moment later, he emerged and looked up at me. Out of all of us, Derek seemed the most in his element. His upbeat mood made me wonder if it wasn’t him who had stolen the food.

  I tossed down a few berries. “What do you think?”

  Catching them, he rubbed one against his lips, not eating. He waited, then cringed and dropped them. “No bueno.”

  I held the berries in my hand. They looked delicious. “What do you mean no good?”

  “My lips are tingling. They’re poisonous.”

  “But I saw a monkey eating them.”

  “Em, it’s evolution. They live here, we don’t.”

  I climbed down the tree and met him at the bottom. “What about you? Any luck?”

  He shook his head.

  The more I looked, the more berries I saw. They were everywhere: on trees and bushes, and all of them forbidden. How long would it take before we crushed them in our mouths for lack of anything else?

  Derek and I inched along, our eyes peeled. Green and brown gave way to more green and brown.

  “Would you have really left Ryan?”

  He didn’t even look up. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.”

  “This isn’t Star Trek.”

  “It’s the principal.”

  “And I could recite another one,” I said. “Leave no man behind.”

  “Clearly,” Derek motioned toward his thin physique and said, “I’m not a military man.” He saw how I looked at him. “Don’t judge, Em. This stopped being a high school trip as soon as we hit the water. You can throw stones once we’re back under four walls and a roof. Until then, it’s survival.” He leaned in. “And if you want to live, you’ll follow my lead.”

  We searched for another ten minutes when we heard screams. Ryan’s voice pierced through the jungle, much worse than when he was bitten by ants. They weren’t screams of pain or frustration; they were something else. They were the screams before falling into the abyss.

  Derek burst ahead of me.

  I followed and ran back through the tangled vines, seemingly lost in a dark fairy tale.

  I emerged into the clearing where we’d built our bamboo beds. Ryan’s screams filled the air, and along with it, a curious fast rustling. Viv, Nico, Molly and Derek had beaten me there and stood in a semi-circle far on the outskirts. All I saw were their backs. Whatever they were watching had frozen them in place.

  “What’s wrong?” I yelled, but they didn’t turn. Didn’t speak. Didn’t move.

  With tentative steps, I approached them in my own personal horror film, fearful of what I would find, and when I did, I understood.

  A blur of black, a flash of white, and Ryan on the ground.

  A wild boar charged Ryan. The boar moved like thunder, a hideous creature of black bristled hair and tusks. It had gored Ryan, lifting him off the bamboo bed and dropped him on the flat surface. Ryan screamed, his mouth releasing a horrible sound, a note of despair and fear, that for all his challenges, this beast next to him was one he could not overcome.

  He was alone. A gladiator of one.

  His chest bled from the wounds, flaccid flesh surrounding leaking holes.

  He lay, tired and shocked, but not defeated. I saw his mouth move, and imagined him saying, “Help me.” He began crawling—crawling towards us. As he did, the semi-circle moved away.

  I was paralyzed with fear. Any second, the creature could attack us. But Ryan was the easier prey.

  The boar charged, and Ryan tried to dodge it, splaying flat and eating mud, but the boar raked his tusks into the ground. The tusks caught Ryan in the back, impaling him. Ryan’s body went rigid. Red spilled onto the white ivory and the beast lifted Ryan like he was nothing at all, like a terrier shaking a toy.

  I couldn’t look any longer.

  I couldn’t look at my friends doing nothing.

  I picked up a piece of broken bamboo and ran at the boar. “No!” I yelled and swung the bamboo over the boar’s head. With a hollow thud, it bounced harmlessly off.

  The boar faced me, its eyes little slits, releasing angry, guttural growls.

  How I hated that creature.

  I took the bamboo pole with the V-groove, using it like a spear, and I charged.

  Damn this jungle, I thought. Damn this death.

  The bamboo hit the pig, and the laws of physics played themselves on in that clearing, where its weight held it steady, but launched me to the side, and I fell into the mud. The boar’s thick hide had protected it.

  But I had certainly pissed it off.

  It bared its mouth, releasing a breath of foul air.

  Fear gave way to survival. I grabbed the bamboo and thrust at its face, again and again. The boar kicked up dirt, scuttling back and forth holding its piece of property, and every second felt far too long. My mind was empty. My vision tunneled, and all that existed, had ever existed and ever would, was the boar and I.

  I jammed the bamboo into its snout. With a squeal, it gave up and scurried off into the jungle, darting away.

  Time kicked into gear.

  To my right, Molly, Viv, Nico and Derek stood watching, caught in a chrysalis between what had happened and what was yet to come. They hadn’t moved. They hadn’t done anything.

  Cowards.

  I turned to Ryan to tell him it was all right, we’d saved him, we would bandage his wounds, and it would be a great story to tell one day.

  But he was still.

  Too still.

  His eyes opened to the sky, his face contorted in confusion, as if asking why me, why me?

  Chapter 17

  The mud was saturated with water and could absorb nothing more, so Ryan’s blood floated on top like a cartoonish oil slick. We stood over him and he looked like a boy, smaller in death than the image we carried in our memories. Lying there, his body seemed such a fragile vessel for such a resilient spirit.

  The boar had attacked Ryan because he was weak. Because Ryan had been near death. I wondered if we were all near death, reeking of it from our pores and not knowing, having grown used to the smell.

  I didn’t know what to call Ryan’s demise. Accidental death? Murder? I wanted it to be something classifiable, something with resonance. Otherwise, his passing in time would become a joke, yet another story about “When Animals Attack,” or some anecdote kids would throw around at parties. (“Hey, you hear about the guy who got gored? That’s some sick shit, man.”) I’m not even sure what killed him: the boar, the jungle, or the rest of us who didn’t lift a finger to help.

  Ryan could’ve been saved. Should’ve been saved. I turned to them. “We should never have left him alone.”

  Derek said, “What’s done is done, Em. It was a mistake. It happened. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “He didn’t need to die.” None of them met my face except Derek.

  “I refuse to feel guilty,” he said. “And I don’t.”

  I looked at the rest of them. “Do any of you?” When none of them answered, I said, “I thought you didn’t do anything because you were scared. At least that I could understand. But if you did nothing because you chose not to?” They looked anywhere but at me.

  “I told you,” Derek said. “It’s survival. So before you get on your high horse, think this through.”

  “He’s dead. Ryan’s dead.”

  “What if the boar gored one of us? What then? Who would carry ‘em
? There’s no 911, no ambulance, no hospital. There’s only putting one foot in front of the other, and praying you don’t fall sick, or slip and break a bone because there’s no room for error. No safety net. Nothing but ourselves.”

  There it was: cold logic. I didn’t want to be logical. I wanted to be right. “I think you let him die.”

  “What?”

  The answer was like a bolt of truth. “You let him die. To save your energy. To not have to share food. To save yourselves. He was slowing us down. Sapping our strength because we had to carry him. He was dead weight to you.”

  Derek turned away.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m not gonna stay here and listen to this. I’m hungry. And if I find enough food, I’ll bring enough for all of us.”

  “What about Ryan? We can’t just leave him out here in the open! The animals will get him.”

  “They’ll get him anyway! Whether we dig him deep or not.”

  The others were starting to split off. Viv said, “He’s right, Em.”

  “Can we at least say a few words? Before we leave him?” Before we leave him forever, I thought. I picked up a few large leaves, the closest thing to a funeral sheet I could think of and laid them over Ryan’s body.

  How fast would it take the jungle to erase his very presence? I wondered if we’d ever be able to find him again. At his funeral back home there might be a casket, but no body or bones inside, only an empty space.

  The group paused, waiting for one of them to make the decision, and then the rest would follow. Derek walked forward. Viv, Nico and Molly circled around Ryan, hands at their sides. We bowed our heads. I pictured soft shafts of light falling through the canopy on him, and whether it was true or not, that’s how I was always going to remember it.

  Viv said, “Does anyone know what to say?”

  “Goodbye, Ryan,” I said. “You helped save us.”

  Derek scoffed.

  “Rest in peace.” I looked at the others. “Anyone else?”