Open Book {Mark Lee Series}

Chapter 7

Clara couldn't hear the interminable beeping of the monitor she was hooked up to. Instead, she found herself hearing the crunching of leaves under her feet as she walked in dreams through a forest. It was not just any forest. It was clearly the woods outside her Uncle Jerry's house. As she trudged through the rugged terrain, she realized she was not alone. Her cousin, Kevin, was beside her. A year her senior, he had been given staunch instructions to keep her safe as they hunted bucks.

Clara was tired and hungry, but Kevin had little patience with her complaints.

"When can we eat our sandwiches?" Clara asked. "My blood sugar is dropping. I can feel it."

"Your blood sugar, my ass!" was Kevin's response. "You need to suck it up, buttercup," he quipped as he scanned the area around them, looking for footprints in the light covering of snow on the ground.

"It's so cold," Clara complained. "Do your handwarmers still have any heat left in them?" she asked expectantly.

"Damn, girl, you sure do talk a lot! You're gonna scare the deer with all your chattering," Kevin warned. "Where the hell are Courtney and Dad? They were supposed to go up on Miller's Ridge and drive the deer down our way, and I haven't seen hide nor tail of them," he groused.

"The people or the deer?" asked Clara.

"Huh?" Kevin replied absently. Clara didn't make a second attempt at her word play but chose instead to put her gloved hands in her armpits to try to warm them. She wondered how long it took for frostbite to set in.

Kevin pulled out a small metal flask from his pocket and took a long swig from it. "If you're really all that cold, you should have a sip of this," he urged.

"You know, alcohol actually lowers your resistance to the cold. It just makes you feel warm while you freeze to death," she countered.

"You think you're so smart, don't you?" Kevin prodded. "You think you know better than the rest of us. To you, we're all just a bunch of rednecks," he charged.

Clara looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "The depth of your ignorance truly knows no bounds," she commented dryly. "I don't judge you because you're a redneck. I judge you because you have a singular distaste for learning new things. Your MO is entirely anathema to growth and development," she stated matter-of-factly. These types of words were not uncommon for the 13-year-old Clara, but they did stand out quite a bit from the way the rest of her family spoke, which always invited the charge that she thought she was better than they were.

"Hush up," Kevin whispered suddenly. "I saw something moving over there in that bramble patch," he continued with quiet urgency. He pulled up his gun and looked through the scope, hoping to catch a glimpse of the animal that was stirring about 200 yards away.

"Do you think they could have driven something down this way?" Clara asked. "I never heard them come past here." Clara knew she would have heard her cousin, Courtney, had she passed by. Courtney's unmatched driving technique was the stuff of legends. She would usually begin with several loud shouts of, "Come on, buddy, buddy, buddy!" as if she were taunting a baseball player. She would follow the shouts with some high-pitched whistling which was followed by her rendition of some show tune or another. She had recently been on a Phantom of the Opera jag. Her singing was only mediocre, but she made up for it in sheer enthusiasm. And the deer never minded her wavering pitch. They found, in her singing, reason enough to get up from their warm hiding spots and move on wherever she drove them.

Clara was much closer to Courtney than to Kevin. Though Courtney was two years younger than Clara, she wanted very desperately to emulate her older cousin in everything. Sometimes Clara found it annoying that Courtney insisted on copying her and following her every footstep, but mostly, she found the fawning attention to be pleasant.

"Hey," Kevin broke into Clara's musing. "Take a look down there. That's a buck, right?" he questioned.

Clara blinked her frozen eyeballs. They ached from the cold and watered profusely. Clara wondered if tears could get frozen to her cheek. She squinted at the mass of brambles just beyond the clearing. She had left her glasses in the house because they always fogged up when she went hunting. Plus, she feared the backfire of the gun would break them just like it had broken Ralphie's in "A Christmas Story." She giggled privately as she thought, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!"

"You're no help!" Kevin complained. "I forgot you was half-blind."

Clara looked again at the bramble and saw something moving. She searched for Courtney's hunter-orange coat but saw no sign of it. "You know, it's hard to tell the difference between the thin branches and antlers from this distance," she admitted. Just then, she saw a flash of tan, followed by tiny blip of white. "I think I saw the white tail!" Clara whispered to Kevin. "I'm almost sure I saw a deer down there."

Kevin waited for no further confirmation. He took the shot. A sharp squeal was heard echoing through the forest. The sound seemed almost human, but it couldn't be, Clara reasoned. Kevin and Clara walked down into the valley and up the next embankment toward the brambles.

"Holy shit!" Kevin cried out as he reached the spot several seconds ahead of Clara. There lay Courtney in the brambles, her orange coat tied around her waist. Her tan T-shirt was stained with blood around her abdomen. She wore a white knitted hat with a puffy ball of yarn at the top. Clara reached into the thorny mass to push aside the brambles so she could reach her beloved cousin. Courtney was still conscious and looked in horror at her hands covered in her own blood.

"We thought you were a deer," Clara explained. "Oh, my God! The bleeding won't stop! How do I get it to stop?" she asked Kevin who was staring blankly into the distance. Clara remembered her Health class first-aid training and put both hands over the wound, pressing down on it. "Kevin!" she shrieked. "Snap out of it! Call 9-1-1!" Kevin did not move. He stood over Courtney yet seemed unaware of her distress. His eyes were dead and unfocussed. Finally, Clara pulled her phone out of her pocket and called 9-1-1 while still holding pressure down with the other hand.

The rescue crew did arrive, and Courtney's life was spared, but the bullet had hit her directly in the uterus. She would never have children all because of Kevin and Clara's split-second decision. When Uncle Jerry arrived, Kevin immediately threw Clara under the bus by crying out, "Clara told me she was sure it was a deer. She said she saw its tail."

Clara made no attempt to defend herself. Instead, she kept her hands on Courtney's bloody abdomen. She leaned over her little cousin, tears dripping from her eyes onto Courtney's pale face. She did not budge from that spot, even after the rescue workers had long ago moved the young girl onto a stretcher. She continued to cry over the bloody spot in the snow. "I really thought it was a deer! I honestly did!" she repeated over-and-over as she rocked back-and-forth.

Back at the hospital, Clara began to sweat profusely as she felt herself coming back into her body again. Her nightmare of the past was over, and she was back in her current reality. She jolted awake, and for the first time, heard the steady beeping of the monitor and saw Mark's worried face hovering over hers.

Upon seeing her eyes open, Mark released a relieved sigh. "You scared the shit out of me!" he charged. "Don't ever do it again!" he scolded her in a plaintiff voice.

"Well, I didn't do it on purpose," Clara clarified. "If I could have stopped it, I would have." She looked away from him toward the white wall of the hospital room. "There is nothing I hate more than being vulnerable," she admitted. "If there were any way I could keep this from happening, I assure you, I would do it."

Mark pressed his hand against her cheek, moving her head so she was looking at him again. "You have sat through my mess. So, the least I can do is sit through yours," he insisted. Clara wanted to believe him, but something inside of her felt that she couldn't dare hope for love. She felt that she didn't have the strength to choose joy when she was certain it would only be wrenched away from her again.