In the Woods

by Robin Stevenson

  I clear my throat. “Um, tomorrow, maybe? After school?”

  “Oh, I have band.”

  She plays violin. Lots of people think band is for geeks, but no one who saw her play could ever think that again. Besides, Audrey isn’t the kind of girl who cares what anyone thinks. She and Dexter are well-suited that way, I guess. They’re both pretty friendly to everyone.

  As for me, I’d give anything to be that violin.

  “Um, maybe later then? After band?” I suggest. She’s probably wishing she got paired up with someone smarter. I don’t know if I should invite her to come here. The thought of her being in my bedroom is a bit freaky, but I’m not working at the kitchen table with Mom offering us cheese and crackers and listening to every word we say.

  “That’d be good,” she agrees. “You want to meet at the library or something?”

  Not my bedroom then. I wonder how Dexter feels about his girlfriend being paired up with me. McKluskey stuck him with Robert James, this obnoxious guy who is always punching everyone in the arm and laughing like a maniac. Hee haw, hee haw, snort, snort.

  “The library is fine with me,” I say.

  “Um, you name the time.”

  “Five?”

  “Sure.” There is nothing else we need to talk about, but the thought of hanging up depresses me. I don’t feel like being alone with my thoughts. “Want to grab something to eat with me before we start work?” I ask quickly. “We could meet at the sub place instead.”

  “Oh. Sure. Okay.”

  She sounds surprised. I guess she’s just thinking of this as a project. Not a chance to hang out. Duh, Cameron, you idiot. What did you expect?

  “Well, whatever,” I say quickly. “I don’t care either way.”

  There’s a brief silence. “A sub is fine,” Audrey says at last. Her voice is soft, careful. “Cam? Is everything okay?”

  Maybe I need to talk about it. And maybe I’m just seeing a way to keep her on the phone for a few more minutes. I don’t know. All I know is that for whatever reason, I start blurting out what happened. “Ahh…I had a weird night, Audrey. I was out at the lake, you know, past the picnic area?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And, um…I heard some crying. So I looked around and I couldn’t see anyone. And then I saw something sticking out from behind a tree. And I found, I found…” I can’t think of any way to say it that sounds anything but bizarre and melodramatic.

  “God. Tell me you didn’t find a dead body.”

  “No.” I wonder if she’s even going to believe me. “I found a baby.”

  “Jesus,” she says.

  “Yeah. I know. It was kind of intense.”

  “A baby.”

  “Yeah.” Talking about it is bringing it all back—that moment of pulling back the blanket and seeing that tiny blood-smeared head. It’s a video clip replaying in my mind. No, not a video. A series of stills.

  Freeze frame. The woods. Muddy, leaf-strewn ground. Flash of blue. My hands are slick with sweat, and I wipe them, one at a time, against my jeans.

  “Jesus. What did you do? Was it… was it alive?” Audrey’s voice is even softer and lower than usual, and her accent seems stronger. She says “jaysus” instead of jesus.

  “Yeah.” I tell her how I bundled the baby in my jacket and rode my bike and hitched to the hospital and got grilled by the social worker and the cops. The whole story. Well—not quite the whole story, I guess. Not the part about Katie.

  Chapter Eight

  When Katie and I were younger, we were pretty close. I guess most twins are. We fought sometimes, over stupid stuff: who got the larger scoop of ice cream, who had more room on the back seat of the car, whose turn it was to use the computer. She usually won. Katie’s always been a big girl—tall and broad-shouldered and big-boned—and I’ve always been a bit on the scrawny side. Mostly, though, we were best friends. Even after the boys and the girls drifted into separate groups and we stopped playing together at school, we still hung out together at home. She’d sneak into my room after Mom was in bed, and we’d play Monopoly and eat snacks we’d pilfered from the kitchen cupboards.

  I don’t know exactly when all that changed, but I know why. I just got tired of Katie always being so perfect. I got tired of the swimming medals in the fancy display case that Mom bought, tired of her bringing home report cards filled with As while I struggled not to drop below a Caverage. Most of all, I got tired of Mom going on about how proud she was of Katie. Katie’s so bright, she’d tell everyone. I always felt like there was an unspoken second sentence: Too bad Cameron’s so much like his dad.

  I don’t blame Katie for being Mom’s favorite, or for being so smart. I just stopped wanting to hang out with her so much.

  It’s hard to be around someone who never does anything wrong.

  After Audrey and I get off the phone, I lie on my bedroom floor and think about what to do. I know I should talk to Katie. The obvious thing to do is to just go and ask her what’s up and why she was so desperate for me to go out to the lake. I could just ask her if she knew about the baby and whose baby it is. I don’t know why I’m putting it off.

  Or maybe I do.

  As long as I don’t talk to her, I can pretend that all this has nothing to do with her. That finding the baby was just a weird fluke. A coincidence.

  The thing is, even though I’m trying not to think about it, I remember all these little things that have happened over the past few months. Things that didn’t mean much to me at the time but now, post-baby, are taking on an ugly kind of significance.

  Like Katie quitting the swim club four months ago. Swim club was her life.

  Like the way she’s been living in baggy sweatshirts all winter and spending so much time alone in her room. Not going out with her friends as much.

  Pretending she needs to study. Since when has Katie ever needed to study?

  And Mom—who never criticizes Katie—suggesting that if she wasn’t going to swim, perhaps she’d like a gym membership. You look like you might have put on a few pounds, honey.

  Of course, a baby is more than a few pounds, right? Still… I have to talk to her. I drag myself down the hall to her room and knock lightly.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me.” I push the door open and step inside. Katie’s sitting up in bed in her flannel pajamas, the blankets pulled up and a book balanced on her knees. Her dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and her brown eyes meet mine calmly. She looks the same as always, and for a second I feel a flood of relief. There’s just no way she could have had a baby. There’s no way she could have hidden an entire nine-month pregnancy.

  “What’s up?” she asks, all casual.

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you,” I say. “What was up with sending me out to the lake? What was up with me finding a goddamn baby there?”

  She frowns. “What are you talking about?”

  Christ. “Um, the baby? Remember? The one I found in the woods?”

  “Yeah. That sure was lucky.”

  “It wasn’t luck, Katie. You told me to go, remember?” I imitate her voice.

  “Just do this one thing for me, Cameron.

  Just this one little thing.” I stare at her.

  “So what was that about?”

  She looks at me blankly for a few seconds. Then she just reaches out to her bedside table and turns out her light. Her voice reaches me through the darkness.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  And if you don’t mind, I have to go to sleep.”

  “Katie,” I say, exasperated.

  She doesn’t answer. I stand there in the dark for a minute, and then I turn and let myself out.

  What the hell? Has she really flipped out? Or am I the one who is going crazy?

  Chapter Nine

  I leave early for school the next day, mostly because I don’t want to see Katie. I go for a long bike ride first, hoping the rhythm of pedaling and the sound of the wind will calm me do
wn, maybe even help me to figure it out. But it doesn’t. My thoughts just take me around in circles, and I don’t know what to do.

  I mean, if I’m right—if this baby is really Katie’s—no one is going to be happy about me digging up the truth.

  Probably it would be best to just forget about it.

  The trouble is, finding a baby in the woods isn’t the kind of thing you can just forget.

  Audrey spots me in the hallway before the first bell goes.

  “Cameron!” She grabs my arm. “Did you see the paper this morning?”

  I shake my head. “What’s it say? Was there an article about the baby?”

  “Yeah.” She hesitates.

  I look around, glance down the hall.

  No one seems to be staring at me. “It didn’t name me, did it? I didn’t talk to any reporters or anything.”

  “No. It just said a teenage boy on a bike ride.”

  “Well, good.” Audrey still seems to be looking at me kind of funny. “What is it?” I ask. “Do I have bike grease on my face or something?”

  “No.” She gives a little laugh.

  You know how in books sometimes a laugh is described as musical? I never knew what that meant until I met Audrey. Her laugh kills me.

  “What then?” I say.

  “Um…it’s just, in the article? It said that you went there, to the lake, because you met a girl there in the summer.”

  My ears and neck and cheeks are instantly red. “Oh. They put that in the paper?”

  “Yeah. They quoted the police officer. It was all about what a miracle it was that the baby was found alive.”

  “Oh,” I say again.

  There’s a long silence. Finally Audrey sighs. “I was just wondering… this is going to sound really egotistical… but I just wondered if…”

  “Yeah, I meant you.” She looks totally uncomfortable. I don’t want her to start telling me about how she has a boyfriend and all that, as if I didn’t already know.

  “Look, it’s not really a big thing. I needed to tell the cops something, and that was the first thing that came to mind.”

  “Oh. You mean it wasn’t true then?

  That wasn’t really why you were there?”

  “Not really,” I say.

  She looks down at the ground for a minute, and I wonder what she’s feeling.

  Confused, embarrassed, disappointed, relieved?

  “So why were you really there?” she asks.

  My heart starts racing. I want to talk about this with someone. No. I need to talk about this with someone. “The thing is…I might know whose baby it is,”

  I tell her.

  Her eyes open wide.

  “Promise me you won’t tell anyone,” I say.

  “I won’t,” she says.

  “I mean, really promise. Because this could really…”

  “Cam. I swear I won’t say a word to anyone,” she says.

  And so I tell her the whole story. The bell rings halfway through, but neither of us moves. When I’m done, she just makes a thoughtful little humming noise, and then she is quiet for a moment.

  I force a laugh. “Yeah. Sorry. You probably think I’m crazy, huh? I mean, it sounds crazy. No one could hide being pregnant, not from people they see every day.”

  “No. I’m glad you told me, Cam. And people do hide being pregnant. Remember that story last year, about the girl having the baby at the mall? Leaving it in the washroom? It was all over the papers.”

  I nod. Next year, people would be talking about the girl who left the baby in the woods, and only I would know whose baby it was.

  Audrey tilts her head to one side and frowns. “Anyway, why would Katie pretend she didn’t tell you to go there if she had nothing to do with it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.” She smiles at me and shakes her head. “So now what are you going to do?”

  “Do?” I ask.

  “About the baby.”

  “About the baby?” I sound like an idiot.

  An echo. A parrot. I’m feeling extremely weird. I should probably not be near Audrey while I’m in this state of mind.

  “Yeah. Are you going to visit her? See how she’s doing?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me. “Um, you think I could? It’s not like I’m family or anything.”

  “Sure you are,” she says. “If you’re right—if that baby is Katie’s, she’s your niece. She’s your mom’s granddaughter.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me either.

  “I’d go with you,” Audrey says. “You know, if you want company.”

  I want her company, for sure. Whether I want it enough to go back to the hospital is another question. “I don’t know. I guess I could call the social worker and find out if we can,” I say. “I don’t want to make her more suspicious though.”

  “I think it’s natural that the person who found the baby would be curious.”

  I nod. “Maybe. I mean, I’d like to at least know that the baby is doing okay.”

  “Call then,” she says. She looks like she’s about to say more, but then she shakes her head.

  “What?” I ask.

  “What you told the cops…about meeting a girl there…”

  “Yeah?”

  “If that really did mean something to you…our conversation out at the lake… how come you never called me?” She tilts her head to one side. “How come you just cut me dead when I saw you at school in September?”

  “I didn’t.”

  She shrugs. “Seemed like it to me.”

  It had never crossed my mind that she’d want me to call. If I’d avoided her, it was just in self-defense. I don’t much like rejection. “You could have called me,” I say. “Anyway, you started going out with Dexter.”

  “Whatever,” she says. “I guess we better get to class.”

  “Yeah.” I watch her walk away. Then I yell after her. “Hey! Are we still on for after school?”

  She pivots on one foot and flashes me a smile. “We are, Cameron. Because

  I believe in giving people a second chance.”

  I spend the whole morning wondering exactly what she meant by that.

  Chapter Ten

  I’m heading outside at lunchtime when I see Katie. She’s standing by the steps with Nikki and Luba, and she gives me a casual wave. Normally I’d wave back and walk on by, but today I stop and join them. Just like last night, I’m struck by how totally normal Katie looks. She’s wearing jeans and a bright red fleece jacket, and she’s laughing at something one of her friends has said. I feel a flood of relief. Not Katie. God, my brain is like a freaking yo-yo. Katie, not Katie. I eye Nikki and Luba and wonder if there is any possible way that Katie could be covering for either of them.

  “How’s it going?” I ask.

  Katie looks at her friends and then back at me. “Fine.”

  Nikki grins at me. “What’s up, Cameron? How was your weekend?”

  “Uh, Katie didn’t tell you?” If Katie had nothing to do with this baby, there’s just no way she wouldn’t be gossiping about this.

  “Tell us what?” Luba tucks her short reddish curls behind her ears and sticks her hands into her coat pockets.

  I speak slowly, trying to watch all three of their faces for any flicker of emotion. Searching for any trace of fear or guilt. “Katie didn’t tell you what I found?”

  Katie’s face is ghost white. Even her lips are pale. She gives a tiny shake of her head. A plea.

  An admission.

  I grab Katie’s arm. “We need to talk.”

  “Jeez, Cameron. What’s your problem?” Luba sounds annoyed.

  I don’t answer. I pull Katie away from her friends. “If you don’t want me to say anything, then come with me,”

  I say. “Now. I want to know what’s going on.”

  Katie follows me over to the side of the building and leans against the brick wall. “I’m sorry, Cameron.”

  “Sorry? Christ, Katie. Just tell me, okay?�
��

  “You know already.”

  “Was it…are you covering up for someone else? Or…”

  She shakes her head. “There’s no one else.”

  There is a long silence. I can see all the usual people milling around, but I feel like they’re all far away. Even the sound of their chatter suddenly seems muffled. It’s like there’s a thick glass dome over the two of us, and everyone else is outside it. I wonder if it will always feel like this, as long as we have this secret.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” Katie says.

  I still can’t quite believe it. “That was your baby,” I say bluntly. “You…you gave birth to that baby.”

  She stares at the ground and doesn’t answer.

  I know, but I need to hear it from her. “Katie. I’m right, aren’t I?”

  She doesn’t look up, but she gives the tiniest nod.

  “How?” I ask. “I mean, how could you do that? Leave it there?” It doesn’t make sense to me that she would have picked the woods out by the lake. Not after all those trips there with Brian the Pervert. Then again, in a twisted kind of way, maybe it does. Maybe, for Katie, the woods are a place for terrible secrets.

  She starts to cry softly, silent tears tracing lines down her cheeks.

  “How could you have hidden it from us that you were, you know… pregnant?”

  “It wasn’t all that hard,” she whispers.

  “I didn’t even know I was until right at the end.”

  That makes no sense at all. I mean, you don’t get a period for nine months and your belly gets all big and there’s a baby kicking you from inside? Hello?

  And it’s not like Katie is some dumb kid who doesn’t know the facts of life.

  After the enormous lie of a hidden pregnancy and an abandoned baby, this lie shouldn’t seem like a big deal, but for some reason it gets right under my skin.

  I keep seeing that tiny baby lying there alone in the woods. Maybe I should be more sympathetic, but what I feel is fury. I want to grab Katie and shake her, slap her face, make her wake up to what she has done.

  “You’re sick,” I tell her. “The baby could have died.”

  “I knew you’d find it.”