The Bargaining (26 page)

“It's not like he was . . . I mean, they were just animals, and maybe they were already dead before he . . .”

A conversation I should never have heard meanders into my memory.
He needed help, not . . .

I look at the shed in the painting and run my finger over the shaded entry. When I do, I swear I see just a smidge more light shine on the hearth than was there before. My eyes are burning they're so tired.

“I don't understand. What does this have to do with what Margie said?”

“I told my pop,” Miller blurts, his voice loud on the stiff air around us.

I shake my head. “Miller, what're you—”

“I told him, don't you get it? I started the whole thing.” He looks at the painting like it's a living, breathing creature he'd like to step on. But the instant I see that hate burn in his eyes, the fire is snuffed out and he looks up at me, the thread between us tugging.

“I thought I'd make him proud if I told him.” Miller drags his hands through his burnt hair and tugs, the skin around his eyes lifting. “It's just . . . I was only eight.”

I want to say that I know, that I completely understand, that the thread isn't tugging too hard on me now. But suddenly I'm understanding a little bit more about Miller's specific pain in losing his brother after that—even if some part of him returned.

The little boy standing in the doorway, scratching at his arms, waiting for someone to notice him.

“Miller, you don't think—”

“I made it happen, Penny.” The fire that burns his hair now looks like it's traveled someplace behind his eyes. “It's my fault. Everything that happened after I told my pop, it's all my fault.”

I think of the man, Burt, returning with Jack, the boy left in the woods for six months. I think of the woman, Doris, her hand raised high in the air, her eyes wild. Her eyes finding anyone but the eight-year-old Miller standing
in front of her, ready to receive the blow. But none of it makes sense. Did they send Jack into the woods as punishment before they realized what they'd have to do to get him back? Or did they know and do it anyway? The thought is almost as horrific as the confessions Margie laid on me in The Washingtonian.

“Miller, you didn't make any of that happen. Whatever your brother did. Whatever your parents did. None of that was your fault.”

I wait for second before I add, “You were just eight.”

But his words repeated back to him do nothing to comfort this eight-year-old boy who is a young man now. He's shaking his head before I can finish, and I know I'm not understanding what he needs me to understand. And he's right. I have no idea what it was like to grow up in his house, though if whatever Jack's been showing me at night is even half of the reality Miller lived and not just a figment of my own messed up imagination, I'm starting to get a better idea.

I look down at the painting with the mark of Miller's troubled childhood memory all over the canvas. I trace the brushstrokes and read the thoughts an eight-year-old Miller must have had when he was waiting for his missing brother to come home, watching his parents
­grapple with a reality few have ever had to face. I feel stabs of guilt for my outrage at Margie the other day at The Washingtonian.

Then I remember the rest of her story, the story of what she did to ease the burden of her pain.

I set the painting down on the folding table before looking back up at Miller, and I'm not at all surprised to find him entirely deflated when I raise my eyes. The thread snaps.

“It wasn't your fault. However horrible the whole situation was, you weren't the one who made it happen.”

“Penny, don't you get it? There's something going on in those woods. You know it too, or you wouldn't have gone around asking.”

“What I know is that if Margie was telling the truth, some horrible things have gone down in those woods. And I'm not sure I can believe something that awful . . .”

“It happened,” Miller says, and the sadness that soaks his already faltering voice is enough to make me buckle.

We share the silence, searching for each other in the murky depths of it. Because he said it—because his parents lived it, and that means he did too—I can't deny that Margie was telling the truth anymore. Whatever those woods are or aren't, I have to hold up at least one truth as a light through the trees. A bargain was made, the “mir
acle” that brought those kids back one by one from the North Woods.

And whatever remains there now isn't what the Point Finney Four left behind. It's whoever was left in their place.

“It wasn't you.” I finally say to Miller.

But he doesn't say a word. He simply hooks his finger gingerly under the canvas's wooden frame and pulls it toward him.

“It wasn't you.” I say it again because I can't think of what else to say.

He takes a while to answer. And when he does, he sounds more assured than he has the entire night. “Maybe not,” he says, “but I could be the one to make it right.”

I search his face for answers, but I can't get past the smoke from all that fire around him.

“Miller, what do you think you could possibly do now—”

“You know,” Miller says, his eyes widening. “I
know
you know. You've all but confirmed it. What I'm doing is making a difference. It
changes
things.”

His eyes are wild with a kind of mania I've never once seen in Miller. They drop to the painting of the shed, and I wonder if this is how everyone's been looking at me all these months since Rae died. The way I want to look at
Miller now. To convince him not to believe all the things his bereaved brain is telling him.

“The painting? Miller, that's just a coping mechanism. It's like therapy. It's not real.”

I don't mean to sound like I know better. I write letters to my dead friend. But it comes out like that anyway, which is why the fire burning all around him snuffs instantly, and he walks me to the door sooner than I'm ready to go.

“I just wanted you to know,” he says, unlocking the bolt and ushering in the June night's breeze. “I thought you'd want to know there's more than just a horrible mistake behind what happened back then. Whatever you've heard—whatever you've seen—it was more than just a mistake. There's blame, too. And we all share a piece of it. It's not just bad people who do bad things.”

I consider what he says from the step outside his trailer.

“There's always more to a horrible mistake than what happens after it,” I say just before Miller closes the door behind me.

I walk slowly to April's jeep despite the chill reaching toward me from the woods.

Even though the sun has finally set and the moon is fighting for a space to shine between the dense trees, I don't feel nearly ready to go back to the Carver House. I
check the dash and find that April's tank is three-­quarters empty. And because it's the closest station to the middle of nowhere, I get back onto WA-16, ignoring the impossible lure that tempts me toward I-5 North and back to Seattle. Instead, I pull off at the same concrete-laden gas station April and I stopped at the day we arrived in Point Finney after leaving the rest stop. April's jeep is shuddering as I depress the brake, and I notice that the thermometer is climbing toward the
H
. I make a mental note to buy coolant, but not before I enjoy this moment outside the car, surrounded by concrete. It feels good to be in a place free of the encroaching trees, just for a second.

I slide my card and situate the pump, tapping my foot absently to the tinny music playing through the speakers overhead. The same inane jingle I heard the last time.

I look up at the convenience store, its brightly lit entrance marred only by one flickering light that can't manage to keep up with the glow of the rest of this place, with its sparkling red fixtures and absence of oil stains that haven't yet formed on the concrete. The convenience store is closed, the pumps set to accept only cards.

“Not exactly the most convenient convenience store,” I mutter.

The same boy sits just off center of the entrance,
crouched with his knees under his chin. His cardboard sign is lettered neatly in all caps:
NEED $5 FOR BUS RIDE HOME. HUNGRY. WILL WORK. GOD BLESS.

The pump clicks to a stop behind me, but I hardly notice. All I can think about is what Miller said, the singular focus of his pain. I can practically feel the textured paint of the little brown shed under my fingers.

“I thought you'd want to know there's more than just a horrible mistake behind what happened. There's blame, too. And we all share a piece of it.”

I can't shake the feeling that I let Miller down. That I didn't meet him at the conclusion where he's been waiting for me. But all I learned tonight is that Miller thinks he
is
the canvas on which the rest of this story is painted. That somehow he was the architect of the events that led to his brother's disappearance and reemergence from the woods six months later. A fraction of his former self, but enough to satisfy anyone looking from a distance. That he thinks he can repaint the saddest picture in the world to somehow make it a happier one.

And while I have seen enough over the past few weeks to open my mind to a lifetime of horrific possibilities I would have dismissed as insanity prior to that, I have to remind myself that I've had a constant companion in Rae for the last nine months.

I think back to the night she turned me by my shoulders, pleading with me.
“Then why am I still here?”

“Because I keep you close,” I say, and I see the head of the boy by the entrance lift in response to an answer that isn't his.

Rae is so close, I can smell the vanilla bean lotion she used to wear.

“Because I'm not ready to let the pages burn yet,” I say to her.

20

T
HE WOODS ARE SO QUIET
by the time I pull up to the Carver House, I almost feel like they're waiting for me to do ­something.

“Nothing to talk about tonight?” I say, knowing I'm insane for taunting whatever might be listening, but I am delirious from lack of sleep and I've heard enough horror stories in the last few days to numb me for the moment. It feels good to be a little pissed, and I let the shell of that anger shield me all the way to the front door and through the living room.

Even in the shadows and the silver light of the moon, I can see that April has rearranged the furniture and done a respectable job of scrubbing and polishing the floors. I feel a pang of guilt for not being here for that, and I vow to be of
more help starting tomorrow, even if all we can manage right now is to make the place look prettier.

A large eye winks at me from the side table by the couch, and I recognize Linda's blue and white strap dangling from the edge like a tail. A pink Post-it in April's handwriting reads: “Borrowed your camera for some before and after pics. Nice, huh?”

I advance backward through the pictures, seeing the “after” before the “before,” and I have to say that I'm impressed. It looks like she took some magical lint roller to the couch, and what she uncovered, at least according to Linda's digital record, is something less mauve and more like a cranberry color. She left the gray coat hanging on the hook by the door, and it's the only thing that disrupts the room's appearance of antiquity.

I scroll backward and find a couple more pictures reflecting the work she did in the first two rooms upstairs, the ones closest to the stairs. With the beds made, the mattresses in place, it actually looks like this house could serve as a bed-and-breakfast to a buyer with just the right kind of imagination.

One who doesn't care about small things like plumbing and electricity.

And uninvited visitors.

I click back once more to find the room with Jack in his mural, and as always, my eye travels straight to him. Everything looks as it should. His earnest green eyes fixed on the closet across the room. The clumps of trees growing thicker as they travel to the top and back of the mural. I'm sure if I zoomed in close enough, I'd be able to make out the little wooden shed—the one I've seen not only in person, thanks to Rae, but centered on its very own canvas thanks to Miller's eternal guilt.

But I don't want to see any more.

April is in bed. I can see her room from where I stand in the living room, her back to me in a position that feels oddly familiar, and it's not until I'm almost taken by sleep—my body finding the curves of the newly cleaned sofa—that I remember another woman lying on her own bed, staring at the reflection of her face in a vanity mirror that refuses to give her any comfort instead of staring at a little boy standing in her doorway, waiting to be noticed.

“Just for a second,” I say to no one in particular, but I know someone is listening. Someone is always listening in this place. “Just for a second, give me some quiet.”

I allow the heaviness of sleep to press me into the sofa, its tufts of fabric cushioning my head. My body is limp from exhaustion, and I let sleep swallow me whole.