“I miss it like an ex-con misses the other inmates.” Like the ice after the fist. They come in pairs.
“Think you’ll ever move back?”
“Never,” I said. At Jackson’s look, I added, “I’m getting married. To a guy in Philadelphia.”
“Does Tyler know this?”
“Yes.”
“But he’s the one you called after midnight . . . No, you’re right, none of my business.”
I caught a stanza of Poe heading up his forearm, a line from Kerouac slashed across his wrist. As though he had mined my father’s old books, borrowed words, and hidden beneath them. “I gotta go. Thanks for breakfast.”
“It was good to see you, Nic.”
I stopped at the door, turned to see Jackson still watching me. “She’s dead, Jackson,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
* * *
I DROVE BY TYLER’S parents’ place on the way back; his truck wasn’t there, either. For all the time we spent together, I didn’t know them well. Tyler wasn’t the type to bring a girlfriend home for dinner. We stayed indoors only in bad weather. We always had his truck, and there were the woods. On first glance, it may seem like there’s nothing to do here, but honestly, the world is yours. And the woods were ours. The clearing where we’d set up a tent. The caverns if we were with friends. And the river. We spent a lot of time down near the river, lying on our backs, fingers loosely linked.
The river cut between our homes, which now seemed more metaphorical than physical. I could get to Tyler’s from my own place if not for the river. Technically, it was possible to cross in the narrow section on one of the trees someone had dragged across. But it was out of the way and tricky in the dark. One misstep and you were over. The water cooler than you expected, the rocks sharper, the night indifferent to your plight.
No, it was better to take his truck to the drugstore and go from there. Much shorter, too.
I passed that drugstore on the way back home, and then the elementary school, the police station, the church, and the graveyard. I felt myself getting light-headed at the stoplight, holding my breath until the light turned green.
* * *
I DIDN’T GO IN my house or the garage; I’d accidentally left the door ajar when I’d left with Jackson in a hurry. I trekked out to the hill behind my house, looking down into the valley, imagining all the possibilities that could’ve happened out there. The Carter property was to my side, beyond the dried-up creek bed—I could see a sliver of white from the remodeled garage in the distance; the river farther in the distance, now hidden. In the winter, when the leaves fell, and depending on the angle, you could catch a glimpse. Now all you could hear was the low, steady rumble. We could hear it more after a few days of rain.
I used to find Daniel up here sometimes, though I’d thought this spot was mine alone. My haunts, my places, probably belonged to every child who ever lived here. Annaleise must’ve sat here, too, surveying her world. She must’ve stumbled upon the clearing with the fort that I thought belonged to us. She must’ve known all the paths through the woods, all the places to hide, just as I did.
I followed the one I knew best—the one that cut a straight path to the clearing. I used to think the downtrodden underbrush, the exposed dirt, was from the wear of my steps and Daniel’s over time, but it probably was begun years earlier and would continue years after.
There was the tree with the hole in the trunk. I stuck my hand in, pulled out a few acorns and a collection of stones we’d stored there years earlier. There was the spot in the corner, the flattest surface where Tyler and I would pitch his tent. There was the joint between two trunks where Daniel and I collected long branches in case we needed to ward off outsiders.
Corinne and Bailey and I took over the clearing once, way before boys, when we were still made for play, and tried to make Daniel and his friends earn it back. Corinne had raised a big stick over her head, pretending to be the Lord of the Rings wizard, which the boys had been watching in the living room. It became this big event: me and Corinne and Bailey guarding this site, Daniel and his friends trying to sneak inside without getting caught, and Corinne’s booming voice, You shall not pass!, disintegrating into a fit of laughter. We’d played until it was dark, and Corinne tried to make them declare their loyalty to her as Queen of the Clearing, waving the stick in front of her body, swishing her hips in a rhythm. Eventually, Daniel swung Corinne over his shoulder—she was skinny and straight, and her hair nearly brushed the ground, and she was yelling, “A curse on you, Daniel Farrell!” because she was Corinne Prescott even back then.
I could feel them surrounding me here before things changed—like the past was alive, existing right beside the present. Daniel abandoned this place first. Always responsible, too mature, no time for kid stuff. Corinne and Bailey didn’t want to hang out here by themselves. “It’s only fun if someone’s trying to fight you for it,” Corinne said. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
I tried to hold the memory of all the people who had been here with me. Daniel and Tyler, Corinne and Bailey.
And then I tried to imagine an outsider watching us all.
All those times we used to scare ourselves with sounds—an animal, the breeze. A monster, Daniel had said, and we had rolled our eyes. Nothing, Tyler had said, pulling me closer in the tent, I got you. But what if there were something? What if the monster were a child just watching? What if it were Annaleise crouched in the bushes? I tried to make myself small, make myself timid, make myself her, and see our lives playing out through her eyes. What did she see? I wondered. What did she think? Who was I through the filter of her eyes? I stood, wandering to the center of the clearing, trying to picture us.
I was so caught up in the memories of other people, the feeling of people sharing this space with me, that at first I didn’t recognize the feeling of someone real. Someone now.
The crack of a twig and the shuffling of underbrush. The hairs raising on the back of my neck in response.
I was in the middle of the clearing, completely exposed, and I felt eyes. I was sure I could hear breathing.
“Tyler?” I called.
I hated that he was always my first instinct. The number I’d start dialing after midnight and then stop. The name I’d call when I heard a front door creak open.
“Annaleise?” I called in a voice just above a whisper.
I took out my cell phone, so if there were someone, he or she would see I had it.
Sounds—footsteps—from just out of sight, from deeper in the woods.
I backed away, into the trees, closer to home. Heard something from the side and spun in that direction.
I held the phone in both hands. And I had a signal. A beautiful signal, out in the woods, with the one service provider who covered out here. Terrible plan otherwise—couldn’t get a break on mobile-to-mobile, the data-service part was murky at best, but I was alone in the woods, and it worked.
Everett had taken my phone once while his was in the other room charging. He tried to look up the scores of a game, got frustrated, and said, “Why do you have this service? It’s horrible.”
“It’s not horrible,” I’d said. But it was.
Now I thought: Because. Just in case. For this. For here. I thought of all the little things I’d held on to. All the little things I’d taken with me when I left. A fine, transparent thread leading all the way home.
I held the phone to my ear, and I called the one person I knew would come, no questions asked.
The phone rang two, three times, and I was teetering on the brink of panic when Daniel picked up. “I’m in the woods,” I said. “At the clearing.”
“Okay,” he said. “Are you okay?”
The faint wafting of a scent on the breeze—cigarette smoke. Gone as suddenly as it had registered.
“I don’t know,” I said. My hand on the tree trunk with the hole, the bark rough and familiar, grounding me.