He Started It

by Samantha Downing

  ‘She drugged us,’ I said.

  He shook his head, looking like he was about to puke. ‘She’s a bitch. She’s always been a bitch.’ Eddie stood up and ran back into the woods.

  Portia lay down and closed her eyes. ‘Sick,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ Grandpa said. ‘I’ll get you some bread.’

  Nikki had done a lot to Portia on the trip. She had used her as a pawn, a weapon, an ally – whatever suited her needs at the time. But Grandpa had tied her up, for Christ’s sake. Nikki had to do what she did.

  Grandpa was the asshole. Everything Nikki did was a reaction to that.

  I grabbed my bag to see if she had taken her stuff. She had given me some of her makeup because I had helped her put it on while her hands were tied, and it was still in the bag.

  I also had the camera – the first one, the one we used to take pictures of ourselves. Eddie still had the second; it never left his pocket.

  One thing had been added to my bag: Nikki’s rainbow shirt. The one I always wanted was now mine, yet I wasn’t happy about it. I didn’t want it like that.

  Nikki had also taken something. What I didn’t have were my ashtrays, the two I had stolen from the motels, the two I had kept when Grandpa took the others. Both were gone, along with the shirt I had wrapped around them.

  The button is gone.

  The old one with the tarnished gold color, it’s gone. At first, I think that I’m just missing it, that it must be here, but it isn’t. I realized this as we repacked our bags before heading out into the woods, to the campsite, and now it’s all I can think about. That damn button appeared and then disappeared without any explanation.

  Felix doesn’t know anything about it, so if he did go through my bag I doubt he’d take an old button. He’d take the cigarettes instead – or at least wonder why I have them.

  It would be easy to blame Portia since we shared a room so many times, but Eddie had access as well. There were plenty of times I left my bag in the car to use the restroom or go into the store. Anyone could have taken it.

  I think about this as we walk single file into the woods, even as I continue to argue with Felix. ‘You bought way too much stuff for one night.’

  ‘You buy too much stuff all the time,’ he says, half turning around to wink at me.

  Now that we have our camping equipment, he’s back to the pretend fighting, and he’s really bad at it. I still wink back.

  ‘Time out,’ Portia yells from behind us. ‘Hold the bickering until we get there.’

  I don’t say anything else. All I hear now is the clink of the bottles in Portia’s bag.

  The walk isn’t a long one. One minute we’re in the middle of the woods, and the next we’re in a small clearing in front of the water. This isn’t one of the formal campgrounds, so there are no cabins, outhouses, or anything that looks like civilization.

  The memories come back. I can see exactly how it looked then: where each of our sleeping bags were located, and off to the right, the woods where I last saw Nikki.

  It makes me feel like crying all over again.

  ‘Well, this is nice,’ Felix says, walking around like he’s checking out another motel room. ‘I don’t see any bear droppings or anything.’

  Lovely.

  Portia looks at him like he’s crazy.

  ‘You didn’t look for bear droppings last time?’ Felix says.

  ‘No,’ Eddie says.

  Felix whistles. He’s good at it. ‘You guys are so lucky to be alive.’

  ‘All right,’ Eddie says, cutting off anyone who thinks about continuing this conversation. ‘Here’s how we’re going to set this up.’

  He barks out orders about where everything should go, then Felix contradicts him, and I feel like hitting both of them with my can of bug spray.

  Portia motions for me to follow her into the woods. She grabs one of her orange juice bottles and brings it along. We go just far enough that we hear them talk but they can’t hear us whisper.

  ‘Bears?’ she says, unscrewing the top. She has premixed vodka with the orange juice. The smell hits me from a foot away.

  ‘He’s just being … Felix. That’s how he is.’

  ‘Huh.’ She takes a swig of the drink and nods. ‘How long have you been with him?’

  ‘So many years.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘You don’t like him?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, he’s fine, I guess. A little quirky, maybe.’

  Quirky. Yes, I would say he’s quirky. And he can be uptight, finicky, and completely overorganized. And when you least expect it, he’ll slam his fist on the dashboard. Maybe into other things, too. Maybe I’ve just never seen it.

  ‘It’s weird being back here,’ I say, changing the subject. Everywhere I look, I imagine us here as kids.

  ‘I guess,’ Portia says.

  ‘You don’t remember.’

  She looks around, like she’s trying to conjure it up in her mind. ‘I remember Nikki being tied up. I remember the ghost stories and the marshmallows and the cocoa.’ She stops and stares at the campsite in front of us. ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She starts to say something. Stops. Starts again. ‘Sometimes I think I remember but I don’t know if it’s real or I’m just making it up.’

  Felix looks at us through the trees and I wave him off, letting him know that we’re fine. He doesn’t have to come save us from any bears. ‘Like what?’ I say, taking a gulp of the strongest drink I’ve had in a while. ‘What do you remember?’

  ‘I think she said goodbye to me,’ Portia says. ‘I swear I can hear her whisper it.’

  I nod. ‘I bet she did. I bet she said goodbye to you.’

  Portia tilts the bottle and downs a lot more than a sip. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and chuckles. ‘I was joking,’ she says. ‘Nikki never said goodbye to me or anyone else. She was nothing but a selfish bitch.’

  I feel like I’ve been slapped.

  ‘But you loved her,’ I say. ‘You worshipped her.’

  ‘Beth, she tricked me into drugging everyone. Into drugging myself.’ Portia scoffs and shakes her head. ‘Nikki was a horrible person.’

  She walks away, leaving me in the woods by myself.

  We don’t use sticks for the marshmallows. Not this time, not with Felix around. He bought a set of metal spears made just for roasting marshmallows, because ‘I’m not eating anything off a stick because a bear could’ve peed on it.’

  Once the campfire is lit, we heat up our store-bought soup and eat it with our store-bought bread. For dessert, we roast marshmallows while drinking Portia’s screwdrivers. I drink very little because the orange juice doesn’t mix well with the marshmallows. I also can’t afford to have another memory blackout. Once in my life was enough. Bad things always happen during blackouts.

  ‘Your turn, Beth,’ Eddie says. He was finished telling a story about a ghostly fisherman who rises from the lake. ‘Don’t make it stupid, either.’

  He didn’t set the bar very high. Eddie’s story was about as generic is it gets.

  ‘Once upon a time, on a dark and moonless night …’ I ignore Portia rolling her eyes. ‘There was a group of teenage boys who wanted to have some fun. Well, really they wanted to get laid, but since they were all virgins and didn’t have any prospects, they had to come up with something else.

  ‘They decided to break into their high school, because where else would teenage boys go? One of them says there’s a broken window latch in his math class, so that’s where they go first. It doesn’t take much to get in, because the school is old and budgets have been slashed and who pays attention to window latches? Not this school.’

  Eddie clears his throat. I take it as a sign the story is stupid, but I don’t care. I have a point to make.

  ‘They went straight to the teacher’s lounge, just to see what it was like. None of the students were allowed inside, and as far as the boys knew, no one had ever tried to get
in. The lounge was like the black hole of secrets, and the boys wanted to be the first to know what they were.

  ‘They were surprised to find the door unlocked. All these years, and the damn thing was unlocked. They walked right in, assuming it was empty. It was not.

  ‘A whole group of teachers stood in the center of the lounge, huddled together like they were gathered around a campfire. Except they weren’t. Instead, they were all smoking. The air was so thick it was hard to breathe. The teachers didn’t see the boys until one of them coughed.

  ‘“Oh crap,”’ the boy said.

  ‘All of the teachers turned around. Their eyes were hollowed out. They all had grey skin and sunken cheeks. Like they were dead.’ I glance at Felix, whose expression doesn’t change. ‘One of the boys pointed at the teachers.

  ‘“They’re … floating,” he said.

  ‘He was right. The teachers hovered about a foot off the ground, and their feet looked like wisps of smoke.

  ‘One of the boys said, “They’re ghosts.”’

  ‘The comment made all the teachers start puffing harder on their cigarettes. They also started moving closer to the boys.’

  ‘Do ghosts smoke?’ Eddie said.

  I ignored him. ‘The boys took off running back down the hall, but the smoke followed. They turned and found another hall filled with smoke, but they plowed forward, into the abyss.’

  ‘One boy screamed, “Screw the alarm” and they ran toward the front doors of the school. The first boy burst through the doors, setting off the alarm. All the others followed behind, but the boy who came out last was never the same. He started smoking that very night. Didn’t stop, refused to even try. Within a month, he got kicked out of school for smoking on campus. The boy wouldn’t do anything except smoke; he wouldn’t go to any other school, wouldn’t see his friends.’

  ‘His parents had to put him in an addiction center, but he was kicked out for smoking. Next they put him in a psych hospital. He’s still there, still locked away in a room. He doesn’t say a word. Never has.’

  I pause to glance at Felix again. Still no expression, no reaction to my story about his new habit.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Portia says.

  ‘All the boy does,’ I say, ‘is smoke.’

  Everyone stares at me.

  ‘Was that supposed to be scary?’ Eddie says.

  ‘It was supposed to be creepy,’ I say.

  No one responds.

  Portia wiggles like she’s shivering. ‘Jesus Christ. Who the hell thinks of smoking ghosts?’ She stands up from her rock, brushes off her butt. ‘Now I have to use the facilities. If I scream, it’s because I saw a smoking ghost.’

  ‘What did you think?’ I say to Felix.

  ‘Not bad, I guess.’

  Dick.

  I roll my eyes and stand up, walking into the woods after Portia. Maybe Felix is still pretending to fight, or maybe he really is as quirky as Portia says.

  She doesn’t hear me coming because the guys launch into a loud, drunken conversation. I see her kneeling down and assume she’s taking care of business. Instead, I see her slip something out of her pocket and hide it beneath a tree, under some leaves.

  I wait until she’s done before walking closer.

  ‘Hey,’ I say.

  ‘Oh hey.’ She whips around, the guilt in her eyes as clear as the nighttime sky.

  ‘You forgot the toilet paper,’ I say.

  She smiles. ‘Yeah, I just realized that.’

  We go back to get some and I make a mental note about that tree, so I can come back to it.

  After we go to bed, I wait an appropriate amount of time for everyone to fall asleep. Half an hour, at least, and then I get up as quietly as I can. Using only my phone as a light, I make my way into the woods, toward the tree. It isn’t hard to find. Earlier I noted a particular branch it had, the way it bent out like an arm with a broken elbow. Just as I’m about to kneel down, I hear him.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Felix.

  Goddamn Felix.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I say. ‘You scared the hell out of me.’ Truth.

  ‘I heard you get up and thought you needed to pee, but you didn’t take any toilet paper,’ he says.

  ‘So you followed me out here instead of saying something back there?’

  He nods, like he doesn’t understand the problem, and it’s so irritating. All I want to do is see what Portia hid out here, but I can’t get away from my husband.

  Who is probably awake because he wants to smoke.

  I do not get to check what Portia left in the woods. Instead, I have to pretend to pee and then go back to my sleeping bag, where I’m afraid to move. Almost like I’m being held captive by my overprotective husband.

  And I don’t like it one bit.

  The music. I hear it again, that same song by Garbage. In the middle of the wilderness, that music wakes me up.

  It’s not loud and booming like it was last time. Now it’s faint, like an alarm clock ringing in another part of a house. I glance around. The moon gives off enough light so it’s not pitch dark. Everyone else is asleep. I slip out of my bag and stand up, checking to make sure I can see everyone’s head and not just a lump in the sleeping bag. No one is missing this time.

  The music stops.

  It starts again.

  When I move, I step on a rock. I bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from screaming.

  I put on my shoes and grab the flashlight Felix bought.

  At the edge of the woods I turn it on, scanning through the trees. Nothing. No one is there, no movement, nothing but the music. I take a step forward because, yes, I can be an idiot. An idiot who wants to find her sister.

  The music grows louder with each step. The same song, over and over, on a never-ending loop – sort of like this road trip. Appropriate. Ironic. You know what I mean. It still doesn’t stop me from going into the dark woods alone.

  Because at some point, we have to know. We have to find out.

  So I move forward, clearing the leaves with my toe before I step down. Making as little noise as possible to not wake the others. I can’t hide from whoever is out here, because I’m carrying a damn flashlight.

  About thirty feet in, the music is loud enough to know I’m close.

  ‘Nikki?’ I say. Not a whisper, but not too loud.

  No answer.

  No movement, no breathing other than my own. I’m alone. I know this, I can feel it. All I have to do is find whatever is playing the music. A little digging through the bushes is all it takes.

  A phone, the generic prepaid kind. The same song, the only song, plays on a loop. It’s the alarm going off again and again, not stopping until someone turns it off.

  I should’ve known Nikki wouldn’t just step out and reveal herself. She’s not done playing yet. But at least I know she’s still right here with us.

  I turn off the phone, making the music stop.

  Now I have a chance to see what Portia hid, but first I look back to make sure Felix is still in his sleeping bag.

  I go to the tree and kneel down, rummaging under the bush at the base of it. This takes longer than I expect. It seems Portia was shoving something into the dirt, burying something, not just placing it on the ground. Eventually, I find something that doesn’t feel natural. Well, not anymore. It feels like leather.

  A wallet.

  A billfold, actually – the kind men often carry in their back pockets. This one isn’t empty, either. It’s stuffed so full of credit cards it barely folds in half. I pull the first one out and look at the name.

  Ian P. Welton

  No idea who that is. I pull out the next one.

  Johnathan Ricker

  One by one, I take the cards out. All the cards have male names, and I wonder if she stole them back home, from customers at the strip club, or if she’s been doing it on this trip. Not that it matters. She needed to get rid of them, and the woods are a convenient place to make something di
sappear.

  Portia really is a thief, and she steals more than candy bars now.

  And if she gets caught, she won’t inherit a thing.

  Two Days Left

  Felix is up in time to see the sunrise. I’m up at the same time, which is a surprise to me, considering how little sleep I got after my walk through the woods.

  At home, this is normal for us. Most mornings we get up at the same time to go walking, then we get ready for work and drive together to International United. This is our routine, our way of life.

  Now everything feels different.

  For example, the day before we left on this trip started like any other. Felix was up first. He was already changing into his walking clothes when I woke up.

  ‘I’ll come, too,’ I said, sitting up in bed.

  ‘You don’t have to. Get some extra sleep, if you want.’

  I sat there, knowing I should walk because I would be sitting in a car for the next two weeks, but also wanting to sleep. And here was my sweet kind husband telling me to stay in bed, like he knew that’s what I wanted to do.

  Wrong. I was completely wrong. My husband wanted to go out alone because he wanted to smoke. He didn’t give a shit about what I wanted or if I needed more sleep.

  And what about all those times he offered to go out when we needed something? A run to the store, to the cash machine, to get gas … was he being nice? Or was he trying to find a moment alone to feed his nicotine habit?

  Then there’s the big question, the one I still haven’t been able to answer. What else is he hiding? Besides, apparently, a temper. It’s so clear to me now, ever since that slam of his fist. Maybe I’ve missed all the signs that spouses miss, but everyone else can see.

  Jesus Christ, I’ve become the worst kind of wife. The stupid one.

  This is what’s going through my mind as I heat up the kettle and make us some instant coffee. Portia and Eddie sleep right through it.

  I motion toward the woods with my hand and whisper, ‘Want to take a walk?’

  He shrugs, as if he doesn’t care, but I bet he does. He wants that morning cigarette.