What the Woods Keep

by Katya de Becerra

  It’s the worn-out notes in her voice that do me in. As I nod in surrender, her posture softens up. “Okay,” I say, “but I like your idea of barricading the doors.”

  She claps her hands in celebration and maneuvers around me to get to the fridge. “So what’ll it be?” She fishes out the eggs again, hugging the carton gently into her chest.

  “I don’t know. Scrambled?”

  “Scrambled it is!”

  As Del busies herself with cooking, I sit at the table, my mind running through possible scenarios to explain the presence of food supplies in the Manor. (Home invasion? Some kind of misunderstanding? Doreen made a mistake and I’m the invader?) Something really fishy is going on here, and the main overarching question I have is whether it all connects somehow: Mom’s ghostly plea for me to finish her incomplete business, the military base hidden in the woods, the signs of life in the old Manor …

  Her back to me, Del says, “By the way, these woods are genuinely creepy. How could you sleep at night here when you were a kid, having that forest for a backyard?”

  She still has no idea what actually happened in these woods. Would she feel even more disturbed about being here if I told her? “Are you scared?” I tease. “Want me to tuck you in tonight and stay with you till you fall asleep? Sing you a lullaby?”

  “Stay out of my bedroom, witch,” she laughs, blissfully unaware of how uncomfortable her words make me.

  * * *

  We settle in the “salon” (a hybrid of a library and a living room), but not before I conscript Del to help me make a pathetic barricade out of a dusty armchair propped against the entrance door’s handle. Del keeps rolling her eyes but, being a good friend and all, indulges me. Once done, we sit down to eat our egg feast. Empty bookshelves covering the room’s perimeter stare at me—with question or accusation, I can’t decide. Even after we remove most of the fabric protecting the furniture from dust and time, the Manor still looks inhospitable, despite the signs of life in the kitchen.

  We find a pack of minicupcakes shoved at the back of the fridge and devour them along with an entire bottle of some god-awful, fortified red wine—another gift from our unexpected benefactor. We toast to the “custodian” of the Manor, adding a half-assed “sorry” for eating all their food.

  I just hope there won’t be any bears coming in through the Manor’s door at midnight, finding two stupid girls in their beds and devouring them.

  The salon’s dark, reflective windows make Del uneasy—I keep catching her looking sideways at them, her forehead creased with concern. Can’t blame her. After Fort Greene, where it never gets completely dark at night thanks to all the light from the city, nighttime Promise is so dark, it feels like it’s suspended in a jar of black ink.

  I stand up, light-headed from the wine, and walk the salon’s perimeter, drawing down the curtains to hide us from the night’s penetrating gaze. While I’m at it, I avoid looking at my reflection in the window, irrationally scared of what might look back at me. It’s an old fear, one I thought I’d exorcised out of my mind a long time ago. But the act of being here now, in Promise, where the events that shaped my childhood psyche crashed and burned like the woods the night Mom disappeared, is akin to being pulled in all directions at once.

  With too much force, I jerk the last curtain closed, its weathered fabric tearing at the seams.

  Tomorrow I’ll find out who the hell’s been maintaining the Manor all these years and, when I do, I’ll have words with the mysterious, cheap-wine-loving “custodian.”

  I fall back into my seat next to Del. She’s uncharacteristically quiet, meditating over her (third?) pink-glazed cupcake. When she notices me staring, she stuffs the entire thing in her mouth. Her lips are stained with wine, her cheeks blushing. I probably don’t look much different.

  “So this is where mysterious Hayden Holland grew up,” she says like a doctor giving a diagnosis, and not a very favorable one at that.

  “If you think I’m mysterious, then my mother is the Great Sphinx incarnate.” Affected by alcohol and exhaustion, I have little control over what’s coming out of my mouth. But I don’t regret bringing Mom into our conversation. Dad refuses to talk about her. Dr. Erich believes I’m healed and have moved on. But the truth is, I still think of my mother in present tense.

  Del puts down her empty glass and pulls up her long legs. Her ankle boots are off and her belt’s unbuckled. “What was she like?”

  “Perfect.” It’s not a lie. To the child-me, Mom was just that: a perfect semidivine creature who all but shone in the dark. A common way for young kids to see their parents, I was told. Anyway, I grew up with this image of Mom stuck in my head. And nothing, not even her erratic behavior in the woods, worsening in the weeks prior to her disappearance, could shake that image.

  My body relaxes as wine-fueled heat spreads through my veins. I lower my head on the couch’s armrest and hug my knees in. Like the good old days of therapy.

  My tongue loosened by alcohol, I blurt out, “She was perfect. Made of light. Her head was always up in the clouds. Sometimes she’d just forget to speak and go silent for days, and I’d be silent, too, because I thought it was a game.… It’d drive my father nuts. But … there was this streak of darkness to her light. Like she knew our family idyll wasn’t going to last. If you believe in premonition, I swear my mother had it.”

  We plunge into silence. I bet Del’s just like me at this moment: wading through the chest-high waters of childhood memories, good and bad.

  “So what really happened to her?” Del asks. “I mean, I know she disappeared, but do you have any idea what happened to her?”

  I don’t register Del’s question straightaway. I must be staring at her for too long, because her face tenses. I suspect she regrets asking. On any other day, I’d evade her questioning and retreat into my protective shell, but tonight … “I’d say she left us. Just took off without a good-bye, because she couldn’t bother with the family life anymore. But some things about her disappearance just don’t add up, so I have my doubts.…”

  And then the metaphorical levee breaks and the river overflows and I talk, opening up like I’ve never opened up to anyone before.

  13

  ABOUT MY MOTHER

  William of Ockham was a Franciscan friar and philosopher who lived in England between the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Ever heard the expression Ockham’s (or Occam’s) Razor? Yeah, it’s named after him: a philosophical problem-solving device.

  Imagine you’ve got a mystery on your hands that needs solving. You come up with a number of possible explanations based on evidence, speculations, and observations. You hypothesize what the answer could be. But which of the explanations is closest to the truth? By applying Ockham’s Razor to the mystery, you can slice away all unnecessary, long-winded explanations and details, until there’s nothing left to slice. That leaves you with the simplest answer and, as Ockham’s Razor tells us, the simplest truth. Or as close to the truth as one can get.

  But then there’s a Rube Goldberg machine—an overengineered device that goes through a whole lot of complicated (and unnecessary) steps to perform a simple task. An alarm clock’s arrow pulls down a string; the string lifts a gate, which releases a marble; the marble hits a parrot; and the parrot jumps. It goes and goes until two eggs crack and fall into a sizzling frying pan and—voilà—here’s your breakfast!

  Back before Dad completely retreated into his crackpot science world of the Nibelungs and muon portals, we used to build Rube Goldberg machines with him while Mom watched on and smiled softly.

  I know that, in reality, it’s almost always Ockham’s Razor, but if I had a choice, I’d take a Rube Goldberg machine over it every time.

  * * *

  Yeah, so the levee breaks and the words tumble out of my mouth. “That night she just took off into the woods. But the thing is, Mom got all weird weeks before that. I mean, weirder than her normal weird.… She’d wander the woods for hours. We used to go together,
for walks and stuff, but then shortly before her disappearance, she stopped taking me. I knew she was sneaking off alone. She’d talk to herself a lot, too. And she had these cuts and bruises on her arms that never seemed to heal.…”

  Red stains forming on Mom’s silk blouse sleeve. She notices me looking, laughs it off—a glimpse of the old Mom in her warm smile. Says she’s a klutz! Says she had a strawberry jam accident! I don’t believe her. She knows it.

  “Am I freaking you out? Tell me when it’s too much, please?” I study Del, trying to read her, but she’s unusually quiet, her expression blank.

  “And your dad never noticed anything odd?” she asks.

  I shrug. “I guess he really didn’t. Or didn’t want to. My memories from that time are probably skewed, anyway.” I backpedal, starting to regret that I said so much, but Del pushes on.

  “And the cops?” she asks. “They searched the woods after … she was gone?”

  “Yeah, they searched everywhere but found nothing. I mean, nothing useful…” I take a deep breath and tell Del about the new clearing that magically appeared the night of Mom’s ordeal. I tell her about the burnt trees and soil turned to glass. And I tell her about Mom’s blood found splattered nearby the new clearing. Mom was bleeding heavily, it was concluded, and judging from the amount of blood lost, she couldn’t have wandered far from the clearing. And yet she wasn’t there, or anywhere near it.

  I’ve never actually seen it with my own eyes. Dad made sure the Black Clearing would remain a mystery to me, taking me out of Promise almost immediately after Mom vanished in these woods.

  Would I want to see the site of Mom’s demise now?

  Maybe. Not really. Possibly.

  “There was something else, wasn’t there?” Del asks. As if blood spilled in the woods isn’t enough, she demands more. But she’s right. There was something else. The last known piece of the puzzle to the Black Clearing mystery.

  “It gets creepy.” I meet Del’s rapturous eyes. I never thought I had a talent for storytelling, but I have Del totally hooked. If I proceed bluntly, I’m going to give her nightmares. And she’s already slightly freaked out; she just doesn’t show it. When I take too long to speak, she hurries me on with an impatient hand gesture and a raised eyebrow. What are you waiting for?

  “They found a finger,” I say. “A pinkie. Not far from where Mom’s blood was spilled. The finger wasn’t Mom’s.”

  A short, loaded silence. “And what were the cops’ theories?” Del serves more wine into her glass and tops up mine as she says, “I mean, it’s all weird, obviously, but the police must’ve been working on something?”

  My body is my armor, and right now my armor’s growing particularly thick, bringing a certain sense of detachment, like I’m a machine going into safety mode after overheating. I continue talking, but it feels like it all happened to someone else. “They went through it all: foul play, Mom left us, even faked her own death for whatever reason.… But it never made much sense to me. Let’s say Mom did intend to leave us. She took nothing of hers from the Manor. She walked out into the cold night, barefoot and wearing only her nightgown. My father, on the other hand, had a lot of theories, each one crazier than the last. But he’s known for that—crazy theories, I mean.”

  Del stays quiet for so long, I think maybe I tired her out, or maybe it’s her turn to get into safety mode, to distance herself in the name of self-preservation. But then she asks the question I’ve been dreading.

  “But what do you think happened to her? What do you really think?”

  What do I think? My answer to Del’s question is twofold. “Have you ever heard of Ockham’s Razor?”

  “Are you really going to tell me that the simplest explanation is always the explanation? What is the simplest explanation in this case, even?”

  “Not the supernatural one.” There, I said it. “So the next one is—whatever comes to your mind after you rule out the paranormal.”

  I study Del. Her cheeks are flushed with wine and excitement, but her glow’s waning and her eyes are half-closed. But even tired, she’s not letting this go. I owe her this, I decide—I brought her here with me, and she needs to know why.

  “I grew up listening to Mom’s stories. She loved everything with secrets, puzzles, and clues to a riddle. She was fascinated with fairy tales and used to tell me that every one of those stories had a grain of truth in it, even the most gruesome ones. Especially the most gruesome ones. So when I was little, I believed Mom was kidnapped by … let’s call them fairies.”

  “Fairies are not scary,” Del says.

  “I think you and I read different fairy tales growing up. But okay, let’s call them monsters. I thought she was taken by monsters into a monster kingdom, because she was their lost princess. They searched for her for years while she hid in the last place she thought they’d look.”

  Del looks at me like she’s trying to reconcile the author of the aforementioned theory and the Hayden she knows well—the mostly logical creature who can explain almost everything with science and facts. I go on, “For a while, I thought that one day they’d release her or she’d break free and walk out of the woods, come back into the house to take her seat at the dinner table, like nothing happened. But now I think she just had one of her episodes and wandered off too deep into the woods. Maybe she fell into Edmunds’ Gorge. And the cops were right that the finger from the woods was something else, something unrelated. I realize that I may never know the truth, and I’m okay with that.”

  That last bit is a lie.

  I will never be okay with not knowing what happened to my mother. But the possibility of knowing the truth has always been a scary prospect for me. What if the truth is that Mom left us? Left me? That somehow her mind got twisted and dark to the point where she decided to orchestrate her own disappearance? This possibility is too heart-wrenching to dwell on, because it means Mom never really loved my father. Or me. Or if she did love us, that love wasn’t enough to stop her from leaving us.

  I stand up to stretch my tired legs. “Should we go for a run tomorrow?”

  “Definitely. Possibly.” Del crawls off the couch and helps me gather up our dirty plates and utensils. Before leaving the salon, Del picks up her glass and gulps down the rest of the wine. Normally she doesn’t drink much. Promise must be really getting on her nerves already. “Wake me up if you get up first. Don’t let me sleep till noon, please. Now let’s go check out the bedrooms.”

  Del goes upstairs, but I linger to check that the front door’s still locked and the chair we set to block it is not too flimsy. I’m tempted to go and explore the Manor after Del falls asleep, to see if I can find any more signs of our mysterious benefactor whose food we ate and whose wine we drank this evening, but like Goldilocks, I’m simply about to crash. I find my old room upstairs and enter with trepidation.

  Here’s my old bed, its mattress bare. My painted wooden bedside table, an ugly yellow lamp atop it. The used-to-be pink-and-yellow wallpaper isn’t peeling, but it’s heavily weathered, with the colors too faint to discern. Darker squares indicate where my Labyrinth posters used to be. I flick the light switch on. The fact that the Manor’s got electricity means someone’s been paying bills. I wonder if Doreen knew something but didn’t tell me; she was eager to help me sell the Manor, but she did seem as confused as I was by Mom’s codicil and everything that went with it.

  “I found bed linens and stuff,” Del yells out from the corridor. I step outside and find her in the linen closet, its door wide open. When Del emerges from the cramped space, her hands hold a pile of white fabric. “Smells clean. Our benefactor’s been doing laundry.”

  “Maybe we should take turns sleeping,” I suggest. “In case our mystery resident returns in the middle of the night and my armchair booby trap fails.”

  “This bedroom can be locked from the inside,” Del says, nodding at the guest room behind her shoulder.

  “Mine can’t.”

  “You can stay in
the master bedroom, though,” she suggests. “There must be a lock there.” I eye the heavy, dark wooden door at the end of the corridor. My parents’ old bedroom. Even the thought of going in there, let alone sleeping there, makes me very uncomfortable. “Nope, I’m good here.”

  I walk back into my old room and close the lock-free door behind me. After I make the bed with the linens Del found, I set my eyes on the only other piece of furniture present—my bedside table—and, after a short deliberation and more physical exertion than I’d like to admit, bring it to the door. This will do.

  I note that pillows are conspicuously absent in the Manor, which makes sense, because Dad’s always had this antipillow thing, saying he likes the feel of blood flowing to his head unstopped by the elevation. There was a period of my childhood when Dad kept trying to instill his ways of life in me; that included an attempt at making me sleep without a pillow.

  I wrap my messenger bag in some linen and place the bundle at the head of the bed. I fall asleep as soon as my face touches my makeshift cushion.

  * * *

  How long was I out before, disoriented, I jolt awake? My eyes peer into the pitch-black space. There’s not a single source of light, not even the moonlight sneaking through the curtains. As the initial disorientation wears off and I remember that I’m no longer in the safety of my tiny Fort Greene bedroom, I listen to my surroundings for any clue as to what woke me. It takes my groggy brain a few intakes of breath to put two and two together and then I break into an uncomfortable sweat, my hands instantly slick: There’s a shuffling noise coming from right outside my door.

  I switch into panic mode. Did I lock the door? No, because the door’s got no lock! The shuffle comes again. Someone’s in the house. The mysterious resident has returned. Nothing good can follow.

  I think sadly of Del’s baseball bat, left in our Fort Greene lair. How I wish I had it with me now. If I scream loud enough, will anyone hear? I can break out of the house and run to the Reasers’ in hopes that someone still lives there. That would be quite an introduction back into Shannon’s life. Of course, assuming he’s still there.