Still fighting the feeling of disorientation, she emerges from her room. Here, the blinds are all closed, and it’s darker than in her bedroom, so it takes her eyes a moment to readjust.
Her mother sits on the couch with her back to Laura. Laura is sure she can hear her walk up, but she doesn’t react.
Panic strikes Laura too late. Next to her mother on the couch are Laura’s clothes from yesterday with her coat sitting on top of the pile. In her mother’s lap is the dully glinting tangle of gold jewelry.
“I don’t know where this came from,” her mother says slowly without turning around, “and I don’t want to know. Come here.”
Laura knows this tone. She’s heard it before. She briefly contemplates disobeying, but what good would it do? Her legs feel stiff and wooden, and not just because of her pained muscles. Fear surges through her, twisting her insides into a treacherous knot. Her bowels gurgle, cowardly.
“Move it!”
Laura comes to stand in front of her mother. She watches as the woman picks through the tangles. She picks out a ring that comes loose from the rest of the jewelry and holds it up to the feeble light, inspecting it. It’s a thing of beauty, it really is. Red and white stones glint brightly even with the little light there is. Her mother puts it on and turns her hand this way and that. It looks grotesque, Laura thinks. The beautiful piece of jewelry is such a sharp contrast with her mother’s hands, their smattering of early liver spots and bulging veins and huge knuckles and the leathery skin pulled tight over them.
Laura opens her mouth to say something—something in her own defense, anything she can think of. Maybe even the truth, if she thought it might help. But she doubts it.
Her mother holds up her hand, the one on which she put the ring.
“Shut your mouth. It’s better that I don’t know. I’m going to go up to Quebec and pawn it, and you’re going to keep your mouth shut if you know what’s good for you.”
Laura is frozen.
“Are you deaf now? Did you hear what I said?”
She nods yes.
“Good.”
Her mother raises herself from the couch and slaps Laura across the face. Hard. Hard enough to knock her off her feet. The ring slices painfully into Laura’s cheek, making her cry out as she hits the floor, the impact echoing in her other injuries.
“Keep your mouth shut!” Her mother’s voice booms above her. Laura’s vision swims. She hears rather than sees her mother pick up the belt that had been sitting next to her on the couch. “You sneaky, thieving, conniving little rat.”
She brings the belt down on Laura without really aiming. Laura holds her hand up to protect her face, which only spurs her mother on. A kick in her side knocks the breath out of her, sending a jolt of pain through her already bruised ribs.
“You brought this on yourself, you know.”
And the blows rain down, over and over, until Laura loses count.
TWENTY-FOUR
2017
I float out of the fog into a sickly, bluish-white glow. Just as soon, a strong medicinal smell mixed with the reek of disinfectant fills my nostrils.
I try to sit up and notice there’s an IV in my arm and one of those heart rate monitors that pinches my fingertip.
My head spins. The blinds on the window are drawn but I can see slivers of bright light through them. Too bright.
I’m obviously in a hospital room. “Room” in the loose provincial-hospital sense. There are some plastic curtains drawn on three sides of me, like white shower curtains stained with mildew at the top, and through them, I hear the busy hum of the emergency department: voices over the PA system, beeping of various machines, chatter of nurses.
My first healthy reflex is to wiggle my fingers and toes to make sure I still have them all. My foot protrudes from under the threadbare hospital-issue sheet, encased in a plastic brace, but my toes that peek out from underneath are a normal, pink color. My body aches, but it’s nothing crazy.
“Oh, you’re awake.” One of the nurses, I assume, flings a curtain open and bursts into my tiny personal space. “Good, good. I’ll let the doctor know. He’ll come see you ASAP.”
Again, in your typical hospital, ASAP is a flexible term, so I don’t hold my breath.
“What happened?” I rasp just as she turns to leave.
From the look on her face, she clearly has places to be and other patients to tend to.
“They found you in the forest,” she says cryptically, which does nothing to reassure me. “Your cousin is outside. Why doesn’t he tell you all about it?”
I choke on whatever I was about to say. Like, for instance, that I don’t have a cousin, and that I’d very much like to know what exactly went down in the forest. But by the time I get my bearings, she’s gone with a swish of the plastic curtain.
Moments later though, the curtain flies aside once again. Luc bursts in.
Great. Just great.
“I take it we’re now cousins?” I ask.
“Jesus, Stephanie.” Only now I get a good look at him—too good in the merciless neon lights overhead—and notice how awful he looks. I’m assuming I’m no beauty contestant myself, but his face looks drawn with dark blue circles under his eyes. There are some thin scratches under his hairline and on his cheeks. “We looked for you for hours. We thought you were dead.”
I struggle to sit up higher. Luc reaches out, presses some button out of my line of sight, and the top part of the bed rises with a mechanical whir.
“What exactly happened?”
“I felt terrible about how we ended things,” he says. “I went to Laura’s only to find that you never got back. I called my dad, and we went to look for you—”
“Your dad?”
