What She Found in the Woods

by Josephine Angelini

  See you soon.

  He doesn’t try to continue the conversation. I’ve been keeping our exchanges brief for the past week. I won’t lie to Rob, so I haven’t been able to say much at all. I still want to break up with him in person, and I’m sure he knows something like that is coming.

  I’m probably overthinking the whole thing. I should just text him and tell him that I’ve met someone else.

  But I actually care about Rob, and I want to do this as respectfully as possible.

  So instead, I guess I’m stringing him along.

  Jesus. Is there ever a right way to break things off with someone? I never cared before, so I never gave it much thought, and now I’m pretty sure I’m making a mess of it.

  I swing my legs out of bed even though they’re screaming at me. Everything hurts. I’m still wearing the shirt dress I put on after getting back from the forest, and I consider whether or not I can get away with just staying in it. But no. I’ve got to get to the shelter, so I drag myself into the bathroom to get ready.

  What the hell am I going to do about my arm? I take a pill, put on the salve, but it’s still purple. It doesn’t hurt as much, but it looks atrocious. I realize my hands are all scratched up, too. Must have happened while Bo and I were butchering the deer, or maybe when I was dragging the sledge, walking through some tougher brush. I’m covered in bruises. It’s alarming. I’ll have to wear a long-sleeved shirt and keep my hands out of sight.

  I wash my face and stare in the mirror. I open the vanity. The orange bottles of pills are all lined up, just as I left them.

  I waver. They would make this easier. I want easier. But I don’t really deserve it.

  I shut the vanity and go downstairs. My grandparents aren’t up yet. I make coffee for them, have a cup myself, and then get on my bike.

  This is the way Mila came after she dropped me off at the shelter to get my bike. After we got ice cream. Right before she fell off the face of the earth.

  She drove on the other side of the street. What doesn’t make sense to me is how Mila went from being scared out of her mind about what was in the woods to going on a hike through them just minutes later.

  Did she see something on this road that made her decide to go home, get her hiking gear, and go into the woods? It’s kind of a busy road – if you can call any street in this sleepy pocket of the world busy. It runs through several towns going up the coast. Did she pass someone or something on the way that made her decide suddenly to embark on a dangerous night hike?

  I slow down and look around. I see tyre tracks as if someone went off the road. They look new. Excited, I pedal over to them to get a closer look, and as soon as I do, I recognize the ridiculousness of my actions. They’re just tyre tracks. I’m not a sleuth. Any clue short of a blinking neon arrow saying ‘She went that way!’ would be lost on me.

  I push on to the shelter, still thinking about Mila. I can’t fathom why she would go into the woods at night. I don’t buy that it was to find drugs. There are a dozen ways a beautiful young girl can score if she wants to. Ways that are far more certain that she will actually get drugs than wandering around the woods blindly.

  Unless she knew where she was going and knew for certain that there were drugs there.

  Unless she knew how to find Dr Goodnight.

  I don’t know how I know I’m right. I just know I am. Mila wasn’t telling me a ghost story at the Snack Shack. She was asking for help without asking, because that’s her way. Speaking around the problem. Never naming the unnameable.

  I remember the desperate way she looked at me. How she kept begging with her eyes. She was hoping that I’d be smart enough to figure it out, or at least that I was suspicious enough of her behaviour at the Snack Shack to follow her out on a hike, say, that afternoon. She knows I can hike, and she knows that I’m fascinated with Dr Goodnight, or I wouldn’t have grilled her about him. She was practically daring me. She wanted me to follow her. Find him. And save her.

  And I laughed in her face.

  ‘You coming in?’

  I turn and find Gina standing next to me. I’m still at my bike, although I’ve already chained it up. I’m just standing here, stuck.

  ‘You ever think you’ve already been the worst person you could possibly be, and that you’re past all that, that you’ve grown, and then you wake up one morning and realize that you’re an even bigger asshole than you ever were?’ I ask her.

  She looks me up and down, sucks her teeth, and says, ‘Girl, you need a meeting.’

  ‘Mila’s missing,’ I say. I realize I’m twisting the bike chain in my hands. ‘No one’s seen her. It’s been almost forty-eight hours.’

  Gina sighs heavily, and all the tough-girl bluster goes out of her, and I swear I can see a teenaged girl inside this forty-year-old woman standing across from me, and she’s hearing for the first time that her friend is gone. The police don’t count someone missing until after forty-eight hours. But after forty-eight hours whatever is going to happen to a girl has already happened. We know that. We both know what forty-eight hours means.

  ‘He has to pay,’ Gina says.

  I nod. ‘Yes. He does.’ I keep nodding hectically, but my voice is calm. Because this is something I know I’m good at. I had a lot of practice making people pay while I was in the hospital. ‘I will make sure he does.’

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘You got family inside, and we’ll get you through it.’ She locks up my bike for me and corrals me into the kitchen.

  We go in the back, but before we can pass the walk-ins and go on to the kitchen, I stop Gina and pull her into one of the freezers.

  ‘You know him,’ I say flatly. ‘Dr Goodnight. You know him.’

  Gina bites her lip and shakes her head. ‘I haven’t seen him in years,’ she mumbles. ‘Way back before he was Dr Goodnight. Even before he had a kid and disappeared into the woods.’

  ‘A kid?’ I say, my voice thin. ‘So . . . what, does he have, like . . . a family out in the woods?’

  ‘How the hell should I know? I got clean,’ she says. ‘I know he had a son about seventeen, eighteen years ago, and so he had to be more careful. Then he disappeared. Twelve or thirteen years later, everyone’s talking about Dr Goodnight out in the woods.’ She looks down. ‘Same guy, though. He liked it when people would nod out and not wake up. He used to laugh.’

  All the air rushes out of me. In the sub-zero, it looks like a ghost.

  ‘I said nothing,’ Gina says, fierce now, pointing a finger at me.

  ‘Where is he?’ I say, grabbing her arm before she can walk away. ‘Gina. Who is he? What’s his real name?’

  ‘We’re done,’ she says, shaking me off roughly and going for the door. But she’s not angry. She’s scared.

  Gina pulls the door open and stops. She sighs and turns back round. ‘Come on. You don’t need to talk in circle time, but you should listen.’

  When I don’t immediately follow her, she comes back and puts an arm around me and brings me out with her.

  She holds my hand all the way through circle time. Gina is a good person. And she thinks I’m a good person. That’s why she’s trying to protect me, and maybe herself a little, too, by not telling me his real name. She thinks I’m the type who’ll go running to the police, get caught up in the witness thing, and end up dead. And she’d end up dead for telling me.

  But I’m not a good person. And I’m not going to the police.

  I’m going into the woods.

  I knew something was wrong the next morning. They wouldn’t give me my journal back.

  The deal was I would give them my journal right before I went to sleep, and it would be returned to me first thing at morning check-in.

  But that morning, they gave me a new notebook and told me to keep writing. But I couldn’t. I hadn’t finished all the pages in my last one. You can’t start a new book of your journal with a ton of blank pages left in your old book. You just can’t.

  I stood at the door of my r
oom, dangling the foreign object out in front of me like it was a wet cat. I held it towards the door for I don’t know how long, waiting for someone to come and take it away and give me my journal back.

  I remember my arms aching, but in an offhand way. Finally, one of the doctors came and took it. He said that it was going to take a little bit longer for them to return my journal to me, and they didn’t want to leave me with nothing to write in.

  I still couldn’t talk. I remember thinking that I should say something, that I should demand my journal, but nothing came out of my mouth. So I stood at the door. Again, I’m not sure how long I stood there.

  Someone came to take me to my individual therapy session. I stood in the middle of the room, unable to sit. Three doctors came in and tried together to talk to me. Until now, I had shown no signs of disobedience. I ate, slept, peed, and walked when they told me to. The only thing I hadn’t done when asked was speak. This was different.

  I stood through the whole hour of my therapy session with Dr Jacobi. She sighed a lot. Frustrated with me, or my silence, or my sudden disobedience – I’m not sure which, really. Dr Jacobi was an extremely astute psychiatrist, probably the smartest person in that hospital, but she didn’t have a lot of compassion for the patients. Made me wonder why she did it all.

  When an orderly led me back to my room, I stood at the door of my room until it was time for group therapy.

  It wasn’t stubbornness. I wasn’t making a statement. Without my journal, I couldn’t write. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t rest. Standing was, simply, the only thing I could do.

  Someone brought me to group therapy. Dr Holt wasn’t sitting in the leader’s chair. I stopped a few steps in the door, knowing this change had something to do with my journal somehow. I did not come in any further, even though the new doctor, Dr Weinbach, waved, then coaxed, then urged, and then finally allowed me to stay where I was as if my standing was his idea.

  Dr Weinbach explained to all of us that he would be the new group leader and that Dr Holt had been moved to another floor.

  David demanded to know why. The doctor sidestepped this question. Then David wanted to know how long before Dr Holt returned to our floor. When the doctor dodged this question as well, David started yelling, and swearing, and setting off the more easily agitated members of our group.

  Everyone started hurling questions at the doctor. Insisting that we don’t hold back in group. That none of us would ever tell him anything if he wasn’t straight with us first.

  Once we cobbled together all the half-answers the doctor reluctantly gave us, it became clear that it was very likely none of us would ever see Dr Holt again, due to an emotional dependence that had developed between her and a certain member of our group.

  That’s when David attacked Dr Weinbach.

  Gina spends the rest of the day hovering. She asks me what my plan is for after work. She invites me to hang out with her, which is totally awkward for both of us, but I appreciate it. She’s worried about me.

  At the end of my shift at the shelter, I go to the office to figure out my upcoming schedule with Maria. The door is shut. Which is unusual if someone is in there.

  I hear voices inside, so I lean up against the wall and wait for the door to open rather than disturb what must be an important conversation. When the door swings open, Maria and her companion jump at the sight of me. Like I’ve caught them doing something wrong.

  It’s Officer Longmire.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ he barks at me.

  ‘Uh . . . I was just waiting for Maria,’ I stammer.

  ‘Come in,’ she calls. ‘I’ll be in touch, Officer,’ she says, dismissing Longmire, and then she waves me in impatiently.

  I have to pass the officer on my way in. ‘Sorry I startled you,’ I tell him, barely able to suppress a payback smirk. He gets it just as I turn away.

  ‘Shut the door,’ Maria tells me.

  I do as she says. She stands behind her desk, and she doesn’t invite me to sit opposite her.

  ‘What did you hear?’ she asks plainly.

  ‘Un-muf-ner-rumm-sss-murf,’ I mumble incoherently. I pretend to think it through. ‘Yeah, I think I got that word-for-word.’

  Maria stares at me for a moment and then breaks up laughing. ‘OK, sit. You want to talk schedule?’ she says, still smiling and shaking her head. ‘You’re funny, you know.’

  ‘It’s my only redeeming quality,’ I say. I watch her pull out the schedule sheet. ‘But, just out of curiosity, what were you talking about?’

  She looks up at me and narrows her eyes. ‘I don’t want to upset you.’

  I meet her gaze. ‘Too late.’

  She studies me before answering. ‘Mila.’

  ‘What have you heard?’ I ask, coming to the desk. ‘Do they have anything?’

  Maria holds up her hands. ‘No, nothing. There’s no news yet. He just wanted to ask me some questions about her and her . . . habits.’ She looks away.

  I nod. ‘He wanted to know if she was using.’

  Maria nods. ‘It changes where they look and how they look . . .’

  ‘Or whether they look at all,’ I finish bitterly.

  Maria sighs. ‘Yeah,’ she admits. Then she leans towards me earnestly. ‘What happened to Mila is bound to throw you, but don’t let it throw you off the path. Don’t let her bad choices choose for you.’

  I nod and get back to the schedule.

  I’ve already made my choice.

  Aura-Blue answers her phone before the first ring ends.

  ‘Did you hear anything? Did they find her?’ she asks breathlessly.

  ‘No,’ I say, sighing so I don’t start yelling. ‘They don’t know shit.’

  I debate telling Aura-Blue about Officer Longmire coming to the shelter today, but I decide it’s too much. She needs to think the police are doing something to help, even though I can tell from the way Maria looked at me that the police are ready to write Mila off as a runaway drug addict who doesn’t want to be found.

  Unless the FBI gets involved.

  They’re here for something, and I need to know specifics. Right now all I have are vague similarities. If I’m going to rat out Bo’s family, I want it to be because I know for certain that Ray is Dr Goodnight, not because he helped sick people end their own lives. Because if euthanasia is his crime, who the hell am I to judge? I’ve done far worse.

  ‘Listen,’ I say, putting some hope in my voice. ‘I want to talk to your grandfather. He used to be sheriff, right?’

  ‘I mean, of course you can meet him, but why do you want to talk to him?’ she asks.

  ‘Is he still in touch with the FBI?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says curiously. ‘What are you thinking?’

  What am I thinking?

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admit, ‘but I’m not OK with leaving Mila’s fate in the hands of Officer Quagmire,’ I say, purposelymis-saying his name. Aura-Blue bursts out laughing.

  ‘And why’s that?’ she asks, still chuckling.

  ‘It’s just a feeling I have,’ I reply, ‘but I need to talk to someone who believes that Dr Goodnight is real. For a bunch of different reasons.’

  There’s a long pause before Aura-Blue replies. ‘Grandpa lives really close to your house, you know. We can go see him right now.’

  As we drive down the long driveway right on the edge of the forest, we pass a sign that reads Whispering Pines. My heart sinks.

  ‘You didn’t tell me your grandfather was in a nursing home,’ I say. I don’t try to hide my disappointment.

  ‘I know it looks bad,’ she says, pulling into the back lot where the guests park like she’s done this a million times, ‘but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ I watch her profile as she carefully avoids my gaze and parks. ‘Most of him is still there,’ she insists. She turns off the engine and faces me. ‘If you don’t want to talk to him . . .’

  I open my car door and get out in answer. What a mess.<
br />
  Grandpa is in the rec room. I mark the nurses, the orderlies, and the locked doors as I follow Aura-Blue back towards a hale-looking man reading a newspaper by the window.

  The hospital was like this, although the clientele was significantly younger – just as addled, of course, and just as many drugs and rubber diapers, but far fewer wrinkles. I used to think that the elderly in nursing homes were sad, but I don’t any more. They lived a full life and now they get to forget all the mistakes they made. Sign me up.

  ‘Grandpa?’ Aura-Blue says, touching the surprisingly fit-looking man’s shoulder. His hair is thick and solid white, like he’s about to pitch a reverse mortgage commercial. His doesn’t use glasses. He smiles up at Aura-Blue and stands to give her a big hug.

  ‘Marcy, where you been?’ he asks, squeezing her tight.

  ‘Mom’s not here,’ she tells him, casting a nervous glance my way. ‘It’s just me, Grandpa. Aura-Blue.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. Like now he gets the joke and he can’t believe he missed it. ‘Every day you look more and more like her,’ he says, recovering winningly. ‘That’s a compliment, too,’ he informs me.

  I smile and nod politely, but I’ve never met Aura-Blue’s mother, so I have no idea.

  ‘This is my friend,’ Aura-Blue says, introducing me. I shake Grandpa’s hand as he looks me over approvingly. I know how to dress for a visit with my elders.

  ‘Very nice to meet you,’ I say clearly, not too high and not too low, but dead centre in my register so he can hear me without me having to raise my voice.

  I don’t know if he’s hard of hearing, but it’s best to start out neither shouting at an old man nor whispering. I’ve spent a lot of time reading to the elderly when my mother was still volunteering me for everything. You never know who’s all there and who’s stone deaf.

  ‘Francis Tanis. What can I do for you?’

  He gestures with his rolled-up newspaper for me to sit opposite him, and I see the sheriff in him still. He’s obviously done this many times, and his hearing is all there. I fold my skirt under me and sit with my knees pinned together and tilted to the side.

  ‘I have some questions for you,’ I say.