degree vertical. No one but Count Dracula could climb them at ninety-five degrees. Gravity would not be defied. The inward curve of her jar was more pronounced than a mere ninety-five, closer to a hundred and fifteen.
The only way out was however the monster came and went. It would be easy enough to climb down a rope, but climbing up over the curve would require strength and agility.
Also, it would probably be better not to be drugged off one’s ass.
Two good arms would help. Gingerly she shrugged her left shoulder. Maybe it was her imagination, but she was sure she could feel the round bone end trying to push out of the socket. Whatever held her together—tendons, ligaments, muscles—was torn or stretched.
Sand scattered over her belly. “Buddy,” she said as she struggled to a sitting position. “What are you doing?”
The skunk kit had dug up a moldy green snaky-looking thing. He had it in his teeth and, front paws braced, haunches bunched, was trying to pull the rest of it out of the dirt. It was a strap, Anna realized, army green and tightly woven like the belts with the flat buckles. Memory flashed and she saw the belt around Kay’s hips as the boys abused her, saw the water bottle clipped to it with a carabiner.
“Let me help you, Buddy,” she whispered and gently took hold of the strap between his jaws and the dirt. Buddy didn’t run or let go. “We’re a team,” Anna assured him. With little effort she uncovered the rest of the belt. There was a small fanny pack she hadn’t noticed before and the water bottle: one liter, clear plastic and three- quarters full. Pizarro looking on El Dorado, Ponce de Leon at the Fountain of Youth, Arthur and Excalibur: Anna was stunned by the glitter of the treasure Buddy had unearthed. Her hands shook so badly, she had to stop for a moment and rest them on her lap. The water bottle lay on its side. Sudden fear that it was leaking goaded her into movement. Carefully, as if it were delicate china, she set the bottle upright and banked sand around it.
The first capful should go to Buddy, she knew that.
Buddy was already onto the fanny pack, scratching and gnawing on the black dusty nylon. Anna pulled the zipper open for him.
“Granola bars with chocolate chips. That’s what you were after all along, isn’t it?” Using her teeth, she tore one of the two foil-wrapped packets open and bit off a corner of the bar. This she spat into her palm and offered to Buddy. Gingerly, one eye on the prize and one on the biped, he took it, then scurried away a few feet to eat it. The next bite Anna kept for herself. Hunger was with her these last hours or days, but thirst was a good appetite depressant and she hadn’t suffered the pangs much. Chocolate awoke them.
Doling out the water as if it were the most precious commodity on earth—which, in fact, it was—Anna filled the cap from the plastic bottle with the good water and set it a foot or so from Buddy. The first swallow was his. The next was hers.
The urge to drink all of the water was almost too powerful to resist. Almost. Anna sipped and chewed. Once, she refilled Buddy’s cap and gave him another chunk of the granola bar. It was his nose, after all, that had found the treasure. This time she picked out the chocolate chips first, then offered it to him. “Chocolate might not be good for little skunks,” she said apologetically. Buddy, had he had any fear of her to begin with, had none now. He took the morsel from her fingers and ate it.
Anna returned the second granola bar to the fanny pack. Fortified with sips and bites, she was settled enough to see what else the pack contained. Sunscreen, SPF 40—so shady was her jar, Anna hadn’t much use for that, but she rubbed it on her face for the moisture. As the heavy cream soaked in, she felt her skin relax and expand to cover her bones. There was a ChapStick that she pounced on greedily, rubbing the oily wax into her cracked lips. The small sack was emptied. Having administered to herself, she replaced the lotion and lip balm inside and zipped it closed.
“I have a plan, Buddy,” she announced to the baby skunk. “It’s only partially baked. So it qualifies as a bona fide adventure.” So saying, she wondered if the miracle of the bars and the water had made her giddy.
The first play she’d ever stage-managed was
“Pudding, Buddy,” Anna whispered.
SEVENTEEN
Anna drank as much of the drugged water as she dared and slept the rest of the day. Buddy nosed her back into consciousness when the light was nearly gone from the sky and her circle of sand in deep shadow. She shared the last granola bar with him and opened the clean water from Kay’s belt. Anna drank a good portion of what was left and gave Buddy his fill. If her half-baked plan fell flat, she doubted she’d need to ration the clean water. The drugged would be just fine; there would be little point in prolonging sanity.
The influx of fluid into her dehydrated body was nothing short of miraculous. As water seeped into her cells, she felt an opening inside, much as she imagined a flower feels when unfurling its petals. Strength, energy, hope: Those things that made life worthwhile flowed in with the moisture. Grabbing onto these sensations, Anna closed her mind to the possibility of failure.
Buddy watched while she put herself through deep breathing exercises, sit-ups, and rapid walks around the circle of their tiny arena, trying to shake off the effects of the drug.
Having achieved a modest level of alertness, she set about erasing all traces of herself from the bottom of the jar. The belt went into the loops to hold up her shorts. She would need both arms free. The fanny pack she wrapped around her waist, snapping the plastic buckle in place. The scraps of paper from her and the skunk’s repast she shoved into the pockets of her shorts, then clipped the plastic water bottle to the strap of the fanny pack with the carabiner.
If the monster came, he must come down the throat of her jar. The angle dictated that, if he used a rope and didn’t simply crawl down the sides like a blowfly, he would enter her world slightly off center. Beneath the angle where the throat widened into the body of the jar, and the stone overhung the farthest, was the least visible part of the bottom.
As the last of the light was going, she dug out a shallow trough six feet long and two feet wide in the exposed area where she could see the throat and the eye of sky. Sitting in it, legs straight, toes pointing toward where a rope thrown down the jar’s gullet had to land, she buried the canvas-covered canteen next to her right knee and laid the strap along her thigh. That done, she swept sand over her feet and legs. When she was certain nothing of her extremities was visible, she lay down and, grateful that Kay had been so well endowed, arranged one triangle of the bra over her eyes and the other over her nose and mouth. Doing the best she could by feel, she buried her chest, neck, and head, leaving only a slit between the fabric of the bra and the bridge of her nose so she could see out. Moving as little as possible, lest she disturb her sandy shroud, she burrowed her right hand and arm under the sand till she felt the canteen strap and closed her fingers around it.
Buddy had watched her doings with interest and even found the courage to pounce on her foot when she moved it beneath the sand, much as a kitten might. It made Anna wonder if skunks hunted and, if so, what? Even through the sand banked around her head she thought she could hear him nosing around and several times felt him walking across parts of her anatomy.
Then he, too, was still. Night had come. The slit between bra and nose showed only black regardless of whether her eyes were shut or not.
Tonight it would be decided if she were to be, or not to be. A melancholic since Zach’s abandonment, Anna knew the narcotic comfort in contemplating suicide. Molly would be amused that when the choice had been taken from her, and someone else could choose her “not to be,” Death ceased to be a suitor and became the enemy. Sheer contrariness was an excellent motivator.
Anna opened her mind to the sand. For so long she had cursed its incursions into her crevices, its dust in her nose and eyes and ears, its grit between her teeth. Lying as one with it, she embraced the camouflage it afforded and tried to rethink herself as a trapdoor spider, hiding in her own controlled vortex of sand, waiting for her prey to come too near. She pictured the darkness overlaying the sand overlaying her, providing another layer of protection. Almost, she felt herself slipping into the stone surrounding her and wondered if it were the dregs of the drugged
