After the Woods (6 page)

Mom grips the edges of the pan. “That's untrue.”

“You probably feel like what happened to that girl Ana shows how dangerous it was to save Liv. Like it proves some lesson,” I say.

“How could you ever say such a thing? I'm not a monster!” she says.

“You never liked Liv. I did the right thing by saving her, but you hate her so much you couldn't even be proud of me.”

“You think you did the right thing.”

“I know I did!” I step forward and Mom jumps. The pan tips and fat splashes across her left arm. She cries out. I cover my hands with a kitchen rag and grab the pan, and she bolts to the sink, wrenching on the cold-water valve. The smell of burned flesh and butter fills the kitchen.

“Mom?”

Pain twists her mouth. She looks away.

“I'm so sorry,” I say softly.

She shuts off the water and inspects the mark, blazing pink. I set the pan on the table and spread paper towels on a spray of fat congealing on the tile. She blows at the burn while digging one-handedly in the junk drawer for wound salve. When she finally climbs onto the leather counter stool, arm slathered in goo, I hold my breath, waiting for her to say something bouncy, like “At least I'm a righty!” or “If you didn't want chicken, you should have said so!”

She blows on her arm. This time, her eyes are closed. Outside, wind chimes tinkle helplessly in the bluster.

“Mom?”

“I'm always proud of you.”

“I know.”

“I don't hate Liv. But sometimes I do think there are better friends for you. Remember Alice next door? Whatever happened to Alice Mincus?”

“Mom,” I whisper. “I haven't hung around with Alice since fifth grade.”

Her eyes open and settle on me, the fine skin underneath newly crosshatched and gray. “A mother wants the best for her daughter. That is all. Can we just be quiet for a few minutes?”

Deborah wanted things for Liv, too. Different things. The pageant career she blew when she had Liv, for one. Living in the Northeast stunted that, since pageant culture is more foreign to New England than sweet tea and hush puppies. Then there was the virtuous persona that Liv resisted. When we were thirteen, Liv got the idea to meet this guy she liked and ride the T into Boston to see a free concert. His name was Stevie Something, and he was seventeen. Which doesn't seem old now, until I think about a guy around my age dating a thirteen-year-old. Liv told Deborah she was going to my house, and I told Mom the reverse, and we took a bus to Parlee, the next town over. We met Stevie Jerkface and a friend, Nameiforget, who was supposed to be my “date” except that I don't think he was expecting a flat-chested child. Stevie Jerkface was drunk or high, and Liv giggled nonstop while we waited on the platform. Once we got on the train, the Jerky twins shared nips that smelled like pinecones. I refused, got called a word I'd never heard, and we were abandoned at the next stop—Savin Hill, or as the locals call it, Stab 'n' Kill. At which point a large homeless woman in a dress boarded the train and wandered around the car. When she bent over, we saw she wasn't wearing underwear. And that she'd been using newspapers as toilet paper, because they were still stuck there. I vomited in my mouth. Liv buried her face in my sternum. The story ended when we begged a T cop to ride the train home with us to Parlee and called Mom, throwing ourselves at her mercy.

So when Mom suggests Liv is a questionable influence, I can't deny it. But together we have history. An undeniably funny history.

Mom slides off the stool and digs through her bag for Advil, twisting the cap with her teeth and knocking back two. “I think it's important that we see Dr. Ricker together. Sort through all your questions. She thinks your obsession with the case is getting in the way of your progress.”

“Actually, Dr. Ricker is on board with my approach. She even wants to hypnotize me to regain my lost memories.”

Mom looks sideways at me.

“It's either that, or play with dolls,” I add.

“That sounds a bit … regressive.”

“Regressive would be hanging around with my friend from elementary school.”

“Alice has always been good to you,” Mom protests.

“I believe you mean good for you.”

Mom pops a third Advil. I wish she would laugh.

“Let's talk about Deborah again. She's beside herself about the girl in the woods,” I say. “To the extent that she could have been her mother. That would have been upsetting.”

Mom chokes. I slap her back, fearing I might break every fine bone through her shirt. She waves me away. I pour her a glass of water and continue. “Also, the news will take away from her Catholic Woman of the Year announcement, which is clearly a competing local news item. I don't know how WFYT is going to decide which to cover.”

“Try to cut Deborah Lapin some slack, please,” Mom rasps as she pads across the kitchen and eases a glass from the hanging wine rack. “You're not being respectful.”

I serve the meal that neither of us wants, tonging soggy salad onto our plates. The suction sound of Mom opening the wine fridge is the tearing off of a figurative bandage: a natural marker for a scene change.

So I go there.

“What happens if the woman in the woods has some connection to Donald Jessup?” I ask.

“Then the police will find that out. And hopefully, her family will have some closure,” Mom says, filling her glass to the top with pale wine. “But that's not a story you have to follow. It doesn't have import for you.”

“Kind of hypocritical, don't you think? Criticizing me, given you're someone who spends your whole life questing for knowledge.”

She moves her wineglass in a slow circle. “You make my life sound like a Homeric epic.”

“A scientist's mandate is to question,” I say.

“Not when the question is irrelevant,” she says.

“Relevance is an elusive concept. Its meaning is impossible to capture through logic.”

“Something is relevant to a task if it increases the likelihood of accomplishing the goal. Your task is healing; your goal is to be well.” Mom swirls the straw-colored liquid. “Trying to make connections between yourself and Ana Alvarez is not healing, and it will not make you well.” The windowpane above the sink rattles in its casing.

“I take it you'll be drinking your dinner this evening?” I rise and stack her full plate on my empty one.

Mom points with her glass. “Maybe everything's not as complicated as you think it is.”

“You're the one who taught me to think critically. That most stories are not black and white.”

“On the color spectrum, black and white represent the highest level of contrast to the human eye. Maybe viewing a situation in black and white is seeing critically,” she says, smiling as she turns it over in her mind, annoyingly mellow.

“Okay, here's black and white for you. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there are approximately 258,000 child abductions each year. Only 115 children are abducted by strangers. That's four one-hundredths of one percent of total abductions, and fourteen one-thousandths of one percent of total children reported missing. The odds of Donald Jessup stumbling upon Liv, me, and Ana Alvarez in the woods by chance is infinitesimal. So what does that mean? It may mean nothing. You can look at it as a fluke, or you can consider the alternative. I'd think a MacArthur Genius would have no trouble seeing that.” I blow past her and dump the plates into the sink with a clatter. “Perhaps you can act like the mother and fill the dishwasher tonight.”

Mom's smile dissolves. “Donald Jessup is dead, Julia.” She sets her glass on the counter and reaches for her phone. “I need to speak with Dr. Ricker.”

As she shuffles away, texting, I snatch the tinfoil wedge from the fish mug and tuck it into my jeans pocket. I throw my messenger bag over my shoulder, the hard spine of my notebook sticking out of the top at a jaunty angle, and head for the stairs.

She stops texting and suddenly looks up. “Homework?”

“Tons,” I yell, charging up the stairs and slamming my bedroom door. I scoot down in my bed with the laptop against my bent knees and bring up the WFYT Web site. A new headline inside a banner blazes across the top: PAROLE BOARD CHIEF UNDER FIRE. I click it to see Paula, her dark hair brushed behind one ear, the other side in a vintage Hollywood wave. Square red fingernails pop from the cuffs of her cheetah trench coat and gleam on the microphone. Behind her are trees, stark in the camera's blazing light.

“One year after the Shiverton Abduction, WFYT wants to know why parolee and convicted sex offender Donald Jessup was not properly monitored when he attempted to kidnap two teenage girls”—wave of one lacquered hand—“from this wooded enclave on the edge of the suburb of Shiverton, last fall.”

THE SHIVERTON ABDUCTION: ONE YEAR LATER materializes in front of a graphic of silhouetted pine trees. Then the Fells entrance is gone, and it's Paula, sitting in an office across a desk from a guy wearing a purple tie and a badge plate. He has a long, Roman face, sunken cheeks, and shadows under thick-lidded eyes. Across the bottom of the screen reads PAROLE BOARD CHIEF VALERIO PANTANO.

Paula scissors her legs and leans forward.

“Donald Jessup was on parole following his 2010 conviction of stalking a woman with intent to harm, before he brutally attacked two females in the Middlesex Fells Reservation in November 2013. Mr. Pantano, who is responsible for monitoring serial offenders on parole?” Paula asks.

“The governor is convening an outside committee to examine the monitoring of Mr. Jessup,” Pantano says.

“Was it the psychiatrist who treated Donald Jessup following his conviction in 2010? Who said, and I quote: ‘His prognosis is excellent. I do not suspect he will ever be at risk for violence'?” Paula says.

“I am not qualified to speak toward his psychiatrist's findings,” Pantano responds.

“Was it the probation officer who rarely visited Jessup at his home, never talked with neighbors or local police to know if he violated his parole, and ignored complaints by coworkers at the GameStop where he worked that Mr. Jessup made them feel uncomfortable?”

“The actions of the probation officer in question are being examined internally,” Pantano says.

“Or is it the seven members of the Massachusetts parole board who granted parole to this high-risk offender? The seven men and women appointed by the governor who decided Donald Jessup should be allowed back on the streets of Shiverton, so that he could strike again?” Paula presses.

Pantano runs the tip of his pinky finger over a ring on the other hand.

“The seven men and women who directly report to you?” Paula adds.

Pantano grimaces. “I cannot say that the parole board or the police did all they could to ensure public safety.”

“Let me be clear: you're telling me you cannot say that the parole board or the police did all they could to ensure public safety,” Paula repeats.

Pantano twists his gold ring hard.

“The governor is convening an outside committee to examine the monitoring of Mr. Jessup, who has since committed suicide while awaiting sentencing in custody at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Cedar Junction, as you know. I have no conclusions at this time,” Pantano says.

Switch to the studio, and the pancake-faced reporter, now in the anchor chair, asks Paula if what they just heard is the department's official statement.

“You heard him, Ryan,” she says. “Parole Board Chief Valerio Pantano cannot say that the parole board or the police did all they could to ensure public safety. We'll keep following this story as it develops. Live in Shiverton, I'm Paula Papademetriou. Back to you.”

I whistle. “Damn, girl,” I murmur.

My last thought before I fall asleep is of a severed pinky finger in a box.

*   *   *

I wake in the predawn dim with an anger hangover. The memories come at night now, more vivid than the daymares. So real that I'm lying here thoroughly pissed, because I remember the days after the woods, in the hospital, like it just happened. I'd been ready to cry with Liv, looked forward to a good, long, cleansing cry, one that included survivor high fives and hugs. Instead, she had observed me with an alien lack of empathy, refusing to acknowledge my busted ankle, my terror, or the fact that I took her place in hell.

Everything had looked creamy from the morphine drip, lit from within, with glowing trails coming off the nurses' fingers as they tended to my IV and adjusted the traction ropes that held my foot. The blue fluorescent bar above my head made Liv look angelic.

“You went to heaven,” I'd said, all dopey.

“I went where?” Liv asked.

“Never mind. It's the drugs. You came. How'd you get out?”

“I sprinkled a ground-up Ambien in Deborah's pinot noir and begged a ride from Boseman.”

Liv's cousin Boseman was a party hanger-on who stunk of cloves and always looked me up and down with skittery eyes. He was at least twenty-four and made beer runs for the whole school, taking too much money and skimming off the top.

“I'm glad you came,” I said.

“Of course I came.” Liv stared at the IV taped to my hand.

“Where's my mom?”

Mom hadn't left my side. She slept in a vinyl chair under a blanket and ate leftover Jell-O off my tray. I figured Erik had finally dragged her to get something real to eat. Later, I found out she'd been in the parking lot arguing with a reporter doing a stand-up, which is when they plop themselves at the scene of the action, like town hall or a burning house. And that Liv had bumped into her on the way in.

“I have no idea,” Liv said. I don't know why she lied.

“So she doesn't know you're here,” I said, sulking. Even half-sedated, I wanted Mom to see what a good friend Liv was, checking up on me.