Dark Water - Laura McNeal [31]
There was nothing to do, really, but put everything away as quickly as possible and run home.
I turned around one last time and saw him watching me. There was enough light to see his face, but not his expression.
“Sorry,” I said. Did he want to talk to me but couldn’t? Or shouldn’t, like Robby said? I remembered Robby asking if Amiel could mime hanging himself, and for some reason, I lifted my hand up in a fist like I was holding a noose around my neck, and then I acted like I was hanging myself. I thought Amiel smiled, but it was so dark I couldn’t be sure.
I turned around and whacked my way through the reeds until I stood on the tiny beach. I felt an unexpected dread of the slow-moving water, darker now. It was the same shallow current, of course, holding the same shy creatures, but I was afraid. I told myself to be sensible, and I forced one foot into the water, then the other. I sloshed through in a kind of terror until I found myself on the other side. At first I had no need of my flashlight, but the trees formed a tunnel that was darker than the open spaces. I shined the light chaotically on the ground and up nearby trunks and then down again to make sure I could see any spiders that might have suspended their webs across the path. For a while, I made good time among the unfamiliar cracking sounds and spiky shadows. I heard owls and pictured mountain lions. I heard mice and thought coyotes. Somehow I came to the place where I had to walk along a fallen log to cross the water and told myself it was just like the balance beam and that it wasn’t quite dark yet, not black dark, and the log bridge was at least a sycamore, so it was white. I shone my flashlight down on the log, started toward it, tripped on the mud bank, and fell. I cried out too loudly and hysterically, I’m sure, for the injury itself. It was just a scrape on my shin and my hand. I heard footsteps behind me and felt hands on my arms, which shot new fear through me before I turned and saw that it was Amiel. He had followed so quietly I hadn’t heard him.
“You scared me,” I said. I wanted to grab hold of him, but I just sat there. I thought that if I held still, he would leave his hands on my arms, but he didn’t. He let go.
He gestured for me to stand up, and I did. I brushed feebly at my dusty shorts and glanced at my shin, which throbbed. There was nothing impressive about the scrape, unfortunately. I could see only a needle-fine slash of blood in the darkness.
He made another gesture for me to follow him, and he led me over the log, reaching back for my hand when I was nearly to the end. It was just gallantry; he dropped my hand again when I stepped off the log. Without speaking or accepting my offer of the flashlight, he led me swiftly out of the riverbed, and as we came to the meadow that lay just inside the trailhead, the moon came up. It wasn’t quite full, but it looked huge above us. The fennel plants trembled and a bat twitched through the sky.
“Thank you,” I said. “Gracias.”
He neither nodded nor shook his head. He leaned down and snapped off a tiny piece of an aloe plant, squeezed it, and then rubbed the blob of cold aloe on the scraped part of my shin. He stood up again and wiped the rest of the aloe on his pant leg. Though he’d just done something kind, I felt the distance between us the way, in science class, I sometimes felt the uncrossable space between planets.
He turned away and I heard, for a second or two, his light footsteps on the path. Whether he waited for me to unlock my bike and ride away, watching over me still, or whether he ran immediately back to his house in the woods I couldn’t tell. He was too familiar with a life in hiding to let me know his position in the darkness.