inside, it rose to the surface. Oklahoma mounted her all over again.
It was April, thirteen years past, the morning after.
The playground grass was brittle and yellow and rimed with frost. Like this, exactly like this, on her right side, eyes open, she had watched the town come awake. The cold sun climbed. A man stocked the newspaper box. After a time, a school bus had passed. No one noticed the bundle of rags in the park. It was mid-morning before the lady who owned the stationery store saw her and called the police.
They never did find the guy. They never really looked. He was just another nomad like her. Like her, he’d given up trying to thumb a ride the night before and had walked to the town park to find a little shelter. That’s where they’d met.
She didn’t have to be bumming rides. Her parents would have given her the money if they’d known how serious she was. But part of the exercise in running away was to hurt them the way they’d hurt her. It was stupid. They loved her more than their own lives. They said that over and over. And yet they had confined her in a fiction for all her conscious life, and how loving was that? In running off to search for her birth mother, she had invited suffering for them all.
They treated her like one more case of the suburban blues. The ER nurses were kind. They swabbed her with Q-tips and cleaned her cuts. One of the cops said that it wasn’t what you would call an actual rape. She’d overheard him outside the ER room. These kids, he said, they couple up on the road and then something goes sour and all of a sudden it’s a 911. She just doesn’t like how it turned out.
His words had made her wonder. After the first few minutes, it was true that she’d just let the attack happen. She had quit fighting and stood off to one side and watched him go at her underneath the swing set. She’d heard of out-of-body experiences. It was true. She’d quit smelling his breath and tasting the canned spaghetti on his teeth.
When he was done, she’d gone back into herself. Her knees had drawn up into her chest like rawhide constricting. She’d hugged herself through the dawn.
She heard her name. “Molly.”
She thought it was part of the memory. He’d asked her name. He’d shared his SpaghettiOs before doing it.
When the cop had come in to take a description, he’d asked her for her parents’ phone number. In that instant, Molly had realized that her search could end right there. She could return to their sunny fiction, defeated by reality. Or she could accept the ugliness and get on with her journey.
He’d fucked her so hard she could barely stand. But she somehow got to her feet and took the cop’s report and crumpled it into a ball to drop at his feet. With blood leaking down her thighs and one eye swollen shut, she told him, sure, she’d made it up. They released her that afternoon.
Only later, years later, did it occur to her that the animal who’d mounted her that night might have been her own father. Not her very father, of course, but a man like him. Because who could say what violence her poor mother had accepted in the name of love? Who could say where she’d come from?
“Molly.”
This time the birds fell silent.
She listened. Men were calling her from far away. She clung to the sound of her name. “Moll-lee.”
She stirred.
She felt earthbound. It took an act of will to get her hands to let go and her legs to straighten. Oklahoma faded. She sat up in the center of the tent.
It was her home away from home, the same dome tent she’d used to grand-slam Colorado’s fourteeners and photograph the Pleiades meteor shower and sleep by high lakes and wake to vistas of light. Only this morning, she noticed, it had leeches.
Their silhouettes showed through the fabric. They were as graceful as dancers waving their bodies out there. She passed her hand underneath them and they bent to her chemical signature or whatever leeches go for. At the recovery site, she’d never seen more than a few at a time. The forest was more abundant. Here they waited for her by the dozens.
Unconcerned, Molly put herself together, what little there was to put together. She pulled off the layers of shirts and quickly shed the sundress and pulled the shirts back on and tightened the belt on her canvas pants. She folded the yellow dress and laid it in one corner. If all else failed, it could serve as her blanket tonight.
Shedding the night, warming up, she rolled her shoulders and tried a simple yoga position. But the voices called her again, dragging the syllables out, like grappling hooks. Did they think she was lost?
“Moll-lee.”
They wanted to start their morning, though the day was still dim, with no hint of eastern light. “Coming,” she said under her breath.
She tried rattling the tent to shake the leeches loose, but that only agitated them. She reminded herself that they were slow, blind and mindless. A little haste on the exit was all that was needed.
She scooted to the door, arranged her camera bag, and wrapped Duncan’s scarf around her head. On three, she pulled down the zipper. Feet first, she slipped out through the opening and, that quickly, her
Now that she was standing outside, there were even more leeches than she’d thought. The tent wall was covered with them, glistening and stretching for her, maybe not so mindless or blind after all. She zipped the door as tight as a drum to prevent any bedtime surprises, and made a note to get her hands on a flashlight.
Blue mist had replaced last night’s patchy fog. Her tent stood on a wide stone ledge, and below that she could just make out another ledge. The men were invisible down by the trucks, but she could smell their cook fire and coffee and cigarettes wafting up. Oddly, their voices were coming from above. Could they have started exploring without her? Kleat wouldn’t care, but surely Duncan would have come to wake her. They were in this thing together.
The stone terrace was cool and slippery under her bare feet. Her shoes were somewhere in the mule bag, a first order of business once she got down. Her flip-flops were set at the entrance to the tent, or at least one of them was. The other had been tipped upside down during the night.
Ordinarily she wouldn’t have noticed, but local custom had seeped into her habits. It wasn’t just a matter of taking off your shoes or sandals when entering a temple or someone’s house. Footwear was always positioned neatly, side by side, and always upright. Even Samnang was superstitious about such things. And so she’d very exactly placed her sandals with the soles flat to the ground before climbing into the tent last night.
The culprit was a thin green shoot of bamboo that had grown up through a joint between the stones. It was three inches high, and she definitely hadn’t seen it there last night. There was only one explanation. The bamboo had sprouted through the crack while she was sleeping, tipping her sandal out of its way. She pressed at the sharp nub, charmed in a way. Duncan was right. Things grew fast in the rain forest.
“Moll-lee.” They were up there all right, and it was more than one voice calling her to join them. Possibly there hadn’t been time to wake her. Duncan could be trying just to keep abreast of Kleat’s predation. What were they finding?
15.
Slipping her sandals on, Molly shouldered her camera bag and hustled along the ledge toward the stairs. A red tent materialized on the lower shelf, then atomized in the mist. Giant airborne faces floated off to her right, their tonnage elevated by dharma smiles. Invisible animals shifted in the brush. Dewdrops hung like jewels.
She glanced up the steps, tempted by the pale brightening in the upper forest. Instead she started down into the thick of the mist where coffee was brewing and her socks and shoes waited in the truck. A quick cup of St. Joseph, then the proper footgear, and she’d double-time the staircase. With her long legs and jogger’s lungs, she’d overtake the men before the amazement died from their eyes. The mist would bead her lenses, but this green light was gorgeous. You couldn’t get more saturated color. She wanted to sprint down the steps, but they were steep and greasy with moss, forcing her to pick her way carefully.
