“I’m sorry that happened to you.” She looks like she really is sorry, like she really cares.
I grunt.
“It must have been…horrible.”
Anger fills me. I want to believe she cares. “I dealt with a lot of predators out here. I’ve been at the mercy of some of the worst ones. But the way those reporters came at me…I was weak from my injury, weak from the drugs. I didn’t understand.”
“I read about the orderly when I was researching your case. The one they paid to get you to come out of the hospital.”
“I thought he wanted to help me,” I say. “He said he would get me outside. I wanted to touch the grass.”Eat the grass.But I don’t say that. “I was so weak and dizzy. The infection made me hallucinate, or maybe it was the drugs. I wanted to go home so badly. It’s all I wanted.” I look at the passing scenery. It’s still like a dream to be home.
“Kiro,” she whispers.
“He took the tubes from my arm and got me a winter jacket and boots. He made me wear a hat—a ski mask—and shoved it over my face. He told me to walk normally. He told me they didn’t want me to leave, but he’d help me get home. He got me out a side entrance. Instead of nature, there was pavement and a mob of reporters, flashing camera lights at me, shouting. I was…bewildered. The orderly tried to take the ski mask off my face, and that’s when I started fighting. I hit him. I hit everyone I could. The flashes blinded me. I could barely stand. I was so weak. Thrashing around.”Like a wild animal. She probably knows. There were lots of witnesses to it.
“I heard about it.”
“I finally braced myself against the wall, fighting just to stand, unable to get away. They kept asking about the wolves—did the wolves raise me? Did they feed me? Where did I live? And the flashes from the cameras…” I breathe in, trying to stay calm. The terrain is changing. I concentrate on that.
“The kind of work those sorts of reporters do dehumanizes people. It’s wrong. But not all reporters are predatory like that.”
I close my eyes, remembering their dark hunger, wishing I could trust her. Wishing she wasn’t one of them.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ann
Ifeel shittyand stop asking questions.
We hit shore and trudge on. It’s farther than I imagined.
And it really seems far just for him to turn around and bring me back to the truck.
At first I had this idea that I could visit him again. I imagined mapping his coordinates on the phone. I would drive up and hike in.
The longer we go, the more I realize how silly that was.
And little by little I have this sense of journeying into something deep, not just in terms of geography, but something more—like sinking into shifting sands.
It makes me uncomfortable.
I used to say that the story begins where the comfort zone ends, but this feels different. Dangerous. But then I look at him, and he’s so beautiful and wild. And I think how he’s been treated—he’s never met anybody who doesn’t want to hurt him.
Most of all, I’m starting to question any story about him.
I don’t want to use him like those other reporters did—I won’t fucking do that. But what does that leave me with? The idea of doing his story for his own good? To help him gain economic independence?
This guy doesn’t need economic independence any more than the wind needs it.
I could figure out why he’s being pursued like he is, though. I could arm him with the information about who his enemies are and why. That’s still important. Or is it?
I own this,he said.
This wilderness area is as large as a small state. Maybe he really can get lost in it. Maybe he doesn’t have to literally own land. Maybe I don’t know jack shit about anything.
We head down a river that’s bounded by massive rock formations like a giant baby’s blocks, piled haphazardly. Pines along the sides stretch heavenward, as if to create a cathedral ceiling.
Times when I’ve been deep in the tropics I had this feeling of being somewhere exotic and otherworldly. I never thought about the far north as being exotic and otherworldly, but the wildness of this place is every bit as intense.