AILD - pharmacy

She looked lost, standing in the corner of the pharmacy, pausing before she went in.

I walked up to her and she turned her gaze to me; a slow, steady, pedantic look. I saw a placid confusion settle in her expression; whether it was a slow panic or already a jaded look of acceptance, I couldn’t tell.

As I came closer to her, I could see that her legs were streaked with mud. Her clothes reeked a little, of stale water and dirt and God knows what else.

I didn’t know this town at all. But I couldn’t help but ask, “Do you need help?”

She kept staring at me with a sullen, steady gaze. “I didn’t get it,” she said.

I walked up, closer to her. “Get what?”

“He said I could get it at the drugstore.” She held up a crumpled bill in her hand. “Ten bucks. That’s all he said it would be.”

“Where is he?” I asked. “Lafe?”

She looked down at the ground and shrugged. “He said it would work,” she whispered. “And now it’s all my fault. I have to get the medicine. I have to fix this.” She shook her head. “I can’t have it.”

I took one look at the instinctive, protective hand over her stomach and I knew. I saw the flash of shame that clouded her slow, panicking expression; I caught the hesitant movements, the unwillingness to leave the drugstore even though it seemed as if she had clearly been refused.

“It’s my fault,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. I just did what Lafe told me.”  

“How did you know? Did you tell your mother?”

“She’s dead. I just woke up one day and knew. No one else knows.” She stuffed the money away, her fingers trembling. “No one except Darl. And he’d better not tell anyone.”

Her voice broke and my heart sank, just a little. I looked at her, trembling on the steps of the pharmacy, her palms clutched in tight fists around the bill; motherless, clueless, and frightened. I swallowed. “You shouldn’t be here alone.”

“I’m not alone,” she said. “I got my family.”

But I took one look at her and knew. She, too, feared her family; for knowing too much and not knowing what to do about it; she relied on them to travel and yet couldn’t trust them. She was only seventeen; too young to travel alone but old enough to bear the consequences of her actions. She feared going back into the pharmacy and bearing the sharp, scrutinizing words from Moseley; she feared being cast out for what she had done. I knew what it meant to self-exile, to be estranged from the family. I knew, too, that it had stemmed from a single moment in time. For her, it was the moment she realized she had missed a month; for me, it was the night in the cabin in the northern woods of Alaska, where I kissed a girl for the first and last time and my reputation crumbled around me.