Page 81 of Wild Life

“We need to stop this boat. I need to go back. Aleki is waiting for me.”

“Maris, listen to me. We are not going back. Your home is not back there.” He was speaking to me like I was a child, and it was making me more anxious.

I ran to the railing and clutched the smooth metal.

“Don’t touch me. I want to go back to him.” I planted my foot on the edge, but before I could jump to freedom, I was yanked down and fell flat on the deck.

Eli straddled my belly, weighing me down. I kicked and screamed at the top of my lungs, but I couldn’t move. “Let me go!”

He shouted over me to someone out of my frame of view. “Radio the authorities and tell them we’ll need an ambulance. We need to get her straight to the hospital when we make it to shore.”

I sobbed hard, Eli’s face blurring through hot tears.

“What did that savage do to you, you poor girl?”

Chapter 36

No Place Like Home

Maris

Three months later—Washington state, U.S.A.

My eyes burned as I clicked through peer-reviewed articles, scanning rows of text like a machine scanning barcodes. The information dumped into my wasteland of a brain, stored for use at a later time. My finger never left the scroll wheel on my mouse, not even to scratch my nose or fidget in my lap. Before, when I’d worked, I had always been in motion, and now I found myself, more often than not, frozen. Still.Too still.

And nothing around me seemed to move, either. Time never changed. No one aged. The university had remained untouched while I was away. My office was still the same, not a pen out of place from how I had left it.

The only difference was inside of me. The part of me that had finally come to life…had died. For years, I had believed I was broken beyond repair. Then I had realized how untrue that assumption had been, that I was capable of so much more than what my environment, the people around me, could give me. And when all of that had changed, I had become free to bloom.

Footsteps echoed outside in the hall, careful and controlled. Perfectly planned. Predictable.

Not to my surprise, they stopped in my doorway. I didn’t look up. I already knew she was standing there and how the visit would go.

“Maris.” No hello. No humor. Just homogeneous gray. I didn’t bother answering because she’d invite herself inside anyway.

“You’ll need glasses soon if you continue to stare at the screen like that.”

My pupils betrayed my brain and flicked to her position as if summoned by the formidable woman standing properly in her charcoal-gray pantsuit. Her silver stud earrings were plain and peeking out from her gray hair.Talk about a gray aura.

I sat back in my chair. “Aunt Sherri. What brings you here?”Nothing good.

She entered without invitation and took a seat on the chair across from me. I saw much of myself in her: the thin and pointed nose, lips that turned down slightly at the corners, eyes with specks of gold. I had inherited more from her than my own mother. It also extended to our strong sense of obligation. Or maybe that had been forced on me by her.

“I came to check on you.”

“That’s very kind of you, yet very off-brand.” She had never been a warm woman. I had always sought her approval, but nothing I’d ever done had earned the affection I so desperately needed as a child—and now as an adult.

“Are you taking your medication?”

“Ahh, that’s it,” I said, realization dawning on me.

“That’s what?” Her nose wrinkled, much like mine did when I was confused.

“The real reason you’re here. You took time from your busy day to play social worker, coming for a wellness check.”

She let out an exasperated sigh that reminded me of when my mother used to do the same thing when I spoke back to her. “You need to take your medications. The doctor warned that they’re important to your recovery.”

After I had threatened to jump overboard, we’d stopped in Fiji and were met by an ambulance, which had rushed me to the emergency room for care. The doctors there wouldn’t listen to my pleas to be let go and had instead sedated me enough to fly me back to the States on a private medical plane comped by the university.

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