“I’ve got it,” he told her. “Yeah, listen, Sheila now’s not great. I have to umm…-”
“Loan me that book,” Kim jumped in, standing. “You said we could swing by your house to grab it, and I really need it tonight so…”
Sheila glared at Kim, but when she shifted her attention to Max, she smiled coolly. “Some other time. You have my number, Max.”
She turned and walked away, her heels disappearing into the grass. Max wondered how she stayed upright.
“We don’t have to go,” Max said. “I should have just said no, but-”
“We can go,” Kim offered. “Watching all the kids makes me sad.”
“It’s early, though. I hate to take you back to Ellie’s House. I have a couple bottles of red wine at home if you’re interested? I hope that doesn’t sound presumptuous.”
Kim smiled and nodded. “That sounds like something Kim Phillips would enjoy.”
* * *
“Hey, Ash!”
Ashley looked up from where she sat with Sid, who was on his second helping of potato salad.
Brenda Dean waved at them. “You guys in for capture the flag?”
Sid looked at Ashley and gave a short shake of his head.
Ashley bit her lip and looked toward the woods. “There are twinkle lights all over the place, Sid,” she said.
Sid snorted. “And you think twinkle lights will stop it?”
“There're kids too, in groups. Unless it’s trying to get caught, it’s not in there,” she insisted. “Yeah,” she called back to Brenda.
“Awesome!” Brenda gave her a thumbs up. “You’re with us. Sid, you’ll be on Norm’s team.”
“Noooo,” Sid whined, flicking his eyes to Norm, a tall freckled boy who was so competitive he’d pushed a special-ed girl the year before after she’d bested him in a drawing contest. “Norm is a total show-off. I don’t want to be on Norm’s team.”
“Oh, come on, Sid. You wanted to do something fun, right? Here’s your chance.”
Sid dragged his feet as they walked across the grassy field separating the park from the woods.
The Shindig committee, a group of parents and kids, had strung white twinkle lights along the branches that edged the woods. However, deeper in, the forest lay thick and dark.
Ashley spotted Shane Savage on Norm’s team and gave him a half wave.
He nodded at her and smiled.
“Okay, everybody on my team wears camo bandanas. Don’t take them off either,” Norm announced, walking through the kids and thrusting bandanas into their hands.
“We’ve got yellow bandanas,” Brenda said, grinning. “So we can actually see each other.”
Norm shot her an annoyed look, but her team laughed.
Ashley tied the bandanna around her bicep.
“Our flag is hunter orange because Brenda didn’t think she could handle the camouflaged one.” Norm gave them all a look as if Brenda were a total wimp.
“And ours is light blue,” Brenda added, holding up the light blue flag.
“The territories are divided along the trail sign.” Norm pointed at a small wooden sign that explained the several trails that wound through the woods. “Everything to the right is our territory and everything to the left is Brenda’s. If you get tagged, you’re frozen until one of your own team frees you. And don’t even think about moving your flag once it’s hidden,” he added, glaring at Brenda’s team.
Ashley rolled her eyes. Norm was a notoriously poor sport who bent the rules to win. If anyone was going to move their flag, it would be Norm.
“May the best man win,” he added, offering Brenda his hand.
“Or woman,” Brenda snapped. When she extended Norm her hand, he jerked his back and smoothed it through his short brown hair.
“Better luck next time,” he said.
Sid offered Ashley a pained expression before following Norm, Shane, and the rest of their team into the woods to the right of the sign.
“Five minutes and the game starts,” Norm added before slipping into the trees.
Brenda wanted to hide their flag on a knobby oak tree at the end of their territory. Ashley climbed the tree and tied it around a branch.
After the team broke apart, Ashley slipped into the trees, stealthily moving out of her team’s territory and into Norm’s. She hadn’t expected to get into the game, but the look on Norm’s face had her wanting to see his expression when she captured his flag.
She hunched down and ducked under a dense pine tree, running smack into Shane Savage.
He grunted, but managed not to fall over.
“Oops, sorry,” she apologized, rubbing her chin where she’d struck his shoulder.
“I think you hurt yourself more than me,” he said, squatting back down. “So, am I frozen or are you frozen?” he whispered, laughing.
“Let’s call it a wash,” she said. “Are you trying to find the flag or just hiding from Norm?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Don’t you know Norm is invisible with his camouflaged bandana on?”
“I like capture the flag, but Norm takes it to a whole new level.”
“Norm takes everything to a whole new level. Did you see him in dodgeball the last week of school? He whaled Sally Hansen in the face with the ball so hard her glasses broke.”
“What a dick,” Ashley murmured, her desire to get the flag stronger as she imagined poor Sally crying over her broken glasses.
“Catch you on the flip side,” she said, starting forward.
Shane’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist.
She froze as Norm, squatting low and shuffling through the forest like a soldier, crept by.
Shane smirked, and Ashley clamped her teeth together to keep from laughing.
Norm had painted two streaks of black paint across his cheeks.
Ashley thought of tagging Norm, but knew if he saw her and Shane, he’d throw a tantrum and likely insist the game be started over.
Norm disappeared into the darkness.
Shane laughed silently, and the tremble of his shoulders was too much. She spurted a laugh, her breath catching, and dropped to her knees on the bed of leaves.
“Shhh… " Shane told her, putting a hand on her shoulder as his body bucked from the quelled laughter.
Their laughter subsided and Ashley took a deep breath “Seriously, that guy is a freak,” she giggled.
“And that’s if you’re being nice,” Shane added.
A scream pierced the quiet, and Ashley jumped up, heart racing.
30
Shane stared at her, smile gone, his blue eyes wide and confused.
“What was that?” he asked, though they both knew it had been a girl’s scream.
The girl screamed again.
They pushed through the trees, running toward the sound.
Other kids had come out of their hiding spots. In the darkness, Ashley watched dark figures running haphazardly. She couldn’t make out faces. Voices called and branches snapped.
The forest, silent moments before, filled with sound.
“Who screamed?” someone yelled.
“Was it a joke?” Brenda’s voice drifted through trees.
Another scream pierced the night, this one different from the first.
Sid’s scream
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” Sid was mumbling, and Ash ran toward the sound.
A flashlight beam waved across the forest floor.
Sid stood staring at a leafy ground, his flashlight shaking. The light flitted across blood-splashed leaves. At the edge of the trampled grass lay the body of Krista Maynard, an eighth grader. Blood gushed from a wound in her throat.
Ashley knelt, pulling her bandana from her arm and stuffing it against the girl’s neck. Warm blood seeped through the bandana.
“Sid, give me your bandana. Shane, yours too,” Ashley commanded. “Somebody run for help. Shane, get Mr. Freeman.”
Mr. Freeman taught social studies at the middle school. He
was also a volunteer firefighter and a paramedic.
Shane thrust his bandana into Ashley’s free hand and sprinted away.
Sid had not moved. The flashlight continued to weave and bob.
“Sid, give me your damn bandana,” Ashley boomed as Krista’s blood saturated Shane’s.
Other kids stepped from the trees.
“Is that Krista?”
“Oh my Gosh, what happened? Did she run into a tree?”
Ashley heard their murmurs, but trained her eyes on Krista’s face. The girl’s eyelids fluttered. Blood had soaked into her blond hair making the light strands that fanned out behind her look dark.
The seconds dragged and suddenly Mr. Freeman was there along with Sid’s mother who was a nurse.
Someone pushed Ashley aside, and she stood on shaky, stiff legs.
When she emerged from the trees, parents and kids stared at her, horror-struck. She looked down. Her light blue t-shirt was streaked in blood.
* * *
Max poured the wine and corked it, pausing when he heard murmured voices.
Kim sat on his back porch, hardly a place for a casual conversation at almost eleven pm.
Kim laughed.
He took their glasses and pushed open the screen door with his hip.
Kim sat alone in an Adirondack chair. Her pale legs were crossed, and her hands rested on her knees.
“Who were you talking to?” he asked, surveying the dark yard beyond.
“Oh, just-” she smiled and turned her head as if to ask the person their name.
She craned around in her chair looking toward the side of his house. A tall hedge of juniper trees separated his yard from his neighbors. Kim stood and walked down the steps, peeking around the house, and returning a moment later with a puzzled expression.
“She was right here,” she said. “I can’t imagine where she ran off to.”
Max looked into the shadows of the yard, the skin on the back of his neck prickling.
She.
“What did she look like?”
Kim bit her lip. “A bitty thing with bleached blond hair. She couldn’t have been over eleven or twelve.”
Max handed Kim her wine and walked down the stairs. The grass was cool against his bare feet.
He looked toward his neighbor’s house and then gazed at the dark tree line fringing the backyard. Nothing stirred.
“What did she say?” he asked.
Kim sipped her wine thoughtfully. “She said, ‘It’s a full moon tonight.’ I agreed with her and laughed because I got a chill. And then you came out…” Kim trailed off, looking at him, concern tinging her voice. “What is it, Max? Are you feeling ill?”
Max shook his head and returned to the porch. “She said it’s a full moon?”
On the cusp of his words he heard sirens in the distance.
Both he and Kim looked toward the sound, but it faded away and the quiet night took over once more.
“Eerie,” she murmured, shivering.
He nodded and wished eerie was where it ended.
“Shall we go inside?” he asked, gazing toward the trees crowding his backyard, hiding the wildness that hid within them.
He’d never feared the woods. Few kids who grew up in Northern Michigan did, but the woods in the day differed from the woods at night. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in daylight the woods were sun streaked and filled with the comforting sounds of birds and chipmunks. At night, darker things reigned. They crept out from holes and caves, their eyes glowing and their teeth gleaming. Few children walked into a dark forest without such thoughts.
“Yeah,” Kim agreed, rubbing her hands over her arms as if she’d gotten a chill. “Do you ever get the sense you’re being watched?” she asked, following his gaze to the trees.
He nodded, and broke his stare, pushing open the back door and releasing a flood of light onto the dim porch.
Kim followed him through the kitchen and into the living room. They sat on opposite ends of his gray suede couch. The conversation that had been so easy on their drive home from the Shindig seemed stilted. They sipped their wine in silence.
“I feel like a meteoroid.”
“A meteoroid?” Max asked.
She nodded.
“Nicholas loves outer space. We made a paper mâché solar system for his room. Denny probably destroyed it. I hate to think what else he’s done.” She took another drink and pressed the glass against her forehead. “I feel like I’m drifting in space. No path, no gravity, just adrift.”
“My mother would say, rest in the uncertainty of this moment,” he told her. “She used to tell my brother and me that all the time growing up. Whenever we were anticipating something or recovering from a break-up. I didn’t get it as a kid, but it’s come in handy as an adult. I had no idea how much uncertainty there was in life. I still don’t. Not at the level you do, anyway.”
Kim stood and walked to his bookshelf, examining his photos. The shelf held pictures of his graduation from Michigan State University. He stood wedged between his beaming parents, holding his diploma. He saw photos of himself posing next to his new motorcycle, photos of a family cruise they’d all taken several years before.
His face fell as he watched Kim studying his pictures. His life looked like happily ever after. One smiling, shiny day after another.
He hadn’t seen any family pictures in her apartment. The frames had probably all been smashed by her violent husband.
“Uncertainty,” she said after several minutes of silence. “Right now, in this untethered space, I think that’s why I stayed with Denny. I don’t think I had a word for it before this moment, but the uncertainty is what I feared most of all. At least with Denny, his fists were familiar. I don’t even know how to be in this life. Am I still a mother? When someone asks if I have children, what do I say?”
Max winced at her question, imagining his own mother if she ever lost her sons. Her heart and her legs, she had called them just days before. And more than once in his lifetime, she’d told Max he and Jake were her life’s purpose.
“You say yes,” he told Kim. “And then you tell them all about Nicholas. Why don’t you start with me?”
Kim’s head drooped, and she continued to face the bookshelf.
“I gave birth to Nicholas on Valentine’s Day. My Valentine’s baby, I called him. Denny brought me one of those big heart-shaped boxes filled with chocolates. He ate all of them except the cream-filled kind.” Kim laughed and touched a finger to a framed photo of Max and Jake as children dressed in matching powder blue suits. “I didn’t care. I’d never been so in love.”
She turned to Max with red-rimmed eyes.
“Not with Denny, but with Nicholas, my son. He lay on my chest and blinked up at me with those milky blue eyes. He weighed less than five pounds, but he gained weight fast. I remember his doctor told me not to introduce cereal into his bottle because he’d get fat.”
She laughed.
“Fat! Nicholas ran from the moment he woke up in the morning until he fell into bed at night. Fat was the last thing he would be.
“He loved outer space before he could walk. We lived in a little trailer in those days, and I’d sit with him on the porch and look at the stars. Tinkles, he called them. He started to talk about aliens in elementary school. All of his art projects showed googly-eyed aliens and giant silver discs flying through space.”
Max watched her shoulders relax as she spoke. She lifted her head and walked purposefully to the window, peeling back the curtain and peering into the night sky.
“He learned about the moon and how its cycles affected the tides. He used to mark the new moon and the full moon on our calendar at home. He liked to fish and play basketball. He requested lasagna for his birthday dinner every year and angel food cake with whipped cream and sprinkles. He hated carrots. He used to pick the carrots out of soup if I tried to sneak them in there.”
Her eyes shone in the moonlight slanting through the window. She walked to th
e lamp and flicked it off. Only the eerie white glow lit the room. Kim’s skin looked translucent, almost glowing in the darkness.
“He loved to read. Every other Friday we walked to the library, and he checked out books by Ray Bradbury.”
“Fahrenheit 451?” Max asked.
Kim nodded. “But The Martian Chronicles was his favorite.”
Max smiled, remembering reading the same books as a boy.
What had happened to the space loving child? If they were in a happily-ever-after novel, the boy would have been abducted by space aliens. The aliens would worship him, and later he’d convince them to return to Earth to rescue his mother from her abusive marriage. Nicholas and Kim would live happily ever after on a planet with six moons and pink waterfalls.
“He read for hours,” she went on. “In the summer he read ten books a month.”
Max didn’t know what had compelled him to stand and go to her, but he’d barely registered the thought when his hands slipped around her waist. She tilted her face, and he kissed her, sinking his hands deep into her wavy hair.
She tasted of wine and something deep and sweet, memories he thought, memories of her son.
When he drew away from her, his breath hitched.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have-”
But she cut him off by pressing her finger to his lips. She took his hand and pulled him toward the stairs.
* * *
Ashley’s mother rushed to her and squatted down, grabbing her shoulders, gazing at her with panicked eyes, and then pulling her close.
“Sid’s dad called me. Oh Ashley,” she moaned, and buried her face in her daughter’s hair, mumbling her name several more times before leading her daughter to her gray Chevy coupe.
Ashley waved to Sid, who sat in the back of his parents’ minivan. He looked at her, dazed, before lifting a limp hand in a farewell wave.
The car stank of cigarettes, a bad habit her mother indulged in only while driving, but never when Ashley was in the car.
Despite the stink, the car was clean, the ashtray empty. Ashley spotted her mother’s white smock draped over the backseat next to a paper plate with two chocolate cupcakes.
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