After the Woods (10 page)

“If that was true, I'd say you have a right to be pissed. But it's obvious that reporter is trying to revive her career. The story might be hot today, but tomorrow, no one will care, and she'll be on to her next conquest.”

“Kind of like hooking up at a woods party and blowing someone off the next day?” I spit.

Silence.

“You're talking about Liv Lapin,” he says.

“I am indeed.”

“Liv was basically using me, because I was there,” Kellan says.

“Oh, that's rich. The classic story: girl uses guy.”

“Did Liv say she was pissed that I never called her?”

“Well, no,” I answer.

“Then why do you care?”

“She's my friend.”

He smiles slyly. “Sounds like your mom would prefer you hang with Alice.”

I hold the sides of my head. “Oh my God. I was friends with Alice in fifth grade! Liv is my best friend!”

“You sound like you're trying to convince me. But I don't need convincing: you risked your life to save her. Maybe you're trying to convince yourself.”

“Where do you get off saying that?” I ask him.

“All I know is that there's a pattern. I blow off Liv. Liv couldn't care less, but you want to raise an army against me. Some chick gets killed in the woods, the same way you could've got killed in the woods, which should freak you out. Yet it's Liv who hides while you want to go examine the body.”

“You're saying I have a pattern of overreacting while Liv underreacts?”

“I'm saying you and Liv together are a hot mess.”

“You think I'm a mess?”

“Together you're a mess. Alone, I think you're fascinating. And a little bit of a mess. But mostly fascinating,” Kellan says.

I shoot him my best dirty look from under my eyelashes, which I hope is at once meaningful and alluring. He smiles wider. But I'm just getting started.

“You mean morbidly fascinating. I get it. You can't look away. I'm the girl who had interactions with a sociopath. Extended, day-long, night-long interactions. We hung out together. He fed me. Offered me hits off his joint. And everyone wonders: Did he touch her?”

Kellan drags a knuckle across his forehead.
Didn't think I was going there so soon, did ya, buddy?

“The supposition makes me automatically creepy,” I continue. “And there's the automatic next question: What did I have to give away to escape?”

“You don't have to go there…” Kellan says, trailing off.

I circle the table. “Donald Jessup was a paroled assailant of women. He played a soft-porn video game that involved hunting women in the woods. He lived with his shut-in mother and barely left the house, except for that one day, when he happened to get some kind of stirring that involved dressing in camo and packing a hunting knife. So how could I possibly have escaped untouched in that most carnal of ways?”

“But you did.”

“I did.” I sit on the table's edge and slap my thighs. “And now, no one really knows what to do with me. Every time I ask too many questions, they shut me down, or redirect me, or tell me to move on. It's like I'm this oddity. In 88.5% of all abductions, the girl is killed within the first two hours. What do you do with the girl who comes back?”

He sits near me. “What happened in the woods?”

“You really want to know?”

“I've always wanted to know.”

I pull back. “What do you mean, always?”

“I've lived with your story for the last year. It's where my dad was, in his head, all the time. With you, I mean.”

“Your father found and arrested Donald Jessup within forty-eight hours. What was he preoccupied with for the last year?”

He looks down for a moment. “Maybe I'm not supposed to talk about this.”

“You're the one who wanted to go there.”

He meets my eyes. “Once my father realized there were lapses, he felt sure you and Liv weren't Donald Jessup's only victims.”

“Oh.”

We're quiet for a moment. Laughter booms from the kitchen. Erik swears he's telling the truth about something, and Mom is flirtatiously dubious. In a flash, I realize that it's a relief for my mother when I'm not around. She sounds young and happy and maybe drunk, but still, young and happy. Happy to have the attention of a gorgeous guy; happy to be brilliant and pretty. Light. Free of slithering black things in your belly.

Kellan slides closer. “You don't have to tell me what happened. Just tell me what it was like.”

“When I was alone? Or with him?”

“Both.”

I drop my head. “Moments were splintered, in the woods. I have no way of knowing how many pieces there are, or if I have them all.”

“I can imagine. I mean, I can't imagine.”

“You can't. See, absolute darkness isn't absolute. You can still make out shapes, ripples of movement. Branches buckled. Things flapped and scuttled. After a while, it started to rain. Your skin feels spongy, like it doesn't belong to you. Water fills your ears. It slips between your lips, even when you jam them tight. You don't bother brushing it from your eyes. Soon you stop feeling it. Sometimes, I think Donald Jessup isn't what changed me. It's the woods that changed me. It's where I learned to live inside my head.”

Kellan swallows hard.

“Hunger. Cold. Your lacerated hands. The need to piss and sleep. All those things vanish. You turn off a switch, rid yourself of the burden of bodily pangs. The only thing left working is your rational mind trying to calculate a way out,” I say.

From the kitchen comes a shout and a cackle. Kellan puts his hand over mine, as if to say
Mute that boozy interruption. Go on.
His hand is warm, but not yuck-warm.

I keep my hand still.

“A lot of people would have curled into a ball and waited to die,” he says.

“It was pure survival instinct. I had no choice.”

“It was a choice,” he says. “You chose not to die.”

“I guess. But here's the thing: sometimes, I think I got stuck in that mode. I can't turn the switch back on. I can't stop calculating and start feeling again.”

“Maybe you're still trying to survive,” he says. His eyes dance as he moves my hair off my shoulder. It would be natural to slip my hands around his neck, breathe in his boy smell.

“I should check on Mom,” I mumble, staggering away and into the kitchen.

Mom and Erik are three-quarters into a new bottle of cabernet. Erik perches on a counter stool, knees pointed, bopping his head to the Sirius grunge station and smiling at Mom, who's decided this is the right moment to belatedly carve our Halloween pumpkin, which smells rotten. She's got the top off, and is digging the guts out with bare hands, sleeves up to her elbows. They both look snockered. Someone has lit votive candles and set them on the counter and the breakfast table. The timer dings, and Mom rushes to pull some kind of Indian rice pudding off the stove. I block her way. “You wash your hands and let me get that,” I say, slipping on potholders and lifting the pan. The aroma of cardamom and raisins grows, nearly eclipsing the pumpkin funk. My stomach growls. Mom and Erik take forks to the pudding and hash out whether or not some professor's article was worthy of having been published in the
Lancet
, and how they are sooo bad to be gossiping about it, never mind having double dessert, shame on them, giggle-giggle.

Kellan and I stand back, gawking. “Should Erik ride his bike home?” I whisper, flustered. If there's anything more paralyzing than seeing a parent drunk, it's seeing your parent's friend drunk and scarfing down rice pudding.

“I'll offer to drive him home.” Kellan tilts his head until our temples nearly touch. “But I think he might stay.”

“Should I throw a sheet and some pillows on the couch?” I ask.

“They'll sleep together, dummy,” he says.

“Oh no. They're research partners. It's not like that,” I say.
But I can't tell you what it is like, either
.

“Oh really? I guess you weren't picking up the signals I was picking up. There's major history there.”

I nearly yell “Ha!” Instead, I deflect. “It's … complicated. They're kind of codependent. Like, Erik completes my mother when it comes to things like social skills. She doesn't have the greatest EQ. After the woods, she dragged me out of Shiverton, supposedly to get away from the nosy reporters and bad memories. So where does she take me? To the Berkshires. Home to the largest state forest in Massachusetts. This at a time when I'm avoiding trees in any number.”

“I maintain anything in large numbers is scary. Take kittens. One kitten is cute. Five hundred kittens in one place? Terrifying. The principle applies to anything. Birds. Ladybugs. Babies.”

“It's not a joke,” I say, trying to scowl, though I want to laugh. Because an argument right now would make it easier to keep things on the right plane, with this guy who not only hooked up with Liv, but is involved with an aggressively preppy puck—

“I know. You were traumatized. And half the time you feel like you're being punked, because of the wildly inappropriate things people do and say in front of you. Like trying to make you feel better by sending you to a vacation home surrounded by woods,” Kellan says.

“Or worrying I might get PTSD from seeing Ana Alvarez's dead body, because it's not like I might already have it from, say, getting abducted.”

“Or saying they're acting like they haven't seen food in days, when you went two days eating, what?” he says.

“Basically nothing.” I smile a bit. “You caught that.”

“And I'm sorry for saying it.” He leans against the wall, thumbs hooked in his pocket, his signature slouch. “It must be hard to feel like the world is periodically surreal. Like you're being punked all the time, or on
Candid Camera
. Don't you feel like looking into the camera sometimes and saying, ‘Seriously?'”

My jaw drops. How does he know?

“But I've figured something out about you. You think it's kind of funny when people make those gaffes,” he says.

“I think it's funny when someone offends me?”

“I know you do. You'd be looking straight into that camera, your eyes wide with disbelief, getting a laugh. You know what else? If I was in the audience, I'd be laughing with you.”

The show of my life. Who gave him a seat in the audience?

Kellan points at a votive on the counter dissolving into a molten mess. “That's going to leave a stain.”

I yelp and blow it out.

He lifts his back off the wall. “Oh, and the fact remains that your mom and Erik are totally a couple. You might be a brainiac, but you're the least aware person I've ever met.”

“Now I'm truly offended,” I say, frowning energetically. He smiles, mocking and irresistible. We stand like that, me scowling, him smiling, until he wears me down and I laugh.

Suddenly Erik lurches across the room to us. “Did you kids see my bike helmet in the dining room?” he slurs.

Mom insists he's in no condition to ride, and besides, they're expecting torrential downpours. Perhaps Kellan could give him a lift?

Kellan's eyes bore into me. My face gets hot. He doesn't want to leave. Do I want him to leave?

I shake my head. “Go.”

Kellan disappears into the front hall looking for his coat. I pace, trying to pull myself together. Erik staggers in first, jacket over his shoulder. Kellan follows behind and Mom chases after them, forcing the pumpkin onto Erik, saying he needs fall decorations because his condo is as spartan as a monk's. I don't ask how she knows what the inside of his condo looks like. They climb into Kellan's truck as I stand in the doorway waving. Mom sprawls on the couch, minutes from sleep. Smoke from a neighbor's coal stove laces the air, and I breathe deeply as I walk down the driveway to move Erik's bike into the garage. Back inside, Mom snores. I tuck a blanket under her chin and walk around blowing out votives, greasy wax puddled on countertops.
We can chip at it with butter knives tomorrow
, I think, shutting off the nineties grunge music and dragging myself upstairs.

I reach for the picture tucked into my mirror. It's the same picture Liv has of middle school graduation. It's a gorgeous shot of her, her rosy cheek squished against my pale one. Easier times. It was never really the same after that, when Deborah began focusing on every thing about Liv: a gradual shaping of the way she looked, the friends she made, the clubs she joined.

From the top of the stairs I listen to Mom's woolly snores. In her empty room, the coat she wore to work still lies across her bed. I feel a finger-flick at my thawed heart: single mom, lonely mom, only able to laugh when I leave the room and after two and a half bottles of cabernet. I really am a drag.

But fascinating. Mostly, morbidly fascinating. Any girl can have an apple face, or boobs since fifth grade. But she can't be an ironic heroine survivalist.

I grab my notebook and flop onto my bed.

Things I Know About Kellan MacDougall:

- Loves to be fed

- Wants to know what it was like in the woods

- Would laugh with me

My notebook falls to the floor with a satisfying flutter. I lie back and drift off, Kellan's voice curling around me, until I'm distracted by the feel of something solid underneath my butt. My fingers graze the sharp point of the little tinfoil wedge. I unpeel it carefully, and the numbers are faded, but I grab my phone and type them as best as I can make out, giggling.

Hi
I type.

Immediately, the telling ellipses appear on my iPhone screen. Three little circles, three little hooks to keep me tuned in. My breath hitches. Three words appear.

Is this Julia?