Wild Page 8

  “No,” Ellie said, frowning. “It won’t.”

  * * *

  Girl is coiled up like a young fern in this too-white place. The ground is cold and hard; it makes her shiver sometimes and dream of her cave. While she was asleep, the Strangers changed her. She smells now of flowers and rain. She misses her own scent.

  She wants to close her eyes and go to sleep, but the smells in here are all wrong. Her nose itches most of the time and her throat is so dry it hurts to swallow. She longs for her river and the roar of the water that is always leaking over the steep cliff not far from her cave. She can hear the Sun-Haired Her breathing, and her voice. It is like a thunderstorm, that voice; dangerous and scary. It makes her scoot closer to the end of the place. If she were a wolf, she could burrow through it and disappear. The idea of that makes her sad. She is thinking of Her . . . of Him, even. Of Wolf.

  Without them she feels lost. She can’t live in this place where nothing green is alive and the air stinks.

  She shouldn’t have run away. Him always told her it was cold and bad beyond their wood, that she had to stay hidden because in the world there were people who hurt little girls worse than Him did. Strangers.

  She should have listened, but she’d been so scared for so long.

  Now she will be hurt worser than the net.

  They are waiting to hurt her when she comes out, but she will be too small for them to see. Like a green bug on the leaf, she will disappear.

  Sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair in the cheerily decorated playroom, Julia stared down at the notebook in her lap. In the last hour she’d talked endlessly to the girl hidden beneath the bed, but had received no response. Her notebook remained full of questions without answers.

  Teeth—dental work?

  Deaf?

  Stool—any evidence of diet?

  Toilet trained?

  Scars—age of

  Ethnicity

  In the early years of her residency it had become clear to everyone that Julia had a true gift for dealing with traumatized and depressed children. Even the best of her teachers and colleagues had come to her for advice. She seemed innately to understand the extreme pressures on today’s kids. All too often they ended up on the dark backstreets of downtown wherever, selling their thin bodies to pay for food and drugs. She knew how exploitation and abuse and alcohol marked a child, how families lost their elasticity and snapped apart, leaving each member adrift and searching. Most importantly, she remembered how it felt to be an outsider, and though she’d grown up and merged into the traffic of adulthood, those painful childhood memories remained. Kids opened up to her, trusted her to listen to them, to help them.

  Although she hadn’t specialized in autism or brain damage rehabilitation or mental challenges, she’d dealt with those patients, of course. She knew how autistics functioned and reacted.

  She knew, too, how profoundly deaf children acted before they’d learned sign language. Astoundingly, there were still places in this country—backwoods settlements and such—where deaf/mute children grew up with no ability to communicate.

  But none of that seemed relevant to this case. The child’s brain scan showed no lesions or anomalies. The girl under the bed could be a perfectly normal child who’d been lost on a day hike and was now too terrified to speak up.

  A perfectly normal girl who traveled with a wolf

  —and howled at the moon

  —and seemingly didn’t know what a toilet was for.

  Julia put down her pen. She’d been silent for too long. Her best hope with this child lay in connecting. That meant communication. “I guess I can’t write my way to understanding you, can I?” she said in gentle, soothing tones.

  “That’s too bad, because I enjoy writing. Probably you prefer drawing. Most girls your age do. Not that I know your age, exactly. Dr. Cerrasin believes you’re about six. I’d say you’re a little younger, but I haven’t really gotten a good look at you, have I? I’m thirty-five. Did I tell you that? I’m sure it seems old to you. Frankly, in the last year, it’s started to feel old to me, too.”

  For the next two hours Julia talked about nothing. She told the girl where they were and why they were here—that everyone wanted to help her. It didn’t matter so much what she said as how she said it. The subtext on every word was Come on out, honey, I’m a safe place. But there had been no response whatsoever. Not once had so much as a finger appeared out from beneath the bed. She was about to start talking about how lonely the world could sometimes feel when a knock at the door interrupted her.

  There was a scuffling sound under the bed.

  Had the girl heard the knock?

  “I’ll be right back,” Julia said in a quite ordinary oh-there’s-someone-at-my-door voice. She went to the door and opened it.

  Dr. Cerrasin cocked his head to the right, where two white-clad male orderlies stood. One held a large box; the other held a tray of food. “The food and toys are here.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No response yet?”

  “No, and it’s impossible to diagnose her this way. I need to study her. Actions, reactions, movements. That damn bed makes it impossible.”

  “Whatcha want us to do with this stuff?” asked one of the orderlies.

  “I’ll take the stuffed animals. Store the rest of the toys for now. She’s hardly ready for that kind of play. The food can go on the table. And be quiet. I don’t want to scare her any more than she already is.” To Max, she said, “Does this town still have a library the size of my car?”

  “It’s small,” he admitted, “but with the Internet, you have access to everything. The library went online last year.” He smiled charmingly. “There was a parade.”

  She felt a moment’s connection to him then. They were the outsiders, laughing at small-town customs. When she realized that he’d made her smile, she stepped back. “There always is.” She started to say something else—she wasn’t even sure what, when it struck her.

  Move the bed. How had she missed the obvious?

  She spun around and shut the door, realizing a moment too late that she’d shut it in Max’s face. Oops. Oh, well. She went to the nearest orderly, who was just setting down a tray of food, and said, “Take the bed out of here, please, but leave the mattress.”

  “Huh?”

  “We’re not furniture movers, miss,” the other man said.

  “Doctor,” she pointed out. “Are you telling me that you two aren’t strong enough to help me?”

  “Of course we’re strong enough,” the taller man sputtered as he set down the box of stuffed animals.

  “Good. Then what’s the problem?”

  “Come on, Fredo. Let’s move the bed before the doc here starts wantin’ a fridge.”

  “Thank you. There’s a child under there. Try not to scare her.”

  One of the men turned to her. “Why don’t you tell her to come out?”

  “Just move the bed, please. Carefully. Put the mattress in the corner.”

  They placed the mattress where she’d indicated, lifted the bed off the floor, and backed out of the room. The door clicked shut behind them, but Julia didn’t notice. All she saw was her patient.

  Crouched low, the girl opened her mouth to scream.

  Come on, Julia thought, let me hear you.

  But there was no sound as the child scrambled back to the wall and froze. She went perfectly still.

  Julia was reminded of a chameleon settling into its environment. But the poor kid couldn’t change color, couldn’t disappear. She was all-too-noticeable against the speckled gray linoleum floor and bright yellow wall. So still she seemed to be carved of pale wood, her only sign of life was her nostrils, which flared as if to pick up every scent.

  For the first time, Julia noticed the child’s beauty. Though the girl was wretchedly thin, she was still striking. She stared near Julia, but not quite at her, as if there were a dangerous animal to Julia’s left that bore watching. Her expression was both bl
and and strangely obsessive; it gave nothing away but missed nothing, either. There was no curve to her mouth at all; no indication of displeasure or curiosity, and her eyes—those amazing, blue-green eyes—were serious and watchful.

  Julia was surprised by the lack of fear in those eyes. Perhaps she was looking at the other side of fear. What happened to a child when fear had been the norm forever . . . did it melt into watchfulness?

  “You’re almost looking at me,” she said in as conversational a tone as possible. Eye contact was important. Autistics routinely didn’t make eye contact until or unless they’d undergone significant therapy. On her pad, she wrote: Mute? Her sister had said the girl made noises, but Julia hadn’t heard it for herself. Besides, her sister had also implied prodigious jumping and tree-climbing skills. “I imagine you’re scared. Everything that’s happened to you since yesterday has been frightening. It would make anyone cry.”

  There was no reaction at all.

  For the next twelve hours Julia sat quietly in a chair. She observed everything she could about the girl, but that wasn’t much, to be truthful. In all those early hours, the child was almost completely motionless. Sometime around midnight she fell asleep, still crouched against the wall. When she finally slumped to the floor, Julia cautiously moved toward her, picking her up gently and transferring her to the mattress.

  All through the night Julia watched the girl sleep, noticing how often she seemed seized by bad dreams. At some point Julia fell asleep, too, but by seven the next morning she was awake again, ready to go. She called home to tell Ellie that she’d probably spend the day at the hospital, then went back to work.

  When the girl finally woke, Julia was ready. Smiling easily, she began talking again. In her voice, she made sure the girl heard acceptance and caring, so that the meaning was clear even if the words were unknown. Hour after hour Julia talked, all through the breakfast and lunch, which went uneaten. By late afternoon two things had become true: Julia was exhausted and the girl had to be hungry.

  Julia moved very slowly over to the box that had been delivered yesterday. She was careful to make no sudden moves. She talked in a steady, soothing cycle of words, as if the child’s silence were the most natural thing in the world. “How about if we look through this stuff now, see if you like any of it.” She opened the box. A stuffed gray wolf pup lay on a pile of other plush toys and folded clothes. She picked it up and then went to the next box. Still smiling, she started to unpack it. “The people of Rain Valley sent you this stuff because they’re worried about you. I’m sure your parents are worried, too. Maybe you got lost. That wouldn’t be your fault, you know, and no one would be mad at you.”

  She glanced back at the girl, who was sitting up on the mattress now, perfectly still, staring just past Julia.

  The window, Julia realized. The girl hadn’t taken her gaze away from the window. Though the glass wasn’t big and didn’t reveal much of the outside world, there was a patch of blue sky and the green tip of a fir branch. “You’re wondering how to get out there, aren’t you?I’d like to help you get home. Would you like that?”

  There was no reaction, not even to the word home.

  Julia grabbed a big book off the shelf and dropped it on the floor. It hit with a loud thwack.

  The girl flinched; her eyes widened. She glanced at Julia for a heartbeat, then scurried over to the corner.

  “So you can hear. That’s good to know. Now I need to figure out if you can understand me. Are you hearing words or sounds, little girl?” Cautiously, she moved toward the child. All the while she was waiting for a flicker in the eyes, an acknowledgment that she was being approached. There was none, but when Julia was about eight feet away, the girl’s nostrils flared. A tiny, whimpering sound leaked past her lips. The tension in her laced fingers turned the tanned skin almost white.

  Julia stopped. “That’s close enough, huh? I’m scaring you. That’s good, actually. You’re responding normally to this strange environment.” She bent down very slowly and tossed the stuffed animal to the girl. It landed right by her side. “Sometimes a soft toy can make us feel better. When I was a girl, I had a pink teddy bear named Tink. I took her everywhere.” She went back to the table and set the box on the floor, then sat down.

  A moment later there was a knock at the door. At the sound, the girl scrambled farther into the corner, crouching down to appear as small as possible.

  “It’s just your dinner. I know it’s early, but you have to be hungry. I’m not leaving you to eat alone; you might as well understand that now.” She opened the door, thanked the nurse for the food, then returned to the table.

  The door clicked shut again, leaving Julia and the child alone.

  As Julia unpacked the food, she kept up a steady stream of conversation. Nothing too personal or intense, just words; each one of them was an invitation that came back unopened. Finally, she pushed the box aside. On the table there was now an array of kid-friendly food. Macaroni and cheese—from a box, just the way kids liked it—glazed doughnuts, brownies, chicken tenders with ketchup, milk, Jell-O with fruit chunks, cheese pizza, and a hot dog with fries. The tempting aromas filled the small room. “I didn’t know what you liked so I pretty much ordered everything.”

  Julia reached over and plucked a doughnut off the red plastic plate. “I can’t remember the last time I had a glazed doughnut. They’re not good for you, but oh man, are they good.” She took a bite. The flavor exploded in her mouth. Savoring it, she looked directly at the girl. “I’m sorry. Are you hungry? Maybe you’d like a bite.”

  At the word hungry, the girl flinched. For just a moment her gaze skittered across the room and came to rest on the table of food.

  “Did you understand that?” Julia said, leaning ever so slightly forward. “Do you know what hungry means?”

  The girl looked at her for a moment. It lasted less than a breath, but Julia felt its impact all the way to her toes.

  Understanding.

  She’d bet her degrees on it.

  Very slowly Julia reached for a second doughnut. She placed it on a red plastic plate and then stood up. She walked closer to the girl than she’d been before—this time there was about six feet between them. Once again the child snorted and whimpered and tried to back up, but the wall pinned her in place.

  Julia set the plate on the floor and gave it a little push. It skidded across the linoleum. Close enough to the child that she could smell its vanilly sweetness; far enough away that she had to move forward to take it.

  Julia returned to her seat. “Go ahead,” she said. “You’re hungry. That’s food.”

  This time the girl looked right at her. Julia felt the desperate intensity of those blue-green eyes. She wrote down: Food.

  “No one will hurt you,” Julia said.

  The girl blinked. Was that a reaction to the word hurt? She wrote it down.

  Minutes passed. Neither one of them looked away. Finally Julia glanced at the window by the door. Dr. Better-looking-than-God was there, watching them.

  The second Julia glanced away, the girl ran for the food, snatched it up, and returned to her spot, like a wild animal returning to its lair to feed.

  And the way she ate . . .

  The girl put most of the doughnut into her mouth and started to chew loudly.

  Julia could tell when the taste kicked in. The girl’s eyes widened.

  “Can’t beat a good doughnut. You should taste my mom’s brownies. They were delicious.” Julia stumbled slightly over the past tense of the word. The odd thing was, she would have sworn the child noticed, though she couldn’t have said why she thought so. “You’d better have some protein with that, kiddo. Too much sugar isn’t good.” She got a hot dog and doctored it up with ketchup and mustard then set it down on the floor about two feet closer to the table than before.

  The girl looked at the empty plate where the doughnut had been. It was obvious that she recognized the difference. She seemed to be gauging the additional distance,
calculating additional risk.

  “You can trust me,” Julia said softly.

  No response.

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  The girl’s chin slowly came up. Those blue-green eyes fixed on her.

  “You understand me, don’t you? Maybe not everything, but enough. Is English your first language? Are you from around here?”

  The girl glanced down at the hot dog.

  “Neah Bay. Joyce. Sequim. Forks. Sappho. Pysht. La Push. Mystic.” Julia watched closely for a reaction. None of the local towns prompted a response. “A lot of families go hiking in the forest, especially along Fall River.”

  Had the girl blinked at that? She said it again: “Fall River.”

  Nothing.

  “Forest. Trees. Deep woods.”

  The girl looked up sharply.

  Julia got up from her seat and very slowly moved toward the girl. When she was almost close enough to make contact, she squatted down so that she and the child were at eye level. Reaching behind her, she felt around for the hot dog plate. Finding it, she grasped the plastic rim and held the plate of food forward. “Were you lost in the woods, honey? That can be so scary. All that darkness, all those sounds. Did you get separated from your mommy and daddy? If you did, I can help you. I can help you go back where you belong.”

  The girl’s nostrils flared, but whether from the words or the scent of the hot dog, Julia couldn’t be sure. For a moment there—maybe at the word back or help—there had been a flash of fear in those young eyes.

  “You’re afraid to trust me. Maybe your mom and dad told you not to talk to strangers. That’s normally good advice, but you’re in trouble, honey. I can only help you if you’ll talk to me. How else can I get you home? You can trust me. I won’t hurt you,” she said again. “No hurt.”

  At that the girl inched slowly forward. Not once did her gaze waver or lower. She stared directly at Julia as she scuttled forward in her awkward crouch.

  “No hurt,” Julia said again as the girl neared.

  The child was breathing fast; her nostrils were blowing hard. Sweat sheened her forehead. She smelled vaguely of urine because of the diapers they’d been unable to change. The hospital gown hung slack on her tiny body. Her toenails and fingernails were long and still slightly grimy. She reached for the hot dog, grabbed it in her hands.