‘Exhaustion. She must eat a little, and rest a lot,’ she heard him say to one of the men.
‘Will—’ she faltered as they began to move her. Tears suddenly slid from the outer corners of her eyes. She felt desolate, terrified to be leaving him. This was it, yes, the rescue she had yearned for, the escape she had craved – but she wasn’t ready to go. What she had thought she wanted and what she actually wanted were worlds apart. She was a queen at lying to herself. ‘William!’
He looked down at her and smiled one of his gap-toothed smiles. He just nodded as he placed his hand on her forehead and said something she couldn’t understand in his native tongue, his eyes closed, the other palm raised to the sky. When he had finished, he looked back at her again. ‘It’s all going to be okay now.’
‘I don’t want to go—’
‘Then come again soon,’ he said, giving her a wink before stepping back, out of her line of sight.
No! Didn’t he understand? She wanted to stay here, near Alex! She wanted to be there, with him, in the earth . . . But her body was inert and as empty as a husk. It wouldn’t move. Even without the straps binding her down, she felt paralysed and powerless.
She felt the wind beat upon her as they moved into the downdraft. It was like lying beneath the wings of a phoenix and she was forced to close her eyes, feeling herself lifted into the body of the aircraft.
The sounds inside immediately changed, the battery of wind ceasing like a hairdryer being switched off. She felt whatever tension, whatever fight remained in her body slacken. How many helicopters had she flown in, in her lifetime? And yet none like this – no stitched leather, no fridge with a bottle of Bollinger chilling inside. This was an alien landscape, sterile, medical. The walls were lined with lifesaving equipment – an IV drip, a defib machine, oxygen masks . . . She didn’t care! She didn’t want to be saved, why couldn’t they see that?
Tears streamed down her cheeks, over her temples, into her hair as the doors were shut and she felt the first tentative hops of take-off. She thought of William watching from the trees, of Alex somewhere under the mud, broken, destroyed, lost . . . and she began to sob, unable to bear it, the pain coming in sharp vicious waves that she had managed to hold off as she numbed herself in the mud. She had lost him for good and she would never even be able to make her way back here, she would never find this place again and be able to sit by the spot where she had last seen him, checking for her, before he was spirited away.
She felt hysterical with grief, she wanted to rip the skin from her body, pull her hair from her scalp, anything that would hurt less than this. The paramedic said something over her to his colleague, coming back into her field of vision as he observed her distress. She couldn’t hear his words but she caught the shape of his mouth and one word: sedative.
‘Take me back!’ she cried, shaking her head from side to side. ‘Take me back!’
She felt the other paramedic on her far side reach for her hand.
‘No!’ But she couldn’t pull her arm away, she was strapped down.
‘It’s okay, ma’am,’ the first paramedic said, leaning closer so she could hear him better. ‘You’re safe now. We’ve got you.’
The other paramedic was still stroking her hand, trying to calm her.
Oddly, it was working. Had he injected her already? She felt something deep inside her begin to settle as his fingers clasped hers, brushing over them with his thumb. There was a gentleness to the gesture that touched her, like he was soothing her troubled soul. It only made her tears come faster; kindness was more than she could bear.
He couldn’t understand that she didn’t want to feel, that she didn’t want to be.
The grip tightened fractionally around her fingers, a small squeeze equivalent to a parent saying ‘there, there’, and as her thumb slid against the side of his hand, it felt the raised edges of . . . a small moon-shaped scar.
She felt the breath leave her body.
She turned her head as far as she could and took in the sight beside her. Completely caked in mud so that only his eyes were visible, an oxygen mask on and an arm and leg both splinted, Alex blinked back at her. She felt a sonic pulse jolt her world back to life. If her thumb wasn’t feeling for itself the ridges of that little scar, she wouldn’t have believed what her eyes were showing her.
He was weak, the other paramedic administering morphine in the very arm whose hand she was holding. She couldn’t imagine the pain he must be in. She gripped his hand harder now, as hard as she could as they stared at one another, unable to speak over the noise; but steadily his grip weakened, the drugs taking over. His eyes flickered, as though he didn’t want to lose sight of her again, until finally he slipped into unconsciousness.
Tara kept on holding his limp hand.
The pilot radioed ahead as they cut through the clouds, the forest at their feet. She felt its vastness and fragility all at once, its beauty and horrors. It was a land of rainbows, where even as the rain fell the sun still shone. Only by being lost there had she found herself.
Found him.
For the second time.
Epilogue
Two months later
‘A good speech is a short speech, I’ve always said it,’ Holly said, clapping enthusiastically as Tara’s father folded up the sheet of paper in his hand and invited the President to join him at the podium.
‘You have always said that,’ Tara agreed, her eyes upon the stage.
They were sitting in the front row – along with her mother, Miles
