After the Woods

by Kim Savage

  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 i
nto 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.

  “Did you really think I was dead?” Liv asked.

  “No. I get confused. Like I said, it’s the pain medicine.” I held up the round end of my morphine pump. It had a button in the middle that I pushed every hour. The other end was tipped with a cannula that delivered the drug into my spine. Every part of me hurt, but mostly my ankle, the one Donald Jessup snapped. Ropes and pulleys forced my body to form new bone to repair the break: an impressive contraption that you might mention if you were seeing it for the first time.

  “I bet the morphine confuses things. Makes your memories unreliable. But all things considered, that’s probably best. Forgetting, in order to move on,” Liv said.

  “There are gaps. But I remembered his face enough to ID him. And the things he said.”

  Liv’s smile went stiff, as though she caught it before it slipped away. “Things?”

  I shimmied down into my blanket a touch. Jessup’s voice was still in my head: the jangly shouts and the sharp orders. The stammering when he was jonesing. The spooky calmness when he arrived at an idea. “He talked a lot.”

  “Did you tell the police what he said?”

  Her question confused me. “They weren’t interested in what he said to me. They were interested in what he did to me.”

  “You weren’t raped. They told me you weren’t raped,” Liv said quickly.

  There are other violations. Like forcing someone to see something in a pit that will haunt them forever.

  “I wasn’t raped.” I said it wearily.

  “See? We’re both fine now.” She reached for my hand, but I left it there, tethered to its needle.

  “Why are you downplaying it?” I said.

  She grabbed my other hand and patted it enthusiastically. “I’m simply trying to say we’re okay.”

  “We’re okay now.” I sounded sour. For a second, I had wished I was her, unblemished and upbeat. Already looking ahead. Maybe I could act normal too, if I could get the fractals of my memory and how Liv was acting right then to make sense. “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “Yes?” Liv said.

  “What did you do after you got away?”

  Liv asked if I was chilly and didn’t wait for my answer. She pulled the sheet to my chin and perched on the bed, speaking mechanically, with measured beats and pauses. “I ran back down the trail. I had no cell—you had yours, remember?—so I had to drive all the way home before I could call the police. They went and looked for you, exactly where I told them, where the Hill crests, to the exact spot where I—”

  “Left me.”

  She sighed like I was a child.

  “Were you with them? The searchers?” I asked.

  “Everyone was there. The whole town came out, it was over the top”—Did she roll her eyes?—“you’d just vanished.”

  “Were you there looking for me?” I had to force myself to be still under my blanket.

  “I wanted to,” she said, smoothing the blanket across my chest. “But they wouldn’t let me. I had to be examined. Make my report. Besides, they said if I went back in the woods, it would distract the volunteers.”

  “They wouldn’t let you?” I asked.

  “Of course not. I mean, he was still out there,” she said.

  “So was I.”

  Liv stared hard at the muted TV, twisting a bit of blanket between her fingers. Red, white, and blue streamers rippled across the screen and dissolved into stars that chased one another in a circle and split to re-form the number three. I’d memorized all the promos: Trust WFYT—the Friend You Can Trust!—for the local angle on the biggest miracle-recovery story since Elizabeth Smart. Paula Papademetriou folded her arms and nodded. I softened a little, watching Liv frown and pick at the cotton weave, and considered asking what she thought of Paula Papademetriou, just to break the tension.

  “To be honest, as long as we’re fine, it’s really not a big deal,” Liv said.

  Her words hurt more than my junk ankle and my briar-shredded back and my hypothermic hands and feet. I twisted on my hip and faced the wall. After a while she left. I rolled back and felt under the sheets for my morphine pump, grabbing the TV remote in my other hand. By then the twenty-four-hour news stations had picked up the story. Every show had some version of the same opening shot—the main entrance to the woods, its trees blanched dry and pale in the camera lights. The woods I knew were wet and black. Newscasters used phrases like plucky teen and heroine and remarkable courage. When one segment ended, I found another on a different station. Some channels covered my story twice in the same hour. The story became more horrific with every telling, proving that we’d been through hell, and that Liv should have been relieved that we were alive, grateful we both made it out, and shocked that it had happened. Yet she was none of these things. And I wanted to know why.

  After a while, I let the morphine pump fall, and swore I’d never let anything cloud my mind again.

  My alarm blasts Kiss 108. I roll over and hammer the top with my fist, then feel for the thick glasses I abandoned for contacts in sixth grade. My notebook lies, propped on its fanned pages, spine-up on the floor next to my bed. The memory trails off like the ends of clouds. I grab a pen and scribble in the growing light:

  Things I Know About Liv:

  - Drove home before calling the police

  - Said my memory is unreliable

  - Lied

  FOUR

  355 Days After the Woods

  Principal Ligand splits his pants as he mounts the brick wall, unsteady in wingtips. He yanks down the back of his tweed jacket. Someone hands him an electronic bullhorn.

  “All students must now report to their homerooms!” He turns side to side like he has a rod in his back. “If you do not enter the school now, you will be marked tardy.”

  A line of male teachers stand with their arms crossed like undersized bouncers. We huddle in clumps, the bus kids and the kids whose parents drop them off, and the ones who drive, like me, all standing outside in the bright, cold morning ignoring Ligand and his visible boxers along with the first bell. We shift and shiver and steal looks at the white vans with their curlicue cables and satellite dishes parked in a wagon circle around the WELCOME TO SHIVERTON HIGH SCHOOL! HOME OF THE CHIEFTAINS! sign. The WFYT van has driven up on the grass, its wheels sinking in the mud. The crowd of students gives off a dangerous, honing energy looking for a place to land. A pack forms around a boy named Ari, the son of a wealthy computer executive and a leader because of his brutal sarcasm and contempt for authority. He dashes across the driveway and a patch of butterscotch grass, circling the vans and disappearing behind the welcome sign. Two boys shove each other until one, then the other, follows Ari across the grass.

  The kids near the wall dissolve, and there is Liv near the curb. She stands stiffly, feet together, wearing a cropped puffer jacket and pencil jeans, an arc of space between her legs. She spots me and holds my eye, her mouth a line of fear. I close my eyes for a second and try to shed the anger from last night’s stupid dream. I start toward her. At the same moment, the crowd follows the boys and Ari, and I am swept onto the lawn, pressed in among morning smells of body spray and clean hair. Everyone ignores the drunken sounds of Ligand garbling into his megaphone. Ari scales the back of the sign and pokes his head over the top, balancing on his stomach and waving his hands over a reporter’s head. When the camera light trained on him dies, the reporter shoves up the sleeves of his logoed half-zip and charges behind the sign. Ari and the two boys fly back across the lawn to cheers.

  A black SUV pulls up on the grass. Everyone buzzes and cranes to see if it’s really her, because everyone in Shiverton claims to be six degrees from Paula Papademetriou. The thrill of seeing Paula in her official capacity is infectious. They specu
late that she’s in her own car because she probably came straight here, maybe from Starbucks, because someone saw her there in her tennis skirt last week. And in the long line for the pharmacy at CVS. Buying kale at the farmers’ market on the town common. A lot of TV people are tiny in real life, but Paula is tall—not Madonna-sized, not fun-sized, they say. Serious and real.

  Her hair is the color of espresso and brushed straight back from her face, which is made of angles and hard planes. We jam our hands in our pockets and huddle against the brisk November morning air, but she looks at ease, coatless in a pantsuit. She holds notes that she passes to a man crouching nearby as the camera starts to roll. Her camera voice is lower than in real life; I know this because I’ve heard her at the organic pizza place, holding a glass of chardonnay at a tall table. Mom and I were on the other side of a hedge of plastic plants. That night, her voice matched the high, shrieky voices of the other mothers. This voice is much better.

  “A real-life horror story is unfolding here in Shiverton, now that police have identified the body of eighteen-year-old Ana Alvarez, who went missing while jogging in a remote section of the Middlesex Fells Reservation in August 2013. The police will not say exactly where she was found, only that her death is suspicious. Alvarez was a freshman at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, and sources tell me that officials have seized her computer and smartphone in their investigations into whether or not she knew her killer. I’m here at Shiverton High School, where the two students who were attacked last November by the man many believe is the prime suspect in Alvarez’s murder are enrolled as juniors. That man, Donald Jessup, committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial. This latest development only intensifies the scrutiny local law enforcement faces, as new questions are raised about this predator who many say should have been under the strict surveillance of the police.”

  The light dims and Paula crouches, shuffling papers. She holds a phone to her ear and looks up at the cameraman, wrinkles layering her forehead.

  Liv appears before me. Up close, I can see that her pupils are a shade too large, and her hair hangs in matte clumps.