Otherwood

by Pete Hautman

  “Me neither.”

  Stuey reached out again. Elly hesitated, then lifted her hand. Their fingers touched, then clasped, solid and warm and utterly real. Joy flooded the empty space inside him — Elly was back, but how? Had she ever been gone?

  “Are we crazy?” she said. Her eyes were wet.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what happened, but we have to tell them you’re okay. I have to tell my mom.”

  “Your mom was really upset. I saw her on the news. She was crying.”

  “My mom is fine,” Stuey said. “Except she’s worried because she thinks something bad must’ve happened to you.”

  “She went in the hospital. My dad says she had a nervous breakdown.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s when you go crazy.”

  “She’s not crazy! And she’s not in the hospital. Come on, I’ll show you. Then she’ll see you’re still here and everything will be okay.”

  Stuey stood up and pulled her toward the doorway. Elly held him back.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “What if you’re not real? What if I’m not real?”

  “We’re both real,” Stuey said confidently. He wasn’t sure he believed it, but he wanted to. “Look.” He let go of her hand and lifted the compass from around his neck. The needle was still. “You gave me this so I can always find you.”

  He handed it to her.

  Elly took the compass and pressed it to her chest, then hung it back around his neck.

  “You keep it. I gave it to you. It’s our connection.”

  “We should go. We can tell my mom, and she’ll call your parents and everything will be like before.”

  “Okay,” Elly said. She followed him out into the dappled sunlight.

  “There were hundreds of people searching for you,” she said, looking around the trampled ground.

  “You too. Come on.”

  He started up the path toward home, but Elly didn’t move. He glanced back at her. She was looking around frantically, turning in circles.

  “Stuey?”

  “I’m right here,” he said. There was only about twenty feet between them, but he was having trouble seeing her. She looked scared.

  “Stuey?” Her voice sounded far away.

  “Aren’t you coming?” he said. She didn’t seem to hear him. She was moving away, growing fainter, more transparent. The last thing he saw was her mouth silently forming his name, and then she was gone again.

  Stuey ran all the way home. When he got there, red-faced and panting, his mom was standing by the front door talking to Dana Johnson.

  “Stuey!” his mom said. “Where did you go? I’ve been calling for you.”

  “I was . . . running,” he said between breaths.

  “I can see that.”

  His mom was okay. Elly had said she was having a nervous breakdown, but she was fine.

  “Did you forget that Dana was coming?” she asked.

  “I guess so.”

  Dana was dressed in jeans and sneakers instead of the skirt and high-heeled sandals she had worn before.

  “I’ve only been here a few minutes,” she said. “Your mom says you’re feeling better.”

  “I guess,” Stuey said. That was the moment when he might have told them that he had seen Elly Rose, that she wasn’t missing after all. But as he was about to speak he realized that they wouldn’t believe him. “I’m okay,” he said.

  Dana tipped her head and said, “Stuey? Did something happen?”

  “No,” Stuey said. He could tell she didn’t believe him.

  “Okay then . . . what do you say we take a walk?” She gave him her gap-toothed smile. “Maybe you could show me your secret place.”

  Dana Johnson was not used to walking in the woods. She made her way across the uneven ground with exaggerated delicacy, as if every step presented an unknown hazard. Stuey had to stop and wait for her several times.

  “Shopping malls are more my thing,” she said. “I’m not much of an outdoors girl.” It felt odd to hear her refer to herself as a girl.

  “This all used to be a golf course,” Stuey told her.

  “That must have been a long time ago.”

  “It was. My great-grandfather built it. My grandpa said the woods devoured the golf course.”

  Dana stepped carefully over a fallen log. “I feel like it wants to devour me!”

  “It’s not far,” Stuey said.

  When they arrived at the deadfall, Dana looked at it for a long time before speaking.

  “I can see why you liked it here,” she said at last. “It has a magical feel to it, doesn’t it?”

  “Do you want to go inside?”

  Dana peered into the dark opening. “Is it safe?”

  “I’ve been in lots of times. It’s nice.”

  Dana ducked her head awkwardly and entered. Stuey followed her in. He had never been inside with anybody except Elly. Dana made it feel small and crowded. She stood on the stone slab in a half crouch, as if the branches overhead were pressing down on her.

  “It won’t fall down on us?” she asked.

  “It’s solid.” Stuey thumped his hand on one of the trunks. Dana flinched.

  Stuey kicked at the ground with the toe of his shoe. “See the sand? I think this used to be a sand trap.”

  “I wonder how this big rock got here,” Dana said. “It looks like it’s been shaped — it’s perfectly rectangular.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is this where you were when Elly disappeared?”

  “We were sitting right here, eating pie and talking. It felt like the stone was moving, and then she was gone.”

  “It is kind of . . . well . . . I can see how you could imagine things in this place!” Dana said. She ducked back outside. Stuey followed her. “How many times did you and Elly Rose come here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. A bunch.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “Mostly just talked. Elly likes to talk. She thought it was like a castle. I liked to pretend it was a ship, like it would float above the ground and go places.”

  “Go where?”

  “I don’t know. We always ended up back here.”

  Dana nodded slowly. “When I was a girl I’d lie in bed and try to make myself levitate. I was sure I could do it. I’d reach up and try to float high enough to touch the ceiling.”

  “Did you ever touch it?”

  “I thought I did, once. I felt it.” She shook her head sadly. “But it wasn’t real.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because . . . gravity.” She laughed. “I know that’s boring — it’s what happens when you grow up. You’re how old? Ten?”

  “Nine,” Stuey said.

  “That’s a good age. Do you still believe in Santa Claus?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “But you used to?”

  “Maybe when I was four.”

  “And that was okay, right? Nothing wrong with believing in Santa when you’re little, but now you’re older and the things that were real back then aren’t real anymore. As we grow we —”

  Stuey stopped listening because he saw something a few yards behind Dana, a sort of distortion, as if the air had thickened in one spot. The distortion took shape and solidified.

  It was Elly Rose. She pointed at Stuey and said, “See? I told you! He’s right there!”

  “. . . and sometimes it’s hard to sort these things out,” Dana was saying. She had not heard Elly speak.

  “Who are you talking to?” Stuey asked Elly.

  “My dad,” Elly said.

  “I’m talking to you,” Dana said.

  “I’m talking to Elly,” Stuey said. He pointed at Elly. “She’s standing right there.”

  Dana looked around, confused. “Stuey, there’s nobody else here.”

  Elly looked up at her invisible father, then back at Stuey. “He can’t see you,”
she said.

  “Can you see Dana?”

  “Dana? The lady from the police? Is she with you?”

  “She’s right here.”

  Dana frowned. “Stuey, who are you talking to?”

  “Elly,” Stuey said. “I can see her.”

  Elly’s arm jerked up as if someone had grabbed her hand. “I gotta go.” She was walking away, being pulled by her invisible father, looking back at him over her shoulder, dissolving —

  Dana was talking. “. . . it’s just the two of us here. Look at me, Stuey. When you . . .”

  — and Elly was gone.

  Dana kept talking. “. . . minds are amazing things. Our imagination fills the gaps in our perceptions and creates its own version of reality. Figuring out what is real isn’t always possible, because our own brains are telling us stories . . .”

  It sounded like gibberish. Stuey stared fiercely at the place where Elly had faded away, willing her to return.

  “. . . people imagine UFOs, they imagine monsters under the bed, they imagine ghosts . . .”

  I saw her! He wanted to shout it in her face, but the way she was looking at him, her face all scrunched up with concern, he knew there was no way she would ever believe him.

  He wasn’t sure he believed himself.

  Dana didn’t have much to say on the walk home. Stuey could feel her eyes burning into the back of his neck. He looked back and caught her staring at him in a measuring sort of way.

  When they got home, Dana and his mom sat in the living room and talked for a long time in low voices. Stuey didn’t want to hear what they were saying. He sat on the porch steps, looking out at the apple orchard. The buzz of their voices merged with the faint rumble of trucks from the highway and the cicadas calling from the meadow. He couldn’t make out their words, but he could imagine what they were saying.

  The boy is seeing things. He thinks he’s seeing ghosts. He should be put away, locked up, medicated.

  Stuey left the porch and walked toward the orchard until he reached the stone marking Grandpa Zach’s grave.

  “I’m not crazy, Gramps,” he said. It helped to hear himself say it out loud. “She was there. I touched her.”

  The gravestone was silent, but Stuey imagined his grandfather’s voice:

  You spend enough time out in those woods, you’ll see them.

  “See who?”

  The ghosts.

  “There’s no such thing,” Stuey said to the gravestone.

  He could have sworn he smelled burning pipe tobacco.

  After Dana left that afternoon, Stuey’s mom put her hand on his head and looked at him with this weird sad expression and said, “How is your head?”

  “Fine,” Stuey said.

  “Dana said you thought you saw Elly Rose.”

  Stuey sensed from the way she was looking at him that his answer was important.

  “I don’t know.” He sat down on a kitchen chair, mostly to get her hand off his head.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I mean, I thought I did. But then there was nobody there.”

  “I see things sometimes,” she said. She knelt down on the wooden floor in front of him so their heads were at the same level. “Out of the corner of my eye. The other day I was working in the garden and I sensed Grandpa standing there watching me, but when I turned he wasn’t there. Sometimes we imagine things because we miss them so terribly.”

  “But what if I did see her?”

  “You didn’t, honey. Elly is gone. We might yet find her, but it’s possible we won’t. You can’t be making up stories, no matter how much you want them to be true. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “What if it was me?” he asked. “What if it was me who disappeared?”

  She looked at him; her mouth grew small and her cheeks hollowed. Stuey had never seen that expression on her before. Was she mad at him? Her eyes glistened. Was she crying? She drew a shaky breath.

  “Oh, Stuey,” she said. “I would . . . I don’t know how I would go on. Don’t even say it. Don’t even think it.” She put her arms around him and squeezed. He could feel her heart.

  “I miss her,” he said.

  “I know you do, sweetie. Imagine how Mr. and Mrs. Frankel must feel. You wouldn’t want to be telling them that you’ve seen their daughter, would you? Giving them false hope?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think maybe you should stay out of those woods for a while.”

  Stuey thought about that. He thought about Elly all alone in Castle Rose, waiting for him. He thought about his mom — the one in Elly’s world. The one Elly said was in the hospital. If that was true, she needed him. She needed to know he was okay.

  “For how long?” he asked.

  “Just for the time being. Just until . . . well, until you feel better.”

  “I feel fine.”

  “I know you think you do, but we can’t always tell when things aren’t right. Dana thinks you should go see a friend of hers. Her name is Dr. Missou.”

  “Why?”

  “We think maybe she can help you deal with losing Elly.”

  “But —” He almost said Elly’s not gone, then caught himself at the last second.

  “Dr. Missou specializes in children who have suffered trauma. Do you remember we talked about PTSD?”

  “It’s that thing that makes you scared.”

  “I’ve made an appointment for you for Thursday morning.”

  “After, can I go in the woods?”

  She said, “We’ll see”— her way of saying Probably not.

  “But maybe?”

  She nodded the way she would nod when she didn’t really mean it.

  Dr. Missou was the opposite of Dana. She was a slim, older woman with blue-rimmed glasses, pale-blue eyes, and short, straight blond hair. Her thin lips were coated with brownish-pink lipstick. She wore a tan suit with dark-brown stripes and no jewelry other than a gold wedding band.

  Their meeting — Dr. Missou called it a session — took place at her office at Clover Center, a strip mall on the east side of town. Stuey’s mom sat in the small waiting room while Stuey followed Dr. Missou into her office. She sat on a wooden chair and crossed her bony legs. She had a pen in her hand and a notebook on her lap. Stuey took the only other seat, a soft armchair with floral upholstery. There were no windows in the room. The only things to look at were several shelves of neatly arranged books and a few framed diplomas.

  “How are you feeling today, Stuey?” she asked. Her lips looked like two writhing angleworms.

  “Okay.”

  “Your mom says you’re having kind of a hard time the past few weeks.”

  Stuey shrugged and looked at his shoes. The right one had a bright-green grass stain on the toe. He tried to rub it off with the sole of his other shoe.

  “Would you like to talk about it?”

  “I already said everything.” Stuey sensed something predatory beneath Dr. Missou’s exterior. Her eyes peered at him hungrily from behind her glasses, and when she smiled her worm lips separated, showing a set of small, slightly yellow teeth.

  “Tell me about the last time you saw Elly Rose,” she said.

  “It was that day in the woods,” he said.

  “Which day?”

  “You know. The day she disappeared.”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought she’d gone home. But she was just gone. I don’t know what happened to her.”

  Dr. Missou tilted her head. “Is that all? Didn’t you tell the police you saw her disappear?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And then you thought you saw her again a few days ago.” The way she was leaning forward in her chair and peering at him made Stuey all squirmy inside. “Isn’t that right?” she said.

  Stuey shrugged.

  Dr. Missou sat back and pressed the top of her pen against the corner of her mouth. She looked disappointed, as if she wanted him to be crazy.

  “Do you have nigh
tmares, Stuey?”

  “Sometimes. Like I’m falling, or something is chasing me.”

  “Do you dream about Elly Rose?”

  Stuey thought for a moment and decided he could answer that honestly.

  “No.”

  “Do you ever get your dreams mixed up with real life?”

  “Not really.”

  She frowned. He wasn’t giving her the answers she wanted.

  “What about when you went to your tree place —”

  “The Castle Rose.”

  “Yes. When you went there with Ms. Johnson, you told her you saw Elly Rose. Isn’t that right?”

  She was trying to pin him down, to make him say something so she could say he was crazy. He felt trapped. He didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to answer her questions.

  “Stuey? Is that true? Did you think you saw her?”

  He remembered what his mom had said — that he shouldn’t tell anybody about seeing Elly. That made him mad. Nobody really cared about getting Elly back, they just wanted him to stop talking about her. He felt something give way inside him, as if the wall between truth and lies had crumbled.

  “I was just goofing around,” he said. It felt as if somebody else was talking through his mouth.

  “You didn’t actually see her?”

  Stuey shook his head. Dr. Missou wrote in her notebook.

  “You told the police you heard music and voices,” she said.

  “Sometimes the wind in the trees sounds like music.” That was true, but it was the lying part of him saying it.

  “And the voices?”

  “Sometimes wind sounds like voices too. But it’s just wind.”

  Dr. Missou pressed her worm lips together. Stuey felt as if he had won a point.

  “Do you miss your friend?”

  “I just hope they find her soon.”

  “It’s been a month.” She tipped her head back so the fluorescent light bounced off her glasses and hid her eyes. “You don’t seem very upset. What if she is never found? How would that make you feel?”

  The question made Stuey extremely uncomfortable, but the lying part of him responded easily.