Winterwood

Inside the cabin, there’s a bunk bed against each of the two walls—four boys to a cabin—and the air smells of damp wood and campfire smoke. It’s a smell that has settled into the bedsheets and starched-white pillows and the frayed green rug in the center of the room, into everything.

I crouch down beside the potbellied stove set in the corner.

The counselors tell us not to let the fires go out in our stoves—to keep them burning day and night, to keep the cabins warm. But most of the boys forget. And our stove has gone dark.

I place dry logs on the embers, coaxing the fire back to life, but the room is still cold, wind howling at the windows, rattling the thin glass. I kick off my boots and walk to the wood dresser on the right-hand wall. I kneel down and pull open the bottom drawer—the drawer that was mine. But it’s empty. My clothes, the backpack I brought with me, the handful of books, the dead cell phone—they’re all gone.

The counselors must have taken everything out. Boxed up my few belongings when I went missing, ready to ship it all back to my uncle once the road cleared. We’re sorry to inform you that your nephew, Oliver Huntsman, has gone missing from the Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys. If he turns up, we’ll let you know. In the meantime, here’s all his stuff.

I push the drawer closed, a strange hollowness sinking into my gut. My few things are gone—hardly enough to represent a life anyway. But it was all I had. All I had left that meant anything at all. Of my life before. My parents. And I hold back the threat of tears. The wretched twisting in my chest. Perhaps the counselors were already clearing away space for another boy. My single drawer, my bunk—wiped clean of any memory of the boy who vanished.

Oliver Huntsman, swept into nonexistence.

I climb the ladder to the top bunk—my old bunk—and the sad, sagging mattress settles beneath me. I stare up at the low ceiling, an arm’s length away, the wood carved with boys’ names and symbols and crude drawings. Nights when boys couldn’t sleep or were bored or didn’t want to be forgotten, they dug the blade of a knife into the wood. Proof that they were here.

Inside my coat pocket, I find the cotton pouch filled with herbs she gave me. It smells like my mother’s garden, where she used to grow thyme and potatoes and carrots we would eat straight from the soil. I press the pouch against my chest, my ribs, trying to push away the cold. Push away the memory of my mom that is a raw blade against my throat. That makes me feel alone. Awfully, desperately alone.

The boys call Nora a witch. A moon witch who is full of weird thoughts and strange words. Who lives inside a strange house, filled with strange things.

Maybe they’re right. Or maybe they only tell stories to pass the time. They tell stories about her so that no one will tell stories about them.

Maybe she feels alone too. Misunderstood. A vacant gap inside her that will never be filled.

Just like me.

The fire crackles and I close my eyes, pulling the blanket up over my head to keep out the cold. I try to sleep. To let the day melt away around me. And for a while I do sleep, but my dreams are black and bleak and I’m running through trees, eyes flashing upward, searching for the starry night sky but I’m lost and I sink into the snow and the cold until she touches my hand and I snap awake.

My eyes flutter open and I’m still in my bunk, peering up at the ceiling.

But I’m not alone.

Voices carry through the cabin. The shuffling of boots across the floor.

The others have returned.

I stay still, listening to their lumbering movements, the door shutting behind them. The cabin is dark, the sun long set, and they don’t know I’m here, hidden in the top bunk. They don’t know I’m back.

“Told you the fire wouldn’t go out,” one of them says. I recognize the voice—the voices of the boys who I shared a cabin with before my mind went blank. Before I went missing. It sounds like Jasper, his words more pitched than the others.

I hear someone add more wood to the stove, the kicking off of boots, the opening and closing of dresser drawers. The bunk below me creaks as Lin flops onto his mattress and starts tapping a foot against the wood frame.

Jasper, whose bunk is directly across from mine, says, “I don’t know why I need to learn this shit. When will I need to use a compass? After I leave here, I’m never going into the woods again.”

“You’ll probably get a job as one of the counselors,” Lin suggests below me, and laughs in a quick burst.

“Hell no,” Jasper answers.

A long pause settles between them, and the wind grows louder outside, making the fire in the stove pop and crack. Drops of rain begin to drum against the roof.