Read Online Left for Dead: A gripping psychological thriller by Deborah Rogers - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Deborah Rogers
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restaurant we loved so much, and our hand-in-hand walks through Central Park past the guys on the bongo drums, and making love on a Sunday afternoon as the sun blessed us through the window. Don’t do it. Don’t look back.
By daybreak my head feels like it could slip from my shoulders and I know I can’t not sleep forever. But for now I return to the ridge. Sky the color of seawater hangs over the vast land. The beauty is not lost on me. Heaven, or some part of it, will surely look like this.
Tracking the frosted clouds as they drift east, I study the terrain. Four choices. North—mountains. East—flat land covered with thick trees. West—more mountains and fields of scree. South—the trees thin out, a small hill, possibly a clearing and grassland, the glint of a waterway and what looks like a gorge and maybe a bridge. This could mean farmland. From up here it’s too hard to tell, and I don’t know anything about distances, how many miles it would be to get there, just that it seems very far away.
But I can’t stay here and south could mean people.
Before I leave I use tiny pebbles to spell out my name and my mother’s phone number beneath a giant SOS, and the words— Alive. Gone south.
All day long I weave my way through the assembly of trees, pausing frequently to scratch and inspect the underside of my troubling foot. I think about how cruel it was for him to take my shoes. Then I remember that it didn’t happen that way. I ran from him and he caught me and killed me and I came back to life. I tell myself that I mustn’t forget. The ten things, especially. Mint Capri. Kermit. Beaded seat cover. Boy on a bike. O, K, 1, and 7.
As I walk I think of my life, my childhood, my worst and best mistakes. I think of my mother.
“Talk to me, Amelia, I’m worried about you.” This was her refrain from my childhood. Her other favorite was “Sweets, it’s not good to bottle things up. You need to let them out.”
My mother is a verbalizer, the type of person who feels the need to announce every single thing that pops into her mind. What’s worse, she has no filter. Announcing things I think best kept private.
Like the times I’d hear her on the phone to her friends. Amelia got her first period today. Amelia had a bad case of diarrhea after camp and messed her pants. Amelia cries herself to sleep at night.
I never felt the need to share everything I did or felt, so whenever my mother said, “What’s going on in that head of yours?” I would tell her that everything was fine. “There’s nothing to talk about, Mom. I just need to get on with my homework.”
She didn’t even know I’d broken up with Matthew.
I know what she’s going to think when I don’t come back. She’s going to think I ran off. She’ll tell everyone I needed space, that I was more fragile than anyone ever knew. I think of how broken-hearted she’s going to be. What’s worse, she will blame herself. My poor mother, the woman who desperately tried to hold her fracturing family together after my father left.
Oh, how I wish she was here now. With a needle and a Band-Aid and some antiseptic cream for this irksome foot. My mother liked nothing more than to lance a boil. She once said she must have been a nurse in a former life.
*
Late morning and I breach the tree line and step into a field of astonishing yellow. Stretching out across the clearing, thousands of wild mustard plants convulse in the strong northerly wind. Bees levitate over the blossoms, their hind legs inked with gold. I bend to pluck a mustard flower, crushing it between my forefinger and thumb to rouse the spice. My nose itches and I toss the bud away and lift my chin to the sun.
I open my eyes. I must move on. Across the other side of the field, more woods and the hill I hope means the gorge and waterway I saw from the ridge. I move forward, passing through the bony green stalks, leaving a laneway of buckled plants in my wake.
I reenter the forested land and
By daybreak my head feels like it could slip from my shoulders and I know I can’t not sleep forever. But for now I return to the ridge. Sky the color of seawater hangs over the vast land. The beauty is not lost on me. Heaven, or some part of it, will surely look like this.
Tracking the frosted clouds as they drift east, I study the terrain. Four choices. North—mountains. East—flat land covered with thick trees. West—more mountains and fields of scree. South—the trees thin out, a small hill, possibly a clearing and grassland, the glint of a waterway and what looks like a gorge and maybe a bridge. This could mean farmland. From up here it’s too hard to tell, and I don’t know anything about distances, how many miles it would be to get there, just that it seems very far away.
But I can’t stay here and south could mean people.
Before I leave I use tiny pebbles to spell out my name and my mother’s phone number beneath a giant SOS, and the words— Alive. Gone south.
All day long I weave my way through the assembly of trees, pausing frequently to scratch and inspect the underside of my troubling foot. I think about how cruel it was for him to take my shoes. Then I remember that it didn’t happen that way. I ran from him and he caught me and killed me and I came back to life. I tell myself that I mustn’t forget. The ten things, especially. Mint Capri. Kermit. Beaded seat cover. Boy on a bike. O, K, 1, and 7.
As I walk I think of my life, my childhood, my worst and best mistakes. I think of my mother.
“Talk to me, Amelia, I’m worried about you.” This was her refrain from my childhood. Her other favorite was “Sweets, it’s not good to bottle things up. You need to let them out.”
My mother is a verbalizer, the type of person who feels the need to announce every single thing that pops into her mind. What’s worse, she has no filter. Announcing things I think best kept private.
Like the times I’d hear her on the phone to her friends. Amelia got her first period today. Amelia had a bad case of diarrhea after camp and messed her pants. Amelia cries herself to sleep at night.
I never felt the need to share everything I did or felt, so whenever my mother said, “What’s going on in that head of yours?” I would tell her that everything was fine. “There’s nothing to talk about, Mom. I just need to get on with my homework.”
She didn’t even know I’d broken up with Matthew.
I know what she’s going to think when I don’t come back. She’s going to think I ran off. She’ll tell everyone I needed space, that I was more fragile than anyone ever knew. I think of how broken-hearted she’s going to be. What’s worse, she will blame herself. My poor mother, the woman who desperately tried to hold her fracturing family together after my father left.
Oh, how I wish she was here now. With a needle and a Band-Aid and some antiseptic cream for this irksome foot. My mother liked nothing more than to lance a boil. She once said she must have been a nurse in a former life.
*
Late morning and I breach the tree line and step into a field of astonishing yellow. Stretching out across the clearing, thousands of wild mustard plants convulse in the strong northerly wind. Bees levitate over the blossoms, their hind legs inked with gold. I bend to pluck a mustard flower, crushing it between my forefinger and thumb to rouse the spice. My nose itches and I toss the bud away and lift my chin to the sun.
I open my eyes. I must move on. Across the other side of the field, more woods and the hill I hope means the gorge and waterway I saw from the ridge. I move forward, passing through the bony green stalks, leaving a laneway of buckled plants in my wake.
I reenter the forested land and
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