Chapter Text
“Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known.
That all courage was a form of constancy.
That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first.
After this all other betrayals come easily.”
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses.
October, 1978
The frost blankets the trees all around him, wrapping them in a delicate casing of thin but solid ice, which wraps him, barely thirteen, in the lonely, barren landscape. The grass beneath his boots is long dead and brown now and crunching as tiny, icy sheets shatter. His eyes don’t leave the ground as they return the earth to its dull autumnal state below the fragmentations. It’s too cold, too dark, too early.
From behind him, “Shhh!” His father scolds, holding out a hand. He stops in his tracks, “… you’re scarin’ the prey.”
Prey, and the way that it hides. Burrowed between rocks, living a life in tunnels and caves underground, running, not because of bravery but biological instinct. Born to know the sounds and smells of the huntsmen and their weaponry. Born just as much to be caught in the crossfire. He often takes comfort in hiding. Imagining himself as some groundhog or squirrel burrowing, concealed from the world, safe but solitary. The rustling of dried leaves sets his vision in a spin, trying to pinpoint the sound’s origin.
“Sorry.” He says meekly, refocusing on the task at hand and trudging slower into the brush than he had been before. He rolls his eyes when he knows he’s fallen far enough behind that his father won’t see. He pivots, stopping his son once again.
“Hey. Chin up.” He says, mimicking the motion with a hand gesture, flipping up his chin to match.
He obliges swiftly, taking a deep breath in and correcting his posture. It is the first day of Ben’s first hunting season, a rite of passage. Having spent the previous night loading the truck up with gear, his father following each piece with its own thorough and boring explanation before placing it in the truck-bed, all of which he is already painstakingly familiar with, he tries not to nod off as he walks.
He knows all the important safety stuff already. Never aim at another person, even if the weapon is unloaded. Safety on until you are aiming at your target. Keep unattended weapons in a safe and hide the key out of plain sight. So on and so on.
They sit underneath a particularly large tree. They don’t talk. They never do. Ben wouldn’t know what to talk about anyway. The hunt occurring at this very moment? Football or soccer or school… all things he is good at, but not very interesting. Music? A definite no, nothing in common there. Sometimes he feels like he has been dropped into a house he has never seen before, where a tall stoic man parades around in silence, waiting like a cobra to shoot venom.
His snow-pants brush together at the ankles, making an awful swooshing sound, and he wonders why he’s wearing them when there isn’t any snow on the ground. Right. The cold. There is a field and a clearing to their left. A doe stands stoically in its center, undisturbed by the sight or scent of them yet. From a distance, the scene looks like something out of a painting. The blue of night is slowly disappearing, giving way to the orangey haze of a chilled morning, casting long shadows over twisting branches, dead leaves all departed in a way that looks almost feathery.
Ben’s father shifts to his feet, crouching and urging his son to do the same. He puts the shotgun in his hand, nodding encouragingly. His father is smiling a genuine smile, and he tries not to feel hurt at that. He raises the firearm, just as he’s been taught, staring through the scope with one eye closed. The doe is large but young looking, eyes a deep black that don’t see him as he aims under the cover of the forest. He doesn’t want to.
His hands are skinny, awkward, and shaky. The gloves make it hard to grip the trigger steadily; the fabric around his thumb is bunched and bothersome.
Eyes back on the doe, backlit by the rising sun, highlighting its warm brown fur. It looks coarse and itchy, but warm, except at the tail, which is fluffed and pure white. Ears twitching with the anxiety of a forest’s worth of noises to root through, searching for potential dangers at the drop of a hat. Not knowing it’s right in front of her.
His heart thuds disobediently in his chest as he raises a finger to the lever, tapping it gently. The round leaves the gun, sudden but expected. His breath hitches for a moment, heart stopping as if the round has entered the hollow of his chest in equal measure to the helpless creature on the other end of the barrel.
A burst of smoke and a small spark hang in the morning’s freezing air, just the same as his breath. The drop of the doe makes a soft thumping on the forest floor from their semi-close distance. He wondered where its parents had gone, if it frequented the field often, like some sort of home and stationary resting place in the vast expanse of the earth it wandered. He wondered if it felt the same fear that pounded through his chest in its final moments.
He wipes a tear from his cheek as his father pats him on the back, “Good job,” he says finally. He sniffles, trying his hardest to make his emotion discreet as they approach the corpse, still warm. Men don’t cry, over and over on a loop in his head, his father’s voice warns. He swipes a gloved hand across his nose, running from the cold, then leans down to touch it.
He runs a hand over the fur, coarse and prickly over the gloves' fabric. Its eyes are still frozen in fear and hard to look head-on when he knows he’s responsible for this. His first kill, another rite of passage. He’s been witness to the processing before, the separation of the animal for meat, for the hide, for the antlers. He’s never done that part, but knows it isn’t far away.
Somewhere, a knife sits in the barn, gift wrapped and reserved just for him, a token of this new role he will take on. He tells himself, in his head, as the last tear falls, he will get stronger. Like prey, he will get better at hiding. He has to.
August, 1997
Each day passed with an aimless scanning of the filthy pen that had become his resting place and (not that he found much rest there; it was more a holding cell than anything else, and filled with the sounds and smells of small livestock.) an unexpressed appeal to the dwindling merciful natures of the girls he knew in what felt like a distant lifetime. No longer privy to the courtesies of their kindness or trust, they fed him when they needed to and ignored him otherwise.
He’d have been angrier with the trial’s result if he hadn’t presumed it would end in some sort of punishment from the moment it began. From the moment he stared down the barrel of the rifle in the dim, damp world of the cave. Isolation invaded. Why it had to be this, why it had to be an injurious and undignified and torturous wait which brought with it nothing but pain, only for the result to be the same, filled him with a bile-inducing paranoia—Hourglass with a broken bottom. Sand falling from what had once been contained, into the pits. No one was coming for him.
The air was sticky with pollen and misery, and the sweat dribbling down his brow was the least of his problems. He wanted to be clean, desperate imaginings of a shower head’s heat and steam and soap bubbles. Still, he felt warm, not comfortably, not warm like sitting by the cabin’s hearth. Warm like sunburn, like itching out of his skin, warm like cell death.
If he thought about it hard enough, he could picture the blade still pressed to the back of his ankle and winced at his imaginings. Many times since the crash, he questioned whether what he saw and heard and did was real or merely a series of hallucinatory figments. Reality was often difficult to distinguish. Being sliced by a student was a new one, but then again, all of it was. Even Natalie, who had once been a trusted confidante, could scarcely look him in the eye for too long these days.
The gash on his heel was bright crimson, and the trail of blood, brown, long oxidized, still littered the top layer of the hay, which served as the pen’s only cushioning. Every slight movement made matters worse, gravity bogging down on separated skin, bone grinding against muscle, irritating it further. Hissing through gritted teeth had become second nature.
Nat tended to him reluctantly in the days that followed, painfully sympathetic underneath pursed lips but still stifled in the expression of her full compassion, at the risk of being ostracized by the rest of them, he figured. He didn’t have the energy to take it personally. He supposed if he was going to be a prisoner, it made sense for them to treat him like one. It didn’t matter to them that he hadn’t set fire to the cabin; they believed he did, and that was more than enough.
“Nat, why am I still here?” he asked her.
“You were spared.” Even she doesn’t believe that.
In the wake of his abandonment, the team had rebuilt more than their shelter. What rose from the ashes in his return was a world in which he still couldn’t find his place, a world in which he was unsure he had a place. An unclear list of rules continually revealed itself with the unsteady footing of a fawn in the backdrop of an impressive fairytale village made up of sticks and flickering torches, from what he could see as he sat in the petting zoo. Hierarchies. Chores. Chaos and order, in step with one another. All things he recognized despite his peering in from the outside, despite how different those things looked in this world.
Autumn, 1997
Summer drifted to fall, and the heat exhaustion lessened, as did his appetite. He scratched a fingernail around the edge of his zip-up’s dirt-caked sleeves, brown flecking off in a fine powder. The makeshift shelter erected over him was a band-aid over a bullet hole, but at least he wasn’t being rained on. The nights were getting cooler, and he wondered how long before the first snow. What was to be done with him then?
It had been weeks since the slashing of his Achilles, and the pain in his remaining leg hadn’t let up; his right foot, now socked to bear the elements, lolled over itself awkwardly. So much for functionality. He tried to sleep it away when he could, to a tune of no reprieve, exacerbated by the humming heat of a Canadian summer. Sleep came easier as the nights cooled, and it was the only thing left for him, anyhow. He sometimes wondered if it was easier for the team to have exiled him to an invisible part of their commune, one unseen and unheard. If it were easier not to witness the damage done.
He stirred at the creaking of the pen’s gate as Nat entered silently. No good morning, but then again, it wasn’t. The two shuffled along in silence most days, and on other, relatively high-energy days, he tried but failed to convince her that death was his best and only option.
When she wasn’t around, he brainstormed new and creative means of achieving his demise. If he couldn’t enact it of his own accord, take his life in his own hands, and crush what was left of it himself, he wished instead for it to be kindly put out, like the weak flame of a candle, by the hands of an ally.
If not, who knew when the others would tire of him? When they might decide that there had been some misreading in Akilah’s gas-induced vision. That what food they allotted to him might be better utilized to split among themselves more evenly, instead. He could only hope.
He hated begging, but he hated being kept more. Days had turned into weeks long ago, and it was harder now than it had been before to conceptualize much beyond his own imminent decay. The thought of spending another two-dozen hours filthy, and motionless, and bound was inconceivable but likely. It replaced the hunger in his stomach with a snarling, rolling, wave-like nausea.
“You have to eat.” She said with a firmness that didn’t come naturally to her, planting a plate of food down next to him.
She untied one of his hands, wrist raw from rope burn, as he wondered why it was his hands were still shackled together after weeks of not moving from the same spot anyway. Their only use had become to shift himself off of his tailbone when lying in one position for long enough became too unbearable. He was too weak to fight back even if he wanted to, and he didn’t.
“Thank you very much.” He said in mock gratitude, raising his free hand and knocking his wrist to bump the plate.
“Eat.”
“I’m not hungry.” He said, pushing it away with an eye roll of what little intensity he could muster.
Blade. Bullet. Bubbling brook. Brain bashed inward.
“We’re just going to keep having the same discussion. I can’t, Coach.”
“I’m asking for your help.” It was a low-blow, and he knew it.
“I want you to go home. With the rest of us. I care about you. Enough to at least give you that chance. That’s how I can help you.”
“Is that what you tell yourself? This is bullshit, Nat.” He complained, dragging out his l’s in a hellishly sarcastic display, “Even if we get rescued, do you really think things would ever be the same—”
“No.”
“Thank you.“
“But they could still be good.”
He didn’t see how. His team hated him, painted him a murderous psychopath. He was sure he was no longer a thought in Paul’s mind, that he was probably happy with someone else in the city. He was sure his apartment was empty and surrendered to someone else after months of vacancy; all his possessions floated elsewhere to a storage unit or a flea market, or the garbage. Not that there was much of a life contained in its walls anyhow. Funny, how much of his life before he’s wasted convincing himself he had one.
The team's insistence that he be kept alive began to feel like a sick joke after a while. Like his living might glean them some cosmic reward. Because letting him stew in his filth so long as a pulse danced along in accompaniment with a wasting physical form was somehow better than letting said pulse fade into peace and painlessness, despite having been dead set on execution before.
It wasn’t a life. Not really. Not staring at the same landscape of trees every day as the leaves fell from them, with the exception of the evergreens. Or picking the bark off the pen’s centerpiece of a log. Not trying his hardest to stay still and avoid the stabbing pain in his ankle, or unenthusiastically picking at his plate and making the conscious effort with each chew to keep doing so. Not convincing Nat to let him go.
What was a reward for them could only be a punishment for him. Like his longing for death was the very reason it could not be afforded to him, even as he could feel the beginnings of a cold coming to fruition. A wet cough and a feverishness that always broke in the evening. He hoped, in some sick or lucky twist of fate, that it might worsen. Maybe then, Natalie would consider obliging his request. Better yet, perhaps it would spare him before she got the chance to.
He had been so close, the day he stood against the tree. He had begged, then, foolishly, to be spared, and regretted it every day since.
He became so emboldened in the venture for death that, eventually, Nat stopped coming around. Rotating team members entered silently, placed their plates, and left the same as they came. Days passed as they always did, the routine of his new reality becoming increasingly monotonous and unwanted.
He gambled to make his lack of interest in food, in life, a death sentence in her absence. With no one to watch over him with any care or regard for his further decline so long as he was still breathing, he accepted each plate, tossing the contents out of sight as far as he could reach after each day’s stand in left, placing it back where it had been offered in time for it to be collected again before his next meal.
He continued on with this, not bothering to count the days in case superstition had any staying power. On one particular morning, Mari shook his leg gently, jostling him. The panic of a returned consciousness made him more alert than he’d been in weeks, fraught with thinking of all the ways he could be ruined further. No one else bothered to greet him, just dropped the food like slop for pigs, and left.
“Morning, Coach,” she chirped. He took a deep breath in, surprised at the voice.
She smiled a sad smile as the swell, the buzzing of gnats and flies, grew louder. The confusion and disgust on her face grew as she discovered the pile of food, now as rotten and pungent as he had become in his neglect.
“Coach? What the fuck are you doing?”
It had been a hopeful idea, the hunger strike. To take back the choice in one of the few aspects of his half-life that he still could. The days of walking and roaming were long passed. As were the days of setting traps and being free, despite the terrible irony of it all. If he went long enough without eating, maybe he might be fortunate enough to be far enough out of his mind and body that death would feel less like death and more like floating from one place to the next, instead, and if his life couldn’t be his, maybe his death could.
The irony of taking that decision upon himself is that it would, from then on, be made for him. The team prepared themselves at the gate, entering in a cluttered step. Masks covered their faces, swatches and patches of ripped up fabric and repurposed clothing, covers from plane seats surrounded him. They descended upon him, sedentary, like a flock of vultures tuned in but apathetic to his fear, circling prey. It was cool, breezy outside, and he struggled to stay warm, blankets not doing as much as they could to insulate when his half-covered shelter couldn’t adequately mitigate the wind’s ferocity.
“What the fuck is this?” He said as he glanced around, the eyes of his students meeting his as his sight narrowed, trying desperately to discern who was who.
Misty directed the team as he unsuccessfully pushed back, flailing weak limbs to try and fight them off. They forced his mouth open, jaw unhinging with a stick in Y-formation as he yelled at them to stop. The contraption they constructed for feeding, if the activity could even be referred to as such, was a homemade funnel and tube that looked more like a medieval torture device than one made for it’s intended use.
Thick sludge bypassed his mouth as he squirmed and received it like some sort of awful medicine. Misty reassured the group, “Good, good,” she said before telling him, “It’s okay, it’s okay. Hold still. You’ll only make it worse. This is for your own good,” her voice was sing-songy like it always was, oddly composed in the groups’ performance of such a barbarous display.
He couldn’t think of anything worse.
The few minutes it lasted felt like an eternity. With each liter of unwanted nourishment, he could feel his mind and body shutting down, unable to resist the brutalization. Reassurance flowing freely from Misty’s mouth might have been oddly comforting in any other universe; when it was over, he rolled to his side, coughing and panting and catching his breath as the group filed out, ripping their masks off their heads. He spat the strange matter onto the straw nested beneath him. With each breath in, he felt like throwing up, but suppressed the urge.
“Service here sucks,” he stated, wiping his mouth weakly.
“I’m sorry,” Natalie said, teary-eyed, as if any apology could make up for all the ways he’d been violated. With each passing day, his body felt less and less like his own and more like a vessel for the team’s demented optimism, less like a body and more like a means to an end.
“Why can’t you just let me fucking die?” He asked, spitting blood, and whatever remnants of the strange formula that had been made from plants and the spoiling organs of game and god only knew what else. Thick and disturbing and sliding from the tube into his throat unwillingly. It tasted like shit.
“… ‘Cause. We can’t.”
How humane, he thought, shuddering as he recalled the mouth feel of thick, chunky liquid and sets of hands holding down his arms, legs, and head.
Biting anger was the only emotion he reached for, the only thing he had left in the sickening creature that had been made of him. He no longer possessed the strength or will of the man he’d been before, he was instead replaced, a hollow husk hoping only for release.
“You can’t.” He laughed, repeating himself over and over again. The more he said the words, the more abstract they became. Until the phrase he was repeating no longer felt or sounded like words, and didn’t mean anything, either.
October
Rescue came before the first snow. Rescue came when wandering scientists and their guide stumbled upon a quiet camp in the early afternoon, torn from their set path by a pounding rainstorm that had lasted days, at the tail end of autumn. Rescue came before Ben could go.
The dizzying high of pain and the nauseating scent of grime and filth and waste flooded him. He would be so disgusted with himself, his indignity, with the team, with the very ground beneath him if he hadn’t been entirely resigned to numbness. Not feeling or thinking of anything was the closest to death he had come without being cruelly ripped backward.
The gate swung open, followed by an unusual bout of rowdiness which persuaded his attention to something other than the silence and the darkness of closed eyes. Seeing them, outsiders, as he had become, was like a mirage in the desert. Almost too good to be true. The woman, who looked like she might be his age, maybe a year or two younger, looked like a deer in headlights upon meeting his gaze. Her eyes continued to widen at the horror of Ben’s seemingly relaxed demeanor.
“Hello?” He said, taking a hard blink and shifting upward to sit. Wrapping the torn blanket tighter around himself to (ineffectively) camouflage the grime, the vomit, the blood on his jacket. He knew how it looked. Did he actually care how it looked?
He drew his knee upward in a pained grunt as his foot failed to brace the movement and his elbow fell back with him, left arm contorting overtop of his right, which landed on and was stabilized by the log anchored in the pen’s center.
“I’m Hannah.” She said, reaching a hand out to him as she drew forward and down toward him, dropping onto a knee. He didn’t shake, hands still bound. She looked kind. She also looked horrified. Two men stood behind her at a distance, draped in clean hiking clothes, one with glasses, binoculars slung over his head, the other rugged and tall, with a scar on his neck.
“Ben, ” he replied with an eye roll, unable to stifle a small coughing fit before rolling back over to be met with sleep again, if his body would allow it.
They were children, after all, it was no wonder that they would bring in the first adults, the first anyone they came across, as if to say What do we do? Despite the way that his presence incriminated them, a taste of rescue crumbled the strengthened front of their survival. The one that allowed them to reach these new and creeping heights of cruelty, instead returning them to the scared soccer team from New Jersey who crashed into the middle of the woods and missed their families. Certainly not the same team that kept a dead man alive under the guise of a prophecy fulfilled. He wasn’t sure he had anyone back home to miss, or anyone to miss him in return.
Maybe he was their bridge home, whatever that meant. Maybe these outsiders, their new way out of here, meant his purpose had been served. Maybe the executive decision to put him out of his misery might be so carefully reconsidered. If they couldn’t kill him themselves, despite having the courage to injure him and remain righteous and apathetic in that decision as he suffered, he hoped they might at least do him the favor of leaving him behind to live out his last days insensately and unknown to the world they would return to.
“He needs help,” Natalie reminded the team and pleaded to the outsiders.
“Nice going, they’ve already seen him,” was whispered as the group, now three denser, contemplated the crossroads of the brutality they existed in, and a home where, without it, they might forget who they had become. The animal pen grew more crowded as concerned students filtered in to witness the commotion. His back was turned to all of them, not wanting to see them, and wanting even less to be seen.
“What else do you suggest? They can’t just wander camp if they’re our shot at going home.”
“They could leave, and totally ruin that chance, or, hurt one of us trying to escape.”
Brief murmurings hovered over his head, some indistinguishable, some glaringly clear, “We can’t hide him forever. It’s better, that he’s here now, alive. Rescue could be a matter of days. But he can’t die. We can’t run that risk.”
“We’ve been given a gift… from the wilderness. He’s the bridge—We’re being rewarded for our patience, and our sacrifice.”
“It’s not a gift. They got lost.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Guys! Who cares?! They can get us home,” a brief pause, “You can get us home, right?”
He didn’t even know who was talking anymore.
When he woke again, his limbs pooled heavy with exhaustion. The fluorescent glow of the hospital room washed over him in a blinding blanket; he opened his eyes, closing them again almost immediately. He thought briefly that the light, it’s whiteness, might be some sort of afterlife. His fantasy was cut short by the steady beeping of monitors, which stood at his side. It was grey and white, the rhythm of his heart projected onto the black screen in a blue line, feeding through and through. It fluctuated, up and down as he took breaths.
He was alone, not for the first time in the past year, but certainly the only time he’d been able to relax. No impending threats of death or injury or fate in the hands of a group of malnourished and traumatized teenagers. Not beyond the damage done.
He took another deep breath, only to be met with a pounding in his head. With each inhale, a new ache formed. His ankle hurt, swaddled tightly and half numb below bandages. He wondered how many stitches were underneath.
He coughed, an ugly, rattling cough that burned from his throat to the very core of his chest. His mouth was dry and tasted terrible. Another breath out brought with it a grunt, his body settling into itself like the foundation of an old house. Creaking, shifting, painfully rearranging. He was freezing; the hospital blanket felt like a sheet of paper blowing in the wind.
He rubbed the sleep away begrudgingly, arm tugging on the IV anchored into the ditch of his elbow as he drew an arm to his face. His sight corrected itself, bleary through his yawn, onto the highlighter-yellow ‘fall risk’ wristband around his arm, and the one below it, detailing his personal information. Name. Birthdate. Known allergies. He rolled his eyes.
As he returned to himself, he grew more jaded by the day at all the talk of the miraculousness of his survival, about the absence of infections and sepsis, and the quick thinking of his student. He thought to himself, maybe in the beginning, before it all turned into something else. Now, it didn’t feel miraculous to him. He hadn’t wanted to live.
Miracles and goodwill existed in short supply at the news that, yes, he would make it through, but his recovery was far from over, and the memories of the woods would never leave him. A torn tendon took several weeks to heal with proper attention and treatment. Melissa’s job sat for months, completely severed, curled in on itself. Maybe he’d move his remaining foot again, but walking seemed a bit of a stretch.
He pushed hospital food around the plate with a spork, disinterested. He thought, after starving, he might return home with more of an appetite than he had now. After so long without it, real food gave him a stomachache. He was glad this time it wasn’t being shoved down his throat.
He’d spent months in the trees learning to maneuver on sticks. Laboring over rough terrain, arms and shoulders aching from the constant pushing forward. He hadn’t ever been proud of it. It had just been another thing on the long list of things that he needed to do. Looming feelings of redundancy struck him. He was worried this time that there might be no reeducation.
He stared in focused contemplation at the thin blanket laid across his legs. He wiggled the toes of his wrapped foot, or unfruitfully gave it an honest effort, grateful for real, honest to god painkillers. He couldn’t go back to coaching now, and would he even want to? Was it ever what he wanted?
“You won’t always feel this way,” He remembered Nat telling him once. He wondered why it was he was still waiting to feel different.
He ran his fingers through the pages of a book to keep himself focused as the surgeon explained that he’d lose more of what remained of his right leg in the coming days to correct the haphazardness of Misty’s original work. She’d done her best, but it certainly hadn’t been perfect. The drip of IV fluids stood tall above the hospital bed, the metal rolling stand pierced with a sunbeam of the early morning from the window. He felt like shit, but he forced a neutral smile as she left.
For a few minutes, he was left reluctantly alone. He tried hard not to think. An officer, a man in a dark suit with ridiculously gelled hair, took a notepad from his briefcase, greeting Ben, “Hello.” He said.
“Hi.” He answered back, uncertain.
“How are you today, Mr. Scott?”
He thought for a moment, like he’d been hit by a car. Like he’d been in a plane crash. He settled on, “I’m alright, thank you.”
“I’m here because the hospital staff expressed some concern about a few of your injuries when you were admitted. They called my team in initially, but decided you should be given a few days to rest. I don’t want to overwhelm you, but I wanted to ask you a few questions, if that’s okay.”
Ben’s blood ran cold. There was a full laundry list of ailments and injuries now added to his medical history, not all of them such innocent indicators of their stranding. Starvation and dehydration were the obvious ones, but those weren’t exclusive to him. An improvised amputation could easily be drawn as a natural conclusion of the crash. The respiratory infection and pneumonia could be chalked up to the weather, a poor immune system from not receiving proper nutrition for a sustained period, and a battered, bruised body working overtime to fight off infection with no real sterilizing agents or antibiotics.
The red rings around his wrists, tender and raw, the sores on his legs, a painful consequence of lying too long in the same place, festering with what he could only imagine to be some sort of infection, sepsis adjacent, making him feverish and delirious. The scratches and bruising in his mouth and throat from round after round of tube-sludge, making his voice raspy and faint, all a lot harder to explain.
The slashed tendon on his remaining leg, well, he didn’t know how that might look to doctors or the police, but he was almost sure it didn’t spell a-c-c-i-d-e-n-t. They’d ruined him, revoked from him all things he had left in his own control; He was simultaneously pedestalized, relegated to the power of a messiah whose life might get them what they wanted most, to go home, and stripped bare-bones to less than a person, forced to go on in indignity for their benefit. Yet, he couldn’t find it in himself to ruin them back by telling that truth.
A special sort of hurt brewed within him as he tallied the damages up, losing count. The man asked questions, and he dodged the facts in any way he could think of.
“Were you injured by your students?”
“I was injured in the crash.”
“Your leg was amputated then?”
“By one of my students, yes. I was trapped under the wing when the debris settled, I was ejected from the plane. She saved my life. I remember that, but the rest is a little blurry,”
“Your injuries don’t stop there.”
“No,” Clearly not. He stifled an eye roll.
“And they seem to suggest some… mistreatment,” understatement of the year, “I apologize if any of this comes off as invasive or insensitive. I’m just trying to string together a proper timeline, get an understanding of what happened while you were out there.”
“It’s fine.”
“You don’t mind if I continue?”
He shook his head silently.
The marks on your wrists… ligatures… rope burn… extreme malnutrition… lacerations… tendon… how did this happen?
Words passed in and out of his ears as the pace of his heartbeat quickened, details becoming muddled in a violent riptide of the mind and body’s misalignment. He shouldn’t be alive. What happened if he let the wrong words slip? I did it to myself didn’t seem a plausible nor satisfying answer to the man’s question.
“I have to be honest, it’s all a little fuzzy. I remember bits and pieces, but most of it is just… not there.” He lied. Without closing his eyes, he’d be able to perfectly reconstruct all the important points, all the gruesome ones.
“Okay then, moving on.”
“I think I’m done answering questions for now.” He said.
“Mr. Scott—“
“Really, I’m exhausted.” Half truth.
Alone again now, he thought of Paul, a pit growing in his stomach. He still remembered his phone number, how Paul written it sloppily on the back off his hand one night at a bar he hadn't wanted to go. His mind took a dim but still present interest at the notion.
He could try calling his apartment phone. What if he didn’t live there anymore? It had been a full yea, and leases expired all the time. He chuckled to himself, mildly embarrassed in some strange, mystified disbelief at how, even after everything, Paul was still top of mind. To pick up the phone and dial was one thing. Hey, Paul. It’s me, Ben. Yeah, I know. It’s been a wild year—lack of a better term. I’ve got so much to tell you.
Like he would even know where to begin. It’s not like there’s a handbook for phoning the ex you broke things off with just before your plane crashed into the mountains and you spent the following year starving and hiding away, only to be captured by the group of students you used to coach and rescued just as death’s door drew close enough to open, fountain of youth taunting in its twisted embrace, shelling out more seconds like unasked for coins of luck hitting the cement of its floor.
He closed his book, removing the bookmark, a blank piece of paper, and unfolding it. He reached for the pen at his bedside.
Paul,
As I write this, I’m not even sure you’ll receive it. I owe you an apology. You knew what you wanted, what you needed, and even though it was what you deserved, I wasn’t ready.
I was scared, then, but that doesn’t matter now. I could detail everything I can remember about the past year, but I won’t because it’s too fresh of a wound to open up here, or anywhere, and really, that doesn’t matter either. I don’t even know why I’m writing you this letter. Maybe to make myself feel better. To know that I tried. To know that I gave you the explanation you deserved, even if I couldn’t do it the first time around. Or maybe, after experiencing the worst year of my life, I’ve decided that I’m finally done hiding.
I’m not sure how to feel about this being the thing to finally draw me out of myself, and make me brave. It should’ve been the day you offered me the spare key, or the day the plane took off out of Newark. Maybe I should’ve never boarded. It’s pointless now to spend time picturing what my life might have looked like if these things had happened. I spent enough time doing that out there. But either way, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that this is what it took. I’m sorry I couldn’t be who you deserved.
I’m not expecting anything to come of this, so don’t feel pressured to respond if this does find you. I’ve just been bestowed the gift of unending downtime and real food, and as a result, have also been gifted (actually, maybe cursed with) a lot of time to think. Anyway, I’m reminiscing, and the more I do, the more I find you are the one thing I return to. I hope, if nothing else, that you’re happy and doing well. I hope you’re still working on your book.
Best Wishes,
God. Was there any good way to end a letter? There was a certain formality to a well-wish that felt cold and impersonal, as opposed to the closeness of ‘yours’ which would’ve worked if he were writing a letter to a lover. But that’s not what they were, he reminded himself. Not anymore. You forfeited that when you left.
Take Care,
Ben
Take care didn’t sound much better.
The team sat in a circle around the hospital lounge’s coffee table, door closed. The air conditioning struck a chill into all of them, but it was nothing in comparison to the months-long winter in a cabin with no heat, and the tail end of it which they were forced through with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and the high burning flames of cabin walls no longer intact.
“Okay. Why are we here?”
“I think it’s in everyone’s best interest that we figure out what to do about Coach.” Taissa suggested.
“What do you mean, what to do?”
“There’s a lot that can go wrong. We wanted to keep a clean image, right? Nothing gets out.”
“Natalie, you have to talk to him.” Van said.
“Like that’ll go over well. Do you all actually have any idea what we put him through?” She reminded them in a whisper-yell, scanning the wall of windows that paneled the far wall of the lounge, creating a perfect view of the nurse’s station and elevators just outside the door. The coast was clear, but merely glancing wasn’t enough to know for sure.
They all stared at her blankly. She never complained about the hardship of tending to him in the pen as it fell on deaf ears, and was more a hardship on him than her, she knew. She also knew they didn’t care, and that the only way they might, was to see him, really see him, wasting away and miserable. Too little, too late for that now.
“Well, we don’t have many other options. We’re all pretty sure you’re the only person he’ll even consider talking to.”
“Yeah, I wonder why.”
“We don’t need a lecture, Nat.”
“I think you might.”
“I mean,” Misty tried, “I could try.”
The group looked around at her, Van starting to laugh underneath her breath, drawing a hand to her mouth to conceal it. Tai nudged her elbow in annoyance. The rest of the group whispered rudely, not bothering to humor her.
“No way.” Shauna said.
“Why not? I mean, I think that, if I could talk to him, we might be able to come to some sort of understanding—” She went on, well-meaning.
“It’s okay, Misty. Thank you for offering, but I think it’s probably better if I go.”
“Or, y’know, we could… finish what we started.” Shauna perked up, “It would be easy.”
A pause, the tension of silence tugged as they all looked around the room, at each other, then at the floor. Nat’s eyes remained on Shauna. Easy because he was at his weakest, affliction born of their imposition.
Mari began, “That is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”
“And besides… you don’t think… now that we’re out of it, we could still risk making It angry if we try to…” Robin chimed in, shrinking herself in fear as she shrugged.
“Oh, enough with the wilderness bullshit,” Travis cut her off, “Lottie isn’t here.”
“Like you didn’t do your fair share of buying into it—“ Melissa pointed out.
“Shut up!”
“Enough!” Natalie yelled as the rest of the group bickered in layers of agitation and antagonism, startling them, “We are not doing this.”
“Someone’s got to make sure he doesn’t say anything. What better way is there to do it?”
“Are you out of your mind? We are not killing anyone,” As if they hadn’t before. Natalie wondered sometimes if they remembered Javi’s face as well as she did, from the day at the lake. She wondered how they couldn’t remember the darkness of the body swallowing him, the flailing and the thrashing of freezing water under the crystalline surface. Of course, it was her name that he’d called out, in desperation to be saved. No one else’s.
“Especially not Coach.” She said after a moment.
“Why not? If he talks, a whole lotta shit could fly our way, Nat.”
“We could scare him a little more.”
“This is not a negotiation.”
“Guys,” Taissa said, “Natalie’s right.”
“Think about it, Tai. It would take care of our problem.” Van raised an eyebrow.
“And create ten more in its place. Assistant coach mysteriously dies after being found injured with very obvious signs of torture.”
“And we’re not putting it to a vote, either.” Natalie asserted, looking around, “Not after last time. That decision is final.”
Was it too late now, she wondered, the step in, to take action instead of letting the opinions of the team overwhelm her into oblivion despite the illusion of control she maintained, the power she unwillingly commanded. Too late now to save his life when so much of it had been eroded away at their hands, by that same inaction.
“Look, I will talk to him, but I can’t make any promises. And no one else is to go near him. Besides, it’d be pretty obvious if something did happen.”
“And who could really pin it to us?”
“You don’t think people would draw that conclusion themselves?”
“Coach knows our secrets, the worst of them, probably. But I know them, too.”
Tai stiffened, “What are you saying?”
“That there’s really nothing that would stop me from blowing everything up if any of you guys were stupid enough to attempt murder.”
“Mutually assured destruction. Considering your stake in rescue, I’m assuming the rest of us don’t get an opinion regardless.” Shauna rolled her eyes.
“You’re right,” She said cuttingly, standing up and throwing her jacket on, “You don’t.” she finished, walking toward the door. She slammed it behind her as she left. The room went quiet. Whether or not it was too late, she’d be damned if she didn’t at least try.
“How’s your pain today?” Ben’s surgeon asked, looking bored but focused as she scanned his chart, moving her pen down the paper line by line and mouthing it’s contents silently.
He thought, better than it had been, not bad enough to mention. Phantom pains weren’t new to him, a dull and shallow ache radiated through, and every so often it bit, sharp and deep and shocking. The nerve block in his foot had worn off in the first few days after surgery. A wrap concealed the stitching running up the back of his shin. The drugs available to him now that he resided in a real hospital were a hell of a lot better than the Midol Misty stole for him in the days after the crash.
“I feel alright.” He took a breath out, lying through his teeth.
“That’s good, let me know if it changes, we’ll make the proper adjustments.”
“Thank you.”
“I did want to discuss a few things with you.”
Ben gave her a small neutral smile for the go-ahead, nodding politely.
“The nature of your injuries restricts your mobility significantly for the time being. You’ll enter an inpatient program once the stitches come out of your heel, and you’ll learn how to use your wheelchair in your occupational program. Usually, crutches are preferable after an amputation, to make sure the mobility of the uninjured leg is maintained, take measures to avoid blood clots and such, but you—“
“—Don’t have an uninjured leg at the moment.” He stated the obvious in a lighthearted tone.
“The surgery on your tendon was exhaustive but it did go well, all things considered. Now, it’s a waiting game, time will tell how much you’ll be able to regain in terms of mobility, range of motion.”
“Will I be able to walk?” He asked nervously, but with hope. He knew, admittedly, less than nothing about the workings of prosthetics, but the tensing of her expression told him more than enough, not a definitive no, but more complicated than it seemed.
“We’ve got you on the book for a procedure next week. Your limb will have to heal and you’ll have to return to a healthy weight again before we begin discussing a prosthetic; the fluctuation in the coming months will make it hard to get a proper fitting. Your minor injuries will have to heal as well.”
“And after?”
“It’s hard to know, just yet. It’s certainly not impossible. The loss of your leg isn’t cause for concern, that’s what the prosthetic is for, and plenty of achilles injuries we come across make full recoveries, but you have to understand, your circumstances are quite… unique.”
Uniquely fucked.
“I can’t say I’ve ever come across a patient facing both injuries at once. Learning to balance and bear weight on a prosthetic is a bit of an adjustment period, even when the sound limb is unaffected—It’s a lengthy process. Trying to learn again after a rupture to the tendon on the opposite leg has the potential to make things more difficult. You could be looking at a longer recovery window than typical, there’s a possibility that you may not bear weight even after your tendon heals.”
Ben huffed softly, it was all he could do, “Sounds promising.”
“Mr. Scott, your tendon was completely lacerated, which, on its own, might have made for an easy repair, but it was left in that state for an unknown amount of time. The longer something like that is neglected, the higher the chances are your mobility is affected.” Apologies for my inability to provide a more precise timeframe. I lost track after about the first week of being held captive against my will. He held his face in a consciously neutral expression, careful not to make his disappointment a concern of anyone but himself.
“Really, it’s a miracle the wound didn’t become infected. The risk of infection from an open wound in an environment like the one you were found in, potentially into the bloodstream, it’s a miracle we didn’t have to amputate. Given your initial state, I’d say it’s a miracle you survived at all.”
He bit his tongue and played with his hands in frustration. It wasn’t the surgeon’s fault, the state he’d been found in. In the pen, he hadn’t thought much about what his life might look like if rescue came. He had hoped for it, for the team, but could never seem to see it for himself. On one indistinguishable day of many, he spent thinking about his demise on an endless loop, so unceasingly he thought it might be upon him. It wasn’t. It never was.
To return to a world which hadn’t stopped spinning the entire time he’d been gone put a magically nauseous pit in his stomach at the idea, as he was once again faced with the bog of uncertainty, pulling him down, surrounding him in thick, sticky, hot, black goop, pooling over his eyes and mouth and nose like an unescapable sheet, so much heavier.
She took Ben’s silence in response as a cue to move on, “Of course, this is all case dependent. You’ll find what works, so I don’t want you to be discouraged. I know it’s a lot to think about, and I know it can be a lot to navigate. If you’ve got questions, I’m happy to answer them.”
Her smile was sympathetic, and her tone was soft yet clinical as she delivered the news.
“Thank you,” he said, and his anxiety eased a bit at that.
Self-reliance had always been Ben’s first instinct. Crash landing into the mountains and having his leg axed off didn’t shunt all the applicable knowledge from his brain; he still knew all the ins and outs of using and cleaning and shooting a rifle. He knew the step-by-step process of gutting and skinning and separating an animal. Of preparing for consumption and preserving the rest. He’d know how to do it all with his eyes closed, but knowing is different than doing.
He’d spent plenty of time feeling sorry for himself, wallowing over how differently his life might’ve turned out if he’d been braver before he allowed the bitter winds of winter, and his team’s feast upon their own, to pull him out of his slump, which they were only half-successful in doing. It only took a near cliff-dive to fill him with enough adrenaline to put the effort back into survival, as unappealing as it felt. Biological instinct was a hell of a drug.
He hated being, hated feeling stuck in that cabin as snowy days passed. The team divided tasks among themselves as he wasted away in their shelter’s only bedroom. What he wouldn’t have given to force ice-coated shoes off of freezing feet at the end of an unsuccessful hunting day, or put an awkward silence between Natalie and Travis as they searched for game in the desolation of the woods. Even if he’d end up with nothing, at least he would’ve been doing something about it. The crushing of the wing against his leg effectively sealed his descent from control, over the team. Over himself. Over anything.
He thought about his crutches. It had been only one stick, at first. The shape was convenient and half-assed sturdy. He only made it a day or two using them as they were, before the discomfort of the friction under his arm forced him to wrap the handles in any unused sweatshirts he could get his hands on for cushioning. He felt strange about using clothing from the luggage of those who hadn’t survived the crash, but there weren’t any alternatives. He rooted through the then newly ownerless suitcases guiltily and avoided Bill’s at all costs. Was stealing from your boss wrong if he was dead?
They weren’t perfect, they weren’t even real crutches, but it worked better than tracing his hand along the logs of the cabin walls to get from place to place, it certainly worked better than the tarp. The handcrafted attachments of leather and splintering, wiry rope, oddly ski-pole-like in construction, made it possible to traverse the snow without sinking step by step, but didn’t do much else. Falling into the cushion of snow was less treacherous than a fall onto hard ground. The terrain was rugged and unforgiving, but well known and easily identifiable by the maps he’d taught Nat how to stage. Upon reaching the cave, bats kept him fed well enough that he didn’t need to leave to eat, but he did spend more time sleeping than not. Hibernation for humans felt like a story out of a sci-fi novel, and reaching spring was a waiting game, but he got there.
They’d been taken from him after the trial, hardly the cruelest punishment he’d been served. He wondered but never asked what had been done with them. Not that it mattered. He couldn’t have used them anyway. He never thought there would be a time when he looked back on them in fondness or grieved their absence, and yet, he did. He never thought there would be a time when a pair of makeshift sticks would come to fruition as the most influential instruments of his freedom and survival. Now, he’d do anything to have them back.
He had proven himself capable even in a landscape strapped for resources, where tree branches were his most suitable option. Making the switch from crutches to a wheelchair in a world that was, by all accounts, easier to navigate felt like a further relinquishment of independence, like giving something up.
The absence of it, when he had so long depended on nothing but himself to get him through, was a daunting, impossible thought. Maybe that’s why forgiveness felt such an impossible feat. They were his students, individuals he’d grown to love and care about, even through their relentlessness and animosity. His brain found it hard to reconcile that given the choice of what to do with him, the punishment they chose seemed to be irreparable cruelty, tailor-made to what might cause him the most individualized agony. It wasn’t something that had merely happened, but something that had been done to him.
Edward and Carolyn Scott were stoic people to their son, but not in the way of kindness. Ben’s father was tall and quietly intimidating, with greying hair and eyes he had passed down, which Ben was tired of hearing about from everyone who jumped at the chance to remind him. His mother was short and slender, with dark hair, plain clothes, and eyes a piercing green. She looked and was friendly enough to most people she met, flashing smiles at church on Sundays and organizing raffles. They were picture perfect, and on paper, so was he.
They’d gotten lost on the way in, mistakenly taken the elevator to the third floor instead of the fifth. No knock at the door accompanied their entrance, just a rude barreling through. The nurse checking his vitals excused herself from the room, shooting him an understanding look as he tried to make out his parents' undistinguished bickering, both harboring a nervous exasperation and tension under their breath.
To see them here now, looking worried like they had ever really cared, felt like a sort of staged, melodramatic theatre. After nearly losing their son, whom they hadn’t spoken to but on holidays, and his birthday in so many years that Ben, too, had lost track, thinking he was dead for a year allowed the scales of their inclination for nurturing and love to be tipped, finally, in his favor. About thirty years too late.
There was a tall order of tasks and post-rescue prospects intensifying the weight of simply surviving what had been done to him in that place, which made him wish he had died out there. The idea of moving back in with his parents, their idea, and in his recuperation, no less, was near the top of that list. Even if it meant a guaranteed place to stay and food to eat. It felt like walls closing in on him, like a willing suffocation. News about the crash settlements slowly streamed in as the days went on, and he grew increasingly hopeful that the money would be enough to avoid the hospitality of his family.
“Oh, Benjamin, we’re so glad you’re alright.” Carolyn lilted, aside from the fact that by alright she simply meant still alive, she hadn’t actually asked how he was. She fawned over him uncomfortably, attempting to run a hand through his hair, still matted and overgrown, caked in the grime of the forest. He eased away from the gesture. She rose from the chair at the bedside, seemingly unbothered by his refusal, waltzing to the far wall and drawing curtains to let the light in. October in New Jersey had never seemed so unappealing.
“Thanks.” He said with a smile he forced on.
His father made casual conversation without barriers, as if Ben were a person he knew. “... the traffic on the way into the city, we’re never out this way. You know how it is, your mom and I just prefer it in the country, not as crowded or…” In theory, this care, this closeness, was all he ever wanted. Now that it was upon him, it just felt so… empty.
There were times when he thought he never had a choice, in living or dying, in hiding, in the making of the choice itself. Now, it didn’t seem so difficult. If he could survive starvation, and capture, and losing a fucking leg, everything else paled in comparison.
He’d been tuned out for a long few seconds, watching his father’s mouth move in slow motion as he pondered why it was he was going about the motions, why it was that he was playing at normalcy, still. How long had he spent pretending to be someone he wasn’t, pretending the be a version of himself that he wasn’t so ashamed of? Had the shame originated internally, was the question, or was watching his parents' eyes, their shock the night he sat in the back of the squad car while the cops rang the doorbell the thing that put it there.
For fucks sake, he wasn’t guilty of anything. Was a kiss in the park really so bad? Okay, so maybe he was drunk. Maybe he was sixteen. The lack of property damage and vandalism was reason enough not to have him picked up from the station. The longer he sat in the cruiser's backseat staring at the manicured lawn and its alternating diamond pattern of slightly different shades of green from the inside of tinted windows, the more he felt like being escorted home was almost worse.
“…The other young man ran off, but you should know that when we found them…” said the officer, a dickhead with a stupid mustache, who Ben could just barely hear from the end of the driveway. The beer had been Jesse’s stupid idea in the first place. After a while longer of tense debriefing, the car door opened for him, he rolled his eyes and shuffled out, walk of shame up the cracked concrete. At least they’d done him the favor of not putting the cuffs on.
“Thank you, sir,” his father waved the officer off, trying hard to hide the anger on his face until the door closed, but Ben could see it, radiating off of him in the twitch of a brow and a narrowing in his eyes along with a steadily tapping foot in leather loafers.
“Do you care to explain yourself?” His mother spit.
“What’s there to say?”
“Don’t do this, Ben.”
“Why are you so pissed? You didn’t even know where I was! You probably wouldn’t have ever known if—“ he yelled. If Jesse hadn't run off. If we hadn’t left his room or gotten bored of playing the same three card games and passing cigarettes from the windowsill. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if you’d cared enough about what I was doing every day to tell me that four nights in a row away from home was too many, and to be back in time for dinner.
His father chimed in, he’d been on the warpath last week, but last week Ben had given him nothing to be angry about, just the usual shit, “You’re lucky they didn’t take you to the station. He let you off with a warning. Do you have any idea what people would say, how this family would look if he’d filed a report?”
“Yeah,” and he’d heard it all already. He wasn’t what they wanted. He wasn’t who they wanted. He’d tried to be, more times than he could count, and each time, each edited version felt more and more wrong. Each way he twisted himself to fit the picture of the golden boy grew more unnatural, more uncomfortable. The more he changed, the happier they were. Good grades, star athlete, talkative but not too talkative, polite, all with a pretty girlfriend to go along. For a brief time, anyway. At the beginning, it was easy to pretend, but it never lasted long.
“As long as you live in this house, you will not conduct yourself that way.”
As if playing dumb would make it any better. Suddenly, all the years of indifference, all the years of brushing him away, telling him to tough it out and shape up when he needed help or a shoulder to cry on had metamorphosed into something much stronger, much uglier.
What use was there in denying it? He could feel the heat of embarrassment swell in his face, tears pooling. He rolled his eyes as the blink sent the salt slowly down his cheeks.
“You’re going to ruin your life, Benjamin.” The words cut like jagged glass, the anger in her voice like stones with each word she spat, and all he could do was freeze in perfect alignment as each stone landed upon him in a painful, striking burst. Her eyes widened, rimmed with tears. It’s not like their reactions to the evening news all his life hadn’t told him exactly what he needed to know. He thought, foolishly, that maybe his being their flesh and blood might change anything at all. That if he tried hard enough, he could turn the tide, twist their disappointment into some semblance of an understanding.
His father nodded, stoic like always, but with an undercurrent of something that struck fear into him, and his mother, her brows knitted together in a quiet protest of disgust. Like the curtain pulled back revealed a grotesquerie instead of her son.
“Go get yourself cleaned up. You smell like booze, and we’ve got service in the morning.” His father wagged a finger at the staircase, increasingly irate. His face was beat red, voice never faltering, only growing stronger and deeper.
“It’s not booze, it’s just beer.” Like his father hadn’t told a million stories of weekend ragers and running from the cops himself, touting every one of them like a trophy. Hypocrite.
He stood a moment longer, nausea sparking in the lowest point of his stomach, “Now,” his father insisted, louder this time as a fist slammed into the wall, leaving a hideous, cracking dent. He knew better than to push his luck, better than to talk back.
He left wordlessly, trekking to the stairs in an exasperated sprint. Alone in the solitude of his bedroom, he slammed the door behind him, unfazed by the possible consequences; he didn’t care. He rooted through the dresser drawer for his Walkman, dialing the volume as loud as it could go. He let out a deep, deep sigh, and flopped onto the bed. He put the headphones over his ears, then pressed the heels of his hands into closed eyes, letting starburst patterns fill the dark, vast void of his sight as the baseline began playing.
He spent the following days bearing the weight of a grimy, heavy silence. He pondered the furrowed brows and grimacing mouths of his parents and grew more burdened with the shame of it all, the harder he thought. He shuffled around the house he lived in like a rodent, scurrying to get somewhere safer but still trapped in a cage of insurmountable loneliness, not enough space between the bars to make an escape or breathe.
At school, Jesse momentarily made and broke eye contact in the hallway on the way back from lunch. Ben sat underneath empty bleachers, waiting for a pair of green eyes and a hand to hold discreetly, neither of which showed.
He didn’t love him. Or maybe that was what he told himself so that he could forget how he felt before the sirens sounded off. Like there wasn’t anything wrong with him. When they were together, he could pretend the world was kinder than it was. Now, he was only angry that he would never know what happened when he ran off. How quickly the facade of security crumbled before him as the flashlights drew closer and officers shouted.
Somehow, a six-pack shared between the two of them looked a lot more pathetic strewn across the grass as Jesse disappeared out of his line of sight, leaving him alone. He was scared, and Ben didn’t blame him. To be caught together meant something different for Jesse than it did for him. He knew that, and he didn’t take it personally. Being left in the dust wasn’t a new feeling; that didn’t make it hurt any less.
Ben looked at the man in front of him, mouth moving but still spilling out in an undistinguishable echo.
“I don’t think I can stay with you,” he said, snapping out of it.
“What—“
“I spent so long thinking that if I didn’t change… if I didn’t take any risks, that everything would be exactly as it should, you know, like you told me. Don’t ruin things for myself.”
A pause, a hitching breath as he, for once, chose something that he never had, the truth. Even if it meant they’d walk out the door and never come back. Losing what he never really had didn’t feel so scary. Not after everything else, “But sticking to the plan didn’t make me happy. And, when I got out there… I realized that sticking to the plan, forcing myself to be somebody I wasn't, would never make me happy. It’s the whole reason I left in the first place.” He thought of all the times he’d retreated into himself, in the name of safety, or even worse, in the name of appeasement. Could he still be considered himself in that retreat?
“Where is this coming from?” Carolyn narrowed her eyes with a calculated confusion.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think, is all… I was out there for over a year. After a while, I didn’t think any of it mattered anymore. I didn’t think I would make it out. I was sure I wouldn’t. So… now that I have… I think I owe it to myself. If not to be happy, then at least be honest.”
He paused, taking a breath. Would he have done this a long time ago if they hadn’t been so insistent that he wasn’t who he’d practically clawed out from underneath a second skin to be? Only to be denied his truth.
His father huffed a sigh, stunningly in character, and his mother pursed her lips in a suggestion of teariness and sorrow. Her eyes flitted back and forth, unable to meet his. What he’d been afraid of all his life, the weight of never being able to say it, met with rejection as confrontational as they both could manage. His world didn’t crumble at the very notion of it, even now having his answer. Didn’t he deserve better? Didn’t he deserve more? And couldn’t he let himself have it?
“I’m gay.” But it wasn’t like he was telling them what they hadn’t already known.
The silence was deafening but familiar. She reached for his hand and squeezed tightly, thumbing the pad at the base of his thumb momentarily before she slowly released him. He felt a sense of release in that, too. After all the years of holding his breath, praying not to have the rock lifted from his fragile, aching form, scared of the scorch of light. Now that it was here, he felt only a glowing warmth.
He recalled glimpses of rescue now, the shouting of medical personnel, and the pull of aching limbs downward against the canvas stretcher. How he’d weakly kicked and screamed and begged to be left there, mistaking salvation for another unwilling participation. Flinching under the touch of a team of emergency responders who had no idea what the hell they were walking into. The day had been blindingly sunny for the middle of autumn in the mountains but he’d spent a great deal of it in and out of the annoyance of consciousness, eventually under the influence of sedation.
Anesthesia made his mouth dry in the same way starvation and dehydration did. Scratchy throat, choking cough. The only difference was, the haze over his head felt peaceful and not like an unwilling surrender. He yawned, eyes watering. A knock at the door swayed his attention.
He felt sure his eyes and ears were deceiving him. In the doorway, Paul hung back, lingering, and at once, Ben could feel, if not life, then certainly a rush of mixed, melancholic joy, returning to him.
He didn’t say anything, just stared. Paul waved, suddenly taking on the sentience of the real life he lived, no longer remaining a still life in his mind.The knot in his stomach grew.
Suddenly, it was all too much. He felt… too sick, too weak, too…
Not enough himself to be having the reunion he’d rehearsed so many times in his head. The one he never thought he’d have. And never mind how he felt, he knew even without a mirror that he looked much worse. Suddenly, his hair was too long and unkempt, and he could feel all the weight that left him fleetingly in starvation, its absence. His eyes were hollow and sunken, the rest of him pallid and scarred and bandaged like some sort of Frankenstein’s monster. Certainly not human enough to want to be seen by the person who had once made him feel so deeply human, so deeply exposed.
To look Paul in the eyes and answer his questions and smile and go on like he was fine or even half-together was a lie so shameful he could feel himself retreating into himself. He hesitated, anvil of vulnerability pressing to his lungs, flattening them. The air in the room became scarcer with each passing moment. How ridiculous he felt to be simultaneously skilled enough to put on a facade of fine-ness at one moment and to be filled with the strife and sickening memory of that place in the very next. Gliding between the two felt like some fucked up purgatory closer to hell than heaven.
“You okay?” Would he ever be again?
There existed a certain element of parody in playing at humanity despite everything he’d seen. Hard to feel human when you’ve watched the last of humanity dissolve before you. Hard to feel human when you’ve been treated like an animal. Unfeeling, sickly, wasting away like one ailing cow in a pasture full of cattle more fit for consumption than you. At least the sick cow could call death its savior.
“Sorry. yeah, come in,” He answered, attempting to clear the hoarseness in his throat with small, short coughs. He shut his eyes briefly, hoping that avoiding eye contact would make the previous staring and lack of interaction a little less odd. Hoping that the morphine was enough to curb the pain, but not so much he’d lose control of himself and say something he’d regret.
“Hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I got your letter,” Paul said, wounded eyes darting between Ben and his shoes, like he was studying them. He drew closer to the bed.
Off to a perfect start. Of course, he’s here because of the letter. That’s the logical next step to receiving mail from someone who writes to you after they’ve been missing for a year. Way to make yourself look stupid, Ben. “Oh, good. That’s—that’s great,” He said, feigning casual, “I wasn’t sure if you were in the same place, or if you’d read it, I just… needed to let you know.”
“I read it,” Paul smiled and nodded, pursing his lip in a bit of sadness before asking, “I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier. I wanted to. I wasn’t sure if you were…” he trailed off, “How are you?”
“Been better,” He laughed, feeling lousy. A moment of awkward silence passed, and he kicked himself internally for the laugh, how strange it probably sounded and looked when he looked like all the life had been drained from him. Suddenly, he was all too aware of the meds making his brain foggy. The fresh bandages, the sterility of the room. How exhausted he was.
“Sit.” He finally said.
Paul obliged, pulling the chair closer to the bedside, “You’re all over the news. Well, you and the team.”
“God, don’t remind me.” He cringed, mind running wild with all his worst imaginings of what news anchors and talk show personalities were undeniably saying, filling nightly broadcasts and magazines and newspaper headlines. The news of the Yellowjackets’ return was the most exciting thing to happen in Wiskayok since the screen at the drive-in caught fire, and the appeal didn’t stop there. Their disappearance caught the attention of national television networks and publishers looking to make a quick dollar, bombarding anyone they could get in contact with, hounding for details, hounding for a story. One no one wanted to tell.
“Don’t worry, sounds like they’re keeping things under wraps.”
“That’s probably for the better.”
“I can’t believe you’re here.”
“How was my year away?” Ben joked.
Paul looked away in silence, glancing back up, suddenly scanning him with an unfamiliar concern, “Scared the shit outta me. You look exhausted.”
He was.
“What, nothing new?” Ben asked, trying hard not to sound paranoid, and kicking himself for the jealousy and the desperation, but testing the waters happily. Was it so wrong to wonder? It seemed like an innocent question to the untrained ear. They weren’t together. They hadn’t been. The woods had done quite a number on his sense of hope.
“Nothing that stuck.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Ben asked, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s not the only reason.”
“I missed you.” He said, turning his head to the side, falling further into the pillow, which was flimsy and flat. He closed his eyes, which felt heavy with sleep.
“That’s gotta be the drugs talking.”
“Uh-uh. No.” He insisted.
“Well, then I missed you, too.” Paul said, “God, your hair’s a mess.” He reached out a hand to run through it, unfazed and laughing in disbelief. Tears prickled in his eye as he soaked in the imagine of the man he never thought he’d see again, an almost-ghost.
“You should’ve seen it before.”
“It looked worse before?”
He laughed, “Oh yeah.”
His nervousness melted away as Paul eased humor in the air of the room, he’d always been good at that. A comfortable silence fell over them, monitors still humming quietly. It was a sunny day for the first time all week, but he knew without opening a window that it was deceptively cold outside. After a while, sleep called to him. He reached a hand out to Paul, entangling their fingers carefully.
“I think, maybe, you should come back. When I’m not so…”
“What? Strung out?” Paul supplied, and his smile grew.
He put a hand over his eyes, impervious to the laugh he tried hard to stifle. When he uncovered them, Paul pressed a kiss into his forehead gently, lingering for a moment as he took a deep breath in, memorizing a scent that Ben could only imagine reeked of traces of the blood, sweat, dirt, and pine he’d grown so accustomed to. He took a step back from the bed, Ben fighting weakly to keep interlocked fingers the way they were, scared to let him go again.
“I should go.” He said, “I think you could use the sleep.”
Ben waved him goodbye, wordless.
He studied his left leg, what remained of it, between the change of dressings. Stitching neatly running the length of the incision, like the feet of a millipede, short, straight, black. A far cry from the mess it had been more than a year ago, jagged edges of irritated pink flesh warping around the tail end of exposed bone were now neatly squared away thanks to a revision and a real medical team.
It still hurt to think about. Severed nerve endings, the result of a chop and a burn from Misty’s axe. There wasn’t much about the initial experience he remembered, other than a pain so intense his eyes went bleary with tears and he thought, in the zeal of being knocked back into consciousness, that his left foot was only badly injured, not unattached and buried in the dirt somewhere. He navigated the panic of waking up in the middle of the night, the rest of the group off in the distance, howling in laughter at something he couldn’t exactly make out.
He glanced around with ill-adjusted eyes into the endless expanse of unfamiliar trees and dirt through the deep navy sky, no light around for miles and miles. Then there was Misty, alone, and greeting him ominously by the light of an isolated bonfire, far enough away from the group that he could rest undisturbed. His leg was wrapped in cloth but still bleeding despite the tourniquet’s greatest efforts.
In the dark and warping confusion of a day spent falling from the sky, he looked down to see what was there, what was no longer. When he woke, he was unsure of how many hours or days had potentially passed him by. In his feverishness, he couldn’t be sure that the empty space was nothing more than his mind playing tricks. That’s impossible.
The warm iron glow of the axe sent a flutter of danger through his chest. He was glad, and lucky in hindsight, that the body could only bear witness to so much terror before it took an emergency out in the form of fainting. He despised the disorientation of reentry more than he could fathom. When he woke again the next morning, he woke writhing. Not with as much fervor or surprise as the first time. Light filtered through bare branches in the canopy of otherwise leaved trees in a winding pattern like that of river tributaries and he groaned and stretched out the sleep briefly, hurt settling in.
It gave him hell during the winter, invisible foot twinging at an itch that could never be scratched. With so much else to attend to in the desolate brutality of that place, he tried hard, and often, to bite his tongue at the pain. Occupying the cabin’s one room, aside from the undercurrent of annoyance it instilled in the team, did have one undeniable benefit: privacy.
He often tucked himself away when the pain prodded too intensely, breathing through it as the gaggle of voices muffled from the other side of the door. He tried not to make a show of it, or a spectacle of himself like he’d done when he fell from the porch onto the blood-soaked bandages that kept his leg from making contact with the dirt. Not his finest moment. In the grand scheme of survival, it was the least of anyone’s worries.
The intensity of it fizzled, never to a point of non-existence, but enough. Months sleeping on the dirt floors of the cave certainly didn’t help; he was always sore, and sleeping poorly. It seemed better than running the risk of being cast out, becoming the next feast of the wild. Until it didn’t. When he was on his own, he didn’t have to worry about keeping it hidden.
In the cave, the pain had been hard not to focus on, as there were only so many things he could think of or do to pass the time. He laid down next to the fire, moisture condensing from the humid walls of rock. He rested his head over of his folded up fleece, left in his sweatshirt and polo. Not the warmest.
As the team’s penchant for retribution, for answers after the fire grew more insatiable, it was inconsequential. The loss of his leg was an unavoidable truth of the crash, an accident. His latter injury, a blaze of revenge for his false guilt, a perpetuated choice, and a fitting punishment in the eyes of the team.
November
“The team wants to see you.” Natalie burst through his room’s open door, no longer in a hospital gown, now in sweatpants and a hoodie. The team had all been released after comprehensive examinations and enough IV fluids and food to make them feel normal again, or as close to normal as they could get. Her eyes were ringed red, the sides of her nose the same shade, irritated by the salt of tears and a continuous sniffle.
“Hello to you, too.” She had to realize how absurd the idea sounded, all things considered. He sighed.
Natalie sighed in return, “I’m sorry—“
“What, so we can all finish the job? Jesus, Nat, seriously? Why don’t you send Shauna and Melissa in first,” He laughed, humorlessly, angrily. Because having words with Shauna was something that historically led him to conflict resolution and continued safety. It wasn’t funny, but it was laughable.
He could be angry with her for what she’d done to him, the role she played in it all. But he’d always be more angry with himself. He failed her, and he knew that. He would regret it for the rest of his life; that much was true.
Still, the memory of the last time he’d seen her soured the image of the quiet girl with brown eyes who’d cried in frustration trying to get her passes right. Who made playbooks in the back of her journals as Bill reviewed the faults of the previous game or scrimmage in a team huddle, shuffling back to the bleachers momentarily to neatly tuck whichever book she was using, always intricately patterned, back into her bag. The one who didn’t even like soccer, but played better than half the team despite it. She felt abandoned because she’d been abandoned, and that was his doing. He failed her, but couldn’t stifle his wondering; Did he deserve this? Did his failures warrant all of the cruelty?
Now, he could only picture this succession of events: The outcome of the trial. The swaying of the vote. The blade of the knife and his kicking, flailing struggle. His immobilization. All had been par for the course out there, in a landscape riddled with such uncertainty, where things could only get scarier and stranger. Now, removed from it, he found himself far too full of resentment and rage for his own good.
They all voted for it, or, most of them did. It wasn’t her fault, but her influence, that drove the trial’s verdict from on the fence to guilty. Everything was downhill from there. Before that, it almost seemed like the team was coming around. He told his side of the story, which was only worth what they believed of it. The intimidation game and the hive mind of an increasingly hungering and straying group had done him in, in the end. But she’d still pushed, still tried her very hardest.
“We’re all a little worried about what you might say. Group decision, believe it or not. I’m just the messenger.”
“What I might say…” Of course. Like anyone would believe him if he claimed the slash across his ankle was an accident. He wondered to himself what details had been released to the press and the public. He cringed at the thought of cameras in the faces of the team. They hadn’t asked for any of this.
Despite the circumstances that the emaciation and the telling wounds of imprisonment alluded to, I don’t remember seemed a believable excuse to the man in the suit.
If he needed a cover, aside from the truth, which was not an option, maybe that it had been self-inflicted would be a more believable lie. Plea of temporary insanity, perhaps, and enough disdain from parents of the survivors and the dead alike at the thought that he had hurt and incapacitated himself with so many to take care of. Whatever got him out of Wiskayok, though, he did ponder how disgustingly neurotic that idea felt. It might not shield him from answering to angry guardians, but at least it would keep scrutiny away from the team, which was the last thing they needed.
He could pack up, start over, and pretend it was the shame of having failed them all so horrifically and not the pain of having tried before he failed. He was under no pretenses about his innocence; he hadn’t done what they had done, sure, but he had left when it mattered, which put a knot in his stomach that he couldn’t undo. He searched for answers in his own mind, grasping for memories of what he’d done in the days leading up to his escape, aside from rotting away on a worn-out twin-sized mattress.
“Nothing incriminating. If that’s what you’re worried about,” he bit back, and could feel the shame settling heavy in his stomach. What came out of his mouth was much different than what circled the track of his mind.
“I’m sorry. You know, I didn’t mean to—“
“Just don’t. This is insulting. You’re covering your ass, covering for them, too.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?”
He sighed, pausing before he could say anything else. A burning rage at the thought that he lived to see another day flickered, swelling and subsiding cyclically. Maybe with Nat, for not putting him out of his misery when she’d had the chance, when he’d asked. Over and over and over. Maybe with all of them, for what they’d done to Javi, to him. He’d never know the truth, and he worried, if he asked, it might be worse than what he imagined. Maybe he was angry with God despite years of distance and disinterest.
Natalie tried to do the right thing; she always did. He hated himself for the resentment that bubbled inside.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Nat. The suits stopped by to ask me about all of it already. I didn’t give you away.” He raised eyebrows and nodded in the direction of the door. They weren’t perusing the hallway anymore, but he was sure she’d seen them. They were hard to miss.
She drew closer slowly, her voice dripped with fear and hesitation. “I’m sorry I didn’t put a stop to her bullshit, that none of us did. I’m sorry I didn’t stand up for you. I should’ve called the vote, before it turned into—”
He didn’t know what else he’d expected of a trial run by high school students, their only real concept of the law being police procedurals and the knowledge of history books that no high schooler wanted to study. To juggle a life in their hands, barely knowing that witnesses must be sworn into a court of law, was a memory he still had a hard time wrapping his head around. Sometimes he wondered if he’d dreamed it.
He couldn’t bring himself to say anything else. Forgiveness felt farther away the closer it drew to his mouth. He knew she meant it, but silence hung in the air, waiting to be broken.
After a moment, she seemed to understand and decided to change the subject.
“I never asked again, because I didn’t want to know the real answer, but did you really… You know…”
“I did it, you know that?”
Tears welled in her eyes as her bottom lip quivered, then hardened in a line of rage and betrayal. If he tried hard enough, he could retain a grasp on his mind like sand, half there but still slipping. He’d tried everything else. Asking outright, starving himself, though, he had grown far too weak to even attempt untying the rope knotted around his thinning wrists. Not that it hadn’t occurred to him through the fog of hunger and misery.
It was cruel, and he knew it, and he was desperate, like the dog that gnaws off its own leg to escape the jaws of a trap. Frenzied and constrained by filth, itching to clamp onto anything else in sight with sharp teeth and fueled by the rabidity of the very idea of release and what ecstasy it might offer him, even if only temporarily before the fade to nothingness. What happened after didn’t concern him.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, I did…”
His voice bleared and twisted inside his skull overtop a pounding migraine, and rattled back to his ears in a warped echo. The pull of muscle, unsupported by the lack of tension in his tendon cut loose pained him too intensely to focus on anything else. The story left his mouth a made-up detail at a time, and the order didn’t matter because, of course, he hadn’t done it, but the truth didn’t matter either. Not anymore.
“I said I don’t believe you!”
He caught his breath, reeling from the performance and the frustration. He was out of options.
“…You sentenced me to death, you need to keep that promise!”
It was difficult in hindsight to remember what exactly he’d told her, as delirium had so overtaken him that the words had exited his mouth, but done so as if he hadn’t really chosen them. Now, he was left with a very muddied memory of speaking them. He can remember, how when the job was done, he recited please, like a liturgy, like a sacred sacrament of his own morbidity.
“I thought that if I could make you angry enough, you’d…” he stopped himself, “… give me what I wanted, which… I realize, is not what I—“
“Look, Nat…I didn’t believe rescue would come. I thought it was bullshit… I thought that I’d just be stuck there like that. I should never have asked that of you, and I shouldn’t have lied, I’m sorry for that. But I didn’t want to hurt you, and I didn’t try to. I left because I was scared, and I meant that. I didn’t even know about the cabin. ” A hard blink puts him right back in the pen, pale and treacherously thin and weak beyond all belief. Living in a hell of his team’s making.
She let out a sigh of relief and, almost in tandem, a tear fell from her eye. Her face softened as she sat down in the chair next to the bed, she buried it in her hands for a brief moment. When she returned, she looked at him again with a sad, not-quite smile. The silence still hung.
“So… my parents came by,” he casted the line as Paul sat next to him for the third day in a row, book in hand to pass the time. He folded it closed, glancing up. The nurse had just left the room after completing her last rounds of the day, heart rate, blood pressure, EKG all monitored. His weight has still low, but slowly getting better.
He knew the progress would’ve been made better, sooner, if he hadn’t thought of the tube every time it was time to eat. Sometimes he could muster through, but more often than not he found himself picking at his plate, sometimes refusing. He wasn’t trying to be difficult, but didn’t often find that he was hungry. He knew he should be.
“When did this happen?”
“They came to check in on me when they heard the news we’d been found. It was really…” there were few proper words to describe it— Painful? Awkward? Relieving? He still couldn’t decide for himself. His mom had called since, asking if he’d reconsidered, but never bold or brave enough to ask about anything else. His father was always conveniently away from the phone. It’s better this way, he thought.
Paul’s brow furrowed, soaking the information in.
“They wanted me to come back home, or they offered. Until I’m better. Whatever that means. I’m sure their idea of better is different than mine.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That I couldn’t.”
A brief pause. He’d been tiptoeing around the conversation, terrified to bring it up. Terrified to tow the line between their re-established connection, new despite it’s familiarity, and to fall deep, head-first back into what has been there before. Scared to know if what had been might still be.
“Look, I know that we’re not together anymore… that we didn’t end on the best of terms. I don’t expect you to just… I don’t know… pack your life up for me, or… or change because I couldn’t—”
“Ben, where is this going?”
“What I’m trying to say—is that I did it. I told them.”
Paul raised a brow, his expression twisting with a whirl of uncertainty, “Are you serious?” he asked.
A nod.
“And now that they know, it’s weird. I thought it would be, like, a nail in my own coffin. They didn’t seem happy about it. But there’s not much I can do to make them happy.” He shrugged, a reminder to himself more than anything else.
“I take it things didn’t go the way you wanted?”
“Not the way I wanted, no. But better than I expected.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Y’know, when I asked you to leave, I didn’t mean to give you an ultimatum or—“
“—I know that. It wasn’t fair of me to ask you to keep us a secret. You have this whole life, and I had my own. I didn’t hate it. But it wasn’t what I wanted, and I don’t know why, I just… couldn’t bring myself to give it up.”
Trading the fear in for something new, something better, didn’t seem possible when he couldn’t see what was on the other side of it all. It didn’t help that the team made it so hard to leave, growing on him more and more as the years passed. He’d helped to build something they were all proud of, and being so close to victory wasn’t something he could sacrifice. Not when the team had worked so hard, given so much. He had to see it through. He thought for months every night as he tossed and turned in the lead up to nationals, just as soon as the season was over, this time, this year will be my last.
“But I still asked you to leave, and I never forgave myself for it.”
“How could you have known?”
A pause, pensive.
“Y’know, It’s been damn near impossible to get myself to be with anyone else, or even think of them.”
“Flattery is a good look on you,” He joked, leaning in, “A year’s a long time,”
He knew that better than anyone.
“Ben—”
“And if you’ve moved on,” He paused, contemplating, ruminating in the knowledge that he wasn’t the same as he’d been before. His stomach turned over the thought that mind, body, and soul he had changed. All the baggage he carried before had been a deal breaker, and he’d understood—coming home brought a new set of challenges, ones he hoped wouldn’t function as a new set of deal breakers, too, “If this isn’t what you want… I get it.”
“I thought you were gone.”
“So did all of New Jersey.”
“I’d keep the news on, even when I went to sleep, check the paper, call your place, I felt like maybe I had no right to be so broken up about it because we weren’t together, we hadn’t been, but I felt like it was my fault—“
“Don’t blame yourself. It had nothing to do with you.”
A pause, the warm flush of embarrassment, of guilt, in his face.
“Look, Paul, you’ve been—” he paused, “You’ve been great, and I want you to be here—I just want it to be for the right reason. Not because you feel guilty, or like you owe me something because we ended where we did. I don’t want you to stay because you feel like you have to. that’s no way to-"
“Don’t say that. I love you, Ben. I meant that, too.” Paul reached for his hand, clutching it tightly.
“I love you.” He said, letting go, but unburdened in the knowing that this time when he said it, it wasn’t accompanied by all the fear, all the uncertainty it had entailed before.
Choked up, Ben said, “I want my life to be mine, and I want to be with you.”
“Well, it’s funny you say that,” Paul said slyly, wiping his own tears away, “I was kind of hoping you’d still take me up on my offer,” he asked, with brows furrowed in playful contemplation as he fished into the front pocket of his jeans, pulling from it a pair of keys, which he jangled in the air. He bit his lip in anticipation of an answer, a smile barely contained.
“Nothing would make me happier,” He answered, reaching for Paul’s hand again with his own, clutching the cool metal of the keys and drawing him forward all in the same motion. Tracing his hairline with careful hands. Smiling into eyes a cool, glassy blue. Crashing into him, soft lips eager and hungering.