After the Woods

by Kim Savage

  He holds out the joint. “Want a hit?”

  I shake my head wildly.

  He shrugs. “Might help.”

  He takes softer drags, puffing and sucking, intimate sounds that make my privates clench. I’m hit with a wave of revulsion. I stare hard at the outlines of trees and hills, trying to get back into my head, match their silhouettes with the woods I know in daylight. The fire between us burns a low flame, but it’s enough for me to imagine my rescuers will see it and come. How long ago did Liv run away? Seven, eight, nine hours? Why hasn’t anyone come?

  “This was a mistake,” he says.

  I shift in my spot. If I am a mistake, I am less valuable to him. That feels dangerous.

  “If you free me, you could go back to your game,” I say, my voice small.

  He giggles, teeth flashing in the dark like little pearls.

  I force myself to mirror his laugh, but I sound like a hyena.

  “What are you laughing at?” he says.

  I stop laughing. “I’m not.”

  “Oh, what, was that an owl?” He laughs again, uncontrollably this time. “Was that an owl laughing in the woods?”

  I become very still, trying to make myself shapeless so he’ll forget I am a GIRL, because that feels the most dangerous of all.

  If only there were stars to count. Math, then.

  1,133 divided by 2 equals 566.5.

  8,349,179 divided by 7 equals 1,192,739.8 … 6.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” he sputters, taking a last drag and flicking the orange stub into the darkness.

  “Yeah!” I say, unconvincing.

  “Here we are, you and me. Not what I expected. But something.”

  * * *

  “What happened to you?” Liv cries, her hand out, warding off others.

  In nine months of e-mails, she never did ask me what happened in the woods.

  Ms. Dean mouths my name in slow motion. A ring of pale faces crowd in over my crumpled body, their voices drifting, but I make out “swallow tongue” and “orange juice” and “so sad.” Liv plants herself to avoid being shoved. Now she’s arguing with the guy next to her. Ms. Dean’s mouth moves again, but I can’t hear her over my own breaths, loud as shotgun blasts.

  I sit up. “I think I have a fever.”

  Ms. Dean dings my forehead with the nugget on her college ring. “You’re burning up. Off to the nurse.” She yanks me up light as paper and tosses me toward the exit.

  The pack collapses, and Liv runs after me, grabbing my arm and whispering close to my ear. “It was like you went somewhere else. Where did you go?”

  I look at her meaningfully.

  “My God. You’re remembering.”

  “Lately, yes.”

  Ms. Dean turns to the crowd. “Nothing to see here but a girl with Kuru disease. Lapin, back in line. Make teams for dodgeball!”

  I smile lamely at the floor. There’s something grounding about having a gym teacher straight from central casting screaming about dodgeball, the purest form of Darwinian selection in any high school. Shane Cuthbert, slouched on a bleacher until now, rises on loose legs and strolls over. He wears the required sweats and a ratty T-shirt with a smiley face, its eyes Xs, its tongue hanging out. Some girls think Shane is hot, with his inky hair and unnaturally blue, Siberian husky eyes, but never me.

  He stands behind Liv, thumbs jammed deep in his pockets. He’s always had a creepy thing for her. I glare at him above her shoulder.

  Liv’s eyes flicker all over my face.

  “A-hem,” Shane says, his nasal pitch cartoony.

  Liv spins and he catches her wrist in the air, grinning, his eyes popping white.

  “What do you want, Shane?” I say his name like a swear.

  “Nothing you can give me, nutters. Weren’t you heading to the nurse?”

  I check Ms. Dean’s coordinates. She’s already heading back toward us, overdeveloped forearms pumping.

  “Whatever you’ve got, it better not be contagious. I don’t want my girl here catching it,” he says, snaking his hand around Liv’s waist.

  I wait for Liv to twist away. Instead, she giggles.

  My girl?

  “Liv?” I rasp.

  Shane’s lank hair brushes Liv’s cheek as he whispers something in her ear. She pulls away with a sour look, which he catches. She smooths it over with a quick smile. “You have a filthy mind,” she says, swatting his chest with a fist. He explodes in a pratfall, sharp knees and elbows, a bug on its back. He grabs her ankle. She squeals and tries to shake him off, like it’s the funniest thing in the world, so funny to get grabbed, but he’ll let go before the ankle snaps, because it’s Shane Cuthbert and not Donald Jessup and the panic lacing round my throat can stop now.

  I’ve known Shane since kindergarten. He lives on the other side of Shiverton, where the walkways to tidy houses are lined with pansies in the summer and chrysanthemums in the fall. Every so often, you pass by one where the windows are glazed yellow and a car sits on the lawn. Donald Jessup lived in one of those houses. His mother still does. Shane’s house is pretty nice, and by all accounts he’s lucky to have it, because he was adopted from a Russian orphanage where prostitutes dump their unwanted babies. His real name was Alexei, but his parents renamed him Shane. In elementary school, Alexei-Shane couldn’t sit still, so by seventh grade doctors put him on a rainbow of pills. When he missed half of sophomore year, everyone said he’d been sent to McLean Psychiatric Hospital, and got thrown out when he stabbed an orderly in the hand with a jackknife.

  Shane clambers up, shaking hair from his eyes. He laughs, at me or at nothing, and his lips peel above a tooth lodged high on his gum. His hand settles on the small of Liv’s back, steering her away. I cry, “Wait,” but it’s barely a whisper.

  Slowly, his hand moves to his left pocket, so much bigger than the right, to a rectangular bulge, so much like a folded knife. My throat tightens.

  “Liv!”

  They turn, his smile in profile with that one misgrown tooth.

  Her eyes are worried. Is she afraid of what I’m going to say? Or that I’m remembering again?

  “What is it?” Liv says.

  What is it? What?

  “I’ll see you after school,” I say. “I’ll come over. We’ll do … statistics.”

  She cocks her head and squints like I’m daft. Then she laughs, not a real laugh, but like she knows other kids are watching. “Awesome. You can help me with independent and dependent events.” As they turn back around, Shane slaps her hard on the butt.

  Her shoulders clench. They stay. They do not fall.

  I squeeze my elbows and hustle to the nurse’s office. The nurse is missing, and this is good, because I’m learning the memories might surge fast, but they also cool and crust. It’s best to record them fresh. Except my notebook is in my locker.

  I look around the sterile exam room wildly. Stealing a pen from the nurse’s desk, I tear a sheaf off the roll of exam table paper, and write:

  Things I Know About Donald Jessup:

  - Dopehead

  - Losing his game

  - Not what he expected (me)

  THREE

  Later

  Lamplight burns the side of my face. I close my stats book and flatten my cheek against the cool nubs of Liv’s white crocheted bedspread.

  “They’re hard to explain. I think of them as nightmares, only during the day,” I say.

  “A daymare,” Liv says.

  “Right. And it’s not like watching a movie. I smell what I smelled. Sweet smoke and leaves. Alive and dead things underneath the leaves; that’s a musty smell. The rain smelled like metal. I taste things, too. The beef jerky he gave me. Blood.”

  Liv winces. “What were you remembering in the gym?”

  “That first night. The night he and I were together. The night I escaped. The next day and night I spent being hunted…”

  Liv exhales loudly.

  “Right. Sorry,” I say, trying my best to “move forwar
d and all.” “It was after we stopped. We couldn’t go farther because it got dark, and he was tired of dragging me. I could barely walk. And he wanted to smoke a joint.”

  Liv twists her hair hard near her ear. “Did the joint make him, you know, talky?”

  “Mainly he was jonesing to play his video game. He was worried other players would steal his weapons and his prey.” I raise myself on my elbows. “You know about Prey better than I do. That’s what he was playing, in his sick mind. But you know that.”

  Liv ignores my mild dig, releasing her hair and winding it around her fingers again, tighter. “How do they happen? The daymares.”

  “A trigger sometimes. Sometimes nothing at all. This last time, it was the cold.”

  She drops her hair. “This last time? How often do they happen?”

  “Too often. In Ricker-speak they’re called intrusive.” I don’t mention that I haven’t gotten around to telling Ricker I have them.

  “Can you make them stop?”

  I shake my head. “I haven’t been able to yet.”

  “You never told me about them in your e-mails.”

  The back door slams and the old Victorian house quakes. Keys clatter in a china bowl, the antique rimmed with gold Greek keys on the hall curio. Liv groans and rakes her hair with both hands.

  “Olivia!” Deborah screams up the stairs.

  “Should we go?” I say.

  “I need a minute,” she says.

  “Then it’s your turn,” I say quickly. “Speaking of things unmentioned: Shane Cuthbert? When did that start? And why?”

  She tips her head forward until her hair waterfalls onto the desk, and kneads her scalp. “I’m just fooling around.” Her voice is muffled. “It’s not serious.”

  “With Shane Cuthbert? You could have anyone!”

  “Shane Cuthbert happens to be an exceptionally effective way of pissing off Deborah.”

  “I heard he got thrown out of McLean for stabbing an orderly. Is that true?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You’re seeing him! He called you his girl.”

  “You’re making a big deal out of nothing.”

  “Seeing Shane Cuthbert is not nothing. He’s always been obsessed with you. Even if it’s nothing to you, it’s something to him, I’m sure of that. What happens after you use him to piss off Deborah? How will you ever get rid of him?”

  She draws her hands through her hair hard. “I know exactly what I’m doing with Shane.”

  “Olivia! I know you’re up there!”

  She flips her hair back. “Down in a second!”

  Deborah murmurs something sharp below. Liv fans her fingers in front of her, examining hair like floss—lots of it—threaded through each set of fingers, catching the desklamp light.

  “Liv?”

  She shakes her hands above the wire trash can under her desk.

  “Your hair!” I say.

  “Come down now, we have no time!” Deborah’s voice is clearer now; she’s moved to the gilt mirror at the bottom of the stairs. Liv slowly pushes away from her desk and trudges down the bare stairs, her steps hollow, the runner long ago stripped to wood and staples and left that way. I wait, wondering if I should bother to come, wondering if I want to. Slanted rain pelts the quarter moon–shaped window. Barring Deborah’s box-of-chocolates persona (never know what you’re gonna get), I’ve always felt at home here, especially in the cool, quirky attic bedroom, with its secret eaves and its Amityville Horror window. Now the house seems as if the rain might poke straight through. Before the woods, Deborah constantly renovated the Victorian like it was another whole being she cared for in reverse proportion to how much she cared for Liv. Now the repairs have ground to a halt. Curlicues of yellow paint speckle the tops of shrubs overtaking the porch, worn silver in spots. Today, the front doorknob fell off in my hand.

  I stash my book in my backpack and head for the landing.

  “That idiot hairdresser took forever and it was pouring by the time I left, and I had to wear my hood, and now I have static.” From my spot, I can see Deborah leaning toward the hallway mirror, glaring at hair plastered against her cheek. “How will I ever fix this?”

  “It gets worse if you touch it,” Liv says, taking the last few stairs.

  “I’m going to have to leave it alone, because we have less than two hours, and I still need to write down what I’m going to say to that reporter. I am so perpetually rushed. You could have started your own hair while I was out; you know how to mix the chemicals by now. Honestly, everyone on the planet is so selfish with my time.”

  Liv follows her into the kitchen and leans against the doorframe. The TV on the kitchen wall plays a commercial. I recognize the sounds: a savvy mom whips up a fancy chicken dish using a jar of mayonnaise, and the teenage son goes from dour to amazed. My stomach rumbles. In most homes in the Northeast region, it is the dinner hour.

  “I had a terrible day at work. No one is satisfied with the schedule—the dentists want it full, the hygienists want breaks, and the assistants want time to clean the instruments. I have no energy left and a million things to do in less than two hours.” Deborah pauses her rant. “Do not expect me to make some lavish dinner right now.”

  Liv sinks against the wall. “I do not expect you to.”

  Deborah heaves a dry sigh. “You know, you can be very difficult to love.” I come from behind Liv just as Deborah reaches for a bottle of pinot noir from the lattice rack above the fridge.

  “Olivia!” she exclaims. “You didn’t tell me Julia was here.” She sets the wine on the counter and swoops me in her arms, her chest hot through her blouse. “I thank God every time I see you.” I feel her shove up her sleeve to check her watch behind my back.

  Box of chocolates. Right after the woods, Deborah was grateful that I saved Liv. In the news footage of Mom pleading for my return, Deborah was right there, holding Mom up (though the opposite scenario was true: Deborah took Valium and could barely lift her eyelids). The news stations made a lot of the two-attractive-single-mothers angle, but the reporters cared mostly about Dr. Spunk, who managed to look elegant and calm during the worst two days of her life. Besides, Deborah had her daughter back, and Mom was still in that bad place. After I got home, the Today show asked Mom to host segments on missing children (she declined). For a while, Deborah was all about girl power and hugs. But then the frost set in. She never visited our house between the time I was released from the hospital and when we left for the Berkshires. Liv blamed it on her Valium detox, but finally she slipped that Deborah thought Mom and I liked the media attention a little too much.

  “Liv probably didn’t tell you that there’s a reporter from the Shiverton Star coming over at seven thirty to interview me about being Catholic Woman of the Year, and he’ll be photographing Liv and me together. I want to make sure she looks her best, so I planned a little pampering session. You should probably be heading home…”

  Liv stares past Deborah to the TV. I follow her stare, and Deborah follows mine.

  A reporter with a snub nose and a pancake face rests his foot on the railroad-tie stairs that mark the main entrance to the woods. His suit jacket flaps over his crotch in an unseen breeze. Behind him, yellow caution tape flutters between two young trees. The sign says MIDDLESEX FELLS RESERVATION: GATES CLOSE AT DUSK.

  “I’m at the Middlesex Fells Reservation in Shiverton, where a couple out walking their dog yesterday afternoon stumbled upon a body many believe to be eighteen-year-old Ana Alvarez, who went missing while jogging in a remote section of this enormous wooded area in August of last year.”

  A thud, then glug-glug-glug. The wine bottle lies on its side, its nose pointing to a scarlet puddle. A rivulet makes its way to the middle of the island. No one moves to clean it up. The scene cuts to two women, Paula Papademetriou and a generic blonde, sitting in the WFYT studio.

  “Ryan, has the body been positively identified?” Paula asks the on-scene reporter.

  “That�
�s what police are working on right now, Paula.”

  “Is this a murder investigation?” Paula asks.

  “The police will not yet say. But many are wondering about the involvement of a man who attacked two high school students in the same area nearly one year ago. That man has since died in jail awaiting trial.”

  “You’re referring to Donald Jessup, a man on parole at the time for earlier attacks against women in those same woods,” Paula says.

  “That’s right, Paula. It sounds like the police may be explaining once again why a parolee was loose in these woods. This time, perhaps, with fatal consequences.”

  Paula folds her brow and leans in to ask more questions as Deborah cuts her off with a wave of the clicker. She rushes toward Liv. “My baby!” she cries, pulling back and grabbing Liv’s jaw. “Do you know how lucky you are to be alive?”

  I wrinkle my nose at the smell of damp earth and cherries and turn away, embarrassed for Liv, embarrassed for Deborah for being the only person in the world who hasn’t heard this story in the last forty-eight hours, and embarrassed for me, because hello, I’m pretty sure I was in the woods, too.

  “Should we clean up the wine?” I ask.

  Deborah releases Liv and flutters her hand at the TV. “But for the grace of God! The mother of that girl could have been me!”

  “If we don’t have time to do my hair, it’s all right,” Liv says.

  “It’s most certainly not all right! There’s no chance those reporters aren’t going to be sniffing around again now. We have to prepare, Olivia. What do you want, roots on live television?” She unravels a trail of paper towels and goes at the wine spill with a grunt. “This body in the woods is going to be a great big distraction, that’s what it’s going to be.”

  “You’re telling me,” I pipe up, just to say something. “Once in the Berkshires, a reporter camped out next to us on the concert lawn at Tanglewood.”

  “I’m talking about my award! This honor was planned last November, before the incident happened. It’s like the world is out to thwart me. You need to promise me that you will not speak to any reporters about this latest bit of ugliness, even if that Ryan Lombardi comes around again, flattering you, Olivia.” She drops the wine-soaked towels into the trash and turns to clear coffee mugs from the sink. “I’m sure your mother will say the same to you, Julia.”