What She Found in the Woods

by Josephine Angelini

  And then you just let that character get away with it.

  After several weeks of reading a story about a doctor who occasionally bullied his more suggestible patients into saying things they weren’t ready to say so he could manufacture yet another ‘brilliant breakthrough’, the hospital board took a second look at the video surveillance footage of how Dr Weinbach broke the news to David.

  Like meeting an actor who always plays the bad guy, they couldn’t watch that footage of Dr Weinbach glibly telling David that Dr Holt wouldn’t be returning and see it as anything but the reckless mismanagement of a tender soul by a man engaged in a pissing contest with his predecessor.

  They fired Dr Weinbach. We got Dr Jacobi for group leader.

  Which worked for me because she was next on my list.

  Bo and I track Mila for hours.

  We’re moving fast, even though it’s unbearably hot, and travelling deep into the forest far from any path. I’m glad I’ve had a few weeks to toughen up out here or I’d never be able to keep up with Bo. He’s a machine.

  Despite that, I’m keeping close tabs on where we’re going. I’m still no tracker, but I have learned a few things about finding my way through the woods. We’re going north-east. I’ve never been this way before. It’s steep. It’s dense. In places, it’s nearly impassable.

  The deeper we go, the more fear I sense in Bo, and the faster we move.

  Something about this isn’t right.

  I reach out and grab his arm to stop him. I look up into his face, but his gaze scatters off, his eyes darting anxiously around us.

  ‘What?’ I ask, instinctively keeping my voice lowered. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Everything. This is all wrong,’ he whispers, shaking his head.

  ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘What is it?’

  ‘There’s more than one set of tracks, but the first set is faint,’ he whispers. ‘That can mean two things. Either your friend was following someone who knows how to cover their tracks, or she’s coincidentally going in the same direction as a really skilled hunter. But there are no game trails out here.’ He points up the incline, and even I can see that deer don’t come this way. ‘There’s no reason for a hunter – or anyone – to cover their tracks. Unless they thought they were being followed.’

  I stare at him, not sure what to make of that. And from the look on Bo’s face, he doesn’t know what to make of it, either.

  He scans the ground, frowning. ‘Was Mila a good tracker?’

  ‘She said that she grew up hunting out here, so probably?’ I reply, shrugging.

  ‘She could have been out here tracking someone who’s really good?’

  I shrug again, and his frustration turns back into anxiety as he looks around at the tangled brush.

  ‘Something else is bothering you,’ I say, knowing this goes deeper than finding two sets of prints.

  ‘It’s this area,’ he snaps, and then immediately lowers his voice again. ‘My dad made it off limits years ago. There are dangerous people out here, Lena.’

  I look into Bo’s dilated eyes.

  ‘Like who?’ I whisper. He doesn’t answer me. ‘Like Dr Goodnight?’ I press.

  Bo’s face twists up comically as he pauses to think. ‘Dr Goodnight? Isn’t that a Stephen King novel?’

  I stifle a bark of laughter, and not just because I thought the same thing once, but because I’m secretly relieved. There’s no way anyone could fake Bo’s response. He literally has no idea what I’m talking about. I’ve never been so happy to be so misunderstood.

  ‘No, that’s –’ I start to say, and we both finish, ‘Doctor Sleep,’ at the same time.

  He smiles, bemused. ‘Who’s Dr Goodnight?’ he asks.

  ‘Wow,’ I say, wondering how the hell I’m going to tell him. ‘Where do I start?’ I say, cringing at my colossal foolishness.

  I’m saved from having to explain for now as a few fat drops patter down through the canopy ominously. A cold wind gusts through the stifling heat.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Bo mumbles. He looks skyward.

  Thunder rolls. And just like that, a downpour begins.

  Bo looks at me, his face falling. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.

  In moments, the ground is sopping wet, and all trace of Mila’s trail is gone.

  There was no malice in what I did. There was anger and a sense that justice hadn’t been done yet, but I’m not Machiavelli, ruthlessly plotting to eviscerate my enemies. It wasn’t like that. I had just been watching for a long time. Months. I had been paying attention to the inner workings of the hospital. Boring things. Strange things. Everything.

  I saw stuff that was already there. Risky behaviours that, but for dumb luck, should have cost any one of them their jobs.

  Take, for instance, Dr Jacobi’s near constant miscommunication with the nurses who administered our meds. At least twice a week, Dr Jacobi would pull one of the nurses aside and grill her about why so-and-so was still on this dosage when the order had been put in hours ago for a change. Dr Jacobi couldn’t seem to understand that hospitals, like big ships, could not turn on a dime.

  Nor did they want to. Not for her. It wasn’t that the nurses couldn’t understand Dr Jacobi. It was that they couldn’t stand her. Like many brilliant people, Dr Jacobi’s disdain for lesser mortals always seemed to bite her in the ass. Her impatience translated as condescension, and you should never, ever talk down to someone who can, in essence, spit in your soup.

  There had been many near misses where the meds were concerned. The nurses always put Dr Jacobi’s changes in last because they had no desire to put them in sooner. Once, I even saw them put a change in so late that Dr Jacobi went and got the dose from the locked room herself. Not knowing this, the next shift nurse prepared it a second time. It was only blind luck that Zlata was in the bathroom and that Dr Jacobi happened to come back out front and see the second dose of phenobarbital waiting.

  I watched Dr Jacobi carefully in that moment. I wrote it down in my journal – the falling look of terror on her face. A second dose would have killed Zlata. Shit, a second dose would have killed a young hippo. Zlata’s phenobarbital had been grandfathered in from Russia. She was skating the knife as it was.

  Dr Jacobi had a history of miscommunication, which is pretty unforgivable in a doctor. No matter how brilliant she was, or how much of her outside life she’d sacrificed to her job, she had done things that endangered patients. She deserved to get fired, and not just because I hated her.

  That’s what I told myself. That I was saving people from an eventual catastrophe.

  All I had to do was wait for one of the bi-weekly power struggles at the nurse’s station to make my move. Dr Jacobi would swoop in and drag the nurse distributing the meds back to her office to scream at him or her, and a fill-in nurse would stand at the post.

  Nothing I was on would kill me if I took twice as much of it. I would tell the fill-in nurse that I hadn’t got my dose yet, even though I had. There was only ever a tiny chance that the fill-in nurse would believe me, but if she did, I’d get my second dose and go straight back to my room so I could drool and babble for the night surveillance cameras. I needed this on tape if I was to get Dr Jacobi fired.

  What I didn’t know, had never dreamed, was that the fill-in nurse would assume that everyone on the roster after me had also not received their meds.

  She double-dosed half the floor.

  I didn’t find out until I woke up two days later. My throat was raw from having my stomach pumped. Zlata had died. Two more patients were in comas, and they were both still in them by the time I left the hospital.

  I told anyone who came within ten feet of me that it was my fault. I had done this on purpose to take down Dr Jacobi. To expose her as the emotionally bankrupt egomaniac that she was. I insisted they put me in jail before I killed anyone else.

  They had to put me in solitary for a few weeks and pump me full of Zlata’s phenobarbital because I was upsetting the other patients. But no
matter how much I yelled that I was a murderer, I could not legally be considered culpable in any way.

  It is the responsibility of the doctors and nurses to administer the drugs properly, no matter what a patient says to get more, or what that patient means to do with them once they’re obtained. We’re just mental patients.

  Maybe the rest of the hospital could be considered that way – victims of their own minds – but I knew better about myself. I’ve never been a victim.

  The entire nursing staff was fired. Dr Jacobi was arrested for first-degree manslaughter, and it was clear from the onset that she would be convicted. After all, there was precedence for her malpractice. It was all recorded in my journal, which the police copied in less than an hour and returned to me.

  But Dr Jacobi didn’t make it to trial. After posting bail, she jumped off the roof of her Brooklyn apartment.

  I had settled down by then. I was talking, and not screaming any more. I was allowed back into group therapy and into the common room, although no one ever came near me again. Not that they ever had before, but now instead of avoiding me because they simply mistrusted what I was writing in my journal, they genuinely feared me and my journal. They were right to be afraid. What I’d done was scary. It scared me, so I stopped. I wrote one last time, and then that was it. No more journal.

  We got Dr Holt back as group leader, which was nice. I liked her.

  1 AND 2 AUGUST

  We trudge back to our spot much more slowly than we set out.

  We are silent the whole way. When we get back, I see all the stuff Bo took from my pack lying scattered and wet on the ground. I have no idea what to do next.

  I actually feel worse now. I’d only entertained the barest spark of hope for such a short amount time, it shouldn’t affect me so to have it snuffed out again.

  But still. Losing hope is harder than never having it at all.

  ‘I should have left you at Mila’s house and tracked her myself,’ Bo growls. He grabs his hair with his hands, like he’s trying to pull all the bad thoughts out. ‘I could have gone twice as fast. I might have been able to make it before the rain started, and . . .’

  I step towards him and put my hand on his chest to quiet him. ‘It was never going to end well. She’s gone.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ he says, wrapping me against him. ‘Someone could still find her.’

  I shake my head. ‘The time when I could have helped her came and went. And I laughed at her. I’m going to have to live with that. Like I’m living with so many other mistakes.’

  Bo holds me, but I’m not crying.

  ‘It’s not your fault she ran away,’ he says.

  ‘Bo. I’m so far past the point where anyone can make excuses for me any more,’ I say. ‘I should have helped her when she asked. That’s what good people do. You wouldn’t have avoided getting involved because you couldn’t risk getting hurt by a friend again. You’d have just helped her. Like you did with me.’

  ‘I haven’t been hurt by my friends as many times as you have,’ he says quietly. I touch his face, remembering that Bo had been hurt by a friend once. I see the pain and humiliation in him again.

  If I ever find that guy . . .

  ‘No, don’t get angry,’ he whispers, and he kisses me.

  This is what I need. To touch and to be touched. To live outside myself by letting someone else live inside of me. Finally, for the first time ever in my sewn-up little life, to open myself up fully and come out of the cocoon.

  Bo insists on spreading out the blanket, on taking all of our clothes off first, on taking off his socks. It’s his sweetness that makes me want to gulp him down whole.

  ‘Wait,’ Bo gasps, pulling back even as I’m pulling him into me. ‘Are you sure?’

  Of course I am.

  I regain consciousness in the river.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  Bo is holding me draped across his arms and I’m floating on the roiling surface of the river. It’s like flying. I see his pale face over mine, and I reach up to touch him.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask.

  ‘I think you fainted,’ he says. He takes a deep breath and lets it out. ‘There was some blood, and I didn’t know what else to do, so I brought you in here hoping the water would wake you – you really scared the shit out of me.’

  ‘Blood?’ I say muzzily. I try to sit up.

  ‘Easy,’ Bo says. ‘Let me get you to shore first. The water’s too fast.’

  I can’t take my eyes off him as he wades over to shore, still holding me. I know vaguely that I should be embarrassed – I fainted; who faints when they have sex? – but I can’t be anything but happy right now.

  He puts me on the mossy bank and jumps out of the river to sit next to me.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ he asks bashfully.

  ‘No,’ I say, grinning at him. I am sore, to be honest, but it’s a good sore. I can’t stop smiling. He smiles back at me, but he’s shaking his head, too.

  ‘You have no idea what you just put me through,’ he says, but now he’s laughing, and I’m laughing, and our shoulders are touching. The laughter dies, and we just stare at each other. Speechless.

  He shivers violently, and I realize how cold I am.

  ‘Can you stand?’ he asks.

  I nod, and he helps me to my feet. I’m woozy, but he steadies me. I look at the blanket.

  ‘That’s probably more blood than normal,’ is all I can say.

  ‘I hope so,’ Bo says. He looks at me, his eyebrows raised, and we both burst out laughing again.

  ‘The clozapine makes you bleed more, even for something small, but I didn’t even think about it for . . . this. I’m so sorry. I should have warned you,’ I say, and now I feel terrible for putting him through that.

  ‘No – I’m sorry,’ he says, worried again. ‘You sure you’re OK?’

  I nod and move closer to him. ‘Better than OK.’

  We flip the stained blanket over and lie down together. We intertwine our fingers and memorize every freckle, dimple, and scar. I never used to understand why people cry when they’re happy. I get it now.

  I don’t know when we fell asleep.

  ‘Shit,’ Bo whispers.

  I sit up and see dusk is falling. ‘I’ll have to run it.’ I sigh.

  ‘Can you?’ he asks, worried about me again.

  ‘I’ll have to,’ I say, reaching for my clothes.

  I really don’t care about curfew right now, but I can’t spend the night out in the woods and put my grandparents through that kind of worry. Not after Mila’s disappearance.

  Bo folds up the blanket while I stuff my things into my pack. We don’t get to say any kind of goodbye before he’s jogging along next to me, still concerned that I’ve lost too much blood.

  ‘Go, Bo,’ I tell him, giving him a little shove. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, rolling my eyes. ‘You have further to go than I do.’

  ‘I love you,’ he says, and then he breaks for home.

  ‘I love you, too,’ I say, glancing back for him. Poof. He’s already gone.

  I feel like I’ve barely fallen asleep when I hear my phone buzzing.

  Normally – now, in this tech-free era of my life – I wouldn’t bother answering it, but something reaches inside my dream of rushing water and blood and sex and whispers Mila’s name.

  I answer before I sit up.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  There’s nothing, and then a shaky, wet inhalation. ‘They found her,’ Aura-Blue gasps. ‘They found her in the river.’

  I’m standing. I’m moving. But I don’t know where I’m going. So I stop.

  ‘She’s dead,’ I say, pointlessly.

  All I hear is Aura-Blue’s sobbing. I sit back down on my bed and I wait. ‘Tell me,’ I say when Aura-Blue has calmed down enough to speak.

  ‘She was stabbed, I don’t know, dozens of times,’ she says, sounding garbled. Probably becau
se her mouth won’t shape words while it’s pulled into a grimace of grief. I wait for her to continue. ‘She must have fought him because there were defensive wounds, and they say it took her a while to die.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I say, too loudly. ‘If she fought him, there’ll be some kind of evidence. DNA. Hair. Skin.’

  ‘No,’ Aura-Blue says, and stops to sniff. ‘He was careful.’

  I hear my grandparents wake up and call out to me, but I don’t care.

  ‘They’ll look under her fingernails,’ I shout. My grandparents appear in my doorway with owlish, staring eyes.

  ‘No, they won’t,’ Aura-Blue says with finality.

  I sit on my bed for a long time after Aura-Blue hangs up.

  I sit long after my grandparents have given up trying to tell me to pretend that it never happened. To get on with my life. I didn’t openly reject their calm, rational bullshit, and so they took my passivity as compliance and finally left me alone. I’m not catatonic. I know that. I’m just waiting for dawn. Some glimmer through the grey. Just enough so I can slip into the forest and run to Bo.

  My phone buzzes again, and I answer it without looking. It’s Rob. He’s crying.

  I try really hard to listen to him. He knew Mila much longer than I did. He dated her, and I’m pretty sure she let him do far more than I ever entertained doing with him. I never used to equate sex with an emotional bond, but I do now. Rob is really hurting.

  My eyes locked on the window, looking for daylight, I uh-huh him and tell him there’s nothing he could have done. That it wasn’t his fault. He tells me he’ll be back tomorrow – or is it today? Anyway, he’s nearly back and he can’t wait to see me. He needs to hold me, he says.

  Dawn breaks. I tell Rob I have to go. I hang up. I stand up.

  I understand that this is the end of something. I don’t know what yet, but I know I’m leaving. Either I’m going to live in the woods with Bo for a few weeks until we go to school, or I’m going to find out that Ray is Dr Goodnight and I’m going to kill him. Quietly, of course. Maybe out hunting? I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. And then I’m taking Bo away from all of this so he can go to school. So he can be brilliant and kind and generous and bring something beautiful to the world. Either way, we’re leaving.