by Pete Hautman
“I guess I would feel sad.”
“Do you feel sad now?”
“I’m pretty sure they’re going to find her.”
“Why do you think that?”
Because I’ve seen her, Stuey wanted to say. Because I know she’s alive.
“I just do,” he said. “Is that wrong?”
“Of course not. Let’s go back to the day Elly Rose disappeared. You were at your fort in the woods?”
“It’s not a fort, it’s a castle.”
Dr. Missou made a note. “That’s where you were. At the castle?”
Stuey nodded.
“I want you to close your eyes and go back to that day. Go back to the last moment you saw Elly Rose.”
Stuey closed his eyes. He remembered sitting on the slab with Elly.
“What were you doing?” the doctor asked.
“Just talking,” he said.
“What were you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” his lying self said. “I don’t really want to talk about it,” he said truthfully.
“You don’t have to talk. I just want you to remember.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes it helps to reimagine a traumatic event, Stuey. It’s called imaginal exposure therapy. You remember an event over and over, and your emotional response to the memory becomes less . . . problematic.”
“So the more you remember something, the less you remember it?”
“Not exactly. It’s more like exercising to make yourself stronger. Now, close your eyes again and go back to that day . . .”
“Well?” Stuey’s mom said as they drove home. “How did you like Dr. Missou?”
“I didn’t like her much.”
“Why not?”
“She thinks I’m crazy.”
“No she doesn’t! She just thinks she can help you get through this difficult time.”
“I don’t need help.”
“We all need help, Stuey.”
“Then you go see her. All she wants is for me to remember when Elly went away, over and over again.”
“Yes, I discussed that with her. It’s a special type of therapy. She said it was the least invasive treatment option.”
“I don’t need treatment.”
“I know you think that, honey, but when you come out of the woods and tell me you were talking with Elly . . .”
“I just made that up,” Stuey said quickly. Stuey hated to lie to his mom, but his lying self didn’t seem to mind. “I was just goofing around.”
She gave him a skeptical side-eye glance.
“I was playing make-believe.” I’m playing make-believe right now, he thought.
“Aren’t you a little old for that?”
“I guess.” Except when I’m with Elly Rose, he thought.
They turned into their driveway.
“So can I go in the woods now?”
“Tell you what. I want you to see Dr. Missou again, then we can discuss it.”
That afternoon, while his mom was in her studio, still working on her crow painting, Stuey sneaked out. He had the woods to himself. The muddy boot prints around Castle Rose had dried hard and crisp. The search for Elly Rose had moved on.
Stuey sat on the slab and looked at his compass. The needle pointed north. He closed his eyes and listened.
Nothing.
A part of him wondered if his mom, Dr. Missou, and Dana were right. Maybe he had imagined it. Maybe his lies were the truth, and he had just been playing make-believe, and Elly was truly gone.
He looked again at the compass. The needle was quivering. He closed his eyes and listened harder. The faint hiss of air passing through leaves and branches. A low, distant rumble of traffic. The sound of his own breathing: in, out, in, out . . .
“Stuey?”
He opened his eyes.
“Elly.” She was standing on the end of the slab looking down at him. He sat up. “Where have you been?”
Words tumbled out of her. “My parents still won’t let me go in the woods. My mom watches me like a hawk. Actually, more like an owl with those big eyes, only she had to go to some kind of meeting and dropped me off at Jenny’s but instead of going inside I came here and I’ll probably get in trouble but I don’t care.”
“I’m not supposed to come here either.”
“Nobody believes me. They think I’m disturbed.”
“Me too.”
“They made me see this scary doctor. I think she might be a witch.”
“Dr. Missou?”
Elly’s eyes widened. “How did you know?”
“They made me go see her too. She’s a specialist.”
“That’s what my mom said. She has cold eyes.”
“And creepy worm lips.”
“I know! I don’t like her. I just tell her lies.”
“Like what?”
“I tell her I didn’t see you disappear, and I never saw you after. She wouldn’t believe the truth anyway. Then she told me you might never come back. She told me you might be dead.” She looked at him carefully. “You aren’t, are you?”
“No! Maybe you are.”
Elly shook her head. “If I were dead I’d be able to float around and stuff. You know what I think? I think the world broke in half. There’s the woods where I live, and the other woods, where you are.”
“That sounds like something my grandpa told me. He said the whole universe breaks apart all the time. Like, if I turn left there’s another me that turns right, but I only know the universe where I turn left.”
Elly leaned forward, her eyes darting around his face. “You think that’s what happened? You turned left and I turned right?”
“Except we’re both here now.”
“We have to glue it back together,” Elly said. “We have to do it right now! That’s what I have to tell you — my parents are sending me away to school! In Atlanta! That’s in Georgia. For the whole school year. They think if I go away then I won’t care anymore about you being gone.”
“But I’m not gone!” It wasn’t fair. Elly was gone, not him — and now she would be even more gone.
“They say I’m traumatized.” She spoke quickly. “But I’m not. I just don’t like it that you disappeared and they think I’m imagining things because I said I saw you but maybe if you come back they won’t make me go. We have to fix it. We have to put it back together. You have to come with me. We have to show them.”
“How?”
“Here, hold on to my hands really tight.” She reached out. Stuey grasped her hands. They were warm and alive. She squeezed. “Really tight.”
“Now what?”
“Close your eyes and wish.”
“For what?”
“For the world to be stuck back together again.”
Stuey closed his eyes and wished. After a few seconds he peeked. Elly’s eyes were still shut tight, so he closed his eyes again and wished some more. He tried to imagine Elly’s world where her parents were sending her away and everybody was looking for him. He imagined his face instead of hers on the posters. He imagined that the posters had never been.
What would happen if they put the world back together again? Would it be as if nothing had happened? Or would there be even more worlds, with more Ellys and Stueys wandering around looking for each other?
“I think it worked,” Elly said.
Stuey opened his eyes. Elly was looking at him intently.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t, but maybe it did.”
They sat there holding hands for what felt like a long time.
“Now what do we do?” Stuey asked.
“We go home. Don’t let go. We have to keep holding hands.”
They stood up and went outside, Stuey walking backward so they could fit through the entrance without letting go. Everything looked the same.
“Do we go to your house or mine?” he asked.
“My house. So my mom can see you and I can stay in Westdale. And th
en we can go see your mom. They let her out of the hospital but now she never leaves the house. My mom had to bring her food.”
Stuey didn’t say anything. The thought of his mom being so unhappy made him feel sick inside. But if he went to see his mom in Elly’s world, then what about his mom — his real mom — who was expecting him home for dinner?
“What’s the matter?” Elly asked.
“What if I can’t come back?”
“But that’s where we’re going! We’re going back!”
“What if I go to where you are, and then both of us are gone from where I was?” He imagined his mother calling for him. “What about my mom?”
“She misses you. Everybody misses you!”
“If this doesn’t work — if you disappear again — you have to check on my mom,” he said. “Make sure she’s okay. Promise!”
“I promise. Now come on!”
Stuey looked at her face, at her eyes so dark they were almost solid black, and suddenly he was afraid. It was all too confusing. What if she was a ghost taking him away to some sort of ghost world?
“My grandpa said that you can’t tell ghosts from real people,” he said.
The expression on Elly’s face changed, as if he had slapped her.
“I’m realer than you are,” she said. Her dark eyes glistened with tears. “I’m not the one who went away. You did.”
“I didn’t,” Stuey said. “I’m right here.”
“So am I!” She tried to pull him farther up the path, but Stuey wouldn’t move. “Come on!”
“We have to go to my house first,” he said. Her hands felt as if their palms were separated by a layer of oil.
“You’re all slippery,” she said, looking as scared as he felt.
Stuey squeezed her hands tighter. His fingers curled through her flesh as if it was soft clay; his fingertips pressed into his palms; he could see through her arms; her face blurred; her mouth was moving but he couldn’t hear her — and she was gone. He was standing alone, his hands white-knuckled fists, his breath coming fast and shallow.
“Elly?”
No reply. He circled the deadfall and called her name. No sign of her. He went back inside and waited. Elly did not return that day. He returned the next day, and the next. His compass pointed steadily north. Elly never came.
Stuey’s second session with Dr. Missou started much like the first. She told him to close his eyes and remember the day Elly disappeared. This time he was ready for her. Instead of remembering what really happened, he imagined himself sitting on the slab listening to the sound of leaves in the wind, the birds, the hum of distant traffic. When he opened his eyes, Dr. Missou was frowning at him.
“I must’ve fell asleep that day,” he told her, the lie coming easily. “I woke up and she was gone.”
“I see,” said Dr. Missou. Her eyes narrowed.
“All that stuff about her disappearing, I must’ve dreamed it.”
“Okay, let’s try something else. Try to remember what happened right after. The moment you realized that Elly was gone.”
“I just thought she must’ve gone home.”
Dr. Missou wrote something in her notebook.
“Close your eyes and remember what happened next,” she said.
Stuey did so. He had run all the way to Elly’s house and knocked on the door, but nobody was there. He’d waited awhile, then walked home.
“I went to her house but she wasn’t there,” he said. “I figured she was at a friend’s. Then I came home.”
“Again. This time I want you to remember being with Elly Rose, and then remember the last moment you saw her, and what happened after.”
Stuey closed his eyes and thought about the last time he’d seen Elly. How they’d tried to glue the world back together and failed. He remembered the sudden vacuum inside him, how he couldn’t seem to get enough air. He thought about the last few times he had been to the deadfall — the times he had been alone, with no sign of Elly. He imagined that she was really gone, that he had never seen her after the day she disappeared.
“Like I said. I must’ve fell asleep. I just made that other stuff up.”
As the words passed his lips he almost believed them. It wasn’t that hard. He could lie to himself as easily as he could lie to everybody else.
Stuey returned to the deadfall almost every day. The woods were recovering from the search parties. New plants were popping up on the trampled paths even as the older leaves began to lose the brilliant green of summer, as the acorns fell from the oaks.
He always brought his compass. Sometimes the needle moved, but only the tiniest bit. Sometimes he thought he could feel her, just beyond the reach of his senses, far away and very close. The woods still knew she was their queen, even if her parents had sent her to another city a thousand miles away.
Stuey saw Dr. Missou one more time. He told her about how he and Elly had played make-believe. How he knew the Castle Rose was just a pile of dead trees, and that Elly was gone, and that she might never return. While he was in Dr. Missou’s office he believed what he said. He believed it when he told his mom the same things. It was as if he had split into two different people, a boy who told adults the things they wanted to hear, and the boy who knew the truth.
A week before school started, his mom told him he didn’t have to see Dr. Missou anymore. “She tells me you’re doing very well, Stuey,” she said.
“I’m okay,” Stuey said. Another lie.
Elly’s parents sent her to stay with her cousin Sarah in Atlanta.
“It’s just for the school year, sweetie,” her mom had told her.
“But I don’t want to go!”
“Honey . . . you’re not happy here, and we understand. It’s a terrible thing, your friend disappearing like that. I think the break will do you good. You like your aunt Ginny and your cousin Sarah, don’t you? Sarah goes to a really nice school. You’ll love it.”
“Why do you want to get rid of me?”
“Honey, we just think it will be best for you,” her father said. “You’ll meet new friends, see new places — and Atlanta is warm!”
“But what if Stuey comes back?”
Her parents had looked at each other and didn’t say anything. Elly felt tears gathering in her eyes; she wiped them with her sleeve before they could spill down her cheeks.
Her dad said, “Elly . . .”
Nobody else thought he would ever come back.
Nobody except her.
Sarah’s school was the Rothman Academy, a kindergarten through eighth grade Jewish day school where the girls all wore beige skirts and blue polo shirts with the school logo on the chest. The boys wore dark pants and red shirts. Her aunt promised to take her shopping, but that first day Elly had to borrow Sarah’s clothes, which were a size too big. All day long she had to keep hitching up her skirt.
Elly’s parents weren’t particularly religious — they went to synagogue on holidays, but that was about it. She didn’t know how to be Jewish the way these kids were Jewish. Even the younger kids seemed more mature, more serious, and smarter than her. Most of them came from conservative families. All the boys wore little round caps called kippas on their heads, and many of the older boys also wore little leather boxes strapped to their foreheads. Elly had never seen that before. She asked Sarah about it.
“Seriously?” Sarah said. “You never saw tefillin before?”
“What are they?” Elly asked.
“Tefillin have verses from the Torah hidden inside. It’s supposed to remind the boys to be good or something.”
“It looks uncomfortable.”
“They don’t wear them all the time. Anyway, girls don’t have to wear them.”
Elly remembered Stuey talking about how they were from different planets. This felt like another galaxy.
The kids at the school all knew about Stuey. Sarah had told them all about it, but they still had a lot of questions. Elly didn’t try to answer them honestly. She already felt li
ke a weirdo. If she’d said what had really happened they’d all think she was as weird as she felt, so she just told them Stuey got kidnapped. After a few days of that they more or less lost interest in her.
Elly didn’t know any Hebrew at all. They put her in a Hebrew class with first- and second-graders. That was humiliating. Here she was at a school where everybody was Jewish, and she’d never felt like such an outsider.
After the first few weeks she learned to fake it, but every day was hard and, even worse, boring. If she had told them about the Castle Rose they would have laughed at her. So she hunkered down, kept her mouth shut, and pretended to be smarter and more mature than she was inside. It was exhausting.
Living with Sarah’s family was just as hard. Her aunt Ginny was so nice that Elly felt like she had to say thank you about a thousand times a day, even when she didn’t feel thankful at all. Her uncle Rob, who was her mom’s brother, was a tall, silent scarecrow of a man who hardly seemed to notice her. And Sarah, who was the same age as Elly, treated her like her disadvantaged little sister — soooo nice and soooo patient it made Elly want to rip her hair out.
The one thing Elly’s parents were right about was that the longer she was in Atlanta, the less she thought about Stuey. She knew he was still back there, in his own world, but that world felt farther away as each week passed.
By the time Passover arrived in April, she thought about him only at night, just before sleep, when she imagined that her bed was a slab of stone and her ceiling was a lattice of branches. Alone at night, she could still be the Queen of the Wood, and he was her knight-in-waiting.
Westdale had changed after Elly Rose disappeared. The main roads leading into or out of town had billboards with her face on them. Neighbors looked suspiciously at neighbors. Worried parents kept their children at home. Security cameras appeared on utility poles, garages, storefronts, and in parks.
The police bought three new squad cars with tinted windows and heavy black steel bumpers that made them look like military vehicles. Anyone from out of town was likely to be pulled over — anything from a broken taillight to driving too slowly would get them a citation. People from the surrounding communities avoided driving through Westdale.