Chapter 3

The first few miles were fairly easy going. Once I topped the small hill where my car had gone off the road, there was a long, winding downhill grade that followed the contour of the land around me. I walked carefully on the yellow line that bordered the curb, using it as a guide marker to keep me from stepping off the pavement in dark. The last thing I wanted was to twist my ankle in a sudden stumble, or slip in dirt or wet gravel and hurt myself even more.

I was holding up surprisingly well. I could feel my pinched nerve flaring now and again, but my headache was still only a dull throb at the base of my skull and didn't seem to be climbing any higher. As I walked, I could feel another old injury make its presence felt. I had once fallen onto a concrete sidewalk from a height of about six feet, somehow missing a step and landing on my back. I didn't think I was hurt at the time, but every once in a while, pain would shoot from my left buttock all the way up into my shoulder blade, reminding me of my monumental clumsiness and tendency toward letting my thoughts distract me from paying attention to what's in front of me.

I couldn't see much of the surrounding countryside; the trees were just dark shapes that occasionally resolved themselves in more detail when a gust of wind shook out their branches. The rest of the flora along the road might well have been invisible. I could hear movement, but couldn't identify where or from what it was coming. Sometimes, in the silences between the whistling gusts, I could hear the sound of running water nearby. I wondered if a creek might be somewhere up ahead, perhaps at the bottom of the hill.

My mind kept drifting back to that image of Maria, gently touching my arm in the car. Maria, both concerned and amused, wishing I wasn't so impatient, but knowing I couldn't sit still.

Don't think about it.

A useless admonition, that. What else was there to think about here? Sudoku? Football? Airline schedules?

Don't think about it.

Airline schedules... airport terminals... helplessness. Especially that. Helplessness and surrender. The last vestige of my life stripped from me, pulled from me, leaving me no reason to breathe, no reason to eat.

Papa!

DON'T THINK ABOUT IT!

I didn't tell him why we were at the airport beyond the fact that we were saying goodbye to his aunts after their long visit from the Philippines. We had sat away from them in the uncomfortable chairs just beside the international terminal gate. He looked at me as I struggled to find words to make him understand what was about to happen. "Papa?" he asked, as I held him tight, sobbing. His aunts finally tore him from my grasp as the final boarding call for their flight home sounded through the terminal.

"Papa!" he screamed, when it became apparent I wasn't coming too. He struggled to reach me, stretching his arms toward me as he was grabbed around the waist and hustled down the corridor toward the waiting jet.

"Papa! Don't let them take meeeee..." His cries faded as the jet port swallowed him and the rest of his blood relatives.