Free Call Me Home by Megan Kruse

in the wet dark, there was something about it that wasn’t quite right. To take something alive and change it completely.
    He got to his feet, shaking his hands in the cold, kneading his numb fingers together. The deep woods here were not so different from the woods he’d grown up in. Idaho was drier, but it had the same density, the same feeling of roiling, tangled life. Thick bark, dense moss, roots that wrapped their arms around the earth. A moth at the window, a mouse at the door. In Washington, the double-wide they’d lived in on Firetrail Hill had been likea live thing. The cat left a squirrel twitching on the kitchen floor; mushrooms pushed up the carpet in the back room; a raccoon let himself in the front door. For a few years, the whole forest was a treasure chest. Even now his memories were flawed by fantasy – here, he remembered, a witch came out of the tangle of weeds. He and Lydia sitting in the old rowboat rocked by the hand of a giant. The forest floor moving beneath them, spinning them, a leaf trembling in his hand. He had that same feeling now, in the blue dark, dizzy and sick, but still the forest was all around him and he was glad for it. He took deep gulps of air. Scraps of last night were tossing in his foggy head – cigarette butts, spilled beer, the throaty laughter of the men. He’d followed them around the room, through the music and close heat, swinging his arms, pulling out his wallet. He turned back up into the woods, even as above the lake, the sky began to lighten.

Lydia
    Women’s Shelter, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 2010
    FIRST, GATHER EVERYTHING. THE CREDIT CARDS AND your birth certificate. The bank statements. The social security cards. If they are gone, it’s because he has taken them. This will make things harder, but not impossible. You will be lighter that way. You will make everything new. Go to a place where no one knows you. The closer you are to home, the more careful you will have to be. Close to home, you must walk quickly through the streets with your eyes on the ground. The world is big. It’s best if you keep going.
    We drove for four days to get to New Mexico, through the mountains, the red Utah canyons, the flat sand. I watched the lava fields and they were ghostly as the moon. At the shelter there was a room with a sink and a tall window I couldn’t see out of. We sat for hours in a little room talking to the caseworkers.
    â€œHe could find us anywhere,” my mother said. “He could always do that, track you down in seconds. We’d make these plans and it was like he knew before we’d even left.”
    It was a small town, they told us. He knew the car. He might have had surveillance equipment. They told us that it’s different, now.
    You will need to sell your car. Choose something that he wouldn’t expect. Choose something that doesn’t look like you. Try not to think about times you felt that you were being watched. Instead, think about the life you want. Imagine that soon you will have a new house, and allof your new friends will come to visit. They’ll be the best friends you’ve ever had, even better than the ones you had before.
    We would stay for two months at the shelter in New Mexico, before leaving again for our new life. “Texas,” my mother said. “But not Fannin. That’s where I met your father.”
    In the caseworker’s office, we called my mother’s mother, who I’d never met. Her voice through the receiver was as clear as if she were in the room.
    â€œAmy?” The voice was scared. “Amy. Where are you?”
    â€œShh,” my mother said. “Shh. Everything is all right.”
    â€œAmy, listen to me,” the voice said. “You come here. You live with me.”
    â€œIt’s not safe. People know us there. People know G there.” Even in the shelter, she wouldn’t say his name.
    â€œExactly,” the voice said. “If they