So it was like that, death. Uninvited, thin, and dirty. Luring you into its home, a tree house made for killing. She hadn’t ever met it face-to-face, even though she would have, gladly, if someone had only told her. Mary Ellen shuddered violently and forced herself to open her eyes. The girl was tiny but looked like a teenager. Fifteen? Sixteen? Mary Ellen smoothed back the girl’s hair, and some of it came away in her fingers, long and dull. The child was turning to dust right in front of her.
“Ma?”
Mary Ellen gasped and backed against the wall of the deer blind. Then she pulled off her coat and swiftly wrapped it around the girl, over the blanket. She remembered her hat, in one of the coat pockets. She found it and pulled it over the girl’s head. The girl was shaking, her teeth knocking together. “Okay, okay,” Mary Ellen said. “You’re going to be okay.”
She scooted over to the ladder, looked down. Too far to jump. “How did you get up here?” she asked the girl, but she seemed to have died again. Mary Ellen pulled off her sweater. She lifted the girl into a sitting position and tugged the sweater over her lolling head. She laid her back down and fished for an arm through the sleeve, pulling it through, then the other arm. She put her gloves on the girl’s hands, then spread her coat open on the floor and lifted the girl onto it. Her body was lighter than a pile of laundry. As Mary Ellen was threading the girl’s arms through the coat sleeves, her eyelids fluttered and she started shaking again. “Can you wake up?” Mary Ellen asked, zipping the coat.
She remembered the time she’d tried to wake Shelby up for a feeding, when she was barely a week old, and couldn’t get her to open her eyes. “I think she’s unconscious,” she’d said to Matt, bouncing Shelby in her arms.
“She’s asleep,” Matt had said, his head under a pillow.
“Something’s wrong.” Mary Ellen blew gently on Shelby’s face, and the baby’s eyes opened briefly, startled, then sank closed again.
“Put her back in the crib. She’s not hungry yet.”
So Mary Ellen had reluctantly put Shelby back to bed, then stood there, her hands clamped around the crib rail, until she couldn’t stand it anymore and blew in the baby’s face again and again and again until Shelby finally exploded in furious sobs.
Now Mary Ellen was taking off her boots and her socks. She pulled her socks over the girl’s thin, bony feet and rubbed them vigorously. “Wake up,” she said briskly. “Let’s go.” Mary Ellen was shivering now. She pulled her boots over her bare feet, then lifted the girl into a sitting position, leaning her against the wall. The girl’s eyes rocked open like a doll’s. “What’s your name?”
“You’re not…” The girl seemed drunk.
“I’m Mary Ellen. Who are you?”
“Where—” The girl swiveled her head slowly to one side, blinking.
“We’re in a tree.” The girl’s sunken eyes were blue; freckles were just starting to rise out of her cheeks’ pallor. She had a sharp overbite that gave her a rabbity look. “We have to get down. Do you think you can hold on to me?” Mary Ellen went to the doorway, turned around, and lowered her feet onto a rung. She held on to the two rails that flanked the door. “Come over here.” The girl just stared at her. “Come on.”
Life was seeping back into the girl. She drew her knees to her chest, lowered her chin. Her eyes darted around the little tree house. “There’s no other way down,” Mary Ellen said. “You have to come here.” The girl didn’t move. Mary Ellen held out a hand to her. “I have food in my car.”
The girl crawled to the doorway. “Put your legs around here,” Mary Ellen said, patting one of her hips. “And put your arms around my neck.” The girl did as she was told, hesitantly at first, but then she clamped onto Mary Ellen’s torso with unexpected fierceness, tucking her head into the space between Mary Ellen’s shoulder and jaw. She smelled like a bad nursing home—urine and hopelessness. Mary Ellen leaned as far back as she could, pulling the girl out of the house, then slowly descended the ladder, feeling for the rungs with her feet until they finally met the snow. Staggering backward a few steps, she hooked her hands under the girl, whose grip was weakening, then turned and headed up the hill around the side of the house, toward the driveway.
“Let’s get you to a hospital,” she said. The girl moaned and shook her head. Mary Ellen paused to catch her breath, stretching her chin away from the girl’s hair, which kept sticking to her cheek and getting in her mouth. She took some sideways steps up the slope, her feet feeling their way over the rocks and branches hidden under the snow. Her hands were sliding apart, unable to stay interlaced under the girl’s weight. Her thighs were shaking. “I don’t know if I can make it to the car,” she said. “Let’s go through the house.”
Just outside the sliding glass door, Mary Ellen lowered the girl to her feet so she could use one hand to push the door open. The girl cried out as her feet touched the snow. “Sorry! Sorry,” Mary Ellen said, helping her inside and settling her into an armchair in the den. She pulled the wet socks off the girl’s white, bony feet and rubbed
