In the Blood (30 page)

I followed the trail of crinkled colorful paper to a pile of boxes stacked like a fort at the back end of the room. I wondered briefly how either of them, Rachel and Luke, had managed to get the boxes up here. Both of them were slight and not especially strong. Then I realized that the boxes were empty. Luke must have smuggled them up at some point to construct himself a little hiding spot.

As I passed the row of boxes, I saw that he’d brought up his beanbag chair, an iPad, three giant bags of candy. There was a stack of magazines and books, a couple of photo albums. I sank into the
beanbag and started sifting through the pile. There were library books about the history of The Hollows, some psychology texts. There was an old
Vanity Fair
magazine that held one of the more in-depth articles about my mother’s murder. Where had he gotten it? It was three years old.

I imagined him up here, eating candy and reading library books. And I almost felt sorry for him. Was he lonely like I had been? Did he come up here to hide from the stressors in his life, as I did when I disappeared to my spot in the woods? I could envision him, reading, eating candy, feeling that special kind of freedom you have when no one knows where you are. He probably came here while his mother thought he was locked away, and maybe it made him feel like he wasn’t a prisoner after all.

I picked up a slim book from the stack. It was heavy, in spite of being a paperback:
Mines and Tunnels of Upstate New York
. It was a photography book and trail guide to various sites around the areas where hikers, spelunkers, and cavers could go beneath the earth and explore the natural caves, crevices, and tunnels, as well as those blasted by the iron miners that helped settle some of the area, including The Hollows.

In fact, the largest section of the book was about The Hollows and some of the neighboring areas. I felt a catch in my throat as I started flipping through the chapters and came to a dog-eared page. It talked about a site about a mile into The Hollows Wood, not far from where Beck and I had been that night. There was a brief passage about the woods, and how it was known by area residents as the Black Forest because of the resemblance of its flora and fauna to the forest in Germany by the same name.
It is the haunted forest of fairy tales and nightmares,
declared the author,
so creepy and quiet that one could almost believe it was home to the witch’s cabin and the Big Bad
Wolf, and populated by the restless spirits of the forest. Something about the area confounds cell signals. So make sure you take your old-school compass with you and that you let someone know where you’re going.

The wind was picking up, and I rose to look outside again. I was alone, and no one knew where I was. Suddenly that didn’t seem like such a good thing. We need other people, we really do. As much as I’d always liked to think that I was better off on my own, I wondered if it was true. There were people who wanted to help me, who cared about me in spite of everything. I thought about Bridgette, who was probably having a cow. In that moment, feeling my isolation in a way I never had before, I thought about calling her. But I didn’t want to hear the fear and disappointment in her voice. I didn’t want to deal with her expectations of me. Maybe that’s why we choose to isolate ourselves, those of us who do. Because in so many ways, it’s just easier.

I went back to Luke’s depressing little hideout and picked up the book again. It meant something. Why had he marked off that page? Was it the next clue in the scavenger hunt? The last poem hadn’t ended with anything that led me to another place. It was angry, as if he’d lost his focus. It wasn’t like the other clues, which was why I suspected someone else had written it. But what if I was wrong? What was I supposed to take away from it? Had he known I’d be lost, that I’d come here for answers and find his aerie? No, that was giving him too much credit. I was certain that he would be furious at me for being here.

I’d come to see who he might have been communicating with, and quickly discovered that he really didn’t have his own e-mail account, just as Rachel had told me. Maybe he had access to another computer somewhere. But where? At school? At the library? I sank back into the beanbag and closed my eyes. I felt just like I did when
I was playing chess with him, five moves behind, certain he had a master plan for my destruction, though I had no idea what it was. And, there was some kind of clock ticking, apparently. But only he knew when time ran out.

I got up from where I lay beside Beck and awkwardly started pulling myself together.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m freezing,” I said. “It’s thirty degrees.”

I was shivering but not from the cold. I was afraid, angry. Passion and desire had abandoned me, and I felt myself shutting down. Even though I could still smell her on me—her skin, her hair, her perfume. Even though I knew I loved her and maybe had for a while, I wanted to be as far from her as I could be. She knew too much. She’d seen too much. What had I been thinking? I remember the simmer of a terrible rage, the rage of the liar discovered.

“Are you mad at me?” she said. “You can’t be.”

She’d pulled her pants up, sat down, and curled herself into a ball, her arms locked around her legs. Her eyes were big, looking up at me. She had dropped her usual mask of indifference. I saw her in all her sadness and vulnerability; she was my mirror. She was as lost, alone, and in need of love as I was. I almost sank down to her and wrapped her up in my arms. But I didn’t. I was that selfish, that cruel. That’s the problem with damaged, broken people. We’re unpredictable. We’ll draw you close, then shove you away. It’s nothing personal. Emotions are painful, frightening. It’s so much better to be dull and blank. There’s less risk. Don’t open yourself wide; they can’t hurt you if you don’t.

“I want to go,” I said. I fastened up my coat. When I looked at her again, she was crying.

“You felt it,” she said. “I know you did. You love me.”

She stood and brushed herself off. The look on her face—it was a grimace of disappointment and disbelief.

“Give me a break,” I said. “It was
sex
.”

That’s when she yelled at me, when her voice rang out into the night, angry and sad.
How can you be so cold?

The anger inside me, the twisted thing that wanted to hurt and strike out, that wanted to say cruel things and wreak destruction . . . it was so powerful. I hadn’t felt it in so long, I had to marshal all my resources to control it. It frightened me, the things I wanted to do to her, the things I wanted to say. I imagined striking her hard in the face. I saw myself digging her grave. I heard myself calling her unspeakable names, things that if I said I could never take back. I was shaking with it. She saw it; she saw it in my face and she recoiled from me. Her eyes were a mirror where I saw myself. I was a monster. I ran from her, from myself, and from everything we were together.

I left her there—in the dark, cold night . . . I left my best friend crying. She was sobbing actually, from pain that I had caused her. And now she was gone. I thought she had run off, that she was punishing me, as I heartily deserved to be punished. I thought she’d turn up all sassy and victorious to see the pain she’d caused. Because Beck liked that. She liked people to hurt for her. That was how she knew they cared. But now I had to wonder. Who else had been out there that night? And what had he done to Beck?

I was sunk deep into the beanbag, flipping through that old book that maybe no one but Luke had ever read. The silence seemed to expand. And then I heard a door open and close downstairs.

I froze, listening to slow, heavy footsteps resonating through the wood floor of the attic. Not Rachel, not Luke—the footfalls were too heavy, too deliberate. Rachel was soft and light on her feet, tapping out quick staccato beats. Luke was all banging—tossing his bag and coat down, storming into the kitchen.

Whoever was in the house was moving carefully down the hall. I heard the copper gong that hung in the hallway give off a hum. I thought of my bag on the floor, in plain sight. There was a terrible pause, a moment of silence. I forced myself to breathe deep. Then I heard him (it had to be a man) move back down the hallway toward the staircase. I’d left Luke’s closet door, the attic access, wide open. If someone were looking for me, it would be very easy to figure out where I’d gone.

There was another agonizingly long pause, in which I thought maybe whoever it was would leave. Maybe the front door was open for some reason, perhaps it had swung ajar and a neighbor came to investigate. Or perhaps it was the handyman Rachel had mentioned. The man who was hanging her paintings, erecting bookshelves, hauling away junk left by the former residents. It could have reasonably been any of those things.

But then I heard someone on the stairs. I put the book into my pants and started crawling quietly along the dusty floor. Maybe the handyman had a quick errand to do in the house, or had to drop something off. I just had to stay quiet, undetected.

From my vantage point on the floor, I saw the other exit from the attic. There was an identical hatch with an attached ladder that opened down the hallway from Luke’s room across from Rachel’s. I moved over toward it slowly, my mind ticking through options.

I’d have to wait. If I heard someone come up from Luke’s access,
I’d exit quickly and run. If I got caught, I had the Mace in my pocket. But then there was only a silence that stretched on so long I began to convince myself that I was alone after all. I thought of my medication in my bag, how I hadn’t been good about taking it at precisely the same time every day. How I’d already passed the time for my dose this morning. My mind played tricks on me when I went off my medication, something I hadn’t been foolish enough to do in years. Maybe that was what was happening now, a crack in my chemical armor, demons leaking from my subconscious to my conscious mind. Funny how, in certain circumstances, the worst-case scenario becomes the best.

Oh, how the seconds snake and crawl when you’re afraid. But how attuned are your senses, how your blood pumps to fuel your muscles for flight, how your focus tightens. The brain releases its flood of chemicals to increase your chances of survival. There’s a certain power in the prey response, a rush that nothing but fear will deliver. Then there was a soft sound that lifted up through the open hatch to Luke’s room.

I realized in that moment that Luke could get out of his room anytime he wanted, even when Rachel locked him in. I knew from snooping around that she took pills at night; so her sleep must be sound and impenetrable. All the banging he did, all the pounding at those cheap locks, pulling them out of their mounts. It was just theater; how it must drive Rachel crazy. Not that it was the best choice to lock your kid in his room. Maybe she deserved the anger he felt toward her. But what did I know?

My parents, so distressed by my behavior, sent me to board part-time at a school for troubled children. The school was forward thinking for its time, blending education with talk and medical therapy. It was a safe place, and I got well there.

I don’t have any horror stories of abuse to recount—but the staff locked us in our rooms at night. We each had our own space to sleep in, and it was actually a relief to know that no one else could get in. It was a school for crazy kids, after all. I had been staying there four nights a week, spending weekends at home. At first I was distraught, nearly doubled over with despair at missing my mother. I know that, but there’s no real visceral memory of pain. It’s honestly kind of a blur. There was class, then therapy—group and individual. There was the new cocktail of medications I took, and what they gave me to sleep at night. Initially I was overwhelmed and foggy. But eventually, it all normalized and it became my life. There was a certain measure of relief in being away from my parents. It was quiet—no more fighting.

The kids there were all handpicked because Dr. Chang believed that we would benefit from his program. We were all gifted. His critics accused him of “creaming,” skimming the least disturbed kids, the most intelligent, those who were most likely to respond to medication and therapy, in order to obtain the best results for his program.