Some days, she still woke up with it in her nostrils. She knew she’d probably carry the smell of the burning forest with her for the rest of her life.
The soil was black here, still scorched to match the grasping, burned bones that jabbed out of the cindered earth. It was going to be a long time before the forest healed from what they—what she—had done to it, and even then it would still bear the scars for decades to come. She could sympathize. Chloe understood scars better than anyone she knew.
Up along the shoulder of the freeway, she heard the car’s engine cut out. Turning to look, she saw the little Hyundai’s emergency blinkers switch on, metronomic in their steadiness. She’d had to recruit someone to drive her here; she hadn’t driven anywhere since she’d gotten out of the hospital. She wasn’t allowed, legally speaking. Too many injuries still healing. Too much of a liability. She wasn’t about to ask her parents to cart her down here, either. They would have shit themselves if she’d even mentioned it, probably would have locked her in her bedroom for good measure.
She wouldn’t have blamed them. She would’ve thought she was crazy too.
But knowing that wasn’t enough to stop her from making the trip. She’d just needed to find alternative transport out of Randolph. She waved to the little sedan—I’m fine, thanks, be right back—then hobbled over to the steel embankment and swung her legs around and over the top. She didn’t plan on staying long.
Pick-thrush. Pick-thrush. Pick-thrush. The girl swept her hardened aluminum cane through the black dirt at a steady pace as she trekked between the dark trees to a place where she could only barely hear the hiss of cars whipping by on the Garden State Parkway. The smell was stronger the farther in she went, to the point that she was almost gagging on it, back here among the remnants of the blaze. She’d watched the fires churn and swell on the television in her hospital room in Saint Clare’s for weeks until the firefighters and FEMA and the forestry service got them under control. When it was all over, the sprawling forest that made up the lower third of the state was left blackened and crumbling.
Eventually, the doctors had been able to stem the infection that had been chewing its way through the trunk of Chloe’s body. When she was finally discharged from the hospital, she left behind a kidney and three feet of small intestine, sporting, among others, a scar like a lightning tree from her ribs to her navel, thick and ridged like wood grain. Her leg had never healed right, either, but she was never going to go out for the track team, anyway.
Carefully, she climbed over another fallen tree and wended her way through a tangle of broken, ashy branches, feeling the thorns catch in the fabric of her jeans, drawing tiny beads of blood from her shaky legs. Bracing herself, she used her cane to clear the path before her, limping along until she came to the clearing. It looked exactly like it did the first time she’d seen it: bright, verdant green despite the ash and destruction that surrounded it, filled with broken tree stumps, and almost perfectly circular. Like the lake, a bitter little voice hissed inside her head. Like the grave.
Swallowing the tongue of bile that had crept into her mouth, Chloe stepped into the clearing. The memories, however bad they were, were just that. Memories. Besides, it wasn’t the clearing itself she’d come here to see. Not exactly, anyway.
She’d first had the dream a few months after her release from Saint Clare’s, with all its beeping machines and procedures and tired-looking grown-ups in stained mint scrubs. Initially she’d thought it was like the others, another haunted vision left inside her head from her time spent lost in the Barrens. But this one was different. While the others were cold and gray and dead all the way through, this one positively brimmed with life, with color, overflowing to the point that when she woke from the dream, she could feel it pulsing and crackling like a live wire woven through her skin. There was a clearing near the edge of a forest, still green and alive despite being surrounded on all sides by ash and death. In its center, a sapling grew—young and slender to the point of seeming fragile, but it was already tall, well over six feet, its underdeveloped branches heavy with green leaves. Swollen with life, despite its blackened surroundings.
The image of that tree had stayed with her all the way into waking life, growing in the center of her brain as stubbornly as she’d seen it sprouting through the soil of the clearing. It was only a matter of days before it had started to slither into the rest of her life, peeking quietly around the corners and edges, barely there at all … until it became impossible to miss. She saw it in her other dreams, and again when she woke up, as if its outline had been tattooed onto the insides of her eyelids. When she wasn’t paying attention, she’d find it hiding in the streetlight shadows splashed across her bedroom walls at night; scarred into the tile of the girls’ room at school in cracked, stained grout; once, she’d even found it curled atop her mom’s windshield, drawn in the shallow January frost.
It was another three months before she decided to go and find it, that tree—her tree. Erin, a girl from Trig class, had offered to drive the second she mentioned the idea. She liked Erin, as much as she liked anyone these days. Friendships were harder since she’d come back. But Erin was nice, and unlike basically everybody else, she didn’t ask too many questions. Plus, with her shock-purple hair and nose ring and bright, friendly demeanor, she kept people from looking too closely at Chloe.
She felt it as soon as they were on the road, pulling out of the school parking lot on a beeline for the freeway—a pressure building behind her right eyeball, like a tumor blossoming high in the socket, sudden and unwelcome. It didn’t hurt; it was just a pressure, much like a sinus headache, but strong enough to distract her from the fact that at the same time her head started pulsing, the gnarled scar hidden away underneath her shirt had started to throb too. That was fine. She could deal with a little more pain. She ground her teeth against it until it got to be too much, and then she told Erin to pull over. They were here. The pressure, the ache, the drumming—they all vanished the instant she stepped out of the car, and the first thing that hit her was the smell.
The tree stood in the middle of the clearing, exactly like she remembered it. Or dreamed it. Both. Neither. Leaning most of her weight on her cane, the girl limped over to the lone sapling, watching its branches and envy-green leaves sway in the spring breeze. Standing there, looking at it, as real as anything else in this world, Chloe’s heart flinched in her chest. She didn’t want to be standing here like this, because if she was really here and the tree was really real, then everything was nearly over.
But she wasn’t going to turn around and walk away from him. Not now. Not again.
Easing herself down onto the closest stump, she ran the fingers of her free hand over the sapling’s soft, cool leaves, feeling the gentle pulse of connection.
“Hi, Parker.”
She sat there for an hour or more, just venting to him, unloading every feeling and thought everyone else in her life—parents, friends, teachers, court-mandated psychotherapist—had been trying for months to get out of her. They said it was healthy to externalize. So she externalized. She told him everything, unburdening herself of all the secrets she’d kept since she’d crawled out of this place. She told him about the hospital—the smell of it, the way the lights gave her terrible headaches, the elderly internist who wouldn’t (or couldn’t) stop farting. She told him about school, and how there seemed to be a hundred different versions of what had happened to them in the Pine Barrens, and how everyone who told it swore up and down that theirs was the no-shit, hundred-percent capital-T Truth.
She told him how everyone in every grade seemed to know her name and face now, and even though they all played nice, she still caught them whispering behind their hands when they thought she wasn’t looking. She told him about the worried expressions that never seemed to leave her parents’ faces, and the nervous, careful way they treated her. Without even really meaning to, she even did the thing she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do, and told him as much as
she could remember about the funerals—all five of them. She wanted him to know. He deserved to know. If he’d kept his promise, he would have been there with her.
It all just came pouring out of her like a waterfall. There was no stopping it once she got started. The only thing that she did manage to hold back was the horrible thing that Aunt Lori had done, at the end of everything. He didn’t need to know that. No one did.
Chloe talked, and Parker listened. It was just like when they were kids, except without the radio, and now, one of them was dead. Or maybe not dead, just … different. Further away, yet far more immediate than he’d ever been. She could feel him humming in the bark of the tree, the heartwood, the leaves and roots and the ground beneath her feet. It was him, he was here, and yet … it wasn’t. He wasn’t.
Because they weren’t alone, the two of them. Beyond the tree and the burned soil and all the destruction that lay between, she could feel it. The lake. The water. And the ancient, dead, dreaming thing far underneath. Still there, still waiting, still listening. Patient, cruel, and eternal. She’d brushed up against it twice before; she wasn’t eager to make it three times. Not if she could help it.
In her jacket pocket, her phone suddenly trilled with a text message. She checked the screen. Underneath the weak, flickering service display read the name: Mom.
When are you going to be home, Scoot? I’m making meatball casserole for dinner!
5:43PM, 4/15
And just like that, the spell was broken. She’d stayed too long. At this point, she’d be lucky if Erin hadn’t abandoned her out here. “I gotta go,” she said to the tree, planting her cane in the ground to rise to her feet again. “Sorry. Say hi to everyone else, if you see them, or whatever. Tell them I’m sorry.”
She could already hear the thrum-and-hiss of passing cars on the highway. Bringing up the keyboard, she tapped out a short response to her mother:
Home in a couple hours—might bring a friend if that’s okay?
Love you!
5:44PM, 4/15
She waited for the phone to get a strong enough signal to send, then pocketed the thing again. She looked back at the sapling. It already seemed less colorful, less lush. Its leaves were just leaves again, drifting in the muddy sunlight. Was it shorter now too?
Chloe’s eyes played across the black trees that stood around the clearing like tombstones. Wherever he’d gone to, whatever he was now, she couldn’t blame him for not hanging around. She wasn’t planning to, either. Fact was, she didn’t have that many months left in Jersey before she moved away and stayed away, going as far as she could without giving her parents a stress-stroke. These days, she was thinking California. UCLA wasn’t offering her a full ride, but she was smart. She was going to be fine. Eventually.
Slowly, she made her way back through the trees and ash, clearing another path with practiced swipes of her cane. Emerging from the underbrush, she climbed back over the embankment and onto the pavement, then limped up to climb into the battered little four-door. Behind the wheel, Erin was drumming on the steering wheel with slender fingers and mouthing the words to some song Chloe didn’t know.
Chloe pulled the door shut while Erin killed the music and turned to look at her. “So?”
Chloe didn’t turn to look back her way. “So.”
“You find what you were looking for out there?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“Cool. Where to now?”
“Home,” said Chloe. “I just want to go home.” She thought about it. “You want to come over for dinner tonight?”
“That’d be great,” Erin said. “What’re we having?”
“I think my mom’s making meatball casserole.”
“That’d be cool, thanks. Are you sure you’re ready to go?”
Chloe stole another look out at the burned forest. She couldn’t even see the clearing anymore.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
Without another word, Erin switched the hazard blinkers off, kicked the engine to life, and then merged back onto the highway. They melted into the traffic as if they’d never stopped and could just pass the wreckage on by. Like it wasn’t there at all.
Without thinking, Chloe reached over and turned the music back on, back to whatever Erin was listening to before. It didn’t matter what the song was, as long as it could drown out the silence.
THE END.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have happened at all without the guidance and support of some really fantastic people that I am profoundly fortunate to have in my life.
Thanks first go to my amazing agent, Nicole Resciniti, at The Seymour Agency. Nic, you’re one of the most insightful, driven, encouraging people I’ve ever known; thank you for your loyalty and wisdom, and for telling me to keep writing even when the writing wasn’t easy. A big thank you also to Lynette Novak and the rest of the Seymour crew for reading an early draft of the book, providing crucial feedback and not getting too grossed out to keep going.
All the credit in the world goes to everyone at Turner Publishing who worked so damn hard to make this book the best it could possibly be: Stephanie Beard, Heather Howell, Kathleen Timberlake, Lauren Smulski and Kathy Haake, thank you for believing in the story and taking a chance on it. Working with all of you has been a joy since day one.
Massive thanks are due to my oldest friend in the world, Emma Price, who generously read the very first draft of this novel, saw something worth pursuing and pushed me to make it better and better and better.
A big thank you goes to Liz Claps, for loaning me her hometown, and for teaching me how to speak the mysterious language of New Jersey’s myriad highways.
It should come as no surprise that my family has been instrumental in the creation of this book (and everything else I’ve ever written). To my Mom and my sister Lucy: you two have been my fan club from day one and have always encouraged me to follow the writing, wherever it took me, and there is no way for me to express how much that means. You’ve propped me up and you’ve cheered the hardest, and I love you two so, so much. To the rest of my family: Steve and Anne and Aaron, Dave and Kris, you guys are nothing short of amazing. Thank you for believing in me. Serious credit is also due to my very patient parents-in-law, Rick & Val Emmelhainz: thank you for understanding every time I said “I’m sorry, I can’t; I have to finish writing this goddamn book” during vacation.
All my love and thanks go to Pat Marshall for reading my stuff, even the bad stuff (hell, especially the bad stuff), way back before I had a chance in hell of publishing a word of it. Thank you for your patience and your encouragement, and for always pushing me to try something new, even when it scared the absolute hell out of me. Sorry I said fuck so much.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Rusty Barnes, Editor in Chief of Tough Crime. It’s not an exaggeration to say that literally none of this would have happened without you first believing in my work enough to send it off to seek out bigger and better things. Thank you, Rusty. Next time I’m in your neck of the woods, coffee’s on me.
Kevin and Amy Sims, you two have been a constant source of encouragement ever since I first told you “So, I’ve got this idea for a book about these kids that get lost in the woods…” over drinks. Having the love and support of two such phenomenally talented artists has made all the difference in my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m humbled by the both of you, and am incredibly lucky to count you as my family. I love you both so much.
My love and appreciation go out to the numerous other folks whose enthusiasm, kindness and patience saw me through the process of getting this book into the world: Ashley Marudas, Rebecca Agatstein, Dragan Radovanovic, Kim & Scott Collins, Cindy Socci, Jennifer Russell, Lauren Bochat, Rachel Brody, Rebecca Gorman, Elizabeth Copps, Marni Salmon and anyone else I might’ve missed. You’re all amazing and I don’t deserve any of you, but thank you for sticking around all the same.
Finally and most importantly, Th
e Night Will Find Us would not exist in any form without my wife, Chelsey Emmelhainz. This book is dedicated to her, and if it’s worth a damn at all, it’s because of her. She is the best, scariest, most insightful reader I’ll ever have and there’s nothing I’ve written that she hasn’t helped make better in some way. Thank you for the unending love and support, the sage insights and the brutally hard questions. Thank you for choosing me.
Thank you, for everything, forever.
I love you with my whole heart, Chelsey.
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