The Box in the Woods

FOR A MOMENT, THERE WAS NOTHING. SHE WAS NOWHERE. THERE was no Stevie. She was totally and utterly free from space and time, with the air a soft whistling noise in her ear. Something hard made contact with her left side. But that was nothing compared to what came a second later. It was like smashing through glass. Cold water shot into her mouth and nose. Everything was burning from pain and air hunger. She didn’t know where to go. She didn’t know what was the surface and what was the bottom. The dark water consumed her every sense.

She was going to die.

That was interesting. No effort was required on her part. Just some bubbles in the dark and a fall to some unknown depth. She was aware enough to know that her backpack was still on her back and was weighing her down. She wriggled, through the confusion and burning, trying to get it off. It came off easily on one side. She didn’t understand how the other side of her body worked in the water, but eventually she turned in the right way and it gave. It buoyed her a bit, but she still couldn’t figure out which way to go. The panic swept over her, blanketing her in a rush. The world fragmented into black and white dots as she slid toward unconsciousness. In the next moment, the world next to her exploded—some weird mayhem of turbulence and violence and she was going to the bottom of the lake and her lungs were . . .

Something was on her arm, something pulling her. She broke the surface, gagging and coughing. She couldn’t make herself breathe. There was water in her. Nate slammed her as hard as he could on the back and water came pouring out of her mouth and nose, thick with mucus. She retched as it tried to figure out how to take in air, how to clear itself. There was water in her ears, so his words were muffled, and she couldn’t see from all the tears in her eyes.

She was too weak to tread water, but they weren’t too far from the rocks at the bottom of the point. Together, they managed to pull each other toward them.

“The diary-y!” she screamed between shivering breaths. “It’s gon-n-n-e.”

“It do-o-es-n-n’t matt-tt-ter. Forget it-t-t-t-t. Stevie. Stee-e-e-vv-ie.”

Stevie gripped the rock with her right hand, but it was tiring out. She went to switch to the left, but when she did so, a shock of pain shot through her arm. She almost slipped down the rock, but Nate grabbed her shirt and pulled her back.

“I think-k-k my arm-m-m . . . ,” she said, but that was all she could manage before the pain blotted out the sentence.

The water was black and still, with a tiny cartoon moon bobbing on the surface. She tried to look up to see if anyone was visible above them, but it was all rock and darkness.

“Do-o you think they’re g-g-g-one?” Nate sputtered.

She shook her head, unsure if she meant no or that she didn’t know.

“Hey!” came a yell from the other side of the lake. “Hey! Are you okay?”

David’s voice. Was she hallucinating? Had any of this happened? The shots, the fall . . . did she die in the water?

“No-o!” Nate screamed back.

“Nate? Hang on! Hang on!”

“Well-ll, yeah-h-h,” Nate said, his shivering growing worse.

Not a hallucination. That was David.

Stevie watched David and his kayak come closer through the water. Whether it took him five minutes or five hours, she had no idea. Everything was cold, and her hold on the rock was ever weakening. She wanted to try to belly-crawl on top of it to get out of the water, but she didn’t have that kind of strength.

As David glided up to them, Stevie was surprised to find that the first emotion to bubble back to the surface with the rest of her body was annoyance.

“What-t-t the hel-l-l-l a-r-r-re you doing-g here?”

“Getting your ass out of the lake,” he shot back. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Oh-h my Go-d-d,” Nate said. “Shut-t up-p.”

That tiny burst of emotion drained whatever reserve of energy Stevie had. Her body was numb and exhaustion took over. She began to slip from the rock.

“Whoa . . . whoa . . .” David swung his legs over the side of the kayak and slipped into the water, catching her in a clumsy hold. She was dead weight and he struggled to get a grip on her and keep the other hand on the kayak.

“Okay,” he said, seeming to sense the gravity of the situation, “how do we do this? Nate, do you think you can get over here and grab the kayak?”

“I think-k so,” Nate said, reaching for the kayak. He fumbled once or twice but finally got a firm enough grip on one of the ropes on the side and hauled his body over it.

“Arm-m,” Stevie mumbled. “Doesn’t-t-t work-k.”

“Okay,” David said, trying to sound calm, and failing. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

He reached up into the kayak and pulled out a life vest, which he put over her functioning arm. Nate was holding the back of the kayak, so David helped guide Stevie into a resting position slumped over the front.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s a short distance to the beach area there. Nate, hold on.”

David climbed up on the rock and got himself into the kayak, pushing back with the paddle and narrowly missing Nate’s head. With choppy strokes, made to avoid striking either of the people attached to the front and back of the kayak, David began to paddle. The closest stretch of dirt beach was about thirty yards away—not a great distance, but impossible in Stevie’s current state. Stevie felt herself growing sleepy at points. She wanted to close her eyes, but her inner voice and David’s outer voice kept telling her to wake up, hold on. She needed both arms through the life vest. She tried to move her left arm again, and a white-hot pain shot behind her eyes, causing the world to scramble into black-and-white dots. No left arm. Instead, she put further demands on her right. Her right arm was going to give the performance of its life. She commanded it to ignore cold, ignore fatigue. It was the strongest, best arm in the world.

She could feel something under her—her feet were dragging on the ground.

“Almost,” David said. “Here . . . here . . .”

Nate released his grip, which caused the kayak to turn a bit. He staggered onto the beach. By this point, Stevie’s right arm was numb from overwork and she felt herself slide, but she held on until the ground hit her knees. David got out of the kayak, half falling, and got her up under his arm and moved her to the shore. The kayak, its job finished, decided to embrace the moment and float away.

David leaned over Stevie and Nate on the cold, rocky sand.

“You guys,” he said. “Are you okay? What the actual fuck . . .”

Stevie looked up at him. His face blocked out the moon and the fireworks.

“I think my-y-y arm’s broken-n-n,” she said.

And then, mercifully, she passed out.

The next few hours were hazy. Someone from the campground had summoned a ranger, who found them on the beach. Stevie partially noted the conversation that went on, the questions about whether she could walk. She must have failed that test, because someone put her on a backboard and secured something around her neck. There was a strange journey through the woods, bumping along on a board held by two people who had appeared out of the ether. Then she was in an ambulance with Nate.

“The diary . . . ,” she said.

“Forget the diary,” he replied, shivering in his metallic blanket.

Everything hurt—a dull, allover ache that penetrated the depths of her bones. She kept trying to close her eyes, only to have a paramedic wake her and shine a light in them. Why wouldn’t anyone let her sleep? Maybe if she slept, she could read Sabrina’s diary in her dreams. . . .

The thing she was resting on suddenly popped up and she was wheeled into a bitterly cold and obscenely bright emergency room. She watched the ceiling tiles go by as she was wheeled along, watched the fluorescent lights, the signs over doorways. She was taken to a curtained compartment, where a nurse asked her questions like what her name was. People kept appearing, not looking urgent or alarmed, but refusing to let her be. They wanted to see her pupils, listen to her chest, move her arm . . .

That got a little scream.

She kept trying to close her eyes and recall Sabrina’s writing, hold the diary in her mind. But then she got something better. A face. That face, with the wide brown eyes and dark brown hair. Sabrina. She couldn’t quite see her, but she sensed her nearby, whispering something she couldn’t make out.

“Hold it right there, Stevie. You’re doing great.”

She opened her eyes to find that she was not speaking to Sabrina, but to a member of the hospital staff who was inserting her head into a massive machine. It was a brief stay, then she was removed.

God, this place was freezing. She shivered uncontrollably.

“I’ll have the nurse get you a blanket,” the person said.

Back out in the hall, a nurse came along with the promised blanket and tucked it around her.

“Is that too tight?” he said. “Do you want it loose?”

“Moose?”

“Loose.”

“I saw a moose once,” Stevie replied.

The nurse frowned, but she settled Stevie in and wheeled her to her next destination, which was the X-ray department. From there, she went to a small room where her left arm was put in a cast. Finally, her journey through the hospital complete, she was returned to the emergency room. For a few minutes, she was alone, then the curtain scraped back and Nate appeared, shuffling in in a voluminous pair of purple yoga pants and a Box Box fleece.

“Hey, stupid,” he said. “Let’s never do this again.”

He came closer, standing by the edge of her bed.

“You’re okay,” he said. “They think it’s mostly shock. They weren’t sure if you hit your head, so they’ve been watching you. You had a CAT scan. Do you remember?”

“Vaguely.”

“They think we were messing around and jumped off Point 23,” he said. “They think we’re two assholes. I didn’t explain that we jumped because someone shot at us. I thought about it—because someone shot at us. But we had broken into a house, so . . .”

Stevie nodded wearily.

“I told them to call Carson. Which is why I’m dressed like this. Since he owns the camp, he has access to all the parental consent forms our families had to sign and copies of our insurance information, stuff like that. And he’s irresponsible enough not to call our parents, so we might get out of this night in one piece.”

Stevie felt her eyes well up.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s fine,” he said, looking down. “Whoever follows you to a second location deserves what they get. We called Janelle. She was so determined to get here that I thought she was going to walk, but I convinced her to wait until morning. They’re probably going to admit you, to keep an eye on you. I can go home. David’s going to stay until they take you upstairs.”

“You know I love you, right?” she asked.

“You better.”

It looked like he was going to take her good hand and squeeze it, but then at the last moment, he tapped the back of it in an abbreviated gesture of affection.

David had not gotten a change of clothes. Nobody had thought of him. His shirt was still clammy and damp, and his hair was drier, but not dry. As a gesture, he had been given a sheet to wind around himself, which was odd and also somehow fitting.

She remembered the first time they had kissed—he was sitting on the floor of her room in Minerva House. He was leaning up against the wall in a pair of ancient Yale sweatpants he had taken from his dad. She was explaining the problems with witness testimony using office supplies as props. It had been, in many ways, the defining moment of their relationship before this one, with Stevie in a hospital bed after breaking into a house, and him wound in a sheet, wandering the emergency room.

This was them.

He came up to the side of her bed and leaned down, his elbows on the rail, looking at her. He shifted his gaze from left to right, and from the way he was looking, she knew there had to be something about her face that wasn’t great. She decided not to worry about it.

“What else do you want to do tonight?” he asked quietly. “Wanna steal a car?”

She was too tired to joke. She considered smiling, but whatever it was that was wrong with her face was too sore for that.

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow night.”

She continued looking up at him, his head haloed by the greenish fluorescent lights.

“Nate didn’t want to say why you guys jumped off a cliff in the middle of the night,” he said. “I know you both well enough to guess there was probably a good reason. Or a reason.”

“You left,” she said, her voice hoarse. “You were gone, before. Your tent . . .”

“Flooded. Completely. I had to move site.”

“I texted . . .”

“My tent flooded,” he said again. “My phone was on the ground. It stopped working until it dried out.”

“I thought you just left,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to leave,” he replied.

The nurse snapped back the curtain and made her way behind David.

“Time to go upstairs,” she said, arranging and tucking the various wires and bits connected to Stevie’s bed.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “Call me if you need me. It works now.”

She was wheeled to the far side of an empty double room. Once the nurse settled her in, putting all the wires and rails and bits and pieces in place, Stevie was left to rest with the door to her room open. She tried to close her eyes, but there was a flicking light. It was a reflection of something in the hall, bouncing off the whiteboard by the door with her nurse’s name on it. There was a beeping sound that went with it, but it was out of sync.

Flash. Pause. Beep. Flash. Pause. Beep.

Stevie tried not to think about it, to close her eyes and sleep, but even with her eyes closed, the light seeped in under her eyelids.

Flash. Pause. Beep. Flash. Pause. Longer pause. Beep.

This was intolerable. But her head didn’t hurt anymore, and neither did her arm. That’s right—they said something about giving her medicine for the pain.

Still, even through the haze, it was amazing how distracting a flashing light could be. Maybe she would make the light her friend. The light was saying, Go to sleep, Stevie. Night night, Stevie.

No it wasn’t. No flashing light says that. The point of a flashing light is to say, Look at me! Look at me! Something is happening!

What was happening? Nothing. She was in this bed, tired and sleepless, a cast molded neatly to her arm.

Flash. Pause. Beep. Flash. Pause. Pause. Beep. Flash.

Look at me! Look at me!

Stevie felt something click in her brain.

The cast was snug. The cast was a part of her. The cast—

Look at me!

Stevie fumbled around in the bed, scrambling in the half dark with her right hand until she found the clicker she sort of remembered the nurse putting by her hand. She pressed it once, then again. A figure appeared in the doorway after several minutes.

“You okay?” said the nurse.

“Pen?”

“What?”

“Please can I have a pen?” she said. “Please. It’s important.”

The nurse let out a barely audible sigh but produced a Sharpie and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” Stevie croaked. Her throat was rough from coughing out that water.

When the nurse was gone, she pulled off the cap with her teeth, realizing after she did it that maybe it wasn’t a great idea to stick hospital pens in her mouth. No matter. She had the Sharpie now. It was dark, but she could about make out the words she was writing on the cast:

light. flash. form.

Now she could sleep.