With a loud shriek, she woke as Niko shook her shoulder.
Incoherent warnings to back off, that the sky was falling, and that a chicken was coming to eat her left her cracked lips as she hurried and scrambled to stand. Warding Niko back with wild waves of her arms, she stared at both of us like a crazed woman, spooked no doubt from being woken by a stranger but also the delusions and hallucinations in her mind.
“We only want to help,” I said in the calmest and firmest voice that I could manage, holding my hand out.
“Help.” She went still and narrowed her eyes. “Help. Help. Help.” It sounded like a bird cooing.
“Yes. Help.”
She bobbed her head, nodding rapidly as she reached into the pile of her things she’d stacked behind her head as a pillow on the bench. “She help. Help. Help.”
Niko glanced at me, cautious. We both stayed alert, watching her as she pulled out an old model of a flip phone.
“Did you call for help on that phone?” I asked, pointing at it.
Just as quickly as she had nodded, she shook her head.
“Do you know who called for help on that phone?”
Once more, she bobbed her head in a rush of nods. “Help. Help. Help.” A crazed smile crossed over her face as she gathered her things and began pushing a cart.
At first, I worried she was walking away. As she kept chanting that cooing repeat ofhelp, it seemed more like she was guiding us somewhere else in the park.
Niko and I followed. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking, but I was losing hope that this was a lead. Maybe she’d dialed a random number, just using the phone as a toy.
Moments later, though, when another bench came into view, I changed my mind.
Lightly covered with snow, this bench looked the same as the one this woman had been sleeping on.
Another person lay here, too. A smaller, shorter person.
Maybe it was just someone sleeping.
Or dead.
With stark awareness of how hard life could be, I was sure that many homeless perished out here in the cold.
“Help. Help. Help.” The grizzly old woman kept chanting like a bird as we walked toward the bench.
I didn’t know if she intended to show us something or if this was a delusional pastime in her addled mind. Nothing else was out here this way. Just the bench with a prone person under blankets. Hell, maybe it wasn’t a person but strategically placed bags to resemble the shape of a human.
Niko approached it first, still keeping a lookout as I lingered by the woman. So far, she was the only tentative link to Raisa’s old number being called.
“Alexsei. Here!” Niko reached the person, pulling back a blanket from where a face might be. Whatever he saw had to be a sign of hope. That limited peek gave him such an optimistic tone.
Something that sounded like success.
I jogged forward, ignoring the older woman as I joined Niko. He continued to pull back layers of filthy blankets. It was a young woman lying there. She was so pale, so still, that at the first glance, I was confident she was dead, no longer among the living but a corpse.
Maybe she had blue eyes. I wouldn’t know until she opened them.Ifshe opened them. Hinged on the hope this could be Kalina, I watched as Niko put two fingers under her nose.
“She’s alive,” he reported. “She’s breathing.”
I nodded at Niko.
If she had been lying out here for a while in this cold, there was no time to lose. Yet, before I acted on a rash impulse, I strained to determine if this was who we were looking for. It was impossible. Based on the bruises littering her face, it was clear she’d been attacked. Beaten. Any number of injuries could’ve rendered her unconscious.
But I couldn’t be a hero for a random stranger.
