She closed her eyes and tilted her head toward the sky. The sun soaked her face like warm syrup. Her exhausted body absorbed the heat, and in less than a minute, she drifted to the border of consciousness. It was a delicious place, better than sleep itself.
A honk startled her. Nadia snapped upright. Scanned the horizon. A heron swooped down in slow motion from its perch on a limb across the stream and spread its wings six feet wide. As it dove, the bird’s blue-gray plumes cast a dark shadow on the water. The heron landed on a rock midstream and snatched a fish from the water with its yellow bill, barely causing a ripple. It tossed the fish in the air, uncurled its “S”-shaped neck, lunged forward, and swallowed its prey midair. Batted its wings three times and soared over the trees out of sight.
Awesome.
Mrs. Chimchak had taught Nadia that the forest was no different from the city. There were two types of creatures in both places. The hunter and the hunted. Which one did she want to be?
Maybe the other kids in her neighborhood in Hartford were tough when they were in groups. Maybe they tossed bubble gum in her hair and chanted “lesbian” when she walked by because there were usually three or four of them and she was alone. Maybe they wouldn’t be so strong out here, alone in the wilderness, where you had to be a hunter to survive.
An hour later, Nadia turned to head back to camp. The late morning sun shone on four bumblebees buzzing around a cluster of creeping bellflower, their open purple blossoms still wet with dew. Something about the scene struck a chord somewhere, but Nadia couldn’t figure it out so she moved on.
A minute later, a wind shook a grove of beech trees and sent a shower of nuts sprinkling to the ground. One of the nuts hit Nadia in the head. She picked it up. It was as green as the skin of a lime, and totally useless. Beech nuts could be ground into soup with boiled water but they’d probably make her sick if she chewed on them raw.
The nut glistened with moisture, like the inside of the bellflower. As Nadia’s fingers absorbed the wetness it dawned on her: there was water for the taking every night. Just as the bees could extract pollen from a plant, she could pull it from the ground by collecting dew.
When she returned to camp, Nadia used a sharp rock and her bare hands to dig a ditch big enough to fit the bowl from her mess kit. She pounded away at the rocky soil for more than an hour, pausing to rest every few minutes. When she was done, Nadia secured a plastic bag over the bowl with twine, poked a tiny hole in its center, and placed it in the ditch. She dropped a pebble on top so the plastic fell inside in a concave fashion. That would force the dew to stream down into the bowl.
When darkness fell, she jumped into her lean-to and crawled inside her sleeping bag. Excitement over the prospect of having water in the morning yielded to her current reality. Without the crackling sounds and blistering flames to distract her, each rustle of leaves and chirp of a cricket struck fear in her heart. How would she ever fall asleep?
She underestimated her fatigue, though, and after fifteen restless minutes she passed out.
A hoot from an owl roused her from her sleep. A flash of light pierced the darkness outside her lean-to. A second one followed quickly, and a third. After a pause, three more flashes of light followed, each of them longer than the first three.
Nadia sat up.
Five seconds later the flashes started again. Nadia rubbed her eyes. Three short followed by three long. Pause. Three more short followed by three long.
Morse code.
The SOS signal.
Someone was in trouble. Someone needed her help.
The flashes of light grew brighter as the person approached. The footsteps came rapidly.
Nadia had stored the whistle her father had given her in her knapsack. She remembered her brother getting in trouble for blowing it and vetoed the idea. Whistles were for losers.
Instead, she retrieved her knife from her lean-to and unsheathed it. Placed her thumb on top of the handle and turned the edge facing upward.
Forward grip, edge up. Forward grip for maximum reach. Edge up for finesse and flexibility.
Nadia slid behind the largest tree on the periphery of her camp, its trunk wide enough to hide her entire body, and waited for the source of the SOS to reveal itself.
CHAPTER 16
The neon sign on the outside flashed “Brasilia,” and the New Hampshire license plate nailed to a wall on the inside foyer read “ASS4U.” My brother had built custom motorcycles for twenty-one years until Hartford real estate took a dive and never fully recovered. I’d heard he’d bought a bar but this was my first visit. It was located in a seedy section of Willimantic on the outskirts of the University of Connecticut, twenty-five miles east of Hartford. When I first learned Marko had bought a bar, I expected it to be a bare-bones watering hole consistent with his biker sensibilities. But I wasn’t prepared for a strip joint. It’s hard for a woman to imagine her brother making a living by serving up naked portions of any kind of ass to anybody.
Brasilia reminded me more of a bar in Deadwood than a beach in Rio, and the woman on stage looked more like a refugee from Woodstock than the girl from Ipanema. A wave of nausea washed over me while she gyrated to Joe Cocker singing God lift us up where we belong. As she arched her skinny-fat hips toward her sole pair of customers, the older one said to the younger one, “Pay attention, son. This is a preview of hell.”
My apprehension about seeing Marko for the first time in six years exceeded any anxiety I’d experienced visiting my mother. In her case, I took some comfort in my sense of self-righteousness that she was a worse mother than I was a daughter. In his case, I could find no such solace. In his eyes, I’d become the opposite of the little sister he’d loved as a child. He considered me trash and he’d disowned me, and the sad thing was I didn’t disagree with his decision. I thought he was fully justified in doing so because I’d done something unforgivable.
The place was cavernous, with two bruised and battered wooden bars and a dance floor big enough for a Hells Angels’ convention. It was 2:30 in the afternoon, which explained why there were only twelve losers in the entire place, human stools with shot-glass hands and thirsty stares. I pulled my jacket tight and lowered my head as their cumulative eyes fell upon me. I guessed that was to be expected in a strip club, but I still hated them for it, almost as much as I hated myself for not looking as good as I wished I did.
A waitress whose figure could have turned ketchup into Tabasco told me Marko was in the back. I found him and his wine barrel of a body aging in his office, nursing two bottles of Mickey’s Big Mouth beer and watching a Red Sox game on a big old square TV. As a young man, he’d seduced women on sight. Now he looked like a cautionary tale to high school heroes who lived in the past, except he’d never even been all that.
He did a double take when he first saw me. I held my breath as I sought evidence of residual affection: a raised eyebrow, a curl of the lip. A few choice Ukrainian obscenities would have sufficed. After all, why swear at your sister if she doesn’t matter to you? But he bestowed no such gifts upon me, the undeserving. Instead, he inflated his cheeks with apathy.