What She Found in the Woods

by Josephine Angelini

  ‘Wait. How did you generate enough force from your knees?’ Sol asks, confused.

  ‘Some women have a lot of power in that position,’ says a male voice.

  I spin around and see that Bo’s father has joined us. I stare at him. He looks away from me, disconcerted, and finishes answering his daughter’s question.

  ‘You couldn’t make it using just your arms, Sol. But most women have very powerful muscles in their thighs and pelvic floor, and enough flexibility in their lower backs to create the torque necessary. It’d be a tough shot, though.’

  Sol rocks up on to her knees, testing it out again, but this time trying to use her deepest belly muscles. She nods, as if to admit she could imagine it working.

  I look down at my hands, remembering the shot, and realize my left forearm is injured. I have a series of red welts on the inside of my forearm that are quickly turning purple. I wasn’t wearing an arm-guard, and the bow-string skipped across my arm during release. I have no idea how I’m going to explain that to my grandparents. It looks like I was raked with claws or beaten with a cane. There is literally no scenario in my life that would explain these marks in a non-violent way.

  ‘Does that hurt?’ Ray asks.

  ‘A little,’ I lie. Now that I have a minute to think about it, it’s quite painful.

  ‘Come on,’ Ray says, walking away. ‘I’ve got something for it.’

  I stand up reluctantly. I look for Bo, but he’s caught up in a serious conversation with Raven. I can’t really wave him down without making it weird.

  I follow Ray out of the circle of dormitories, past the greenhouse, and through some trees. As the foliage closes in behind me, I glance back over my shoulder, trying to judge the distance to the main camp. Could Bo still hear me if I yelled for him?

  My feet slow and my breathing quickens when I see Ray is leading me towards a padlocked shed. There’s an axe driven into a weathered stump right out front. Every rational part of my brain knows that Ray is not Dr Goodnight, and he is not going to kill me with his family a few hundred yards away. But the rational parts of my brain are too busy freaking out to be effective right now.

  I keep my distance while Ray unlocks the shed, one foot planted in case I need to run. But run where? I realize with a jolt that I don’t know my way back home. Not all the way. I know bits and pieces of the trail, but it’s so easy to get lost out here. I glance back over my shoulder again in the direction of camp, wondering what Bo would do if I screamed.

  And that unearths a thought I don’t want to have. I bury it again.

  ‘Are you allergic to penicillin?’ Ray calls from inside the shed.

  ‘Ah . . . no,’ I answer back.

  He pokes his head out of the door of the shed. I peek around him and see that long, thick flaps of plastic separate the doorway from the outside. Beyond them I can just make out stainless-steel-topped lab tables, glass beakers, scales, and other equipment, and shelves of neatly arranged white bottles. Inside the shed, everything gleams with the futuristic look of a spaceship. It’s like he’s opened a door to another world. Even the chilled air leaking out between the flaps of plastic smells dried and scrubbed.

  ‘Any history of blood clots?’

  ‘No,’ I reply, still trying to see over his shoulder.

  ‘I can’t let you in here,’ he says, understandingly. ‘It’s a clean room.’ That’s when I notice he’s put on gloves and some kind of backwards smock that reminds me of surgeon scrubs.

  He disappears back inside the plastic flaps for just a moment. Not long enough for me to make up my mind about whether or not I want to run. He comes back out, minus the scrubs and gloves, and gives me a small tub of goo and a small, rattling bottle of pills.

  ‘The pills will bring the swelling down and help with the pain. The arnica salve will keep the bruising to a minimum,’ he says. His eyes drop and shift around.

  ‘You were a doctor,’ I say mechanically.

  He nods.

  ‘What kind?’

  His voice is reluctant as he answers. ‘Anaesthesiologist.’

  I have to know. I don’t know why I have to know, because I don’t really want to know, but I’m in this too deep to back out.

  ‘What did you do?’ I ask. ‘Why are you out here?’

  He stares at me for a while, caught. Then he really looks at me and takes my measure. He seems to make up his mind about something.

  ‘Assisted suicide,’ he replies. ‘I helped seven people end their lives.’

  He pushes past me, and a mangled half-laugh huffs out of me while I watch him head back to the main camp.

  ‘You put them to sleep,’ I say. But he’s too far away to hear me.

  I startle at Bo’s voice. ‘Hey,’ he says. I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here. He’s right in front of me. Bo dips his head down to look directly into my eyes. ‘Are you OK?’

  I shake my head. ‘I want to go home now,’ I say.

  ‘OK,’ he says, looking spooked.

  He starts to lead me back to the main camp to say goodbye, but I just can’t see Ray again or I’m going to lose it.

  ‘Now,’ I say, almost shouting. ‘I want to go now.’

  He doesn’t move right away, so I strike out on my own. I really don’t care which way I’m going. I don’t care if I’m wandering around the woods all damn night. I have to get out of here.

  Bo catches up and runs backwards in front of me as I march on. ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ he says, putting his hands on my shoulders to stop me. ‘What happened? Did my dad say something to you?’

  I look at him, and the thing my mind unearthed earlier rises again like the undead. Which is: if Ray is Dr Goodnight, then Bo has to know. There’s no way Bo can’t know. He’s not blind or stupid or too young to get it. If his father were a kingpin drug lord and a psychopathic murderer to boot, Bo would know.

  I shake my head, but I’m not sure at what. I think I’m just saying no to my own inner voice. I cannot accept that Bo could be a part of anything like that. I don’t care how bad it all looks. There’s got to be another explanation.

  ‘Please tell me what’s going on,’ Bo whispers. His mouth is still a little swollen from kissing me.

  I give up and lean against him. I’m too tired to talk or think, and I just want to be close to him. I want him to hold me, and I can’t help but think that if I truly thought that he was the willing accomplice of a brutal psychopath, I couldn’t want that.

  Unless I am fully insane.

  30 JULY. AFTERNOON

  Bo walks me back to our spot, but I insist he turn back, rather than walk me all the way home.

  ‘There’s still plenty of light,’ he says, glancing down shyly. He turns to face me, holding both my hands in his. ‘I want to meet your grandparents.’

  ‘That’s a terrible idea,’ I groan.

  ‘No it isn’t,’ he says, smiling. His face suddenly falls. ‘Unless you’re embarrassed by me.’

  I give him a warning look. ‘We’re past that.’

  ‘We are?’ he asks uncertainly.

  I roll my eyes. ‘I’m in love with an idiot,’ I grumble. He laughs, and I know we’re OK. ‘I’m not bringing you home to meet my grandparents because they’re going to ask all kinds of questions you can’t answer, and you’re not good at lying, Bo. If my grandparents even think that you live on public land, they’ll report you. One of the first things my grandmother did when I got here was warn me about the druggies in the woods.’

  ‘We’re not druggies,’ he says, confused either by the word or the notion that anyone would define his family in that way.

  ‘To them you are. My grandmother would love to turn you in. It would make her year. She’d probably put the fact that she got a whole family arrested in her Christmas cards.’

  He mentally stumbles for a moment over the Christmas card thing, clearly not understanding that most people give yearly updates to acquaintances that way. In fact, I sort of wonder if Bo knows what a
Christmas card even is. He shakes off his confusion quickly in lieu of frustration. He’s frustrated because he knows I’m right.

  ‘You said once that you wanted to come home with me because you wanted to know everything about me,’ he says. ‘I feel the same about you.’

  ‘You’re not going to learn anything about me from my grandparents,’ I say, shaking my head and smiling. ‘They’re cardboard cut-outs. They’re not real, because real people are messy, God forbid. And when I’m around them, I’m not real. I live in their house, and I’m grateful they’ve taken me in, but in order to stay, I have to be the granddaughter they want or they’ll kick me out. And I’ve got no place else to go,’ I admit. ‘My parents made that clear. I can’t live with either of them in New York any more.’

  I look down, a little ashamed of it all. The compromises I’ve made since I got here, the fact that my grandparents really would tell me to move out if I bothered them too much, and that my parents are done with me and each other because of me – I burned all of those bridges.

  ‘Besides,’ I say, breathing a tired laugh and looking back up at him, ‘you don’t need to meet my grandparents to understand me. You already understand me better than I understand myself.’

  Bo shakes his head slowly and moves a lock of my hair behind my shoulder. He stares at me for a long time before he kisses me.

  Why did I never like the idea of sex before? This is the second time in one day I’m practically tearing Bo’s clothes off and begging him. He pulls back and shakes himself.

  ‘Not like this,’ he says, more to himself than me. ‘Not on the ground. I mean, I want to.’ He sits back and rubs his forehead. ‘I really want to.’ He laughs at himself and looks up at me longingly. ‘But you’re tired, and your arm probably hurts, and we don’t even have a blanket.’

  I laugh and nod. ‘My arm does hurt,’ I admit, looking at the welts the bow left.

  ‘Did my dad give you something for it?’ Bo asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I whisper, staring at his worried, precious face. I dig out the salve and pills from opposite pockets in my shorts.

  Bo hands me his canteen, discarded in the mad rush to get out of our clothes, and shakes out a pill for me. I swig it down while he rubs my arm with the salve.

  ‘This looks worse than it should. You bruise easily,’ he says, frowning. Then he narrows his eyes at me. ‘Do you have an iron deficiency?’

  ‘No, it’s probably the lithium,’ I say, staring at the inky map under my skin. When the silence becomes too heavy, I notice and look up at Bo. ‘They put me on lithium for a while. It does weird shit to you for years afterwards.’

  He nods, but his face twists like he’s going to cry.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say, moving closer.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ he says, and he pulls me to him, wrapping me up in a full body hug. I’m warm everywhere. I’m warm down deep in the frozen parts of me. ‘Why did your parents do that to you?’

  ‘Because I turned them into the horrible parents of a girl who encouraged a thirteen-year-old to kill herself on social media.’ I breathe out. It’s not a laugh, but it feels good like a laugh does. To let it out. ‘Everyone blames them for raising such a monster. When I lost it, they didn’t try to help me. My mom put me in a room, and they pumped me full of drugs, and she promised me I’d never really come out of it.’ I look at him. ‘I’m never getting out of that room, Bo. Even here, in the middle of the woods, I’m still there.’

  He shakes his head. He won’t accept it.

  ‘Come with me,’ he whispers. ‘When I leave for school, come with me. Live in my room.’

  He can’t be serious. ‘Bo. You’ll be starting over. Meeting new people,’ I say.

  He shakes his head. ‘I won’t go without you.’

  ‘But you have to go to school,’ I say, frowning. ‘Your mom . . .’

  ‘I don’t care.’ He laughs in a rough, pushed way. ‘My whole life has been about my parents’ choices. Even college.’ He rolls me under him and holds my face between his hands. ‘You’re my choice. I want you with me. Come with me when I leave.’

  He’s hovering over me, waiting for an answer. A part of me is screaming yes. I could get a job in a kitchen somewhere near his school. Maria would write me a recommendation. Bo could sneak me into his dorm room until I found us an apartment. I could figure this out, even without touching a dime of my enormous trust fund. I could do what I’ve always wanted to do but never had the guts to try. I’ve got no reason to stay here once Bo leaves, anyway.

  I shake my head.

  ‘This is insane,’ I say, trying to sit up, but he won’t let me. ‘What about your parents?’ I ask.

  ‘Are you kidding? After my mom met you, she told me you were perfect for me,’ he replies, smiling. ‘She’ll be thrilled.’

  I’m confused. Why would Maeve think I was perfect for anyone? I’d just told her I was a liar. A fraud. A conniving, vindictive . . . oh. Now I get it.

  Maeve is good. Who better to protect her painfully naive son from a world full of social situations he has no clue how to navigate?

  I’m angry with Maeve for manoeuvring me (again) for about a microsecond, because the thought of Bo going to one of those exclusive schools full of teenagers who are used to either being the smartest in their class or the richest in their town turns my stomach. They’ll eat him alive. Unless I’m there to eat them first.

  And I would. If anyone ever tries to hurt Bo I will destroy them. Maeve knew that, the moment she looked me up and down. I have to go with him.

  ‘OK,’ I say, deadly serious.

  ‘Really?’ Bo says, surprised.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to stay here for.’ I smile up at him like I’m doing this solely for me. ‘I’ll go with you wherever you go.’

  ‘Yes!’

  He’s giddy and boyish. He laughs and squeezes me and makes promises about how great it’s going to be. He even asks me to help him choose a school. He’s narrowed down his choices to the West Coast, to stay close to his family, but he’ll go to whichever of those I like best. It’s all the same to me, but I appreciate how hard he’s trying to give me some kind of power. But that’s Bo. Always giving, even when he’s getting.

  ‘I think I’m going to like California,’ I say.

  ‘The redwoods,’ Bo says, picturing a colossal forest to rival his own.

  ‘The freeways,’ I say, picturing a sprawling city to rival my own.

  Bo laughs. ‘Figures you’d be romantic about freeways.’

  I roll towards him, laughing. ‘Of course, I’ll have to learn how to drive, first. And then I’ll spend all day changing lanes and taking exit ramps.’

  ‘Just like Joan Didion,’ he says, touching my face.

  I shake my head. ‘I’m not a writer,’ I say with finality. I roll on to my back again.

  That’s another bridge I burned. Who would ever believe anything I wrote after my completely falsified blog for the Cultural Outreach Club?

  Which is a relief, actually.

  Because, in my hand, a pen is a sword.

  There was a ceiling fan in my room.

  The ceilings in the dormitories at the hospital were high, so it was maybe twelve or thirteen feet up. From that distance, it made a faint woop-woop noise that I could only hear when all else was silent, which was surprisingly often.

  Before the room, I had pictured insane asylums as noisy places. You know, Bedlam. But that place was quiet because everyone was drugged. It was a good thing, being drugged. So much easier than being me.

  My room wasn’t padded, but there were no hard edges anywhere. Everything was soft. Everything was designed to soothe. The furniture, which was bolted in place, was done in pastel colours.

  I didn’t have a window. Forget about locks: a window is the real difference between a prisoner and a patient.

  The only break in the monotony of my room was my daily therapy sessions. During the twice-a-day flashes of lucidity between one dose and the next, I was take
n out of my room and brought to individual therapy in the morning, and then group therapy in the afternoon.

  The first two months, I didn’t speak. Catatonic people rarely do, although I have no memory of that time. The next two months, I didn’t speak either, although I was no longer catatonic and finally aware of my surroundings.

  I remember trying to shape words in my mouth, trying to push air past my teeth to make sound, and nothing would come out. But there was stuff going on behind my eyes again, so I wrote.

  I didn’t write replies or questions the way someone with laryngitis might. I still wasn’t engaging with people directly. Instead I wrote narratives about what had happened, and what was happening around me, as if all of this had occurred not too long ago to someone else, somewhere else. I wrote in the third person. I wrote about the people who had hurt me, the people I had hurt, my doctors, and the people sitting in group therapy with me as if they were characters in a book. I wrote about myself as if I were a character in a book.

  It was all one big story.

  The team of analysts that handled my psyche ward of deranged teenagers encouraged me to write. They felt it was a necessary part of my rehabilitation. I gave them my journal right before I went to sleep every night, and they read every page, of course. I got my journal back first thing in the morning while they had meetings about my writing. In my individual session, they made observations based on what I had written in an attempt to draw me out and start a dialogue.

  Dr Holt in particular tried to get me to talk. She usually led group therapy. She really cared about us, and although she was young and pretty and should have had a life of her own, she devoted all of her time to helping everyone in our group get better. Like Mary Poppins with those anaemic English kids. She tried to coax me out of my cocoon, but I knew I needed to stay in there because I wanted to be a better person.

  In my cocoon, I was learning how to be honest, and everything I put into my journal was the truth as I saw it. No more un-journal. No more lying. I was going to burst out of my cocoon a beautiful, honest butterfly, and I’d never hurt anyone again.