Lost in the Woods

by Chris Page

  “Jake,” she said, passing him towards the front door to switch on the lights. “You shouldn’t sit here in the dark like that.”

  He thought to reach forth and swipe the beer from the table to swig. He stared into it, watched a bead of sweat roll along the aluminum can. “Didn’t notice night came on already. There was sunlight in here when I sat down.”

  Carrie stepped up towards the table. “How long have you been sitting here?”

  Jake looked up at her. “Dunno,” he answered. “How long have you been gone?”

  Her head bobbed side to side in a false show of calculation. “Oh, I don’t know, a few hours.”

  He didn’t care to ask. The time for it had long passed, and besides, asking questions only invited them, spurring conversation. Her whereabouts were left alone.

  Carrie took a seat next to Jake and felt herself roll towards him from the effect of his indentation. She eyed his body in her periphery, curious about its proportions. She wondered if he’d gained weight. She couldn’t tell, and honestly had no metric besides sight to determine it. Its dimensions went without exploration since before it happened. Since before Benny disappeared. Her mind returned to the forest, lamenting another day’s lack of success. Yet still the desire to return remained as always.

  Jake felt Carrie’s body press into his own and wondered whether it was an intentional maneuver on her part, or if she’d only slid into it. Without a second gesture to inform the first, he assumed the latter and continued his show—head dropped low, body slunk, eyes drearily absorbing the light shot into them by the screen. He thought she’d only stay as long as she felt required of her, for appearances, appearing normal for no one but each other. He wished she didn’t even bother.

  Carrie watched the show dutifully. She leaned into the couch’s groove, laying her body into Jake’s side. Her head for a moment even laid upon his shoulder to no protest of subtle shrugging. If anyone had peered through the window at that moment, they would believe the two of them to be as stable in their marriage as the next house in line. She imagined someone sneaking house to house, verifying the status of each relationship. She saw them write a passing grade for the Holloways, in spite of their tragic circumstances.

  She remained long after the first episode was finished. Another of the same program played next, Jake wanted to change the channel, but couldn’t bring himself to take up the remote and enact his desire. He watched the setup to the misunderstanding between the two characters and played the rest out in his mind in fast forward. He sighed. She was staying longer than she normally did.

  “Have you thought about getting back to work?” he asked without shifting his posture.

  “Work?” she asked. Carrie was genuinely surprised at the subject. She mulled over his tone, questioning whether there was some intonation that explained the purpose of his bringing it up. “Going back to the office?”

  “Yeah,” he returned quickly. “Haven’t they reached out? Asked when you might?”

  “Not at all,” she said. He couldn't tell if he’d offended her. He didn’t much care. He could taste the saliva collecting in his mouth, the time of the night had come for scotch. Scotch and the shed. Studying. “I don’t expect them to,” she continued.

  “What do you mean?” Jake asked. Carrie sensed aggression, but didn’t understand why. Perhaps, he thought, they fired her.

  “They haven’t cut me,” she reassured him. “I mean, they’re not going to be pushy.”

  He turned his head towards her with an open mouth. She could smell the beer on his breath. “No,” he said, “no, of course not. I mean,” he paused, then, “don’t they miss you?”

  “I haven’t spoken with them,” Carrie said. “They said I could come back whenever I was ready to. They said no rush.”

  He could see her eyes reading him and wanted her to stop. She was becoming a nuisance to his work. Tacitly demanding he play his role of husband for some time each day, taxing him when he needed all his time. He had brought up work unconsciously, but now it seemed a wise topic. “Don’t you want to?”

  She took in a breath, then held it. Maybe he wanted what was best for her, in his estimation. She could imagine some warm, concerned feeling for her filtered through his cold, calculative expression. It was a male impulse to solve things, perhaps his worry for her felt like a problem in need of fixing. She had returned briefly some time after Benny went missing, but since the search was called off, it wasn’t a question. Same as Jake’s work, hers recognized the second emotional toll, the need for space once more. She thought of going back, of the time it would take away from her schedule. Work hours ate up all the day’s sunlight. The trails were closed after dark. “I suppose.”

  Jake pushed against the balls of his feet, readjusting himself on the couch. He felt her slide down his body. He looked down at the top of her head, somewhere halfway along her jagged part. He spied her scalp. Was she losing hair? But then she turned her face upward, and his eyes fell on her lips. “Would give you something to do.” He wondered faintly what it was she did with her days, where she had been before she arrived home. “Other than your wandering about.”

  Wandering about. He thought her a lost soul. She wasn’t sure if she should feel offended. She looked into his eyes. There was a sincerity in them. She decided, for the purpose of avoiding a monstrous thought of her husband, that it verified her earlier presumptions. He did care. “You’re right,” she said. She could go back to work. She had a stock of vacation days. She could take two days off every week. They would understand, accept the terms of her return. She would spend two days a week in the forest, the rest recharging herself for the next visit. Mondays and Fridays. The middle days she would feign interest in the company’s work. “I’ll give them a call tomorrow and tell them I’m ready.”

  He smiled. This was good, an outcome he didn’t expect from her extended stay beside him on the couch this night. The nuisance had been resolved. She would return to work, and exhaustion would seep back into her life the way all normal working people experienced it. And with exhaustion, an absence of all her petty obsessions over optics, their relationship, his personal health. He shifted his left arm to wrap around her body, squeezing it into his own. She was warm.

  Carrie felt his hand on her hip and her body rolled further into his. She enjoyed the gesture, and she went to put her hand over his on the other side of his body. When she lifted it to extend over him, she realized there was yet more space to roll and as her body turned towards his, she placed her hand down for balance.

  Her fingers landed across his penis, and suddenly Jake was aware of an erection. He’d been half-sleeping, eyes dozing as the programming passed over them. It must’ve come while he grew comfortable in the hazy space before slumber. She must’ve seen it. Taking his arm’s motion as an indication of his affection, she’d understood it as a prompt. They hadn’t had sex since before the disappearance, Jake had only occasionally masturbated in the basement bathroom before sliding into bed, blowing off steam for a better night’s rest. The actual, physical act, even sex in the abstract, had remained beyond disinterested reach. Yet, now, with her fingers resting there, dust was shaken from such thoughts, for a moment, reintroducing the impulse.

  She stared into his eyes and found a mirrored realization in their sudden contact. His hand squeezed at her side the flesh above her hip, his fingers outstretched over the fabric of her shirt. His touch was warm. She allowed her hand to spread over his jeans, feeling the contour of his erection. She wondered if she was capable of converting this into the full act. She was here, anyhow. She might as well try. A good marriage had sex. She could feel a tingle in herself, or at least, she could imagine it arising shortly, and so she shifted closer, rubbing her knee against his and her hand closing in around the bulge of his pants.

  Her touch had decided for him that he was ready to return to the subject of sex before his conscious thoughts had arrived at the same conclusion. Jake opened his mouth to expel a small gr
oan while her hand became more brazen with its intention. His chest rose and fell with each breath, his head rolled back onto the couch. He listened to the zipper draw down, then felt her clammy hands retrieve his penis. She drew up, then down, in a mechanical, but no less enjoyable motion. If for no other reason than to have it be another hand than his own. But then he felt her weight atop him.

  Carrie straddled Jake and continued her hand’s movement, careful in her maneuver so as not to cause him any pain. When his head swung forward to peer into her eyes, she could see some lust in his, and her thoughts latched onto it, grafting upon it a hunger for her own body, and in that hunger she saw herself desired. Desire excited her, and she began to feel the pang of wetness creep in-between her thighs. She rubbed her vagina against the base of his erection and chewed her bottom lip like she always used to. Mimicking the motions would bring it all back, she thought, quickly removing herself to pull off her own pants and underwear.

  Carrie returned to him, holding him in place as she positioned herself, lowering upon him with a soft moan. It was a now unfamiliar appearance of his wife that drew his interest, like having sex with a wholly new woman. Their abstinence renewed their sexual forms, made her fresh again to him. His hands gripped her knees, bent beside him. Then they ran up the length of her pale thighs, ignoring the little stubble there on their path towards her smooth, wide hips. He did remember how much he enjoyed her hips. They were his obsession when they first married, just before—the baby.

  Carrie shifted her body atop him and watched his eyes, holding them closely, her focus intent on completing the act, on not faltering. But then she felt him inside her, once stiff, suddenly soften, and then he felt like nothing at all, and what she saw in his eyes went dark.

  He could think of nothing else, and that potential consequence loomed now over his thoughts, quashing what sexual impulse he had when she began this.

  She felt the excitement exit her body and in its place, an awkward shame. Like a discomforting substance had been smeared over her exposed flesh. She thought of honey. Movement would only intensify it. But she couldn’t remain. That was worse.

  Without words, Carrie removed herself from Jake. They laid low on the couch for a short time, letting the show’s laugh track fill the silence between them. Then, when the credits rolled, Jake flipped the set off and ascended the stairs, an unspoken understanding prompting Carrie to follow. In bed, they laid side by side, Carrie under Jake’s heavy arm. Then, some time briefly after they fell asleep, he rolled over, and for the remainder of the night before his alarm would awaken him, they slept facing away from one another.

  7

  _________

  She took a deep breath as she turned the key and the engine sputtered out. She peered through the window up at the building. A six story, brown brick structure rose to obscure a patch of the blue sky behind it. It was a nice day. She imagined her coworkers would be upbeat today. A Tuesday, sunny, warm, relaxed. Cloudy would have been better.

  The walk to the door was numb. She heard her heels clacking on the parking lot’s pavement, she watched the doors grow in her sight as she drew nearer, but her body ignored it like a dream. Not the vibrations of her steps in her legs, nor the breeze passing stray hairs across the tip of her nose reached her. And before she could conceive of stepping past the threshold, she was inside, the hum of the office building surrounding her, assaulting her.

  The lobby was sparse, brown, shiny tiles laid out across the largely empty floor. Those rushing past her rudely brushed by her shoulders, but she still couldn’t feel anything. The security officer sat behind a desk, his eyes drooping. The twin elevators pinged with each floor on their ways up and down.

  Carrie took a deep breath in, then released. “Okay,” she said to herself and stepped up to the others waiting before the silver doors. She hadn’t anticipated feeling so unfamiliar, she expected herself to be more ambivalent. Now, however, with work so imminent, she was uncertain if she would be able to perform her tasks, if her supervisors would be breathing down her neck, ensuring that she hadn’t forgotten how to do her job. She scoffed at the thought while entering the elevator. Her job was simple. Administrative assistant to the paralegals in a law office largely meant copies, mail, scheduling, and fielding complaints from her direct superiors about the lawyers running the firm. The more she thought about the actual motions of her position, the more relaxed she felt listening to the floors tick by overhead.

  The doors opened at the top floor and Carrie stepped out into the hallway, turned left, and walked to the frosted doors that read Henrickson & Michaels Law Office. She donned a modest smile and stepped through.

  Her coworkers didn’t turn, didn’t spare the moment to look up at her. Like most of the days spent in this office, she went unnoticed. It wasn’t until she arrived at her old desk, now presently occupied by file overspill, that she was greeted.

  “Carrie,” she heard her name intoned with a warm, low voice accompanied by a ginger hand laid across her back.

  She turned to view the cherubesque face of her main boss, Maddie Sims, a paralegal. “Maddie, good morning.”

  Maddie rubbed her hand between Carrie’s shoulder blades back and forth a couple times and then held it before her own torso, cupping her other hand there. Her eyes fell to the desk and the mounding pile of files. “Sorry, Carrie, we kind of took over your desk.” She began gathering up the files in her arms.

  Carrie smiled more broadly. “Oh, that’s alright. Here,” she said, helping Maddie collect the files.

  “Oh, great, thank you so much, just follow me over here,” Maddie said, turning to march down along the wall of glass enclosed offices. Carrie spied through the windows as men and women in suits paced, leaned, occasionally typed, and mostly spoke into their phones or headsets whilst chewing, sipping, or fidgeting with some item on their desk. None of them averted their gaze to watch her walking in step with Maddie on towards the corner room, where they unloaded the files.

  Maddie smoothed her grey skirt. “Thank you, Carrie.” She put her hand against Carrie’s shoulder. If this was the only person she would have to deal with handling her so delicately, she believed she could float through the day without issue.

  “So,” Carrie spoke, “what can I get started on?” She said it in a way that conveyed urgency, that to be offered work would be the best form of sympathy she could receive. Maddie acknowledged the question’s intent by dropping her facade and listing tasks for Carrie to accomplish. It was the standard list. Copies, notes, data entry, scheduling. No problem.

  She returned to her desk, booted up her computer, and got to work.

  Except—

  She thought of the forest transposed over her screen and its icons, meaningless little avatars for programs she was meant to click, but her hand merely hovered over her mouse. She saw the trees, the brush, the darkness beyond the trails. Her eyes went wide, her mind traveled out from the office. She could feel the call. It spoke to her. And suddenly a notion occurred to her, emerging from the fermented thoughts of her obsession. It arose like a bit of inspiration, and she imagined it was what artists felt when struck by their muse.

  Pathways.

  She’d been travelling down the same pathways, the same trails, all carved out within the previous twenty years, during the reforestation effort. The old paths had become overgrown. The dirt trails, abandoned for the modern preference of wood chips, had faded into the forest. The veins, once throbbing with the spirit of the forest, wound through the wood like a series of arteries, capillaries, feeding into one another, and deeper into the forest. When Carrie was a teenager, after some years of the forest falling into disarray, there was an effort by the city of Willow Brook to reclaim what had fallen into the hands of vagrants, homeless, junkies. It wasn’t that the forest was dirty, but that it was rich with grime, with shadows and mystery. They went in, hacking, mowing, and removing so much of its life to be remade cleaner, safer, and easier, for the changing demographics of Willow Bro
ok. Women like Shelly could now jog through the flat, wide paths in their tights and sports bra, knowing the nooks and crannies had been emptied, if not flattened, smoothed into the backdrop of its picturesque scenery.

  Carrie had been trying to feel the forest from the pathways that scarred it. The old pathways, less insistent upon their own direction than as the forest’s inclinations, would forge greater channels between her and the soul of the woods.

  But the old trails were no longer marked. What remained of them would be, by now, barely discernible foot wide lines tracing their way into the recesses. She couldn’t find them.

  Unless she had a map.

  The computer screen came back into focus, the cursor hovering over the internet browser on the dock. She leaned in and double clicked, launching the window. She dragged the cursor to the search bar and typed: Willow Brook Forest Map Old.

  The search provided a few results. She began clicking through, throwing herself into research. If she could only find a map detailing the pathways from her youth, she could identify where they were today, she could walk them again. She could follow the voice of the forest.

  She became aware of footsteps nearing her. She minimized the internet window and lifted her shoulders higher in an attempt to cover the screen. They neared, crossed behind her, and receded.

  She opened several of the links, pulling up image after image, some links showing only the reforestation plans, the new trails. She glowered at the screen, moving onto the next link. Some websites provided historical accounts of the forest’s evolution, with the occasional detail about an old trailhead, descriptions of its former routes. Still, it wasn’t enough. She needed a clear and precise map, one she could take along with her, something she could transpose over a current map to see where the old pathways intersected the new. She needed an old map. She needed it.