A History of Wild Places(11)

The police said she died sometime in the night, in the early hours before I found her. The front desk clerk at the motel said Ruth checked in around ten in the evening. Another guest, whose right jawline twitched when she spoke and her eyes were unable to focus on anything for longer than a few seconds, said she saw no one enter or leave Ruth’s room.

This wasn’t a homicide; her death was exactly what it looked like: suicide.

The empty bottle of prescription pills beside the sink told the story that her toxicology report would verify—overdose. Oxycodone, to be exact, with a dash of muscle relaxers. And she hadn’t taken just four or five, she’d taken roughly twenty. Enough to finish the job.

The detective on the scene suggested that it might have been an accident. Maybe she didn’t mean to take as many as she did. She didn’t intend to end her life.

But I knew that wasn’t true, because I saw the afterimage of my sister standing at the bathroom sink, with its butterscotch linoleum floor and cracked mirror—like some previous guest had punched it, sending a web of fractures out from the point of impact. I saw how she tipped the prescription bottle to her lips, swallowing whatever was left inside—not even bothering to count them. She then tilted her head to the sink and drank water straight from the tap. Quick and efficient. There weren’t even glasses in that stale-smelling motel room for her to pour herself a cup of water—that stuck with me, the inhumane nature of it, that she wasn’t even able to take her last drink from a proper glass.

I knew my sister had been depressed, a slow unwinding in recent years, but I didn’t know how bad it had gotten. I didn’t know how deep into the hole she had tumbled—headfirst like Alice down the rabbit hole. I should have seen, should have recognized the already half-gone slant of her eyes. She didn’t even leave a note, just pills down the throat and then lights out. Maybe she knew I would come find her, maybe she knew I would see her afterimage and know what she’d done—a note was unnecessary. Redundant. She knew her big brother would see it all once he arrived, a sputtering slideshow of awful images. Maybe it’s why after she took the drink from the faucet, she looked into that broken mirror and winked. She did it for me: a parting gesture, a last goodbye.

See ya later, big brother.

She knew I’d witness it all.

But that’s not the part that keeps me up at night.

It’s the moments, the hours, that separated finding her alive and finding her dead.

If I’d driven faster, if I hadn’t stopped a few miles back at some crappy roadside bar that served black coffee, if I hadn’t pulled off the road and slept for four hours the morning before at the south Dakota border, I would have gotten to the motel just as she checked in. I would have found her in her room, switching through channels on the TV, unpacking her duffle bag. I would have caught her before she found the bottle of pills, tucked between sandals and unwashed Tshirts. I would have taken her by the hand and pulled her from the room, then driven her to the twenty-four-hour diner I passed up the road. WORLD FAMOUS PANCAKES, the sign declared. We would have eaten two heaping, butter-drenched stacks of apple pancakes. We would have drunk cup after cup of burnt, artificially sweetened coffee, and I would have shown her the shell that led me to her, and we would have laughed about that day at the beach and I would have said, Let’s go back there. Let’s drive to Pacific City. She would have shaken her head and called me crazy but we would have gone anyway. Gotten into my truck and driven all night into the next day until we reached the wide, glittering Pacific coastline. My sister and I would have stood on that shore, salty air against our faces, in our hair, tired but happy, and she’d still be alive.

I would have saved her.

I could have.

But instead, I arrived a couple hours too late. I stood in the doorway and watched them fold my little sister into a black body bag and hoist her out into the morning sun. Ain’t life fucked.

This. This is why I dropped out of existence. Why I stopped answering my phone, why I started sleeping in truck stop parking lots. Why I had been thinking of going to Canada and getting as far away from my sister’s death as my truck would take me. I’d been running from it for a year.

Guilt is a beast. And it might just kill you, if you let it.

But now, out on this snow-covered road—with this feeling, this burden sunk like a half-ton weight inside me—I force my legs to move forward. Because maybe this is also how I save myself. Redemption is somewhere out there in this dark, cold forest.

I just need to find it.

If I can rescue this woman in time. Bring her back to her parents and her old life. Then maybe it’ll fill the ravine that split me wide open when I walked through that motel doorway.

Maybe.

I haven’t gone far from the truck, it’s still visible behind me, when I see the flicker of her: Maggie St. James plods ahead of me up the road, her backpack sagging low against her waist. Her legs are moving slowly now, tired. Shoulders slumped from the weight of her pack.

Her chin lifts as she rounds a bend in the road, and she stops walking.

I stop too, trying not to lose the flickering memory of her. Trying to hold on to it. But my eyes begin to blur and a cold spot blooms in my chest.

Maggie sees something ahead.

And then I see it too: a wood fence, bordered by rocks. But there are no sagging or broken boards, the fence is well maintained. A sign is nailed crookedly to one of the posts: PRIVATE PROPERTY.