She went into the crowded barbecue joint instead, grabbing leftover scraps from abandoned tables. The place was understaffed and busy. Easy pickings. Ribs and chopped brisket, sweet rolls, corn on the cob. Potato salad. It was a fast-food place, and everything was already contained in convenient Styrofoam take-away boxes.
Vern tucked her scavengings into her carry pouch, then left, heading toward the side of the rest stop devoted to the trucks. She loitered there, scouting for passersby. “Can I get a ride?” she called to someone several feet away. It could’ve been a station attendant or a trucker. Could’ve been someone walking their dog. She couldn’t get her bearings in this combination of night, blaring lights, and hurrying people. “I need a lift to Sugar Mountain,” she said. It was the only touchstone she had, Lucy’s auntie’s house. She had no idea how close or far it was, but she hoped she was at least in the right state. When she’d made her ten-day trek through the woods, she’d used flora and fauna as a map, finding her way based on geography, but that wouldn’t work now.
“Can’t help you,” the person said.
Vern was thankful for the weariness in her body, for the pain abrading her insides. It made her courageous. Already on the edge, all she had to do was let herself fall. Vern called out to everybody who passed until she got the attention of a trucker. “Sugar Mountain?” he asked.
“That’s right. Can you take me there?”
The trucker looked her up and down.
“I can get you pretty close,” he said. His voice was resigned, like he wasn’t sure he wanted to be doing this but he was duty bound to.
“How far is it? And how close can you get me?”
“It’s about three hundred miles. I can get you two hundred twenty of those. You’ll be able to catch a bus from there. Hop in, kid,” he said.
Vern smiled and clapped her hands before intertwining her fingers. “Okay. Wait just one second, and I’ll be back.”
The trucker sighed as he leaned against his rig and shook his head. “I got to get moving,” he said.
“I said I’ll be right back. I got to get something. Don’t go. Please,” said Vern, but she didn’t like the sound of herself begging and changed tack. “I mean it. Stay right there.”
Vern jogged back to her children, counting paces once she stepped from the concrete of the parking lot onto the patchy grass at the side of the road. Twenty-one steps. Left. Just across from the triangular yellow sign. That was where she’d left them.
“Howling?” she said. “Feral?” She called their names again, but neither child answered. “Children.” Breathing in to calm herself, she brushed her hands against the trees and bushes along the side of the road. She plunged her arms into the leaves and branches. Her fingers mauled for heat, for flesh.
“Little bears?”
She wrestled twigs and branches on her way back into the woods. Leftward, a scattering of dark trees expanded endlessly before her; rightward, more of the same. Wind pricked her cheeks. “Little bears. Come out. No hiding.”
Twigs snapped, but not underfoot. She followed the cracking. There they were, her babes, but not just her babes, a tall woman holding their hands, guiding them into the dark. “Hey!” Vern shouted, and gave chase. She grabbed her children’s shoulders to jerk them toward her, but her hands filled with air, not with Howling, not with Feral. They’d gone again, out of her grasp.
“Mam!”
Vern bolted back to the road when she heard the voice. Howling was waving his hands and jumping up and down, shouting to her. “Mam! Mam!” She dove toward him and snatched him into her arms. His legs were there, his feet, his arms, his shoulders, his face, streaked with salt trails from tears. She rubbed her nose along them. “Thank God of Cain,” she said, and burrowed her face into his. “Where’s Feral?”
Howling pointed to the spot in the bushes where Feral lay sleeping. They’d drifted off and didn’t hear her when she called for them. Poor Howling, waking up all alone in the dark, his mam chasing a lie back in the woods.
“We did what you said. Stayed right there,” said Howling.
“I know. I’m proud of you. I hid you too well,” Vern said. She hoisted Feral, who was still sleeping, up into her arms. The pain of lifting him was immense, a pulse of snapping sensations from the joints in her toes and the tendons in her feet, up through her back, to the vertebrae of her neck. Miles and miles separated Vern from answers, as many miles as were in the universe. On Vern’s unsteady legs, a single block proved a marathon. Sugar Mountain or Sri Lanka or Saturn, wherever Lucy was, she was as much a delusion as the howling wolves, the drownt child, the horse and carriage, the tall woman in the night luring her babies off into the dark. She would never find her friend.