21st Century
The light hits me first, and my response is to cower for a second, maybe two, before I realize it's nothing. It's just the light of the town reflected against the cloudy sky, the light from the streetlights that run the length of the road just a short distance away. It looks so strange though, after so many months away – so other-worldly. There's noise, too. A single car speeding, roaring down the road. Only it's not speeding – or roaring. It's just driving. I blink as my eyes barely manage to follow it. My brain has forgotten how fast things move in 2017.
The house. You have to get into the house. You have to go online.
I make my way out of the trees and up across the backyard, eying the house. Once again that sensation of deep familiarity melds with another – equally strong – of deep strangeness. The house looks enormous, monumental even, despite it being a very ordinary dwelling, of the type almost everyone I know in River Forks grew up in.
There are no lights on. That's good. My father must be sleeping. I try the back door and it opens into the kitchen. The smell of home floods my nostrils – laundry detergent, dinner, and all of those unidentifiable things that make one house smell unlike any other – and I almost feel dizzy from the wave of memories that washes over me.
I step inside, bare feet on old linoleum, and close the door gently behind me. Then I make my way through the kitchen with ease, because just the light from outside is enough for me to be able to see exactly where I'm going, on my way to check that the door leading upstairs is closed. Halfway there my hip bumps against something and I cringe at the sound of a large stack of papers hitting the floor. I don't move for a full minute, waiting for the sound of my father stirring upstairs. None comes. I make it to the door – it's closed.
It's now or never. I go to the desk where my father keeps the ancient desktop computer and nudge the mouse. A second later the screen blinks to life and I lift my hand to my eyes, shielding them from the brightness. One-handed (because the screen is still too bright for me to look at directly), I type various search terms into Google and then write down the answers on one of the many pieces of paper stacked on the desk. Ten minutes later I have a list of medicines, only one of which I've ever heard of, and two of which I have underlined: Cephalexin and Amoxicillin.
Before leaving the house I do four main things. First, I raid the fridge, and wolf down the rest of a pasta casserole sitting on the top shelf. Next, I put as much food in the linen sack as I can fit, and as I think I can reasonably carry. Then I go into the laundry room and find a clean pair of my dad's sweatpants and a t-shirt, both of which I put on, and a pair of my own sneakers, sitting untouched for months beside the back door. If anyone sees me, I want to look at least semi-normal.
Lastly, just before leaving again, I grab another piece of paper off the pile sitting on the computer desk, intending to write my father a note. But the light from the computer screen is just about enough for me to see something I recognize on the paper, just before I flip it over to write the message. I hold it a little closer to the screen and then gasp audibly when I recognize what I'm looking at.
I'm looking at myself – a picture of me. Emma took it in the kitchen of our rented apartment towards the end of our freshman year. I'm smiling widely, saying something to Emma – I can't remember what. Someone has cropped out the background and the rest of my body and just used my face. Across the top of the piece of paper are 7 stark capital letters: 'MISSING.' Underneath are my details, my name, height, weight, date of birth, where I was last seen.
I brace myself against the edge of the desk. Don't sit down. You can't sit down, Paige. You have to go. You have to go right now.
The rest of the papers are all the same. My father is upstairs. I could go and wake him right now, I could end the torment he must be in.
No. You can't. He won't let you go. He'll want to call the police.
I grab a pen and write a note. My handwriting is messy because my hand is shaking – and because all the muscles I use to write with are out of practice.
"Dad –
I love you. I am safe. I am not hurt. I can't stay because someone I love needs me but I just want you to know that I love you so much and I'm OK. Say hello to the goblins in the woods for me, even the one with big ears! I love you. I miss you so much. Paige."
The part about the goblins is a secret message of sorts – silly stories my dad used to talk about when I was very little. The goblins in the woods were friendly, if grumpy, and the one with big ears was the grumpiest. Nobody else except me and my dad will understand what that's about, and I want him to know that it's me, and that I'm not being forced to write something against my will, or lie about not being in danger if I am.
I fold the paper in half, and then again and put it beneath the empty casserole dish in the fridge, because I don't want to risk him waking up early and seeing it before I've had time to get back to Caistley. And then I leave, taking my bike out of the garage and stopping along the side of the road on the ride into town to pick up a large rock.
Main street is deserted, but brightly lit. I see Johnson's Pharmacy, sandwiched between the dollar store and the fast food restaurant and I have my second serious moment of doubt since leaving the Viking camp. Am I supposed to just walk up to that door, throw the rock through it, go inside, find the medicine and leave? And cross my fingers no one sees anything, no one hears anything? And even then, how long has it been since I left Eirik? Three days? He was sick when I left, already saying things that didn't make sense. What are the odds he's even still alive? So many things have to go right and it doesn't seem possible that they all will. I sit down on a bench for a few minutes, thinking, but it doesn't help because there's no plan B – there can't be. I either get the medications or I don't, and every second I delay the worse the odds of anything working out become. I take the rock out of the sack and approach the front door, looking around me all the way. Nobody appears. I look into the fluorescent-lit pharmacy – I guess I'll be able to read the packaging easily enough – and close my eyes briefly. Am I really doing this? I am really doing this. Because there's no other way.
The rock bounces off the glass door and lands at my feet the first time I throw it. Damnit.
I pick it up again, throw it harder. It bounces off again. My heart hammers in my chest. Have I come all this way to be thwarted by a glass door? The next time, I don't throw the rock. I keep my fingers wrapped around it and bring it down hard against the glass, shrieking with the effort. A web of cracks appears at the place of impact and I smash the rock in that same spot again and again and again until there's a hole that I can kick at with my sneaker-clad foot. By the time there's a hole big enough for me to squeeze through without being cut to ribbons it's been about ten minutes and I'm sweating with effort. The doubts are still there, not even in the back of my mind anymore, and growing more and more insistent.
You could barely kick in a broken glass door, Paige. How are you going to make it back to the Viking camp? You're too weak. You can't do it. Go home. Give up. It's over.
I refuse to listen to them as I duck through the hole in the door and climb awkwardly over the counter at the back of the store. I hold the list I've written up next to my face as I start making my way up and down rows of shelves, each crammed with various containers and blister-packs of pills and bottles of liquids. None of the names on my list are coming up. Ten minutes later, still nothing. Another five minutes and I'm about to start crying with frustration. What if they're not here? That's not possible! This is a pharmacy – they must have antibiotics!
And then I see it, a box with 'Amoxicillin' written on it. There are eight boxes in total, and I put all of them in the bag. I'm obviously at the antibiotics now, I should keep going, just to see if they have the Cephalexin – better to go back with two possible treatments than one. By this point I'm moving so quickly I'm knocking things off the shelves, almost in a full panic, every instinct screaming at me to get the hell out of there.
A bright light – much brighter than the overhead lights – suddenly illuminates me and my surroundings. I look up and my eyes close, blinded.
"THIS IS THE POLICE. PUT YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOU HEAD."