Without looking in the mirror, I crept out of the room and into the kitchen where Nathan was always waiting for me whether I managed to get up or not. Even now, he was sitting on the chair at the head of the table. Behind him, the window was wide open, letting in the smells of spring, blossoming life, and pure, humid freshness as well as the swamp. In the distance, I could hear the dull thuds of wood chopping, probably Kjertan or Rayk chopping wood. One was always with me, but I never knew who, they just looked too similar and I never looked at them for long.
I took a few deep breaths.
“Hey, Will.” Nathan smiled broadly. “A good day?”
I nodded and sat on the narrow wooden bench so that I could see the door and window. I still didn’t talk much.
“Ian went into town with Mrs. Durand. They’re buying ingredients for Cajun rice.”
I felt a brief smile fly across my face, like the smile Nathan used to have. Cajun rice was my favorite food because there weren’t any connections to it for me. Rice with liver, groundmeat, celery, and Tabasco. For me, a little Tabasco because a spot in my mouth wasn’t healing well and it would burn too much.
“Rayk or Kjertan, I don’t know, is chopping wood.”
I smiled briefly again. “Unmistakable, yes.”
Nathan rose. “Do you want breakfast?”
“Tea.”
He poured me a cup from a thermos and placed it in front of me. “Anything else?”
I shook my head and wrapped my hands around the mug, which was warm from the mint tea. I needed this warmth because I was still so terribly cold inside. I also wore multiple layers of clothes all the time, not just for the warmth they provided, but also because they made me feel less vulnerable.
I sat there for a while sipping my tea when I felt the inner restlessness rising within me; that still happened now and again in closed rooms.
“Shall we go outside?” Nathan rose again.
“Yes.” He always knew what I needed. I stood and carried the teacup outside with me. The first hour of the day was the hardest. Sometimes, it took a while for me to find my way into the present.
Outside, the morning lay before us like a pure gift from God. The brother of Mrs. Durand had his wooden house on a narrow eastern branch of the Atchafalaya with a forest on the opposite sandy bank. Not a swamp forest, but a deciduous forest. The sky was still peach-colored with delicate violet veils that bathed the bare tree branches in mysterious light. On one hand, it was difficult for me to be in the same area where I was held for weeks, but on the other, this section looked completely different. We were a ways away from the basin, much further east, I didn’t know where exactly. In any case, the water here was not green,but lavender blue, a reflection of the sky, and there was much more solid land.
I sat on a tree stump beneath the porch and Nathan smiled. He was so full of patience and understanding, and that smile, so gentle, that I wanted to cry. So many things made me cry at the moment, every kind word and every kind look. Maybe that was why I was so closed off from everyone, even Nathan. It was these loving gestures that threw me off-balance and showed me how vulnerable I truly was. And how weak, even though I always tried to sit up straight and not belittle myself.
“Tell me how you found me,” I asked now, just to say something so that the silence around Nathan and me wasn’t so deafening. It wasn’t a completely uncomfortable silence, but he didn’t deserve it.
He raised his eyebrows. “Again?” he asked teasingly.
I peered at him over the rim of my teacup. “Yes, again.”
“Okay. Where should I start?”
“When you woke up.”
He sat next to me in the dewy grass, whether he got wet or not. It didn’t bother him. Nothing was ever too much for him. He was always there as if nothing could upset him and I knew why. He had been through so many hells himself, having to fight his way back after each loss. This path that I took, on which I stumbled so laboriously even if the reason was different and the paths different, he had walked them often enough. Each time, he had returned from the darkness into the light, and if he had managed that, I could too. One day.
I listened to him as he told how he had woken up with almost no sight, his eyelids swollen and sticky. How he had stumbled through the swamp with horror and fear in his veins before Rayk had found him. Isaac and the others had simply abandoned Kjertan’s twin somewhere, confident that he would get lost and unable to follow them. “He was never on Isaac’s side. Not atany time. And I was lucky he was with me. I could barely walk. I vomited for days and I definitely had a concussion… Without Rayk, I wouldn’t have made it back to Lost Memories. He even had to carry me once…”
I loved Nathan for not hiding this from me. He had kept enough from me, but that was a topic for another day.
I kept listening. About their way back to Lost Memories where they were going to build a raft to search for me. That was where they met Icarus, who was working on a raft of his own, and two hours later, Kjertan joined them. He had been circling the area for several days, knowing that Ian or Noah had to be the real traitor. He had hoped that he could somehow come to our aid, but suddenly, there was no one there, only Icarus, but even then, he had first observed him from a distance.
From then on, there were four of them and they had the boat. Rayk told them what happened after our escape from the Agamemnon. Since the men no longer had a seaman on board, they rowed the raft in stages to the coast of South Carolina. Like us, they headed toward Louisiana, Atchafalaya Basin, where they split up to search for us. Isaac had obtained cell phones for his closest confidants: Billy, Maury, and Anthony, so they could communicate, but obviously, they didn’t find us. They would never have found us, just as Nathan had promised me. After not finding us for three weeks, they settled in the empty, two-story house. From there, often gone for days, they continued searching.
Nevertheless, the group split up because Ben and Jerry had secretly overheard a conversation between Isaac and Billy. Isaac had hinted to Billy, in a drunken state, what he really wanted to do to me. “They were horrified, Will. They would never have guessed that Isaac was such a monster. And they weren’t with him voluntarily anyway. They were hoping to find us again the whole time.”
Ben and Jerry, my hobbits, I thought. They told the preacher guy, whose name was Raphael, and the eternally grumpy Jack with the emerald-green eyes. He, in turn, confided in Rayk. “Ben, Jerry, Raphael, and Jack went off on an expedition to warn us, but they became hopelessly lost. Rayk stayed with Isaac as a spy so to speak. But Billy caught him when he stole Isaac’s cell phone one night to call me. That was when they locked him up and later used him as bait.” Nathan shook his head in disbelief as he did every time at this point. Maybe he was also thinking of Rayk’s“Where are you?”
We must have been deaf and blind!
