I’m shaking my head at him. It won’t be OK. Nothing will ever be OK.
‘You’ll feel calmer after you take these,’ he says, pouring the medication into my hand. ‘Take them, Magda. It’ll be OK because you’re not a bad person,’ he says, too firmly, like a part of him is still not convinced.
‘Yes I am, Rob. I’m a very bad person.’
‘No, you’re not. You just need your medication. We’ll – get rid of the clothes.’ He frowns, looking down, as he realizes what he’s committing himself to. But he doesn’t back out. Instead he nods his head, his decision made. ‘We’ll never tell anyone about this,’ he says firmly.
I take the pills and lay back, my stomach swooping like I’m sliding down a steep slope. I’m so tired.
‘You should hate me,’ I say. ‘Why are you protecting me?’
Rob shakes his head, smiling sadly. ‘Oh, Magda. I’d do anything to protect you. I love you. I’ve always loved you.’
I never got used to everyone being afraid of me.
Probably because it didn’t make any sense. There were some seriously scary people in that hospital. There were the explosive kind who would lose their shit over anything, and the creepers who watched and waited and harboured filthy intentions. I was neither of those. Yet everyone at the hospital was terrified of me.
I never had anything against any of the other patients. I genuinely wanted to get better. Well, OK, to be honest I always knew I wasn’t like the other patients. I had a handle on things, and they didn’t. But even though I knew there was no way for me to technically get better because I wasn’t sick like them, I did want to change myself enough so that I felt better. That’s nearly the same thing.
When Dr Holt came back as group leader, I began to hope I might actually achieve that. She was the one doctor on that floor who was there for the patients and not for her career. She was still alive in that part of her heart that allowed her to connect with us as a human and not just as an authority figure who was going to ‘fix’ us.
So when she pulled me aside and told me that she was going to recommend that I be released immediately, I was confused. I’d wanted out, but that was before. That was when fumble-fingered morons were in charge of me. I wanted to learn from Dr Holt. I wanted to get better. She was going to heal me.
‘But . . . I have so much work to do on myself,’ I said, shifting uncertainly.
She nodded hastily. ‘And you’ll do it someplace else,’ she said, lips pinched, eyes reluctant to meet mine.
I remember laughing. The weak kind of laughter that people do when they’re trying to convince themselves that they’re not getting thrown away.
‘They’ll never let me out,’ I said. I was trying to bargain with her. Make her see sense. But I already knew that even if I stayed, I wouldn’t be working with her any more.
Dr Holt looked right at me.
‘You’re not staying here,’ she whispered. A look of anguish crossed her face. ‘In one year, three suicides have been directly connected to you. I’ve never even heard of that before. And Zlata is dead because of your revenge plot to bring down a doctor – which worked. What if someone else angers you? Letting you out is a crime, I know that, but I’m trying to save these kids,’ she said, gesturing to our group of neurotics, shuffling weakly towards the rec room and their second dose of synthetic stability. She shook her head, her eyes shut, fighting a battle inside herself. ‘Out there, you’ll at least be dealing with people who can get away from you. In here, these kids are sitting ducks. You’ll kill them all.’ Her eyes grew sad. ‘I can’t stop you. I know that. I’m not clever enough to beat you, so I’m letting you go. God help me, I’m letting you go.’
The next day, I was released with a plastic baggie chock-full of prescription drugs, a plane ticket to my grandparents’ house, and a clean bill of health.
And my journal, of course.
4 AUGUST. DAWNING
I wake in the middle of the night.
Hunger has given me the jolt of adrenaline I needed to pull myself out from under the weight of my chemical sleep. Suddenly lucid and full of energy, I feel that I’m not alone in my room. I sit up carefully and see Rob sleeping on a mattress at the end of my bed.
I regard him for a while, noticing small things, like the fact that he’s changed his clothes and brought a small leather travel bag with him. It’s Hermès. Bespoke. But there’s no designer name stamped gaudily on the outside announcing its exclusive pedigree. I only recognize it because of the strap and distinctive hardware around the top.
I stare at the bag while, from the corner of my eye, I watch Rob’s chest rise and fall with the oceanic sound of deep-sleep breathing. The drugs have brought me back to that impassive state that seems safer for everyone. In this detached way of being, I notice that the bag has captured my attention, but I don’t know why because I feel nothing about it.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen such a raw display of status since I left New York. An overnight bag like that costs about twenty grand, but it’s not about the exorbitant cost. It’s the fact that you can’t walk into a mall and buy that bag. You go on a list. You wait. It takes commitment as much as it takes money. But I know that about Rob already. When he wants something, he’s willing to wait.
I slide out of bed and move silently to my desk. Even my skin is listening to Rob’s breathing. I don’t want to wake him. Some things are meant to be done in private, I guess.
My journal is waiting, pages open. I sit and read, really taking in the depth of my sickness. The first entry begins back in the hospital, when David was still alive. The last entry is from before Bo and I had sex, I’m assuming because it was lost.
But it wasn’t actually lost. Rob said he found it right here. Some part of my fractured mind must have placed it on the centre of my desk without informing either the part of me who wrote in my journal or the part of me who had no idea about the journal writing.
How many me’s are there?
I skim through pages, checking the dates. Trying to pin down exactly when I started writing behind my own back. I had thought I’d stopped writing after Dr Jacobi killed herself, but I hadn’t. After her suicide, my style of writing changed dramatically, though. It went from the third-person past-tense voice that I used to tell the ‘story of me’ like it was happening to someone else long ago, to close first-person present tense, where I am narrating my life as it happens.
And as if that isn’t confusing enough, later, after I’d been out of the hospital and living with my grandparents for a week, a new voice appears. It’s written in first person, past tense, and I seem to be looking back at what I’ve done. The first entry like that begins, ‘I was not the most popular girl in school. That was Jinka Pritchett.’
Now that I think back, I remember writing in my journal and telling myself this was the last time. When I left the hospital, I must have convinced myself that I’d kept that promise to myself and really stopped, but I hadn’t.
It seems so odd. Now I can remember sitting here, at this desk, writing furiously every night before I went to bed. I can even remember spreading out my blanket in the woods and filling a few pages before Bo met me there.
Stop.
He’s not real. I’m not allowed to mourn the loss of a fictional character. Anyway, deep down, part of me always knew he was too good to be true. I kept thinking it was all like a dream.
I need to figure out what I was doing all those hours I thought I was with him. That leaves a lot of hours. I couldn’t have been writing all that time or I’d have filled volumes. I could have been killing people. That almost seems like the most obvious possibility at this point.
But I need to remember.
First, I need to sort out how many personalities I have. There is the me who I was aware of all along, the me who wrote and who I remember now, and a third who is still hidden from me. She’s the me who took my journal and left it sitting here on the desk. She’s the me who did something while the other two me
’s believed we were with a boy who doesn’t exist.
My eyes shift to the closet. The door is cracked open.
There are three bloody outfits in there, and there have been three women found cut to pieces since I arrived in this small town. I have no memory of doing violence to anyone, not even now that I’ve been confronted with that possibility. As soon as I was forced to see my journal, I remembered writing in it. So I guess I need to force myself to remember killing them.
Rob simultaneously came to the conclusion that I’m the killer and excused me for it by reading my journal cover to cover and realizing that I believed I was killing deer. But is he right? Do the dates match up?
I was extremely faithful to my journal. I’m writing in it right now. I wrote about everything, it seems – everything that happened to me at home, with my friends, at the shelter, with Bo and his family, my attempt to quit the drugs, and the subsequent hallucinations. In between these present-tense daily reports are the bursts of past-tense storytelling.
I page back through my journal, looking for the days I came back bloody. The first time I met Bo, I thought I fell asleep and woke to a boy and an injured deer falling on me. The next evening, I found out about Chelsea Oliver, the dead hunter, while playing mini-golf.
Then, I thought I’d killed a fawn by accident and chased it through the brush, only to get covered in blood. A few days later, Sandy Crosby’s body was found.
And finally, Mila. She went missing the day I killed the buck and butchered it in the woods. I don’t need to look that up. I remember coming back here to my grandparents’ house. How everyone was waiting for me. I was the last person to see Mila alive. The police must not know that, or Officer Longmire would have questioned me. Or the FBI would have. Maybe my friends are protecting me.
They really shouldn’t.
I close my eyes and try to edit the images in my mind. I force Mila’s face and her body under my knife because I know if I make myself see it, then I’ll remember what the third me did. I need to remember it.
And when I remember, I’ll . . . what? What will I do? I can’t go back to the hospital because if I really did do these atrocious things, and Dr Holt let me out, she won’t just lose her licence. She’ll go to jail for the rest of her life. So I can’t turn myself in.
I know Dr Holt hates me, but she has every reason to. Because of me and my journal, the other doctors at the hospital stepped in and had her moved to another floor when she was probably managing David’s attachment just fine. I can almost picture Dr Weinbach waving my journal around, insisting that Dr Holt had lost her professional detachment and needed to be removed. Because he wanted her job.
Of course Dr Holt blames me for David’s death. If it weren’t for me and my journal, she might have been allowed to help David work through his feelings when he was ready to. She’s a good doctor. She cares. I won’t ruin her life by going back to the hospital.
This time I’ll do the right thing. Probably the thing I should have done as soon as I found out about Rachel.
But I don’t remember. Not the way I remember writing in my journal. It won’t come back to me, no matter how hard I push.
Something is still hidden from me. There’s got to be a missing piece, something that will trigger the memory. I have to find it. I have to. Because there’s also another thing I know for certain. Dr Goodnight started killing people at least twenty years ago, and I definitely wasn’t killing people before I was born. There are two murderers running around the same few square miles of woods. If I’m one them, there is a chance – even if it’s just a slim one – that a buried side of me knows who Dr Goodnight is and where he’s camping.
And if that hidden shard of me knows where Goodnight is, I’m going to find him and kill him.
I sit until the sun comes up, waiting for my ghosts to show. They don’t. I stare at Rob’s gorgeous bag. I can’t take my eyes off it.
‘What are you doing?’ Rob asks sleepily. He sits up in bed, tousled and doe-eyed with sleep.
‘I’m hungry, but I don’t trust myself enough to go anywhere alone. Not even downstairs,’ I reply. ‘It doesn’t matter that I’m on my meds again. I was still on my meds when I wrote most of this without knowing it.’ I gesture to my journal. ‘And maybe I did a lot more than write.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ he says quietly.
‘You sure about that? I’m dangerous, Rob. You’re not safe around me.’
Rob nods, his brow furrowed. ‘I’m not afraid of you.’ I smile at him gently. ‘That’s because you think you know me.’
Rob leaves the room to allow me to bathe and dress.
He waits outside my bedroom door. It doesn’t leave me a lot of time to decide what I’m going to do next, but it’s enough.
We join my grandparents downstairs and slip easily into our most gracious facades. Rob handles them perfectly. He must have been handling them since I showed up three nights ago, or they wouldn’t have allowed him to share my bedroom.
‘How are you feeling, Magdalena?’ my grandmother asks gravely as she serves out the scrambled eggs.
‘Much better, thank you,’ I reply with a relieved smile. ‘I don’t know why I thought I could do it without taking my medication. I felt better, so I thought – why keep taking them?’
My grandfather nods sagely. ‘I did the same thing with my blood pressure medication once.’
‘Almost died of a heart attack,’ my grandmother adds on cue.
‘Magda has a condition, but it’s manageable,’ Rob says. He offers me some orange juice, and when I decline, he offers it to my grandmother first, and then my grandfather, before serving himself. Ever the gentleman.
My grandmother beams at him. ‘Well, we’re so lucky to have you, Rob. It was so brave of you to—’
‘No, it’s OK,’ Rob interrupts, hastily refusing praise. ‘We don’t need to go back over it. Let’s just put the whole thing behind us.’
‘Hear, hear,’ my grandfather says, raising his coffee cup like it’s champagne.
And that’s it. We eat our eggs and fruit salad, and drink coffee, and talk about my grandmother’s garden and what I’m going to do with myself for the rest of the summer.
We decide that stability is what I need, and that working at the shelter was good for me. If Maria still wants me to work there, that is. After breakfast Rob agrees to take me to the shelter so I can repair things with her. I bring my keys to the office and the walk-ins, just in case I can’t repair things and Maria wants them back.
‘You know, Maria called once while you were sleeping,’ Rob says as he drives his rare, classic car slowly down the winding, forest-lined road.
‘Did you speak to her?’ I ask.
Rob nods. ‘I told her you were really sick. She said she understood.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure she did,’ I reply, sighing. Now Maria thinks I’m using again. Which, technically, is true.
Rob glances over at me. ‘You don’t have to worry about your job,’ he tells me. ‘She’s cool.’
I frown. ‘I didn’t know you knew her,’ I say.
‘I don’t know her, know her,’ he fumbles. ‘I mean . . . I spoke with her. I’ve met her before. But, she’s got to be cool because look at what she does, right?’
I nod and watch him. Then I look out the window. ‘Right.’
As soon as we walk into the kitchen through the delivery door, I realize I shouldn’t have come back. I should have called and quit.
Gina walks past carrying a chafing dish. She sees me and Rob and freezes. Even with the painted-on eyebrows, I can see that she’s surprised. She looks between the two of us, and then her eyes really land on me and turn down in sadness for a second before she whirls away and goes to hide from me in one of the walk-ins.
‘What was that?’ Rob asks.
‘She’s programme. AA,’ I say shaking my head. ‘She took one look at my dilated pupils and knew I’m on frigging horse tranquillizers. This was a mistake.’
‘No
it’s not,’ Rob says encouragingly. ‘Just tell her that you have a condition. You’re not an addict, like them.’
He doesn’t get it. But the way he said ‘addict’ was surprising.
‘I had no idea you had such a thing against addicts,’ I mumble as we make our way through the kitchen and towards Maria’s office.
‘It’s why I broke up with Mila. She liked to do drugs, and I don’t touch them.’
I glance at him. ‘There’s history there,’ I guess.
Rob’s lips press together. ‘My mom had some issues with drugs when I was little,’ he admits stiffly. There’s an edge to him I’ve never seen before.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, meaning it. ‘That’s rough.’
‘Yeah,’ he says gratingly. ‘Mothers should put their kids to bed, not the other way around.’
We stop in front of Maria’s door. ‘How bad did it get?’
‘As bad as it can get until my dad did something about it,’ Rob says. He knocks on Maria’s door for me, ending the conversation.
Maria pulls open the door and she looks at Rob first. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she asks him angrily, and then she sees me standing next to him. She gives a quick embarrassed laugh, and shakes her head, and waves us inside all at the same time.
‘Sorry – he’s with you?’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘I thought I was going to have to call Gina to help me throw you out. No men allowed in here, you know.’
She gives me a hug. ‘Are you OK?’ she asks.
‘Yeah, I’m much better,’ I reply, feeling horrible for lying to her.
She reaches out a hand to shake with Rob. ‘We spoke on the phone?’ she hazards a guess. ‘Rob?’
‘We’ve met before,’ he reminds her. ‘But it was just for a second.’
That was awkward.
‘Oh. Well. Thank you for bringing Magda back.’ Maria turns to me. ‘When can you start working again?’
‘Really?’ I say, excited. ‘How about now?’
‘Ah . . . sure,’ Maria says, thrown. She looks at Rob, who’s shaking his head, and she stops.
What She Found in the Woods Page 21