What She Found in the Woods

by Josephine Angelini

I stare at him. Smart. Sensitive. But most of all, he listens. It’s amazing what you can pick up on when you really listen. I couldn’t be more in awe of him, and I’ve just lost him. I threw him away so I could tell the truth.

  ‘No,’ I whisper. ‘I’m not in love in with her any more.’ I think it through carefully before I continue speaking. ‘I don’t hate her. I don’t love her. I don’t miss her. But I’m still trying to find who I am without her.’

  I jump – literally gain air between my butt and the blanket – when he puts his arms around me.

  ‘You’re Lena,’ he whispers in my ear. ‘You don’t need anyone to tell you who you are.’ I feel his laugh breathe across my neck. ‘Not even me.’

  The irony of this is so staggering, I don’t know where to start. But then, I don’t have to. Because he kisses me, and everything goes out the window.

  I have to stop him. To warn him. ‘Bo,’ I say, thinking about the hospital and what I did there. ‘I’m not well.’

  ‘I can see that,’ he says. His eyes are sad, but smiling, as he pushes my matted hair away from my face. ‘But you’ll get better,’ he whispers. ‘It’s not your fault Rachel killed herself,’ he says. I can’t look at him, though.

  It’s not my fault, but I am to blame.

  Bo lies down on his back. I sprawl across him with my leg wrapped over his hips and my head on his chest.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,’ I say.

  I feel him take a deep breath as he relaxes. ‘No, this was the right time,’ he replies musingly. ‘I knew you were hiding something or . . . I don’t know . . . dealing with something big and dark.’

  I lift my head to look at him. ‘Then why’d you keep seeing me?’

  He rolls his eyes and grins. ‘I couldn’t stay away from you. I still can’t. Even if it means . . .’ He breaks off suddenly and his eyes turn inward.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Even if it means I’m fighting with my father night and day about it,’ he admits.

  I was expecting this, but it still stings. ‘Night and day? Really?’

  Bo nods. ‘It’s dangerous for him. For my whole family.’

  I sit up. ‘I’m not going tell anyone you guys grow pot.’ This is so ridiculous, I almost laugh. ‘It’s legal to grow in small amounts anyway, you know.’

  Bo sits up too. ‘This isn’t about the cannabis.’

  He can’t look at me, so I know it’s huge. ‘What?’ I ask. ‘Bo. Why is your family hiding out here in the woods? And don’t tell me it’s just because you want to live close to nature.’

  He swallows hard and shakes his head, his mouth set. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I nearly shriek. ‘You’re not going to tell me after I told you what I did?’

  ‘The police aren’t after you because you didn’t commit a convictable crime. They’re after my dad because he . . . he did,’ he says. His eyes are wide and rabbit-like again.

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ he repeats.

  I stand up. ‘I can’t believe you.’

  I grab the edge of the blanket, seeing red. I emptied myself out for this guy, and he still doesn’t trust me?

  ‘Get up,’ I order. He doesn’t move. ‘Get up or I’m going to yank it out from under you.’

  He stands up slowly.

  ‘Move,’ I say when he lingers. His feet are still on the blanket.

  ‘Lena,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I say, cutting him off. ‘I trusted you, and your parents. Do you know that you and your mom are the only people I’ve talked to about this? I never even spoke about it at the hospital. But if you can’t trust me back, then what’s the point?’

  I roll up the blanket in a twisted jumble and try to cram it into my backpack, which is nearly impossible if it isn’t folded right. I’m so angry and hurt, and feeling . . . I don’t know – rejected, I guess, that I can’t bear to be near him.

  I turn to cross the river, and Bo grabs me. Hard. He holds me in a way that I know I could never break. He’s so strong. He knows how to catch a deer with his bare hands – what chance do I have of getting away? I stop struggling and look up at him, furious. He’s not angry. He’s desperate.

  ‘If I tell you and we get caught, they will charge you with aiding and abetting, obstruction of justice, and anything else they can think of. This is much bigger than whether or not I trust you.’ He lets me go and stands back. ‘I’m trying to protect you, Lena. Not him.’

  I look down. ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘He threatened to move us to one of the other sites we use. He actually started packing.’ Bo laughs and puts his hands on his hips like he’s tired. ‘He said I could stay here alone if you meant that much to me.’

  I shift uncomfortably. ‘What did you say to him?’

  Bo smiles. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘You mean they left you?’

  He shakes his head. ‘My mom got between my dad and me.’ His face falls suddenly, remembering the conflict. ‘I’m going eventually. For school. My mom won’t let me stay in the woods forever, but she’s not ready for me to go just yet because she knows she’ll never see me again.’

  ‘Wait. Never? I mean, you could come visit or . . .’ I break off.

  He shakes his head, his eyes far away. ‘No. As soon as I register at one of the schools I’ve been accepted to, the FBI will be watching me. I can’t see my parents again.’

  The words hang there, and I swear the whole forest goes silent.

  ‘And your brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Well, we’ve had time to plan,’ he says quietly. ‘They’ll each come out to live with me when they’re ready. But it will be years in between. Could be twelve or thirteen years before I see Moth again. And if one of them doesn’t show, I’ll never know if they decided to stay with Mom and Dad, or if they’re . . . if something happened to them.’

  I sit down on the ground. ‘That’s horrible,’ I whisper.

  Bo crouches down in front of me, his eyes intense. He brushes a lock of my hair behind my ear. ‘I don’t care any more. I mean, I do,’ he amends quickly, ‘but my whole life has been about my family. About my dad. And now I need it to be about something else.’

  I put my arms around him. That’s all I can do, really. Too soon, Bo pulls back and stands.

  ‘Come on,’ he says.

  ‘Where’re we going?’ I reply, standing up and reaching for my things.

  ‘I promised to teach you how to survive out here.’ He looks at the air between the sunbeams and shadows, judging the light, or the probability of rain, or the migration of gnats, for all I know. I really have no idea. ‘We’d better get going,’ he says, like the air told him something.

  He takes me out into the brush, well beyond any human trail. He’s in control out here, and I think he does it more to take a moment and slow down the physical side of things between us after what I told him, rather than to teach me anything. But I learn plenty anyway. He stops and stoops down, pointing out a small white flower.

  ‘Queen’s cup,’ he tells me. ‘The leaves are edible.’ He picks a few of the leaves that grow around each flower, never stripping any of the flowers bare. He gives me a handful, and I put one in my mouth and chew. It’s sweet. I smile at Bo, and he smiles back, chewing on a leaf of his own.

  We move on, chewing and scanning the ground. He shows me the yellow-flowered wood sorrel and makes a face.

  ‘Sour,’ he says, gathering them anyway and putting the flowers and the leaves in the pockets of his worn cargo pants. ‘They’re better cooked.’

  We go on like this for hours. Barely talking, but looking and listening and finding. I take notes in my journal. I try to draw the flowers and the leaves.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ he asks.

  I look around. ‘Are we . . .?’ I spin around. I hear running water and go towards it. We’re back to there.

  ‘You’ll get better at it,’ he tells me when he sees
the devastated look on my face.

  ‘I had no idea we were heading back this way until I heard the water,’ I say, frustrated.

  Bo nods. ‘But you heard the water and went towards it. Why is that good?’ I shrug and roll my eyes. ‘Because water flows downhill,’ he says, answering his question for me. ‘And what’s down?’

  ‘Town is down,’ I say, finally getting it. ‘If I come across a stream, I follow it down the mountain.’

  ‘Right,’ Bo says, nodding. He’s standing too far away from me. I step towards him, but he smiles and shakes his head, evading my touch. ‘It’s too late. It will be dark soon.’

  He’s aching to touch me. I can see it. I love how transparent Bo is. He really is a rainbow. Every colour, every shade, and still so easy to see through him.

  ‘The day after tomorrow?’ I ask. ‘Tomorrow I have to be at the shelter in the morning for some deliveries.’

  He shifts anxiously. ‘Would you like to come home with me again?’ he asks. ‘My mom was asking for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘I really like your mom.’ Although I don’t know why she keeps inviting me when my presence so obviously endangers her husband.

  ‘Good. The day after tomorrow,’ he says, and moves away before I can come up with a way to ask him about that.

  He drifts back into the gloaming, and I lose sight of him.

  29 JULY

  The drugs are completely out of my system, so it’s with me all the time now. The image of Rachel’s dead body. All the blood.

  I can’t tell if I’m nauseous because I went off my meds, or if I’m nauseous because I keep hallucinating Rachel’s dead body everywhere because I’ve gone off my meds. It’s a subtle point, but one I can’t seem to get straight. The sweating has stopped and so have the tremors, thanks to Ray’s little white pills, but the nausea is still there. I wonder if I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life seeing corpses and being sick to my stomach. It wouldn’t be half the punishment I deserve; I know that. It would be inconvenient though; walking around always seeing the people I’ve killed.

  First, always first, is Rachel. I see her at the foot of my bed when I wake up in the morning, then stretched out under my grandparents’ breakfast table when I go downstairs. I see her passing me in a car while I ride my bike to the shelter. I see her hanging from one of the hooks in the walk-in freezer. Her black tongue is pushed out between her blue lips.

  But, wait. That wasn’t Rachel. Rachel wasn’t the one who hanged herself, I tell myself. I can’t even keep all my ghosts straight any more. And I need to keep them straight. I owe them that, at the very least.

  ‘Miss?’ says a man’s voice.

  I whirl around, my high-pitched bark of a scream cut off as soon as I see who’s behind me.

  ‘Oh, Officer,’ I say when I register the blue uniform. ‘You startled me.’

  The young policeman smiles at me. ‘I didn’t mean to sneak up on you,’ he says, amused.

  Why do men love scaring women so much? Nearly every boyfriend I ever had thought it would be a great idea to pull some prank on me to make me scream. What do they get out of that? It’s never made any sense to me.

  ‘Is Maria here?’ the officer asks, all business now that it’s clear I am not amused.

  ‘No. Some mornings I do the inventory for her. Did you have an appointment?’ I ask, stepping towards him and forcing him to move back so I can exit the walk-in.

  I’m not being rude. I smile to make sure he knows that. I’m just making it clear that I belong here, he doesn’t, and I don’t like to be cornered. Or frightened out of my skin so he can have a little chuckle.

  ‘No. I . . .’ He breaks off, cowed now that I’ve come right at him. He musters up his big-man voice. ‘I spoke with her the other day about a missing girl who used to stay at this facility.’

  I nod and look down sadly. ‘Sandy.’

  ‘You knew her?’ he asks.

  ‘No. She left before I got here,’ I reply. ‘But Maria told the staff that you found her remains.’

  ‘You’re new here?’ the officer guesses.

  ‘I’m a summer volunteer. Officer . . .?’

  ‘Longmire,’ he says, supplying his name. ‘What’s yours?’ he asks, pulling out a notepad and a pencil.

  I give it, and now I regret standing up to him. But maybe if I play docile for the rest of this interview – and I see now that’s what this is – I can seem innocuous enough so that he won’t look too deeply into my past.

  It’s not like anything is on my permanent record. I’m not technically a criminal. No red flags are going to pop up if he enters my name into a computer.

  But. He won’t have to dig too far to find several newspaper articles about a major humanitarian prize and a high school hoax that have my name all over them. That’s small potatoes, though. Embarrassing, but not criminal. At least my involvement in Rachel’s death never made the papers. After I was hospitalized, I was legally exonerated due to ‘extenuating medical circumstances’.

  But. There’s a paper trail about how I was questioned by the police in New York City, although the details – including the fact that my interrogation was temporarily under the umbrella of a possible murder investigation – have all been expunged.

  But. My state-mandated stay in a mental hospital would be easy for him to find, even if he did have to dig deep to connect my need for a state-mandated stay at a mental institution to a potential murder investigation.

  Fear is a gymnast somersaulting up and down my bones.

  My only chance to avoid further questioning from the police – and I’ve been down that road, so I know I don’t want to go down it again – is to make this young officer not want to look into me at all, and hope I get lucky.

  ‘I’m staying with my grandparents for the summer,’ I tell him, like I have nothing to hide. I give details about their address and how long they’ve had a summer home here without him needing to ask.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to come and spend time with them forever but, see, I’m from the East Coast? Manhattan?’ I make it a question, as if he’s never heard of New York City, and put a hand on my hip and wave the other in the air. ‘And I have friends who always have amazing stuff – I mean, like, amazing stuff – to do all summer, and so I’ve been really, really bad about my grandparents, you know? They’re not going to be around forever –’ I duck my head down as if even mentioning death is somehow impolite – ‘and finally I realized what was important in my life, you know? Because, for me, my family is way more important than going to the Hamptons. In the long run, anyway. Although you do meet the best people there – not that this isn’t great too, but the Hamptons are on a different level, you know?’

  I see him deflate after I turn stupid and chatty, like the thrill is gone now that I’m no longer a challenge. I keep going, telling him about how Aura-Blue and Mila invited me to join them volunteering at the shelter, and of course I was excited for the opportunity to help people less fortunate. Oh, and by the way, did the young officer know Aura-Blue? Her grandfather was the local sheriff for years. No? What a shame.

  By the time I’m done with Officer Longmire, he can’t wait to disentangle himself from the self-important asshole who obviously couldn’t be hiding anything because she didn’t stop talking about her meaningless life for a solid fifteen minutes.

  ‘I really hope you find out what happened to Sandy,’ I say as Officer Longmire tries for a third time to break away from me. I lower my voice like Grandma does when she’s talking about druggies. ‘Was it an overdose?’

  ‘There’s no indication of that as of right now,’ the officer replies, desperate to get away from me.

  ‘Really?’ My voice solidifies from the breathy, girly tone I’ve adopted, as I’m momentarily shocked back into my real self. ‘Then how did she die?’

  Longmire closes off. ‘We’re still looking into it,’ he replies.

  ‘Is there a connection between Sandy and the woman from out of state?�
�

  His face freezes. I rock back on my heels, his answer implicit, and the officer realizes his mistake.

  ‘There’s no official connection between the deaths of Sandy Crosby and Chelsea Oliver at this time,’ he says curtly. So, yeah, there definitely is. ‘Let Maria know I stopped by and that I’ll be back to speak to the rest of the staff.’

  ‘Oh, certainly, Officer. Maria will be here tomorrow morning,’ I say in that chirping, girly voice again.

  After Officer Longmire leaves, Gina seems to magically appear out of thin air.

  ‘You’re good,’ she tells me. ‘Talking a whole lotta nothing.’

  I smile at Gina with narrowed eyes. ‘Hiding in the office?’ I ask in return. Gina’s completely plucked and redrawn-in eyebrows make her look permanently surprised. People without their real eyebrows are harder to read, I realize.

  ‘I don’t talk to police,’ she tells me. She looks away, and I feel the sadness in her more than hear it or see it. ‘But I do hope they find whoever murdered Sandy.’

  ‘He never said mur—’ I start to say, but Gina’s eye-roll stops me.

  ‘Be careful out in those woods,’ she warns. ‘Some crazy bastards out there.’

  I sputter for a moment, surprised.

  ‘Like who?’ I call after her.

  ‘Like Dr Goodnight,’ she says over her shoulder. The way she says it makes me laugh nervously.

  She’s joking. Is she joking? Dr Goodnight sounds like a mattress store. Or a Stephen King novel. I think it is a Stephen King novel – no, wait, that’s Doctor Sleep. Whatever. She’s definitely trying to get me to bite, saying ‘Dr Goodnight’ in a low, ominous voice. I shake my head in frustration and go to my station to start work.

  Rachel’s there. Waiting for me. She’s stretched out over my chopping block, dripping blood. I shut my eyes tight, and when I open them again, she’s gone, but a girl in a hospital gown lies on the floor. I never saw Zlata’s body, I think in an offhand way. It’s not that my ghosts are coming for me. They never left. I knew they were there, but the drugs made it so I couldn’t see them. Couldn’t deal with them. Now I don’t have much of a choice.