After the Woods (26 page)

Deborah always has to have a project.

In my lap, my hands hold a nonexistent pen above a nonexistent notebook. I mime scribbling, trying to trace the logic. Liv's purpose for Donald was to foil Deborah. What is the purpose of Shane?

Old truths wash away like a splinter of glass from my eye.

*   *   *

My stomach is finally quiet. Snakes wait in weeds and holes in the ground, not in girls' bellies. They defy decapitation and are immune to their own venom. Sometimes, they have daughters.

 

FIFTEEN

368 Days After the Woods

I'm sure of it now. My senses are sharper than before the woods, tuned more finely. I have evolved into something that survives.

I've listened to Paula approach for a quarter of a mile, her footfalls crunching the frost. Wind whips the flag above the watchtower. As she enters the Sheepfold, grackles hidden in the tops of pines take off in a whorl. I sit on a flat stone to the side of the tower entrance, the one I palmed before hiding inside, because it was smooth and seemed like it might be the last pleasing thing I would touch before dying.

“Thanks for meeting me here,” I say.

“I hadn't heard from you in a while. I wasn't sure how you felt about me.” Paula wrestles her heavy hair into a ponytail. “I'm not popular around Shiverton these days.”

“How Shivertonians feel about you is irrelevant. How I feel about you is irrelevant. What is relevant is that I still need you,” I say.

Solve it, or leave it.

I nod toward the crime scene. “He collapsed the pit, but the police dug it up again.”

“I know. I saw it before,” she says, her voice brittle. “The day we met, remember?”

The pit looks nothing like it did the last time I saw it, and the things inside. Ubiquitous yellow crime tape is staked in a rough octagon wide of the pit's original perimeter. It flaps in the breeze like sad party streamers. A perfectly excised rectangle of earth has been removed along with Ana. If Jessup closed over the pit after I escaped and before he was arrested, that means he came and saw her one last time. He wasn't experienced enough to know he should have taken her out, that you can't just leave a body in the elements. Ana's soul might have flown off long before I saw her, but her body would stay and make itself known.

The pit is too changed. It doesn't suit my purpose.

“Why did you ask me here, Julia?” Paula says, impatient.

I reach into my bag and hand her the pamphlet. “I think Liv and her mother are going to Bolivia for something called Makeover Travel.”

Paula skims the text and lewd photos. “Where did you get this?”

“It was in Liv's Christmas stocking,” I say, twisting my mouth grimly. “I think it's a present.”

I once asked Liv what she wanted for Christmas. She scoffed, reminding me that she stopped making lists when she was six, because didn't I know that Deborah always decided what she needed?

“You like to do research,” Paula says, a new edge to her voice. “What do you know about medical tourism?”

“Only that something like half a million Americans go abroad for procedures every year, and the majority of those procedures are elective cosmetic surgery,” I say.

Paula hands me back the pamphlet. “So what do you need me for?”

“Confirm what Deborah's up to for me.”

“What Deborah's up to? You'll have to be more specific than that.”

“Confirm whom the surgery is scheduled for,” I say slowly.

“Did you know I ended up with ethics infractions from complaints made by your mother and your therapist?
Dateline
didn't care, but the station took the charges more seriously than they had to, because it made them look good,” Paula says.

“I'll give you something,” I say. “The story of my escape. And how I found Ana Alvarez before everyone else did.”

Paula stares at me for a full minute, eyes blazing. Then she digs for her phone and paces away, speaking into a cloud of breath. When she returns, the edge in her voice is replaced by exhilaration.

“I confirmed that the Lapins' travel plans were made through an intermediary, something called Swan Tours, a company that sends Americans to Bolivia specifically for the purpose of getting plastic surgery.”

“Why go all the way to South America to get a nose job?” I ask.

“The cost is lower than in America. Bolivia in particular is becoming a hub for this kind of thing. It's a third of the price in some cases.”

“Deborah doesn't hurt for money. She gets anything she asks for from Leland. It's always been that way.”

“Perhaps her ex-husband wouldn't pay for elective plastic surgery.”

“Maybe.”

“There's something else. Liv is sixteen?”

“We're both sixteen.”

“Plastic surgery is viewed differently in South American culture. It's practically a birthright. If you have the money, and you don't like it, you get it fixed.” Paula comes closer, that old look in her eye, hot and bothered, wanting something from me. “Is there a part of Liv's body that she's unhappy with?”

I see them, in front of my eyes. Faded marks, encircled
X
s, on her bottom, legs, arms.

I shake my head.

“Well. Either way, there are reasons to be concerned. The standard for medical training isn't the same in other countries as it is in America. And there's no one on this half of the equator policing it. There are countless horror stories, deaths under anesthesia, inadequate follow-up.” Her eyes glitter. I've given Paula her next story: mothers who schedule unnecessary plastic surgery for their sixteen-year-old daughters in foreign countries.

I've made my promise, my bargain. Now she gets two stories for the price of one.

The flag at the top of the tower waves to me. I step inside, met by the rank smell of piss, and climb. I hit the second landing before Paula's weight on the stairs joins mine. When I reach the top, I press my back against the wall and slip down to the floor. Paula's face appears, but it doesn't awaken me. Too late, I'm already gone. My ears seal over.

*   *   *

The watchtower is a green-gray cylinder framed in morning light. Patches of moss climb its sides. A wrought-iron staircase spirals upward, visible through long windows. On a pole at the top is a weather-beaten American flag, its tatters undulating in the wind. The tower means I am heading in the direction of the parking lot, where kids used to leave their cars and hike up to the tower to drink and get laid before it became too overgrown to pass. It's twenty feet away. I can do this. I hobble toward it, dragging my leg behind, using my knuckles to propel me like an ape. Cranking my neck, I fix my eyes on my goal. I think of a famous painting I once saw in New York of a crippled woman dragging her body toward a farmhouse. Christina. I fall to my hip like Christina, dragging myself with my arms, which aren't yet ruined. This is somehow faster. I am moving now, really moving, dragging my body across roots and rocks, falling and rising up again, digging in with my elbows, scuttling across the ground like a crab. The tower is closer, twelve more feet to go.

My hand falls through the earth. I freeze.

Pebbles spray from under my hand and are swallowed by darkness. I kneel at the edge of a hand-dug hole in the ground. An inch more, a shift forward of my weight, and I would have thrown myself into the hole behind the pebbles. It is six feet across. The smell of overturned earth lingers, and it terrifies me. I scurry backward, folding my ankle back underneath myself. Pain lances through swollen tissue. I can't go much farther on this thing, not firmly attached.

I turn to the side and vomit.

Time passes. Behind me, the sun rises. My bile sparkles like diamonds on briar leaves. A vine grows over the pit's edge and inside. I swipe my sleeve across my mouth and follow the vine, crawling back to the lip and peering over. Rocks poke from the sides like blisters in a throat, and there are holes where rocks might have been but are missing, as though they were knocked out by someone trying to gain a foothold. I shift to let sunlight past me into the hole. From top to bottom, it's the height of two men, maybe less. Wedges of pale green and orange—cantaloupe rinds?—cut into quarters by a human hand. Silver wrappers. Plastic water bottles. Something was fed and watered down there. The electric buzzing of flies. I lean closer. Two mud-covered hot-pink sneakers splayed at a terrible angle. And something else, covered in black leaves. A dark lump curled in the shape of a shrimp.

A twig snaps. I hunch my back and peer over my shoulder, feral and alert.

RUN.

I clamber up and rise, but my ankle caves instantly, soft white static filling my eyes. I drop back to my shredded knees and crawl, around the hole, over rocks and brush, bleeding from so many places. The tower is farther than it looks. I scuttle on, leaving a trail of blood. When I reach the base of the tower I pray the door is unlocked, rising and swaying on my knees like a prairie dog. I throw my weight against the door and fall in on my hands. The smell of ancient piss rises beneath me, but I am past things like hygiene and disgust. Beer cans litter the floor. I look over my shoulder at the vegetation I've beaten down with my hands and knees. My blood trail will lead him to me, and I will be trapped. I know what I must do. The railing, a skeletal helix, rises from the floor. I use it to pull myself up, and it squeals under my weight. I hop to the first step on my good foot, then two, then ten. I take breaks every three steps. At eighteen I stop counting. At thirty-two, I reach the top. Someone spray-painted PURGATORY on the wall in front of me. I laugh, but the laugh loses to my breath that explodes like firecrackers in the trapped tower air. I swallow my noise, because it interferes with my hearing, and hearing is what's kept me alive in the woods until now. The first day, I listened to the man's tone, to see if he would grow affectionate toward me the longer we were together. Later, I listened as his random mutterings become more distant, as he began to regard me as less than human: something he caught, but did not want. That first night, I listened for the man's heavy footfalls in the mud, as he searched for his escapee, in the dark and through the rain. On this day, I listen for the swish and switch of a hunter cutting through brush that stands between him and his prey.

He will come soon.

I move to the window, palming the wall. When he comes, I will listen as he pushes through the door. I will listen as his feet touch the first landing. When he gets to the third landing, I will jump, headfirst, which will snap my neck. And then he cannot keep me. Because I will be free.

I watch.

The sun travels across the sky. My eyes dull. I give the window my back and sink to the floor. On the walls are shadows, a sinister lace of leaves and branches. The patterns shift and change. I rest my head on my knees and doze. When I wake, light fills my eyes from the back window. The sun climbed over the tower while I slept. I push myself up with my hands. My ankle is twice the size of the other, heavy with blood. The calf looks fat too. I use my hands to stand. My ears ring, a tinny hum. Surfacing too fast, getting the bends. The tower walls tilt, and the spray-painted letters lengthen.

The window. I hop hard through the wooze, four hops to get me across the room. If he comes, there's no rule that says I can't jump to my death from this window instead of that window. I laugh, weaker even than before, an anemic hysteria that fades to husky sighs. A faint
whoosh!
from below. Different from the wind in the trees, different from the owl swooping to the ground to snatch a vole in the night. A deliberate, man-made noise: rubber tires skimming through leaves.

I throw my waist against the windowsill and flail my arms.

“STOP!”

A biker flies past. I thrust my torso out of the window and scream as loud as I can:

“HELP ME!”

The terrible scraping noise goes on forever. He braked too fast, got thrown from his bike. My heart sinks. I have killed him. Then slow, staggering footsteps. The biker in the tight turquoise shirt printed with Italian logos staggers underneath my window. His helmet sits crooked on his head, leaves are caught in the hairs on his shins, and his elbows are clotted with dirt. He leans forward, his back heaving. When he looks up, his eyes are slices, his mouth is ugly with pain.

“Are you the missing girl?” he gasps.

“Yes,” I whisper.

*   *   *

Paula kneels on the ground holding my hand. I didn't feel her take it.

“Julia?” she says, tentative.

My head rises. “You'll use your contacts. Speak Spanish. Confirm which one of them is scheduled for surgery?” I say.

“I'll do my best,” Paula promises.

“Then I'll tell you what happened to Ana,” I say. “Papademetriou is Greek, right? You've heard of the Ionians? They were an ancient Greek tribe.”

“I suppose. Though I don't see the significance.”

I rest the back of my head against cold stone. “Have you ever heard of the Ionian word
zagre
?”

 

SIXTEEN

369 Days After the Woods

Each hour, the rain fell harder. I know because I stayed awake listening.

It stopped as the sun rose. By then the damage was done. The Aberjona River had overflowed. Sewage leached into backyards and playing fields. Water pushed through the foundation of a house on Lake Street and exploded its basement. The new track is permanently damaged, some say. There is talk of a FEMA intervention.

Liv's front yard is pocked in spots where the ground gives way.

“This isn't fun anymore. We should go,” Alice says. After a morning spent surveilling Liv's house, Alice wants to do something more fun on our day off before the holiday.