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“Are you okay?” he asked—using his “outdoor voice,” as a grade-school teacher would have put it.

I slapped his arm hard enough to smart. “What the hell is wrong with you? Shut up!”

“Sorry! I’m sorry. ”

“Not half as sorry as you’re going to be,” I grumbled, closing the car door so the dome light would extinguish itself. “What do you think you’re doing? Christ, my car. Holy shit, Malachi, look at what you’ve done to my car. ”

“Technically, I think it’s the tree that did the damage—unless you’ve got a dent in your bumper from where you struck me. ” He sulked a feeble defense, but if he thought he could make me feel guilty he was barking up a very wrong tree.

“My front bumper is fine and I barely nicked you. But this?” I ran my hands along the damaged panel. “This is not fine. This is not fine at all. ”

“You can’t even see it. Come on, let’s get out of here. You can check it out when it’s light. Look, your headlight isn’t even broken—just the blinker on the side. ”

Off in the distance I thought I heard a car’s engine. I waved him quiet and listened. The last thing we needed was a good Samaritan.

“Eden,” he whined my name, making the “E” too long.

“Shut up. I think someone’s coming. ” But even as I said it, the rumble faded and I knew I was mistaken.

“We have to get out of here. ”

“I know. But first I need to make sure my car is in one piece enough to drive. What were you thinking? I mean seriously? I thought you were supposed to be over at the signs. ” I opened my car door again, kneeling on the front seat to reach into the glove compartment for my flashlight.

“I couldn’t make it. I tried, I swear. But I couldn’t do it. I got scared. Kitty was talking about a man wandering around outside near the river, and I thought I saw him. Except…”

“Except what?” I kicked my door closed again and snapped the light on.

This time he actually whispered. “Except I think maybe it wasn’t a man. I think it was something else. ”

“Really?” I asked, more out of conversational habit than real curiosity. I was preoccupied with examining the damage. “Oh, my poor little Nugget,” I breathed, running my hands along the battered metal.

“Really. I don’t think he saw me, though. Or maybe he did, I don’t know. If he did see me, he didn’t care that I was there. He freaked me out, Eden. I started running, but I got turned around in the dark, and I slid down the bank into the river. That’s when I got bitten by the snake. ”

I glanced up at him and pointed the light at his torso. Only then did I notice that his pants were wet, and one of his arms was black with mud. “The world’s most harmless copperhead?”

“It might’ve been a copperhead. You don’t know. ”

“Where did it bite you?”

He held out his muddy elbow and pointed at a spot just below it. I saw some scraping and a bit of dirty blood, but nothing that cried out to me, “festering snakebite. ”

“I think you’ll live,” I told him. “But that’s only in the event that I decide not to kill you. Look at this!”

I aimed the light at my front tire. Though the car’s frame appeared, in my limited inspection, to be all right, the rim of the wheel-well was bent sharply inward. “If we try to leave with it like this, we’re going to have a blowout. ”

Malachi rubbed his wounded arm, then rubbed at his thigh too. “What do we do?”

Again I thought I heard an engine, or voices, or some indication that we weren’t alone. I flipped the light off and grabbed his unhurt arm, pulling him back behind the car. As the moments passed, I began to feel stupid. No cars came along, and no inquisitive neighbors came out to investigate our crash.

Surely someone had heard us; but then again we seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. The closest sign of human habitation was the hospital, and we were half a mile away from it yet.

“Do you hear that?” I asked him, bringing my voice as low and soft as I could and still be heard.

“No?”

“Me neither. ”

I didn’t hear anything. Not a sound. No traffic, but no insects or birds, either. I fancied I could maybe hear the river if I listened hard enough, or maybe it was a different rushing hum and I was only mistaking it for water.