We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  I cracked my eyes (which, I was surprised to discover, I had at some point closed) to see a puce Louisa glowering at me, her fur-lined parka rendering her an incongruously redheaded Inuit.

  “I tried to call you,” I said accusatorially, not stirring from my position on the ground. I didn’t feel very cold anymore, which was, I dimly recalled from childhood lectures on hypothermia, not a great sign. My right arm was soaked through with freezing water.

  “My phone is dead. The cold. Obviously,” Louisa said. As though this were somehow my fault.

  When she answered, I realized I had spoken aloud.

  “No, it’s not your fault. I have a few ideas of who I’d like to blame, but that doesn’t feel constructive at the moment. Will you please, as I have asked a few times, get the fuck up?”

  Begrudgingly, I complied. “Where’s the truck?” I looked around myself and, for a few unsettling moments, wasn’t sure what direction I had come from. But I could make out the vague impression of my boots in the snow. It wouldn’t be long before they disappeared, though, since snow was clearly falling faster.

  “Should have brought bread crumbs,” I said. “I’m a shitty Hansel and Gretel.”

  “Agreed, entirely. This is extremely not good, Mack.”

  I looked at her, and something occurred to me. “Where’s Beau and Jack? And Fennel?”

  “You’ve hit upon my central concern,” Louisa sniped, and her pursed lips and scared rabbit eyes finally registered through my fuzz. She was terrified. “We got separated. I’ll tell you the story once we’re in the truck. I hope you have a phone that works,” she added, pulling me along.

  We began trudging back to the road, which, it turned out, was not that far away; it was certainly closer than I had thought while I’d stared up at the pine trees swaying over my head. I clumsily located my keys (Why had I locked the truck? How stupid, I thought. What if someone had gotten to it and been unable to get in? What if I had dropped my keys in the snow?) and we piled into the cab. Louisa demanded my phone, and I handed it over before turning on the engine so it could charge.

  “They’re all dead,” I said, explaining.

  “Jesus, what the fuck, Mack!” Louisa said, turning to look at me in horror.

  “No, no, the phones,” I corrected. “I’ve been trying for hours. All the batteries must be dead.”

  “Shit. And you spoke to Natasha? She hasn’t heard from anyone?”

  “She’s home with Chloe. They wanted to come, but, you know, space.” I gestured at the truck’s cab.

  “Fuck.”

  “What happened, Louisa?” I finally said.

  “It just went wrong,” she answered, shaking her head. “We thought the snowstorm would be the perfect time, because everything is shutting down. We were sure no one would be there, and we could just go in and get out and it would be a day or two before someone caught on. We knew the trucks couldn’t do their usual run in this weather, and they’d be stuck there. We figured it would be empty. So we broke into the property. Beau had figured out a way in, the last time he was there, before he got pinched. Once we were inside, it was easy. We torched some paperwork in the office—files and names and the like. We made digital copies of everything that seemed useful, to put online. Home addresses, that sort of thing. Then we fucked up the trucks, so that they’d have to pay attention. Sugar in the tanks, slashed tires, broken windshields, the works. It felt amazing.” Louisa smiled softly to herself, with a quiet glow that was incongruous with our current circumstances.

  “And we thought we’d done it. We were pumped—I’ve never seen Fennel look so happy. I mean, we know we can’t hope to really change things, but you have to start somewhere, right? The sight of those trucks, absolutely annihilated. It’ll cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Anyway, we got back to Fennel’s van, which scared the shit out of us for about two minutes because it didn’t start. But we got it going, and we took off. Thought we were fine.

  “But a mile or so on, we see this SUV come up behind us, and it keeps flashing its lights at us. We figured it was a security guard, because most of the Lakeview rent-a-cops drive those fucking gas-guzzling Suburbans. Jack and I wanted to pull over, but Fennel was…I don’t know, she was so determined that we get away. It’s like she was just…” Louisa shrugged and shook her head. I’d seen Fennel in her stubborn moods, and I could imagine the terrier-like fixation that would cause her to do something stupid.

  “We maybe could have talked her down, but Beau has a gun, and he pulls it out, takes a shot at the guy’s tires.”

  “Why on earth would he do something that stupid?” I asked, stunned.

  Louisa shook her head. “Heat of the moment? Male idiocy? His abiding sense of anarchy? Who knows. You may have noticed he’s been coming off the rails a bit. Anyway, the guy follows us. So Fennel is essentially now in a car chase in the middle of a blizzard on country roads, and some guy in an SUV is trying to ram us off the road, and Jack keeps begging her to just stop, pull over. But she was convinced she could get some distance or—I don’t know what she thought, actually. I mean, he had our plates. Who knows what he was thinking, for that matter, chasing us in this weather.

  “This only went on for about a mile or two, but we’d made it a ways up Mathews Road when Fennel, in her infinite wisdom, tried to take a sharp turn onto, I forget what it’s called. Burnt Road or something. Her van flies out of control, and the SUV that’s been on our ass cruises right into us, then into a ditch and flips over.”

  “Fuck me,” I breathed. As I warmed, some sense of reality was stealing back over me, and Louisa’s words began to register. She seemed bizarrely calm—perhaps she, too, was hypothermic?

  “Then we made a tough call,” Louisa continued. “Fennel was unconscious, since the other guy had hit her side of the car. Jack’s shoulder was dislocated, but he was okay to move. The guy in the SUV didn’t look like he was in great shape, but he was still breathing. So I used Fennel’s phone and called 911. I said that I was her and I’d just been in a car accident. I gave them the location, and we decided to go.”

  “Jesus, Louisa! You just left them? Isn’t that a fucking crime?”

  “It is. So is breaking and entering, destruction of property, and manslaughter. For Beau it would be his third arrest this year.” She bit her lip. “Look, I don’t know how I feel about it. But we panicked, and it just seemed like our best shot. Otherwise we could stick around and get arrested, and there would be no more decisions to make. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Okay, but then…where are Beau and Jack?”

  “We were all together at first, and Beau knew his way through the woods—he spent a lot of time out here as a kid, and if we went through the woods, we could pretend just to be stupid hikers if we got picked up. Dumb survivalist kids.” Louisa laughed at this. “Not inappropriate, as it were.”

  “But where are they?” I pressed.

  “One minute they were right behind me,” she said softly. “And then they weren’t.”

  * * *

  We were essentially paralyzed; we couldn’t leave, with Beau and Jack still in the woods. Nor could we get ahold of them or see them through the wintry screen that obscured anything more than a few yards away. Louisa and I both made brief forays to both sides of the road to call for the boys, but the futility of this gesture was more alarming than reassuring. They could be a scant five hundred feet from us and would neither see nor hear us. Meanwhile, it was clear that the storm was only going to intensify. Plugging my phone into the charger, I scanned weather apps with mounting anxiety—the Finger Lakes were preparing to have more than two feet of snow dumped upon them over the course of a storm that would last at least another forty-eight hours. We were genuinely fucked.

  After hours of pointless attempts to locate Beau and Jack, Louisa turned to me.

  “I don’t think we can find them a
lone,” she said, stating what had been obvious for some time. “We need to call someone.”

  I nodded. “What do we say happened, though?” I asked.

  “We’ll say that we were out hiking and got turned around in the snow. They’ll think we’re idiots, but hopefully they won’t connect us with what happened at Lakeview. I mean, they probably will. But at this point…” She didn’t finish the thought.

  I handed her my phone, and after a pause, she took it. She made the call, calmly summarizing our situation: we had gotten separated from our friends, and we now feared that they were lost in the national forest in the midst of a historic blizzard. We would sit tight and wait to be rescued. In reality, we had no choice; the drifts that had accumulated across the road made it abundantly clear that we were going nowhere under our own steam. We sat silently in the cab, shivering. I dreaded the arrival of our rescuers—having to lie, looking deeply foolish, answering questions I wasn’t sure how to answer. This anxiety allowed me to subsume the much larger fear that Beau and Jack might not be found. Not in time.

  A fire truck came whirring over the top of the hill, kicking up plumes of snow as it plowed its way towards us. I glanced over at Louisa, who sat grim and tight-lipped next to me. We hopped down from the pickup to greet our knights in shining armor.

  “You the kids who lost your friends in the woods?” one of the young men asked, naturally addressing himself to Louisa.

  “Yes. They’ve been out there a few hours now. I think they’re through there”—she gestured towards one side of the road—“and must have gotten off the trail somehow.”

  “Not somehow. This is no weather to be hiking in,” the man scolded. “Do they have any survival gear on them? Are they dressed for this?”

  “More or less,” Louisa answered. “But now that it’s dark…” She trailed off, and I felt a panicked thud of my stomach surging up towards my rib cage.

  “What about you two? How long were you exposed?” The firefighter looked at us carefully.

  “Not too long,” Louisa answered. “We’re okay.”

  “I’m not sure you are. Your friend looks like she might have some hypothermia. How long were you outside, hon?” He peered at me closely.

  “I’m not sure. A few hours?” I said. The firefighter gestured to one of his colleagues, who had been busying himself with equipment. “Can we check her out, maybe get a heat blanket?” He directed me towards the truck and his solicitous fellow hero, who had me hop up inside. I stumbled slightly hoisting myself into the vehicle.

  “Have you been experiencing any disorientation? Sleepiness?” this new man asked me.

  “I guess? I’m not really sure,” I answered.

  “Confusion? Slurred speech?”

  “I don’t know? Maybe?”

  The firefighter peered at me, and I felt weirdly unwilling to meet his eyes. My stupidity had brought this man out here. He rooted around behind himself for something, and when he turned back he held a thermometer, which he placed in my mouth.

  “How about you move your hands for me, tap your fingers in order.”

  I obliged, but we both paused when we looked at the two outer fingers of my right hand. They were stiff and vaguely bluish. The firefighter reached out to touch them, and the warmth of his hand made me jerk. The skin on those two fingers was hard. “Was this hand exposed to the weather?” he asked.

  “I tripped into a stream a few hours ago, and my hand got wet. But I didn’t notice anything,” I tried to explain. Really, who could be bothered with two numb fingers when I’d lost two friends in the cold?

  “You’ve got some pretty bad frostbite here, and you’re hypothermic. I think we need to get you straight to the hospital.”

  “But I need to stay here and find Beau and Jack,” I argued feebly. “I need to help find them.”

  “You need to take care of yourself,” the firefighter said firmly, and turned away from me to call an ambulance.

  Chapter 28

  I slept on the ride to the hospital, and nodded in and out once I arrived there. I felt unspeakably tired and just wanted to curl up in the fetal position and shiver beneath the blankets until Jack and Beau were found. In my disaffected delirium, I apparently furnished someone with my parents’ phone number, because my mother and father soon appeared at my bedside, looking quite reasonably distraught. I tried to apologize to them, but my mother shushed me through a veil of tears and a clearly fraudulent mask of stoic bravery. My father looked both pissed and worried, which seemed about right. I thought about my lack of health insurance with detached horror, and rolled over to fall back asleep.

  At some point, a doctor came in to inspect my bandaged fingers. As he peeled back the gauze, he openly frowned at them. I tried to catch a glimpse of my hand and saw two darkened digits.

  “Let’s just monitor how they do over the next couple of days before we make any decisions,” the doctor said. This was not comforting, but I shrugged and tried to go back to sleep.

  Finally, I had the presence of mind to ask about my friends.

  Louisa was apparently here at the hospital, being treated for exposure, though she was fine and would likely be released in a few hours. No one knew about Beau and Jack; they weren’t, in any case, at this hospital. I wanted to call Natasha and Chloe, but I realized dimly that Louisa still had my phone. So I fell back asleep.

  I woke again to find Louisa by my bed, looking down at me.

  “Hey, you,” she said. “How are you doing?”

  I waved my gauzy mitt at her and felt the sharp stab of pain there. “Oh, you know.”

  “Fuck, Mack. I’m so sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” I said. “What’s the word on Beau and Jack?”

  She met my eyes, and I saw the fear in hers as she shook her head. “No one has found them yet. But the storm…”

  I glanced out the window, where it was apparently daytime, though the sky was darkened by the whiteout. “How many inches have fallen?”

  “A foot, at least. The storm is supposed to go through tonight and most of tomorrow.”

  “Jesus,” I said. We didn’t need to say what that meant. “Jesus.”

  “The searchers are going to keep looking, though,” Louisa said, trying to smother the note of despair. “It’s possible they could have stumbled out of the woods and found a house. Or been picked up on the road.”

  “Wouldn’t they have tried to call us?”

  “Probably. But, you know, maybe they’re trying to lay low,” Louisa said, dropping her voice.

  “God, what about Fennel?” I said with a jolt, realizing that she had completely disappeared from my mind in my worry about the boys. “Was she okay? What the hell happened?”

  “She was airlifted. She’s okay. Concussion, so they’re keeping her a little longer, and I think a broken arm, but mostly all right.”

  “Has she said anything?”

  “I really don’t know,” Louisa answered. She paused. “I hope not. The security guard who followed us is dead.”

  “Oh God.”

  “So it’s only a matter of time before they charge Fennel with what happened at Lakeview. Then it all depends on what she says.”

  I stared mutely down at my hand. How had all of this happened?

  “Listen,” Louisa said, “I’ll let you sleep some more. Chloe and Natasha want to visit, but you know, with the snow…”

  “No, they should absolutely stay put. We don’t need any more of us out in this,” I said, watching the snow pile up on my window.

  * * *

  My fingers were amputated a few days later. This felt too surreal for me to process in my numbed state, so I simply nodded at the doctor’s explanations. Normally he’d wait longer, he said, possibly even weeks, but I was developing symptoms of septicemia. Okay, I said. My mother wept; she, clearly, was in a more emotional
ly attuned state. When I woke up from the surgery, I felt faraway and relaxed. I surveyed my swaddled hand for several minutes; encased in a baseball mitt of gauze, it didn’t really seem different. I couldn’t feel it at all.

  * * *

  —

  I was released from the hospital after my recovery. The storm had ended that Wednesday night, as predicted, and the town was gradually shoveling out driveways, dealing with downed power lines, and returning itself to business as usual. For us, usual had disappeared beneath the snow.

  Jack and Beau were still missing, which was a tactful way to avoid saying that they had almost certainly died of exposure during the storm. Louisa was still stubbornly insisting that they might be holed up somewhere, avoiding questions. In moments of optimism, I clung to this absurd notion too. But the fantasy was folly; I knew they were dead.

  Fennel was released the same day I was, and while she had so far avoided arrest for what had happened at Lakeview, it was clear that the cops suspected her. Sitting with Louisa in our kitchen, I was trying to learn how to drink tea (and, indeed, do everything) with my left hand when she told me that Sy had been arrested that morning on a varied bouquet of drug charges.

  “I talked with Rudy about it, and he says they likely put pressure on him to come clean and tell the whole story, give one of us up. Rudy says they’ll threaten him with trumped-up charges to see if he’ll talk.”

  “Do you think he will?” I asked.

  “No idea. And I don’t know what Fennel will say, either. They’re throwing the word ‘terrorism’ around.”

  After Louisa had fetched Chloe from the Collective and the three of us had briefly conferred with Natasha, we’d all agreed that the two communes would maintain some distance from each other until things settled down. I had no desire to see or speak to Fennel; I was glad she was okay, but I harbored a deep sense that none of this would have happened without her. And Matthew.