Hedgerows

 I walked out of the gap in the hedge, and onto the street. Here's the problem: I don't remember walking in.

It was purple evening, and I was standing there in the grassy kerb, looking up at the silhouettes of the branches overhead. When did it get so late, I wondered? My phone battery was dead. I never normally let it run all the way down in case of an emergency, like the one this was shaping up to be, but I had no other choice but to hoof it.

That was the other problem. I didn't know where I was. For a while I was too dazed to be scared, until something soft crackled from the hedge behind me. I paused and slowly looked back, to the gap I just walked through. Nothing but dark trees.

The sound had my hackles up. I jogged a little faster away, checking back over my shoulder every minute. No street lights around. But even as it started getting dark, there were no animal noises from the woods around me, just wind rattle and the occasional soft crunch. Sweat gathered on my temples and my back. Where the hell had I gotten to? 

The moon was up, giving a sickly glow to the blue-black world, when I heard the car coming up from behind. When I turned back I couldn't see the gap in the hedge anymore. It had vanished around the bend I'd been running. I waved like I was drowning until the headlights blazed over me. The driver stopped. I must have been a sight because he let me in without a question beyond asking if I was alright. At that moment, getting back to civilization was more important to me than thirty something years of being told not to get in a car with a stranger.

The only other thing in my wallet aside from a driver's license and a debit card was a room key for some hotel I've never heard of. I asked if he could take me there, and he seemed surprised, but said it would be no problem.

'Havens Inn.' After what had to be miles, the hedge lined back road connected to the main street. Points of orange glow dotted the empty landscape ahead. Desolate with no other cars around. The guy had his phone GPS going, but it hadn't been working right since I got there. Suddenly, like he'd come out of a dead zone, it snapped back into order.

In the car, as the daze and panic wore off, I was suddenly exhausted. Everything was sore from my shoulders to my feet, not just like I'd been walking for a long time, but maybe climbing or crawling, or carrying something heavy. Taking inventory of my body, my hiking boots were pristine, way too clean for walking in the woods anywhere. My arms below the cutoff of my t-shirt were scratched up.

We had to drive another couple miles through the dark to get into town. On the GPS it was called Havenrand. It looked like mostly farms, a gas station, a Piggly Wiggly- I remembered what that was. I thought he was going to drop me off and drive on, but he got a sort of embarrassed look on his face and pulled into the hotel parking lot. The hotel, the Inn, it was a decent sized place, three stories, and it was the only hotel I'd noticed in the sparse town. A little run down, though it looked more from sheer years than from willful neglect. Lit up by the newish sign out front, the building itself could have been going on a hundred years old. We both got out and walked to the entrance.

My rescuer went right for the stairs. I didn't get his name. I wanted to talk to the reception desk, because I realized the moment I walked in the door that I didn't know if I even had a room here still, let alone which one it was.

The girl behind the counter was a little too friendly. I don't think she'd looked away from me once since I walked in. She had on one of those phony customer service smiles that make people look like androids and it didn't waver an inch as I tried to ask as normally as possible which room was mine. She rattled off my room number without having to look anything up, and I tried to tell myself it was because they don't get many people passing through a little town like this, except that as I tried to extricate myself and head for the stairs, she blinked and asked me:

"Did you have any luck today, ma'am?"

Against my better judgment I stopped and asked her what she meant.

"Out on the hedgerows," she said politely, like that explained anything.

I said no and excused myself. I'd have bolted up those stairs if I wasn't so exhausted.

There was barely a sign of life in the hotel. They had an ice machine up there humming, but that was all the noise I could hear. Not even a TV going quietly in another room. The hallway was long enough to give me vertigo; it hit me then what a big hotel this was for such a little town, given every other room but mine and the driver's on this floor seemed unoccupied. His was the only door other than mine on this floor, I guessed that had a do-not-clean do-not-disturb hanger on the handle. He had the room next to mine. He was shuffling around in there, maybe having dinner. My stomach churned.

I went to put my keycard in the door. Something whirred from inside. I put my ear to the door. From inside there was that wind-through-the-branches rattle I'd heard out on the hedgerows, and I couldn't remember what that meant, but I knew suddenly that I had known what that meant once.

I didn't have the guts to go inside. I went next door and knocked; after a minute, the driver answered the door. He looked just as tired as I felt, his eyes red and shadowed. But he didn't look angry at me. Concerned, if anything.

Holding my card to keep my hands from shaking, I asked if I could come in. His face turned very grave. He nodded and stepped aside.

I'd been driving for hours when Julia burst out of the dark in front of me, her eyes flashing in my highbeams like a coyote's. I slammed on the brakes and threw the passenger side door open.

"Jesus, are you alright?"

She had this blank look on her face, hesitant. There was this sort of animal quality, like she'd feralized in the week since I'd last seen her. But she nodded after a little bit of staring and glancing around, and crawled into the car.

The whole drive back was absolutely eerie. She looked so faraway and out of it that I didn't try to ask questions or keep up conversation, no matter how anxious I was. I figured she was in shock. After staring out the windshield for a minute, she started rifling through her pockets and got out her wallet for some reason? I couldn't make out much of her expression in the dark.

She pulled out her keycard for the Havens Inn and squinted at it like she'd never seen it before. She showed it to me and in a croaking voice asked, "Can you take me here?"

I just nodded. I was so relieved when I first saw her run onto that dirt road, but the panic was starting to creep back up my throat, a scream that wanted out bad. She was even moving weird, the way people move when they're too high to function, looking at her hands and clothes all detached. God, was she high? Or sedated or something? I had seven whole days of her life totally unaccounted for when anything could have happened.

Pulling into the hotel, I thought she was asleep at first. She rolled her head and looked at me through heavy, narrowed eyes.

I'm not proud of the way I booked it up to my room, but I didn't want to deal with the receptionist, and I couldn't handle Julia. I thought she'd be right behind me, if maybe a little slower. It was only when I got to the top of the stairs that I realized she was still down there. I thought about going back, and I didn't. I'm not proud to have left her behind.

She knocked on my door a half hour later. I thought it might be some sort of trick at first, some sort of... it doesn't matter what I thought. When I answered the door, Julia was trembling.

"Can I come in?" She was still speaking weird. Her voice was rubbed raw.

In spite of everything, she was still Julia. Of course I let her in. She sat down on the wheelie chair by the desk, pulling her legs up into fetal position. She'd gotten so thin since the divorce, it couldn't be healthy. I sat across from her on the bed.

Gently, I asked, "Julia, what's going on? What happened to you?"

Her empty eyes filled up with fear. "How do you know my name?"

It felt like getting kicked in the head. "We were married for six years, Jules." I didn't mention the three years we'd been separated. They seemed like a given.

She shook her head. Slowly at first, and then faster, like she was trying to shake something out of it. "No. No no no, that's not true. That's not possible."

"Jules, hey, calm down."

"Don't fucking touch me!" She jerked away the moment I tried to get close, scrambling back in the chair until it hit the wall. "I don't know who the hell you are or how... how I got here. I was just in class a bit ago and I..."

She grabbed her head and squinted again, hard enough I thought she'd bust something. "Class?" I tried asking, backing off to kneel by the bed.

"I'm a student at UW."

"You're not. Jules, you're not. You haven't been at UW since you were 20."

Her eyes were hysterically bright. "I am 20." But the moment she said it, she knew it wasn't true. She kept repeating it to herself under her breath, letting me creep closer to her.

"Were you able to find Audrey? Listen to me. Did you see her? Anything at all?" She had a finger between her teeth, biting down on it for something to ground her. Gently, I took her by the wrist and guided it out of her mouth so she wouldn't hurt herself.

"Audrey? Um. I don't..." she hiccuped, holding back a sob.

She didn't know anything. She didn't know *anything*. I couldn't believe how calm I was. "Your daughter. She's almost ten. You told me you were coming here for her."

Something cleared, just a little. I could see it happen. Her hands sank and she looked at me with some kind of recognition for the first time all night. "Tim?" she whispered.

There was a knock at the door. I was still holding her wrist, and she grabbed hold of me when I moved to get up. "It's okay. It's okay. I'm just gonna check who it is."

Peeling her hand away from mine- she was too frozen to the chair to do much- I crept for my suitcase and pulled out the 2 inch utility knife I'd stuffed into the pocket. It wasn't much, but it was the closest thing to a real weapon in the house when I'd gotten her call. I palmed it and walked as silently as I could to the door. Whoever it was knocked again. There was this scraping sound behind the door that had me gripping the knife harder. I took the handle.

"Tim, don't," Julia whispered behind me. "The wind in the hedgerows."

She wasn't making any sense. I opened the door and I was