“Enough of that! Enough of trying to make me feel like an outsider! I know I’m an outsider, Aleksander! I just didn’t think it mattered to you!”
“That’s not what I meant, Yona!” He touched her arm again, and again she pulled away. “Just that you’re different than we are.”
She snorted. “I’m different, so I couldn’t possibly understand what it feels like to be betrayed?”
“That’s not what I’m saying! What I mean is that it’s not like what you’ve probably read in your books, Yona. It’s a whole different world out here. I was just trying to find some happiness for a little while, to forget the misery…”
“And you couldn’t do that with me?”
He opened and closed his mouth a few times before looking away. “You don’t look at me anymore the way Sulia does. She needs me to save her.”
“So you don’t want me because I’m not helpless?”
He looked back at her, his jaw set. “It’s just…” He raked his hands through his hair. “It’s more difficult with you. And with Sulia, it is easy. Isn’t life hard enough?”
Her heart suddenly felt hollow. “I make your life more difficult?”
“That’s not what I mean, Yona. Please, just stop packing your things and listen to me for a moment. You don’t understand.”
Indeed, Yona had little experience with the way people were supposed to interact with each other. But she knew enough to know that when a man loved a woman, he didn’t do this. Not a good man, anyhow. And she knew, just as surely as she knew her own soul, that she couldn’t stay here for another second. She may have helped the group to find their way, to survive the winter, but they knew the things she knew now. And they were Aleksander’s group, not hers, as he and Sulia had just made abundantly clear. Yona had ignored Jerusza’s warnings, had opened her heart incautiously, had made an enormous, unthinkable mistake by believing she was actually a member of this family. Even now, she could hear Jerusza’s laughter, soft and cruel in her memory.
It was time to go.
It took her only five minutes more to put everything she owned into her knapsack. She turned to Aleksander, who was still behind her, still talking, saying things that didn’t matter. She put a finger to her lips, and finally, he stopped, his eyes shining with desperation in the darkness. “Yona?” he asked, his voice high, pleading. “It is the woods. The rules are not the same. We are all just trying to survive.”
“I shouldn’t have stayed so long,” she said softly, and when his eyes widened and he began to protest, she held up her hand and waited until he went silent again. “It was my mistake. When Zus and Chaim return with the mercury, gather several eggs from nests nearby. Use just the whites. Mix them with the mercury, and dip strips of fabric into the solution for everyone to wear across their chests for a day, then across their backs for a day. It should rid you of the lice. You know how to hunt now, how to trap, how to fish, how to stay on the move. Zus and Chaim are with you now, and they know the woods better than you do, so don’t let your pride get in the way, or you’ll die out here. Listen to them. And never let your guard down, for the Germans will find you. May God watch over you all.”
She turned to go, and when he grabbed her wrist to stop her, her pain bubbled to the surface as a white-hot streak of anger. Twisting away, she dug her nails into his forearm, squeezing until he yelped in pain and let go. “You will never touch me again,” she said.
“But the woods—”
“Are where we learn who we really are.” And then, extinguishing her pine light in a puff of breath, she hoisted her pack onto her back and slipped into the dark night.
Across the clearing, Sulia stood outside her shelter, her dress askew, a small smile on her face, as if she believed she’d finally triumphed by driving Yona out. But it hadn’t been Sulia to make her go. Yona should have been gone months ago, but she had foolishly opened her heart to the wrong person, which made her ignore all the things she knew to be true. Now she was wiser. Now she would return to the world she knew, the world in which she flew alone, a dove in the wilderness, untethered. Her wrist throbbed with purpose as she turned and strode toward the trees.
Later, when her anger had faded and the heartbreak crept in, the thing that would hurt most was the fact that when she left, Aleksander didn’t follow, nor did he try to stop her. She didn’t turn to look back, but she imagined him standing beside Sulia as they watched her go, the woman who had helped them to survive already no more than a footnote in their story.