The Ruins (38 page)

 "
Eric,
"
Stacy cried.

 "I
thought it would just come tumbling out," he said. It had to
be painful, but he didn't seem to mind. He kept pushing at
the wound with the knife. "It's right under here. I
can feel it. It must sense me cutting, somehow, must pull back into me.
It's hiding."

 He
felt with his left hand, pressing at the skin above the wound; it
looked like he was about to cut himself again. Amy leaned forward,
snatched the knife from him. She thought he'd resist her, but
he didn't; he just let her take it. The blood kept coming,
and he made no effort to staunch it.

 "Help
him," Amy said to Stacy. She dropped the knife into the dirt
at her side. "Help him stop it."

 Stacy
looked at Amy, openmouthed. She was panting; she seemed to be on the
verge of hyperventilating. "How?"

 "Pull
off his shirt. Press it to the cut."

 Stacy
set down her umbrella, stepped toward Eric, started to help him out of
his T-shirt. He'd become very passive; he lifted his arms
like a child, letting her tug the shirt up and off him.

 "Lie
down," Amy ordered, and he did it, on his back, the blood
still coming, pooling in the tiny hollow of his belly button.

 Stacy
balled up the T-shirt, held it to the wound.

 Things
had gotten bad again, and Amy knew there was no way to alter this, no
way to force the afternoon back into its false air of
tranquillity
. There'd
be no more mimicry now, no more joking, no more singing. She and Stacy
sat in silence, Stacy leaning forward slightly, applying pressure to
stop the bleeding. Eric lay on his back, uncomplaining, strangely
serene, staring up at the sky.

 "It's
my fault," Amy said. Stacy and Eric both turned to look at
her, not understanding. She wiped at her face with her hand; it felt
gritty, sweat-stained. "I didn't want to come. When
Mathias first asked us, I knew I didn't want to. But I
didn't say anything; I just let it happen. We could be on the
beach right now. We could be—"

 "
Shh
,"
Stacy said.

 "And
the man in the pickup. The taxi driver. He told me not to go. He said
it was a bad place. That he'd—"

 "You
didn't know, sweetie."

 "And
after the village, if I hadn't thought of checking along the
trees, we never would've found the path. If I'd
kept silent—"

 Stacy
shook her head, still pressing the T-shirt to Eric's abdomen.
The blood had soaked all the way through now; it wasn't
stopping. Her hands were covered with it. "How could
you've known?" she asked.

 "And
I'm the one, aren't I? The one who stepped into the
vines? If I hadn't, that man might've forced us to
leave. We might've—"

 "Look
at the clouds," Eric said, cutting her off, his voice
sounding dreamy, oddly distant, as if he were drugged. He lifted his
hand, pointed upward.

 And
he was right: clouds were building to the south, thunderheads, their
undersides ominously dark, heavy with the promise of rain. Back in
Cancún
, at the beach,
they'd be gathering their things, returning to their rooms.
Jeff and she would make love, then slip into sleep, a long nap before
dinner, the rain blurring their window, an inch-deep puddle forming on
their tiny balcony. Their first day, they'd seen a gull
sitting in it, partially sheltered from the downpour, staring out to
sea. Rain meant water, of course. Amy knew they should be thinking of
ways to gather it. But she couldn't; her mind was empty. She
was drunk and tired and sad; someone else would have to figure out how
to collect the rain. Not Eric, of course, with his blood rapidly
soaking through that T-shirt. And not Stacy, either, who looked even
worse than Amy felt:
sunstruck
,
shaky, all dazed behind the eyes. They were useless, the three of them,
with their silly stories, their singing, their laughter in a place like
this; they were fools, not survivors.

 And
how was it possible, with such little warning, that the sun had sunk so
low? It was nearly touching the horizon. In another hour—two
at the most—it would be night.

W
hen did it first begin to go
wrong?

 Afterward,
the next morning,
when
all
of them
suddenly meant one less than it had before, Eric
would spend a long time trying to unravel this. He didn't
believe it was the drinking, nor even the cutting. Because things were
still manageable then—unmoored, maybe, a little out of
control, but still endurable in some essential way. Lying on his back
like that, with Stacy pressing the T-shirt to his wound, struggling to
staunch the flow of blood, while the clouds built in the sky above
them, Eric had felt an unexpected sense of serenity. Rain was coming;
they weren't going to die of thirst. And if that was true, if
they could so easily overcome this most pressing obstacle to their
survival, why shouldn't they be able to overcome all
obstacles? Why shouldn't they make it home alive?

 There
was the need for food, of course, hiding just behind the need for
water—and what could rain possibly do for that? Eric peered
up at the sky, puzzling over this dilemma, but without any success. All
he managed to accomplish by focusing upon it was to rouse his lurking
sense of hunger. "Why haven't we eaten
again?" he said, his voice sounding far away even to
himself—thick-tongued, weak-
lunged.
The
tequila,
he thought. And
then:
I'm
bleeding.

 "Are
you hungry?" Amy asked.

 It
was a stupid question, of course—how could he not be
hungry?—and he didn't bother to answer it. After a
moment, Amy stood up, stepped to the tent, unzipped the flap, slipped
inside.

 Right
there,
Eric
would
decide the next
morning.
When
she went to get the food.
But he didn't note it at
the time, just watched her vanish into the tent, then turned his
attention back to the sky again, those clouds boiling upward above him.
He wasn't going to move, he decided. He was going to stay
right there, on his back, while the rain poured down upon him.

 "It's
not stopping," Stacy said.

 She
meant his wound, he knew. She sounded worried, but he wasn't.
He didn't mind the bleeding, was too drunk to feel the pain.
It was going to rain. He was going to lie here and let it wash him
clean. Clean, he'd find the strength to reach inside himself,
into that slit he'd cut below his rib cage, reach in with his
hand and search out the vine, grasp it, yank it free. He was going to
be okay.

 Amy
returned from the tent. She was carrying the plastic jug of water, the
bag of grapes. She set the jug on the ground, opened the bag, held it
out toward Stacy.

 Stacy
shook her head. "We have to wait."

 "We've
missed lunch," Amy said. "We were supposed to have
lunch." She didn't lower the grapes, just kept
holding them toward Stacy.

 Once
again, Stacy shook her head. "When Jeff gets back. We
can—"

 "I'll
save some for him. I'll put them aside."

 "What
about Mathias?"

 "Him,
too."

 "What's
he doing?"

 Amy
nodded toward the tent. "Sleeping." She shook the
bag. "Come on. Just a couple. They'll help with
your thirst."

 Stacy
hesitated, visibly wavering, then reached in, plucked out two grapes.

 Amy
shook the bag again. "More," she said. "Give some to Eric."

 Stacy
took two more. She put one in her own mouth, then dropped one into
Eric's. He cradled it on his tongue for a moment, wanting to
savor the feel of it. He watched Stacy and Amy eat theirs; then he did
the same. The sensation was almost too intense—the burst of
juice, the sweetness, the joy of chewing, of swallowing—he
felt light-headed with it. But there was no satisfaction, no
diminishment, however modest, in his hunger. No, it seemed to leap up
within him, to rouse itself from some deep slumber; his entire body
started to ache with it. Stacy dropped another grape into his mouth,
and he chewed more quickly this time, the swallowing more important
than the savoring, his lips immediately opening for another one. The
others appeared to feel a similar urgency. No one was talking; they
were chewing, swallowing, reaching into the bag for more. Eric watched
the clouds build as he ate. All he had to do was open his mouth, and
Stacy would drop another grape into it. She was smiling; so was Amy.
The juice helped his thirst, just as Amy had promised. He was beginning
to feel a little more sober—in a good
way—everything seeming to settle a bit, to coalesce around
and within him. He could feel his pain, but even this was reassuring.
It'd been a stupid thing to do, he knew, digging into himself
with that knife; he couldn't quite grasp how he'd
found the courage to attempt it. He was in trouble now. He needed
stitches—antibiotics, too, probably—but he
nonetheless felt strangely at peace. If he could just keep lying here,
eating these grapes, watching the clouds darken above him, he believed
that everything would be all right, that somehow, miraculously,
he'd make it through.

 It
came as a bit of a shock to realize that—abruptly, without
any apparent warning—the bag was almost empty. There were
only four grapes left; they'd eaten all the rest. The three
of them stared at the bag; no one spoke for a stretch. Pablo continued
his ragged breathing, but Eric had reached the point where he barely
even noticed it anymore. It was like any other sort of background
noise—traffic beyond a window, waves on a beach. Someone had
to say something, of course, to comment on what they'd done,
and it was Amy who finally shouldered this responsibility.

 "They
can have the orange," she said.

 Stacy
and Eric remained silent. There'd been a lot of grapes in the
bag; it ought to have been easy enough to set aside allotments for
Mathias and Jeff.

 "I
have to pee," Stacy whispered. She was talking to him, Eric
realized. "Can you hold your shirt?"

 He
nodded, taking the T-shirt from her, maintaining the pressure against
his side. He could feel the vine again, shifting about inside him, just
beneath the pain. It had gone away after he'd cut himself,
but now it had come back.

 "Do
I have to use the bottle?" Stacy asked Amy.

 Amy
shook her head, and Stacy stood up, moved across the clearing. She
didn't seem to want to venture into the vines. She crouched
with her back to them, and Eric heard her begin to urinate. It
didn't sound like very much, a brief spattering, and then she
was rising again, pulling up her pants.

 "They
can have some of the raisins, too," Amy said, but quietly,
almost as if she were speaking to herself.

 Stacy
returned, sat beside Eric. He thought she was going to resume holding
the T-shirt against his wound, but she didn't. She picked up
the plastic jug of water, uncapped it, poured a little on her right
foot. Eric and Amy stared at her in astonishment.

 "What
the
fuck're
you doing?" Amy asked.

 Stacy
seemed startled by the sharpness in her voice. "I peed on
myself," she said.

 Amy
reached, snatched the bottle from Stacy's hand, recapped it. "That's
our
water
.
You just poured it on your fucking foot."

 Stacy
sat for a moment, blinking in a theatrical way, as if not quite
understanding what Amy was saying. "You don't have
to swear," she said.

 "We'll
die without that—you know? And you're
just—"

 "I
wasn't thinking, okay? I wanted to clean the pee off my foot
and I saw the jug, and I—"

 "Jesus
fucking Christ, Stacy. How can you be so out of it?"

 Stacy
waved at the sky, the gathering clouds. "It's going
to rain. We'll have plenty of water."

 "So
why didn't you wait?"

 "Don't
shout, Amy. I said I'm sorry, and—"

 "Sorry
doesn't bring the water back, does it?"

 Eric
wanted to say something, to stop or distract them, but the right words
weren't coming to him. He recognized what was happening, what
was starting here. This was how Amy and Stacy fought, in sudden,
intense eruptions that seemed to arrive out of nowhere, little flash
floods of rage that would come and go with a violence matched only by
their brevity. A single inadvertent word could set them
off—more often than not when they'd been
drinking—and within seconds they'd be flailing at
each other, sometimes literally. Eric had seen Stacy slash
Amy's cheek with her nails, deep enough that she drew blood,
and he knew that Amy had once slapped Stacy so hard that
she'd knocked her to the floor. Then, inevitably, at the very
peak of their ferocity, these encounters would collapse upon
themselves. The girls would look at each other in mutual bewilderment,
wondering how they'd managed to say all they'd
said; they'd beg each other for forgiveness, would embrace,
begin to cry.

 And
now here they were again, sprinting down that familiar path.

 "Sometimes
you can be so stupid," Amy said.

 "Fuck
off," Stacy muttered, barely audible.

 "What?"

 "Just
drop it, okay?"

 "You're
not even sorry, are you?"

 "How
many times do I have to say it?"

 Eric
tried to sit up, felt a tearing sensation from his wound, and thought
better of it. "Maybe you guys should—"

 Amy
gave him a look of pure disdain. He could see her drunkenness in her
face, exaggerating her expressions. "Stay out of it, Eric.
You've already caused enough problems."

 "Leave
him be," Stacy said. Both of their voices were too loud; it
hurt his head to listen. He wanted to get up and leave them to this,
but he was still bleeding, still in pain, still quite drunk; he
didn't feel like he could move.