The Bargaining (29 page)

I trace my fingers over the letters already on the paper, trying to remember the feeling instead of simply picturing it like a scene in my head, a snapshot from some moment in time that seemed so profound I had to capture it.

Then I find my pen on the table next to the bed and make a new sentence.

I let you run away to die.

When the lump in my throat finally clears and a tear resurrects itself from the depths of my cracked heart, my new sentence blurs, and I only see the words
I let you die
.

22

W
HEN
I
WAKE UP, THE
letter is in my hand, soft and a little damp from the sweat of my palm. I'd been clenching it in my sleep, the page half torn from the notepad. Sleep deprivation finally won out, even if it came at the wrong time of day.

I look at Linda, whose Cyclops eye is turned slightly away from me.

“I know you're mad at me,” I say, nudging her lens toward me. “I'm going to make it up to you. We're taking more pictures of the downstairs today. We'll start on the kitchen.”

I feel a little better at the thought of erasing a trace of the puffiness under April's eyes as she walks through the door after her meeting with the engineer, her funky oven I still can't find the charm in glistening with the shine of some
powerful scouring, pictures snapped of the ever-important “before” and “after.”

Maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to force myself into the same exhaustion that put April into a deep sleep last night. That is, until I woke her up. And maybe for a fraction of a second, I'll be able to erase from my mind the horribleness of what may have happened in these woods ten years ago.

I sling Linda's strap over my shoulder and head downstairs, setting her on the kitchen counter before returning upstairs for the cleaning supplies.

But as I begin to descend the stairs once again, I hear a clicking I shouldn't hear.

It's the sound of Linda's shutter, and as I round the corner to the first landing, I see her flash working on overdrive in the kitchen, the click popping a bright light for every take.

I lock up for a second at the thought of whatever might be training her lens. The paralysis of last night as I listened to that dragging progress through the mattress tunnel begins to seep in.

And then suddenly, the anger I wanted to feel last night—the animal instinct I was waiting for while I heard that horrible voice—kicks in at the thought of Linda in anybody's hands but mine.

My feet move with a force of their own, landing in hiccupping stops as my boots scuff April's shiny new floors. I round the corner of the kitchen so fast, I'm just in time to see Linda's strap disappear through the open kitchen door.

“Hey!” I scream. “Bring her back!”

I pound down the steps to the dirt that borders the edge of the woods, and a muddy footprint points me down a path that's becoming more familiar than I'd like.

“Bring her back!” I scream into the trees before lunging after the footprints. I can't hear Linda's clicking anymore, but I know she can't be far. I'm moving faster than I have in what feels like months, and the need for exertion, for someplace to put this chaos inside of me, overtakes all.

I crash through the trees with insane abandon, the last of my reason cast in my wake. I push the branches away from my face, the leaves slapping my skin with a little more force than they should be able to.

I've already run too far before I have to stop and admit that I have absolutely no idea which direction Linda could have gone with her thief.

I stand as still as I can on tired, shaking legs. The trees are passing a tiny breeze between them, handing it off from one branch to the next. The ground is damp from last night's rain, and even though I know it can't possibly be
true, it feels almost as though the soft ground is absorbing me like everything else.

I shift to a new stance at the thought of it, receiving a scrape on my shoulder from an unseen branch to my right.

“Where are you?” I whisper, my voice buried under the weight of my panting breath.

In response, I see a billow of white, then a flash of long, dark hair. And then, pointed directly at me, a flash from my own camera.

The same girl from the night with Rae. The same girl who led me all the way out past the clearing to the shed.

“Not this time,” I say through gritted teeth. “You're not going to get that far.”

My patience with the game of chase I've been playing all month has worn so thin, I can see through it. But even as I barrel through the woods to the spot where the girl was standing—her footprints so deeply embedded it looks as though she'd been standing there for half a lifetime—I know that not all the rage fueling me is on my own behalf. I'm feeling their rage, too. These kids. Their insistence on robbing me of sleep every night. Their encroachment into the daylight now. It's their way of being heard, of
making
me hear them. They've been tossed away, traded for what was wanted.

Given over to a greedy place to right a wrong that could never be corrected.

I slow to a walk and edge into the clearing, knowing for certain now that the little girl is bringing me right back to the shed that marks the beginning of the deep woods.

I leave the clearing, brushing past the rope swing with its platform of wood for a seat. I blink away the memory of the boy who was Miller's disposable brother, his feet passing over me as I lay on the ground, drunk and feeling only a fraction as lonely as he must have felt.

When I finally see the back of the shed, I can hear the familiar clicking of Linda's shutter.

“Show me what you want me to see,” I say too quietly for anyone to hear. I know they need to be heard, so I'll brave whatever it is they need to tell me. But after this—after I have Linda safely back in my hands—this stops.

After this, I tell April that we need to leave this place. No one should have to bear the depth of what this loneliness brings.

The splintering green door that was shut so tightly the last time I was here is now standing open. Just a crack, but enough to beckon me. Just like Miller's painting.

And while I know I'm expected, I couldn't feel less ­welcomed.

I see dishes first, and I can't understand why that bothers me.

There's a lot I could have noticed before the tiny round table with four mismatched chairs tucked neatly under the rusted tin belly of the bistro table, but I see the dishes on the table before anything else. They're placed evenly, as if measured by a ruler—a large plate beneath a small bowl at each setting, a fork to the left of the place, pinning a different cloth napkin to the rusted metal table, a spoon on the opposite side. Four chipped, mismatched glasses adorn the upper left corner of each setting, filled with years upon years' worth of rainwater and grime, clouded with the type of organism that grows in water left to stand and wait.

And that's what bothers me, I see now. The waiting.

It's as though the entire table was set in anticipation of something, and it's held its breath ever since.

A newspaper clipping surfaces in my clouded memory.
We'll have more questions for the kids, of course. We'll want to know how they kept alive in that sort of weather.

A centerpiece bound by once-pliable forest grass now chokes the stems of wood scrub and pinecones, intact only for lack of movement. I know that if I were to touch it, the bundle of foliage would crumble in my hands. But I have no desire to touch it.

I imagine four kids brought here separately, playing house as best they know how in a place that is home to nothing.

I pull my gaze reluctantly around the rest of the small cottage. It's difficult to say what this structure is exactly. It might have at one point been a large equipment shed. Hooks on the walls still hold shovels and rakes. I follow an intricate spider web from one corner of the ceiling to a hook holding a gray chainsaw with a corroded blade and a hand crank for operating it. I see the outlines of more toothed machines from somewhere way before my time on various hooks throughout the little house.

“Stop calling it a house,” I say to myself.

There is a doll with a missing arm, seated precariously on the tip of a shovel in the far corner opposite the little table. One glassy eye stares across the room into a corner too dark for me to fully distinguish, the other eye obscured by a lid ending in curled plastic lashes. Her black hair ­separates in a center part, still coiled into slick braids, though dust has matted her crown. The doll is naked, its cloth body slumping under the weight of such an awkward sitting position.

Then I spot the teal My Little Pony abandoned in a shadowed corner, the one with the pink hair, which I last saw in the Carver House. The one that had no other way to wind up
here than to be brought by some intruder. The same kind of intruder who stole Linda.

I look down to find a model car on its side in front of me, the kind that collectors buy now, not for playing with but for admiring from high shelves out of reach of clumsy fingers. Like the one a boy would hide in a box to keep it for himself, a box marked for Christmas decorations. Only this car's wheels are missing.

Upon further examination, I see that the posts on which the little model wheels would spin are still intact, and indeed something on them is still moving. I approach the car and crouch down to see the slowly moving legs of a spider. They writhe and reach for help, and it only takes a second longer for me to see that each of the four spokes that should have wheels attached to their ends instead pierce the thick bodies of brown and black spiders, strategically mounted to the car so that they didn't die, at least not right away.

I pull away in horror before kicking the car over, my brain pushing disgust away long enough to knock the spiders from the spokes and step on them, snuffing out their last moments in four stomps.

My breath dissolves and replaces itself in front of me, white cloud after white cloud of proof that I'm more afraid
of this place than I was willing to admit when I chased the girl into the woods.

The girl. She had to have come here. Where else would she have gone?

I walk toward the table. The bowls are filled, and the gnats and flies that circle startle away from the dishes long enough for me to see their contents. Various insects, some alive. Various parts of small animals, squirrels or something similar, fur matted and stained, decomposing or otherwise disintegrating. And up close, the smell is horrendous.

They were just animals, and maybe they were already dead before he . . .

I throw up before I can keep it down, a physical reaction to the confusion I know I'll have to process at some point, but not now. Now I have to get the hell out of here. Now I have to abandon my beloved camera (
Sorry, Mr. Jakes. Your baby's dead
). Because a particular thought has just hatched at the sight of this horrific table setting.

What if these thrown-away kids aren't trying to tell me anything? What if they're simply angry?

Or lonely?

My breath forms another misty cloud in front of me, and I'm edging toward the door when I spot the curl of Linda's
strap down a short hallway leading to another space in the nonhouse, a tiny room that isn't even a room. It's more like a large closet.

A few reluctant steps bring me to Linda, battered but otherwise intact, the lens miraculously unscratched, at least from what I can see in the murky dark of the little shed.

Linda in hand, I take a single step toward the door before I hear the clicking, then see the stripe of light that follows. A click, then the light. Click. Light.

It's coming from a crawl space at the back of the little room, guarded by a tiny door. Click. Light. Then the light disappears. Click. Light.

Just get out of here.

But what if I'm wrong? What if they are trying to tell me something? What if they're desperate to be heard, their broken jaws screaming soundlessly into the woods that can't talk back, their lives dislocated, stolen, traded for the value they never knew they had?

Click. Light. Then it disappears in the crack underneath the door. Click. Light.

I open my mouth to say something, to start whatever conversation the little girl might be begging to have. Nothing but a puff of air escapes my lips.

I walk closer to the door and put my hand on its little knob.

The light disappears at my feet, and I wait for the next click, for the light to reappear, but the little room stays dark.

I listen a few seconds longer. I wait for the click. Still, nothing happens.

I pull the knob, and the little door opens easily, emitting not even the faintest creak on its tiny hinges.

The space inside is completely black, and I wait a moment for my eyes to decipher something in the inky darkness. So when the click does return and the light follows, I'm temporarily blinded, my eyes screaming behind my lids before they recover. When I open my eyes again, I see only spots, then the blackness, but something has shifted.

Now I can just make out the outline of the light source. A flashlight. A string hanging from the bottom of the handle.

The flashlight I dropped that night at the edge of the woods before following Rae into the forest.

“Enough,” I say, the breath finally parting way for words. My relief is misplaced. I know that, but it doesn't keep me from feeling it. “Rae, I've had it. I told you, I'm done.”

But as I squint into the darkness more closely, I see a small, pale hand gripping the handle. And as I follow the pale fingers wrapped around the flashlight, I see they're connected to an impossibly thin arm, nearly translucent in its whiteness, bent at a jagged angle. The swath of pale skin
looks almost cracked, as though fractured by its tiny dark veins.

And then I hear singing.

The same song I heard in the house. The same song that led me to the mattress fort and the handprint weeks ago. The same song I heard coming from the fort last night. Before the dragging. Before the screaming.