Page 37 of Ask for Andrea

I sat shotgun as we drove up Blacks Creek Road. The radio spit codes and meaningless snippets of information as we turned off the highway exit.

I watched the sagebrush and rocky hills fly past outside the car window. The last time I’d seen them this way, I’d been alive. But not for long.

Officer Willis turned onto an unmarked dirt road, a camping site with two cars and a tent visible along the creek bed. He spent a few minutes questioning the man and woman who emerged from the tent then spent some time studying the area. I followed him. And even though I knew he couldn’t hear me, I talked to him. “It’s farther. Not here. It’s farther up the canyon.” I glanced at the sun, hanging heavy in the sky. There were only a few hours of daylight left. If he spent this long searching every dirt road that branched off Blacks Creek, this was going to take a long time.

He pulled off the road several more times, each of them the wrong exit. He was drawn most to the pull-offs with camping sites. I tried to gauge how far we were from the spot he’d left my body. Would I recognize the pull-off? I hadn’t realized how many dirt paths snaked off the main road. I focused on the memory and found, with surprising clarity, that I could see the horizon and the pull-off as if it were a photo in my mind.

I wasn’t sure exactly how far away we were.

But I’d know it as soon as I saw it.

* * *

The horizon was just turning pink when I saw the pull-off.

The officer had skipped the last two dirt roads, marking each on his paper map to check later. I couldn't tell if that decision was influenced by the fact that it was getting late or if he was following some kind of hunch I’d contributed to. Either way, I felt like we were getting close.

Then suddenly, there it was. The scrubby weeds and tall grass covering the little rise at the shoulder in the road stood out in relief against the darker treeline beyond the road. The shape of that rise was burned into my mind.

“There it is,” I called frantically, willing him to stop.

His eyes flicked to the exit. The area past the rise wasn’t easily visible. In fact, it sort of looked like the turnoff dead-ended before it snaked deeper into the hills.

“Stop,” I called again desperately, sliding over until I was nearly on his lap, my hands resting uselessly on the steering wheel as if maybe I could turn it myself.

He wasn’t slowing down.

“Stop there,” I said again, louder.

Nothing.

His ears weren’t picking up what I was saying. I needed to tap into his brain somehow.

I thought about how I’d been able to slip through the crack in the FroYo shop earlier. That’s when I had the idea to get as close to Officer Willis’s brain as possible.

So I leaned into that hairy ear canal and thought about hitting the brakes hard and pulling off that little dirt road while I looked at the inside of his eardrum.

To my amazement, the car slowed down.

His eyes flicked over to the dirt road. Then he hit the brakes harder and exited.

I felt like cheering. I couldn’t say for certain whether he’d heard me, but I was confident he hadn’t planned to stop. And yet here we were.

My excitement evaporated as he got out of the car and started poking through the brush.

It took him less than two minutes to find my body, unhidden by the dry creek bed.

The animals had found me over the past three days. One of my arms had been separated from my torso, the gray skin torn from muscle and bone in raw strips.

The rest of me wasn’t much better. It was the kind of scene that would have kept me awake at night if I’d seen it in a movie. But this time I couldn’t look away. Because this wasn’t a movie. This was me.

Officer Willis didn’t waste any time in calling for backup.

At first, he hurried to secure the area, pulling caution tape from the trunk of the cruiser and putting on gloves.

There were no other headlights on the road. Everything was still and quiet. We were going to be here for a minute before anyone else arrived. And I wasn’t going anywhere.

So after a few minutes, he paused and sat down in the driver’s seat of the police cruiser, staring toward the spot where the ground sloped toward the creek bed and my body.

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