Winterwood

I think they’ve fallen asleep, but then Jasper says, “It’s been two weeks.”

Below him, in the bottom bunk, Rhett snaps, “Shut up, man.”

“I just wonder where he is,” Jasper adds quickly.

“He’ll turn up,” Rhett answers, his voice biting. Sharp as tacks. Maybe I should say something, tell them I’m here—but I stay quiet, a knot twisted in my stomach.

“Can you blame him for not wanting to come back?” Lin asks below me. The room falls quiet. “I’d hide too.”

Jasper makes a sound. “No shit.”

Someone grumbles, someone else coughs, but no one speaks. And soon the cabin is filled with the sounds of sleep. Of mutters and snores, feet kicking at their footboards, blankets tugged up beneath chins to keep out the cold.

Wind squeals through cracks between the thick log walls. A never-ending scream. Long and hollow. A desperate sound.

The rain turns to sleet and then snow, collecting on the windowsills. The dark outside becomes darker.

But I lie perfectly still, listening to their breathing. They don’t know I’m back. That I’ve returned from the woods. I’d hide too, Lin said.

What happened that night, when the storm rattled the walls of the cabin, when my memory blots out?

I push back the blanket and move silently down the narrow ladder, then across the room. None of them stir. I could wake them, tell them I’m back, ask them what happened that night—ask them to fill in the parts I can’t remember. But the gnawing in my throat won’t let me. The sliver of pain thrumming inside my chest tells me I shouldn’t trust them.

Something happened that my mind won’t let me remember.

Something that is more darkness than light.

I can’t stay here, with them. There are only bad memories in this place.

I yank on my boots and open the door just wide enough to slip through. I glance back and see someone stirring, Rhett I think, his head lifted. But I pull the door shut before he can focus through the dark.

Before he can see me sneaking out.

NORA

Night comes swiftly in the mountains.

The sinking sun devoured by the snowy peaks. Eaten whole.

I carry in freshly cut logs from the woodshed and drop them beside the woodstove—enough to keep Suzy and me warm through the night. If they’ll actually light.

“You found all these things in the woods?” Suzy asks, standing at the darkened window, running a finger over the items that fascinate her placed along the windowsill: silver candlesticks and a small, palm-sized figurine in the shape of a boy and girl dancing, the freckle-faced girl’s head inclined like she’s facing an imaginary sky. These found things I know by heart. The stories they tell.

Suzy spent most of the day holding her cell phone in the air, near windows, trying to find a signal—even after I told her she’d never get reception out here. Then she’d walk into the kitchen and pick up the landline, listening for a dial tone. But there was always nothing. Just the flat silence. Finally, she turned off her cell phone again to save the battery.

Now, with evening upon us, she seems defeated, her voice low and disheartened.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “During a full moon.”

She watches the snow eddy against the window. “People at school talk about you,” she says absently, like I’m not really listening. “They say you talk to the trees. And to the dead.” She says it in a way that makes me think she wants to believe it, so she can return to school when this is all over and say: I stayed in the house of Nora Walker and it’s all true.

And maybe I should feel hurt, wounded by her statement, but I know what people say about me, about my family, and their words fall like dull raindrops on my skin, never soaking in. I know what I am—and what I’m not. And I don’t blame them for their curiosity. Sometimes I think it might only be envy they feel—a desire to be more than what they are. To escape the blandness of their ordinary lives.

I walk into the kitchen and light two candles with a match—one for Suzy and one for me. “I’ve never talked to the dead,” I admit. The truth. Although Walkers have often been able to see shadows, glimpses of ghosts wandering through the old graveyard on the far side of lake. We see flickers of the in-between, phantoms moving from one corner of the house to the other. Our eyes see what others can’t. But I don’t tell Suzy this. Proof that I might really be what they say I am.

Suzy’s eyelids flutter and she taps her fingers against her opposite forearm, narrowing her gaze like she doesn’t believe me, like she’s certain I must be hiding something—a dozen black cats in the attic, a broomstick tucked behind winter coats in the hall closet, jars filled with my victims’ hearts beneath the floorboards. But nothing so gruesome exists within this house. Only herbs and chimney soot and stories that rest inside the walls. “I’ll make you a bed on the couch,” I tell her.

The blankets and pillow from when Oliver slept here last night are still rumpled at the end.